Month: October 2023

From the Author: Michael Balint was a psychotherapist in the Object Relations school. His ideas about the effects of early development are moving and also were ground-breaking, building on the importance of what Freud called the pre-genital or pre-Oedipal phase. Chiefly, his concept of an early state of experience that exists before words has inspired… Continue reading Gram Joel Davies

Introduction Did he eat my heart whole, or bite by bite? Did he wash it down with milk, or another boy’s piss? Where is he? Is he still alive? If he is, does he still love me? If he is, and he does, would he tell me? If he is, and he does, and he… Continue reading Thomas Hobohm

The Border Crossing Point A river marks the border. Narva, burned over and over. The lake separates one country from another. Narva, razed over and over. How do you measure 98% of a city destroyed—what instrument counts the missing shoes by the door, the unharvested root vegetables shellshocked in the garden? They left the river,… Continue reading Amanda Maret Scharf

The New World (2015) Columbus said the world was a big tit, and he wanted to go to the top— I packed my bags in silence but just as smug Columbus said we were in Eden we made it but I don’t buy it— something is still rotten in this state Show me a hero… Continue reading Marina Blitshteyn

Contempt for Indianapolis It was May something-or-other, the year of our Lord whatever, when you arrived with an overnight bag & a joint copped from a Music Education Ph.D. dropout. Could only visit for 24-hours, you said, had more important food on your plate. Not me. I was depleted, my fields canned-soup salty. It was… Continue reading Pablo Piñero Stillmann

Inheritance Wedded first to heterosexuality, second to my father, my mother cursed me to a lifetime of uncooked vegetables. As a child, I stood by her in the kitchen while she beheaded fish, slid a blade along their spines like soothing a colic, extracted gallbladders to stop the flesh from bittering. You must learn this… Continue reading Ngoc Pham

ANGEL CORE // OUR WORD IS VENGEANCE On August 6th and 9th, 1945, the United States of America dropped two atomic bombs on civilian population centers in Japan. Somewhere between 129,000-226,000 people were killed. The Demon Core, a subcritical sphere of plutonium, was intended to be used in a third bomb to be dropped on… Continue reading Nora Hikari