Fiction
Danielle Mckinney, Hold Your Breath (detail), featured in AGNI 103
Featured
More Than You Can Run With
The cut on my cheek stings and I’m reminded that life is dangerously unpredictable. My son runs circles around me and I stand small in the vast vault of the Milano Centrale train station, with its stone drapes and eagles, wreaths of laurel, I guess they are, in their craggy talons . . .
Gun Stories
It was getting late and everyone was telling their gun stories. Times they’d had a gun pulled on them, almost been shot, or, for just a couple of people, times they actually had been hit with a bullet . . .
Cécé’s Cell Phone
I felt Fénelon’s hands on my shoulder and pushed him away violently. He had traces of tears on his sunken cheeks from lamenting his lost virility. He was in a bad way. I took all his money; I left him only . . .
Poetry Lesson
She remarks on his new yellow shoelaces, says how nice they look against the black of his boots, and in that moment feels how she’s missed him—what relief she feels. . . .
Serial
My new boyfriend said he was gonna fuck up my old boyfriend because he makes me cry and then tricks me into forgiving him, again and again and again. He was kind of sexy when he said it, my new boyfriend, because . . .
The Purple House
Five hundred in cash and a pouch of rum was what we were each paid upon returning the flags. Yet another rally of the big leader behind us and yet another fruitful day of cheering done. . .
Futures: A Portfolio of Work in Translation
The future as decolonial, as nonhuman, as exile, as womxn, as queer, no future without memory, no future without infection, and—perhaps the only image not bound by time—the future as impossible to render. What holds the following pieces together is their demand that we, as English-language readers, revisit the past with a 21st-century consciousness, ponder patterns, and widen the capacity of our senses even while shorelines erode and sea levels rise, even as algorithms present worlds to us mined and manufactured from our own data.
From the Archive
The Beast
The Fish
Doberman
Jordie
He pinched the webby flesh between my index finger and thumb, something he knew I loved. I was lucky really to have a man who remembered my pinches more than my pratfalls. I think I might’ve reminded myself to remember that I was lucky. I am lucky, my brain might’ve told my brain.