Letter from the editor
The submissions we have the honor of featuring in this issue center on the ever-shifting idea of permanence. In a time that is many things—unprecedented, chaotic, exhausting—writers in this submission cycle leaned into this unknowingness, this uncertainty, with a striking urgency. Authors invited our readers into the precise moment when the gravitational force of a world is inverted, exploring the intimate effects of what lingers in that space afterwards. With certain pieces, we are pulled into the moment of a change, the precise instant where things that once were are no longer. In other pieces, we are invited into intimate examinations of loss, metamorphosis, disconnect and love. How do we shift through the debris of these emotions? How do we tether ourselves back to our lives, the roles we play, the relationships we build when the ground is radically splintered beneath our feet? How do we navigate a world that is consistent in its constant restructuring?
Our team felt the echoes of these pieces merging, calling to each other as if the authors were all in conversation despite the distance between each of them. It’s the imprints, the shadows cast by the worlds these authors introduced us to, that remain with us, that mark us as a changed person.
Let there be no half light. Let the full and bright sun of change flood our eyes. The visual pieces in this issue have been selected to stand alongside a literary piece. Some create a wide opening for poems. While others are charged with guidance. Some visual works seek to wrap themselves to an ending. As the visual pieces converse with stories, poems, and essays, we must remember that in this strangeness that is our world, art will remind us of our duty to reach each other.
We were left bruised, stung and awed by the work we encountered. It is our privilege to share these pieces with our readers and introduce Issue 2 of Invisible City.
Invisible City's theme this issue is Transience / Resonance. It explores the center of a moment—when change occurs, leaving the audience with the aftermath. Togetherness existing for a brief moment.
Kitchen Windows
Two tomatoes side by side
on the windowsill above the sink,
where white paint curls
away from the wood—lifted
Read the poem →An Alternate Geography
Our bodies are continuations of maps
places we've slept in become sad in
made love in everything that's been
through us an alternate geography
Read the poem →Trypophobia
December is mango season, when sayaca tanagers peck holes and holes and holes.
They flock to trees with northern exposure and gorge on the earliest ripened fruits, which hang motionless like sunkissed teardrops not quite sad enough to fall.
Read the story →Good Neighbor #57
At this point, I have lost track of most of my losses. I try to dwell on fingers and names, the little silences I can take a nap in. They never last that long, and I brew coffee when I rise.
Read the poem →Room Tour
My lover from the future says I am dead in his time.
My lover from the future also says the present me is of “lower energy density.” He shoots lasers in wind tunnels for a living: dissociates naturally occurring nitrogen, watches the atoms recombine in an artificial fluorescence, measures the movement under a high-speed camera.
Read the story →Plunder: Indian Residential School
The children are, at last, asleep. Like bright brass plates we’ve stamped them
with new names: Peter, Rachel, Levi, Esther, Aaron, Ruth. Each day’s lesson
Read the poem →BART WOMAN
“Are you a doctor?”
The voice hangs in the air, speaks twice, before I realize that it is addressing me. The words come from a woman who has just squeezed in beside me on the concrete bench fixed to the subway platform.
Read the essay →Haven’t you
snapped enough rabbits’
ankles to know
it’s no use to scream
I’m sorry
into voicemails how
many this is the last
time’s do you think
you deserve at your worst
Read the poem →Son
We take for granted the hinges that guide us
to the next room
Something my dad once said Go
back now No that’s not what he
said he said Lean into the gravity of what
you choose
Read the poem →A Love Letter to Andre Lancaster from Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko
Under the artificial but highly industrialized canopy that was the D-train running directly over our heads, we stood outside for our first heart-to-heart conversation. It was summer in New York City, distinct in humidity and activity from summers anywhere else in the world, and the workshop process for your Black queer theater group with its five playwrights under fellowship had begun.
Read the letter →Witnessing the Resonances: Shifters, A Debut Chapbook
Randy James is the author of a debut chapbook, Shifters, published by Nomadic Press and is a recent graduate of the MFA Program in Writing at the University of San Francisco.
I met up with Randy, via Zoom, to discuss his new book and his writing life.
Read the interview →Lemon Meringue and Something Else
Last year I visited the city in which we became friends, and I tried to find that pie place. It must have closed at some point. I never knew its name or address, only that it was west of the expressway.
Read the essay →Cateogies of Ex-Lovers, Each with the Same Weight
Those embalmed
and those with one leg
Those who go away to work every morning
The ones who have children with other women
Men who write their dreams down
Read the poem →The Hummingbird, A Love Story
Last April, we had a winged visitor on our deck. The hummingbird’s trips to the sugar water had become more frequent. Peeking out from behind the patio’s glass doors, my husband and I followed her flight from the feeder. Read the essay →End of Summer Nocturne
as always, my life has become
the blade-tip of a spade held by morning
just before the coagulation of light
as always, there is no princedom
Read the poem →An Emptiness Forever
Everything is the same on the way to school, the beard guy with his cardboard sign, the white-orange cat that’s weeks-long dead getting pressed deeper and deeper into the pavement from our tires, and Bailey’s stupid big-wheeled truck with its tattered flag sticking up out of the bed, the I’m a patriot stickers of guns plastered on his bumper.
Read the story →On Craft: Interview with Paul Beatty
Paul Beatty is the author of two books of poetry and four novels, including The Sellout (2015), for which he became the first American author to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2016.Read the interview →Drunk with the Mermaid
“The bottom of the sea is less cruel than you’d think,” she tells me,
four drinks deep at The Schooner Hannah (the dive bar, not the
boat), leaning in to play with the links
Read the poem →Still Life with Timex by Elisabeth Murawski
Still Life with Timex submerges the reader into the mind of a grieving mother, whose distant son has fallen into a coma and inevitably passes. Elisabeth Murawski approaches this subject intensely, rarely straying from the intimate perspective of the mother.
Read the review →The End of the World as We Know It Is the World as We Know It
We aren’t supposed to go near the pit on burning days, but it’s never hard to figure out. Read the story →falling figs
yesterday, grace & i drank white wine in bed. it tasted light, like new friendship. we counted good songs & epiphanies on our fingers but the next morning when i smelt the bed stains, the night was already of the past. Read the poem →Spring 2021
Caroline Read | Editor in Chief
Rebeca Flores | Design & Production Editor
Megan Bounds | Production Assistant
Emily Hoang | Fiction Editor
Tanya Zilinskas | Fiction editor
Darci Flatley | Nonfiction Editor
Isabella Welch | Nonfiction Editor
Katrina Monet | Assistant Nonfiction Editor
Daniel Callahan | Poetry Editor
Catherine Karnitis | Poetry Editor
Sydney Vogl | Assistant Poetry Editor
Nicholas Neyhouse | Assistant Poetry Editor
Kari Miya | Assistant Poetry Editor
Laleh Khadivi | Faculty Advisor
Staff: Amber Diaz, Ashlee Laielli, Christian Aldana, Hantian Zhang, Jonathan Jones, Matthew Hose, Jesse Herwitz