AGNI 100

AGNI 100

The marks the world leaves. Our hundredth issue exemplifies the engagement, nuance, and spirit that are AGNI’s trademark. Cover artist Chitra Ganesh starts things off with a playful visual rendering of “Sultana’s Dream,” a 1905 feminist utopian fiction by Rokeya Hossain. Stories by Colin Winnette, Xueyi Zhou, and Monique Schwitter (translated by Susan Bernofsky) follow women’s subversion of the gaze, into places of throttled emotion. A bounty of poets, including Paisley Rekdal, J. P. Grasser, and janan alexandra, join the formal ingenuities of DeeSoul Carson, Danielle Pierrati, and others to reach a new intimacy with the past. And essayists Wiam El-Tamami, Elvis Bego, and Anna Badkhen bring a rigorous, compassionate seeing to their meditations on loss and conflict. All this and much more.

Editor’s NoteFictionEssaysPoetryArt Feature

Editor’s Note

The Page and Beyond
by William Pierce

Fiction

Finals
by Elsa Drucaroff
Translated from the Spanish by Slava Faybysh
Red
by Alana Franasiak
Resin and Wood
by Monique Schwitter
Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky
Goldfish
by Jasmine Dreame Wagner
Signs of Fatigue
by Colin Winnette
She Went to the Museum to Look at the Nudes
by Xueyi Zhou

Essays

Mythologizing Disaster
by Anna Badkhen
Mother’s Hands: On Grief in 33 Beginnings
by Elvis Bego
Winter
by Wiam El-Tamami
That Otherworldly Blue Glow
by Margaret Everton
Sleep Study
by Shara Lessley
Les Philosophes
by Margaret Todd Maitland
Three Pieces
by Katie Marya

Poetry

Day 68
by janan alexandra
Wanting to Live
by Elizabeth Barnett
Pharaoh
by Rick Barot
23V :: ¡Vanadium!
by Rosebud Ben-Oni
Good Riddance
by DeeSoul Carson
Winter Palace
by M. Cynthia Cheung
Mother Trash
by Nicole Cooley
Cerberus
by Maggie Dietz
As Rivers Flow to the Ocean and Oceans Flow to the Sea
by J. P. Grasser
Lunar Body
by Harriet Jae
Seeing Even with Patches on Both Eyes
by Kim Hyesoon
Translated from the Korean by Cindy Juyoung Ok
Them Killing Fields Right in Our Own Backyards
by Timothy Liu
that has been entrusted to us
by Erika Meitner
Dear Reader
by Athena Nassar
Purgatorio 2: Rising Sounds on the Eighth Floor
by Danielle Pieratti
Learning to Dress a Doe
by Colin Pope
Parking Lot
by Kevin Prufer
Whose bones this ocean
by E. I. Pruitt
Cloud Study
by Paisley Rekdal
Venice
by Paisley Rekdal
Apraxia
by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers
Balancing Act
by Heidi Seaborn
The Photographer
by Heidi Seaborn
What Time Is This?
by Vasyl Stus
Translated from the Ukrainian by Bohdan Tokarsky and Nina Murray
Digging Up My Fathers
by Alessandro Vitali
Pantoum Composed of Lines after Paintings of Girls
by Elinor Ann Walker
Both of My Hands Are Frightened
by Gail Wronsky
I’m No Longer Eager for Danger
by Gail Wronsky
Vanished Qilou Building, Bali
by Yang Biwei
Translated from the Chinese by Liang Yujing

Art Feature

Sultana’s Dream
by Chitra Ganesh
The Artist’s Mark
by Preti Taneja