Somehow, this singular color has woven through our work this month. Alexander Lumans thusly conjures it (even embracing the eponymous Taylor Swift album) as a centerpiece of his short story “The Jaws of Life”: “Red, the color of state clay and C&Cs and fire engines and cherry blossom tips and Xannies and her Beamer and lakes of blood and candy apples and stop signs and hearts and the lightning-strewn sky on the cover of The Fundamentals of Physics (and other things I can’t think of right now).”

The work in this issue represents some of them — from lone but striking visual detail, as with “On Farms,” to the thematic demands of “Where Is Africa,” a cacophonous manifesto in celebration of an Africa wider and more multiplicitous than any historical map with that word might have imagined. And in “Al Qahira,” a stunning enacted collective memory of Cairo and the Egyptian Revolution, Abdelrahman ElGendy draws forward that primal red, remembering “the maroon-tinted epic etched on the bridge’s asphalt when the soldiers retreated, then fled before the unarmed cataract of Egyptians flooding Tahrir Square.”

Salome Asega, in conversation with Emanuel Admassu, explores technology, the archive, the African disapora, and breaking the rules of public space. Kyle Carrero Lopez’s poem “The Rules” is an intimate conspiracy against them, while Jinwoo Chong’s short story “Sleeper Hit” charts the boundaries of intimacy and the anxiety that can exist if they’re trespassed. Plus poems by Zeina Hashem Beck, Robin Myers, and Tilsa Otta, in translation by Farid Matuk.