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Title: Rulerless: The Inaugural Issue Author: Various Authors Date: August 1, 2021 Language: en Topics: fiction, science fiction, poetry Source: [[https://www.rulerless.org/issue-1]]
[]
Maheshwar Sinha is a self-taught artist from Ranchi, Jharkhand, India.
Nature attracts him because it’s infinite and wild, containing
neverending layers of meaning. His paintings have been published all
across India and the world. He also writes short stories and novels in
Hindi and English which have been extensively published.
by John Henry Mackay
Ever reviled, accursed, ne’er understood,
Thou art the grisly terror of our age.
“Wreck of all order,” cry the multitude,
“Art thou, and war and murder’s endless rage.”
O, let them cry. To them that ne’er have striven
The truth that lies behind a word to find,
To them the word’s right meaning was not given.
They shall continue blind among the blind.
But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so pure,
Thou sayest all which I for goal have taken.
I give thee to the future! Thine secure
When each at least unto himself shall waken.
Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest’s thrill?
I cannot tell—but it the earth shall see!
I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I will
Not rule, and also ruled I will not be!
1888
Considering I’m a writer, I always seem to have an astounding lack of
ability to come up with what to say in response to amazing events
happening to or around me. What I can say is that when I was given the
idea for an anarchist poetry magazine in early 2021 (which of course
soon expanded into the idea for an anarchist poetry, short fiction, and
visual art magazine), I had no idea that just a few months later I would
be putting together 25 incredible literary and artistic works into an
issue to be released at the start of August that same year.
What you are about to read is the culmination of 21 people’s hard work
and effort. I adore every one of these anarchic, anti-capitalist,
anti-colonialist pieces, and I believe they flow together seamlessly, in
the anarchistic way: simultaneously as a collective and as individuals.
Whether they cover the devastating effects of war, the joy of knowing
that existence is temporary, or the possibilities of what is yet to
come, they all invoke feelings of wonder, mystery, terror, love, death,
and above all, life. In the world of The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le
Guin, the anarchist revolutionary Laia Asieo Odo wrote of “the Analogy,”
a comparison between a society and a body, with individuals as cells.
All those who have had a hand in the creation of this magazine are
working to fulfill their cellular function, their self-determined life
purpose.
I sincerely hope you enjoy this issue and read the whole thing through
in order. Every featured writer and artist is amazing at what they do,
and they all deserve as much love, support, and comradely solidarity as
we can give.
Byron LĂłpez Ellington
Founder and Editor
Anarchism is not chaos. It is not bombs and death. It is community,
love, peace, and compassionate rebellion.
Anarchism is a set of political philosophies which advocate the
abolition of all social hierarchy in favor of self-organization and
self-management, both on the individual and communal levels. These
liberated people would organize on a wider scale through federation and
free association.
Anarchists believe that though humanity has the tendency to control and
dominate, our tendency for cooperation and fairness is stronger. When
separated from systems that encourage domination, people prefer to live
in harmony.
We are committed to paying all contributors and keeping Rulerless free
to read online, but that’s only possible with YOUR help! Small
magazines, especially radical ones, always struggle. However, you are
not obligated to do anything.
Donors get rewards at certain donation tiers — learn more, and find our
donation links,
.
Send a response to any of the works in this issue and we may include it
in the next! Please email letters to editors@rulerless.org with the
subject line Response to [Piece or Contributor Name]. We reserve the
right to edit letters before publishing them.
While we are anarchists and therefore are against the concepts of
copyright and intellectual property, the former is unfortunately the
only reliable method of protecting one’s work against plagiarism in the
present society, and as such we have decided not to revoke our
contributors’ copyright. However, some may have revoked their own
copyright or applied additional licenses to their work. In that case,
the following statement may be rendered fully or partially null.
All works © 2021 by their respective creators.
Byron LĂłpez Ellington is a mestizo anarchist-communist writer and high
schooler from so-called Texas. He founded Rulerless in February 2021
after realizing that there was no modern anarchist magazine with a focus
on the literary arts in the English-speaking world. He is published or
forthcoming in various literary magazines. You can find him at
byronlopezellington.com and on Twitter @byronymous.
Thank you to Maya DelCanto-Ellington for her help with editing.
Special thanks to Maya DelCanto-Ellington, Byron Jerome Ellington,
Joaquin Del Canto, Robert Evans, Ruth Reinhart, P.B. Gomez, Jerry
Webberman, Neon, Steve the Great, Janessa Frykas, Tyler Mellander, D.
Campbell, Sables, and Josh!
Donating does not affect your chances of being published in any way,
shape, or form.
100% of profits from the first two issues of Rulerless will be donated
to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.
BY P.B. GOMEZ
“Mr. Holmes?”
The sudden sound of his surname dragged James out of his head and into
the present moment. He wasn’t sure how long he had been lost in thought.
James hadn’t been processing anything for quite a while. While the judge
had gone through his courtroom procedure, James had been thinking about
the night of the protest. An echo of the energy and rage of the crowd
still lingered with James, inspiring and heartbreaking all at once. That
feeling was discordant with the atmosphere of the courtroom, a place
sterilized of human emotion.
“I’m sorry, could you repeat that?” James asked.
The judge sighed and inhaled deeply, his eyes never lifting from a stack
of court documents. “Mr. Holmes, do you understand the charges against
you?”
“Yes.”
The judge’s gaze darted up from his bench. Staring intensely at James,
he removed his reading glasses and leaned forward in his chair.
“Yes, Your Honor.”
Attempted murder of a police officer, it was a serious offense. James
was facing the possibility of multiple decades in prison. He admitted
that he was at the protest but denied being the man they were looking
for. James was arrested a few weeks after the incident occured. It was
swift and merciless. He remembered the utter terror of being thrown into
a police SUV. He could recall nearly every word from the frantic
conversation with his father through the phone at the NYPD precinct.
James’s case had been the subject of a lot of controversy. There were
petitions on James’s behalf, money raised for his legal defense, but
resources were spread thin. A lot of protestors were in legal trouble.
James had spent the last few months on Rikers. His bail had been set far
too high for anybody to have posted it.
The trial began. All of the major non-profits had refused to take up
James’s case so he was instead represented by a young attorney from a
small legal aid program based in the Bronx. She was only a few years out
of the law program at Syracuse and while James thought that she was kind
and seemed genuinely invested in his cause, her anxiety was palpable.
They both knew she was out of her league going against New York City’s
goliathan legal system. The judge was quick to overrule her objections
and sustain those of the prosecution.
Representing the prosecution was a rising star in the District
Attorney’s Office, a cum laude graduate of Columbia Law School who had
won several high profile cases against illicit gambling rings in Queens.
