Please read this, everything, carefully, friends.
The Telltale Rot
— A Zine the state would want to burn.
STATUS: Open until December 15th, 2025 for Issue 1; January 10th for Issues 2 & 3
A Letter from the Editor:
My dear neighbours,
I am angry.
Do you know how easy it is to grow a plant? To water a seed, and watch it— grow, sprout, stem, leaf, trunk, tree? In exchange for the dead? That’s all it wants by the way. Dead things. Dead flowers, dead sprigs, dead weeds, dead bugs, dead rocks, dead men, dead bees. And some water and light, energy, fuel. And with that, it will strain for the sky as the most beautiful blossom or the most boring briar patch. And it will lose all its leaves in an overnight cold snap. And regrow them all again in an unabashed summer. And neither the summer nor the sapling cares a scrap about permission. When last did the maple oaf standing tall in your front yard ask you if it was the right time to die? No, instead it ceremoniously litters its offal—all that pointed greenery now sickened and rottening—all upon the putrefying hay damp with rain, that you may have called a lawn three weeks ago.
When a plant drinks far more than its suggested share of water, when it bathes in the fire of the sun for too long, when its roots are engulfed in all the decayed, but with no sign of a living beetle or worm: so then begins… the rot. No plant that had sampled this glut has escaped it. And once the malediction has taken a grasp of the root, so even the top of each of the leaves is condemned, the blackening spots of degradation, the ooze of humiliation, the muck of retribution, the fungal buds gnawing the rot faster and faster through the bones of the being, the telltale signs of an irredeemable entity. And we, friends, are in the thick of the threads of mildew and must devouring this… irredeemable entity.
Surely, yes, you know of the bodies? I know you feel them, their slime, under your toes as you walk to work? In the place where the tent is uprooted? Where the good peaches were put to sit in squalor? Under the bridge where broken homes and river fish hurtle to the finish line? The bodies? Surely you know in which branch you live, on the tree that feasts on them. The tree that worships the gold sunlight torching its leaves? The tree drowning in a wealth of water, who stands imperious, overshadowing the all that flounder in the darkness overcast upon below. And surely, o! my neighbours, you’ve acquainted with it: the unmitigated, reviling, defleshing smell?
The new world is craning for the bones of the old one now, and it’s about time we listened. Some of us are having a hard time of it— hearing the thunderous cracking of the splintered trunk of the empire. Others are becoming used to the noise. They wonder if they are hearing things, they wonder if it is even worth listening, if anyone else even is. Worse, still, are those howling zealots, lunging toward, throwing themselves at, the tumbling, ailing, dying tree, desperate to keep a falling mountain upright,—a fool’s errand—even if it means throwing you!, your own body upon it too—the fool is dangerous,—and they will die with the tree if they stand in its way. Of course, the tree neither cares about its fallen leaves—much like your maple—or the bodies it mangles below. Do you know how easy it is to be alive? You need simply only clear and let the tree fall. The berry bushes below like dead things and they do not bother asking our permission to grow.
And so it was born from anger, from my own scraping desperation, from my hate for this putrid tree that refuses to fall: a Zine that says ‘these are the signs of the empire decaying, here is the rot, here!’ A Zine that the empire would give the order to be burned, for fear it might spill out the secret that the plant is dying. Tell me why capitalism should die. Call on your neighbours’ empathy. Rile up revolt. Each piece should be a lesson and a message you are wailing to the people. It might be a sharp reminder of the bloodshed, or the why behind the wickedness, or the poison in the well. Be inflammatory to the empire. This is an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-fascist Zine.
You can see it, can’t you— the telltale rot in the root of the empire? Can I see it? Would you show it to me? Then, friend, please show it to me! Media that snaps us out of the rhythm, that startles us back to reality, media that shatters the pretty picture of capitalism and colonialism. Poetry, photography, visual artistry, rants, retching, instructions, creative lists, comics, dreams, summons, spells, and more— I hope you get at what I am aiming for. There are those still propping up the trunk, believing they will sit atop the leaves. We must show them what we see. Come! There is so much for us to discuss.
—Elizabeth Dean, Editor-in-Chief
