Image by Caitlyn Murphy
HAZLITT
The World We are Losing
The next night we camp in Atchafalaya Basin, the largest wetland habitat in the US, where the Atchafalaya river delta meets the Gulf of Mexico. Our tent is a thin membrane between us and the wilds. If we touch the tent wall, water will leak through. We lay with our eyes open listening to a chorus of unidentifiable nightlife singing through the velvet black. The swamp is like nowhere I have ever been. The night is alive and wet.
Illustration by Hudson Christie
HAZLITT
The Disneyland of Death
I took the bus to Forest Lawn Memorial Park after waking up on a blow-up mattress in my friend’s tiny Koreatown apartment. I had fallen asleep to the sound of a pastor preaching in Spanish at the storefront church across the street, my first Los Angeles lullaby.
HAZLITT
Secrets Are a Captive Country
My grandfather had never told me about his trip to the Soviet Union in the sixties, but I don’t know why I was surprised. He never told me anything, not even my grandmother’s name.
BRICK: A Literary Journal
Mirror Land
After eating dinner F and I made the plan to sneak into Cinecittà. Five of us sat on a balcony above a soccer field, watching teenagers in neon cleats warm up for the game. A Sardinian man with black eyes rolled a ball of hash between his thumb and forefinger as he explained the linguistic geography of Italy. He had just fallen in love and was eager to articulate his world to us...
PAPIRMASSE
Falling is Relational
James (not his real name) is the kind of man who wears his wristwatch backwards so he can tell the time when he’s aiming a rifle, who is going home to California for a palm tree, jello-soaked Christmas with a Mother that has more to say to a chocolate lab than her husband. He is the kind of man who buys Lego Christmas gifts for boys and Barbie coloring books for girls, who goes for the weekend to a displaced persons camp...
JOYLAND
Cheekbone
I told you over lunch, where Kaiser buns seemed to sprout cucumber through a sheet of spinach, what I thought about Alec Melnyk, the man who measured headstones with a candy coloured yardstick and took the dead out of their tombs...