He was a firm prosecutor of the city’s strict gun control ordinance and
a staunch ally of the NYPD. It was obvious he had political ambitions
for the state legislature. When he called James to the stand, his
questioning was direct and clinical, mostly focused on the facts of the
day. When did James travel to the protest, why was he there, where was
he, etcetera.
“Were you with anyone on the night of the incident?”
James thought about Naomi and worried for her. He didn’t blame her for
not visiting him in jail or for not coming to the trial. She was keeping
a low profile and James knew it was better that way. A mutual friend had
kept him updated when they visited James in jail. Already Naomi was
getting death threats online, and black cars with tinted windows often
sat outside her apartment for hours at a time. She was an activist under
a lot of scrutiny; willingly involving herself in this case was
dangerous.
“No, I went to the protest alone.”
Then the prosecutor began to ask about the incident itself. His voice
changed, questions came much more rapidly, each punctuated with
accusatory hostility. There was a subtle shift in his body language. The
prosecutor faced the witness booth, but he was no longer speaking to
James. He was professing his conviction for all to hear, imparting
adamantine disbelief in James’s innocence.
“Mr. Holmes, did you engage in violence at the protest?”
“No.” James believed this. What he had done was not violent, he was
acting against violence.
“Did you assault an officer of the NYPD?”
“No.” James believed this, but he knew the law would disagree.
The prosecutor nodded. “I have no further questions for Mr. Holmes.”
The first piece of evidence was footage from the officer’s bodycam.
James shifted in his chair to hide his anger. They had cut the footage
so that the jury wouldn’t see the thick mist of pepper spray the officer
had unleashed on the crowd a few minutes earlier, or the relentless
barrage of rubber bullets fired at the backs of fleeing protestors.
All that was shown from the prosecution’s edit was a figure coming from
the left side view of the camera, rushing at the officer before the
camera malfunctioned in the struggle and the footage stopped. The
prosecutor went back and paused on the moment with the clearest image of
the attacker: a tall man with dark jeans and a t-shirt with a
distinctive graphic. His face was concealed by a black bandana adorned
with white geometric shapes and a red, flat-brimmed baseball hat.
“Mr. Holmes claims the man we see is not him. However, our evidence
indicates Mr. Holmes matches every known characteristic of this
suspect.” The prosecutor stopped for a moment. The thick coat of gel in
his raven hair had weakened and a small strand of hair, a crack in his
polish, fell forward on to his forehead. He gritted his teeth, exhaling
deeply as he quickly stroked it back into place. “Mr. Holmes is the man
we see attacking the officer, beyond any reasonable chance of
coincidence,” he said, before returning to his table.
The onslaught of evidence came soon after. Key were the articles of
clothing that the suspect wore in the footage. Although James had
disposed of almost everything he brought to the protests, investigators
had been able to link almost everything to him. They acquired deleted
pictures from James’s phone and found him frequently wearing the same
red hat as the suspect, an unusual color for Yankees’ branding. They had
surveillance footage of him purchasing a black bandana with a similar
pattern at a local bodega a few days before the incident. A single sock,
the only thing James had neglected to throw away, was collected and
analyzed, confirming James had been in contact with tear gas recently.
Most damning of all was the t-shirt, a black and white collage of police
brutality victims over the years. It was how the police were able to
track down James. Investigators found the artist who sold the shirt on
their website, a tiny vendor who specialized in social justice pieces.
Scouring through her transaction records, they discovered the shirt had
been sold to 197 people in New York City: only 79 of which were men,
only 52 were of the same ethnicity as the suspect, and only 12 had a
similar height, weight, and approximate age. Half of these men had
confirmed alibis, and only James’s cellphone had marked his location
within a mile of the incident on the night of the attack.
Confident in his identification of James, the prosecutor was determined
to establish his intent. More than a simple assault, he claimed James
had every intention of fatally harming the officer. He highlighted a
number of social media posts and text messages which demonstrated
James’s disdain for law enforcement. More importantly, the prosecutor
had procured another view of the incident.
Waiting as long as the law would let them, the District Attorney’s
Office revealed, just before the trial began, that they had acquired
footage from a nearby CCTV camera which showed not only another angle of
the attack, but the suspect in the moments leading up to it. The
prosecutor claimed it demonstrated how the attack was unprompted,
premeditated, and unrestrained. He dimmed the lights and turned on the
projector, straightening his jacket as it hummed to life.
The video showed the suspect standing on the sidewalk as the officer
stood in the street, firing rubber bullets at targets off-screen. The
suspect glanced down the street, presumably gauging how long it would
take for the officer’s backup to catch up. Suddenly he charged, kicking
the officer in the side before lunging for the weapon. After a brief
struggle, more riot officers arrived, batons at the ready, and the
suspect fled into the crowd. Even as all eyes in the courtroom focused
on the prosecutor’s dissection of the suspect’s body language, James was
transfixed on the image of the officer he had attacked.
It stood upon four legs, a headless body protected by thick sheets of
dark blue polymer. Two vertical rows of sensors and cameras designated
its face. Agile, motorized muscles were constantly in motion to keep its
balance. On both sides of its body were small tanks of pepper spray,
nearly empty by that point in the night. It carried a rectangular device
upon its back, an automated 40mm grenade launcher loaded with rubber
bullets, tear gas canisters, and flashbangs.
“We saw Mr. Holmes viciously rip away the officer’s service weapon,
causing significant damage to the chassis. Now we see him clawing for
the officer’s power source. That is a deliberate, directed attack that,
if successful, would have easily destroyed Unit-1114. Mr. Holmes has
clearly taken the time to learn enough about the officer’s design to
know exactly how to inflict catastrophic damage.”
James watched the video of himself attacking the thing, a mechanical
automaton to which the state had given life. The Law Enforcement
Protection Act of 2029 had mandated that robotic units in service with
law enforcement agencies were to be given the same legal status as human
officers. No other robot had been given this level of personhood, just
those who inflicted violence in the name of law and order. James still
didn’t know what had happened that night, why he had done what he did.
He knew he was putting himself at tremendous risk. He knew that even if
he had been successful in destroying the thing, it would have made no
difference. Protestors would still be brutalized, the wrongfully dead
would not be returned to life. In that moment, however, something had
stirred in James and the immense gravity of it all fell upon him
suddenly. He was overcome with an indigent, sorrowful rage. He felt
compelled to act, do something, no matter how irrational.
James looked upon the faces of the jury and wondered what they thought
of all this. They were a diverse enough group, although none were from
New York City (the judge wouldn’t let locals anywhere near the case). So
many potential jurors had been thrown out, these were the select few
candidates who were either good enough at hiding their biases or
genuinely apathetic towards the whole thing. They sat in silence and
listened to the prosecutor deliver his final condemnation of James,
betraying nothing with their solemn, exhausted faces. Soon they would
retire into the jury room and deliberate. Despite the fact that they
held absolute control over his fate, James couldn’t help but feel a
modicum of pity for them. They were trapped just like he was, beholden
to a great machine that fabricated retribution and called it justice.
