Summer 2026 Postcards

Michael Onwutalu — Houston, TX

Illustration by Ines Alto

I had been listening to a lot of Kelsey Lu in anticipation of their newest album, So Help Me God. Specifically, I had been hooked on the singer’s debut album, Blood, the music capturing a pre-Covid naïveté that I’ve grown fond of. “Due West,” the album’s 2018 lead single, is so 2019, and what was I doing then? I was completing the transition to high school, binging Game of Thrones, tuning in weekly to Euphoria, and practicing with my school’s marching band for egregious hours in the Houston heat. “Poor Fake,” diverging from the album’s art-pop timbre, is a disco stunner for the ages, crowning in a bridge of campy aplomb. A sombre aubade on a kismet encounter and the welling of tremendous affect, “Too Much,” tinged with a dash of country, rebuffs inevitability. I listen to Blood, songs of the quotidian, in the terribly mundane life that I lead in Houston, everywhere a reminder that I was once lost in a present that felt entirely innocuous—that futurity was once a pipe dream, the stuff of cruel optimism. The time since Blood’s release has seen a pandemic that left everything wrong; the illogic of being alive has never been more piercing than in these past six years. “What can I do?” Lu ponders on the searching and meditative third song on So Help Me God. Their lithe voice warbles throughout the melancholic billet-doux, all to say: I don’t know, and I don’t think I ever will. 

Nnema Épée-Bounya — Greenwich Village, NY

Illustration by Iris Pope

The express 2 and 3 trains have become my sanctuaries, my own personal carriages. I’ve grown accustomed to the rhythm of their jolty speed, the timing of the stops. I know just how many more pages of my book I can read before slipping it back into my tote bag. When I exit the station and am greeted by fresh—or as fresh as it can get in this city—air, I am pushed to label myself as a Fiction Writer—capital F capital W—rather than someone who likes to write occasionally for the select audience of my mother. As I head to class I am greeted by portraits of Jhumpa Lahiri, James Baldwin, Edwidge Danticat, and many other faces whose words have changed me. Within these walls, Zadie Smith is first and foremost a thesis advisor; in that room I hurriedly eat a bagel and check the scores of the World Cup matches before my fiction workshop begins. The Village has become freckled with familiar faces: the barista with an astounding number of facial piercings, the sweet volunteers at the Jefferson Market Garden, the man sitting on the couch just outside of his picture frame store, the talkative booksellers at Three Lives & Company. Quickly, this area has begun to feel just as comfortable as Garvey Walk or Riverside Park—I know when to pick my feet up so as to not trip on certain uneven sidewalks, I can walk around aimlessly during my break and know exactly when and how to turn back. As I let these streets lead me back to class, new stories—little fragments of moments and characters—form in my mind just as I begin to recognize the neighborhood’s faces and blocks; it seems as though creation and discovery are intertwined. 

Hannah Lui – Las Cruces, NM

Illustration by Hannah Lui

Mama, 

I am making note of a mundane visit to a Wells Fargo with a yellowing enamel sign out front. I am watching you talk to the bank teller. He has a mustache and may be the most charming man in the world. I realize he must have complimented your shirt because I hear you laugh and tell him, “My son bought it for me!” It’s a graphic tee with a black cat, a rainbow, and white block lettering that reads, HOLD ON, LET ME OVERTHINK THIS.

We need to make a withdrawal because we spent all our cash on stacks of sterling silver rings from a very convincing old European woman at a farmer’s market. You went in first while I filled up our water bottles, but then I got hot and snuck into the bank after you, after the air conditioning, like a bear after honey. It’s a lot of pressure to be on your first ever mother-daughter road trip. Will we have a tearful heart-to-heart in the car? Will the nature of our relationship change dramatically and irrevocably over the next eight days? Will we get matching tattoos?

I assume you’re talking to the teller about me and my brother when he asks you a question I can’t hear and you start to reply, “I’ve got two …” Then I realize you meant you’ve got two cats, like the cat on your shirt he was probably referencing. I feel a little selfish for thinking you must be telling the bank teller about your own children. I think about how I didn’t care about wearing silver until you told me it looked better on my skin tone than gold. 

You finish at the counter. When you come up to me smiling, you say, “Okay, let’s go!” like I’ve been here the whole time. I realize you aren’t surprised I followed you, even though you didn’t see me enter. You hand me the cash, and it’s as if you knew I’d come in, trying to catch up to you, stay close to you, as long as I could.

Holding on,

Hannah

Sydney Eze – Pittsburgh, PA

Illustration by Sydney Eze

Pittsburgh, unbothered by its own contradictions, charmed me against my better judgment. In New York, I mimicked my neighbors’ movements through the city, moving on a groove worn deep by repetition, routine as armor against the city’s constant undulations.

