issue13 Archives - Sensitive Skin Magazine

Mugged By A Movie Star (Miguel Piñero)

B. Kold

I’m ineligible to serve on a jury. Whenever I’m selected for jury duty, I never make it past the first voir dire—the part where the defense and district attorneys interview prospective jurors to ensure they’re not bi...

GUN NEEDLE SPOON – I’m Starving

Patrick O'Neil

San Francisco, July 21, 1996 In the refrigerator are five cakes: carrot, lemon, raspberry swirl, three-layer chocolate, and some kind of tiramisu, or maybe it’s mocha. I can’t tell. Five large, heavily frosted cakes, ...

A Bad Day – An Excerpt From Duke And Jill

Ron Kolm

Duke knew it was going to be a bad day, even before he got out of bed. He had a splitting headache, and a lump the size of a nickel bag on the back of his neck. He couldn’t remember where he’d been last night—or how he...

Narcisa – An Excerpt

Jonathan Shaw

I was seeing double with fatigue. But Narcisa was just getting started. She hopped along, from subject to subject, like a cocaine-crazed, hyperactive little fairy, flittering between realms of thought I could barely fatho...

Marine 1–10

Max Blagg

A collaboration between Max Blagg and Alex Katz for the Marine Series’ Exhibition Catalogue, Jablonka Gallery, Berlin, 2008. This piece is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Slow Dazzle: Poems & Prose For 23 Artists, pu...

The 9 Lives of Ray the Cat Jones

Stewart Home

I’m a face. My breakout from Pentonville in 1958 has been praised as one of the greatest prison escapes of all time by the likes of south London gangster Mad Frankie Fraser. The details differ somewhat in the various accou...

Beaches in Cornwall, Apples in Devon, A Foot in London

Christopher Romero

draped Kelp and no lullaby thick sound from deep wonder ritual unconformed to sea sutra canters the silver egg’s path from studio to rocks near shore to ocean soaked tidal pools lady lay day heat mapped exposure turn...

Santa Barbara–1980 / San Francisco–1982

Matt McLaren

Santa Barbara–1980 I didn’t have a mattress yet. it had been three months, but I still lay in my room on my dirty clothes, arranged under a fitted sheet. Ron stood in my doorway, leaning against the jamb. He stared at...

Fairies – Photographs by Julia Kissina

Julia Kissina

Photographs by Julia Kissina from the "Fairies" project, from 1997-98. Julia Kissina is a photographer and writer born in Kiev, Ukraine. She graduated from the Academy of Arts in Munich in 1998 and now lives in Berlin. Her w...

Love and Strangulation

Carl Watson

The philosophers of the old romances say, and many specialists today concur, that desire is nothing more than the result of a necessary and continuous projection of the self into others; an unattainable wholeness is represen...

The Calf

D. James Smith

Child of a dying wind it lay In the muck and hot, blond grass Below the dam and its strangled creek That my boyhood friend and I Crossed that morning, determined To flee the nun’s black habits and ink, To claim ...

Welcome to All the Pleasures

Robert C. Hardin

My father liked to say that I’d always been impossible to find. During birth, he recalled, I couldn’t be extracted with forceps. No one could see me, so I made my own way out of my mother. The midwife only located me aft...

Contours of the Irreal: Paintings by David de Biasio

Erik Noonan

Although it may strike a theorist as paradoxical, the artist’s sole response to a moment such as ours—with its ideological cowardice, its reflexive violence, its prurient spectatorship—is always to exult in using the m...

Code of Violence

Thaddeus Rutkowski

On the subway, I see a boy who is about 10 years old; he’s with his father. Both of them have red hair, but the boy has Asian features—a round face and pointy eyes. His father has a long face and Western eyes. Maybe this...

The Storm

Peter Blauner

He liked to have his house in order, which was why he’d never had a family or pets. He liked his routines and there was nothing wrong with that. Every day in the summer months, he wore his father’s old Fire Department wi...