Lost in this cold, mechanical labyrinth, James resigned himself.
P.B. Gomez (he/him) is a Mexican-American activist and writer. He is the
founder of the Latino Rifle Association, which aims to provide
politically progressive self-defense education to Latino communities. He
begins law school this fall and plans to become a civil rights attorney.
He shares his thoughts on Twitter, @MestizoLeftist.
BY ANDRE F. PELTIER
Andre F. Peltier is a Lecturer III at Eastern Michigan University where
he has taught African American Literature, Afrofuturism, Science
Fiction, Poetry, and Composition since 1998. He lives in Ypsilanti,
Michigan, with his family. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in
various literary journals and magazines. Twitter: @aandrefpeltier.
BY NWUGURU CHIDIEBERE SULLIVAN
Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan is a keen writer from Ebonyi State, Nigeria.
He is a final year Medical Laboratory Science student and a Forward
Prize nominee. He has works published or forthcoming in The Shore,
Tilted House, B’K Mag, Juven Press, Rabid Oak, Wondrous Lit Mag, and
several other publications. He can be reached on Twitter
@wordpottersull1.
[]
Martins Deep (he/him) is an emerging African poet, artist, and
photographer, and currently a student of Ahmadu Bello University in
Zaria. He has works in FIYAH, Agbowo Magazine, Barren Magazine,
Stanchion Literary Magazine, and Typehouse Literary Magazine. He tweets
@martinsdeep1.
BY BEN RIDDLE
Ben Riddle has been writing and performing for almost ten years now. His
work has been published in Europe, Australia and the United States, and
he has played stages on both sides of Australia, as well as
internationally. These days, he mostly writes in his room, and mutters
under his breath on buses.
BY NWUGURU CHIDIEBERE SULLIVAN
[]
BY MARGARET KILLJOY
Margaret Killjoy is a transfeminine author, musician, and podcaster
living in the Appalachian mountains. She is the author of the Danielle
Cain series of novellas and is the host of the community and individual
preparedness podcast Live Like the World is Dying. She can be found on
Twitter @magpiekilljoy.
[]
BY BEN SONG
Ben Song is an anarchist activist from Dallas, Texas. He is a martial
artist, SRA member, and Marine Corps veteran. He currently organizes
with Dallas Food Not Bombs, Dallas Houseless Committee, and Fight for
Black Lives. Ben teaches activists self defense, provides protest
security, organizes, serves, and builds.
BY OLLY NZE
Olly Nze is a queer writer living in Lagos, Nigeria. When he isn’t
trying to navigate the madness of the city or tending to his cacti, he
writes decent poetry and acceptable prose to keep himself sane. He has
been published in The Audacity, and is the managing editor for the
quarterly lit mag Second Skin Mag.
[]
Heartless Widget is a visual artist based in the Midsouth. They are
interested in the expression of human emotion in art and have been
recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, among others.
BY LISWINDIO APENDICAESAR
Liswindio Apendicaesar is a Indonesian writer and translator. He is a
member of the editorial board of Pawon Literary Bulletin, and member of
Intersastra’s translator team since 2019. His pieces have been published
or are forthcoming in Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine, Oyez Review, The
Thing Itself, etc.
BY J.V. SUMPTER
J.V. Sumpter is an assistant editor for Kelsay Books, Thera Books, and
freelance clients. She has a BFA from the University of Evansville and
recent publications in Selcouth Station, The New Welsh Review, Not Deer
Magazine, Flyover Country, and Southchild Lit. Visit her Twitter
@JVSReads.
BY PETER S. GOLDFINCH
Peter S. Goldfinch is a pseudonym for a neurodivergent ace anarchist
debt peon and IWW member working on a PhD in a useless discipline. They
believe a better world is possible. Unfortunately they are not a very
interesting person outside of anarcho-clichéism, so they don’t have much
to say about themselves.
[]
Viro is a young native Vietnamese communist anarchist from Saigon. He
got familiarized with anarchist thought while abroad and is committed to
trying to popularize it among the progressive youth of his homeland
through illustrations.
BY DAVID SALAZAR
David Salazar (he/xe/she) is a teenage writer from Chile. He is a writer
at Ogma Magazine and Ice Lolly Review. Xe has been published in various
magazines and you can find xir on Twitter at @smalllredboy and on his
website, davidvsalazar.weebly.com.
[]
Based in the Pacific Northwest, Antifa Artist is a queer disabled
anarchist artist looking to radicalize and support communities through
their artwork. They mostly focus on general themes of antifascism, Black
liberation, and queer liberation. More of their artwork can be found at
@antifa_artist on Instagram and Twitter.
BY FULGARA ETAOIN
Fulgara Etaoin is a trans woman, poet, and anarchist from the southern
US.
BY JUSTIN(E) NORTON-KERTSON
Justin(e) Norton-Kertson is a queer/multigender author, poet,
photographer, musician, and organizer. She currently lives in rural
Oregon with his partner, cats, puppy, goats, and rabbits. They can be
found on Twitter @jankwrites.
BY MARGARET KILLJOY
BY TIMI SANNI
Timi Sanni writes from Lagos, Nigeria. An NF2W poetry and fiction
scholar, his work appears or is forthcoming in various journals and
magazines. He is a reader for CRAFT Literary and Liminal Transit Review.
He won the SprinNG Poetry Contest and Fitrah Review Short Story Prize in
2020. Find him on twitter @timisanni. Find him on twitter @timisanni.
BY MARGARET KILLJOY
The devil lives at the bottom of Gossett’s Gorge. All us kids know it,
which means all the parents must too, because they were kids once
themselves. Knowing where the devil lives doesn’t seem like the kind of
thing you’d ever forget.
I would have told you I wasn’t afraid of the devil, but I would have
been lying, and the proof of it was that I’d never spent the night at
the devil’s shack overlooking the gorge. I’d never crawled down that
rope ladder, the spindly one that’s all fucked up and threadbare that
goes right out over the edge. I’d never seen no one else stay the night
or climb down either, and probably I would have gotten old like my
parents without having ever done it. I would have, until Penny moved
here to Mountain Springs. Until her stupid tagalong brother got taken.
It wasn’t my fault.
I was fourteen years old in 1994. Kurt Cobain had just died and not one
of us believed it was suicide. A grunge girl moved from the city to the
house next door on my country road, and she had the right flannel, the
right jeans, and a Mudhoney shirt. I’d never even heard of Mudhoney, but
I was sure they were about to become my new favorite band. She was a
year older than me, she never smiled, she never brushed her hair, and
she was perfect in every way. Assuming she liked girls.
