Issue 8: October 2019

8.

If humans were to become extinct tomorrow, plastic, that quintessential human artifact, would remain on Earth for centuries more. See Barbie on our cover, seeking shelter behind a piece of driftwood? Barbie would live on as the Rockaways disappear under rising sea levels. Barbie will remain, alone and naked, but we might not. Barbie is what the next life forms will find as they dig through the layers of trash we leave behind to understand what happened to this planet. What will it say about us?

Issue 8 is filled with birds, rolling greens, and other precious remains of summer as fall comes upon us. Will stories such as these also become a thing of the past? Will readers of this uncertain future come across the word “egg” or “field” or “tree” and wonder, what were those? When the next life form toddlers encounter a paper crane, will they know that it once could fly?

When a sixteen-year-old climate activist is ridiculed and demonized, when democracy is repeatedly mugged by filthy crooks and reality itself is vanishing in front of our very eyes, it does require a daring imagination to project ourselves in a future in which we humans still exist and live on as organic matter, and not just as the plastic relics of our failed visions.

How do we dare?

The Editors.

Issue 8

October 2019

Features

Stories

Essays

Poems

Issue Cover

“Rockaway #barbie” photograph by Nadia Belalia.

Issue 8.1

Features from

Prefer to Dive In at Random?

A cagibi is a place where things are often gathered pell-mell, which comes from the French word pêle-mêle, a state of affairs characterized by the random mixing of things, a chaotic state of affairs that also opens the door to unexpected discovery. In that spirit, while this page lists the contents alphabetically by the contributor’s first name, here also is a separate list in random order, to encourage you to skip around the contents of  Issue 8, to discover a work of prose or poetry you’d like to sink down into. We expect it will stay with you, and we hope you’ll be inspired to share it. Dive in!

ISSN 2643-3273. Copyright © Cagibi Literary LLC.

 

Browse Issues