What is our responsibility as artists to reinvent or reimagine our world, our selves, our work in order to dismantle current systems and conventions and tastes that are at best, dated and stifling, and at worst a threat to real, lived lives? What role does re-imagination play in freedom?
Sometimes the name and the body stop serving one another. It has been ineffective to always have to explain what this journal wasn’t (about JF, for instance) before we could say what we were. It is far too easy to distract oneself with the symptom instead of the problems rooted in the system at play.
Dear James, I wrote this all in cat memes cuz I didn’t want anything to get missed.
In addition to excretion (for example the purging of material goods, selling the doll house,… hurling the couch into the ditch where it will sit, half its stuffing
spilling out and beginning to disintegrate, too, until the maggots move in, hundreds of tiny living moons and how they work)
to eliminate a substance from the body.
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I didn’t choose the poems in this issue based on their technical skill, or original voice, or unique imagery – I chose them because when I had finished reading them and was washing the dishes or writing an email, they were the ones that came back to me. Continue reading
And yet the silence left holes in my bones and I realized how much I wanted you to speak to me but you weren’t speaking to me, and inside I felt like the blue part of the fire, the part that’s the most hot. Continue reading
But the stories I’ve selected for Issue 4 all immediately made me put down my cheese and focus. I even had to sit up because I was laughing and it’s hard to lie on my back and laugh with cheese in my mouth. You try it. Continue reading
You’ll be left behind. And not in the fun apocalypse way, but in that used bookstore way when you find an old lit journal that claims to have been contemporary but there’s nothing in those pages that actually speak to the time those people lived. Instead of reflecting culture, you’ll just continue to reflect an indifferent, blind world. Continue reading
What happens when previous contributors become editors? You get issue 4. Visit the editor spotlight for Kamala Puligandla, Courtney Kersten, and Yasmin Belkhyr to refresh on why they became editors for May and June. We can’t wait to share this issue with you. With poetry by: Jamison Crabtree, Meggie Royer, Kelly Jones, Maya Jewell … Continue reading
Flannelled, freezing,
and iPhone compatible,
we re-paint the streets
with lines of Adderall
and stage our acrobatics
with subtle instamatics
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The Caller The 1920s apartment building on the corner of Geary and Hyde was abandoned. San Francisco had forgotten about it. This oversight allowed for a small group of runaway kids to squat there. Takeout menus littered the front steps. Hidden somewhere in the small yard was a plaster-of-paris gnome with a shamrock hat. A … Continue reading
The plan was really a three-part process. Scope out the wild of Cherapunjee and get a feel for the landscape. Cover himself in leaves or toucan dung or something equally rugged and ambush the beast. Board a flight back home and hand Trixie the camera and say, “This is for you, now give me my last name back…” Continue reading
The idea that now he could see us, hear us,
know all that we thought. Terrifying,
and too much power for a boy’s soul;
just yesterday he was a Boy Scout.
But maybe that’s the reward for feeding
your flesh to flames: clairvoyance.
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The James Franco Review 