[{"id":26475,"date":"2026-08-15T10:00:58","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T14:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/?p=26475"},"modified":"2026-08-11T16:33:34","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T20:33:34","slug":"gemini-pastoralism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/archives\/26475","title":{"rendered":"Gemini Pastoralism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Mrs. Mulkey pointed to the nearest desk, said, \u201cWrite your essay right now. You have 15 minutes.\u201d Except I didn\u2019t. Neither did Pac-Man when I watched my favored brother play him, terribly, last night, my shoulders aching from shoveling muck deep as my gumboots. The cattle only knew food and shit, so much shit I smelled above Mom\u2019s creamed cauliflower, her potatoes whipped two sticks of butter yellow bricking me to the chair. I finished geometry, a mandatory pass or fail assignment calculating the curve a Barnes dehorner makes through a steer\u2019s keratin, its hot blood in my mouth inspiring my essay, now titled, \u201cBlood Is Life Until You See It.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

Its introduction describes the scene in the barn last summer, my hands sweating around the vinyl grips, but my dark half enjoying the power: the steer still, restrained in the pin, unaware until the crunch, then the spurts attuned to his quickening pulse filling my mouth, his cry of pain, for help, for whatever god the sun seems, I don\u2019t know, it seems an apt metaphor for how tired I am of the death I\u2019ve seen at 15:<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

dozens of stray dogs, careless cats napping in a wheel weld, squirrels, cattle, deer, good grief the deer strung up and drained, their blood gone with the next rain. Unlike the blood I swallowed, the dehorner an improper shield, red streams on my tongue, up my nose, across my face too. I ended the essay running to the ditch, rinsing my face, careful to not swallow a drop, to not always agree to the gruesome things we do to keep society going. My dark half suggested a different conclusion: Not every death has a purpose. Some things simply conclude. Like this essay. Its lesson to live like Pac-Man, to his last life, eating everything you can while your blood\u2019s still inside you.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

I handed Mrs. Mulkey the paper with my ending, my neat cursive on both sides, the truth nowhere on the page, but in my boots still stuck in the barn, my feet scrubbed raw after the walk out and home, Mom telling me to stay at the kitchen table for homework, to wear two pair of socks to bed, to do the math first, everyone else enjoying my brother\u2019s constant encounters with ghosts: his boots on the carpet, his Pac-Man spinning,<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

the intercepted arc of the final proof eluding me until I realized my lips, not the handles, were the chords, the steer\u2019s blood a sector in which I was inscribed. Trapped by circumference and circumstance. For now<\/em>, my dark half whispered. One day, we\u2019ll run free, horns out and hard enough to make our blood do as we want.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mrs. Mulkey pointed to the nearest desk, said, \u201cWrite your essay right now. You have 15 minutes.\u201d Except I didn\u2019t. Neither did Pac-Man when I watched my favored brother play him, terribly, last night, my shoulders aching from shoveling muck deep as my gumboots. The cattle only knew food and shit, so much shit I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":893,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[206],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26475"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/893"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26475"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26610,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26475\/revisions\/26610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":26585,"date":"2026-08-15T10:00:57","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T14:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/?p=26585"},"modified":"2026-08-11T16:31:51","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T20:31:51","slug":"manatees-dont-dream-of-electric-boats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/archives\/26585","title":{"rendered":"Manatees Don\u2019t Dream of Electric Boats"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When Florida put the last gas motor in a museum, I clapped with everyone else. The governor cut a ribbon over a row of electric pontoons and smiled with his whole mouth. He wore a polo embroidered with a manatee, bright white scars stitched across its back. Old prop marks turned mascot. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The crowd cheered. A reporter shouted about clean water and a new era. I believed it. I wanted a cure that fit inside a headline. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a week, the springs looked rinsed. Water ran clear under the boardwalk. The Gulf held still. Egrets stepped through shallows with careful legs. Manatees drifted in the grass beds, heavy and calm, chewing seagrass into long green ribbons. No metal roar chased them. Someone said the state had plugged in and forgiven itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then the calls began. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Homosassa at two in the morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Crystal River at three.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Weeki Wachee before sunrise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Manatees began to lose their bearings. They bumped seawalls. They circled with eyes open and whiskers slack. They nudged pilings as if pilings had changed their language overnight. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Guides whispered about cows surfacing with red-rimmed eyes. Their skin held pale scars that looked new again under dock lights. A tour captain swore one surfaced beside his pontoon, looked straight at him, and shook, not from cold. From something deeper. From the body\u2019s refusal to shut down. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By week three, a lab biologist traced a finger over a map and didn\u2019t smile once. The new motors didn\u2019t scream. They hummed. A steady low vibration that traveled through limestone and mangrove roots and settled into the inner ear. No deep sleep. No drop into that dark place where bodies repair and forget. The hum built a fence inside the skull. You could graze all night and still wake up starving. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cows grazed without rest. Calves pressed against mothers who forgot the count and slipped under for a second too long. A calf in Kings Bay spent that second in a place with no air. Volunteers hauled it up with towels and prayers. It coughed water and blinked. The mothers kept circling. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The governor returned in a second polo with tighter thread. He announced the Bureau of Aquatic Wellness Soundscapes Initiative. He called the hum a modern challenge and an opportunity for growth. He promised measurable results. He thanked donors with names on benches that would face the water until the bolts loosened. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They hired me because I\u2019d tuned soundtracks that shook teenagers without shaking bolts at Kennedy, and because I grew up on the St. Johns, a lazy river with a quiet that felt older than law. My mother ran an airboat outfit and loved the noise. She said it kept skeeters honest. I wiped blood off tourists\u2019 shins when reeds kissed them. I rinsed prop scars from gray backs in a plastic tub, hose in one hand, throat tight with something I never named. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under a tarp that smelled of gas and wet rope, I made a private promise. I\u2019d work with sound and teach it to keep its hands to itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Bureau handed me a badge and a desk that tasted of old coffee. A map waited on top, peppered with yellow pins for every spring that mattered. They set aside a small budget for underwater speakers and a larger one for consultants in linen who said \u201calignment\u201d and \u201cdeliverables.\u201d I asked for patience. They asked for numbers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I rented a white houseboat in a canal the color of cold tea. Sugar ants owned the galley. The carpet stain shaped itself into Florida. Morning sun drew rectangles on the table. Afternoon thunderheads rolled in and dumped warm pennies on the roof. Night pulled no-see-ums from every blade of grass. I wore a head net and rubbed lemon on my wrists because a fisherman swore lemon beat anything a lab could mix. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My job sounded simple. Design a sound the manatees would accept as a friend. Put it in the water. Tune it until they slept again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started with the easy things. Seagrass sliding in current. Shrimp crackle under mangroves. The soft whoompof manatee breath, then the long release, a sigh that made you feel watched by a kind eye. I filtered the motor hum and laid the old world over the new. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Bureau assigned two interns to keep me honest. One came from Gainesville with a shark tooth on a cord. The other from Tampa with a patch on his hat that read \u201cMAKE WAKULLA CLEAR AGAIN.\u201d They sat in kayaks while the sun burned the skin between thumb and finger. They fastened trackers to flukes with ropes that looked gentle and weren\u2019t. They ate Publix subs under a bridge that smelled of bait and old beer. They wrote numbers on waterproof paper and left salt on their pens. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I sat with headphones and closed my eyes. My head turns sound into taste and color. An ocarina tastes green. Shrimp crackle tastes of red dust beneath a truck. A manatee breath tastes of sugar and coffee. I built a mix with a tempo that matched a resting manatee. I found a low line that rolled under everything, tide moving under a bridge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We placed the first speaker under Three Sisters before dawn on a Tuesday. The water there glows an impossible blue that makes photos look dishonest. Guides tell tourists to hush and be guests, not gods. We got one quiet hour. The river granted it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I flipped the switch. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grass and breath and shrimp rose through the water, cool as a hand on a fevered forehead. Two cows drifted near. One rolled an eye, dark and patient. A calf tucked under a belly and brushed algae with its flipper. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the screen, the tracker lines softened. Heart rates eased. Movement slowed. A line that had jittered all night smoothed, the way a face smooths when someone finally stops listening for a door. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The calf slept for three minutes. Then five. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The interns whooped. I didn\u2019t. I let out a breath I\u2019d held since the ribbon cutting and tasted fear inside it. This could work. Florida could give back one thing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We expanded to Homosassa and King Spring. The Bureau sent a photographer who wanted lens flares on whiskers. He got two flares and a sneeze straight onto the glass. They sent a lawyer too. He said if anyone drowned near my music, it could be an issue. I said people have drowned in silence for a long time. He said silence billed fewer hours. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first side effect climbed out of the water and sat down on the dock with wet feet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two neighbors woke on their porches with hair clumped as if they\u2019d been dragged through eelgrass. A woman woke at the edge of the boardwalk with her sundress stuck to her thighs and a grin that made her face ache. She said she\u2019d dreamed of a dark blue room full of mothers and didn\u2019t feel alone. A teenage boy woke on a pool float under a screened cage and posted a video of himself blinking at dawn while his friends laughed in the comments. One man lay face down in a kiddie pool clutching a burger bun, his body rising and falling with the water, stubborn as wildlife. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Bureau labeled this an unforeseen variable and formed a task force for Thursday. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bureau of Aquatic Wellness Soundscapes Initiative<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Subject: Community Impact Metrics<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Average REM proxy uplift within 1,000 feet of broadcast site<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Tourist Sentiment Index during boardwalk dwell<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Manatee Calf Somnolence Duration (minutes per night)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Lawsuit Velocity (filings per broadcast hour)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Please trend positive on items 1 through 3 while trending negative on item 4.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thank you.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The county called a meeting. They served coffee that tasted of ash and cookies shaped like starfish. Commissioners asked me to stop the sleepwalking. They asked me to keep the manatees asleep. They asked me to tune the sound so tourists would feel something important and still sign waivers with a smile. The minutes called this sustainability. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On my way out, a woman in a straw hat caught my sleeve. \u201cThe manatees can take every dream I\u2019ve got,\u201d she said, \u201cif they leave me one hour of peace.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her husband said he\u2019d bill the county for a ruined pair of loafers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both truths lived in the same house. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I moved the low line down. I lifted the shrimp. I tucked the breath into a pocket beneath the mix, wintergreen in my mouth when I listened. The sleepwalking dipped for two nights and rose again when a storm parked over the county and hit roofs with its fists. People sleepwalk when rain sings. That sits outside any manual but inside every Florida childhood. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Bureau posted new signs on the boardwalk in a friendly font. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

