TERSE.

31/12/2022

Our submission period opens today until 2.23.23.
Happy New Year 🌈

05/01/2020

Micaela Walley's new piece. You can read the current issue, as well as all older issues online at TERSE.

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. The sun might shine or the clouds might lower, but nothing could appear to me as it had done the day before. A fiend had snatc…

05/01/2020

Ben Berman Ghan's new essay "Q***r Time Machines" is now live at TERSE.

Elizabeth Freeman opens Time Binds: Q***r Temporalities, Q***r Histories introduction with a description of the 2002 experimental film K.I.P by Nguyen Tan Hoang – a hybrid of q***r art and gay porn…

05/01/2020

"I have not written about the sea in a while. It has become increasingly harder to think about it, to imagine it, to smell it. I went around telling people that I am taking a hiatus from it being my subject. It being the Mediterranean, the only sea I have ever been in close contact with. I was terrified of repetition, of sounding like a broken record, of writing something I don’t understand. What I don’t understand: how can a body of water encapsulate a whole philosophy of existence? How does it disappear?"

It is here, in this specific spot, across from this sky, here, where it all began.   Monday, January 30, 2017 at 2:23 PM. Beirut, Lebanon. I have not written about the sea in a while. It has b…

05/01/2020

Marc Shapiro's new work at TERSE.

  SHE   She used to like to do it in the morning When sunlight knifed through curtains Highlighting her movements Cat like Like cool easy jazz Then one day something left her Died A singl…

05/01/2020

Read, “i found a dead poem and watched it rot” by Neha Maqsood at our winter issue of TERSE.

    in the purple hued sunsets of london, I found a poem dead, its words crystallised to form bones. we observed, picking the letters through our teeth. the most carnivorous of us searche…

05/01/2020

“Reality” is bad for your health.
I respect science but prefer the occult.

The unknown does not know it is unknown.

Read the rest, and all the older entries, at TERSE.

The occult wants you to know that it doesn’t want you to know.   “Reality” is bad for your health. I respect science but prefer the occult.   The unknown does not know it is unknown. &nb…

18/10/2019

"when the end came we did not save
everything
there was barely room for us
and so
what we deemed us
was saved
what was not us
was left behind
and thus we learned
who we really were
by the mountains of
archives,
artifacts,
and ways of being,
that we left for the destruction"

Continue reading the rest at TERSE.

Art by Kate Shaw     when the end came we did not save everything there was barely room for us and so what we deemed us was saved what was not us was left behind and thus we learned who w…

18/10/2019

Oscar Mardell has a new poem at the latest issue of TERSE.

Art by Kate Shaw     It is the Fiat Tagliero building in Asmara, Eritrea, planned by Giuseppe Pettazzi, fascist aesthete, and built under his watch in thirty-eight.   On either side…

18/10/2019

"The joke you had to explain.
The vision that moved no one.
The pedantic tone.
The embarrassing confession
abandoned halfway. When across freshened skies
jetpacks jockey and curtsey,
and solar-powered dirigibles"

Continue reading the rest at this month's issue of TERSE.

Art by Kate Shaw The joke you had to explain. The vision that moved no one. The pedantic tone. The embarrassing confession abandoned halfway. When across freshened skies jetpacks jockey and curtsey…

18/10/2019

"Late one August evening in a small provincial town, a woman steps out her front door. In her hand, she holds a slim leather briefcase, probably containing a laptop. When she steps down from the small landing in front of the door, a mild breeze fills the air, gently tousling her long blond tresses. She tries to pull her hair back behind her ears without any luck. From the back pocket of her jeans she pulls out a bandeau and ties those unruly locks into a simple ponytail. Now, with no hair interrupting her vision, she looks first to the right and then to the left before turning around to lock the door behind her. After checking twice that the door really is locked, she rotates to face the street for the second time."

Continue reading the rest at TERSE.

Art by Kate Shaw   Late one August evening in a small provincial town, a woman steps out her front door. In her hand, she holds a slim leather briefcase, probably containing a laptop. When she…

18/10/2019

New poem by Tomasz W. Wiszniewski in this month's issue of TERSE.

Art by Kate Shaw   May 16, 2019. Gone to Rita, saintly brick.   At wit’s end thumbed thru the mall my viscera become tightrope-walking rhombuses. My weariness goes headfirst. I’m divested…