Art takes over. Paintings by Danielle Mckinney set the tone for an issue that puts the thinking self among canvases and books.
Wedding
“The Border Moves Through Us”: From Minneapolis, 2026
The works gathered here constitute acts of witness from Minneapolis, 2026. They pull apart and lay bare the historical and embodied dimensions of carceral Trumpism by making sense of its full-scale assault on personhood and daily life. As Lau Malaver writes, “The border, then, is not outside us. It moves through us.”
From AGNI 103
Gun Stories
To Be in a Time of War
Annunciation, Part III
Of the verb whose brief outline is all I saw: / The stuff of dying and killing but with the sound of a smile. / It bleeds, devours, shatters, and so / I didn’t have time to reach the heart of the matter.
Featured
Explaining the Joke
When I told the clown joke to Nelson, he said,
“The scary part is, how do they know he’s a clown,
not just some guy dressed up in a clown suit?”
The Rapture is Happening Slowly, One at a Time, to Everyone
In an advertisement for a sex pill, the various couples enjoying pre-sex activities / (riding in a hot-air balloon, bowling, clinking their glasses of wine) may be—are they?—
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 . . .
Rewriting the Script of Matrescence Memoir: A Conversation with Erica Stern
I felt like my son’s birth destroyed the narrative I’d heard about giving birth and becoming a mother, and I had to recreate a story for myself. So I wanted the form to reflect that muddling . . .
The Refrigerated Thought: On Time and Writing
Say I am sitting with my mother and grandmother at the square kitchen table patterned over by vinyl-cloth apples, having just eaten lunch. Our elbows crowd the breadbasket, in which remains one solid slice and . . .
The Crossing
What does the world look like? What is the world? And what is Gaza? I had been trapped in it for all thirty-one years of my life, and had not left once.