WELCOME TO THE SOUNDSCAPE<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We hope you find peace and connection here.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For your safety, please stay alert near the water\u2019s edge. Float with a <\/em>buddy<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thank you for helping us keep Florida serene!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A pastor from a river church held a press conference under live oaks by the ramp. He held a jar of spring water and said I\u2019d trapped souls in speakers. He called my boxes chalices, and not in a kind way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next day, a neighbor slipped on algae and broke his wrist during a midnight walk. He called it a nothingbreak. The lawyer called it a precedent. Lawsuits came in a damp stack. One signature looped like waves. One stabbed the page. The complaint called my work a nuisance, a trespass by sound. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Bureau sent the lawyer with coffee breath. He told me to reduce broadcast hours. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cManatees need the night,\u201d I said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPeople have more lawyers,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I cut the night to three hours and saved the best mix for that window. I named it GRAZE 3 because acronyms make committees feel brave. The interns started sleeping in daylight and grew a third color under their eyes. The tracker lines flattened and lifted, calm chest on a screen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Commissioners voted three to two to pause broadcasts for two weeks. The county called it prudence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

New signs went up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

SOUND PAUSE FOR YOUR SAFETY<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE AS WE OPTIMIZE TRANQUILITY.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On day six, the spring wore a tired film at the edges. Boats idled in the cut with foam bumpers that squeaked. A calf wedged itself against a warm intake and clicked for a mother who circled wide, her heart fast on our screen. Volunteers slid the calf free with wet towels and soft curses. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I stood behind the rail with my hands on the slats and counted its breaths. I hit ten and lost eleven. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That night I made Cuban coffee on a hot plate. Sugar ants moved over the spoon as if the spoon belonged to them. Thunderheads stacked to the west. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wished for my mother. She died under fluorescent light in an ER that used to be a citrus packing house. Her heart gave out while she sorted earplugs for the afternoon tour. A woman with sunburned arms cried and told me to blame no one. I blamed sound anyway. The airboat outfit went to a cousin, then to a bank, then to a man who sells ros\u00e9 at sunset. I stopped riding on air. I crawled into frequencies and numbers that couldn\u2019t lie unless somebody demanded they did. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I slept two hours and woke to the houseboat rocking. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A cow and calf bumped the hull with soft heads. Their breath came through thin walls. On a nearby dock, a human snored, wet and steady, in time with the canal. I lifted the blind. A boy slept with a pool noodle under his neck. A puffer fish hovered near his hand, eyes fixed, bead-bright. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The interns had left a hydrophone in the seam where the vents fizz and the water rolls, a breath that doesn\u2019tend. They brought me the file after the shutdown because the county wanted proof that our adjustment plan met the new tranquility targets. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We played the recording in the office. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The room filled with a murmur that didn\u2019t come from grass or shrimp or breath. It sounded older than policy. It sounded as if the earth had started talking in its sleep. A simple line formed, repeated, trembled through my forearms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I pulled a spectrogram. Peaks where I wanted them. Gaps carved for humans. The pattern knit together with the certainty of muscle memory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And under it, low and rough, a sawtooth edge, the kind a body makes when it sleeps with its mouth open and its nose set wrong. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A human line. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My line. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I recorded my own breath while I listened and saw its small fish flicker in the margin later. I broke my nose on a swing set when I was nine. We never fixed it. That was the kind of family we were. The snore sat under the chorus, steady as a confession. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I tuned GRAZE 3 to the river\u2019s line. I removed the Bureau logo from the file and tagged it LULL. Permission already lived in the water. I just stopped pretending I owned the gate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The night I broadcast LULL across three springs at once, a storm drew a red wall from Gulf to Atlantic. The weather radio sang its small alarm. Sirens honked on the highway. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I stood at the console and watched radar smear a bruise across the county. I didn\u2019t pull the plug. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On all three screens, circles formed. Twelve animals at a time arranged at equal distance, each rising and sinking in turn. Calves slept while rain hit the river hard enough to turn it to smoke. The interns forgot their hats. Their hair curled into ferns. A ranger whispered that she felt as if she\u2019d walked into church without meaning to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Humans stepped outside and tilted their faces up. Some walked to the boardwalk and stood in the rain with mouths open. Phones stayed in pockets. A woman who\u2019d cursed the program sat on her porch steps and slept, jaw slack, hands empty. A man who\u2019d shrink-wrapped his house in faith lay down under his own gutter and woke with a frog on his chest, quiet as a blessing he didn\u2019t earn. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Morning found limbs in streets, leaves in gutters, and a softness in grocery lines you don\u2019t see in summer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I climbed onto the roof with a squeegee and pushed rain into the canal. The sky looked rinsed, the way the springs had looked that first week. A pull started in my chest that didn\u2019t feel born in me. I had slept two hours, and those hours felt borrowed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A cow surfaced beside the boat and exhaled warm spray across my arm. I didn\u2019t touch. The sign says don\u2019ttouch. I spoke to the water anyway, the way I spoke to my mother when the monitor went flat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sleep,<\/em> I thought. Sleep, you beautiful stubborn body.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By September the Bureau held a binder thick with data and a folder thick with complaints. The governor returned to say the state had done what no other state had done and Florida might do a bigger thing in a bigger seat. A reporter asked if he credited the engineer with the headphones. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He smiled with teeth and said Florida credits all Floridians. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Bureau gave me a plaque with a U where my O should be. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A graduate student at the lab sent me a clip. The interns had dumped a month of hydrophone recordings into a drive named River Sounds Please Sort. He\u2019d found the low sawtooth line. He looped it. The room filled with the chorus and my snore tucked beneath it, obedient as an organ pedal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He asked if he should report it as an artifact or a bug. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHold it,\u201d I told him. \u201cA week.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I knew what a committee would do. They\u2019d scrub anything that smelled of a person. People are liability. People ruin the brand. They\u2019d clean the sound until it could hang in a lobby. They\u2019d call it serenity and sell it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Board slid a form toward me that shifted liability onto my desk. Every lawyer at the table called it fair. My stomach called it a trick. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I signed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I went back to the water. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The county put up a new sign, bold enough to sound like consent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

BY ENTERING THIS <\/em>AREA<\/em> YOU CONSENT TO AMBIENT AQUATIC LULLABIES<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

