Essay
Memory is Narrative; Narrative is Memory
Ronald B. Richardson
Memory is Narrative
Memory is mostly narrative. I say mostly because there are rare memories that are not, such as olfactory memories: you smell something, and it suddenly takes you back to . . . what? In these memories, ...
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Story
Purple Heron of the Night
Raúl Serrano Sánchez
Claudio was only trying to make up for all the years he’d spent yearning for those legs, the ones he was always telling you about over coffee in the newly restored center of the old city, in one of those bars that’s supp...
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Art
Peter Shear – Paintings
Peter Shear
What really sends me is artwork containing a spaciousness of address which allows for our looking to become consuming and urgent. In these moments the relationship between object and audience can be truly generative, a p...
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Story
The Cherub
E. A. Fow
On the way to rehearsal, Amy thought she saw something flit away. An afterimage lingered in her eye, pink and faintly glowing, but she couldn’t make out what it was. She didn’t think about it again until the next day, wh...
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Essay
Catastrophes
Breyten Breytenback
No, the universe remains dark. We are animals overcome by catastrophes . . . but I suddenly discovered that alienation, the exploitation of man by man, and malnourishment, will push into the background the metaphysical evil,...
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Poem
Evil Polish Boners & Other Flarf Poems
Sharon Mesmer
Evil Polish Boners
I don’t know what it is about spandex suits for wrestling and rowing,
but they always seem to create the most evil Polish boners.
The Polish boner is a boner that the Polish boner team created
...
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Story
Looking Back: Anxiety’s Greatest Hits
Patrick O'Neil
San Francisco, June 24, 1997
I’m in a dark, trash-filled alley between tall brick buildings. Two men stand in shadows. I can’t see their faces. I hand one of them money and he gives me a balloon of dope. I look up, th...
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Story
Road Kill
Drew Hubner
In an alley on the fringes of the march, Glory stuffed toilet paper bits in her ears and got out of danger, whispering to the baby in her tummy, running deeper into the alley for safety.
Text me, she'd said to the fath...
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Essay
We Are All Alice B. Toklas
James Reich
Toklasization, being the condition of failing to materialize in one’s autobiography, or of being ghostwritten out by a biographer with more vanity than ours, has become the most significant cause of suicide and psychopatho...
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Music
Steve Adams – Triskotronica
Steve Adams
Listen to the second release from Sensitive Skin Music: Steve Adams' Triskotronica. If you like it, buy it from iTunes or Amazon.
In a world that values the familiar, Steve Adams' Triskotronica should be on another planet...
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What Not
Sensitive Skin #10
The Editors
Sensitive Skin 10, published September 2013, an anthology of post-beat, pre-apocalyptic art, writing, music and whatnot, features work by both world-famous and new-and-emerging artists, writers, and musicians from around the...
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Essay
Taylor Mead, RIP
Nick Zedd
I met Taylor Mead in 1989 when we both acted together in a science fiction movie shot in the Hall of Science at the World's Fair Grounds in Queens. I'd seen his acting in the seventies when I moved to NYC and saw Nude Restau...
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Poem
John S. Hall at the Bowery Poetry Club
John S. Hall
April 30, 2012 (or thereabouts), Sensitive Skin celebrated the release of its 8th issue with a mondo reading at the Bowery Poetry Club. Essentially everybody who'd been in the magazine so far was invited, which was too many ...
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Writing
Herbert Huncke: Letter to Dad
Herbert Huncke
Editor’s Note: This letter from Herbert Huncke to his Dad was first published in Peau Sensible, the print precursor to Sensitive Skin, in the summer of 1992. The issue also contained work by Joel Rose, Jack Micheline, Dari...
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Photographs
Punk Photographs
Ruby Ray
In the 1980s, through the early ’90s, I spent an awful lot of time travelling. Or maybe not travelling so much as running away. I was running away from this guy, this crazy guy who wanted to kill me. Finally, I realize...
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