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.
Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
By no means is this a famous story. It takes place in Huntsville, Utah, a small town of under six-hundred residents, located in Ogden Valley on Pineview Reservoir. Surrounded by three ski resorts (Snowbasin, Powder Mountain, and Nordic Valley) there is no shortage of idyllic views, nor a shortage of seasoned skiers wishing to park amongst these idyllic views. This is observed by the abundance of Parking by Permit Only signs that prohibit parking west of 7300 E Street, made possible by the Huntsville Town Ordinance on April 19th, 2018.
Fiction • Spring 2026 - Fear
Big John stood near me with the electric blue above us, screaming out with its shine for everyone to drink it. Lines of neon stretched and twisted into a beauty of advertising brilliance. We were drinking it and the bottles were sweating and it made me feel good for the first time all day.
The fresh online pieces we experiment with outside of our print cycle. Formerly known as Blog.
From the Archives
Fiction • Fall / Winter 2023
First she finds a finger, tucked neatly under the pillow, slightly crooked as if in admonishment. The mother stares at it for a long moment before gingerly scooping it up and carrying it over to the shag carpet where the boy lies on his back, shadowboxing the air with all four limbs. It takes her a few tries, but by dangling a demonic plush rattlesnake in the boy’s face, she is able to distract him long enough to reattach it, peeling open his tiny clenched fist. The boy immediately starts wailing, high and thin like a faraway siren.
Poetry • Fall 2017
Down by the creek
named for its sweat-
scented roots, my sister taught me
to relieve the ache I imagined
God gave only the wicked. Here
is where to place
your touch, your breath, your troubling
assent. Delight
relived--the anticipated end
of our exploit--came with gloaming,
the appearance of lives
you don't see lived in
full sun. The swallow
you cannot name. (What I've learned
to call pleasure is more
akin to belief.) My sister slouched
over when the soughing
ceased, said, no one has to know
this place exists.
Poetry • Spring 2011
I stiffen: again a shift,
a shuffle somewhere
in the darkness,
impenetrable
as the guillotine.
The scaffold collapses
into a bulging jaw
sputtering against
the shut. The heart
is a muscle. Alone,
against the drawbridge,
my hand, wet with fog,
slicks over the steel,
and the big bolts
resisting rust. Lift,
and the rain
folds like hands retiring
into applause, and
your silhouette disappears
like a question
into a question mark.
As if anyone could be
lost, and permanently.
A candle spills through
its wax, as the buildings,
slowly, fall into a cloud
which appeared as if
to catch them, but, in
truth, held nothing.
Poetry • Winter 2018 - Noise
That’s what the leaves are telling us tonight.
Hear them panic and then fall silent,
So though we strain our ears, we hear nothing—
Which is far more terrifying than something.
Minutes seem to pass, whole lifetimes,
While we wait for it to show itself
This very moment, or maybe the next?
As the trees rush to make us believe
Their branches banging on the house
To be let in and then reconsidering.
All those millions of leaves suddenly quiet
As if not wishing to add to our terror,
With something evil lurking out there,
And drawing closer and closer to us.
The house dark and quiet as a mouse,
If one had been brave to stick around.
Fiction • Winter 2014 - Trial
1. The bikini I wore in Capri, the one you said made me look like a starlet. After one last swim, I rinsed it out, promised myself to retrieve it from the bathroom after I finished packing. But it was only when we were on the mainland that I remembered, already on our way to the airport. I’m sure the hotel can send it, you said. It was a five-star hotel, the most beautiful place either of us had ever stayed, with the sort of view you expect on a honeymoon. You were still married then—separated, but still married—and our affair had already lost its sheen. You look like a Hollywood starlet, you said, watching me climb out of the pool. You wouldn’t swim with me and so I lapped in the water alone. And then, dripping, grateful to be noticed for a moment—because you had stopped noticing by then—I stood still, in that inky blue bikini, brand new, purchased before we left New York. You look like a Hollywood starlet, you said, but you were looking past me as if I were already a memory, a picture to be filed away. In the business class lounge in Rome, waiting for our flight back to New York, I emailed the hotel to ask about the bikini, and they said it was gone. No sign of it, they said, with deep regret.
Fiction • Spring 2023 - Decoy
Every week, a beautiful lady who looks like me comes into the shop. Or rather, she’s beginning to look like me, like a fancy version of me, because every time she comes in some piece of her face has changed. And I have studied her face, believe me. I know the shape of her nostrils, the peach fuzz gleam on the side of her jaw, the little crease on her bottom lip where a crescent of pearly lip gloss shines like a tiny moon. I don’t know how or why this is happening, but all these features have been shifting to make her face look more like mine, and it might be that I’m starting to look more like her, too.
2026