Issue 5
The Apocalypse Contains Multitudes
Invisible City's Issue 5 explores the pros and cons of the end of the world. Our contributors delve into cataclysms great and small, examining the apocalypse as a destructive force, a prelude to rebirth, or a simple subsumption.
Do we embrace our nihilism, or do we seek out sources of hope? Has love saved or degraded us? Are we pursuing a greater sense of truth, or are we chasing our own tails? Have we lost, found, or commodified faith?
As Invisible City undergoes its own yearly process of change—old editors moving out and new editors coming in, one issue replacing another—we choose to see the possibility that comes with renewal. We invite you to consider the raptures of the rapture with us.
The Immortal Ones
I was lifting weights at the gym when suddenly I was surrounded by a crew of Jaguar Knights from the 15th Century.
Read the poem →The Space Where Love Might Yet Live
There are moose tracks on the snow outside the Grand Hotel Saltsjöbaden. The tracks hold pieces of the animal left behind, a tuft of hide, the strength of the animal here, the shadow of it there.
Read the essay →The Edge of a Black Hole Is Called the Event Horizon
I’m Marie Kondo-ing my condo
with the KonMari Method
a can-do attitude
the power of now
Read the poem →/əˈpɒkəlɪps/
An ocean runs in reverse into the eyes
of those who wept it. in the sound of their restless flow,
Read the poem →Memories That Smell Like Mother
Henry’s diary was a soiled jubilation of a recluse’s childhood, stuffed under his iguana’s terrarium, reeking of fierce terror and hands-on scrutiny of grade school intimacy and psychopathy, page by flourished page...
Read the story →The Edges
I pull the clipboard off the dash. On the work order, in blue ballpoint, is: One room, no stairs. A 20-minute job I’ll pad to an hour.
Read the essay →Retrieval
A pipe bursts and the floor buckles, wedging
her office door half-shut; because I am small
Read the poem →Beach Walk
Stonewash sky, distressed denim gulf, each palm tree
sensuously distinct as the organs of lovers,
this bulge, that angle, I admire each one
Read the poem →The Night Sea Dreams
That silver dawn bears no weight, its last wooly leaves
are fire coral sunk to the bottom of the branch worn bare.
Read the poem →Sarah is Pining
The three of them were having a dinner party in honor of Sarah’s fiancé leaving her, eight months ago that Monday. It was the first cold night in November, and Max and Tessa wore doubled-up socks inside their apartment.
Read the story →A History Whittled Down to This Single Story
January. You left your apartment in Cincinnati—all that light, its wide windows, its clean kitchen, its full-belly fridge—and met me halfway up Route 27.
Read the essay →The Janitor of Feather Town
Later, the birds would find what I’d planted
in crooked bins before it could die of thirst.
Read the poem →#2
Wife #2 was sweeping the small bedroom when she found the magazine. A woman with long blond hair adorned the cover.
Read the story →harvest prayer in Homer, AK
Fucking on the moldy leather couch,
exhales drop clumsy from our mouths like apples blackened on
the branch.
Read the poem →Counting Stones at the Bottom of the Tigris River
The day hope died a burden was lifted. Al
-Yahud’s ropes were untied. A sack of
golden bangles, clay tablets and unleavened
Read the essay →God, Diagnosed With Dementia
You know he forgets names,
where he left the keys.
Read the poem →Dislodging Fish Bone
When I was a child, I swallowed a bite of fried catfish whole. A reckless pluck of my chopsticks in a hungry and juvenile daze.
Read the essay →Wild Dogs
On an afternoon walk, a cold wind went through me like a shot
(whiskey, brandy, something dark) and he came to me,
Read the poem →The Fisherman's Seven Dreams
In the first dream, Laxmatte, a fisherman who lives in a small cottage on the coast of Finland, removes Maiju, his plain, broad wife, to a red rocky isle in the middle of the Baltic Sea, where they remain for seven months.
Read the story →Life Lessons
I’ve always felt a need to be a fixer. When I was young, and my father an alcoholic, I went to the library and discovered that making meals with carbohydrates would lessen the desire to drink.
Read the essay →Flight Path
We took down the bird-feeder
Because they told us to, even though
Read the poem →Issue 5
Tanya Žilinskas | Editor-in-Chief
Megan Bounds | Production Editor
Benjamin Briggs | Apprentice Editor-in-Chief
Jess Reinke | Apprentice Production Editor
Matthew Hose | Nonfiction Editor
T.S. Leonard | Poetry Editor
Neal Andreu Tayco | Poetry Editor
Anna Deh | Fiction Editor
Gretchen Lehtonen Hopkins | Fiction Editor
KC Crawford | Assistant Nonfiction Editor
Jess Reincke | Assistant Nonfiction Editor
Bryce Sears | Assistant Fiction Editor
Jake Yarnold | Assistant Fiction Editor
Readers: Olivia Berriz, Konrad Ehresman, Lilia Farrell, Kaitlyn Gleeson, Ameyali Hernandez, Lu Huang, Alexandria Hutton, Kristin Jensen, Erik Johnson, Rosa King, Frank Lowe, Sonya Pendrey, Robert Perea, Sasha René, Cristina Rosa, Krystian Schwarz, Eden Julia Sugay, Katelynn Williams, and Hantian Zhang.