By Kiera Baird who makes the spark, the rock or the stick? the wood that’s fragile with texture, soft with jagged ends, weak with pointed pricks or the solid, sound, smooth surface of the cold and hard, composed and round and ready to be struck? one breaks with two fingers but cuts when it snaps in dying, it lies in the blood of its killer. the other is defended from touch but is broken when dropped, in shattering it is so distant from the hands that let it go down,

By Marvin Cho Chapter 1: The Play P. thought he felt an itch at the tip of his nose, but he did not have the time to remove his mask to scratch it. The director had already finished introducing the University Classical Drama Company and P. was to enter the stage in just a moment. He thus resorted to wriggling his cheeks about, trying to rub the coarse cardboard of the mask against his face. As the audience obliged the director’s request for an applause, the stout junior who p

By Neda Ravandi The horse is very old and has dark eyes. I did not know it would be here when I arrived. It lives in a stable in the furthest corner of the farm, far beyond the guesthouse in dry, unweeded brush. It is summer here but still grows cold quickly in the evening. Sometimes I visit the horse after nightfall, when everybody else has fallen asleep. My bed is narrow and creaks when I rise. I keep the black rubber boots I was given next to my door. It gets very loud her

By Hannah Lui Illustration by Selin Ho Turtle-necked at the Kawai where he learned to waltz&rag. And compose and doodle and dance but I only hear Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf tortured from the copper When I think of him here At the piano I am looking at his post-op face on my phone. Not as bad as I expected Mom says When he left two days ago the last time I saw the face she bore, his&this hits me now Now, Fog bruising purple, his nose is not the same Thick hanging hea

By Lynn Wilcox You are tired. You sweat from your eyes while slumber makes your breath a whistle, I brought you here, my restless traveler, under sterile light, in hotel bathrooms, on cold porcelain, my sole splits. I cry out, but your mind is far away, reaching for some immaterial idyll. Silence enters through the window and I want for you to listen, so I steal a moment from your slumber, unconscious, allowed. I go to sleep with a dirty mouth and unquiet mind. Too early.

By Camille Pirtle We can’t cook. That is our first attempt at endearment to the college girls at the bar. They flip their honey-blonde hair over their shoulders and consider us, shy looks on their faces. They have seen Americans before, but never quite like us. Two of us. Gray sweaters and glasses, brown belts from Abercrombie bought before the trip, twelve-seventy-five-each and no returns. Two girls that dress like boys. Big white fluoride grins. They don’t have that here. N

A lovely moment I recall. By Eva Spier Illustration by Jiaying Geng In 1825, Alexander Pushkin, widely regarded as the father of Russian poetry and memorized by legions of pupils to this day, joined Russian socialite Anna Kern at her aunt’s Trigorskoye estate near Mikhaylovskoye to work on his manuscript of Eugene Onegin . He became infatuated with the woman in a matter of weeks, who had been unhappily married to General Yermolai Kern by ways of an arranged marriage since th

By Elika Khosravani It is spring again and everyone is day-dreaming about falling in love again. Again. And again and again and again, until it finally sticks. So my mind, naturally, is also turned towards love. To be in love, I imagine, must feel like a lighthouse. A crumbling column on a crag, dangling delicately over the frothing sea. A lonely boat, guided by a single lantern and a ramshackled anchor, hesitantly heads toward the shoreline, toward the red and white tower, a

Jewel Anderson The sky’s white mirror makes a feast of me— eyes first, then teeth, then pulse. I open my mouth and she swallows the sound. The light bends wrong tonight. I step into it and it steps back. My shadow clings and flakes like psoriasis. The shine is a trick, a white worm. It crawls the length of my arm, makes veins into rivers, rivers into ropes. I told the doctor I was cured. He smiled, yellow crescent, and asked who was speaking. My mouth is a traitor— The tide l

By Jewel Andersen Oscillating between reality’s thin wires, flashes of Samhain fiending fleshed fires. Echo poised on the cliff’s edge seam, fish-mouthed and bowed in gaping scream. Or Ophelia — weed-laced and willow dazed. Nettle at wrist, daisy gaze half-raised. Foam-veiled, unmade, she mouths the flood — dream-drunk on silt and spindle-blood.

By Joseph Griffiths I lived my life like the recluse tucked within his barky coat amid the dark boreal forest I kept still, not wishing to uproot that hidden light and dark, knowledge I only wished to see everyday, more terribly that beautiful thing that passed me he seemed moved or stuck in some otherworldly energy a love, it was obvious, that would elude my judgement. Until one day, he began hacking and I was feeling unsteady later, in the evening, snapping into my bed, cu

By Elika Khosravani On a sun-stained Sunday, I waltz this island tip-to-tip and think of everything I do not know yet. I am pulled in...

By Armando Javier Gimenez The porch is a tether to the homeland. Flies circle the basil and ivy laid across wooden rails. A...