SEPTEMBER 2016 VOLUME I, ISSUE 2

THE RIFF ZINE ALTERNATE UNIVERSES

TABLE OF CONTENTS Tom Hennemann, “​Future (Miss) Universe” Anonymous, “​Haiku on Science Fiction ​ Character Possibilities” ​ Emily Ruth Taylor, “​So Dark, Up Above” ​ Anonymous, “​Good Guy” ​ Lena Soko, “​Heroine” ​ Anonymous, “​A Nice, Good, Solid, Great Day’s Work” Jill Sadowski, “​Reversible Destiny; ​ or the body that doesn’t die” ​ Anonymous, “​Star girl” ​ A. Felice Freeman, “​A Weekly Reminder” ​ Jane Smith, “D ​ ebris” ​ Jane Smith, “T ​ o A Robot In A Box” Emily Ruth Taylor, “​Worlds That Exist Inside Radiohead’s The Bends” ​ Cristina Ciccone, “S ​ pace Cat”

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…2 …2 …3 …4 …5 …5 …6 …9 …9 … 10 … 11 … 11 … 12

This is a ​free, non-commercial ​zine. The authors retain all rights to their work. The cover image is licensed under Creative Commons Zero (public domain.)

This issue includes works with​ explicit language, sexual content, ​and​ death/death

imagery.​ Thank you to all the contributors and readers, and please share this with your friends.

-- ​Emily Ruth Taylor and Ashlee B. (Editors) 1

Future (Miss) Universe Tom Hennemann in rebound. relationships a revenge. seeks its sex. opposites group. theory gropes big. bang bigger bounce. back bad cheque in. nut shell world. collapse classic. couplings horses hot marriage. cold and heat just. right so Lola ran. to wild child as. entropy runs in the door out. a window of times illusion. persisted on perception. before then after now. measured the matters of. degrees we digress. made up unmatched. strike a light. do it in dark divides. fard lines shown hard. a face card paints. in after glows. old old new. maps vicious. circles polite. squares.

Haiku On Science Fiction Character Possibilities Anonymous instead of purple eyes: NO EYES AT ALL. i’m so over glowing beams. 2

So Dark, Up Above Emily Ruth Taylor Sure, no one ever said that people were getting their powers from the rain. Tommy guessed it had something to do with all those big companies that owned the factories outside of town. Not everyone who got powers lived long enough to use them. But Tommy’s mom — like every other adult he knew — was careful. She bought him an embarrassing yellow rain slicker and made him take it to school with him every day. (People trusted the weathermen even less these days; everyone had suddenly become an expert on clouds. When parents got together you’d overhear hear ‘cumulus, stratus, cirrus’ instead of ‘karate, ballet, baseball.’) It wasn’t like he even needed the raincoat. Recess was cancelled, indefinitely. His class spent their breaks in the cafeteria; laughing too loudly and trying not to look out the windows. Tommy was different. No, he definitely wasn’t crazy enough to walk outside; but he could never help following the tracks the raindrops made down the windows with his eyes and just wondering. Tommy dreamed of raindrops. His mother stuck pictures of palm trees and islands she didn't know the name of in her makeup mirror. Tommy knew better than to say so, but he preferred evergreens. They didn't go to the ocean anymore. Not that their beaches were like the ones in the magazine pictures. It was too cold to wear bathing suits, and the sand always smelled of fish. All you could do was look at the water. Dip your feet in if you were brave and had a fire started. It was Tommy's favorite thing to look at in the world. Endless grey sky fading into endless choppy grey waves. ("They've been talking about acidification for years," Tommy overheard his mom say in a telephone call to his Gramma. The word sounded funny in her voice. Acid-if-ication. I know how to spell that! he wanted to brag. They taught us in the 4th grade! "It's all a cycle, supposedly, all connected," his mom continued. "Not like things aren't worse out there--" Tommy left. He didn't want to hear about the hurricane that almost took Gramma's house. It didn't, and it wouldn't ever, and that was that.) Tommy dreamed of Jesus walking on water. The man on the news said, "We need to leave religion out of this, we really need to leave religion out of this, just leave it out. Leave religion out." He didn't say at all why their neighbor (three streets over, yes, but in cases like this they're all neighbors) burst into flames during a morning jog. "Light mist," the weatherwoman had said. She had dark circles under her eyes. "Stay inside, please, please, stay inside." At school they talked about daring each other to go outside. No one ever did, but the threat of the threat was usually enough. 3

