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You are here: Home / Issue 5
Featured Artwork: In the Beginning - Contamination 50 by Adriano Marinazzo

Issue 5

The Apocalypse Contains Multitudes

Invisible City's Issue 5 explores the pros and cons of the end of the world. Our contributors delve into cataclysms great and small, examining the apocalypse as a destructive force, a prelude to rebirth, or a simple subsumption.

Do we embrace our nihilism, or do we seek out sources of hope? Has love saved or degraded us? Are we pursuing a greater sense of truth, or are we chasing our own tails? Have we lost, found, or commodified faith?

As Invisible City undergoes its own yearly process of change—old editors moving out and new editors coming in, one issue replacing another—we choose to see the possibility that comes with renewal. We invite you to consider the raptures of the rapture with us.

Poetry / Jose Hernandez Diaz

The Immortal Ones

I was lifting weights at the gym when suddenly I was surrounded by a crew of Jaguar Knights from the 15th Century.

Read the poem →
Nonfiction / Renée E. D’Aoust

The Space Where Love Might Yet Live

There are moose tracks on the snow outside the Grand Hotel Saltsjöbaden. The tracks hold pieces of the animal left behind, a tuft of hide, the strength of the animal here, the shadow of it there.

Read the essay →
Poetry / Sally Weston Ziph

The Edge of a Black Hole Is Called the Event Horizon

I’m Marie Kondo-ing my condo

with the KonMari Method

a can-do attitude

the power of now

Read the poem →
Poetry / Martins Deep

/əˈpɒkəlɪps/

An ocean runs in reverse into the eyes

of those who wept it. in the sound of their restless flow,

Read the poem →
Fiction / Meg Tuite

Memories That Smell Like Mother

Henry’s diary was a soiled jubilation of a recluse’s childhood, stuffed under his iguana’s terrarium, reeking of fierce terror and hands-on scrutiny of grade school intimacy and psychopathy, page by flourished page...

Read the story →
Nonfiction / Brian McNely

The Edges

I pull the clipboard off the dash. On the work order, in blue ballpoint, is: One room, no stairs. A 20-minute job I’ll pad to an hour.

Read the essay →
Poetry / Ceridwen Hall

Retrieval

A pipe bursts and the floor buckles, wedging

her office door half-shut; because I am small

Read the poem →
Poetry / Edie Meade

Beach Walk

Stonewash sky, distressed denim gulf, each palm tree

sensuously distinct as the organs of lovers,

this bulge, that angle, I admire each one

Read the poem →
Poetry / Meghan Sterling

The Night Sea Dreams

That silver dawn bears no weight, its last wooly leaves

are fire coral sunk to the bottom of the branch worn bare.

Read the poem →
Fiction / Jessica Langan-Peck

Sarah is Pining

The three of them were having a dinner party in honor of Sarah’s fiancé leaving her, eight months ago that Monday. It was the first cold night in November, and Max and Tessa wore doubled-up socks inside their apartment.

Read the story →
Poetry / Laura Titzer

Acting as Lovers

passion-forged flowers

amongst midnight skies –

Read the poem →
Nonfiction / Shuly Xóchitl Cawood

A History Whittled Down to This Single Story

January. You left your apartment in Cincinnati—all that light, its wide windows, its clean kitchen, its full-belly fridge—and met me halfway up Route 27.

Read the essay →
Poetry / CL Bledsoe

The Janitor of Feather Town

Later, the birds would find what I’d planted

in crooked bins before it could die of thirst.

Read the poem →
Fiction / Eric Scot Tryon

#2

Wife #2 was sweeping the small bedroom when she found the magazine. A woman with long blond hair adorned the cover.

Read the story →
Poetry / D. A. Hosek

宝石の十字架

I saw a woman

Read the poem →
Poetry / Laura Post

harvest prayer in Homer, AK

Fucking on the moldy leather couch,

exhales drop clumsy from our mouths like apples blackened on

the branch.

Read the poem →
Nonfiction / Sarah Sassoon

Counting Stones at the Bottom of the Tigris River

The day hope died a burden was lifted. Al

-Yahud’s ropes were untied. A sack of

golden bangles, clay tablets and unleavened

Read the essay →
Poetry / Beth Oast Williams

God, Diagnosed With Dementia

You know he forgets names,

where he left the keys.

Read the poem →
Nonfiction / Hien Nguyen

Dislodging Fish Bone

When I was a child, I swallowed a bite of fried catfish whole. A reckless pluck of my chopsticks in a hungry and juvenile daze.

Read the essay →
Poetry / Christian Paulisich

Wild Dogs

On an afternoon walk, a cold wind went through me like a shot

(whiskey, brandy, something dark) and he came to me,

Read the poem →
Fiction / Barbara Lock

The Fisherman's Seven Dreams

In the first dream, Laxmatte, a fisherman who lives in a small cottage on the coast of Finland, removes Maiju, his plain, broad wife, to a red rocky isle in the middle of the Baltic Sea, where they remain for seven months.

Read the story →
Poetry / Diane Callahan

Micro Expressions

too busy living

to hit record

Read the poem →
Nonfiction / Diane Payne

Life Lessons

I’ve always felt a need to be a fixer. When I was young, and my father an alcoholic, I went to the library and discovered that making meals with carbohydrates would lessen the desire to drink.

Read the essay →
Poetry / Daisy Bassen

Flight Path

We took down the bird-feeder

Because they told us to, even though

Read the poem →

Featured visual artwork in order of appearance:  Kissing Nature by Rahma O. Jimoh, Untitled by G.J. Mintz, Watching Over the Town by Linda Hawkins, Finite by Margarita Gokun Silver, Shortcuts by Rahma O. Jimoh, Do You Know Where You Come From? by Gerburg Garmann, Santa Fe Mirrors by Lawrence Bridges, Horizon Lines by Paul Rabinowitz, Prison Beach by Philip Kobylarz, Reality by Elinora Westfall, Golden Halcyon by Leslie A. Lindsay, Cafe Cocteau by A.C. Koch, Pigeons in Paris by Sherry Shahan, Freedom by Faisal Mahmud Arnob, Dreams by Elinora Westfall, Son de Catalunya by A.C. Koch, In the Beginning - Contamination 50 by Adriano Marinazzo, Diamond by Edward Michael Supranowicz, Dandelion #8 by G.J. Mintz, Inlay by Philip Kobylarz, Daydream by Timothy Phillips, Alley Art by Sherry Shahan, The City by Sherry Shahan, and Worm's-Eye-View by Rahma O. Jimoh.



Issue 5

Tanya Žilinskas | Editor-in-Chief

Megan Bounds | Production Editor

 

Benjamin Briggs | Apprentice Editor-in-Chief

Jess Reinke | Apprentice Production Editor

 

Matthew Hose | Nonfiction Editor

T.S. Leonard | Poetry Editor

Neal Andreu Tayco | Poetry Editor

Anna Deh | Fiction Editor

Gretchen Lehtonen Hopkins | Fiction Editor

 

KC Crawford | Assistant Nonfiction Editor

Jess Reincke | Assistant Nonfiction Editor

Bryce Sears | Assistant Fiction Editor

Jake Yarnold | Assistant Fiction Editor

 

Readers: Olivia Berriz, Konrad Ehresman, Lilia Farrell, Kaitlyn Gleeson, Ameyali Hernandez, Lu Huang, Alexandria Hutton, Kristin Jensen, Erik Johnson, Rosa King, Frank Lowe, Sonya Pendrey, Robert Perea, Sasha René, Cristina Rosa, Krystian Schwarz, Eden Julia Sugay, Katelynn Williams, and Hantian Zhang.

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