Her parents called her Samantha, and her middle school brat of a brother
Chris called her Sam, but she told me her name was Penny and I wasn’t
going to argue with a girl like her about something so meaningless as a
name.
---
If you show another kid the ropes around here, you gotta mean it
literally. You gotta show em the Three Trees up on Spineback, which are
fat doug firs as old as God that’ve got rope bridges strung between. You
gotta tell em how every two years or something, some kid falls to their
death, usually drunk, usually kids from out of town. Every time it
happens there’s a big fuss and someone takes the ropes down. Every time,
the ropes go back up, and no one is sure who puts them up. You gotta
show them the knots, because they’re weird knots, knots like no one else
really knows how to tie, overly-elaborate. You gotta call them devil’s
knots, too, if you want to sound spooky.
After you dare them to climb up after you into the Three Trees, you
gotta take em to Sandy Creek. Nothing spooky about it, it’s just that
there’s this squat old willow with a rope swing that’s been there for a
hundred years but you can swing out into the widest, deepest, best part
of the creek and it’s half the reason it’s alright to live in Mountain
Springs.
Only then, after they’ve seen what’s good in town, do you take em to the
devil’s shack. No one ever dies at the devil’s shack, you can assure
your guests. No one ever dies there because no one ever stays the night,
and no one ever climbs down that ladder. It’s the safest place in town
if you respect that it’s evil.
The devil’s shack is just a little carriage house, like a big garage,
and a single room adjacent. It’s all timber-framed and wood-paneled and
it ain’t insulated for nothing, but I guess the devil doesn’t need to
keep warm because the devil makes things warm.
---
I showed Penny the ropes. Chris came along, because of course he did.
That’s what brats do. It’s no more right to be mad at a brat for
tagalong than it’s right to be mad at a squirrel for stupid or a devil
for death. Chris climbed the Three Trees, and he swung into Sandy Creek,
and he kept being there when I wanted to talk to Penny about important
stuff like if there was a grunge scene in Portland or, you know, her
opinions on the current popularity of bisexuality among teenage girls.
The thing is, I saw Penny and I saw my chance at a perfect summer. Maybe
a perfect life, but I couldn’t think that far ahead. I saw her and I
riding our bikes down every trail on Spineback and finding every
secluded glade. I saw her dark blue eyes and her messy brown hair close
to my face. I saw us making pinkie swears that escalated to bloodsworn
pacts. I saw us stealing a car and getting away with it. Hell, I saw us
running away to Portland. Or staying in Mountain Springs. I didn’t care.
I’m telling you all this because I know how it sounds, because you
probably saw the news reports about Chris. Maybe with everything else
I’m telling you, you’re going to reach some unkind conclusions about me.
Yes, it’s true, I wasn’t upset when Chris wasn’t there all the sudden.
But for fuck’s sake, I was a fourteen-year-old girl in love. That kind
of shit takes over your brain and makes its own decisions.
When we rode our bikes up the overgrown road to the devil’s shack, and
we passed that rusted out little water tower with the old gold
spraypaint that says “the devil lives here,” I started saying “devil
take you” under my breath. Everyone knows if you say it a hundred times
in less than a minute, the devil will do it, he’ll take whoever you’re
thinking about. I didn’t even get to forty, though, because I’m not a
monster. Nothing that happened was my fault.
“What is this place?” Penny asked, running forward. I couldn’t blame
her, it’s a beautiful sight. The carriage house was nothing special,
just old, but the one-room shack had the sharpest-peaked ceiling you’ll
ever see, and no windows, and it’s right up against the cliff, and it
just looks like magic.
“I told you,” I answered. “It’s the devil’s shack.”
“You said the devil lives at the bottom of the gorge,” she said as we
went inside. The door was off its hinges again. Every couple of years,
someone came by and fixed the place up. Probably some local dad just
looking to scare the kids, maybe the same person who put up those rope
bridges. But the devil’s shack got trashed pretty quick every time,
since, you know, teenagers were around.
There was no back wall, just a ten-foot opening out over Gossett’s
Gorge. Wind kicked in through the gap and it hit the cracks in the
rafters just right for it to whistle. I was glad—the whistling roof is
one of the coolest parts of the shack, but it wasn’t every day you’d get
so lucky as to hear it.
“The devil lives at the bottom of the gorge,” I agreed. “This is like
his emergency backup spot, in case the gorge gets flooded or an angel
comes looking for him down there. I guess.”
“You can’t believe that,” Chris said. He almost never spoke when I was
around, because I think he resented me as much as I resented him.
“Of course I believe it,” I said. I didn’t know if I was telling the
truth or not. I’m not sure that anyone recounting fables or legends or
laws believe they’re telling the truth, they just say the things they’ve
heard because that makes them true. “If you don’t believe me, you can
climb down there and prove it yourself.”
Chris looked suspiciously at the rope ladder. It really was a deathtrap,
with or without the ghost story. In places, it was as thin as yarn.
Other spots looked burned. Some of the rope rungs were ripped off
entirely. The ladder didn’t even go all the way to the bottom of the
gorge, just down maybe eighty feet before disappearing into a tiny patch
of scrawny trees.
He looked back at me, then at his sister, then back at me. A grin
cracked across his face, and damn fool kid did it. One second he was
standing there, the next he wasn’t.
“Chris!” Penny shouted, down into the echo of the gorge.
“Riss!” the gorge shouted back.
I knew right then and there that I was more scared of not impressing
Penny than I was of death or ghost stories. So I looked at her and I
grinned the same dumb way that dumb Chris had dumb grinned.
I got on that rope ladder and started down. It took all my concentration
to keep from panicking. A gust of wind moved me and the ladder several
feet, and I clenched my teeth and my fists and kept climbing.
The cliff wasn’t completely vertical, thankfully, and in spots it was
more like I was scrambling down a hill than just clinging for dear life.
I reached the end of the ladder, but there was no sign of Chris. Not in
the trees, nor on the one-foot ledge they grew out of.
“I don’t see him!” I shouted up. Penny was already on her way down.
That’s when I noticed the cave.
Caves never have the kind of entrances you’d think they would. All the
caves I’ve ever found or seen in the coastal range of Oregon were
exposed to the world only by tiny little cracks and slivers and holes in
the stone.
“Chris!” I shouted into the darkness. My voice echoed, a long ways back.
Penny landed beside me.
That’s when we heard the scream. Clear as a summer lake, we heard the
scream. Loud as a waterfall, we heard the scream.
“Chris!” Penny shouted, then crawled into the darkness on her hands and
knees.
I counted down from three to work up my nerve, but it didn’t work. I
counted down from ten. At one, I crawled in after.
