WILLIAM HAAS | March 30, 1981
First silence. Sound arrives in gunshots. The movement overwhelms the unhinged camera. The screen blurs black. The shooter is thrown against a wall. A handkerchief pressed to a head where the brain bleeds out. An agent cocks an Uzi, surveys the scene. The vehicle peels off across wet asphalt. No leaves on the trees.
ELIZABETH SOWDEN | The End of Rape
At first, I wasn’t certain that the knife had gone in, but then he tried to talk and the line across his throat threaded with blood. His lips and tongue were a brilliant red, and the more he tried to talk, the more blood ran down his neck. He fell forward. He stained the snow.
STEVEN T. BRAMBLE | Lentes Oscuros
There have been many attempts to separate ourselves from history, to wash our hands of all the crimes of the human spirit, and to free those of us who are innocent from that terrible inheritance—tradition—which perpetuates hatred within us for one another. But never before have we had the means, the ammunition, to accomplish this goal. Our digital lives are our frontier. We have pioneered it, but have also allowed it to become corrupt.
JODY GIARDINA | Slow Process
It lasted three days, but despite my lack of urine I continued my nut smacking. By this point I had progressed to a small, decorative brick from my fireplace.
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AARON GEORGE | Full
I want to tell you about Bill. Bill was there in the early days. Bill wasn’t one of the voices, but I could talk to him about them, Bill understood. Bill was my boss at the fast food joint. Bill was forty two years old, divorced three times, and had one daughter whom I went to high school with but never talked to because she was “ugly,” and anyway, I was terrified of women back then. Bill’s teeth were decayed to a point that one of them was green; he liked to drink cheap beer and smoke cheap cigarettes. Bill was fantastic to me. An almost perfect mixture of pride and shame lived inside of him, always a bounce in his step and a sad humility in his voice. Bill drove a rusty car from nineteen ninety three, he hated it, but he refused to buy a new one.
BRANDON HACKBARTH | BZ SIGNAL FOREVER.
Although he cultivated a pleasant, somewhat passive demeanor amongst his colleagues, he had no workplace friends and hadn’t any intention of nurturing the potential for such a relationship.
JUSTIN LAWRENCE DAUGHERTY | The Return of Crows
He knew how a thing only realized it was alive when it felt closeness, a touch, a body against its skin.
RYAN FORSYTHE | God Hates Phags
One time we had just finished playing some basketball, six or seven of us. I had to pee and wasn't paying attention to who was where. The bathroom door was shut but I gave the handle a try and pushed it open. There was Jimmy hunched over, stuffing something in his mouth.
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CALEB TRUE | The Internet in the Occident
The Chinese factory worker’s hands peeled away shrink plastic revealing a refurbished iPhone. The worker’s primary interface with the device had been sorting its conflict minerals into piles. He turned it over, turned it over again. He unlocked the thing. No signal in the factory. He stepped outside. A whistle blew. He stepped back inside again. A bar of signal. No bars. One bar again. No bars again. The door closed. He got back to work.
ETHAN MADARIETA | Tension, Resistance
Elaine adjusted the straps of the duffle bag she had carried all the way from Illinois. The weight of the leg was heavy on her back and she was worried that her sweat might damage the soft Cordovan leather of the boot. Reed noticed Elaine’s discomfort and cocked his head in her direction, offering to carry the contraband for a while, but she declined, savored the feeling of its heat and weight like a penance for its displacement. Until it was returned to Mexico, Elaine preferred to carry the burden.
ISSUE 3 | TAMMY
A parody, critique, and sublimation of the modern woman's magazine, TAMMY includes provocative new work, art, and interviews by Sarah Fox (First Flag, Coffeehouse Press), Claire Burgess (Best American Short Stories 2012), J. Fossenbell, Jared Joseph, , Kelle Groom (I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl, Free Press), Venus de Mars (All the Pretty Horses), Jam Hibdon (Lingua Franca Comics), Jennine Scarboro, Jeanette Gomes, and more.
GET IT ON KINDLE
"A more perverted version of McSweeney's The Believer."
"Cheaper than your local newspaper!"
"A thoughtfully curated collection of art and words by two rad ladies in LA."
ELBERTO MUELLER | Amateur Meth Cooks of the Deep Internet
And I guess you would call it one of those quintessential New York City vacation moments: looking out the window to realize it is the dawn of a new day, the purple undersides of clouds glowing pink with the birth of a new sun, before turning my gaze back into the apartment to the task at hand: using a pair of pliers to peel back the metal casing surrounding an Energizer battery to get at the strip of lithium metal contained inside so that my accomplice and I might throw it into a two liter bottle along with some other chemicals as a catalyst in a reaction to synthesize methamphetamine, aka crystal meth. Life, I thought, in the cultural capital of the world, and here I am living it!
SARAH BANNON | My Achilles
Shots suddenly fire from each side of t
he court, vibrating symphonically off of the backboard. Exploding from the floorboards like a spring, I catch the leather object and run, dribbling towards opposite rim. Olivia, a six-foot-three freshman, guards the basket with both hands raised high. I hastily throw up a shot when I get as close as possible to the basket without coming into physical contact to get into a better position to rebound. My legs compress as quickly as they can and I feel with my fingertips the soft, bubbled feedback of the leather ball. Before reaching the ground, however, my cross trainers land on the large, bumpy surface of Olivia’s size-14 Nikes, and both of my feet snap into an unnatural perpendicular position in relation to my ankle. My tendons slowly pull in different directions, shattering my heels and spreading toward my ankles. I land on the leather ball and am unable to move.