Tommy went outside one day. Hearing the car in the driveway, he ran back inside and closed the door quickly. His mom was coming --- she'd know -- he was in trouble, in serious trouble! She came into the room, seeing Tommy but not really looking. No matter, he was fine. Unwet. Tommy silently marveled, for the first time in his life, how much of everything was hidden from sight. How much of yourself is just explanation -- to others, to yourself. The facts: he stood in the rain. It did not touch him. His unspooled mind threw up goofy explanations: Invisible umbrellas or a balloon passing overhead at that exact moment ... No. It had been him. Tommy. Tommy! She was talking to him, standing in front of their kitchen window. Tommy didn’t hear her -he was watching a ship coming in and the busy smokestacks in the distance. He sat heavily at the table. His mother interpreted his silence as hunger. She began making him a cheese sandwich.

Good Guy Anonymous another shooting a nearby mall he was looking for his ex-girlfriend my little brother asks me if it were you in that mall would you want my gun my line is “i'm not trained. it's a stressful situation, being shot at, i would probably hurt an innocent person" i go through it he doesn't listen his line is "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" he goes through it i don't listen i wish we lived in another kind of world because i don't know how we fix this one 4

Heroine Lena Soko Heroine Tired, angry Dragging, struggling, rising Catalyst of change and the new Creation Why did you not notice? She was there While you were reading And writing and learning and fighting Antiquity Normality She was not destined to be She never met those men Noncanonical You never heard her name Erased The sister of the preeminent bard Find her But not here For she is the unspoken world

A Nice, Good, Solid, Great Day’s Work Anonymous what happens in the mountain stays in the mountain they eat pizza and clock out like everyone else we’re just like everyone else they say, and successfully block their days out but none of them have shiny, chrome fixtures or let their children play beyond the tree line 5

Reversible Destiny; or the body that doesn’t die Jill Sadowski In the simplest of ways, Gins and Arakawa built a world. They built theories and ideas and poetry and philosophies. The couple constructed a whole other realm to explore, new rules to live by. The lovers brought some of it here, with exhibitions and books and buildings and parks. Little dimensional portals into another way of being. The whole premise was simple: the creation of architecture so that you would not have to die. Here are the facts: the body-person is an Architectural Body or more precisely: the synergy of body-person-world. How your environment influences you. How in the right environment, you will live forever. The wasting away of the body will stop if the architecture is properly suited to our needs. We have simply been living in the wrong world. The better realm is out there; we are able to not die. We just have to build it. Their ethos were focused on reorienting the body away from a progression towards death and towards a life that is uncomfortable and everlasting. Their architecture, built and unbuilt, was predicated on the user never getting used to what they inhabited. Bumpy surfaces, slanted floors, circular orbs as rooms, tricky windows. The constantly changing, disorienting environment and how the individual fits in it, or bioscleave, could prevent the wasting away of life, to save you from certain death. I've always had visions of other realities I could inhabit. With Gins and Arakawa they wanted to keep you always guessing, never secure. But my dream worlds as a kid were ones that would keep me safe. And even now, I still dream, from time to time, imagining a perfect person and place where I could be safely. I'm looking for a universe of wellness. In my dream world, I would be more independent, more goal oriented, more sane. I would be more healthy in my loving. And yet these days I tend to be immersed in terror, obsessions, paranoia. I’m looking for a new reality that is actually based in reality, that has more fact than fiction, that soothes me to sleep instead of letting me rock for hours in the dark to ruminative thoughts. And sometimes I want to not-live just to stop the thinking. So then why I am drawn to a world that doesn't end? Why do I feel saved by a thinking of instability and uncomfortableness? I think it's simple: in their reality, because in a reality that is not my own, I would live well in the uncertain. So I want what they have, the idea that I don’t end, that I survive, that I become stronger because of the hurt that’s in my way. Arakawa and Gins don't write about mentally surviving and they certainly don't talk about loving. They met in art school and were married in 1965. They don't write about their own relationship or finding your identity in the world. They write about building a Critical Resemblance House in the Isle of Reversible Destiny. A house that is built to keep you moving. “It could take several hours to go from the living room to the kitchen. Parts of the 6

