This dispatch comes to you from a temperamental Spring—a whiplash swing from frost to flood to flower. All the same, we’re so glad to be back in touch. This issue roams through the body, on its skin, in its inventive imaginary landscapes. It dwells in the many planets the self holds inside it. It cuts through aeronautic noise— its name changes as the hours turn. 

In the last line of his artist statement, contributor Nickolas Payne writes about his work: 

Fantasies reflect the process of the mind puzzling together abstractly related impressions, producing a reflection of reality divorced from the physical world but married to the laws of pain and pleasure more real than anything. In this regard, he considers his fantasy work to be self-portraiture.

This issue is brimming with fantastical self-portraiture. From the vantage of haunting, ghostly loves, to relics of childhood imagery, to tatted skin. This issue is color: it’s beet red, it’s grey, it’s pastel, it’s blue. And, as ever, it’s black and brown. 

José Esteban Muñoz says it best, as he draws up a cartography for the brown commons: 

The brown commons is not about the production of the individual but instead about a movement, a flow, and an impulse to move beyond the singular subjectivity and the individualized subjectivities. It is about the swerve of matter, organic and otherwise, about the moment of contact, and the encounter and all that it can generate. Brownness is about contact and is nothing like continuousness. Brownness is a being with, being alongside.* 

These pieces hold their selfhood while relinquishing their singularity. They be with, be alongside each other. So, come be with us. We extend a standing invitation into the living room. We only ask that you shed your shoes and coat, and that you open yourself to the possibility of interplanetary, interpsychic transport.  Welcome back. 

All our love,
The Editors

*Muñoz, Jose Esteban. “The Brown Commons”. The Sense of Brown (Duke University Press, 2020)