For a hundred feet or more we sloshed and slogged through mud and
darkness on our hands and knees. Once my eyes adjusted, I saw the pale
yellow flicker of firelight ahead and pretty quick I reached this place
inside myself that was beyond fear. Like, anything could be ahead of us
and it wasn’t going to be good but somehow crawling forward felt like
the only possible option.
A sharp rock caught my shoulder, tore my favorite Nirvana shirt and my
skin, and I kept crawling.
After a hundred feet or a million years we came out into a big open cave
room. Three lanterns in a triangle on a natural shelf—an altar, I knew
it without question—cast shadows more markedly than they cast light, and
the whole room danced with fire and darkness.
No one was there.
Empty bottles were there, and empty cans of food, and the walls were
painted up in teen graffiti, and a bare mattress sat on the ground
inexplicably enough. All that was usual for every strange nook and
cranny teenagers can sneak into to drink and fuck. There were other
things, though, worse things. Inexplicable things. The skin of some
animal nailed to a piece of plywood, rotting in a corner. A hunk of
human hair, red and gray, stuck to the wall with some kind of paste. A
wind chime of bones. Large bones. Horse, cow, deer, human, I couldn’t
have told you. A wand, a raw chunk of quartz held to a stick with pine
tar.
What caught my eye and held it, though, was a painting on the altar. It
was on canvas, crudely stretched, and it was beautiful and to me it
looked ancient. In an expert hand, someone had painted sixteen figures
in a forest of fir. I counted them. Sixteen figures, most in shadows,
some in light, all caught in religious ecstasy. The men were nude, the
women were clothed, and one clothed figure bore a mouth full of fangs.
All of them were dancing like how when people at a winery dance on the
grapes, and they were covered to their shins and thighs in dark red
juice but they were just tramping on the ground in the forest. Like the
earth itself was giving up blood.
I stared and stared at that woman, with her mouth full of teeth. She
looked like me. Not exactly like me. Just enough. Red hair. Freckles.
Weird nose, weak chin, bright eyes. She had broader shoulders than me,
though, and a higher forehead, and gray in her hair, and of course that
mouth full of fangs.
Penny was screaming, frantic, searching for her brother, and I was
staring at… look I have no way of proving this, I have no way of
convincing you I’m telling the truth… I was staring at my father’s
mother’s grandmother.
“Hold my belt,” Penny said, breaking my trance. I looked up wide eyed
and confused. Penny had one of the three lanterns in her hand, and she’d
pulled off the belt from her jeans, had one end wrapped around her fist.
“What?” I asked.
“There’re other passages. Only one’s big enough for anyone to get
through I think. Chris has to be there. What if he fell, in the dark. Oh
God. What if he fell in the dark. But it’s slippery, and it goes
downhill, I don’t want to slip. You hold me here and I think I can get
far enough to peer around the corner.”
Caves don’t make sense. I can’t say “corner of the room” because it
wasn’t really a room and it didn’t really have a corner, but I walked to
the corner of the room and braced myself against the wall and held onto
Penny’s belt and she slipped down a passageway with a devil’s lantern. A
moment later, I helped haul her back up.
“It’s just… more. More cave. I don’t know. What if he fell in the dark?”
She started mumbling, then. Just over and over. What if he fell in the
dark.
And I couldn’t tell her he didn’t, because looking around the room, fell
in the dark was about the best case scenario. I saw him buried in the
earth so that cultists or witches or demons could tramp on the soil and
his blood would bubble up onto their shins and thighs.
“We’ll go for help,” I said.
Penny nodded, numb, and we crawled back out of that cave together
without Chris. I should have been worrying about Chris, or maybe I
should have been worrying about Penny, but I was thinking about my great
great great and her gray red hair and her teeth and the blood of the
earth all splashed around and her teeth and I was thinking about her
teeth.
---
It wasn’t two hours later before we got back there with help.
Firefighters, mostly, with some cops trying to boss them around but too
afraid to climb down the cliff. It was only two hours later before the
cave was crawling with firefighters and four hours before a helicopter
was cruising as low as it could in the gorge searching the river and its
banks. As the sun set, our neighbors started combing the woods. By the
next day professional cave rescue people, I don’t know what you call
that job, they declared the cave clear, and some other people started
dredging the river.
They didn’t find nothing in the woods but John the Hermit—people call
him a bum but he’s a hermit and he only comes into town on Christmas eve
on his bicycle to buy supplies and when he does he leaves dried flowers
at every doorstep for ten miles in every direction. They arrested him.
They didn’t put cuffs on him, but they arrested him all the same, and he
looked at the sheriff and he smiled big and said “the devil take you” as
they put him in the car. In the end they didn’t charge him for Chris but
I guess he put up a fuss at the station when they tried to put him in
cage. Resisting arrest, assaulting an officer, obstruction of justice,
and his defense in court was telling the judge “the devil take you” and
that’s the last anyone saw John the Hermit, and we’re all the poorer
without the flowers.
They didn’t find nothing in the river but trash and bones, and they were
human bones, but they were old, from the twenties or thirties maybe.
They weren’t Chris, so maybe human bones in the river would have been
news some other month but we forgot about those bones soon off.
The real thing though, the real weird thing that fucked up my head and
didn’t do my sense of reality any good was that they didn’t find
anything in the cave, either. Anything. No lanterns, no wind chimes, no
mattress. No graffiti. No painting. No Chris.
They took me and Penny to the doctor and they split us up and made us
each tell our story to him over and over again until neither one of us
had it straight and so some of the details didn’t line up, and I think
if my Mom hadn’t come in screaming he would have put us both up in
padded rooms.
The doctor was from out of town, an expert. His skin was as white as the
moon, his hair whiter than the sun reflecting off the water. He was so
white you could see the veins under his skin and somehow they looked
white too. His teeth were white, his clothes were white, the office he
was working out of was white, and he was fucking terrifying. He held
power over me so casually, threatened me so casually.
For nights after, I thought about that doctor’s office as much as I
thought about that cave. Two places where I almost lost my mind. Two
places where I was standing on the edge like Penny standing at that
passageway, trying not to fall, clinging to the belt for her life. In
the cave at least she’d had me; in the doctor’s office it was just me
and that man looking at each other, him trying to decide what was real
and what wasn’t and whether I belonged in a padded room or whether my
head and my memories were prison enough.
That’s how I wrote about it, anyway, in my journal. I liked to call them
song lyrics but let’s be real it was poetry and shitty poetry at that,
but let’s be real it was just me trying to get those things out of my
head.
What if Chris fell in the dark?
---
Penny wasn’t allowed to see me, after that.
The doctor wouldn’t let me on the search teams, said I wasn’t healthy
enough. He wanted me inside. I didn’t see why his opinion should have
any bearing on the matter, but my mom apparently did, so I wasn’t on a
search team.
