“Awareness is a feedback loop created somewhere between our faculties and the object, while the boundaries of a painting could provide a theoretical if not a literal kind of mirror.”
Author: spectralwp
Fiction: “Hammer Blue”
“I didn’t see or realize anything. I felt alien, alone and paranoid – and dull, like the dark moments of a song on the radio that I was indifferent to.”
Fiction: “DEPT. WITHIN”
“Watching, I imagined her mind as an electrical, muscular diamond – both consummately and consumingly luminous, equally ultra-absorbent and ultra-resistant to surrounding energies.”
Poem: “Signal”
“My cigarette is imaginary, a ghost
Smooth scar where once shone a rosy gash,
glossy as the jaws of bloodthirst”
Fiction: “Rotting Porch”
“I was captivated by her relaxed expression as she drew the exhaled smoke into her nostrils and back out through her mouth.”
Hanna Liden and Nate Lowman: “Umbrellas and Dropcloths”
“Pedestrians’ sneakers would leave impressions on the slick wet streets, and the sidewalk silt – a mutant peat soil host to cigarette butts, boredom, annoyance, and other nuisances – would build up and finally disappear down the drains, to be stretched and hung on a wall, or hardened in a block of civic concrete.”
Fiction: “Streak of Lightning”
“A raw but dry attraction that makes me think the words: ‘blunt and scalding colors.'”
Real Fine Arts: “Materialism Parts 1 and 2”
“His story was like a moral tale, childishly simple, and I think it was the lack of complexity in the emotions his story conveyed that made me the most suspicious.”
Feral Kid: “Muddy Banks”
“Under the dimming overcast sky, my clothes already damp from the chronic regional mist, I’d walk over to catch the commuter train, which traveled above ground, passing through layers of suburban development, residences growing increasingly dismal and forgotten-seeming, until I arrived at his stop, which had the same name as his street, one of the local proper names, the name of a judge or sheriff or gambler from the previous century, which was used commonly in the place where I grew up and which evokes such a stew of memories, mostly bad, that to pronounce it for me is analogous to a certain queasiness.”
Empire State: “Nate Lowman”
“Their obsessive lines trace a relentless impulse to filch something of the world and its (dis)contents; pictures borrowed to be returned at an unknown future date.”