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LITERATURE!
ALL ARTICLES (DO NOT DELETE!!!!!!!)
My hand is pressed hard against the window, and I am looking at the bloodlessness of my fingertips and the soft cracking off-white paint on the wooden windowsill.
Maybe the changing decimal places send a buzz that fizzles down from the billboard into the cabling, through the machine and into buttons, shocking their paper thin flesh and pulsating through their nerves?
It begins inside me as a change in weather, a subtle dampness seeping into what I had assumed was stable internal architecture.
When my great grandfather died late in the night in Poland, we were pulled out of bed by our sobbing mother. Everyone quickly slipped into black clothes so we could comfort our immediate grandfather.
Though some might argue that the roses had it coming, blaming their lack of resistance, too fragrant, too passive, too much.
I still had bell hooks. And I still had my grandma. Knitting’s always helped, too.
I dream of a deer drowsing, just like me, supine on the side of the road. I don’t know how I know it’s a deer because the figure in the vegetation has no head, but I wait to glimpse the curve of antlers.
Someone left their tarot cards and a book called Narcissism: Denial of the True Self in my room after a party at the old house.
In my memories, we’re still just clueless children climbing water towers, alcohol running in our blood, watching the forest from above, under the summer sun.
A brown glass decanter, bound in red leather. A sleeping pill bottle, unscrewed. A yellow pitcher. An empty toothpaste tube, A lightbulb, illuminated by cool fluorescence.
She left in a flutter of perfume, cashmere, and the faint clatter of keys. The diffuser exhaled one last measured sigh of peppermint. Dr Clarke capped the pen, glanced at the clock, and opened the next file.
O my faun my hunter you are the soul of the whole room yes there is something in you in the curves of your cheekbones and the strands of hair; in pearlescent earrings, in the corners of your face in you, you are the edelweiss on the acme of Qaf or Meru
Did someone ask you who your favourite philosopher was? Did you get stuck thinking of a name equally pretentious and performative? Answer these questions to find out what your Subway order can reveal. Instant ostentation, no thinking needed!
I am drowning under the river red gum, slipping between mud and silt—who can tell the difference?
I grip my mothers hand tightly, not wanting to let go.
He pictured the half-chewed bread inside her mouth, pulp dissolving with saliva. He thought of her body as porous, dissolving, leaking: the reminder that borders between inside and outside were never clean.
I am on an edge, and if I tip, tip off this edge, then I will go all the way to the ground.
But words are futile.
So I am left with these scorch marks.
Again, I dream that my teeth fall out (this is a dream about control).
Scholars of the Global North sometimes shelter themselves in neo-colonial positions when confronted with revolutionary praxis.
“Something in a fragile state always seems more beautiful because you realise that they might not be there tomorrow.”
Dear [REDACTED],
I want to apologise for the scene that I made at The Rose last Friday.
I am writing this letter at the recommendation of Dr Celine Bertuch (my Freudian psychoanalyst).
For the past week, I’ve had a recurring dream where I find you alone in the Quad General Lecture Theatre (K2.05). Only, when I sit beside you, the scenery changes – the wooden pews turn into the firm, purple leather seats of a V Set Intercity Train. You turn to speak, but when you do, your voice is Dr Bertuch’s (she finds this detail quite fascinating).
“after a week helen declared that the lessons would conclude, and she drove off to meet her friends in an abandoned parking lot. womanhood”
“So I’m there, walking around with L0V3 D0ll and she’s wearing these awfully tight shoes and she tells me it’s so she can always remember her bondage or whatever. Some sexbot thing, I thought. They must know she wants to be a model.”
“I want to look as beautiful as my casket.
I want to live forever and be afraid of everything.
Life is so good and it’s only going to get worse.
And in dreams, I don’t have to tuck my wings inside my dress.
There are angels sitting next to you in the train,
Yet to earn their halo, yet to enter heaven.”
“The play symbol bulges stupidly before the sub-saharan beauty of your jungle. Is heaven nothing but a blank slate? THE END. Play again? What’s wrong? Why are you crying? Here is a gift, do not dwell. Here, a new environment. Let me lead you to a new life. You can always begin again.”
PULP is established on the sovereign land of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, as well as Indigenous members of our creative community.
We respect the knowledge and customs that traditional Elders and Aboriginal People have passed down, from generation to generation.
We acknowledge the historical and continued violence and dispossession against First Nations Peoples. 'Australia' and its many institutions, including this University, are founded on the very same violence and dispossession. As editors, we will always stand in solidarity with First Nations led processes of decolonisation, reflected in the substance and practice of this magazine.
Sovereignty was never ceded.
Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.