HUNTER SHARPLESS | Farther From Shore: My Time in Havana
They wear slippers and sandals and sneakers. They wear red and black and FILA. The priest wears sagging blue-jeans, one of the women wears the Cleveland Indians logo, and on the shirt of another are the words, New York: the Big Apple. One woman pushes a stick into the mud, the mud littered with beer cans, Styrofoam boxes, and the remains of a sacrificed chicken: a cleaved wing, a skull.
NEAL KITTERLIN | Decision 1904
Strange how I feel your heat in my sleep, all our comings and goings in dreams of fair-haired ballrooms, crossed wire dancing on teddy bear-skinned pins, headed up hills charging to glory. There is glory in the unrealized. There is glory in the meeting place that passes us by in every incarnation of historical time. There is glory in a momentary meeting of frustrated purpose. There is glory in your face, my voice, a smile frozen roughly, riding forever in gilded imaginings. The pictures move, love, and so do we.
BRAD LIENING |
Hit The Bricks
Black
tie fractal
Raising
big blood
Money
pudding.
Smithereen
the bootstraps.
Bone
shard another
Fat
ad for drugs
And
tax releases.
Be
your best today:
Look
better fish-
Bowl
sexed. Knock
Knock.
Same ass
Backward wadcutter.
LEIF HAVEN |
A Good Horse
I’m honored
by this moment
that you’ve shared with me.
Somewhere a dog barks
and is quickly shot.
We ride into the sunset.
You ask me the difference
between horsepower and
torque which I just can’t
bring myself to care about.
I’m a horse, so I know
exactly what I have.
COOP LEE |
Wing'd Partyboy
danceparty by the breath
along my cheeks. by the broken bottles in the
stoop-way light. shards at our feet.
our shoes gather momentum as we enter
deeper into the house.
LAUREN ESPINOZA |
I Thought I Had Post-Chicana Blues Because Chicana Wasn't Enough
A short description of Tejanas:
- wear Selena on their t-shirts
- have spray paint stencils of the virgin on their dressers
- get Gloria Anzaldúa quotes as tattoos
- dress up as La Llorona for Halloween
- have cats named Sor Juana and Tonantzin
RUSSELL JAFFE
USA is a time a place a country. The sun takes it somewhat easy. Grain beard latitudes.
USA macaroni Christ. USA plasma screen in the Amish historical society house.
USA onion rings on a hot hat day. USA flea market tents. When there is no water dioramas of wayward families cluster around shadows instead.
> MEG KISSINGER
What can I say that’s different? I guess the value that I could add is that there aren’t too many people who have spent this many years as a journalist covering mental illness. It’s the one unique vantage that I had, so I played to that. What could I say, from my many years of interviewing people who have been touched by violence vis-à-vis mental illness? The huge warning is that you don’t want to associate mental illness necessarily with violence, because it can’t be said enough times: people with mental illness are more likely to be a victim of violent crime than a perpetrator. The reality is that there is a tiny subgroup of the population that is dangerous because of their mental illness. We can’t turn away from that. Even if it is not a conversation that you’d want to have.
> CHINELO OKPARANTA
Inevitably, we will be held accountable for what we put out there, and so perhaps it would be befitting of us to take a moment to consider what potential audience reactions will be, if for no other reason, then simply not to be caught unaware.
We're exposed daily to a dense network of overlapping systems: roadways cutting across flat desert expanses, the domino effect of traffic lights, and airplanes lining up like marathon runners. The structures (both physical and computational) which underlie our engineered landscapes inherit the conditional nature of the tools and frameworks with which we design them. This is the paradoxical responsibility of the structural designer: developing structure for dynamic needs (of information, programs, architecture, policy, planning, ...). How might designed structures facilitate ongoing participation and subjective experience? Perhaps there is possibility in ubiquity, yet it is important to strive for more than just one new standard, but rather new methods for supporting dynamic development- emphasizing adaptability over efficiency, and “big picture thinking” over “the next big thing”.
SPANK ROCK - Outro (Screwville USA)
DAVIE ALLAN + THE ARROWS - Blues Theme
GLENN MILLER - Pennsylvanie 6-5000
BUSH TETRAS - Snakes Crawl
SILVER APPLES - Program
JAVELIN - Waterfalls
PANDA BEAR - Drone
CONNIE CONVERSE - Talkin' Like You (Two Tall Mountains)
THES ONE - Hy-Vee
YOKO ONO - I Felt Like Smashing My Face in a Clear Glass Window
ALABAMA SHAKES - Hold On
ST. VINCENT - Strange Mercy
CHARLES MINGUS - Goodbye Pork Pie Hat
CURTIS MAYFIELD - No Thing on Me (Cocaine Song)
THE MAJESTIC ARROWS - Make Yourself Over (rehearsal)
SUN RA - Nuclear War
QUIET VILLAGE - Pillow Talk
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