DO NOT SLEEP ON RAILINGS. DO NOT NAP IN KAYAKS. DREAM WITH A BUDDY.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

IN CASE OF TRANQUILITY, SIP WATER.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Bureau wanted LULL without the human line. A consultant with white shoes called my snore an impurity. He said it confused the brand. He said judges like clean. He said prizes require polish. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He didn\u2019t look at the river. He looked at bullet points. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I sat alone in the console room and watched the vents boil under a blue that hurt to stare at. The speakers hummed. The circle formed at dusk and again at midnight. Calves slept longer than any calf in spring memory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Bureau filed a clean release with the state archive and removed the human line from the official LULL file. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They left the speakers on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In winter the first cold snap rolled the palmettos and drove a gray fleet into the vents. Children leaned over the rail and counted whiskers. A ranger raised her hands and hushed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Breath rose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Water sang.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A kid tugged his grandmother\u2019s sleeve at the fence. \u201cListen,\u201d he said. \u201cThe water\u2019s snoring.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was right. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You could hear it from the boardwalk if you stood still long enough. A low rough line under the chorus, a body refusing to behave, a person still inside the system. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The grandmother nodded but kept her eyes on the water. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The river keeps some names. It turns the rest into sound. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And out in the vents, the manatees kept circling in their dark blue room. They turned. They rose. They breathed. They turned again into the slow deep place where repair happens. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For one hour, the world felt tuned. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Florida put the last gas motor in a museum, I clapped with everyone else. The governor cut a ribbon over a row of electric pontoons and smiled with his whole mouth. He wore a polo embroidered with a manatee, bright white scars stitched across its back. Old prop marks turned mascot. The crowd cheered. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":893,"featured_media":26589,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16],"tags":[206],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26585"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/893"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26585"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26588,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26585\/revisions\/26588"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":26491,"date":"2026-08-15T10:00:54","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T14:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/?p=26491"},"modified":"2026-08-11T16:24:16","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T20:24:16","slug":"mars-exit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/archives\/26491","title":{"rendered":"Mars Exit"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I walked outside after a long night\u2019s rest and discovered the corporate skyscraper across the street was transformed into a monk\u2019s temple. There were several monks inside meditating and listening to calm music from a diminutive guitar of some sort. Not sure what religion. Didn\u2019t want to find out. I have nothing against organized religion or asceticism for that matter; it just feels like a tough line to walk. What happened to the massive skyscraper, anyway? Was I still asleep? I started pinching myself on my forearm, then I started bleeding. I walked into the busy, musty liquor store and purchased a Band-Aid. It was no relief from the sudden rain. It made me want English Breakfast tea, though. I feel pretentious every time I order English Breakfast tea with the cute artsy barista who writes \u201cgreat choice\u201d on my cup of bitter tea. Should I ask her out? Will that offend her? I am like a 5-year-old Russian chess prodigy vs a highly sophisticated computer program: stalemate. My phone rings. I\u2019m late for my meeting with a group of inquisitive Martians who are interviewing me for a prospective relocation to the Red Planet. Hello, I say. It\u2019s an honor to speak with you all. I\u2019m thinking of making the move\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I walked outside after a long night\u2019s rest and discovered the corporate skyscraper across the street was transformed into a monk\u2019s temple. There were several monks inside meditating and listening to calm music from a diminutive guitar of some sort. Not sure what religion. Didn\u2019t want to find out. I have nothing against organized religion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":893,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[206],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26491"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/893"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26491"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26618,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26491\/revisions\/26618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":26590,"date":"2026-08-15T10:00:53","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T14:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/?p=26590"},"modified":"2026-08-11T16:35:54","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T20:35:54","slug":"cutback","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/archives\/26590","title":{"rendered":"Cutback"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