My instinct to brace and keep moving found nothing to push against. Pittsburgh is an awfully small place; small enough for reliable bus lines that climb hillsides into Victorians half-swallowed by greenery, and small enough that it was nearly just as fast to walk it all anyway. The hills slowly edited my New York stride into something less certain of itself. From the 30th floor of the Cathedral of Learning, the heart of the University of Pittsburgh’s campus, the sweeping landscapes extend ever outward, ever outward. 

From a certain distance, Pittsburgh stops looking like a city at all. Growing up an hour away from Midtown, even Bedstuy’s proud brownstones and tree-lined blocks couldn’t let you forget what the city was—the choking exhaust and a lover’s quarrel from the floor above finding you anyway, monotonous and insistent, a reminder that New York never stops being itself. Even standing on the far edge of the vortex, you still felt its spin. 

In Pittsburgh, there is enough room for glass fortresses clustered within the downtown district, dedicated to consulting cubicles and sterile meeting rooms. Still, at dusk, you can find throngs of rabbits and droves of deer. Their sweet hopefulness as they peek out of the shrubbery, before quietly scurrying back into the endless outwardness, is as peculiar as how the city completely empties around them.. Appalachia, that is. Or the Midwest? Pittsburgh never quite settled the matter itself. It’s the largest city that the federal government claims as Appalachian, perched where the mountains start running out, and the Midwest’s flatness begins to assert itself. Ask around, and the locals are caught somewhere in the middle, too.

After a day of exploring this city, my hands are sticky with what I’ve identified as the mysterious tacky substance that coats Pittsburgh in the summertime: forest moss and burnt clay brick, stormwater, and melted ice cream from local dairy farms.

Magda Lena Griffel — New York, NY

Illustration by Ines Alto

I sent you a postcard from England, but it got lost crossing the Atlantic and I’m not positive it will ever make it to you. There was a picture of Piglet from Winnie-the-Pooh on the back that I picked out because he’s always been my favorite. When I was little, my mother and my nana would read the books aloud before bed and do all the little voices.

Now I’m an adult, writing this second postcard from New York, to New York, which makes me so indescribably happy. You’re here, and I’m here, and we can scream together when the Knicks win and marvel at the lives we’ve built in this city, on our own. I feel grounded here, calm.

There’s a moment in The House at Pooh Corner where Piglet calls behind him:

“Pooh!” he whispered.

“Yes, Piglet?”

“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”

I imagine that right now, somewhere in the Hundred Acre Wood, Piglet is watching Pooh gather raspberries, strawberries, and passionfruits to blend into frozen margaritas. And here in New York, you’re grabbing my hand. I like it when you’re next to me.

xx ML

Duda Kovarsky Rotta – Long Meadow Pond, CT. 

Illustration by Ines Alto

The sun had turned your curls golden, as it often does. We were in the middle of a lake, brought forth by your rowboat, looking at the refraction of the light on the water. You looked towards the lily pads, and your tattoo hid behind the thick layer of sunscreen I put over it. 

Toots, there is a difference in the memorabilia of light we have each chosen to etch into our skin: mine is a fleeting, burning moment, and yours a constant, rising ritual. The sun upon your shoulder will rise and fall alongside you as you move. How cruel that someone who so loves movement might suffer from moving. How does one say goodbye to a childhood home? I don't know, my friend. I think you might have to resign much to memory, and wait for moments to be brought to you in dreams. Soñé que era una niña y volaba. 

Protected and glistening somewhere in your memory, your Buffalo will keep on rusting and smelling like cereal. There will be curly-haired Uzbek-Argentinian Jews. You might even look down a street and see some good man with a purpose, one hand holding a cowbell and another on a scooter. You might pass by an intricate site of world-class espionage conspicuously concealed as an eight year old’s birthday party. Past the window of a beautiful house, you’ll see a woman labeling and keeping her children’s first written words. The Caribbean ball will keep rolling into the goal. Beneath the beat grass, far below the surface, there might just be a discarded fork waiting for enough decades to pass to finally become historically significant. 

During one of our laughing fits, it is often disparaged against us that we laugh like children. As you part from your childhood, all I can say is: I love you, kid, and I promise to walk by your side and think of you when you’re far away. I won’t make you stay in the secluded tower during the snowball fight with the older giants. I’m sailing right behind. 

There are things you take with you when you go: furniture, pictures, Goose’s toilet-paper magnum opus, the songs you composed. Most importantly, you take your distinct kindness to this world; one instilled in you incommensurably by the warmth of 45 Summit. You’ll get the ache some cold December, we know you will. Good thing you know where you’re from, and that you have the suerte of knowing exactly where rests your childhood—the opportunity to lock the red door with a gentle touch.