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
Poetry • Spring 2020
This time, I want it to be simple: say you are
a fresh, cool lemon. Your rind is dotted with wet.
Say I have a tongue and lick away the wetness,
have hands and excavate the seeds.
I pull you out of yourself. I raise newness.
Everything tastes yellow and the sea-line is a line
down my throat. The lemon is a line across
the sky and that too is what you are: everything
mistaken for something else, the citrus getting larger, blooming.
Are you blooming? Are you in bloom? Tell me how you feel.
You don’t have to be a lemon if you don’t want to.
The rind could slip from my hand, if you asked for it.
I only want to speak to you. I’ve known lemons before:
tendrils of fruit clutching to the white, hand unhooked,
every cold, flowered thing giving way to water. Things change
when I speak and fruits flower, open slowly, without knowing it.
Try this: the dig of your finger under stem, stopping
crooked between flesh and peel. So what if when I dream
I dream citrus? I can taste even the farthest slick of air,
unlace semblance from skin. I can feed in pieces.
When I call out your name, it is your name
before it is anything else.
Later, I can ask you about the rest.
Title is taken from Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica."
Poetry • Winter 2010 - Bestiary
underwater they are terribly
farsighted, your body blurs
as you approach. their bodies
are set elsewhere. heavy
chandeliers sinking
with chains braided by wax,
tempting you to reach into
their folds and search them
for whatever you threw
into the murky sea,
see if they would spill out
or harden like shells.
you peel one, look for the heart,
highly organized water,
it is shaking. you find a stone,
apply pressure, watch it shatter.
Poetry • Winter 2017 - Cell
2013,
I
on a dizzy morning in june
my eyes were rubbed against the view
of that piazza
you should see those kaleidoscopes
- even as a child of ten
i could never take my eyes off of them-
for the very first time, as if in a dream
i saw the reality;
my beard grown out,
and my voice cracking,
and seeing
words could be tender
no matter what
i was thinking of those desks
those school desks dangling in my mind
as like question marks
in those school days still capturing my mind
and to those dangerous questions
we used to raise our hands
under the shadow of the rotten stringers
so many unanswered questions has left
a couple thousands of us
trying to explain
the close range between innocence and rage:
rage is cruel without innocence
innocence is submission
without rage, said a man
(on his eyebrows there was blood and sand)
on that morning
we had already burnt down the desks
our kaleidoscopes were in pieces
no rust left on the stringer
no lies in our words
II
the day was booming.
colosseum tumbling down
for the very first time
the earth was seen as it was:
the surface split in two,
two different orchestras, earth in polyphony,
one telling us kurt huber’s dead
the other playing shostakovic, the 7th symphony!
On that very day
just like a dissident string
breaking loose from a violin
the city broke loose
from the earth.
Poetry • Winter 2009
The square opens like a screen,
touching it,
how it’s a hand and a pattern clears.
The morning is some hands in front of
finishing at the time of light
this is because a pattern makes it not happen.
There is no light against the panes they abstract
and stay, you touched
your knee as if you are saying
anything else. The monument
where a boy set himself
on fire and put an image
in his throat,
this is true because you are doing all of it, like his hand
clearing or an icon which is fissive.
Fiction • Fall / Winter 2023
The last of the leftover punch was a little cloudy but still tasted about the same. Eusebia and I sat on Pete’s stoop passing the sticky Vitaminwater bottle back and forth, waiting for him to come down so we could all walk back to her place together. Pete’s apartment was a seventh-floor walkup so nobody ever climbed all those stairs on purpose. Pete himself went up and down all the time and swore it didn’t bother him. He was above-average athletic and had once been a serviceable high school tight end: not slow, not small, good engine. In the first game of his senior year he broke three ribs on a doomed passing play, his opposing defender having correctly anticipated the ball’s flightpath and time of arrival. The football landed in Pete’s chest and cradling arms a fraction of a second before the defender’s shoulder, and Pete heard the arpeggio of his ribs cracking in quick succession, click-clack-clock, top to bottom, like the opening xylophone of “Gone Daddy Gone” by the Violent Femmes, which played on a loop in Pete’s head as he lay on his back in the mud, struggling to breathe. Thus ended Pete’s athletic phase and began his phase of post-punk folk rock, which in turn ended abruptly a few years later, in a Columbus, Ohio coffee house, just as ignobly, though with less violence. There was a story about this, too. And an anecdote about moving to the city, and on becoming an artist, and so on, so that Pete’s life always seemed like a string of colorful vignettes, a series of small, brightly-lit dioramas. I have zero anecdotes, I feel like. I don’t know what I end up talking to people about. For instance just now on Pete’s stoop I was telling Eusebia about how I’d been thinking about competitive bodybuilding, how it seemed connected to conceptual poetry, but I was not yet sure how. The punch was gone and she was smoking and checking her phone and only half listening. I felt pressure building behind my eyes and ate a Sudafed of indeterminate vintage.
2026