At first glance, the museum doesn\u2019t look like much. Tucked in a residential Westside neighborhood among Spanish revival homes and pastel dingbats, the building is a nondescript whitewashed stucco. A barber shop was once housed at this site perhaps, or a bail bond office. There is no sign out front to let guests know they\u2019ve arrived.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Atherton Pollard waits for me at the curb. Pear-shaped and six-foot-five, Pollard looms no matter where he\u2019s standing. He unlocks the front door to his museum and lets me inside, turning on the lights. Tasseled lamps halo jacquard armchairs and curio cabinets in soft light. Bell jars and photo albums rest on every flat surface, and a taxidermy jackalope surveys the room with glassy eyes. On the wall, posters advertise exhibits about the bloodsucking marmot of the Andes, lucid dreaming, and eighteenth-century hair clips carved out of cats\u2019 teeth.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The effect of the room is so overwhelming that the receptionist desk almost blends into the background. But a young, dark-haired woman welcomes me to the museum and asks if I would like a commemorative sticker. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNo stickers today, Tina,\u201d Pollard says. \u201cThis is the reporter I told you about. From the Palms Reader.<\/em>\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before Tina can say she has never heard of the Reader <\/em>(we lack the subscriber base of Los Angeles <\/em>and LA Weekly<\/em>), Pollard leads me past her desk and through a short, black door. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim lighting, but once they do, I see a medical examining table at the center of the room. To the left, on a stainless steel instrument stand, sits Pollard\u2019s claim to fame: a fine mesh mask connected to a huge monitor. This newly patented device can ostensibly identify whether the wearer\u2019s happiest moment has already happened. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMost people don\u2019t know this,\u201d Pollard says, \u201cbut neurotransmitters are like fossil fuels\u2014nonrenewable resources. Once, maybe twice in a person\u2019s life, their neurons produce a flood of dopamine so great it depletes their reserves. If we know when this satisfaction peak will occur\u2014or indeed when it has occurred\u2014then we can help that individual portion out their remaining dopamine.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pollard himself is no stranger to ennui. He recalls the birth of his daughter nineteen years ago as a moment of pure elation, rivaled only by his PhD dissertation defense and dancing with his wife at their wedding. Everything about the new baby, from her red, delicate eyelids to the whorls of skin on the soles of her feet, made him want to burst into song. But of course, the feeling didn\u2019t last. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He can\u2019t pinpoint the exact moment when he realized his happiness levels had stagnated, but gradually, the colors of the world dimmed. His morning cup of coffee no longer tasted quite so smooth, and his wife\u2019s snoring annoyed him more than it charmed him. Even research could not hold his interest. In graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, he spent whole weekends sifting through spreadsheets of unfiltered data, subsisting on Goldfish crackers and chocolate-covered coffee beans because his next discovery was only ever one regression away. Seven years had passed since his daughter was born, five since he founded his museum, and he procrastinated on everything. His wakeup call came when he missed the deadline for an important grant, one that would have funded the museum for five whole years. He needed to get out of this slump, and being a man of science, why not turn to experimentation for the answers? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne thing led to another, and there you go,\u201d Pollard says. \u201cThat was how I discovered the satisfaction peak.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When it comes to the exact process of discovery, Pollard remains cagey.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was quite tedious,\u201d he insists. \u201cYour readers wouldn\u2019t be interested. I thought I had something promising, so I tested it on myself, using the device you see here. And do you know what I found when I tested my own satisfaction levels?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He looks at me with anticipation, waiting for me to guess. When I don\u2019t, he tells me anyway. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey hadn\u2019t peaked after all! The happiest moment of my life was yet to come. So I thought, \u2018If I could help other people going through the same thing, why, there\u2019s no better reason to be a scientist.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those other people helped by Pollard\u2019s research remain mostly speculative. A preliminary trial successfully yielded satisfaction reports for thirty test subjects, but the results have yet to be published. A little publicity, Pollard hopes, will speed up the process. He asks me how I feel about my own life. I seem like a man with an open mind, a fellow with a healthy respect for innovation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOn a scale of one to ten,\u201d he asks, pushing up his glasses. \u201cHow fulfilled would you say you feel? On a daily basis?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I received the email tip about Pollard\u2019s research, I did not intend to become a guinea pig for a yet-to-be-approved device that measures dopamine and serotonin levels in the brain. I consider my life reasonably happy. My parents are both alive and still married, and growing up, they were attentive without being smothering. Saturday mornings, Dad took me surfing in Del Mar, even though I was never good; Monday nights, Mom ordered pizza and played Scrabble with us. My sister and I don\u2019t often call each other, but every Christmas she bakes my favorite grasshopper pie. I went to Northwestern on a scholarship for journalism, and then after moving back to Southern California, I landed a staff gig writing for the Palms Reader<\/em> (although, if I\u2019m honest, I always pictured myself as the next Hunter S. Thompson). Writing puff pieces about the latest low-carb cupcakery in Manhattan Beach has its perks. I get most holidays off, and I\u2019ve never had to work a graveyard shift, unlike my old college buddy who ended up a cable news producer. I\u2019ve never had much luck with the ladies, but I do have a cat who purrs in my lap when we watch ER <\/em>together. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019d give it a six, I guess,\u201d I tell Pollard. \u201cActually, a seven, why not.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd what is the happiest you have ever been?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This question is even harder to answer. What is the happiest I have ever been? College graduation? Moving into my studio in Mar Vista? College graduation involved an hour of sweating through a button-down shirt and trying not to fall asleep while some feckless politician droned on about responsibility and accomplishment. The first night in my studio I smoked a bowl and watched reality TV on a bare mattress in the middle of the floor.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or what about the first time I did a cutback without wiping out? Now that was exhilarating\u2014carving down the face of the bomb, blood in my ears the whole way.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSurfing. I\u2019d give it a nine.\u201d Tens, I imagine, are reserved for life\u2019s crowning achievements. It feels like a waste\u2014or at the very least, a miscalculation\u2014to give surfing a perfect score. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWould you like to know for sure?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He motions for me to lie down on the examining table. I follow his instructions, wondering if I might get electrocuted, if flashing lights might cause me to seize on this table in a tiny room in an unmarked museum. He slides what looks like a blood pressure cuff onto my arm and then straps the mesh mask onto my face. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBe still,\u201d he says. \u201cThis will only take a minute.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I close my eyes and try to breathe normally. I\u2019m more nervous than I thought I would be. The device hums slightly, and a red light flashes through my closed eyelids. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou can relax,\u201d Pollard says.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I open my eyes and sit up. He stares at a computer screen, examining what looks like a series of waves. No big ones, though, just mush.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cInteresting,\u201d he mutters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I ask him what\u2019s so interesting, he looks up disoriented, as if pulled from deep water. He rubs his hand across the stubble on his chin.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYour results are not what I would expect from someone so young\u2014you\u2019re what, twenty-three, twenty-four?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I tell him I\u2019m twenty-six, but the distinction doesn\u2019t seem to matter.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLike I said, so young.\u201d He shakes his head. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I ask a follow-up question, something like why my age would matter or what results he was expecting. My notes get a little jumbled here, the panic mucking up my handwriting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pollard stands up, offering me his chair. When I take it, he leans over with his arm on my upper back, a weirdly paternal stance. The first third or so of the graph consists of thick, dark lines, but the waves that follow are traced more lightly\u2014that\u2019s where the model stops detecting past satisfaction and starts projecting the future. With a pencil eraser, Pollard maps out the ebb and flow of my satisfaction curve, the parts I\u2019d call the barrel, the lip, and the base. But I was never good at the STEM-y stuff, and I can\u2019t make heads or tails of what it all means. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pollard takes his hand off my shoulder and makes sure he\u2019s looking at me for this next part. \u201cThe height of your curve here indicates you have already hit your satisfaction peak.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somewhere in the room, there\u2019s a buzzing sound. At first, I can\u2019t move. Then, I lean in for a better look. I sketch the wave patterns in my notebook, tracing the humps over and over. They\u2019re shallow and rolling, nothing worth surfing. And definitely not the curve of someone who has already maxed out their happiness levels. I ask Pollard how he can be sure. By his own admission, he\u2019s only tested the device on a couple dozen people. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe calculations are sound.\u201d He switches off the monitor before I can ask any further follow-ups. \u201cPreliminary trials indicate that the device is accurate. I\u2019ve estimated the margin of error as less than two percent. The findings are being peer reviewed as we speak.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHow do you know happiness can be quantified?\u201d I ask. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhy do you assume it can\u2019t?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another question waits on the tip of my tongue, but Pollard stands and leads me back into the room where we\u2019d met. He has another appointment he needs to prepare for, he tells me, but there is a garden on the rooftop should I wish to sit and get my notes in order. He pauses at the reception desk and asks Tina to put the kettle on for me. Then he folds himself to squeeze back through the little black door. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is unclear if the garden was here before Pollard founded the museum, or if he designed it himself. Green tendrils cascade down the sides of the building, and a fountain bubbles in the center of the rooftop enclave. Mourning doves coo, and I sip the tea Tina prepared, leafing through my notes at a tile-topped coffee table. One of the doves lands on the concrete ground next to me. When I make eye contact, it bobs its head, anticipating breadcrumbs. I ignore the bird and flip to the page where I traced my own satisfaction wave. If I look closer, there are smaller, shallower waves in the wake of the highest one, small ripples in the timeline of my life. Overall, though, the pattern is one of tapering off.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had thought my happiest moment was that day surfing, but the graph\u2019s apex comes too close to the present. I close my eyes, trying to remember, but nothing comes to mind. I open my eyes. The mourning dove struts along the table\u2019s tile surface. There has been a mistake. That must be it. If I can\u2019t remember my own alleged satisfaction peak, Pollard\u2019s machine must be wrong. Maybe I\u2019m in the two percent of errors. Maybe Pollard\u2019s a quack. Either way, I need further expertise. I stand up, leaving the rest of my tea to the mourning doves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Five days later, I tear open a manila envelope from Pollard. Since Pollard does not use email, he has faxed the documents I requested: my satisfaction report, his own, and a new one belonging to Tina. I fan the documents across my desk and compare the three different graphs. I thought the printouts might include a key to the graphs or a footnote or some kind of annotation, but there is only the graphs themselves.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The patterns of the other two reports differ radically from my own. Pollard\u2019s, like he said, includes a sharp spike at some point in the relatively near future, while Tina\u2019s report contains only a few modest waves until close to the edge of her x-axis. Both of them have the best days of their lives ahead. Me, I lived my happiest moment and didn\u2019t even realize. Unless, of course, Pollard is wrong.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scientists remain divided over the validity of Pollard\u2019s findings. Dulce Moreno Sosa, professor of neuroscience at University of California, Los Angeles, flatly dismisses Pollard\u2019s claims. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIs this a prank?\u201d she asks, looking behind me as if to check for a hidden camera crew. \u201cAm I on Punk\u2019d <\/em>right now?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no evidence to support the notion of a lifetime \u201ccap\u201d on the production of any neurotransmitter, including dopamine, Sosa explains. \u201cIf that were true,\u201d she tells me, \u201cwe would wake up one day completely unable to feel happiness ever again. All seventy-year-olds would be miserable. There would be a suicide pandemic. Scientists would be tripping over themselves to find a solution.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sosa echoes the majority of scientists. But Ochoa, Burnett, and Liu\u2019s 2002 study \u201cShiny Happy People: Measuring lifetime satisfaction levels after milestone events\u201d found sixty percent of participants reported greater feelings of depression and hopelessness in the five-year period after a major milestone. I pore over more studies, and for each paper that disproves Pollard\u2019s hypothesis, another renders it plausible. In 1999, a team of neurobiologists at Delhi University discovered most individuals consistently change what they consider their happiest moment. Before that, in 1976, psychologists at Cambridge University found evidence of diminishing life satisfaction as we age.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I interview four more experts, but they remain as split as the studies. Saul Benjamin of Loyola Marymount University calls Pollard\u2019s mission \u201ca fool\u2019s errand,\u201d but Judith Li at Pepperdine University says she sees \u201cno reason why it wouldn\u2019t work.\u201d Orla Finch at Santa Monica College sniffs disdainfully and tells me Pollard is \u201crunning the same scam as those TV fortune tellers.\u201d On the other hand, University of Southern California\u2019s Arjun Desai is excited by the possibilities and insists Pollard may be responsible for \u201cthe next great breakthrough in neuroscience.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interview with Desai over, I wander through the rose garden at Exposition Park. Not a single flower blooms among the neat rows of green. I sift through memories of my own college days, prospecting for a single moment shinier than the rest. My first kiss, with a girl whose name I don\u2019t remember? We\u2019d been drinking Natty Light at a Halloween party and went outside to talk. The tip of her nose was flushed pink with cold, but we were too entrenched in our conversation to go back inside. We started to make out, sloppy, drunk, but there were no sparks, and I never spoke to her again.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What about when I broke the story of our dining hall underpaying international student workers? The thrill of stitching together evidence, of staying up all night to type it out? No. I thought the story might make a splash on campus, but hardly anyone seemed to read it. For all I know, the article changed nothing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or maybe it was the first time I saw snow? A gray November day my freshman year, that first semester in Chicago. I watched the flakes pile up outside my dorm room and marveled at the stillness, the way everything sparkled, so unlike the winter rainstorms back in San Diego. But it was also a Sunday, and I was too hungover from the night before to do anything other than shut the blinds and go back to sleep.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At a street vendor\u2019s cart outside the rose-less rose garden, I order a hotdog wrapped in bacon and topped with grilled onions. I eat on a bench, watching passersby and trying to imagine what their happiest moments might be. I unfold the copy of the report Pollard faxed me, running my fingers over the waves. Looking at the pattern now, it\u2019s clear my life\u2019s pinnacle came several years after the day of surfing I mentioned in Pollard\u2019s museum, even after college graduation. It looks to have occurred sometime in my early twenties.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I crumple the hotdog\u2019s foil wrapper into a ball. This exercise of identifying the moment feels futile. Knowing when it was, what it was, will not change the decades of flatlining ahead of me, will not make them pass any faster or more tolerably. Nor will it make a better story for the Reader. <\/em>My job is not to navel-gaze; it\u2019s to show our audience something interesting. When I send this draft to my editor, she will probably tell me to cut these paragraphs. Hunter S. Thompson wouldn\u2019t dwell so much on his own misery. He once told the Paris Review,<\/em> \u201cWanting to and having are two different things.\u201d Journalism (even fluffy magazine writing) is about reality, the having, not about the wanting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

* * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In three years, the museum hasn\u2019t changed. Outside the dim light of the museum\u2019s foyer though, the world is radically different. The country has plunged into recession and elected its first Black president. Prop 8 has banned same-sex marriage in the state of California. And Pollard\u2019s research into happiness has been published in Frontiers in Neuroscience.\u202f<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tina smiles at me from behind the receptionist desk. She now wears glasses with thick, black frames and has added a blue streak to her hair, but her work for Pollard has remained the same. I ask her if she has ever thought about leaving. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a decent job,\u201d she says. \u201cHe\u2019s nice to me, and there\u2019s lots of downtime. Why would I leave?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I open my mouth to tell her surely, someone in her mid-twenties, with all the world ahead of her, would want more than faxing documents for a man who still, in the year 2010, refuses to adopt email. But I think better of it. Who am I to tell Tina what will make her happy? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pollard emerges from the back room. He wears a fitted blazer and slim-cut jeans, an upgrade from the cargo shorts and T-shirt he wore when I saw him last. He shakes my hand with confidence. \u201cCorey, my man! Long time no see.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I agree that yes, it has been a long time. Pollard continues the small talk, brimming with an energy I can\u2019t match.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHow\u2019s that magazine of yours? Your editor finally come to her senses and send you back to get the scoop?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I tell him the Reader <\/em>shuttered in 2009, another victim of print media\u2019s slow asphyxiation. I write for a blog now, I say. It\u2019s mostly true. I have a blog, although I make most of my money bagging groceries part time. After my editor at the Reader <\/em>told me the Pollard profile didn\u2019t have legs, I kept my notes. Now, with Pollard\u2019s recent publication, seemed like the perfect time to bring this story back from the dead.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHow does it feel to finally have your research validated?\u201d I ask. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pollard leans against the reception desk and waves dismissively. \u201cTook them long enough, but I knew they\u2019d recognize a breakthrough when they saw one.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wonder what Sosa, Finch, and Benjamin would say to that. But I\u2019m not here to fan the flames of professional infighting. Since the publication of Pollard\u2019s findings two months ago, daily visitors to his museum have increased from five to twenty-five. Pollard\u2019s patented satisfaction detector has been moved to an open side room. Dozens of testimonials plaster the walls, waiting to be perused, to inspire visitors who, like those who wrote them, have all but given up on feeling content with their lives. Pollard walks me through them all, showing off the new-and-improved device, which now connects to a stunningly iMac-like display. I read about a woman who lost her son to childhood cancer, whose satisfaction report showed a very rare instance of twin prominences\u2014another day in her future just as happy as the birth of her lost boy. There was a middle-aged teacher, recently divorced, who learned the wedding to his ex-wife would pale in comparison to his true satisfaction peak. Pollard recounts each story like a proud father. I ask him if they\u2019re all true. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEvery last word,\u201d he swears. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I met with him before, he said the margin of error for the detector was less than two percent. Is that still the case, now that so many visitors have tested the device? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a second, Pollard looks annoyed. \u201cIt\u2019s more like three percent, turns out,\u201d he admits. \u201cBut still. Three percent, for a device of this complexity? Those are results you can be proud of. Only one visitor has complained. Her report cut off too soon, showed she was experiencing severe anhedonia when she\u2019d just gotten divorced and hadn\u2019t been happier in months.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pollard was able to placate the visitor by offering her a second satisfaction report. As expected, the do-over showed her satisfaction peak occurring just after leaving her ex-husband. I ask Pollard about his own report.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think I\u2019ve finally hit it,\u201d he says. \u201cThe satisfaction peak, I mean. Don\u2019t you see? All along, I was meant to bring this discovery to the world.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, what\u2019s next? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy serotonin and dopamine levels will begin to plateau over the next few months and gradually start to dip. But I\u2019m ready. I don\u2019t need any more highs.\u201d\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, that kind of assertion is easy now, while Pollard is at the top of his career. I wonder if he\u2019ll have a different outlook on life if I ask him in another three years. Then he surprises me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd you\u2019re still hanging in there! Tell me, how have the past three years treated you? Did my little machine get it right?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a question I have been asking myself every day for the past three years. The day I sent my editor my draft about Pollard, she killed the story. He was clearly cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, and we couldn\u2019t in good consciousness allow our readers to spend their hard-earned cash visiting him. I knew she had a point, but I\u2019d spent the better part of two weeks working on the story and had nothing else to turn in by my deadline. I left the office in a funk and drove east on Culver to my favorite dive. It was still happy hour, and I ordered a Manhattan, wondering if the rest of my life would be just a series of compounding disappointments.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That night, there was a girl. Drinking a dirty Shirley and wearing red lipstick. Skinny jeans and a sparkly shirt. We got drunk at the bar, made out a little, and then she came back to my place. I woke up next to her, the moles on her back like constellations in the morning light. For a heartbeat I felt Pollard\u2019s report was wrong, would have bet money on it. Then she turned over, and her eyes fluttered open and she smiled at me and she was beautiful, but I remembered the killed story, and we were in my shitty studio in Mar Vista, and then that little ray of sunlight was gone. Like watching the paint on the walls go from yellow to gray. I kissed her, and then I said I had to work. She got up, got dressed, and left me lying on my back in the dark.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later, she texted me, and because she was beautiful and I was alone, I texted her back. We kept going out. After a year, I thought about buying a ring. She always listened to my work problems and made me laugh. But the gray never left. There was never a rush or a spark or any kind of bright shining light when I looked at her, when we kissed. I didn\u2019t buy the ring, and she got sick of waiting around. Then the stock market crashed, and then the Palms Reader <\/em>went under and I felt like a fucking sucker for getting a journalism degree. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYeah, you got it right,\u201d I tell Pollard. \u201cMore or less.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He looks like he wants to celebrate, but I must not look too thrilled. He licks his lips and puts his arm around my shoulder. \u201cIf you\u2019d like to be extra sure, we could replicate the experiment. What do you think?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I agree because, at this point, I don\u2019t have anything left to lose. Again, I lay on an examining table and lie still while the device performs its scan. Again, I watch as the computer generates a graph of gentle, rolling waves. Pollard scrunches himself into the computer chair, scrutinizing my report with pursed lips.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWell,\u201d he says at last, \u201cI don\u2019t see much change.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I join him at the computer. Sure enough, the graph looks the same as it did three years ago. The scientific process has spoken. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf you don\u2019t mind me asking, would you complete our follow-up survey?\u201d Pollard asks. \u201cIt helps us track participants\u2019 outcomes over the years.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I tell him sure. What else am I supposed to say? He says Tina will send over the survey by the end of today. I thank Pollard and exit the museum. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s raining. I zip up my windbreaker and hurry up the block to where I parked. A large puddle pools between the curb and my tires, no way to keep my feet dry. I start the engine and rub my hands together. Through the rearview mirror, I glimpse the dirty white edifice of the museum, still unmarked. If I still wrote for the Reader, <\/em>my editor would say this is all bloat. The audience doesn\u2019t need to know about the weather or about me warming my hands in my beat-up Ford Taurus. But The Palms Reader <\/em>doesn\u2019t exist anymore, and I do, so I get to choose what I linger over in these last lines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I used to end magazine profiles with a quote. Something snappy from the subject of the piece, something heartwarming from their mother or their best friend. For the initial Pollard profile, I had something all picked out, something that felt like solid gold when he said it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWithout identifying when our satisfaction will peak,\u201d Pollard asked me back then, \u201chow can we ever be truly fulfilled?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eventually, I did pinpoint the alleged zenith of my life. I remembered it about a year ago, while my then-girlfriend and I waited outside a new sushi place in the marina. The water refracted the sun, sending light shivering all along the boats bobbing at the dock, and it reminded me of a moment I had completely forgotten.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My old college roommate was in town\u2014the one who works in cable news. He wanted to go to the beach, not a specific one, just any old beach. But it was March and too cold for swimming, and, being from a landlocked state, he couldn\u2019t surf. Instead, we rented bikes and rode along The Strand, all the way to El Porto.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we stopped, sweat trickled down my back. Sunlight shivered on the waves. A boombox somewhere played a Justin Timberlake song I\u2019d heard a million times, but the sun and the blue sky and the company made the usually grating falsetto tolerable. My roommate called Timberlake a bleach-blond douchebag, and I laughed.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We turned and rode back, and on the way, I\u2019d never felt lighter. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At first glance, the museum doesn\u2019t look like much. Tucked in a residential Westside neighborhood among Spanish revival homes and pastel dingbats, the building is a nondescript whitewashed stucco. A barber shop was once housed at this site perhaps, or a bail bond office. There is no sign out front to let guests know they\u2019ve arrived.\u202f  Atherton Pollard waits for me at the curb. Pear-shaped […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":893,"featured_media":26591,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16],"tags":[206],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26590"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/893"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26590"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26686,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26590\/revisions\/26686"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":26494,"date":"2026-08-15T10:00:53","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T14:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/?p=26494"},"modified":"2026-08-11T16:25:47","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T20:25:47","slug":"the-shark-teeth-in-the-anthills-of-my-old-neighborhood-suggest-this-town-used-to-be-underwater","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/archives\/26494","title":{"rendered":"The shark teeth in the anthills of my old neighborhood suggest this town used to be underwater"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\n \n It rained the crops to pulp in 1995, <\/span>
the apple blossoms\u2019 wet cheeks a reflection\u2014
the maniac down the street rubbing himself, <\/span>
opening his palm to me, powderless
wings detached from their thorax,
his darkened thumbnail. Another man\u2014one block over\u2014
looking through the window at my 90-year-old
grandfather while his wife (the man\u2019s; Helen of Troy) <\/span>
combs her lashes\u2014a runway for her wet <\/span>
cheeks. This is about coming back. <\/span>

