The machine has declined to comment.
She typeset the books, handled submissions, mailed review copies, ran publicity, and is now being asked to train her replacement. Her stipend was zero.
READ IT BEFORE SOMETHING ELSE HAPPENS → A poem about the final ten minutes of a reading, when everyone becomes dangerous.
On the peculiar economy in which writers are paid in adjectives.
A poem about the chair that becomes everything except a chair.
Rita Splice presents the year-end numbers nobody asked to see.
The most honest sign in public life may be taped to a machine.
Refresh the page. The editors will deny having put any of this here.
Mabel Torque documents a recurring online ritual.
A close reading of the modern hiring notice, where one person is expected to be an entire department with cheerful energy.
Rita Splice introduces the paperwork required for an unauthorized emotion.
A short field guide to administrative recursion.
A poem about the hour when everybody has heard enough and nobody has gone home.
A single-panel organizational tragedy by Mabel Torque.
A practical guide to converting literary prestige into groceries, rent, and resentment.
A civil servant discovers that the city has been quietly filing away everybody’s final opportunities.
A bureaucratic form for obtaining solitude through a process specifically designed to prevent it.
A practical poem about groceries, stairs, pride, and the logistical design flaw known as adulthood.
A poem about a basement reading, bad chairs, good timing, and the moment a room becomes worth having entered.
Satire: Reporters retain full freedom to ask questions, provided the answers have already been emotionally approved.
Satire: Nothing says working-class authenticity like personally financing a congressional campaign large enough to have its own weather system.
Satire: As beef prices become a campaign issue, the nation prepares for another deeply nourishing culture war.
Satire: A bold new civic benefit combines electoral participation with the soothing familiarity of a mail-in rebate.
Satire: A new efficiency program ensures responsibility is assigned before results become inconvenient.
A short essay about public benches, rest, mobility, and the politics hidden inside ordinary street furniture.
Wombat poop becomes cubic inside the intestine. The explanation involves alternating regions of stiffness, contractions, and actual fluid mechanics.
Six panels of mandatory orientation for a workplace with excellent values and no remaining civilization.
A government office finally offers a proper home for everything you absolutely meant to finish.
Heat makes the Eiffel Tower grow slightly, and uneven sunlight can move its summit around a small circle during the day.
A nonfiction note on submission fees, literary outrage, and why transparency matters more than ritual purity.
A visual field guide for exiting a social event before your departure develops secondary characters.
Shark history reaches back roughly 450 million years — before trees, dinosaurs, and nearly everything with a gift shop.
A small nonfiction piece about abandoned furniture, improvised public space, and the moment a chair becomes infrastructure.
A narrative poem from the weekly republic of folding chairs, dying phone batteries, and five-minute limits.
A copy shop automates everything except one necessary human skill: knowing when not to fix the damage.
Four panels from the only office where an emergency must first obtain a routing number.
A short nonfiction piece about exposure, creative labor, and the strange bookkeeping of literary prestige.
A short poem about domestic order, machinery, and the part of the night that does not go back in the cupboard.
Venus rotates so slowly that one full spin takes longer than one trip around the Sun. This is not metaphor. Space is just like…
Six answers. Six conditions. No referral to a specialist.
He calls it resistance. The dashboard calls it excellent retention.
Conversations, submissions, unfinished arguments, and the occasional useful answer.
ENTER THE WRECKAGE →Occasional satire, dispatches, and evidence that somebody still checks email.
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