My mom was working from home that summer, writing handwritten thank you
letters on the behalf of politicians. Her and I weren’t real close but I
spent a couple days helping her cook dinner and fix things around the
house and the property and just kind of living in her shadow because I
didn’t want to be alone.
“Where’s grandma from?” I asked my mom while she was changing the oil on
the station wagon and I was holding the flashlight. “I mean, dad’s mom.”
See, I’d never met my dad’s mom before. She died of leukemia before I
was born.
“Chicago,” she said.
“That’s where she was born? Where were her parents from?” I asked.
“Ohio.”
“Before that?”
“Mostly Scottish I think.”
“But did they ever live out here?”
“No, of course not.”
I knew if I dug too much further she’d start asking why I was asking,
and I wasn’t going to talk to her about the painting, because I didn’t
want to get locked up. I had to be careful. It was awful, not trusting
my mom. But that doctor. What if she told the doctor.
It didn’t make sense. The painting, the cultists, Chris disappearing.
None of it, nothing, made sense.
What if I fell in the dark?
---
The third night after it happened, I was lying in bed praying to the
devil. “Please give him back,” I was saying. Everyone knows if you say
it a hundred times in less than a minute, he has to do it. Problem is,
he does it on his own timeline. And in his own way.
I decided to cover all my bases, so I prayed to the devil, and I prayed
to God, and I went back and forth with both until I wasn’t always sure
which I was doing.
I was praying to the devil though when the pebbles hit my window, and I
went to look out and there was Penny in the side yard like sneaking out
at night wasn’t a big deal, like there wasn’t a devil out there stealing
children or a cop out there stealing hermits or a doctor out there
threatening to steal us from each other and our families. She waved me
down.
I popped out the window screen as quiet as I could and crossed over into
the pine just outside. I love a pine tree, because they’re built like
ladders. Sticky ladders.
“Hey,” I whispered when I reached the ground.
“Let’s go,” she said. She handed me a flashlight.
I didn’t ask where. I knew where. We got on bikes and took off, only
turning on our lights when we were safely away from where our parents
might see.
“Have you been having nightmares?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, even though I hadn’t. I don’t even know why admitting to
nightmares would have been impressive, but I found myself saying it
anyway. “Well, no. I haven’t been sleeping well enough to dream.”
“I’ve been having nightmares,” she said.
“What are they?”
“It’s Chris. He’s down there still. He fell, in the dark. In my dreams,
he’s drinking from a little stream, and he’s eating moss and crickets,
and he’s scared.”
“What about the graffiti, and the bones, and the painting?” I asked. “I…
hate to say it but I think he got kidnapped. I think a cult was living
down there, and they snuck out while we were getting help, and they
cleaned it all up. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Maybe we didn’t see all that stuff,” Penny said. “Maybe the doctor was
right.”
I skidded my bike to a halt. Penny stopped too, looking back at me,
confused.
“That doctor is not right. Not about what happened to us. Not about
anything.”
Penny was crying. She came over. We walked our bikes to the side of the
road and sat down, and she put her head onto my shoulder, and she cried
a little more.
“Okay,” she said.
“We’ve got to believe ourselves,” I said. “We saw what we saw. They’re
telling us we didn’t because they don’t want it to be true. Because it
doesn’t make sense. But it was there.”
“I’ll believe you if you believe me,” Penny said.
“What do you need me to believe?” I asked.
“Chris is still alive.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. I’ll believe you.”
“I believe you too,” she said.
“I almost wish you didn’t.”
The moon was waning but large and we cast moonshadows across the road,
and we sat like that for awhile before we kept biking to the devil’s
shack.
The ladder was gone, but Penny had rope and we climbed down to the cave.
We crawled in, and with flashlights and rope we searched more and more
of the cave. Nothing. No one. Some soot, though, above the altar, was
enough for me to believe myself. We’d seen what we’d seen.
On the altar in the first room, Penny left water and a peanut butter and
jelly and potato chip sandwich. It didn’t make sense, but I didn’t
argue. We crawled out of the cave, and we climbed back up to the devil’s
shack, where you’re not supposed to go at night.
We stood in the shack and looked out over the gorge, and I didn’t know
what the devil was and I didn’t know where he lived but maybe he lived
in the gorge or maybe no one did.
We got back on our bikes and made it home just as birds started calling
out, and I saw my dad leave the house and get to his truck on his way to
work, his headlights cutting the rising fog of the morning. I scrambled
up the pine and crawled into bed, every bit of me sore and cut and
covered in mud and sap.
---
We went back the next night, and in the room, the main room with the
altar and everything, only the crust remained of the sandwich.
“He’s alive,” Penny declared, and this time I didn’t have to work at it
to believe her. “He hates the crust.”
“If we tell our parents,” I said.
“They won’t believe us,” Penny agreed. “Right to the padded room.”
“What do we do?”
“We find him,” Penny said.
We didn’t find him that night, though we spent hours in the cave. I
crawled into bed at dawn.
Two weeks passed that way. Every night the sandwich was eaten. Penny
left notes, each one taken. Penny left a pen and paper, but no message
was ever written for us. We searched every inch of the cave we could
reach. There were a few cracks too narrow even for us scattered around
the place. There was a hole, the devil’s hole, that I could probably
have fit down that went down and down and down but there was nowhere
good to tie a rope.
We talked about spending the day in the cave, but our parents would
notice us missing, freak out, send authorities, and we’d get dragged off
to an institution without ever having found him.
Finally, on our fifteenth trip—we marked tallies on the paper we
left—Penny told me her parents were going to have a funeral. In
Portland. They were giving up and moving. Tomorrow.
“We have to tell your parents,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if we get
locked up, if they find him.”
“No,” Penny said. “We have to find him.”
This time, she brought rock pitons and more rope. She’d shoplifted it
all from the adventure sports store the next town over. She’d hitchhiked
there. Fuck, she was perfect.
We made our way to the devil’s hole. Penny wouldn’t fit, so she helped
me into a harness. She hammered pitons into cracks in the wall, and the
noise was louder than anything had a right to be, each strike like a
gunshot. She tied the rope to it, and that probably wasn’t enough to
keep me safe.
“Ready?” she asked.
I nodded, and lowered myself into the hole. Head first, I decided. Fuck
it. Better to see what’s coming.
It was like crawling vertically, in parts. Other parts I slid as Penny
fed more rope. I went down. And down. And down.
The white noise of water rose up from below me. The hole went to the
bottom of the gorge, I was certain.
I went down and down and then my flashlight caught a crystalline wall
and the world exploded into light and suddenly my head broke free into a
huge open chamber over a river. I braced myself as best I could, then
gave one tug on the rope. One tug for stop, two for bring me up.
Crystals covered the walls, or maybe the walls themselves were crystals,
or the entire world, entire universe, was those crystals, and there were
facets to everything and everything caught the light. Everything shone.
