This issue, we posed the question: “What would it look like if we used our art to throw sand into—instead of oil—the gears of the machine?”

 

These machines may look like rising sea levels, surveillance capitalism, neocolonialism, genocide, a stiflingly mundane life—anything that demands ideological conformity or that facilitates injustice. But though we have long been conditioned by the systems we live in, each of us still has tremendous power. We still have access to “the immeasurable creative force that breaks a prison using only the artifacts of bare survival which have been allotted to us [like spoons to dig a tunnel],1 and the clarity of knowing why we did it.” (Fargo Tbakhi, “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide”)


With eyes on the machines that run our world, this issue, writers, makers, creators, and disrupters have shared works that attempt to accumulate into larger movements of interruption, including self-interruption. Among others: Sunday school blues. Persian–Armenian wordplay. Ancient Egyptian funerary rites in conversation with capital punishment. A performance of unperformable pieces. A writer’s labor. Though the medium of an online literary journal like this one calls for fleeting engagement—“read it and leave it”—we hope the works in this issue inspire a lasting impression and impulse to continue to interrupt, disrupt, erupt, grind, grate, and sand with whatever tools we have—and with the clarity of knowing why we do it.

1 As Fargo Tbakhi writes, “In September 2021, six Palestinian prisoners escaped from Gilboa prison by tunneling out with a spoon. Among them was Zakaria Zubeidi of the Freedom Theatre, further reminding us that the cultural revolt is inseparable from the material one.”

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