14 June 2025

Our third issue of Magpie Zine lingers in the space after impact. The pieces gathered here shine not in resolution but in aftermath; they are the residuals of grief, longing, absurdity, and memory, offered in fragments, ghosts, impressions. The gift to the reader is not the event but the echo: the small accumulations of disturbances that build like the smoke that "obscures / the innocence of the winter sky"; a former existence scattered across continents as here and now as a pebble in your shoe; the resurrection of how it felt to meet at "the great divide alive" and "chew fishnets for dessert"; or a new year of waiting for grief to recede, for meaning to clarify, for rain that never quite falls.

The body, too, is a remnant. A prehistoric animal, tender and extinct, is pulled into visibility only to be laid out and made inert again. Past intimacy leaves behind a bruised mythology, and the physical self is also both transgressor and witness left wondering whether "it was an accident, / or is that by accident?," both ornament and artifact complicated by a delayed truth ("For so long I wanted / to be beautiful, and then I found I was"), and by how others insist we reveal ourselves (“You're tall. / Is it a problem? / You didn't mention it.”). The body is also both evidence and ideal, bearing physical traces such as a summer-revealed scar and emotional ones explored through the fragility of agency ("Did she adore without losing / herself?").

Beneath the estrangement in this issue is the friction between being seen and being known, between presence and disappearance. There's a weariness with chronology itself. What we carry through time—classic paintings, classic texts, classic languages, classic debates like good vs. evil—doesn't just fade. It stacks. It weighs. Even in moments of humor, the residual persists, and we see what happens when everyday reliabilities malfunction just enough to leave us suspended between identities. Are we dead or alive? Are we willing participants or hostages of the systems we rely on? What lingers afterward is a kind of existential static wherein we can dissect a not-so-implausible balloon-based bureaucracy, explore untapped marketing hypotheses or our dream monster creation, and safeguard ourselves against all emotional vulnerability and unpredictability via a safety coffin.

Across the pages of Issue Three: Residual, meaning doesn't arrive—it accumulates. This issue doesn't ask for closure; it offers a quieter suggestion: we are made up of partials, of what hums beneath the surface, of what clings and shapes.

Please enjoy the remarkable 21 writings and visual arts within.

xoxo,

Magpie