Aster(ix) JOURNAL NEWSLETTER | OCTOBER 2018

POETRY: Two Poems: Dark Water / O Hawaii
by Lark Omura“Perhaps you have been right here all along, deep in my belly: a fire.”

FICTION:  How to Date A Thugboy, Artboy, Nerdboy or Papichulo: Remix of a Junot Diaz Theme
by Nelly Rosario“Clear the huge Bible from the living room shelf. If the boy’s a nerdboy who wears dress shoes with jeans, ram the Bible between the unread cookbooks over the refrigerator.”

NONFICTION: My Big Gay Essay
by Carley Moore“Androgynous style. The little fuck you shadows of femininity. Deployment and subterfuge. Hiding in plain sight. I’ve long used clothing to confuse myself, to confuse others, to register as unreadable or misplaced.”

NONFICTION: The Algorithm Falters
by Laura Winther Galaviz“The boy on Match wants to pick out a woman the way I have shopped for shelter dogs. Does it bite? Good around kids? Can it be taught to stay? To beg? I tell the shelter worker, I am gone a lot. I do not want something that’s too much trouble, just someone to sit on my lap now and again.”

MICROEDITORIAL: Kittens and Cages
by Yvette Benavides“It feels like we are all in a collective nightmare, that recurring dream of paralysis, of feet cinder-block heavy, at the precise moment when we are being chased by something we perceive is both faceless and horrifying or the one where we must open our mouths to speak or scream and nothing comes out and the nightmarish images flash behind our closed, fluttering eyes.”

“In addition to adopting a radical racial lens, moviegoers had to consider how white fear—fear of shifting demography, fear of losing political power, fear of poor racial others—prompted the first purge…In First Purge, moviegoers experienced the collective fear of minoritized communities living with (and through) a nation’s effort to make America white again.”

MICROEDITORIAL:  I Wanna Fight You to the Death (Love Song To G.W.F. Hegel)
by Kegels for HegelsI am the free one—Hegel, ‘cuz you can put your key in my ignition but you ain’t gonna get no recognition—from me.

INTERVIEW: Topping From the Bottom: A Conversation With Kegels for Hegel and Patricia Montoya
by Amy Sara Carroll“Most of our songs and music videos engage some of the ideas of the thinkers we write about in a way that sexualizes them–and also ourselves–and makes reference to non-normative sex acts. One of us writes about the whore stigma, which is used to discipline all women but is most violently deployed against sex workers, racially marked people, poor people and gender non-conforming people. ”