kitchen or the living room reappear in the bedroom or the bathroom.”1 I guess I could make up metaphors about finding yourself but thanks to Arakawa and Gins, I don't have to: “The house relieves one of having to have a personality."2 I think I'm getting somewhere, there's lessons here. I get to build my own world and it has to be uncomfortable. If you're comfortable you're not learning, you're not growing. I repeat those catchy slogans in my head till I can’t breathe. I get confused all over again. After all of this they refer to the Reversible Destiny house as “home sweet home”3 and I feel a new site building itself inside myself. Is the secret to love or not love, to live or not live? It would be too cruel to say that loving is not the answer. What sort of world are we building and why is it always uncomfortable to me? I read as much of their writings as I can get a hold of and I shake. The words seem like the rough boulders one must climb in the homes they’ve built. As if reading their work in and of itself will keep you alive. Too confused to die. But in all honesty, understanding landing sites, phantom limbs, and organism-person-environment becomes like learning a new language. There's a whole new vocabulary and I stutter, my tongue grows two sizes, my brain twists in discomfort. It is as if I am entering a new world, one made out of loving, out of a tenderness, one trying to teach me how to not-die. There are parts that save me, that show me some hope for continuing to live in the world I’m in. I relish the quotes in my head: “'See that woman over there — she's not ​that mortal.' How can this be made to become a statement of truth?”4 How can I be made into something more than I am? How can I build a body that I am in constant want of? I envision body-person me, I project it out into the future, and try to bring a little of their realm into my own. Imagining all my problems as me stumbling through the Bioscleave home, I feel my bones getting stronger, a new body taking shape. I have more questions than answers. Around my city there’s giant chalkboards with the question of “what do you want to do before you die?” and in turn, people scribble down their dreams and their hopes. I would probably put something about learning how to love or function in a healthy way. It’s not as grand as learning how to not-die. But maybe it’s all one and the same, the process of learning how to live. I wonder if these boards create community too, like the reversible destiny parks. Us huddled together whispering our deep fears and dreams of the future. And I think the typical want is to build worlds where we never get hurt, wanting something impossible. I think that is what draws me to the idea of Reversible Destiny so much, that we live longer if we are uncomfortable, unstable. So I wonder: could we live in their world? Is it even inhabitable? Possible? I think the Bioscleave house is still being used as an artist residency space. People live in the Reversible Destiny Lofts. It's possible, it's happening. This world exists in our own. Then the question becomes: What sort of person do I need to become in order to live a life in which I do not die? That may be the point. They wanted would-be residents to “often find themselves unable to 1

Arakawa, Shūsaku, Andrew E. Benjamin, Madeline Gins, Michael Govan, Charles Werner Haxthausen, Radovan Ivšić, Ed Keller, et al. 1997. ​Reversible Destiny : Arakawa/Gins. New York, New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications., 259. 2 Ibid., 259. 3 Ibid., 304. 4 Ibid., 153.