When I dip from the rental Corolla, I\u2019m Mary <\/span>
Magdalene\u2014a whore or a legend. The townspeople stare <\/span>
as I swallow yellowed grass, the pump house, <\/span>
a hazard of onlookers spilling seed. I picture Hilma <\/span>
rendering the apple\u2014everything but its redness\u2014
stitch organs over my eyes: my spleen a repurposing, <\/span>
my reputation the bowels of this village. This is about how <\/span>
the further I go, the harder it is to see my way back, <\/span>
to swallow my wildness then regurgitate it <\/span>
until all I\u2019m left with is a recluse in the hot dark <\/span>

of a playground slide. The tavern men are holed up,
disbelieving women\u2014especially regarding their aptitude <\/span>
for navigation. I trace mountains through heatwaves, <\/span>
nod my way through the grocery store. The fathoms are dark
beneath my shadow, as strange to me as these people
who eye me like totems. I pat the curbs dry of hail,
my palms pallid with plow salt. This is about <\/span>
how when you come back, you\u2019d do well to come back <\/span>
to an ocean\u2014a field where you can flounder
in what now slides across the rivulets of my throat.<\/span><\/span>\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It rained the crops to pulp in 1995, the apple blossoms\u2019 wet cheeks a reflection\u2014the maniac down the street rubbing himself, opening his palm to me, powderlesswings detached from their thorax,his darkened thumbnail. Another man\u2014one block over\u2014looking through the window at my 90-year-oldgrandfather while his wife (the man\u2019s; Helen of Troy) combs her lashes\u2014a runway for her wet cheeks. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":893,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[206],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26494"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/893"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26494"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26702,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26494\/revisions\/26702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":26526,"date":"2026-08-15T10:00:52","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T14:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/?p=26526"},"modified":"2026-08-11T16:36:42","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T20:36:42","slug":"nu-wave-clubber-looking-for-part-time-lover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/archives\/26526","title":{"rendered":"[NU WAVE CLUBBER LOOKING FOR PART TIME LOVER]"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"NU<\/figure><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":893,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[206],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26526"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/893"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26526"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26542,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26526\/revisions\/26542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":26545,"date":"2026-08-15T10:00:47","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T14:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/?p=26545"},"modified":"2026-08-11T16:19:49","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T20:19:49","slug":"selections-from-last-map-by-amy-and-joe-sacksteder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/archives\/26545","title":{"rendered":"Selections from “Last Map” by Amy and Joe Sacksteder"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Note: for a closer look, click any of the images, and the enlarged versions will open in a new tab.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
Islands \/ Two Photographs<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

For Amy Sacksteder: Tell us more about the creation of this series\u2014what drew you to these places? What brought you to the topographical style?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

AS:<\/strong> The drawings in the series Last Map<\/em> emerged from 2009 \u2013 2010 and were made exclusively at artist residencies: in Budapest x 2, Reykjav\u00edk x 2, and Philadelphia. I was thinking a lot at the time about the liminal space at the juncture of life and death, looking to noteworthy figures\u2019 last words for some kind of insight. I was particularly interested in Amelia Earheart\u2019s final flight and last radio transmission, and the islands she was navigating toward and may have been a castaway upon: Howland and Gardner (now called Nikumaroro). While plumbing this content, I attended my first residency in Iceland at S\u00cdM, in June 2010, just following the Eyjafjallaj\u00f6kull volcanic eruption that grounded flights all over Europe and in the wake of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Wanting to make sense of such occurrences in the context of deep time, these and other natural and manmade disasters crept into the content of the drawings. The visual language of maps and a line-based, illustrative approach ebbed into the work from much of my then-experience traveling to residencies and throughout Iceland, as well as my source imagery of variously sourced sea maps, and my own snapshot images: continental rifts, statues, and elements from the natural world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Carnivore \/ Science Fiction<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
Restricta \/ Setback
<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

For Joe Sacksteder:<\/strong> We\u2019d love to hear more about the process of constructing these \u201ctextual sculptures\u201d? What drew you to connecting an essay to the architecture of these artworks?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joe Sacksteder<\/strong>: I came up with the idea for these pieces in part because I was living in the mountains for the first time in my life, during my PhD program at the University of Utah. And, whenever I gained any elevation above Salt Lake City, whether I was jogging the Bonneville Shoreline Trail or driving up to Park City for hockey, I was enchanted at seeing the entire city poured out in the Wasatch Valley. Similarly, Salt Lake is constructed on a grid, so it\u2019s the only place I\u2019ve ever lived where I always knew what direction was north, south, east, west. When I go back to Salt Lake, everything feels like it\u2019s even more spatially burned into my memory because of the grid and because of the familiar mountain line above the city. The way that the strictness of that grid dissolves into the sheer flux, disorder, and comparable lifelessness of the Great Salt Lake and the surrounding desert\u2014it seemed to echo what I was learning in my PhD program about<\/em> learning, about knowledge, about identity, about taxonomy, and about our human attempts to bend the world to our systems. I hope some of that comes through in the pieces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a class called Narrative Forms with Lance Olsen, he would have us complete \u201camphibious responses\u201d to books we were reading, and I made my first attempt at a Last Map <\/em>after reading Steve Tomasula\u2019s highly visual novel, Vas: An Opera in Flatland<\/em>. During workshop, Lance said \u201cThis is really interesting, but the writing\u2019s no good.\u201d He was right\u2014I\u2019d spent so much time on the tech aspect that I hadn\u2019t been paying attention to the language. It wasn\u2019t until about four years later, during the pandemic, that I had the time to do things right. The hardest trick on Adobe InDesign was figuring out how to make the colors of the drawings show through the text. After that, however, the many hours of zooming way in and cutting around positive and negative spaces were really meditative. I was able to listen to music with lyrics while \u201cwriting\u201d for the first time in my life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Half the pieces are about Utah, or the Rocky Mountains in general, and half the pieces are about the tin-roof cabin and subsistence farm in northern Georgia where my mom grew up\u2014a property that Amy and I continue to visit to this day. As she created many of her Last Map <\/em>drawings\u2014the title is hers, by the way\u2014while at a residency in Iceland, I see my contributions as triangulating three mountainous regions\u2014one that\u2019s dear to me, one that\u2019s dear to my sister (that I\u2019ve never been to), and one that we share in common. I\u2019m interested in exploring the idea of shared consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Esja \/ The Odyssey
<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
Fall \/ Security Question
<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

For AS: How do you understand the making of landscape artifact in these images? Do elements of decay\/the wear of time play into the negative space that appears in some of these works (like <\/strong>\u201cEsja\u201d and <\/strong>\u201cFall\u201d)?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

AS:<\/strong> I was thinking artifact as something left behind in the landscape by human activity, and souvenirs as an item (or feeling or concept, even) taken away from human experience with and in a place. So, in these drawings and others, I was continually moving between the interrelationship between humans and the land we (often exploitatively) visit and inhabit, and what we leave behind or take away. I likewise thought of the cutouts as both absences and presences such as landforms are to bodies of water\u2014each needs the other to define it, and of course that relationship is ever changing. Modularly assembling the drawings on the wall in different gallery locations and installation incarnations reinforced this allusion to maps and topography\u2014a traveling, mutable map \/ visual journal, of sorts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Mirror \/ The Seven Canyons Fountain
<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
Borrow \/ The Biological Station
<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

For JS: What is your relationship to legibility? What are you willing (or unwilling) for your readers to not have access to within these visual poems?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

JS:<\/strong> Illegibility is really important to this sequence, a way for me to represent the distortions of nostalgia in a memoiristic project. In terms of the Utah pieces, I understand that I have a tendency to romanticize my PhD years and to participate in historically fraught mythologizing of the American West. I will continue to do so, no doubt, but I was fairly stressed out in Utah on a day-to-day level, and the Salt Lake City that I love is on the verge of environmental catastrophe. The visuals of \u201cThe Seven Canyons Fountain\u201d echo the textual subject matter: drought and the disappearance of the Great Salt Lake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In terms of the Georgia pieces, the mountain cabin of my mother\u2019s childhood was a story told to me from our earliest family trips, and it was some time before cracks started to form in that story. A bootstrap narrative subsumed by Fox News-tainted delusions of \u201climited government\u201d did not jibe with the fact that it was G.I. Bill land and is now worth a lot of money. The illegibility is a way to represent the lacunae in family history, the deliberate and incidental omissions. There are also celebratory pieces: \u201cSetback\u201d simulates conversation during our family\u2019s favorite card game, \u201cScience Fiction,\u201d some sets of bookshelves crammed with sci-fi paperbacks in the Ellijay cabin, \u201cIslands,\u201d my nephews\u2019 introductions to the glories of northern Georgia. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes I would find during the composition process that a crucial moment or favorite phrasing was getting obscured. \u201cThe Biological Station\u201d recounts a trip I took on a whim while visiting friends in Missoula to Flathead Lake, a place where my father had spent a summer in 1971 and then many years waxing nostalgic about to his children. I went to the receptionist and started to explain my unusual pilgrimage to her. She asked what year my father had been there, then pulled down a binder, and there was the sign-in sheet with his signature from decades earlier. That moment is scattered among the small lakes of \u201cBorrow,\u201d well-nigh illegible. Sometimes I would fudge things to leave favorite moments more intact, but I usually accepted a measure of indeterminacy to the process. There was a microscopic chance\u2014when my father signed that sheet at age twenty-one\u2014that his son would look at that signature years later and notice he didn\u2019t yet have doctor\u2019s handwriting. So the illegibility can be seen as also representing a sort of contingency of life, or ephemerality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The past is further past every day, and two people important to this collection have passed into the ultimate illegibility since I made these pieces last year. My childhood best friend, Roy, who went on a trip with my family to Georgia that\u2019s recounted in \u201cSecurity Question,\u201d and my beloved Aunt Leah. I\u2019d like to dedicate my pieces to them. Dianne Davenport as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I enjoy doing performances of Last Map<\/em>, which includes projected images that zoom in and out of cropped vectors of text. I\u2019m inspired by Marjorie Perloff\u2019s notion of \u201cdifferential forms\u201d\u2014the same work of art existing in various mediums. In performance, the text is completely legible\/audible, though the words are ephemeral on a temporal level, there-then-gone, unable to be paused or reread. I\u2019m also a pianist and composer, so a project for future years is to add music to these performances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Here and There \/ Rock Springs
<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
Lifeline \/ Mystic Hot Springs
<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

