ISSUE 59 | DEC 2015

TAXONOMY

Illustration by Pia Peterson

there are three major groups of organisms - the real nightmare was the eukaryotic sequences - the microbiologists were very happy - a last universal common ancestor - a lot of people want to make viruses a fourth thing - peptides stabilize the ribosome - if you start from no life and you go to life

Joseph Spece

Girl

So! This is New York - with sterling thoughts in him - dipping its tines in bright paint - sketching and sketching again - frill themselves - upsetting the vials of sperm - and my little dress would be quite dry was it me - was it me, ponderous, hot, leaking the acid spittle - knock at my nest now

Ethan Linck

Birds, Whiskey, and the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis: Ernst Mayr in the Solomon Islands

New Guinea was almost unimaginably remote - leaving the leader only with a gaggle of Yale college seniors - the Solomons spray like emerald teardrops south of the equator - natural selection, genetic drift, and mutation - thoroughly tired of the tropics - birds like fantails, white-eyes, and monarchs

James Townsend

Root Canal: Reassessment of the Animal Tree of Life and Its Implications

the question boils down to which group of animals branched off from the rest first - what is even possible during evolution - stinging cells on their tentacles - the amorphous, gelatinous portion of ctenophores - sponges first - most ctenophores are incredibly fragile - nerves and muscles and symmetry

Pia Peterson

The Meals of Others

weighs the pages down with a butter knife - coffee and foie gras - blames his acid belly on his girlfriend - health score of parrot - she'll live forever by the sheer grace of the gods - there is nothing else in her fridge - discussing the finer points of local politics with me or the dog

Joshua Batson

On the Surfaces of Things: Mathematics and the Realm of Possibility

you dream of an atlas of the world - the disk is not the sphere - surfaces of things are also finite, and have no boundary - to distinguish the sphere and the torus - the areas that would get colored in MS paint - this was a proof by induction - the shape of a sphere with handles, possibly with holes

Ainsley Morse

Elegy

so pure-blooded before dawn - after their nighttime debauches - what masterpieces shuddered - probably the augurs - the married carry roe - writing about Dmitiri Prigov and hanging out with poets in San Francisco - smaller than Anya although he must have been six