PRESENT
Our third and final issue is present.
We asked for creative and critical work that responds to ‘now’ in any form. Attention. Spectacle. Politics. Consumption. Technology. Anxiety. Expression. Intimacy. Internet. Climate. Culture. Habit. Work. Desire. Identity. The everyday. Today.
What does it feel like to be alive now?
What are we always looking at? What are you being told matters? What are you consuming? What feels normal that would once have seemed strange? What feels strange that has somehow become normal? What are you tired of? What are you obsessed with? What are today’s machines for? What habits, objects, images, technologies, clothes, sounds, or rituals define this moment? Where does private life end and public life begin? What does intimacy look like now? What does attention cost? What feels unmistakably of this moment?
Untitled, Zoe Williams, oil on canvas, 60x80cm.
FOOTPRINTS, Amy Donegan, (2022)
Every Haunt, Zach Bird
I remember first returning to Glasgow, where I was living at the time, after spending a year living in Boston. Trawling the familiar streets, it seemed nothing had changed in my absence. I had gone, yet everything was more or less as I remembered it. I emerged from the subway at a familiar stop and gazed across a busy road I had traversed a thousand times, imagining the thousands of crossings that took place whilst I was away. It occurred to me that for every moment I had been away, there was a corresponding one on this very street, and, for that matter, every street across the globe.
When recalling a place I used to frequent, I often have this strange feeling that I struggle to believe that it continues to exist when I am not there, and harder still to imagine that I myself once existed there. Almost like the fallen tree in the forest that no one hears. I think of places I have lived, holidayed, and visited. Pubs, streets, parks — any haunt. I picture them now, and it feels strange to think that my present moments used to be filled with these places, when they now feel so distant.
We watch the world fly by as the present is bookended by anxieties over the past and the future. Either side of the present moment lies an eternal stretch of time we cannot begin to comprehend. Minute by minute and day by day, the present moment passes us by and though I have spent my entire life in the present moment I do not feel I am aware of it as often as I should be. I dwell on every memory I can summon and cannot believe that, at one point, each was the present moment.
Time passes quickly and with it styles and fashions come and go, usually in such a way that we do not notice the moment they first arrive or finally leave. When one current dominates, we think we have the answer. How foolish we were before, we think now, and we’ll think again in a few years about something else. Popular becomes unpopular; present thought becomes outmoded. Then, as John Ruskin said, ‘the gibes of one generation are the seeds from which spring the praises of the next’. We are always reacting.
When we examine the past, a pendulum emerges. Things swing tirelessly in one direction and then another. The result is a long chain of reactions. We get sick of everything eventually. Baggy and skinny jeans alone illustrate this point. Obsessions come and go. What seemed most important a few weeks ago scarcely crosses our minds today. We love hot-headed sensationalism. The internet has exacerbated this tendency.
It really is quite difficult to comprehend that so much happens in the world and that we see so little of it. To me, this demonstrates how difficult it is to properly understand the world around us and, even more so, each other. How can I truly understand you if I have not seen through your eyes? I think we spend far too little time these days trying to understand each other.
Now that they are both firmly in the past, I still struggle to imagine my time in Glasgow or Boston as a reality. I think of the people and places that constituted my existence for that very particular period, which will never be collated in quite the same way ever again. It seems wholly bizarre to think that, not so long ago, there was where my present moments lay, and now never again in the same way. I write from Berlin and am all too conscious that just like the aforementioned periods, this too will one day be a memory that doesn’t feel quite real. That is an incentive to enjoy every pub, every street, and every park whilst I can. Every haunt.
Eve Indigo, Collection of Ceramic Tiles, (2026)
Tilt, Dave Ward
She is running through the tilt of it –
a mesh of rain which never falls,
a street of dust and gauze,
each shop door open
and inside a darkness
which tastes of silence;
as thin shadows stand and watch,
their hands reach out towards her
to touch the moon which she carries
in her basket, down through the alleys
towards a grey-eyed shore.
Broom, Dave Ward
She takes up the broom each day
to sweep the dust into corners.
She is sweeping herself away,
each mote, each minute flake
of skin, each twist of hair,
until she is the broom itself
clutched firm in her calloused hands
and she feels the pulse
of sap that flowed
along its well-honed length:
the wood which once was tree.
In the Garden, Dave Ward
She crumbles
dry earth between her fingers,
feels its cold warmth
and waits for rain
to plant in her
a seed which will thrust
through the smothering darkness,
through the dust of dry bones
and rooted fears
until it touches the sun.
Drinking a Coffee. Going to the Bank. Emily Turnbull.
Feeling something off about the air.
Not a smell or anything,
but the way it has been used and reused,
endlessly.
The first ambulance passes without a siren,
lights off.
Then another in full glory,
Screaming.
And somewhere a man is leaning over heavy machinery,
his shirt caught in expensive teeth.
Thinking about unverifiable things his mother told him.
And someone’s cousin sitting up in an uncomfortable chair,
mistaking a symptom for a personality.
Going mad from the ordinary business of repetition.
And I am wondering if the first ambulance is empty
or if someone is being attended to inside.
I think about difference a great deal.
Stim, Bingo Allison
Is it quick enough?
Big enough
fucked enough
ten frantic fingers jacked into my brain.
Everything louded
thunderclaps crowded
squeeze it harder and harder
ten frantic fingers keeping me sane.
Sometimes it’s a swan song
with the beats wrong
and my heart gong
soothing sapient noises
ringing
ringing lines of salt around my brain.
And maybe you will fear it
when you hear it
let me clear it
tabulated healing
hold fast in this shout.
So give me the sensation
the right stimulation
give me what my head wrote
the colour and the sidenote
for when tenser lines pull thin
fingers dance
mouth erupts
I stim
I Wish I Didn’t Doomscroll Today, Ellie Cooper
Life moves in flashes, in a sort of
blink
and you’ll miss it situation where
we’ll converse and my eyes will well up and
my ears will be blocked from the buzz of
the underground, overground,
from trying to stay
above ground but I’m
full of stars and beats and chatter
and movement
the pitter patter
that passes my every day… I am stuck—
like a blurred photo
in a child’s scrappy scrapbook
loosely glued to two pages stuck together;
cemented memories of a time gone
but a second ago.
Is this what life is now?
Pockets of memory
dispersed
into the nether,
passing me by as though it happened flashes ago
milliseconds, minutes, moments,
but it’s years
too horrifying to truly capture in my mind and
too beautiful to remember and relay back
and I will
never know peace
in this rolling reel of film,
spinning out
unravelling
like a dog shit on the floor
pick it up
and it crumbles away like ash
disappearing into the sky.
