WINTER 2025
Issue
Eighteen
Contents
Nat. Brut 18
Folio
Edited by Cleo Abramian
From Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse, 1989.
Drawing on Etel Adnan’s book-length poem, The Arab Apocalypse, which she wrote during the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, this folio explores modes of poetic documentation in the space of apocalypse.
Adnan writes to us from the inside of what Jalal Toufic calls the surpassing disaster—that which spills past its immediate material annihilation and into “a withdrawal of tradition,” that which must ultimately be resurrected. “I saw it in color,” Adnan says, “Only that way I could express it.”
This folio examines the possibilities of language in this attempt toward resurrection. How do we locate language when language itself fails? And how can poetry bear witness to or document apocalypse by virtue of illogic, of laying down marks on a page? Of looking and looking and looking again at a sun.
Across the landscapes of genocide and the colonial project, this folio collects writing that stands in solidarity with the struggles of Palestine and the other lands exploited by imperialism. Through the work collected here, we hope to further engage with our various lived and historic apocalypses as systemic, interpersonal, world-forming and destroying, a lens for our collective sight.
“It was a little mountain, resembling a cloud, towering above nothing, high as a bird in the air, big as a tree, and it was very lonely, for before the invention of mobiles, mountains used to correspond with birds, so that memories wouldn't die.”
“playing with my opposites/ laughter without axis/ thought ecology/ frosted , caroused/ show me the optional kingdom/ spliced wild , entropic spook/ nature , am I part of it ?”
“the neck as axis of longing magnitudes of malaise coalesce/ the wrist as juncture thought passes fingers and keys/ according to intelligence derived from some isolated actors/ polycarbonate riot shield”
“from back to front. slow/ as dad taught us. i watched/ & readied for my turn. when/ curls might bristle, refuse to give”
“I have been on the other side of the death machine./ that is where I was born. I know nothing else as incompletely. ... I was not being dramatic/ when i said / I'm falling apart”
“My error is the assumption of what/ I’ll always find: sunken/ eyes waiting by the window, gray braids”
A dried-up river carves its path
“In the summer of 2023 on a trip to Yerevan, I visited the Matenadaran museum of Armenian manuscripts.”
Fiction
Edited by Ariel Chu & Valeria Sosa
“The summer I was seventeen was ruled by hunger and backlit by a fat lemon sun I’ll never forget. When I think of it now, it feels like my skin was always just about to melt right off my bones, but that feeling is only a trick of the light.”
“After years of being Inside, she no longer had the appetite for surprise or the stamina for constant rumination. She’d not thought of him or any other old lover this whole time, not even by accident.”
“I always thought about him when I said the insect’s name out loud: the way the words “emerald” and “ash” had gotten stuck in his mouth, had turned around there over and over.”
“All the shapes we made were rectangular and then we lived in them. I had no baby, this was tolerated. Pebbles came to me in my sleep and when I woke up, I would write them down.”
“The lake was as round as a looking glass and as lightless as pitch. Though it was not a wide lake—one could nearly skip a stone across it—it was queerly deep, sinking to a depth of nearly forty feet at its black, bullseye middle.”
Poetry
Edited by Alana Solin
“It came from dried grass, extreme heat in/ the past weeks killing everyone’s interest”
“Our mothers, our brothers, our aunts/ our saints/ could do nothing/ I wonder from time to time, to whom/ do I owe this life/ Dread, that lasting memoir”
“Lifting a case of non-dairy creamer into the/ back of my car and yet/ still so far away from being/ fluent in porcelain fellatio”
“Makeing no whirlpool, and making Contact/ heavy and difficult, and the x/ soft sputtering after/ Cowardice slips down the throat”
“People gather up people, and after/ Marvel at the act, the act soon fading/ But remembered (itself an act—fading)”
Nonfiction
Edited by Meghan Lamb
"sorry if I've already told you this":
Luan discusses her debut poetry collection, 回 / Return, in which she attempts to translate a Chinese word into English, or a feeling into words, and leaves her attempts visible on the page.
The Dining Room,
Or, Jokes We Tell
(a zuihitsu)
“The older men in this memoir are so serious, without the luxury of turning life into a joke. Things That Signal Caste: Growing up on meat. Insisting on vegetarianism.”
on domed buildings and hospitality in times of grief
“the population of arab christians is dwindling, so perhaps the bond is even stronger, more desperate, but that is not the point. I am born into this warmth, oblivious to the violence that has, for many, preceded their arrival at the church’s wooden doors.”
Comics
Edited by Tony Wei Ling
An interview with Helen Chazan about the gender play of erotic comics, her tracing zines, and the legendary comics artist Catherine Jones.
Tension Comes Through Different Avenues
An interview with Lillie J. Harris about humor, horror, and the careful balancing acts of making comics at/ as work.
Image of Nothing, Image from Nothing
An interview with Anneli Henriksson about the many kinds of grids, constraints, and patterns that shape her comics and her life.
An interview with Aditi Mali about her debut collection of comics, Shampoo and Daddy!, and the process behind its creation.