Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
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From the Archives
Features • Commencement 2013
*Read the full blog post at [Notes from 21 South Street](http://theadvocateblog.net/2013/09/20/i-wont-watch-no-reruns/).*
After the box office success of their 1999 film The Matrix, the Wachowski siblings released in 2003 The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions and plunged their moviegoers into short-lived existential crisis. That same year, British philosopher Nick Bostrom carried The Matrix‘s threat out of movie theaters and into philosophy departments, publishing “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Looking at the past growth of computing power, Bostrom raises the possibility that we are living in a simulated universe generated by an extremely powerful computer, which in turn might itself exist within yet another simulation, ad infinitum and ad nauseum. This skeptical worry along with a few related variations have come to be known as “simulation arguments.”
Philosophers often compare Bostrom to Descartes, arguing that the simulation argument is simply the dream argument — “Are we living in a dream?” — outfitted in the silicon trappings of the computer age. The similarity, certainly, is difficult to overlook. In a similar vein, we can view Dan Ashwood’s Repeat Viewings as a nineties-era refashioning of Bostrom’s skeptical worry. RV records the simulation argument with a camcorder and plays the tape over and over again until the video itself becomes damaged by the VCR. The acts of re-collection, re-membering, and re-vision are themselves caustic, slowly corroding what they attempt to preserve. In Ashwood’s animation, the anxiety underlying Bostrom’s simulation argument deteriorates and falls away. The characters’ existential angst lies not in the fact that they live in a simulated reality, but rather in a general question of nostalgia: Is it worth satisfying? Is our wistful affection for the past an act of violence that we should avoid? Or are the lines of static that gradually obfuscate our favorite videos like green lines of code, shimmering with the promise of meaning?
Fiction • Fall 2025 - Diagnosis
It started in the west elevator, the one with the kitschy old rug and the inner door with the hand-crank. Most people avoided the west elevator because of how much it creaked—like every trip it made might be its last. Nevaeh might have been the only one who consistently used it, and so, mercifully, she was alone when she spat up a frond of sage. Bushy, intact, slightly damp with stomach acid. She had been working late and had half a glass of white to finish the evening. Otherwise, nothing was out of the ordinary.
Poetry • Fall / Winter 2023
I am jet fuel and six miles long. I am bad business. I make the rooms grow smaller. Underneath my shirt is another shirt and under that the cloudbanks clang their worksong. They pitch their weight in droves. This is a cold shelf, Sport. A struck bell. I gloat when I say this. I shine in the frost. You are a ham tied up in string. You are pineapples and cherries and ham on a plate at dinnertime. Fate eats you up. We rub against the facts now. My face is a glass jar. My heart is applesauce and a cold spoon. I clear the decks and spend my leverage. The rest is dazzle. You are an obstacle course and I am a pair of dice. You hop, like a rabbit, cabbage to cabbage. I win by a landslide. I smear the mirror and distort your face. You are the flipped coin and I am the outcome. I don’t decide, I collect; thumbed scale or not. You hit the ground, or so you say. You can’t unknow the facts so you run faster. You, the boy from bruised tomorrow, under the eaves where everything gets put down. I am a lamp, you are a gun. You spend your bullets on a hat, I burn when touched.
Fiction • Spring Summer 2022
Of this I can be certain: Liam’s head is swiveled east, away from the remains of the sunset, where what was April 15th, 2012 is saying adios and leaving a wide loud wipe of pinkish residue in its wake. The building that Liam is looking at is tall, rectangular, shore-colored; squares pop on yellow-white as the day recedes. Liam counts five windows illuminated. Six. The aluminum report of contact: Liam whips to watch the ball slice past the third baseman – bounce, catch, runner rounds to second, left fielder throws to second baseman to cut him off, runner’s back at first. Liam’s in right field. Come back, he is saying to himself: what if the batter hadn’t pulled it? He does the mental equivalent of slapping himself in the face to wake up. Say that guy had swung later: the ball would bounce past first, trace its erratic path back to the fence, and the hard cork on chain-link would articulate in a clink – that sound that only he can hear while all of his teammates, his mother, everyone else in the stands watch what is basically a silent-movie comedy reel, where he’s running back and trying to grab the ball while it bounces and rolls all over the place. And Shit, shit, shit, he’d be saying to himself, hearing the cardial fury of his just-awakened heart, the hush of the ball rolling away from him on stiff St. Augustine grass.
2026