Writer Fabio Schneider sits down in a busy mall to read Anahita Jamali Rad poetry collection Still and begins to feel a mutinous form of interiority. Katherine Chambers gets biomorphic with the work of Vancouver collective, Puddle Popper. In Phoebe Telfar’s review of Toni Tongyu Zhao’s exhibition, Secretly Living, she considers emotion like a limb; “The feeling settles above, around, and within, like a scentless odour or high-pitched hum — the weight of empty memory.” This issue of Discorder struggled to come together. It crawled home tired. It felt like putting your laptop in the refrigerator. While stress does not begin to cover it, an interesting pattern emerged from our discord — bodies, and our uneasy occupation of them. It’s as if in the struggle to make September/October happen, almost every article presented a reorganization of physical architecture. In less poetic terms, we might say we’re reckoning with ableism at its root. I hope these conversations challenge readers to take a good hard look at all the ways ableism manifests in art and literature. As someone for which fatigue underlies every living feature, I think a lot about how our bodies are chaotic, feverish and ungovernable. I don’t regret this issue coming out late, or needing room to breathe, because I think we could all use the reminder that this is ok. That the culture of productivity, scarcity, and perfectionism in art does not know how to say “I love you” back.
“It’s something that makes the way we’ve been taught to understand what is ‘natural’ complicated, and maybe less straightforward than what the colonial Western view would have us see.” Sarah Davidson, Puddle Popper Collective
Lastly, should anyone be following closely, we made a small error with our issue sequencing. April/May was meant to be issue 419, which makes this issue 420. Lucky for us, we did not miss this milestone. Issue #420 welcomes new words from artist Julie D. Millz, with a vivid take on Liquidation World and Discothrash brings you words from B. Caligula. Re-reading this piece before publication, my reasons for choosing it (editing disclaimer: I won’t often be selecting Discothrash poems) changed. It’s gentle audacity felt like déjà vu. What stays with me after reading this poem is the difficulty of regrowth, the way it picks scabs with lines like “milk of magnesia / has replaced my serotonin.”