There was a ledge jutting out from the wall, down close to the river,
and there was the painting, and there was the hair, and there were bones
and skins and crystals. No one was there, but I saw figures everywhere I
looked.
I’d barely slept for weeks, my mind was torn apart by trauma, and
peering into that room I had an epiphany, or I broke, or the devil broke
me.
While I watched the water and the light and God or the devil flowed
through the chamber I watched three people emerge, wading in the water.
None of them were Chris. Two women and a man. Teenagers, maybe five
years older than me. One had a Slayer shirt, and they were fifty feet
below me and they had lanterns, one each, and they were laughing. I
couldn’t hear them over the water but I could see their faces and they
were laughing and they were passing a bottle and one held the crystal
wand aloft. They waved at me, and they passed through the chamber, up
the river the other side.
Two tugs, and Penny lifted me up, which took longer than I’d been alive.
My head swam with thought and non-thought.
I tried to describe what I’d seen to Penny, but once she heard I hadn’t
seen Chris she stopped listening, like I’d knocked the wind out of her.
We made it back to the first room, and she went somberly to the altar to
leave the night’s sandwich.
Someone had written “The Three Trees” on the paper, while we’d been
there.
Penny grabbed the paper, folded it, and put it in her pocket. She turned
to me, her eyes alight. “Chris’s handwriting,” she said. “I used to copy
it when I did his homework for him.”
I was still reeling from the room at the bottom of the devil’s hole and
the world was upside down from where it had been and all the sudden I
realized it wasn’t about me. None of this was about me. It wasn’t about
impressing Penny. It wasn’t even about Penny, not really. It was about
Chris. It was about finding that kid and making sure he didn’t die and
making sure there were so many more years in front of him where he could
talk his big sister into doing his homework and there were so many years
of eating sandwiches and just living life not in a fucking cave in the
bottom of Gosset’s Gorge and just…
“We have to find him,” I said, and for the first time I really meant it,
not for my sake not even for Penny’s sake.
“No shit,” she said.
We made it out of the cave and up to our bikes but the sun was already
on its way over the mountains.
“Shit,” Penny said. “My parents said we were gonna leave at dawn.”
“They’ll know you’re gone.”
“This is the first place they’ll look,” she said.
We got to our bikes and started up the trail but it wasn’t long before
we heard people coming from in front of us and we ducked into the trees.
Penny’s parents, and that sheriff, the one who’d stolen John the Hermit,
the only person I’d ever seen actually steal a person with my own eyes.
We waited breathless for them to pass then hurried to the road. It was
an hour on bike to the Three Trees, and we got there in forty-five. The
sun was over the mountains now, filtered through the forest. The ropes
hung like they always hung, knotted strange, down from the boughs of the
trees.
I hurried up the rope, and Penny came after.
There was the tagalong, sitting calm as death on the platform, covered
with mud and pine, whistling a dissonant tune.
“Chris,” Penny said.
He didn’t stop whistling, and Penny sat down next to him.
“Chris,” Penny said. He didn’t respond.
She freaked out. I didn’t blame her. “Chris,” she shouted, pounding his
chest with her fists.
I sat across from him, and I looked into his eyes, and they caught light
like crystals.
“I saw the devil’s chamber,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”
Chris looked at me, and stopped whistling.
“Did you see the devil’s maidens? The three?” He asked.
“Penny thought you fell,” I said, instead of answering, “in the dark.
But you didn’t, did you?”
“I was rescued,” he said.
“By the maidens.”
“By the maidens,” he agreed. “They took me to the chamber and I saw the
light and I heard the water and I went under the water. I learned the
truth. The devil isn’t real, and we are his maidens, and for as long as
there’s been a world there’s been the devil.”
“The painting?” I asked.
“As long as there’s been a world there’s been a devil, as long as
there’s been a devil there’s been his maidens. We are, each of us, the
devil’s maidens. A million names, a million meanings, a million
cultures, but a devil, a devil, a world, a world, a maiden, a maiden,
and blood.”
I nodded.
“Is that what you’ll be?” I asked. “A servant to the devil?”
“Yes,” he answered. He looked at me. “Will you?”
When he asked me, I felt like I was still dangling in that room of
light. I’d never felt more real, more connected to everything, to my
body, to death, than I had in that moment.
“Yes. I will be the devil’s maiden.”
“Will you tie the knots that hold the trees?” he asked.
“I will.”
“Will you fix the door that holds us warm?” he asked.
“I will.”
“Will you guard the room that sings of the river and light?” he asked.
“I will.”
“For all time?” he asked.
“No,” I answered.
“No?”
“Look at me, Chris,” I said. Chris looked at me. “I will be the devil’s
maiden, same as you, same as those three, but that’s not all I’ll be.
I’ll be myself, too.”
“You’re allowed to do that?” He was suddenly a child again.
“We’re allowed to do anything we want,” I told him. “The devil isn’t
real. God isn’t real. The world is real, and we are real, and we can
serve anything we’d like. We can serve God, the devil, the earth,
ourselves, each other.”
“You served me,” Chris said. “For these past two weeks, you served me.”
“Penny did,” I said. “I served her. No, I served myself. I should have
been serving her, or you, but it’s all the same, too.”
Penny put her arm around her brother, and he collapsed into her, crying.
Whatever spell had held him was broken.
“I want to go home,” he whispered.
“Then we’ll go home,” Penny said.
---
I didn’t see Penny for three days after that. The reunion was kind of
all-consuming for her family. But on the fourth day, late in the
evening, she met me at my front door, and she had sleeping bags.
“Tell your parents you and I are going camping,” she said.
“I don’t know if my mom will let me,” I said.
“Okay, then don’t tell them,” she answered.
“Mom, I’m going camping with Penny! Be back tomorrow!” I shouted, then
Penny grabbed my hand and the two of us took off running before my mom
could stop us.
If she really wanted, she could have found us. She could have figured
out where we were going. We went to the devil’s shack.
This time, Chris didn’t come with us.
We went to the devil’s shack, and the rafters were whistling. They were
whistling that dissonant tune Chris had been singing.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“We’re going to meet the maidens,” Penny said. “And thank them for
taking care of my brother.”
“What do you mean?”
“I talked to Chris more,” Penny said. “He really had fallen, in the
dark. That was the scream we heard. The maidens, they rescued him.
Washed his wounds, kept him fed and warm. Brainwashed him a little yeah
sure, but they saved his life, and they let him go, too.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Besides,” Penny said, “I think you promised to work with them.”
“Well, maybe a little,” I agreed.
She kissed me on the cheek.
“You’re a charming enough maiden,” she said.
“Tell me,” I asked, once we laid our sleeping bags on the floor of the
Devil’s Shack, the one place one must never, ever sleep, “what’s your
opinion on the current popularity of bisexuality among teenaged girls?”
