issue nine
Fall 2024Constellations
Constellations are by definition, groupings of stars that form a recognizable pattern or meaning. From earth, these formations decorate our nights, guiding our shadow selves as the dark takes hold. To many, constellations are a map used to navigate the tumultuous seas and daunting deserts. To others, they are a tapestry of stories carrying the myth and legends transcending generations of life, immortalized by oral traditions.
The stories of constellations offer another example of humanity making tangible meaning out of the mysteries of the universe, and the maelstrom of human experience. It makes permanence out of the present; understanding out of chaos.
With each growing crisis, from Palestine to Congo, to the bone-chilling 2024 Election, constellations serve as a reminder. We are all the architects of our cosmic tapestry and just as our ancestors learned to create meaning, we too can rearrange and redefine the life that surrounds us.
The editorial board at Invisible City is honored to publish these incredible works of transformative essays, prose, poetry, and art. We invite you to sit in the luster of these works and feel inspired by the very stars they chose to include in their constellations. We invite you to feel inspired by the stardust embedded into our existence, take a look up at a starry night and remember that you too, can find meaning in the dark.
Always,
Alexander Torres, Editor in Chief&
Autumn K, Production Editor
Purification Before Battle
Six AM. Winter Solstice. The summit of Burro Peak. In the valley a pronghorn herd assembles to receive the day’s orders. So charged they march through mesquite and cholla, hunting water and fodder. Tazhi gobble love songs to their hens. I, the fireman with elk horns, fork the fourth and final glowing stone through the east gate into the pit. This done, I enter the lodge, close the deerskin flap, and sit cross-legged with my brothers in the sacred atmosphere...
Read the story →REVERSE WOLF
In the end, the Reverse Wolf enters another body. First
it coalesces in the compost of leaf litter, from mosses
and fruiting bodies, from masses of fungal filaments knitting
subterranean threads, flowing now into its wolf form…
Read the poem →Scar Tissue
Your roommate’s voice is as tender as a fresh wound when she offers to pay you two favours in exchange of accompanying her to a funeral. When you ask her whose funeral it is,she hooks her fingers on your collarbones and presses down until your knees buckle. Shepoints to an ex-lover’s name scalpeled in the nook between her heel and her ankle, the woundhaloed red around the deep incision like a neon sign...
Read the story →The Looker
Objects, subjects, the brazen anonymous porn star, whose audacious nudity is not faked. I wonder what brought her to pagination, and no clutter of tattoos, no butt inked—classy, probably the poor kind—and I wonder how she is coping with her life after the shoot, the shutterbug cranny searching analysis, the scrupulous worldly focus, the judging eyes, though I must say my habit is tame, and I mostly look at girls thoroughly alone, impossibly posed, too unlikely, too heavenly, and when I turn the page, all consumed, there she is…
Read the essay →The Jugs
I still mailed them in, even though mail had long since given way to email, which itself had been replaced several times over by more technologically advanced systems. I still mailed them, even though there was nobody left to read the mail, much less deliver it…
Read the story →Quicksand
The first time it happened, Lana was standing in front of a shop window, trying to see past her reflection to the business inside. She doesn’t remember anything special about the moment, but suddenly her insides were collapsing into themselves and the Styrofoam cup of coffee was pulled out of her hands and she dropped to her knees, gasping, everything around her taut and bright…
Read the story →Mausoleums of Monuments
On the way to the city yesterday, I thought I was going to die in the tunnel with a Bible open in the backseat. I looked out the rearview to gauge how much time we had left, Mom talked about the apocalypse, and suddenly we’re spit out on a Manhattan street.
Read the poem →Calling Jack
The sailing ketch Siren’s Call rides her anchor chain in a remote cove off the Sea of Cortez. Warm water laps her wooden hull. Jack Darris, the skipper, first mate, and cabin boy, laps lukewarm whiskey. He watches the last rays of sunlight dip below the ragged Baja horizon while pondering the merits of another whiskey. He does not think long…
Read the story →Nested Skins
Roger and I were at the beach when the fog came in. We had just finished eating. Everyone on the sand stopped what they were doing to marvel at the density and opacity of the fog, and how quickly the white mist rolled toward us over the water. And then all at once, we were in motion. Roger and I packed up our things. Mothers snapped at older siblings to collect the small children still splashing in the small waves. Across the bay, telephone wires and the lattice of the radio tower were made briefly more visible before melting away. The fog seemed to dissolve the world. Already, the horizon was gone.
Read the story →Exoskeleton: a Hermit Crab
Temperature
A small burning fire at the center of your core. Nights spent sobbing in the walk-in freezers. Chilly wine-key, blue frost growing on boxes of wine glasses. Beer stashed behind buckets of sauce. Sticky blue tape, peeling from heat. Burns on the backs of your hands…
Read the essay →Let’s imagine a liver lives forever.
15-year, no-nonsense proof.
Bite of orange, a caramel on toast—
on the nose, as one expects—before
a sip slips a hint
of hummingbird tears…
Read the poem →nude / poem / with
( top : scar )
At this most excellent brink
where the body meets the flesh
of stirred Air
Read the poem →