Editor’s note—
Beyond the paradise of product lines, through an economic wilderness of hollow olives & glycerine drinks, past the invisible homeless & the ghost of Ralph Waldo Emerson (his mum bringing him clean laundry), up a steaming track covered by vaporous cloud—a man with a cowboy hat will lead your pony on.
Dear, dear reader,
If you could drop this issue on the floor of any bedroom:
Its bad sex, self-help gurus & Sunday school cake would grace your house with all the enthusiasm of an existential forest; its indices of maths & physics would elevate your pick-up lines beyond the reach of outer suburbia; its quiet work of saying things (like bees or ants aren’t still when they build things) would secure the satanic moment in your career—
—where finally your portfolio fills: archangels & mountain vistas.
These are our bodies, floating the surface.
This is the moment, built ab ovo.
This is our data, holy & retinal.
Erena Shingade
March 2018
Erena Shingade is a poet and arts writer from Auckland, New Zealand. Her work has been published by platforms such as The Spinoff, Landfall, Mimicry, Blackmail Press, Atlanta Review, Ka Mate Ka Ora, & the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre. After completing an MA thesis on the Zen Buddhist poetry of Richard von Sturmer in 2017, she continues to research the intersection of the poetic and the religious. During the day she works as a publicist for Allen & Unwin.
Victor Billot
Freya Daly Sadgrove
Lee Thomson
Zack Anderson (US)
Murray Edmond
Courtney Sina Meredith
Manon Revuelta
Naomi Scully (US)
Art by Harry Moritz
