How many cried when the avatar floats red across the monotone skyline? The mastered physics fluttering your fabric made of math? You might. When thumbstick millimeter becomes a gait toward simulated sun. The moment tutorial is a muscle memory. When pausing could kill a world. When the orchestration echoes you and swells like a gland would. Congratulations! […]
Issue 90
Alyse Knorr: In which Our Friends hike the Long Trail
Jane’s pockets sag with smooth stones. She takes the incline easy, walks with eyes on the ground. Now and then, Then-Jane reaches back to hand her a piece of mottled slate. The green moss breathes and so does everything else. The Mariner stares directly into the sun and Jane feels suddenly proud—of the sun, of […]
Alyse Knorr: In which Our Friends browse the New York Public Library
Mariner and Cowboy move through the catalogue, eyeing the stacks admiringly to please both Janes. They rub the Braille books to their faces, fill the Rose room’s tables with travel guides, National Geographics, comic books and maps. Jane offers them geology, biology, Qu’ran, and Homer, but they are too far into their ’88 Batman: A […]
Alyse Knorr: Golden Record
World language greetings This is a present, a token. We are attempting to survive. We hope. We face. We step out. We know full well. Let there be Hello! To everyone—Are you well? Regards. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, whoever you are. Hello from the children of planet Earth, from the Earthlings, from the […]
M.P. Jones IV: The Bicycle
Almost nothing separates this tiny boat from gathering silence and darkness pooling along the starless cow fields abandoned as the pine shack that fell in forgotten woods of youth no division between the deep taproots and the loam nothing to displace the topography of ruin save for my panting and the whirring of feet of […]
Kimberly Horne: Shoulder
The shoulder is the hero of his body. The shoulder lifts the arm as the arm lifts the rod and reel. The muscles housed in the shoulders propel the drift boat forward as the arms drag the oars backward. To carry, to take up, prop up, to brace and bolster, to assume responsibility, to commit. […]