[]
Alba Esc Santos is a non-binary Latinx mixed-media artist. Sometimes
they feel like an artist and sometimes they don’t. Alba’s work is
motivated by many attempts to steal from life those moments where the
established mode of being has yet to extend its tendrils; in that gray
is where you can find them.
Alba Esc Santos is a non-binary Latinx mixed-media artist. Sometimes
they feel like an artist and sometimes they don’t. Alba’s work is
motivated by many attempts to steal from life those moments where the
established mode of being has yet to extend its tendrils; in that gray
is where you can find them.
Credits: fierro
Andre F. Peltier is a Lecturer III at Eastern Michigan University where
he has taught African American Literature, Afrofuturism, Science
Fiction, Poetry, and Composition since 1998. He lives in Ypsilanti,
Michigan, with his family. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in
various literary journals and magazines. Twitter: @aandrefpeltier.
Credits: “The Rockets’ Red Glare”
Based in the Pacific Northwest, Antifa Artist is a queer disabled
anarchist artist looking to radicalize and support communities through
their artwork. They mostly focus on general themes of antifascism, Black
liberation, and queer liberation. More of their artwork can be found at
@antifa_artist on Instagram and Twitter.
Credits: Fire to the System
Ben Riddle has been writing and performing for almost ten years now. His
work has been published in Europe, Australia, and the United States, and
he has played stages on both sides of Australia, as well as
internationally. These days, he mostly writes in his room, and mutters
under his breath on buses.
Credits: “From the Water to the Walls of Guantanamo Bay”
Ben Song is an anarchist activist from Dallas, Texas. He is a martial
artist, SRA member, and Marine Corps veteran. He currently organizes
with Dallas Food Not Bombs, Dallas Houseless Committee, and Fight for
Black Lives. Ben teaches activists self defense, provides protest
security, organizes, serves, and builds.
Credits: “Ungrateful”
David Salazar (he/xe/she) is a teenage writer from Chile. He is a writer
at Ogma Magazine and Ice Lolly Review. Xe has been published in various
magazines and you can find xir on Twitter at @smalllredboy and on his
website, https://davidvsalazar.weebly.com.
Credits: “Estallido Social”
Fulgara Etaoin is a trans woman, poet, and anarchist from the southern
US.
Credits: “Attack & Dethrone”
Heartless Widget is an artist from Memphis, Tennessee. He is interested
in the anatomy of the face and its implication on human relation. His
work has been recognized by the National Scholastic Art and Writing
Awards and has been exhibited at the Memphis International Airport,
Brooks Museum of Art, and more.
Credits: Herself: A Stranger Within
J.V. Sumpter is an assistant editor for Kelsay Books, Thera Books, and
freelance clients. She has a BFA from the University of Evansville and
recent publications in Selcouth Station, The New Welsh Review, Not Deer
Magazine, Flyover Country, and Southchild Lit. Visit her Twitter
@JVSReads.
Credits: “On Learning Coronation Spoons Are a Thing”
Justin(e) Norton-Kertson is a queer/multigender author, poet,
photographer, musician, and organizer. She currently lives in rural
Oregon with his partner, cats, puppy, goats, and rabbits. They can be
found on Twitter @countryjim13.
Credits: “A Shepherd with No Flock”
Liswindio Apendicaesar is a Indonesian writer and translator. He is a
member of the editorial board of Pawon Literary Bulletin, and member of
Intersastra’s translator team since 2019. His pieces have been published
or are forthcoming in Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine, Oyez Review, The
Thing Itself, etc.
Credits: “The Nomadic Birds”
Maheshwar Sinha is a self-taught artist from Ranchi, Jharkhand, India.
Nature attracts him because it’s infinite and wild, containing
neverending layers of meaning. His paintings have been published all
across India and the world. He also writes short stories and novels in
Hindi and English which have been extensively published.
Credits: The Community and Togetherness
Margaret Killjoy is a transfeminine author, musician, and podcaster
living in the Appalachian mountains. She is the author of the Danielle
Cain series of novellas and is the host of the community and individual
preparedness podcast Live Like the World Is Dying. She can be found on
Twitter @magpiekilljoy.
Credits: “History at Scale is Terror,” “Give Me Summer,” and “The Devil
Lives Here”
Martins Deep (he/him) is an emerging African poet, artist, and
photographer, and currently a student of Ahmadu Bello University in
Zaria. He has works in FIYAH, Agbowo Magazine, Barren Magazine,
Stanchion Literary Magazine, and Typehouse Literary Magazine. He tweets
@martinsdeep1.
Credits: voice behind and boy with a pot of golden clams
Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan is a keen writer from Ebonyi State, Nigeria.
He is a final year Medical Laboratory Science student and a Forward
Prize nominee. He has works published or forthcoming in The Shore,
Tilted House, B’K Mag, Juven Press, Rabid Oak, Wondrous Lit Mag, and
several other publications. He can be reached on Twitter
@wordpottersull1.
Credits: “An Impartial Account of Where Bombs & Bullets Are Alms for A
Palmer” and “Ozoemena”
Olly Nze is a queer writer living in Lagos, Nigeria. When he isn’t
trying to navigate the madness of the city or tending to his cacti, he
writes decent poetry and acceptable prose to keep himself sane. He has
been published in The Audacity, and is the managing editor for the
quarterly lit mag Second Skin Mag.
Credits: “Untitled”
P.B. Gomez (he/him) is a Mexican-American activist and writer. He is the
founder of the Latino Rifle Association, which aims to provide
politically progressive self-defense education to Latino communities. He
begins law school this fall and plans to become a civil rights attorney.
He shares his thoughts on Twitter, @MestizoLeftist.
Credits: “New York’s Finest”
Peter S. Goldfinch is a pseudonym for a neurodivergent ace anarchist
debt peon and IWW member working on a PhD in a useless discipline. They
believe a better world is possible. Unfortunately they are not a very
interesting person outside of anarcho-clichéism, so they don’t have much
to say about themselves.
Credits: “Poems from the Plague Year, Number Six: Unquiet Summer”
Timi Sanni writes from Lagos, Nigeria. An NF2W poetry and fiction
scholar, his work appears or is forthcoming in various journals and
magazines. He is a reader for CRAFT Literary and Liminal Transit Review.
He won the SprinNG Poetry Contest and Fitrah Review Short Story Prize in
2020. Find him on Twitter @timisanni.
Credits: “Ode to the Spire”
Viroraptor is a young native Vietnamese communist anarchist from Saigon.
He got familiarized with anarchist thought while abroad and is committed
to trying to popularize it among the progressive youth of his homeland
through illustrations.
Credits: Three Arrows
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“We live in capitalism; its power seems inescapable. So did the divine
right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human
beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our
art, the art of words.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin