Art takes over. Paintings by Danielle Mckinney set the tone for an issue that puts the thinking self among canvases and books.
“If war”
Pleistoscene
Futures: A Portfolio of Work in Translation
The future as decolonial, as nonhuman, as exile, as womxn, as queer, no future without memory, no future without infection, and—perhaps the only image not bound by time—the future as impossible to render. What holds the following pieces together is their demand that we, as English-language readers, revisit the past with a 21st-century consciousness, ponder patterns, and widen the capacity of our senses even while shorelines erode and sea levels rise, even as algorithms present worlds to us mined and manufactured from our own data.
From AGNI 103
Annunciation, Part III
To Be in a Time of War
The Head of Goliath
It didn’t always land, but we let her tell it as many times as she wanted, every time she got drunk we let her tell us again, we understood she had to get the story out of her system. Like she might get it right eventually and we’d all laugh together and it’d be okay, it’d be over then, finally, it would be over.
Featured
“The Border Moves Through Us”: From Minneapolis, 2026
To plan a route to pick up my child from school, I check iceout.org for a map of recent ICE sightings. They’ve multiplied in recent days, with the Federal occupation surging to 3,000 agents in Minneapolis, five times the size of the city’s police department. Earlier in the morning, . . .
I Think of My Mother, I Think of Maureen
Three years after my mother’s death, I broke my left wrist
in a fall. My right wrist was sprained, my dominant hand
barely working. I couldn’t drive or open jars. I couldn’t wash
my hair. I couldn’t type or hold the phone very long.
Wedding
I left without saying goodbye to him, my escape quicker and quieter than I’d imagined. And now, as I walk down my street, everything has taken on a peculiar quality: the road narrower than I thought, the stench of trash rising and mingling with a trace of ginger, the lights at the corner . . .
Squinting to See the Faces
My mother’s eyes, my father’s nose and teeth. My father’s curls, his earlobes, my mother’s upper lip. My second-grade face still resides in my 64-year-old face . . .
Tracing the Going Morning
A year ago, I wrote in the margins of a poem of mine, “IDEA: Could send out as letterpressed cards . . . recipients can begin to (&, eventually,) assemble the poem whole.” It was winter and Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing was still settling in me from the summer before. I was growing more . . .
Hurling On for Fame: John Berryman’s Uncollected Dream Songs
In 1964, John Berryman sat in Abbott Hospital in Minneapolis, recovering from an alcohol-fueled East Coast reading tour, and sketched out a plan for The Dream Songs . . .