Subversion

Editor’s Note to Caustic Frolic’s Subversion issue

Lovely readers,

Welcome to the Subversion issue of the graduate student journal Caustic Frolic, housed in NYU’s Draper MA program in the Humanities and Social Thought. Subversion is the first Caustic Frolic issue in history, we previously published as Anamesa Journal. Thank you for being part of the journey.

Subversion is our reaction to the current political situation. It is a way of being graduate students in the humanities when racism, misogyny, transphobia, and so many other thoughts and feelings of destruction rule. The current US […]

Editor’s Note to Caustic Frolic’s Subversion issue2017-11-28T18:14:19+00:00

Flecked Tile

By Logan Shafer

Read somewhere that women sequester apricot-sized pockets of stress in our buttocks. And that must be why she’s taking particular care down, say, where no one has ever paid such attention outside of those most irrepressible flings. But even then no because it’s not exactly copacetic with the way things happen when they happen. What I’m saying is that I’ve never gotten my butt massaged outside of a professional setting where they’ve actually included the technique as one small part of what is, or how it is in my mind, structured coursework complete with diagrams of muscle tissue […]

Flecked Tile2017-12-15T20:26:35+00:00

Notes from Underground: Revisited Reflections

And I wish you never made love to me like you wanted to breathe me in like air, gulping me like milk dripping from strands of hair. Whatever. I don’t really care. Today I only taste those nights in New England on MBTA trains in autumn. The Providence to Boston line in November, when especially cold, is one of the only times I remember that train filled with the excitement of youth. You. You see, unfortunately, you are the first Great Depression. I don’t know how to write fiction because of you and for that I want to commend […]

Notes from Underground: Revisited Reflections2017-12-15T20:26:41+00:00

On the Border Grind

Buena Vista[1]

A secret: the Rio Grande Valley’s first legit skatepark is a living exhibit of border history.

by Jonathan Leal

In the early 2000s, the City of Edinburg opened Buena Vista. Sitting at the intersection of Sprague and Jackson, just down the street from the local university, the prized H-E-B, the beloved CoffeeZone, the booming Luby’s Cafeteria, the last Blockbuster Video on Earth, the skatepark today beams like a […]

On the Border Grind2017-12-15T20:32:45+00:00

FOOTPRINT

By James Bradley

Artificial Intelligence
Of riot police—their padded limbs
Tangled tightly in a black veil
Of plastic & synthetic fire

Breastplates of jacinth, brimstone
And triangulating ‘chips
Capable of locating each
Secret, inevitable thread

Of subliminal contrition
Within a heterodox tract hid,
Their rods of absolution
Humming a simple melody

For scores of black boots to dance to
In steady lockstep, in rhythm,
Thus is the countryside trampled
From Charleville to gay Paris
The dirty-faced farmers are all
Self-erected memorials
Before a hand-painted backdrop
Of non-existence & wheat stalks

Barefoot, the poet walks along
The provincial lanes by day,
And by night sleeps curled within
One such black boot’s footprint

In the series left in the wake
Of the boys with plastic faces,
The rhythm of […]

FOOTPRINT2017-12-15T20:22:46+00:00

Black Mirror 2

From Subway Wisdom series.

Gal Cohen is an Israeli American artist (born 1986), working primarily with painting, drawing, and installation to critique dominant modes of normality. She uses different strategies such as Irony, vertigo, displacement, bitter sweetness, and dark humor to create her self-reflective art.

Gal’s artistic practice explores potential interactions between facts and fiction as her main ambition is to generate new narrations concerning collective memory, social inherited conventions, history, identity, gender, and otherness in contemporary societies. Living and working […]

Black Mirror 22017-12-15T20:31:21+00:00

Discarded Princesses

A box of princesses under a bed
Lies their limbs tangled, hair askew, dirty faces as if there has been a massacre.
Naked, half naked, their clothes torn off by greedy hands
That do not understand
Or care, really.
Snow White in rags
Cinderella so long getting ready for the ball
Walk home in the rain shoeless
Naked
Sleeping Beauty her eyes closed and then the man comes and falls before her in a tussled
Drunken state
But how dare she, how dare she sleep like that?
How dare she?
And Belle – beauty
I was always Belle it didn’t matter if she was beautiful because she read
And […]

Discarded Princesses2017-12-15T20:24:22+00:00

Moving Still

I am interested in articulating the invisible. Within my Urban Artifacts series, the mundane plays important; along with the flowering of the potential in all things and moments.”   -Annette Tacconelli

As a professional studio artist, Annette Tacconelli creates intimate, beaded sculpture, utilizing traditional fiber techniques in non-traditional ways. She has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally.  Her collectors range from major art m

Moving Still2017-12-15T20:31:28+00:00

Interstate 77

By Johnathan McCauley

 

I fell asleep

at the wheel

once, on my

way north to Pittsburgh.

Easily lulled

into dreams

by and of

the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Car horns blared from the

other lane

along with

sounds of metal

grinding against rock

my chest thrown

and yanked back

by the seat belt.

One hundred foot drop.

I plunged toward

the rocky

Whitestick Creek bed.

Yelling up nothing.

Clenching hands.

[…]

Interstate 772017-12-15T20:24:33+00:00

This Is How Your Life Begins

By Geeta Tewari

September 11, 2001, 12:01 a.m.: your twenty-first birthday. Also, International Day of Peace, according to the United Nations. You knock on Ethan’s door and ask if you can lie next to him. This is your senior year at Cornell University, and you remind yourself that now, today, you’re officially an adult. You had met Ethan in the spring of junior year, when you sat next to him on a birch-colored chair in the back of 314 White Hall for “China and the World.” You had arrived seven minutes late for that first class. […]

This Is How Your Life Begins2017-12-15T20:26:45+00:00
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