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 • Winter 2023
Jack’s mother stood in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette wedged between the prongs of a plastic fork—she didn’t like her hands to smell—as Jack helped his father move out. His father was wearing bermuda shorts and flip-flops, both of which were recent developments. His mom was wearing a light pink bathrobe which was not a recent development but an old one, as he rarely saw her in anything else.
Poetry • Winter 2019 - Double
The philosophers say there are words
that do things, make themselves
real in the world,
so that when you said
I promise,
you had to have meant it
and when together you said I do
the bond was real in every sense.
Those are the examples, but there are others
like when I said I’m queer
it did something – not to you
(tho I guess a little bit to you)
but to my world and my body
and when you first taught me the word
woman
man
that did something too.
I think these words are the closest real thing
to prayer. To toss a stone across
the frozen pond and see if it smash
open or skip with grace and stop.
But my voice will not hold my body.
And I don’t know if I can speak transition
or swallow it.
Tell me, can I say
I am?
Fiction • Fall 2016
A squat yellow bungalow trimmed neatly in white, with twin wooden planters that had never been filled by anything but tidy beds of gravel—this was the church where Rick and I first met as kids. Inside, a wide-open room, empty until we set up ten rows of metal folding chairs before each service, empty after we stacked the chairs in two teetering columns off to the side. Near the windows, the table set with plates of cookies and lemonade for after the service.
Poetry • Spring 2018
1
It was like
palm trees in a line
outside the building
I catch my sight
by: I get it
and it goes. Girl
overtakes me
in her leopard coat.
Angora guy
sweeps up his zone.
A river
slides behind
the palms, and the sound.
I tune it all out
too, each getting
a rush in. I get
the feeling grows.
2
I take
my pill daily,
and the days go by
a curb. I leave
to cross,
now, to turn
the one-way.
Not memory:
I wear the jacket
new, hand-painted
blue. All over
it was like:
always meet
your next in fuss
-free pomade.
Few wear gloves
in warm winter.
3
He swayed
as if he had me
with his traps.
It was just down
to his face.
When I inhaled
the air of him
I felt as if
I’d only know.
He was sweet
when he talked.
His mouth closed up.
Orange pullover
and a cling job.
I came away,
not even changed
by the ripeness of his lips.
4
In that office
I saw a plant
so green it was like:
I insist. Being
nowhere else
became its own
effect. I lacked
2026