Prose
“Sometimes I think Oliver is the wisest boy I’ve ever met. But then I remember the way he spins me around by the waist without feeling the flush of my skin. Or how the brush of our hands results in him linking his fingers with mine, only for them to disconnect the second I tighten my grip. And, all of a sudden, I think Oliver is an idiot.”
Ksenia Martynova
“She is an expert at this, swiveling her focus without moving her head, dreaming without taking the first step. The dates shift, the headlines change, but the essence is always the same, the words merely rearranged into new patterns.”
Steffi Kim
“Now I am in a car with an empty tank, coasting down M-6, looking for something new to fill me up.”
Roman Caulk
Poetry
“My mother taught me to count this land in how it’s been lived. / Low-hanging mango, jasmine-inked asphalt, each drop of monsoon.”
Sitara Mitragotri
“& to my mother, I am pressed small by California, / tossed from a hospital window into poppy embers / before the first embrace.”
Sitara Mitragotri
“golden seams / glue your pieces together. / they magnify your fragments.”
Sundos Hejazi
“head rested on the chain, alone, / singing to the silent night”
Eric Yang
“The execution didn’t burst forth, didn’t make itself / Known like the ones before, it slid by.”
Avem Polon
“I only remember you in bones and stems. how you bled out on / my desk / in melon undertones.”
Sitara Mitragotri