Hidy ho, DIAGRAM peeps, I'm writing to let you know about the new issue that just went up this week. It's 26.2!
In this issue you'll find 21 original works, a review, and 6 diagrams in this great issue. It includes:
TEXT / IMAGE: [Katie Berta] [Amber Burke] [Chris Campanioni] [Kevin Chesser] [Celeste Colarič-Gonzales] [Michael Credico] [Jen Frantz] [Aaron Gilbreath] [Jess Gallerie] [Sonia Greenfield] [Lucía Guzman Rodriguez] [Valerie Loveland] [Adrian Lu] [Zoé Mahfouz] [Nation Makes] [Alison Mandaville] [Marilyn McCabe] [Maya Miller] [Ben Mirov] [Martha Ryan] [David Sheskin]
ONE REVIEW: [Rebekah Denison Hewitt on Emily Bludworth de Barrios]
6 SCHEMATICA: [Crystal Communication Unit] [Invasion and Mutation] [Number of Pairs of Shoes Purchased by the Holy Ghost of St. Niklaas, 1317-1397] [Sets of Derivations] [Staff - Longer Version of Standard Energy Rod] [Tired, Inadequate Antibodies]
AND How about a selection from the new issue to whet your appetite? Here are the first two sections of Sonia Greenfield's "Through the Teeth", selected by our editorial intern Svitlana Libet:
THROUGH THE TEETH by SONIA GREENFIELD
I.
Yesterday, on the drive to a Wisconsin cabin abutting a twisty frozen lake, Sarah, my retreat buddy, compared visiting The Dells to getting a colonoscopy or root canal-one eventually must do it if one lives in the upper Midwest, even if it might be uncomfortable. Indeed, necessities are often noted for their discomfort. As a woman over fifty, I have had my requisite colonoscopy, and I have had three root canals thus far. As a woman over fifty, my life has been overstuffed with necessary, painful requirements.
My first root canal was many years ago-in San Francisco, the first city I lived in after fleeing my hometown. A large amalgamate filling had gone bad and fallen out, as they can after a while. The next was when that root canal had to be re-done. Upper right, two from the back. The third was on the other side. Same tooth but on the left, two from the back. I could display my dental chart as a visual metaphor to explain that no matter what level of intervention, sometimes best intentions fail. Sometimes they're just stop gaps on the way to entropic inevitability. With the last root canal, I was in the office for more than two hours.
I like my dentist. He is Greek, with a faint accent and dry sense of humor, and his eyes crinkle when he smiles under his mask. What I especially like, though, is his matter-of-fact approach to the truth of my mouth, though he is not uncaring. I mean matter of fact in that he intuited—despite my inability to engage in meaningful conversation (mouth full of gauze, tools, and rubber wedge)—my desire for knowledge, so he demonstrates and explains without sugar coating, though, naturally, a dentist would be unlikely to sugar coat anything. For example, he showed me the various files used to clear out the root from the dying tooth. On this day, he prepared my tooth by creating a sterile environment, which required isolating the tooth with a rubber skirting as if my mouth were an operating theater.
I have a photo of myself mid-root canal that I took when Dr. Constantin left the room for more than an hour. In the picture I am lying back, as one does at the dentist, with the requisite white cloth covering neck, chest, and shoulders, and there is a large piece of turquoise blue rubber protruding from my mouth and blanketing my lower face, as if I got caught midway through trying to swallow a deflated balloon. My eyes are a little wider than usual—what you might call a surprised expression—but I am giving the camera the thumbs up. I took the photo with my phone to send, mid-procedure, to my best friends in our eternal text thread. This is because I had been lying there, alone, for over an hour. It is hard to have a loose piece of rubber in the mouth, especially with an asphyxiation phobia, without the ability—or should I say permission?—to remove it. If I inhaled too vigorously, I would occlude my throat by sucking in the rubber.
