Keys is an artist in the South Bay/Los Angeles.
Month: December 2020
Categories
Perpetual Flora
In a speculative post-apocalyptic future where all tall buildings have fallen down and man has moved to live underground, almost 100% of the planet’s surface is covered in water. The apocalypse makes way for a new way of living. An ideal way of living where every single process in the world has become completely circular.
Perpetual flora is representative of the manifestation of circularity.
This floating water-based plant grows long stems with big flowers in the spring season. When the flowers are in full bloom the plant gets top-heavy and gets turned upside down. The stems of the flowers turn into new roots of the plants. And the now-exposed roots in turn grow back into the stems for new flowers. Repeating its cycle endlessly.
Keke van de Ven was born in 1994. They are a visual artist, and graduated from AKV-Sint-joost Den Bosch. Their website can be found at www.keke.be.
It’s 2020
lost dad to Covid-19
let’s move to Leiden
On my way to bae
calling with a face mask on
quarantine no more
Dreaming of sick raves
the beat is drumming through us
in the blue moonlight
A room of my own
I have hopes of becoming
vegetarian
Online therapy
imminent recovery
A walk in the park
Phuong Vy Le is a second-year student of the South and Southeast Asian studies BA in Leiden.
Categories
freedom DOS
Categories
The Monolith
Jesse Schwab is a 20-year-old studying English at Colorado State University. Their interests include poetry, graphic design and fitness.
Categories
Showerhead
The slow drip drop of the shower is the sound and sign of dilapidation
Of negligence, falling at steady intervals onto the ceramic floor.
As the river flows over rocks
so do the droplets of shower water eat at the bar of soap residing mid-stream
A metronome you can turn off with the turn of a handle
Imagine if the flow of time could be adjusted this way
What kind of time would it be if we can make it rush, flow, drip, and cease on command?
No time at all or the time that belongs only to us?
From timid to timbuktu we would be lost
Struggling to find the meaning in between our lost intervals and our curtailed experiences.
So we let the metronome run, and let its foggy flow wash over us knowing that eventually the dripping of the showerhead will erode us as well, turning us into nothing but soap at the bottom of a tub.
All this begs the question. Who left the shower running and let the faucet drip?
Daniel Goldshmid is a first-year law student. They love to read and write and listen to music.
Categories
In Due Time
The golden fields will be blown into dusty plains.
The silent forests will be razed.
The brilliant blue lakes will run dry.
This peace will be burned.
My home will be turned to ash.
Markus is a 19-year-old sophomore college student interested in studying history and biology. He enjoys spending time outside and finds sanctuary in the many beautiful natural landscapes of his home state of Minnesota. Markus is passionate about the ecosystem of his home and the 11,842 incredible lakes it boasts. However, every tranquil moment spent in nature is bittersweet as Markus believes that people are not capable of stopping the impending environmental collapse the world faces, and that hubris and greed will soon plunge us into some of the darkest times humanity has ever faced.
Categories
The Scientist
Ours is a world where broad intelligences range
Broad lands, wrack our bodies, possess our minds
In the pursuit of kaleidoscopic nothing.
The nihilum of our age is but a reminder
Of one who was a heavenly prince,
Who once was the light of the ages,
Who now is the lord of dark earth.
Desperate questions with desperate answers,
We fade into the climatic fog
Or vaporise out into space
Or coalesce into fluffy beauteous dreams.
I ask you, dear reader,
Whose minds are in these machines?
Robert Chumbley is an American undergrad whose main interests lie in political philosophy and Chinese language and literature.
Categories
Cancelled Before it Began
“The future is cancelled.”
The words pierce my heart like a bullet.
Everything feels different once you hear those words.
The nights feel colder. The bed feels lonelier.
I turn on the TV. It’s CNN. Two people dressed in suits
Talking about questions we should have answered decades ago.
Arguing over what should be done to reduce carbon emissions by 2%.
They’re so caught up in the argument that they don’t even stop to ask
If what they’re proposing will actually be enough.
But that’s the point, isn’t it?
The conversation never stops. Nothing is ever conclusive.
It’s always “still being looked into.”
Looked into by who? Well, scientists.
And what have they found so far?
Not much, but they say we still have time.
And who do they work for? Who pays them?
Silence. We all know who. Corporations, government funded institutions.
The governments are more honest than the corporations,
But they know what would happen if they told us the truth.
And because they know, they never will tell us
Just how bad things really are.
“The future is cancelled.”
“The future is cancelled.”
