The Toe Rag #6

The Toe Rag is a quarterly print magazine covering contemporary culture, spanning visual art, music, architecture, theatre, performance, fashion, politics and literature.
Founded in December 2023, we publish work that is formally ambitious, considered and incisive. Our issues feature essays, reviews, interviews,  fiction, poetry and art. Our back pages include event listings, puzzles, games, an agony aunt and a Page 3.

Issue 6, Summer 2025

ARTEFACTS

Dear Readers,

Artefacts are objects drafted into service by our impulse to document, to remember, to weigh the present. They are collisions of intention and accident: things forgotten then remembered, dead things that won’t quite die. This issue dissects the corpus of artefacts. Behold its organs:

THE LUNGS: A burnt archive inhales Venetian smoke, exhales lost music.
THE HEART: St. Tabitha’s confetti orb pumps glitter through clinical pink veins.
THE SKIN: Photogrammetry flashes flay us into digital ghosts.
THE GUT: Shit-stained aprons digest wheaten bread and regret.
THE BONES: Syphilitic skulls scaffold our inner museums.

Circulating this system: haunted chocolate (sugar-coated souls), chastity-belt residue (purified lust), cough-syrup ink (chemical memory), a red-framed satsuma (secreted by doubt-secreting citrus gland).
        No metaphor survives this autopsy. These are relics of the real: gallery floor scuffs where art bled into dust, pleas to Oddo too heavy to send, ketchup-sachet reliquaries sweating in the hostel dark.
        We are what we exhume! Crack the ribcage.