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determine where they should position themselves and why.”5 It’s all a giant cycle. I keep writing myself in circles. Dear diary, I’m stuck. It’s all a big joke. I search for more of Gins and Arakawa. Their personal loving philosophies or practices remain hidden, somewhere else. Still, I love them. I love their loving, and how they loved each other so much they didn’t want it to end, they didn’t want to die. And yet here we are. Arakawa died in 2010 from complications with ALS. When Arakawa passed, Gins said that "'This mortality thing is bad news,' ...She said she would redouble her efforts to prove that 'aging can be outlawed.'”6 Still, Gins passed in 2014 from metastatic cancer. I want to live in a world where my lover doesn't die, where relationships don’t end, where I get to be healthy and whole. I want Reversible Destiny, too. The last time I was in New York City I went to the offices of the Reversible Destiny Foundation. They were closed, but I said a prayer and then toured a church down the street. I think the offices are open just a few days a week now, holding onto a legacy. Their website is my favorite on the internet, almost non-navigable. I think it’s meant to keep you young, but mostly I feel clumsy as I try to click on evermoving links, some of which have now gone bad. The thing about living with the remnants of a world that didn’t go as planned, where the primary vision failed; is that you have to accept some new sort of truth. Relationships end, lovers die, realms cease to exist, philosophies are proven false. Believing in and creating the theories of the Architectural Body didn't save the couple, and they won’t keep me alive forever either. But in so many ways, they’re keeping me alive right now.

“​But phantoms do not usually disappear forever. In fact, they may return decades after they seem to have gone.”7

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Ibid., 308. Fred A. Bernstein, “Arakawa, Whose Art Tried to Halt Aging, Dies at 73,” in The New York Times, May 20, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/arts/design/20arakawa.html. 7 Arakawa, Shūsaku, Andrew E. Benjamin, Madeline Gins, Michael Govan, Charles Werner Haxthausen, Radovan Ivšić, Ed Keller, et al. 1997​. Reversible Destiny : Arakawa/Gins. New York, New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications., 163. 6

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Star girl Anonymous (look what you've done) (see what you did) (watch what happened when) read this email, please are you getting these (transmissions) (data) (ones and zeroes) thoughts i had and then thought of you and then my fingers moved across the keys and then transformed (i'm alone) (it's just me) (just me the computer) (it's been months since i've talked to a person) nice to talk to you although it's not really talking ground control to ... you get the idea

A Weekly Reminder A. Felice Freeman with smoke as her breath and liquor on her tongue my mother tells me stories about her life and never lets me forget that in an alternate universe I do not exist

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Debris Jane Smith David, Mio, Tasha, Lissa, and Kaitlyn are golden children floating in a playground made specially for them. It's a circular pod adjacent to the ISS -- they're all children of astronauts and are used to playing with billion-dollar toys. Like their parents. David's inserting his card over and over at his station, and it isn't working. He whines, and Mio sees the eyes of the three girls swivel over. David and Mio are best friends by necessity of gender, but there are times Mio hates him. Or ... he hates himself for hating David, just because the others do. It's not David's fault, not really. He could do the exercises with the others, he could eat less, he could laugh a little more quietly. He could, but he doesn't. And so they all hate him, in different ways. Mio wonders at this, but the complex interdependence of the lives of their parents isn't a particularly appealing alternative. David's station shuts down. And then Lissa's ... and then Kaitlyn's ... and that's when they all stop yelling at David. The lights are going out one by one. The gravity will fail next. The drop beneath Mio is at least thirty feet. Kaitlyn's voice rises above the others. "We have to get into the failsafe seats." They fall in line behind her, moving through the air at an achingly slow pace. Half the inside of the circle is dark. Curiously, there are no alarms. The silence is almost worst. They're at the seats. Kaitlyn straps herself in. Lissa. Tasha. Mio feels indescribable relief when the shoulder straps click in. And then. Mio sees what's happening before David begins to scream. These seats were designed for them a few years ago, when the pod was put into action ... when they were smaller. David, especially, was smaller. David's shoulder straps will not click. Mio unbuckles himself almost without realizing what he's doing. His hands feel numb as he tries to push David's straps over his stomach. David's breath is coming fast on his neck. The acrid smell of sweat is rising off him. He won't fit. Kaitlyn tells him to stop. Tells him to get himself in. Leave David, she says. There's no hesitation in her voice. Mio's voice is equally calm. All debris must be secured. A phrase they all know well. Help me, he says, I need help. (With the debris ...) He doesn't look into David's eyes. (Debris ...) Doesn't look at the girls. As the last few lights flicker out, six hands help him push David into the seat and strap him in. (Debris ...) No one speaks when the last light goes out and gravity fails. No alarms ring. The only sound is of five people breathing, in unison.

