Photo by jeein

Issue Eleven

Fall 2025

Larvae

Invisible City Issue Eleven slips into the crevice between the end of one thing and the beginning of another. This state of duality is represented best by the larva: mysterious, disgusting, engrossing. Historically, it was the symbol of masks and false appearances. Biologically, it’s a stage of growth animals take before metamorphosing into another phase of life. Larvae encapsulate the messy, confounding state of the in-between.

The editors of Invisible City are thrilled to bring you fourteen pieces of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction that unearth the stage of rebirth. The authors featured in this issue explore the borders between life and death, the spaces we hold for loss and grief, the definitions we apply to art and literary genre, the personas we adopt, and so much more.

Thanks for reading,


Lisa Fugere, Editor in Chief
Soo Shin, Production Designer
William Brown, Fiction Editor
Paulina Bylard, Fiction Editor
Zhirui Wang, Nonfiction Editor
Sam Busa, Poetry Editor
Poem by Sam Sax, Photo by Jilli Penner

ART GOES TO DIE IN THE NIGHTCLUB

waiting on line for a sex party, sebas and i go back and forth inventing parties we’d rather be attending—what we’d throw if money, physics, and law were all different animals: a vaccine and hormone distro-party with a cry-floor and dance- bathroom.Read the poem →
Poem by Robert L. Penick, Photo by jeein

Spent

The people in the thrift store today circle, slow-moving but determined sharks, each one intent on making a score that justifies some of the days spent on the factory floor, in the restaurant, kitchen or at the counter, or sitting in the lobby of the temp agency, waiting for the bell to ring and their reward to drop.Read the poem →
Fiction by Georg G., photo by jeein

Companions

I didn’t feel guilty taking this family trip the day after you passed away. I simply couldn’t cancel. I couldn’t stop living my life indefinitely during your months of hospice. All the literature emphasizes the importance of self-care when your spouse is infirmed. Good days, bad days, how should I have known when you would pass? My kids were en route with their families. I’d prepared my grad students to muddle by on their own. 

Read the story →
Interview by Zhirui Wang for Invisible City, photo by jeein

Interview with Dana Diehl

Dana Diehl is an author and educator based in Southern Arizona. Her upcoming collection of short stories, The Earth Room, has won the 2024 Hudson Prize, and two of the stories in this book, "The Woman Through the Door" and "Quicksand," were published in Invisible City. Her other notable works include Our Dreams Might Align (Splice UK, 2018) and TV Girls (New Delta Review, 2018). She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University. We are honored to have this interview with her, in which she shares her writing experiences and offers advice to aspiring writers. 

Read the Interview →
Nonfiction by E. Eastman, artwork by Solanke Boluwatife Emmanuel

Miss Mayfield

“Lock your chair.” 
Tugging the edge of a bouffant mahogany wig with one hand while with the other fondling the folds of an emerald green jersey she’d paired with canary-yellow slacks, Sadie Mayfield replied, “Honestly, I lack the mo-ti-vay-shun.” 
“But we talked about this. Your goal was to walk down these stairs on a Sunday morning, get in the car, and be back in church.” 
“Oh yes, dear, I do, I do need to be in the lair of the Lord, but phys-ically I cannot.”
“Oh, but you can,” I, her physical therapist, said. “You know you can.” 
“Not with this arti-fi-cial extremity.”Read the essay →
Nonfiction by Titilayo Matiku, artwork by Fox Barnhardt

Nobody Wants to Die

The midday cockcrow found me in the kitchen cleaning the mackerels, popularly known as Titus fish, that I had bought from the market. On the white deep freezer in the corner sat my small radio, tuned to a music station. I jiggled my hips with the ease of a palm tree swaying in the wind, my feet tapping on the tiles like a drummer marking time to Angélique Kidjo’s “Wombo Lombo” drifting toward me.

It was a warm Saturday afternoon, the kind that pulled men out of their houses to perch on wooden benches, singlets slung over their shoulders, and half-empty Heineken bottles resting on stools.  

Read the essay →
Poem by Kimberly Garrett, photo by jeein

Letter to the Editor

Remember when
I told you
Grove St. was poppin’?

And my reasonable need
to be symbolically free
though you had not responded to my inquiries.Read the poem →
Poem by James Cagney, artwork by Alexis Jacobson

TINA TURNER’S WIG GIVES ITS FINAL PUBLIC ADDRESS

I ain’t no wig. I am a high jeweled crown
heliotrope to the spotlight.
I may not have roots but anyone can see
we–all of us–are inseparable.
The first compassionate partner she ever got to choose.Read the poem →
Fiction by Daniel Galef, artwork by Anthony Guardado

Cyclops

And then...Read the story →
Nonfiction by Raya Yarbrough, photo by Kelsey Fugere

To the Ones We Knew Only for a Moment

Today we saw his heart beating for the first time, and our hearts responded with a giddy flush. This sea of black, housing a cocoon, housing a smaller sea, encircling a butterfly. 

Read the essay →
Nonfiction by Mark Mazullo, artwork by Anthony Guardado

Berlin Hustle

We settled on the gay neighborhood, my wife Jessie and I, because it was familiar. My older  brother had lived in Berlin in the 1980s, on Goltzstraße, down the block from Café M, one of  Bowie’s haunts during his epoch-making years there. I remember my first pilgrimage to the bar, marveling at the way grizzled, veteran drunks perched themselves at the same wobbly, tin tables  as second-hand-styled teens—leathery, habit-driven creatures of the savannah quenching their  thirst alongside chic, migratory water birds. Thirty years later, Schöneberg was still hip and  nonplussed, immune to the gleaming, late-capitalist blandness that was infiltrating other parts of  the city, altering its identity, in my view for the worse. Much as I craved experience, I preferred  things to remain as they were. 

Read the essay →
Fiction by Zach Murphy, artwork by Anthony Guardado

Insurance

It’s raining, and the living room ceiling drips, drips, and drips because the husband passed up on that free roof inspection and maybe he was afraid of the problems it might reveal, and his father-in-law now lives in the basement, and the husband and the wife keep finding blood-blotted tissues that look like Rorschach tests in the wastebasket, and the father-in-law won’t go to the doctor no matter how much the husband and the wife beg him, and the rain gets louder and louder, and the hole in the ceiling gets larger and larger.

Read the story →
Poem by Noelani Piters, artwork by Tiziana Rasile

Grief in Summer

Life said, See this dead bird
on your evening walk
where tree becomes root,
and now I want to stain
my hands with soil.Read the poem →
Poem by James Slegel, photo by Jilli Penner

STILL

In the last remaining minutes of the year I tiptoe
from the party and out the back door
to breathe in what is left and what will soon be gone,
to salvage some small silence before the corks pop
and the sky burns with crackling rain.
Read the poem →