ISSUE 100 | JUL 2022

HOLES

Sasha Panichkin

I’m Dying Here, Tell the Prime Minister

When I tell the locals that I moved to Armenia on my own and that my family has no idea where I am, they seem surprised, or they get pitiful and offer me help. One guy said, “It’s so cool.” Random old men start asking me for a blow job.

Michael Angelo Tata

The Sadomasochistic Cenote and Its Legal Upwellings

Unenforceable sex contracts—the kind that establish distributions of power between dom and sub in SM role play—follow the same formula as regular old contracts. As an arena of performance, court proceedings also partake in sadomasochistic power play. None of this should be surprising. If sadomasochism can borrow from the legal sphere, why not the other way around?

Tamara Masri

Good Morning, Beautiful World

Between the discovery of the Gilboa prison break and the recapture of its last escapee, six exhilarating days during which the dominant feeling was of holding onto a rope in the ocean, a lifeline pulling us backward and forward in time, tying us into knots, binding us together.

Ojo Taiye

“A Nomad’s Worry” and “Time Passes”

I want to say: once again, each of us a narrative— / a partial dream—mechanical animals tied to the / fading light of memory.

Charlie Macquarie

Open Up This Pit

The quiet, empty pit at the end of a long dirt road is a visceral reminder of all the bad ideas that came and went, leaving some ripped-up earth and making someone who lives somewhere else very rich.

Erica X Eisen

“I Will Take the Not-Easy Task”: An Interview with Almagul Menlibayeva

My great-grandmother, she was a person who witnessed and was practicing nomadism. And my grandmother, she was a person who was already settled and was saying, “OK, I’m going to live in the village, you know, in the kolkhoz.” She became a village person. She lost her nomadism. The language remains, but it’s a different language. It’s a settled language, the language of people who worked for the kolkhoz or sovkhoz.