For AS: Your pieces draw attention to the structure of their natural subjects and the movement within and around them. How do you go about composing pieces like this? How do the shapes and forms of these locations come together?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

AS:<\/strong> Fittingly, I was composing these drawings, and much of my work, in a mapped-out fashion: using vellum to trace source imagery; trying out the scraps of vellum tracings on the page in relationships to one another\u2014finding the composition and content intuitively; then transferring the tracings with graphite to then work into with ink and gouache. It was a fairly exacting, meticulous approach that gave me a sense of both play and control that I think suited me at the time and was also conducive to traveling and setting up makeshift studios in new places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Perfect Circle \/ Utah, Georgia
<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
Dive \/ Gold Bars
<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

For JS: We were really fascinated by our experiences as readers. We loved having to hold onto the words in each piece as our eyes trapezed across the organic, fluid shapes of the poem\u2013\u2013often disrupted by gaps in the body of the text. How does your relationship to the text change or evolve through these specific visual forms? How does your understanding of the geographic place change as you combine your text with these maps? An example we’re particularly curious about is the colorful gap in \u201cUtah, Georgia.\u201d Can you talk a little bit about how this absence works for the text?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

JS:<\/strong> In a way, slowly traversing my sister\u2019s art and the texts I\u2019d written felt both like traversing a physical distance, for example Gooseberry Trail in Canyonlands, and like really meditating on memories in a way that neither looking at photos nor even writing a memoir can provide. A deliberate pursuit of slowness, really sitting down and luxuriating in the memories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A first spread of sixteen <\/a>Last Map <\/a><\/em>pieces<\/a> appeared in The Offing <\/em>in 2021, and admittedly I leapt at what seemed to be Amy\u2019s drawings that would lead to the most interesting treatments for my purposes. When I returned to the remainder of her fourteen drawings, some of them put me at a loss as to how to proceed\u2014and I left \u201cPerfect Circle\u201d to the very end because I had no idea what to do with it. I\u2019m not talking about it as a work of art, but merely in terms of the positive\/negative spaces I needed for textual boundary lines. Such difficulties in this sequence forced me to invent solutions that I never would have thought up had things been made easier for me. \u201cHowland\u201d and \u201cGardner\u201d are two of the islands at the center of speculations about Amelia Earhart\u2019s disappearance, and what I did was flip that hypothetical flight path upside down and reverse it to create a top boundary. I think it looks a little like a hurricane. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amy says the colorful outline is an elevation map surrounding Howland Island; on a craft level, I was always trying to make whatever decision would give me the most color coming through the text, so the decision was a practical one in that regard. Sometimes I expected a big effect from colors, and the result ended up being more subdued\u2014that was a place, on the other hand, where they really took on a luminous glow. I guess that lacuna (Latin for \u201cpool\u201d) is the last thing I should call the blue \u201chole\u201d of the island, but that\u2019s still what it looks like to me, and I liked how it created a textual void that in turn can be seen as a blind spot in memory or ideology. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

* * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amy Sacksteder\u2019s <\/strong>work explores personal and collective relationships to landscape, material, and artifact. She works among painting, collage, drawing, glass, and ceramics. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, recently at River House Arts (Toledo, OH); David Lusk Gallery (Nashville, TN); I Like Your Work (online w catalog); Saint Kate (Milwaukee, WI); Ox-Bow House (Douglas, MI); and Good Naked x The Middle Room (Los Angeles, CA) among other venues. Her work has been featured in The Offing, the Chicago Tribune<\/em>, New American Paintings,<\/em>and included in the Flat File 2022 Program at Ortega y Gasset Projects, where she was also a 2022 and 2024 Artist to Watch. She presently has work included in the Flat File Index at Real Tinsel in Milwaukee. Her work is included in collections at institutions such as Cranbrook Art Museum and Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. Sacksteder is a member of the Long Island City Studio Collective, lives and works outside of Detroit, and is a professor in the School of Art & Design at Eastern Michigan University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joe Sacksteder <\/strong>is the author of Make\/Shift<\/em> (Sarabande Books), Driftless Quintet<\/em> (Schaffner Press), and Hack House<\/em> (Astrophil Press). His work has been featured in The Atlantic\u2019<\/em>s <\/em>culture roundup, and recent publications include LIT, Conjunctions, DIAGRAM,<\/em> and Michigan Quarterly Review.<\/em> His album of Werner Herzog audio collages, Fugitive Traces<\/em>, is streamable for free at Punctum Books. He has a PhD from the University of Utah and currently lives and teaches in Virginia. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Note: for a closer look, click any of the images, and the enlarged versions will open in a new tab. For Amy Sacksteder: Tell us more about the creation of this series\u2014what drew you to these places? What brought you to the topographical style? AS: The drawings in the series Last Map emerged from 2009 \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":893,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[206,102,122],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26545"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/893"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26545"}],"version-history":[{"count":40,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26673,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26545\/revisions\/26673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":26468,"date":"2026-08-15T10:00:46","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T14:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/?p=26468"},"modified":"2026-08-11T16:34:58","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T20:34:58","slug":"notes-on-contributors-34","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/archives\/26468","title":{"rendered":"Notes on Contributors"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u200eBethany Bruno <\/strong>is a Floridian author. She holds a BA in English from Flagler College and an MA from the University of North Florida. Her work has appeared in more than a hundred literary journals and magazines, including The Threepenny Review, The Sun, McSweeney\u2019s, River Teeth\u2019s Beautiful Things<\/em>, and The Huffington Post.<\/em> A Best of the Net nominee, she has won multiple writing contests, including the 2026 Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest. Learn more at www.bethanybrunowriter.com<\/a>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doug Fritock<\/strong> is a writer, husband, and father of four living in Redondo Beach, California. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in SoFloPoJo, Kitchen Table Quarterly<\/em>, and Whale Road Review<\/em> among other literary journals. He was previously a member of Maya C. Popa\u2019s Conscious Writers Collective and has appeared on the Rattlecast Invited Prompt Lines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adelia Gregory<\/strong>is a writer currently based in Minnesota. Her writing has received support from the Minnesota State Arts Board. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in Literature. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tracy Grikscheit <\/strong>is a California poet scribbling on a scrap of paper next to the ocean after seeing a squadron of pelicans. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Megan Hall <\/strong>is a poet and third-year Ph.D. student in Creative Writing at Georgia State University. Rooted in the landscapes and histories of the South, her work engages themes of ecofeminism, bodily autonomy, and the intersections of poverty, gender, and power. She is currently completing a book-length collection that examines the systemic inequalities shaping and endangering the lives of women and girls. Her poems have appeared in Yalobusha Review, Wild Roof Journal, Soliloquies Anthology, Inkwell Journal<\/em>, and Slipstream Magazine<\/em>, among others. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jose Hernandez Diaz <\/strong>is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater<\/em> (Texas Review Press, 2020), Bad Mexican, Bad American<\/em> (Acre Books, 2024), The Parachutist<\/em> (Sundress Publications, 2025), Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man<\/em> (Red Hen Press, 2025) and the forthcoming, The Lighthouse Tattoo<\/em> (Acre Books, 2026). He has been a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California at Riverside and Visiting Writer in Residence at the University of Tennessee. 
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jenny Jope<\/strong> is a writer, fine art photographer, and counselor whose work explores the ways we endure. Her stories often unfold at pivotal emotional thresholds, examining the quiet resilience that emerges in the aftermath of grief. Echoing her work as a photographer, her storytelling is grounded in atmosphere and utilizes careful framing. Alongside her creative work, she helps lead a nonprofit foundation dedicated to supporting survivors of domestic violence. She holds a BA in English and psychology from Simmons University and an MA in Counseling Psychology from Boston College. She lives in New England, where she continues to write about the fragile, complicated relationships and the moments that invite us to begin again.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jeremy Teddy Karn<\/strong> was born in Monrovia, Liberia. He received his MFA from the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop. He writes and teaches creative writing for a living. More of his writing and publications can be found on his website: www.jeremyteddykarn.com<\/a> 
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ben Kline <\/strong>lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. A poet, information professional, Madonna mega-fan slash podcaster, and one of the team behind the University of Cincinnati Libraries POETRY STACKED series, Ben cohosts the MLVC Podcast and is the author of Twang<\/em> (ELJ Editions), Stiff Wrist <\/em>(fourteen poems), and the 2026 Lambda Literary Award-winning collection It Was Never Supposed to Be <\/em>(Variant Literature). His work has also appeared in Copper<\/em> Nickel<\/em>, Florida<\/em> Review<\/em>, Palette Poetry<\/em>, Hayden\u2019s Ferry Review<\/em>, DIAGRAM<\/em> and other publications. 
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marie Kressin <\/strong>earned her MFA from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She has been published in Arkansas\u2019s Best Emerging Poets, SLANT, The Arkansas International, Timber, SWWIM<\/em>, and elsewhere. Marie was selected as Dairy Hollow\u2019s 2023 Moondancer Fellow for Environmental Writers and participated in the 2026 Bread Loaf Environmental Writers\u2019 Conference. Currently, she works as the Acquisitions Manager for April Gloaming Publishing in Nashville and is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Hendrix College. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hannah Kroonblawd<\/strong> lives in eastern Nebraska, where she teaches creative writing at Concordia University. She attended the MFA program in poetry at Oregon State University, and the PhD program in English Studies at Illinois State University. She is the author of the chapbook The Leafcutters, the Minor Saints<\/em> (Press 254) and recent poems have appeared in Potomac Review, Soundings East,<\/em> and Mid-American Review<\/em>, among others. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Giljoon Lee<\/strong> is a writer from Gyeonggi-do and the Bay Area. He won the 2026 Lin Arison Excellence in Writing Award. His work appears or is forthcoming in Liberties, phoebe, Foglifter, <\/em>and elsewhere. His friends call him Justin. Find him at giljoon.com<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

