Dear Reader,
I write this letter in the hottest October I can remember, just another in the grim onslaught of broken records. The air swelters with a logic that has remade the world and continually iterates into new and terrifying constellations. Amidst continued genocide, emboldened fascism, and other spectacular forms of cruelty, so-called artificial intelligence is poured like cement into our eyes and ears. I mourn what we’re losing in the spread of this extractive technology, which the accelerationists declare both a market boon and existential threat in the same, panting breath.
The contributors of Issue 21, however, wield the organic technology of art in service of life. In these works you’ll find a different economy of attention, life-renewing practices of refusal, and a search for the worlds that shimmer beyond hegemonic logic. The narrator of Kokum Mukul’s “Embraces of Elsewhere” laments, “Our home was like any other home, erased for an unprecedented new world.” Yet amidst political turmoil and ecological destruction on an unimaginable scale, they nonetheless open the door to the possibility of love, of enduring connection.
Architectures of containment and discipline sprawl throughout this issue. It is one of this world’s peculiar cruelties that so many of us first experience eros under such repressive conditions. Jeffrey Ehijie writes in “When Memories Move Like Sorcery”:
“The school stood like a fortress…The compound was a maze of strict geometry: everything moved in straight lines. Straight backs. Straight faces. Straight beds. Meals came square and measured. Even the silence felt disciplined.”
Yet amidst the straight order, queer love emerges: “When he smiled, it softened the room. Around him, even the hierarchy seemed to dissipate.”
Conversely, Paulie Malherbe recounts the processes by which homophobia insinuates itself into our bodies just as we are becoming aware of our desires, our unruliness. No one is exempt from these inherited walls:
“I look around me, and it almost seems like, somehow, we’re all still stuck down there, all still buried alive beneath that white chapel. Daylight reveals the exit is open; this need not be our world.”
This need not be our world–a rallying cry that asks us to first take stock of the world as it is. Malak Silmi also weighs in on the cruelties enacted upon children in her essay “On Background.” She reflects on how an iconic photograph of Faris Odeh, a child in Gaza throwing stones at tanks, became an integral part of her connection to Palestine:
“Faris was killed 10 days after the photo was taken in 2000 in Gaza, by a bullet to his neck as he bent down to grab a stone ahead of another tank. But…Faris was still alive in our Michigan home roughly 7,000 miles away from where his body was buried in Palestine.”
Silmi reaches across time and distance to connect to the land, writing of the defiance Palestinian children embrace as “the only way to survive, to claim any ounce of dignity, to hold tightly to the soil that made us.” While the US-Israeli genocide against Palestinians continues as the algorithms filter it out of view, language becomes the medium by which readers are called into relation: “When they refuse to name, I must start with the murderers.” Relation entails responsibility. And by taking on such responsibility, we source collective power as Chariot Wish reminds us: “no entity precedes / the set of relations / that brings it into being our / will must become the sea”.
Issue 21 contributors wrestle with questions of relation, of materiality, of the ways in which our current era feels characterized less by “late stage” and more by “collapse.” People, labor, objects, ideas collapse into each other under such instability as Stephanie Kaylor writes: “a wife is a sex worker, / or a knife is a sex worker, as it cuts the meaning / of our lives into everything / into nothing”.
These are sticky and porous times in which even a word as intimate as “habibi” can be appropriated into a bougie coffee order: “I contemplate / ordering my coffee habibi / then do. Curiosity outweighs / my bewilderment over western / proprietization.” Yet as Elina Katrin writes, to speak the term of endearment aloud counteracts the cloying flavor, and thus language remains alive, “a fresh sound” unbounded by white appetite.
Issue 21 brings us into the fold of language too strange to be predicted, unrestricted intimacies, a blossoming of earthliness. In lieu of anodyne comfort, the writing in this issue urges you to meet the exigencies of the moment. As Brian Alarcon asks, “If you’re too scared to say anything now, imagine what’s coming?” Issue 21’s writers and artists challenge us to imagine through the crises, to create in spite, and to remember: we have everything to lose and everything to gain.
With love,
Zavi Kang Engles
Los Angeles
November 2026
