TBQ6 is here. It’s free. It’s fresh. It’s new. The old lit world is dying. As Peter Venkman warned in Ghostbusters, “we are headed towards a disaster of biblical proportions.” The literary world is collapsing in on itself. Everything is closing, getting its funding pulled, having its book coverage slashed, laying off its talented writers and editors, and pivoting to video. Everything fucking sucks.
Become a writer anyway. Now is the perfect time to start a novel, a lit mag, a chapbook, or a big dumb project that will absolutely fail. Let’s do it anyway. Let’s make art. Let’s get fast food and write love poems. Let’s take the gates. We’ll just invent something new in its place. We’ll make it up as we go.
Here are some new poems and prose and comics and art. Here are some tits and tumors and piss and smut and existential dread and dogs and cats living together in mass hysteria. It’s Art. It’s Literary. It’s Taco Bell. You will die a billion ass times in creative writing. But you will only live once, and time is already running out. Let’s live más.
-MM Carrigan, 2/15/23
Acknowledgements: With thanks to our readers and volunteers this issue: Abbey Chandler, Alessandro Romero, Allison Miehl, Amy Freeman, Aparna P., Amy Barnes, Audrey Kennon, Avantika Mehta, Bella Rotker, Ben Coleman, Caitlin Thompson, Carman Curton, Cody Rukasin, Elyse Jancosko, Emily Rivero, Eye Sinkhole Tabitha III, Gerard Manogue, Hailey Herzik, Hayley Boyd, Huntress Thompson, Jade Lancaster, Jeanette Garcia Polasky, Joanna Acevedo, Jonah Meyer, Katherine Combest, Kei Vough, Larissa Hikel, Liska Jacobs, Marianna Dionysiou, Marisa Maciel, Matt Stefon, Michael Song, Mckenna Bailey, Noah Grey Rosensweig, RJ McCarthy, Sam Gordon Webb, Samuel Saperstein, Shalini Singh, Shaw Worth, Sherri Morris, Skye Dragon, Tali Chais, Tanya Azari, Toby Jaffe, Tyler Aune, Ximena Silva
TBQ6 is dedicated to Kari Flickinger, whom we lost in 2022, and whose work appeared in our first issue. Thank you for helping to invent this thing. Thank you for taking chances. Thank you for your writing.
Taco Bell Quarterly 