In anticipation of our zine-sharing conference on Tuesday, I’d like to post some of the text found within the zine I collaborated on with the Crown Heights Collective:

Singular.

A friend and I wanted to collaborate on a longform poem, something along the lines of a lesser quality “Desolation Row” or “The Wasteland.” But they said they didn’t want to create any art that was “Covid-related,” seeing as how they believed it’d be in “bad taste.” So, naturally, we didn’t collaborate. Not all are granted the morbid possibility of commenting on history as it is occuring–you and I now shoulder this burden.

The pandemic is all I can think about, and it’s a multi-faceted thought process, including a difficulty in quantifying the thousands of people being hospitalized or dying on a daily basis, a complete unknowing of when this will end (“Nothing ever ends, Adrian,” says the godhead, Dr. Manhattan, to the off-brand Rameses II, Ozymandias, in the latter moments of Alan Moore’s Watchmen), and what the new world will look like, because, let’s face it, the old world, the world we were residents of several months ago, is gone, and it isn’t going to come back.

“It was a matter of time, I suppose.”

What follows are pictures and words from the old world, before the Pause, and some from the In-Between, within the womb of the Pause, compiled with the help of the friends with whom I am confronting history.