I had seen the man and women through the window as they were approaching Parkway Dental, which is why Dr. Constantin had left my room. At this point, it was after hours, the offices closed. From a distance, I recognized their cultural status, where their placement in the American hierarchy has been determined by the equation of income times race times class, as in who one comes from. People can articulate this through body language, in the way they hold themselves and move through space. She was white and blonde and thin in that way that says choices were made between sustenance and substances. He was black and carried himself as if he were entering an unfamiliar, potentially hostile, territory. Ninety minutes later, the dentist returned to my room and apologized. In that interim, he performed an emergency extraction on the man, the couple having wandered in off the street in a state of desperation. The man's abscessed tooth was so infected, so swollen, that he could no longer close his mouth, and the infection had started to move into his jaw. The dentist sent him on his way with a packed socket and powerful antibiotics. I learned all of this as Dr. Constantin chattered at me, cheerfully increasing the gauge of files used to hollow out the slightly gnarled and calcified roots of my molar with its little backstory of failure.
II.
If you exist on the peripheries of American society, if you are unaware of how the system works, if you are without insurance, if you are undocumented, if your life does not accommodate the kind of self-care that exists on a higher tier of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs-because you're still struggling with the basics of food, shelter, clothing, clean water, and basic hygiene-then your teeth become the thing you hope to get to when stability is achieved. Emergency Rooms, which are often the only resort for health care for the indigent or near-indigent, are not equipped to deal with dental emergencies. They may be able to prescribe antibiotics, drain an abscess, or administer a dental block, but they cannot extract the kernel of infection. Emergency dental clinics exist, but you need to know how to access them. My husband, an ER nurse for many years, having worked in three different county hospitals in three different states, has seen his share of dental trauma—entire sets of teeth broken from the mouth, an abscessed infection that was so bad the patient's throat was occluded. There are no dentists in the ER, though.
Deamonte Driver, a twelve-year-old Maryland boy, succumbed to sepsis when his tooth infection crossed the Blood Brain Barrier. A long-haul truck driver from Sacramento developed a toothache on a delivery to New York and died when the infection entered his blood and lungs. A former NFL player died when a beam fell on his head at the construction site where he worked. It turned out that the head injury was not fatal. Instead, his autopsy revealed bacterial sepsis with cerebral abscesses and necrotizing lobar pneumonia due to tooth infection.
...
We're in the middle of reading chapbook submissions, so if you sent us one this year, thanks! And know that we're deep in it now. We expect to have the winner chosen by early fall. Keep an eye on this space for news.
And for those of you who read our last newsletter, you'll remember the Significant Objects 2026 project, in which a whole bunch of writers found or purchased valueless secondhand objects for less than $5 from thrift stores etc., wrote stories, poems, or essays about them, and auctioned the objects + stories off as a fundraiser for the Hermitage No-Kill Cat Shelter in Tucson. We auctioned off over 45 objects + stories and generated more than $600 for the shelter. We also collected the stories + excellent color photos of the objects into a beautiful book object:
This book includes writing by: Alisa Alering, Lofton Allen, Brisa Bejarano, Sarah Blackman, Megan Campbell, Adrienne Celt, Ryan Daniels, Dana Diehl, Mackenzie Dougherty, Paul Ducker, Timothy Dyke, Megan Culhane Galbraith, Yadira Garcia Soto, Mahsel Gatan, Avery Gregurich, Valyntina Grenier, Danielle Hartshorn, Wes Holtermann, Caitlin Horrocks, Reed Karaim, Alexi L, Isabel Lage, Jacquelyn Lo Bianco, Sean Lovelace, Juan Martinez, Andrew Maynard, Porter McDonald, Ted McLoof, Christian Moher, Eliza Moher, Ander Monson, Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya, Matthew Morris, Aidan Murray, David Mutschler, L. C. J. Owen, Lydia Paar, Dorian Rolston, Josh Russell, Katie Jean Shinkle, Margo Steines, Gabi Stone, Layla Todd, Jae Towle Vieira, Natalia Williams, and Sierra Ziemann.
All Hail Significant Objects 2026 Season One! If you'd like to buy a copy of this full-color book, you can do so here in the merch store. We're also going to continue publishing these stories in the fall, so if you want to write one and contribute to the project, drop Ander a line at [email protected].
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And hey, thanks for reading our badass litmag DIAGRAM. If you want to support the magazine and what we do, which you should, best option is to buy merch, all of which you can find over at the merch store, or enter the chapbook contest. And of course send us new work! We're always reading, though not always as quickly as we'd like; we are working through the backlog right now. So much good work! It takes a while to do this well.
Ander Monson, Editor
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