Articles

Much can be accomplished in the pregnant
pause, in the gap between wish and warrant:
at such intervals, I studied her brunette crown

and the pale travel of skin along her hair’s part,
uneven as a homemade envelope, and the little
black boots beneath her cloaked ankles, resting

on the far side of the davenport: small mute feet,
clutched together like darkly burrowed mammals
asleep in winter’s decay of leaves.

Dr. Freud of the neat gray beard and muffled
sighs, the dark pressed suits and Ascot ties:
he promises, Mother, that the sharp pains
of all last summer—what cuts across my face
like sharded glass—will subside and with them,
my cough, if only I will talk freely of the fears
that crowd in, upon me, in the narrow dark.

Poised on the foothills of the Sandia Mountains for all that awaits on the rim of her twenties the sun on her shoulder the valley below a barbed-wire stitching of cottonwoods and alfalfa yet her gaze remains fixed on the western horizon a red-winged hawk a plume of smoke the faintest smudge on the white canvas sky a root spiraling down to the rancho she left but will seek her whole life the tributary scars on abuelo’s fingers the parchment map of abuelita’s smile the family santos with blood on their knees a run-on legacy staining her pages with both hands bracing she fiercely holds on.

We were traveling in Melbourne Australia back in January of 2018. The location was at the entrance to the Melbourne Museum of Art. The image was made looking through a window that had water running down on the outside.

Wm. Yost was the creator of a daily comic published in newspapers from 1983 to 2001. He is also a fictitious character I created to facilitate the fusion of asemic writing, visual poetry, mythopoeia and world-building that is Geranium Lake Properties. A large part of Yost’s comic was drawn in a conventional style with traditional comic …

  Headnote from the Editor-in-Chief     Headnote from Christopher Patton Consulting Editor and Artist       Asemia     May Bery           Lin Tarczynski Rosaire Appel   Sam Roxas-Chua Christopher Patton    

I’ve never watched the video of George Floyd being killed by a knee to the neck. I’m ashamed to admit that, but stills and short clips have been all I can take. I finished this short animation as the trial of his killer began. It isn’t about his death, or the historical injustices and systemic inequities that made it possible, but for me it’s adjacent to them.

I like to write on walls. I write small discreet asemic messages available only to those whose eyes wander. When the mind is not so severely preoccupied that the eyes have practically stopped working…

This is the land of asemia. Yet, as space reaches its saturation point, a gasp away from overdose—when all systems fail and meaning melts away—there is still air, some breathing room. Perhaps there, in the tiny gaps, even the tired eye might find a strange form of beauty.

by drea brown   1. on the eve of this new year, in the middle of a pandemic that brings daily surprise and death, i am safe. the only human in my house that needs to be fed, though the stout black cat nibbling my heels would say otherwise. tomorrow there will be plenty of …