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.
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From the Archives
Fiction • Fall 2022
The day she turned forty, my mother burst into flames. I watched it reflected in my father’s glassy eyes across the dinner table, yellow and orange tongues of fire that danced in their devouring. Flesh doesn’t burn like wood or paper, doesn’t turn immediately to ash; it sears and bubbles, melts in layers, and sloughs away in chunks. She collected in a pile of chalky, mangled bone and blood broiled into sticky black tar.
Poetry • Spring 2021
Brief reprieve, then Junetime. The fledgling wins, just as
it does every year. It rushes back rotten. When the last of
the frost puddles, the bake-skinned child emerges, dumb
again. The echo in my drums again. Elena, Elena.
The once-remit light. I still answer to the name like a
dog. Pluck the petals, bald seeds, worry leaves thin. Each
blinding summer, the re-christening among the spindly paint-
brushes. I, running behind the barn. The dried wheat thins,
the frivolous blooming fields, a round-bellied robin giving
chase. I’m tired of regrowth, the youth, the perpetual
youth, the weeds and the boy with the shade hat. Lying
peacefully atop my dull body, bugs landing heavy on their
feet. I once held out my thumb, one brown eye closed, to blot
out the sun. Just my little hand. Now the light tastes sour. The
barn has grown empty and wet. The mold spread there for
years, I’m told. When they were new, the pricks were clean,
the sweet pear and cacti were shining and sweet. I place it all
again as the light leaked this morning: every frenetic bone,
every tooth-lodged seed, the sun in my skin. Landing any-
where, light refracts broken onto me. Well, I opened my rickety
fridge, the sudden cold relief, the wrinkles wrong. I ate every
cherry, let them bleed in my mouth, putrid, forcing the swallow.
Poetry • Fall / Winter 2023
I am jet fuel and six miles long. I am bad business. I make the rooms grow smaller. Underneath my shirt is another shirt and under that the cloudbanks clang their worksong. They pitch their weight in droves. This is a cold shelf, Sport. A struck bell. I gloat when I say this. I shine in the frost. You are a ham tied up in string. You are pineapples and cherries and ham on a plate at dinnertime. Fate eats you up. We rub against the facts now. My face is a glass jar. My heart is applesauce and a cold spoon. I clear the decks and spend my leverage. The rest is dazzle. You are an obstacle course and I am a pair of dice. You hop, like a rabbit, cabbage to cabbage. I win by a landslide. I smear the mirror and distort your face. You are the flipped coin and I am the outcome. I don’t decide, I collect; thumbed scale or not. You hit the ground, or so you say. You can’t unknow the facts so you run faster. You, the boy from bruised tomorrow, under the eaves where everything gets put down. I am a lamp, you are a gun. You spend your bullets on a hat, I burn when touched.
Poetry • Spring 2024
after Halyna Kruk
Good sons have found me crying
in local park ditches, where I’ve been
called chink & faggot all the times
before & after. Still, I return. I keep
trying, like a good son, though not quite
as good. I’m more bird than human,
rolling in the mud I’ve made. Above me,
forefathers looking down from pavements,
carrying guns like bodies, kissing guns
like bodies. I let them repeat history.
The flowering branches in my way—snapped.
The cicadas that warned—sorry, sung—too loudly,
they squashed for me. I’m in good hands,
wrapped in good guns. When released,
there are bullets in the trees chirping
about standards, phone calls flying
in between trees, the trees moving
toward me with legs. I don’t remember
why I was crying, but there were guns
all around the clearing. Big beautiful guns
shoved into my mouth & don’t kill.
Poetry • Summer 2024
Leaves of trees were more alive
than the birds, as my mind went
back to the chauffeur kneeling,
waving his wand—the detector
for explosives under the sedan,
saying, “Just in case.” Then after
checking into The International,
I go upstairs to a room, & I ask,
Have I been here before, standing
at this mirror? A shadow of birds
in trees outside the park pulls me
up to the window, & then a voice
saying, “Do not go to the park.”
Those birds tell all of us to look,
& then I feel as if they are woes
disfiguring the sunset, or lovers
of those gone into Kenyan bush.
My face here on a windowpane,
seeing them as part of myself.
They make the trees smaller,
divined by a lifetime of pleads.
A silhouette of them in the trees
moves with me toward the park,
but before I enter a voice says,
“If your driver had not waved
the wand beneath that sedan
maybe you would not be here.
You know, timing is everything.”
I stood again at the window
as if only waiting for someone
to stir up that cloud of wings
waiting for the world to end.
All at once, I wanted to hug
someone, or to just hold her
against me, breathing as one.
Their skullcaps of pale feathers
became too much to believe in.
Such a ragged hour of half-dead
dreams & deep longing. Maybe
if not the park, I’ll go to the bar
on the corner. I stop at the door,
turn, & walk back to the hotel.
A week later, a grenade is tossed.
Three Aussies die in the Jericho,
& I try to say what turned me
around at the door but I can’t.
Their gaze on me, & half-dark
wings writhing into specters
or deep eyes of prophecy.
2026