S.A. Leger<\/strong> is a writer and ornithologist based in St. John\u2019s, Newfoundland (Ktaqmkuk). She is Associate Poetry Editor at Pleiades<\/em>, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Third Coast, The Los Angeles Review, Wildness<\/em>, and The Offing<\/em>. Her best days are spent at a cabin in the woods with her wife and dachshund.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JoAnna Mak <\/strong>is a poet whose work examines alienation, structural violence, and the things that make love durable. Their poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Margins, Variant Literature<\/em>, and elsewhere. They are currently an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amy Sacksteder\u2019s <\/strong>work explores personal and collective relationships to landscape, material, and artifact. She works among painting, collage, drawing, glass, and ceramics. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, recently at River House Arts (Toledo, OH); David Lusk Gallery (Nashville, TN); I Like Your Work (online w catalog); Saint Kate (Milwaukee, WI); Ox-Bow House (Douglas, MI); and Good Naked x The Middle Room (Los Angeles, CA) among other venues. Her work has been featured in The Offing, the Chicago Tribune<\/em>, and New American Paintings<\/em> and included in the Flat File 2022 Program at Ortega y Gasset Projects, where she was also a 2022 and 2024 Artist to Watch. She presently has work included in the Flat File Index at Real Tinsel in Milwaukee. Her work is included in collections at institutions such as Cranbrook Art Museum and Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. Sacksteder is a member of the Long Island City Studio Collective, lives and works outside of Detroit, and is a professor in the School of Art & Design at Eastern Michigan University. 
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joe Sacksteder <\/strong>is the author of Make\/Shift<\/em> (Sarabande Books), Driftless Quintet<\/em> (Schaffner Press), and Hack House<\/em> (Astrophil Press). His work has been featured in The Atlantic\u2019<\/em>sculture roundup, and recent publications include LIT, Conjunctions, DIAGRAM,<\/em> and Michigan Quarterly Review.<\/em> His album of Werner Herzog audio collages, Fugitive Traces<\/em>, is streamable for free at Punctum Books. He has a PhD from the University of Utah and currently lives and teaches in Virginia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anna Sheffer<\/strong> holds an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder. Her fiction has previously appeared in Porter House Review, phoebe, The Greensboro Review<\/em>, and New Ohio Review<\/em>. Find her on Instagram (@a.na.grams) and Bluesky (\u202a@annasheffer.bsky.social\u202c). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Orchid Tierney<\/strong> is a poet and scholar, originally from New Zealand. She is the author of THIS ABATTOIR IS A COLLEGE<\/em> (Calamari Archive, 2025) and A YEAR OF MISREADING THE WILDCATS<\/em> (The Operating System, 2019) as well as several chapbooks including, PEDAGOGIES FOR THE PLANTHROPOSCENE<\/em> (above\/ground press, 2025), LOOKING AT THE TINY: MAD LICHEN ON THE SURFACES OF READING <\/em>(Essay Press, 2023). Orchid teaches at Kenyon College, is a senior editor at the Kenyon Review<\/em>, and invites you to visit her website at www.orchidtierney.com<\/a>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Daniel Uncapher <\/strong>is the author of American Pomology <\/em>(CutBank Books, 2025). He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Utah and an MFA from Notre Dame, where he was a Nicholas Sparks Fellow. A queer and disabled Mississippian, his work has been supported by Bread Loaf, Tin House<\/em>, and The Kenyon Review<\/em>, and has appeared in The Sun, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Chicago Review,<\/em> and Ninth Letter,<\/em> where he won the 2024 Creative Nonfiction Award. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marc-Anthony Valle<\/strong>is a mixed-Black poet from the Pacific Northwest. He received his MFA from WashU. Marc-Anthony was selected as a scholarship participant for the 2026 DISQUIET workshop in Lisbon. His work has been published or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review,<\/em> Poetry Northwest, Beloit Poetry Journal, swamp pink, Notre Dame Review, The Hopkins Review, Bat City Review, Frozen Sea,<\/em> and elsewhere. Find him at marc-anthony.net<\/a> 
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This issue of The Journal<\/em> is made possible by the support of the Ohio Arts Council. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u200eBethany Bruno is a Floridian author. She holds a BA in English from Flagler College and an MA from the University of North Florida. Her work has appeared in more than a hundred literary journals and magazines, including The Threepenny Review, The Sun, McSweeney\u2019s, River Teeth\u2019s Beautiful Things, and The Huffington Post. A Best of the Net nominee, she has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":893,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[130],"tags":[206],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26468"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/893"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26468"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26712,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26468\/revisions\/26712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":26508,"date":"2026-08-15T10:00:42","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T14:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/?p=26508"},"modified":"2026-08-11T16:28:24","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T20:28:24","slug":"contrapuntal-to-pleasure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/archives\/26508","title":{"rendered":"Contrapuntal to Pleasure"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"I\u2019ve<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":893,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[206],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26508"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/893"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26508"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26540,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26508\/revisions\/26540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":26481,"date":"2026-08-15T10:00:42","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T14:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/?p=26481"},"modified":"2026-08-15T10:10:16","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T14:10:16","slug":"poem-for-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/archives\/26481","title":{"rendered":"poem for us"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

there’s a river<\/span><\/p>\n

curved like a wrist <\/span><\/p>\n

in rural Iowa, <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

we follow.  <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

everybody notices<\/span><\/p>\n

a country<\/span><\/p>\n

thrusting inside us. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

—you wear an orange<\/span><\/p>\n

blouse your hair—a fur<\/span><\/p>\n

coat laid carefully<\/span><\/p>\n

on your head.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

people slow down <\/span><\/p>\n

when we pass <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

we are so in love.  <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

a man in a<\/span><\/p>\n

wooden chair,<\/span><\/p>\n

dancing back and<\/span><\/p>\n

forth hums of the<\/span><\/p>\n

wind in the<\/span><\/p>\n

rhythm.  <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

            it is good  <\/span><\/p>\n

hearing God’s voice<\/span><\/p>\n

in America’s Midwest<\/span><\/p>\n

wind. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

what is love between two<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Liberians without<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

knowing <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

families’ history—  <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

              <\/span><\/em>when your mother <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

finds my people in<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

me.<\/span><\/em> Damning<\/span><\/p>\n

you a Judas. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

draped in the grief <\/span><\/p>\n

of our country’s history, <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

we now eat alone,<\/span><\/p>\n

sleep in separate<\/span><\/p>\n

beds.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

there’s a river curved like a wrist  in rural Iowa,    we follow.     everybody notices a country thrusting inside us.    —you wear an orange blouse your hair—a fur coat laid carefully on your head.   people slow down  when we pass    we are so in love.     a man in a wooden […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":893,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[206],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26481"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/893"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26481"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26714,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26481\/revisions\/26714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thejournalmag.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]