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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Notes
The purposes of this review are twofold: first, to convey the eminently pleasant though not necessarily intellectually stimulating experience of seeing The Light in the Piazza at the Huntington Theater; and second, to convince you, yes YOU, the member of the Advocate reading this (or honestly whoever else) to take up my mantle of reviewing shows at the Huntington now that I have graduated.
From the Archives
Poetry • Fall 2018
I can come but still I cannot meditate.
Before these months, when I saw a bathtub,
I did not dare lie down inside of it,
knowing I might begin to dream of physical
cloud and epidermis, and come apart
as completely as I had dreamed.
As I had feared. So many sensations.
But you know, I tried this last night,
as I went through my meticulous list of
trying, top to bottom. I lit the expensive
candle on the windowsill naked in
my bathroom and admired the stained
marble, and thought of all the things
I was afraid to forget, but could not
know them, nor find reason, and when
in the morning my mother came in
exclaiming she smelled the candle,
I said I did not. For this is how,
whatever is apparent to you I do not see.
While the white scented body of wax
was slow waning there was no pleasant
smell, or any smell at all, only
the self in the throat, slowly diminishing.
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 • Fall 2022
They wake me. Like car alarms bleating along an empty
block. How many beloveds in me whom now I survive?
Even Forough must have run her loving hands to water.
My lips move like a merchant’s hoping to sell survive.
Can you use it in a sentence? Swinging their pendulum
heads, they foretell how few survive.
Sour as berries died on the vine. My fingers stay
in the mouth of astonishment. Can such a shell survive?
Like the owl of Sunday morning cartoons, I want one big
chomp! To see what, on the tongue of a cracked bell, survives.
I reach time. I step in front of a honking car—jump
back. I outlive myself. Can’t help but survive.
A citizen of my catch-all drawer. A keep-sake of the stayed-
behind. A one-way ticket, that will to survive.
To worry is a law of nature. Is it enough? To be
inscribed in lighter hue: she is well-survived.
Veiled mother flickers bodily in the lamp-light
of you. Steps, unsteps in the melt that survives.
I want to love so well, that I spell a name with each
foot-fall in dirt. I reach palms down the wet well. Survive.
They say my mother’s was more than a death. Must mine be more
than a life? How to make my name undone? How to spell survive?
Poetry • Spring 2020
Whatever it was that was supposed to
hold on my face,
steady the astrolabe,
reserve the seats and tether the baboon,
whatever those pills are supposed to do,
those hooks, rings, documents,
whatever I meant by delphiniums,
what she wore by the lake and said,
they say every other Rembrandt
although, as will blood, the fake
is often the most convincing.
Some contaminants make liquids clearer
but put enough black paint on anything
it becomes a door.
It’s dark out.
The most elegant woman in the world
watches me throw up in a trash can.
When you hold something on fire,
shouldn’t it weigh less and less?
Does everything have to become ash
to ascend? It’s not that there aren’t comforts.
An inmate in Iowa sends chocolates.
My mother comes back from the dead.
A call from a friend stuck in an elevator.
A postcard of a child riding a pig.
I went where we used to live
to dump the last teaspoons of dog ash
into the culvert. Someone was signaling.
Someone was being carried out.
5 trips. In pieces. Like a harp.
Features • Winter 2020 - Feast
Chang-rae Lee is the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of five novels: Native Speaker (1995); A Gesture Life (1999); Aloft (2004); The Surrendered; and On Such a Full Sea (2014). Born in South Korea, Lee moved with his family to the United States at the age of three. He previously taught at Princeton University, where he was a creative writing professor and the director of Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing. Since 2016, he has been the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the English Department and Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. This winter, fiction editor Angela F. Hui was able to speak with Lee over the phone. This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
2026