MAYDAY

collapse/collabi/to slip together or: an anatomy of snakes
by Allegra Wilson

Contributed By:

A translucent, glitching triangular form composed of distorted digital pixels stands vertically in a rural moorland landscape with golden grasses, a water body, and distant mountains under a cloudy sky.
“I Saw You Standing There” by Ryan Kittleman

The two-headed California Kingsnake thanks its InstaCart Shopper
by name. It never calls the cops, but has no training on the gun

range. Good with operations, the snake divides its labours: One
head for dreaming, one for mourning. The Dreamer visits redwoods

and listens to the voice of god; subtle airplane in the canopy. It winds
through ocean-salted plastics in a sea of algaed intentions. The Mourner

slides into the narrows of a Jericho life, brick by brick, plaqued
ventricle mitzrayim. The Dreamer digs brass bone maps from dirt,

replants them to grow a pearl tree, nudging its fruit between
the bricks. Causing bricks to slip. The two-headed California Kingsnake

votes third party, but just once. Both heads go dancing at the monthly
goth night in town. When The Mourner eats they both taste gamey

rodent flesh, feel one lump of baby towhee at the back of their throat.
Both heads of the two-headed California Kingsnake watch The Last of Us

together on the couch at night, spectating collapse. Wildflowers climbing
through dirt floors of old apartment buildings, vernal pools in the mall

beneath the broken escalator, rivers back to their old grounds and running
through grand hotels. At times when frogs are sleeping the heads

of the two-headed California Kingsnake kiss. The dreaming head
imagines swallowing the mourner: tailed oroborous.

ALLEGRA WILSON is a writer living in Northern California. Her work has recently appeared in ANMLY, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Inflectionist Review, and BRAWL.

RYAN KITTLEMAN’s artwork has been shown at the Crocker Art Museum, the Morris Graves Museum of Art, and the Channel Islands Maritime Museum, among others. In the press, his work has been called “mind-bending” (Berkeleyside), “darkly comic” (Times Union), and “kooky and delightful” (SFGate).

Further Reading

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2 Poems
by Miguel Avero, translated from the Spanish by Jona Colson

Exemplary You glimpse a slight copy of liquid belly. Talk about the wind, breed waves on each page, breeding breezes on their veneers. You examine that other in the water-logged bookshelf. Give a meticulous detail of tears opting down very tense cheeks. But this one you pose in your hands (leaves fall apart like butterflies […]

My Life as an Eastern European Art Film by Scott Tucker

First, there is the long—still—opening—shot—of freeway traffic outside my office window, flowing in one direction, heavy, and menacing, and gray, like flood debris carried on a strong current through the central business district. Over this, a white expanse of sterile sky dreaming in the color blue. The scene speaks to us all of the human […]

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