Niki Ortiz makes amazing art that speaks for itself, but we wanted to share some of her words too. In lieu of a more traditional interview, we asked Niki to have a conversation about her work with someone who knows her well. She sat down to have drinks and pass a notebook with her partner one evening at Ermanos, in downtown Tucson. We loved the night’s handwritten notes so much that we decided against transcription.
Category: ISSUE 1
Easter Dress/ Tiffany Buck
I’ve got $10.59 in my wallet, and the dress cost $12.00. I promised my little girl she’d have shiny new dresses come Easter Sunday. The unchristian thought of stealing it entered my mind. But I would like to be able to visit this store in the future. I never expected my life to […]
Gilding/ Lizz Huerta
There’s a pencil drawing of exaggerated labia on the portable potty wall. I edit it with my permanent marker, happy the shit truck came early and there is no stalagmite of feces in the hole beneath me. I make an orchid, the beckoning lips perfect, then a bee with a trail of dots swirling out […]
3 Hybrid/ Jim Warner & Beth Gilstrap
Revelation 036 Each week it gets harder to talk to God, even my version I’ve linked it to the construction of the human ear—the Eustachian tube in particular—which is normally collapsed, but opens with pressure, with swallowing, when taking off in an airplane. All I know is the movement of that unreachable, uncontrollable air. But I […]
Hypothetical Bar Fights & Other Cool Shit: An Interview w/ Bud Smith
If you are into the indie lit scene and you aren’t familiar with Bud Smith, you must be living under a rock. Your rock might be really awesome and you might be perfectly content beneath it, but I’m about to fuck that up for you. And you’ll thank me for it.
COMICS
Two Comics/
Daniel Christopher Cain
Six Comics/ Josh Poole
Comic/ Allen Forrest
Shit and Gold/ Elliot Patterson
I joined the impromptu clique of smokers outside the coffee shop and slid into a conversation about tiny houses and woodstoves, teepees and yurts, composting toilets. Some dreadlocked white boy just off the Appalachian Trail was rambling happy about his tarps and tents and his buddy’s yurt, and I let him pronounce it App-a-lay-shun because […]
This Tyrant, This Child of Pride/ Sheldon Lee Compton
There was a chance she wouldn’t even open the door. But Roy hadn’t seen Jenny or her boy, Thomas, in five years. She couldn’t not answer the door. He knew his daughter. He went over what he should say while walking the small dirt road until the house loomed out from the hillside, a tilting […]
RABBLE LIT 