Slice Issue 22 | Page 4
SLICE
CREATIVE DIRECTOR,
CO-PUBLISHER,
FICTION EDITOR
Celia Blue Johnson
BUSINESS DIRECTOR,
CO-PUBLISHER,
NONFICTION EDITOR
Maria Gagliano
ART DIRECTOR
Jennifer K. Beal Davis
ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR
Matt Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Elizabeth Blachman
POETRY EDITOR
Tom Haushalter
NONFICTION EDITOR
Christopher Locke
ASSOCIATE FICTION EDITOR
Randy Winston
ASSOCIATE POETRY EDITOR
Trevor Ketner
READERS
Keren Alshanetsky
Kate Belew
Noah Burton
Matthew Daddona
Eleni Demetriou
Dave Essinger
Bobbie Ford
Christianna Fritz
Lizzy Harding
Marae Hart
Jess Kibler
Ian King
Liz Mathews
Roshani N. Moorjani
Bryan Myers
Casey Nichols
Grace Oluseyi
Chelsea Paisley
Kate Pigott
Jackie Reitzes
Rob Roensch
Julia Specht
Gregory Stewart
Cindy Withjack
Michele Zimmerman
SLIC E IS SUPPORTED BY
SLICE magazine is made possible by the New York State
Council on the Arts with the support of Governor
Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
DEAR READER:
M
y borders have been invaded. As I work on this Borders-themed issue
of SLICE with the authors and my fellow editors, a person is growing
within the borders of my skin. To her, I am a universe—the swell of my
belly is the edge of her space on this earth. I’m pregnant with my first
child, and I’m shattered by strange, everyday miracles. And as I work—
on the issue and on the incessant labor of creation—it occurs to me that the greatest
gift of literature, of language, is the ability it gives us to bring another self, some
other mind’s spark of consciousness, inside our skin.
COPY EDITORS/PROOFREADERS
It also strikes me that the fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in Issue 22 are on the
Dan Avant
Eve Blachman
Vanessa Christensen
Angie Hughes
somber side. We asked authors to write about borders, and in the current political
climate, physical borders have become harsh places, as you can see in our stories
about no-fly lists, refugee camps, xenophobic regimes, and walls that keep out the
SOCIAL MEDIA ASSOCIATE
poor. In the third installment of our International Exquisite Corpse series, four
Eleni Demetriou
authors in four languages create a story in which a woman’s consciousness and a
shadowy institute morph and change until the opening from an extracted molar
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Sarah Bowlin
Matthew Lansburgh
Kimberly Thompson
Shane Welch
Adrian Zackheim
Renée Zuckerbrot
becomes a border crossing where an angry guard rants about illegal entries.
Raquel Salas Rivera’s poem “note for a friend who wants to commit suicide after
the hurricane” (accompanied by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado’s powerful intro) is a
post–Hurricane Maria cry of pain. To Rivera, a border is something that separates
us, the reason we might abandon one another without power or supplies—the “great
hole of fuck-it.” But then the poem tells us that a border can also be a place where we
SLICE , Issue 22
touch: “Come in and I’ll give you food and shelter while I have it,” Rivera writes.
Copyright © 2018, SLICE Literary, Inc.
In many of the pieces in this issue, you’ll see that borders are lonely walls we
SLICE magazine is published semiannually
by SLICE Literary, Inc., a 501 (c) (3)
draw around ourselves and others—Frost’s good fences that supposedly make good
nonprofit organization. If you would like
to help support SLICE , please visit
slicemagazine.org/donate or email us at
[email protected].
neighbors—but they are also the cultural gray areas where we can understand each
other, the shadowy spaces between childhood and adulthood, truth and lies, one
person and another. If our consciousness is a maze, as Sofia Bonati’s painting on the
Visit slicemagazine.org for information
about upcoming issues, submission
guidelines, and subscription rates.
cover suggests, then we might use language to navigate the borders of the maze. We
might tell stories in order to bring another human inside the borders of our skin.
SLICE is printed in the United States.
ISSN 1938-6923
Cover design by Jennifer K. Beal Davis
Cover art by Sofia Bonati
Painting on previous page by Sofia Bonati
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Cheers,
ELIZABETH BLACHMAN
Editor-in-chief
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