Walking along the beach at night, I feel the sand grind beneath my shoes.
Standing here, I feel the sadness of lost dreams
Seep from the ground and into my bones.
My mother grew up playing on this beach
While my grandfather worked in the power plant,
That behemoth of steel and concrete that powers my town and the surrounding cities.
Inside that giant monolith is a complex machine of sorts that generates our power,
By splitting apart atoms and rearranging them… or something. I don’t know how it works.
He worked himself to the bone. And he paid for it in the end.
No good deed will go unpunished.
He worked until he couldn’t work anymore,
Until his back could barely support him.
But in the end, that wasn’t what got him. The cancer did.
A life of work, a few years of pain, and death.
The same life as those before him, who came from Europe
And worked in the quarries
In the very place that I now stand in.
They came for the American Dream,
But all they found was more of the same.
They suffered hoping that their children wouldn’t have to,
And their children did the same.
They kept on going because they thought it would get better
For those who came afterwards.
My great great grandfather, my great grandfather, my grandfather, my mother,
And now me. And it doesn’t look like it’s gonna get any easier. It never does.
“The future is cancelled.”
“The future is cancelled.”
The once clear waters are brown and muddled.
Empty crab shells wash up on shore, a memory of what once was but is no longer.
Shards of shattered glass cut my feet
As I walk barefoot across the sand
Into the new world,
A life that was cancelled before it began.
Nikoli O’Dwyer is a writer that specializes in philosophy, radical politics and occultism of all kinds.
We are a generation of orphans.
We were born where history ended, the last stop of a phantom train—a destination requested by no one. Our parents wandered blindly in the weeds and stood in line to feed money into busted vending machines. And they paid a quarter to gaze at the spectacle of Chernobyl in the East—but this wasteland was a spiritual Chernobyl, from which no one was permitted to evacuate.
And in this psychic Chernobyl, this cultural White Sands, a two-headed serpent was born.
My brain and skin are permanently scarred from the radioactive heat, the deadly poison which seeped into flesh and groundwater. I was born in the shadow of the poison sun. I was born in hell, like you, but like you, I survived.
We grew up in the orphanage of dreams. Pornography was our mother, and our father the brooding dead.
Language was a joke—only science fiction and sick irony made sense. Only hate made sense, and we hated everything. Pushed down, tormented, and flunked; or, the next day, grade A praise and paychecks—in the end, it’s all the fucking same, isn’t it? Who gives a fuck if they give us an A or an F—I vomit on all grades. Their echelons are filth. And with this filth of echelons they baptized us and cast us out into the cold. We were kicked in the ass, and told “Good luck!” (With a face like this, I’ll need it.)
Now I’m free—to do what? Accumulate, and slave away for accumulation’s sake? Drink the poison water of global value chains, and pray?
Well you see, we’ve grown tired of your ridiculous game. We want to fuck, and eat, and drink, and read. And if you can’t give that to us, then your little game will have to end. We’ll end it on the shore of hurricanes and in the frontier of raging fires. We’ll end it in computer viruses and strike waves and financial aneurysms.
I have pulled the knife from my chest like Arthur Pendragon and my body of stone has melted into richness and blood. Now distant rains gather to nourish my wound.
Our inheritance is vast and we are crippled by its weight. Vast histories, vast grudges, vast curses, vast phantoms, vast graves, vast genealogies, vast cities, vast libraries, vast mythologies, vast roads, vast countries, vast lands, vast skies, vast oceans. And the vastness terrifies us because we’re small, and so we disavowed it and hid from it. But the time has come to walk in the ruins. The time has come to dress the ground and sow the earth between the headstones and the rotted barn.
Orphans see beyond the black gate of hopeless years. No tradition, no community, no duty beside the most cynical and base injunction: make money. If we reject this, what is there? Nothing, aside from ourselves.
They told us to follow our dreams, to follow them where? There is only one dream that leads away from this place, only one star—the red star that burns in the darkness. And this red star is ours to name.
A two-headed serpent was born at the end of history. The day has come for one head to devour the other.
The joke of social Darwinism is that it revenges itself on its own moronic bourgeois propagators. If you tell us “this is the state of nature—now go, and survive!” then that’s precisely what we’ll do.
We have one prerogative: survive, we have to survive. If our generation survived, then everyone can. And the future will survive.
Reuben Dendinger is a poet and writer currently employed as a lecturer in English at the University of Maine in Orono, where they live with their wife and two cats. This past year, they published their first chapbook of poems titled Hexes. They can be found on Instagram at @blackflowerahegao.