Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
The fresh online pieces we experiment with outside of our print cycle. Formerly known as Blog.
From the Archives
Fiction • Summer 2024
1
I was born twenty years ago, in Connecticut, to a healthy father and a sick mother. Because they found the tick late in my mother’s pregnancy, the doctors weren’t sure if I would be born with her disease. They ran dozens of tests, both before and after I was born, with laparoscopes and eight-inch needles. My father remained worried until I was two months old, after an intensive blood panel came back negative. He has always been a pessimist.
Features • Fall / Winter 2023
Features • Summer 2024
Every summer, my Latgalian grandmother, who I call baba, my mom, and I gather in a church in the Latvian border village of Ņukši. I kneel on my left foot, cross myself, and sit down on the lacquered pew, put there by some Polish monk who came from Vilnius, Kraków, or Vitebsk to spread the faith up north. The cold, half-lit room fills with incense, the gliding vowels of Latgalian, and the intoxicating smell of sweet, piney myrrh. My knees dig painfully into the wood as we are finally released by the priest with one last āmen.
2026