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You are here: Home / Issue 3
Featured Artwork: Bodhi by Jay Armstrong

Letter from the editors

As the legacy of our literary magazine evolves, the editors share the incoming magazine's manifesto:

We create the space to play in. When your art starts to create shape and you’re a witness to how it transforms, a catalyst for where it lives, how does it feel? At Invisible City we welcome the story. The truth we all need to hear. Give us your work that shouts. That speaks with conviction. That demands attention. Send us imagination playing. Working like only the work can.

That mindset drives us to create an expansive place, one that breathes and changes each submission cycle. Our published pieces reflect the current running through our artist community. This transformative playground of pieces ranging in the subtle & explosive push us to be bold and truthfully reflect the world around us.

We will never reject a piece based on an idea that it’s too different from other pieces we have published. We honor the fluidity, we honor the privilege to consistently build upon what the previous contributors--staff and artists--have begun for us. All genres and explorations of those genres are welcome here though we do ask that art reliant on the art of others (translation, found works, responses) be properly credited and/or permitted by the original artist.

Send us your exciting words, your examined obsessions, your moments of haunting so that we may also be excited, obsessed, submerged in your imagination. Art is not shaped in a vacuum and though the process can often feel lonely or solitary, the creation is anything but.

Invisible City is what we make it so let’s make it together.


Poetry / Emily Pinkerton

Questions for Planning Purposes

is there a ghost

did you incur any loss

did you improve

(melancholy horn solo)

Read the poem →
Poetry / Ashleigh A. Allen

Memory and meanwhile, humbly unannounced

I put you in this box, like the heart of a bird in my human armpit.

Pray every day, face the sun, finger the birch tree I stop at, dogs likely shit on,

young people kiss near. Unfamiliar with what you were like at puberty,

Read the poem →
Fiction / Alexandra Munck

The Uncanny Housewife

The last time I thought about ghosts, I was in a McDonald’s. I had left my grandmother’s house in Des Moines at bedtime, assuming my children would fall asleep in the car, but an unnatural energy possessed them all the way across Iowa.

Read the story →
Poetry / Grace Li

Etude with Late Rain

They’ve taken the temperature of our city

and rubbed its feverish veins. Sweat starts to rise

from the open sidewalks. Blinds drawn, screens

opened, faces lit from below. Our thoughts

Read the poem →
Poetry / Alicia Byrne Keane

McAllister's Garage

Around here, a pause is always violet-coloured,

mostly strung on necklaces and crumbling

to sugar between teeth. The flowerbeds

new I think, speaking to headlamps

Read the poem →
Fiction / Star Su

Let Me Unwrap This For You

Krista has the personality of supermarket cereal—an aggressive love of color and cartoons, easily swayed by sweetness.

Read the story →
Nonfiction / Becca Yenser

Wichita Fridge

Day-old fried cheese curds. Three Vortex IPAs. Pickles. More pickles. Low-sodium soy sauce (brand: Dillons), jumbo ketchup, two packs of brown eggs (organic but not free range).

Read the essay →
Nonfiction / Serena Burman

Undoing

It’s been quiet in the car for a few minutes. With the windows down, I’m breathing in the newly-minted greenery that’s emerged from hiding overnight.

Read the story →
Poetry / Emma Bolden

Inpatient Procedure and Poem Written While Waiting for the Biopsy Results

Lord I love to aching

all this sweet

anonymity, to be a pulse

lighting up a picture

Read the poem →
Fiction / Dana Diehl

The Woman Through the Door

Things go missing in the nursing home.

Helen’s weighted blanket. A letter from her late-husband. An abalone button. A cassette tape of crashing waves she bought at Acadia National Park after she stepped into the ocean for the first time, age fifty-two.

Read the story →
Nonfiction / Nadja Maril

The Land Holds My Memory

Somewhere there are photos, color slides taken in the late 1960’s of me sitting on top of a large rock. Buck teeth, hair held back from my face with a kerchief, and scrawny legs.

Read the essay →
Poetry / Leah Kindler

Sesame Seeds

Last spring, I hid you in a poem of greenery,

described the distance as furious and never thought

I would feel that way too.

Read the poem →
Fiction / Patricia Q. Bidar

The Little Jenny

Back in San Francisco, I would press up behind Leon on his Harley, curving up Market Street and the Portola. When he’d told me it was over, I bawled his name into the night air.

Read the story →
Poetry / Danae Younge

How Levity Hungers

When we met, you told me I had a voice

that could pinch the corners of our Carolina town

wrap its skin into a hand-held bundle

and inflate it -- balloon, string-tied

Read the poem →
Nonfiction / Laura Goodman

The Window

Would not a proper memory of one’s father presuppose a proper father? I’d think so. In the memory I have there is nothing about either it or the father that qualifies as proper.

Read the essay →
Fiction / Chelsea Stickle

There's a girl stuck in a block of marble

and the mother sees it as her job to chisel her out. To Michelangelo her. The tools are sentences like, “You look washed out without makeup” and “you should suck your stomach in.”

Read the story →
Nonfiction / Ali Bryan

Meditations on Trash in a Time of Dumpster Fires

Just before seven a.m., I hear the garbage truck. I’ve already taken the black bin to the curb. The old hockey bag spread inside the front entry for the past month didn’t fit, despite the fact I’d been dismembering it for weeks, disposing of it in serial-killer pieces.

Read the essay →
Poetry / Matt Schroeder

The Lost Tongue of St. Niko

Dear poet of nooses of sharp okra

& tired trams

my bones are filled

with wet tobacco & spent coffee grounds

Read the poem →
Poetry / Nazifa Islam

Skeptical and Inferior

As vacant as ambitions

or wholesome words

 

I have no right to solace here

in this bitter universe.

Read the process poem →

Featured visual artwork in order of appearance:  Strange Dream by Kevin James Thornton, Heritage by Sarah Gao, Lucid Dreaming With You by Karin Hedetniemi, Surfs Up by Jay Armstrong, Smokehouse by Daoud Naouri, Untitled (Collage 1) by Marissa Geoffroy, Lonchera in Pink Space by Rebeca Abidial Flores, Dancing on Flames by Sherry Shahan, Is This Thing Honest by Raphique Barakat, IMAGINE by Rabiah Al Adawiyah, Wires by Daoud Naouri, Edi Sedgwick by Jay Armstrong, Bodhi by James Armstrong, Miami Vice by Jay Armstrong, The Window by Laura Goodman, Body Moving by Zach Searcy, The New Job by Daoud Naouri, The River of Life by S.S.Q., and Mt. Tam at Night by Daoud Naouri.




Issue 3

Caroline Read | Editor-in-Chief

Rebeca Flores | Production Editor

Tanya Žilinskas | Apprentice Editor-in-Chief

Megan Bounds | Apprentice Production Editor

Jonathan Jones | Apprentice Production Editor

 

Jesse Herwitz | Fiction Editor

Catherine Karnitis | Poetry Editor

Isabella Welch | Nonfiction Editor

 

Ashlee Laielli | Assistant Nonfiction Editor

Sydney Vogl | Assistant Poetry Editor

Nicholas Neyhouse | Assistant Poetry Editor

Kari Miya | Assistant Poetry Editor

Laleh Khadivi | Faculty Advisor

Readers: Christian Aldana, Swetha Amit, Margaret Benson, Amber Diaz, Lisa Freese, Kevin Garske, Matthew Hose, Leonel Lopez, Isabella Stewart, Neal Andreu Tayco, Amal Wincek, Hantian Zhang

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