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
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 2024
Smoke your smell sell your smoke
smell your tell your sugar sweet smoky the smoke smell
smoky clothes made war the scent the smell
tales of home my tell smell the smell
ashes sang pit against pit against queen smiling
smell smoke smooth the smoky spicy smell we sell we smoke
sunday on blazoned screens on smoke brought home
unwell rest smell the smoke hell to-go and choke
grandma worked days stiff smoky
family the fire we smoked and toasted burnt
me: welcome to smoke just here is home
try one our smoke sell smoke smell
Poetry • Winter 2023
love had me reeling since the lake, the headlong plunge into barren landscape, where ranks of rolling hills are guarded by black cypress that slant toward bishops. staggering about no man’s land as my rival puzzles over her next move, she bites a fat purple fig then drops it to snowmelt. I stalk like a rook with dark plumes, perfumed, and molting each style like a sable fur coat. my empress preens in expensive taste. I clip on her unwashed braid and feel like a Clydesdale galloping into my 30s; the annihilating, brute whiff of what it means to “have it all—” baby books and dissertations, boss bitch and stinking bibs. consolation? she asks, offering her remedies, her nightshades. I peel my cuticles like eggshells, like archaic wallpaper. who mothered who? dressed me in footie pajamas and laid me down upon the forest floor? was this Plath’s gambit? the unseen latticework of hyphae: overnight, very whitely, discreetly, very quietly our toes, our noses take hold on the loam, acquire the air. we lodge ourselves as truffles, as dreams, adjourned. as wet season spawn with soft fists breaking into Egyptian cotton, the dormant generation becomes sinewy from crumbs, sweeps tidy tercets into the dustbin, heaves through dried leaves, unexcused, not needing light, though a little is nice. we rise like gilled pillars matsutake, hen-of-the-woods—slightly restored, but colossal. as grandmaster of the undergrowth, we inherit stately oak rooms; patient for the poem to swell in the night, up, up toward full-throated spring
Fiction • Winter 2022 - Jellyfish
On the train home from her therapist’s office, the woman made of water tries, desperately, not to slosh onto the teenage girl sitting next to her. Outside, it’s winter in Michigan and has been for several years, but in the train it’s warm, too warm, and as they curl around a bend in the icy Huron River, she foams and spills over into the girl’s lap, her navy slacks and crisp white shirt.
2026