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To A Robot In A Box Jane Smith would making love to you be, like, okay? i've read through the manuals and they don't specify the morality of the specific sex acts that i imagine - oh god - this is horrific ... just, looking in the mirror at the end of the day you're not saying anything, possibly because i haven't turned you on yet, fucking fuck ... this was such a bad idea, but to be honest i'm very lonely, beyond the point of human solace these are just excuses ... it's true that the laws -well, at some point robots are going to have rights not like the pundits are talking about, the tv fights, the endless discussions about what losers like me get up to with their machines when they're at ease ... when you can get through lonely days but not nights the downsides: will this make me more isolated? if my family and friends found out, would i be hated? what family and friends. who am i kidding ... there's only the deliveryman, this isn't living ... i'll take any kind of love ... even automated

Worlds That Exist Inside Radiohead’s T ​ he Bends Emily Ruth Taylor a world where you can talk but you can’t communicate; a world where the machines talk for us; a world where every image of yourself makes you less human; a world where everyone has their fifteen minutes, but only before their death; a world full of dolls that almost look like us; a world where the dolls don’t even want to look like us; a world where the way you feel in your body matches your head; a world where teenagers at a grunge concert can fly away into the stars; a world where your dreams talk to you and never say anything nice; a world where your past selves split off and leave because people like them more; a world without self; a world where the sky is falling, the sky is falling in because of you; a world that it’s past time to leave 11

Space Cat Cristina Ciccone

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THE RIFF ZINE CONTRIBUTORS Anonymous. ​There are poems by anonymous authors on pages 2 (“Haiku On Science Fiction Character Possibilities,”) 4 (“Good Guy,”) 5 (“A Nice, Good, Solid, Great Day’s Work,”) and 9 (“Star girl.”) B, Ashlee​. Ashlee is junior editor of this zine. She is a part-time writer and full-time nice, awesome person. (Emily wrote this bio.) She is on tumblr at silverdawn89. Ciccone, Cristina​. Cristina is an artist who lives and works in South London. Her website is cristinaciccone.co.uk. watercolor/digital illustration, “Space Cat,” appears on page 12. Freeman, A. Felice. ​She can be found on tumblr as blackscifimatters. She loves the stars and is terrified of space. Her poem, “A Weekly Reminder,” appears on page 9. Hennemann, Tom​. Tom is a semi-retired bookseller who travels the east coast of Australia in his campervan, following the sun and surf, reading and writing poetry. He has been previously published in The Ghazal Page. Tom’s poem, “Future (Miss) Universe,” appears on page 2. Smith, Jane​. Jane is very upset about Brangelina, but is Team Angie all the way. Her short story, “Debris,” appears on page 10, and her poem “To A Robot In A Box,” appears on page 11. Soko, Lena​. Lena is an idiosyncratic teenager with interests in philosophy, art, literature, and seemingly pointless musings. She loves the written word and wants to become a grumpy, eccentric professor one day. She can be found as w-nd-r-ng on tumblr. Her poem, “Heroine,” appears on page 5. Taylor, Emily Ruth​. Emily is senior editor of this zine. She is emiruthless on tumblr. Her short story “So Dark, Up Above,” appears on page 3 and her “Worlds That Appear Inside Radiohead’s ​The Bends,” appears on page 11.

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