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.
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From the Archives
Poetry • Winter 2021 - Fast
“Joint fluid,” said the physician, spilled
from a sprung seal in the ultimate knuckle
of my left index finger, just shy of the nail,
and gathering there to a “mixoid cyst,”
a substance also called “digital mucus.”
Once a woman with beautiful hands
said to me, “There are very few physical pleasures
without a little mucus.”
But when this doctor with an expensive
lancet lanced it, there oozed from my mixoid cyst
a viscid substance vastly more limpid than semen
or vaginal secretions. It was like a tear
wept by a fly-sized golden butterfly—
and when I touched the tiny glistening orb of it
with the pad of my opposite index finger, it clung
to the print’s whorls, and when I swirled it
against the pad of my thumb I understood
my body will never repay me
for the satisfactions I give it every day by moving.
O itty-bitty pure lubricious gobbet,
O most licentious and merest whit betwixt the pads
of index finger and thumb
slid together so lusciously the joints between my carpal
and metacarpal bones thrummed a hum
through every atom of my corpus
from this side of corpsehood all the way back
to the slither and divot of my conception,
which the doctor, seeing the look on my face,
closed his eyes before the lust and rapture of.
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 • Spring 2026 - Fear
Today I am weight. Today my tail quivers with the herd’s, a burly
pack of cattails swirling. I am big-bellied, furry, untamable. I am
full of grass. Today I get to think about my next meal. Today I
daydream about the rut, strutting and curling my lip, grunting with
my tongue outstretched. Today I want to wallow in the mud with
all the other lip-curlers, licking pheromonal heat. Shuffle of
salivating verve. Scruff of soul. Today I hoist my bulging bulk. My
nose twitches with distant splays of sweat. Ears infused in
chemical cues. I am nature, never devil. Today I give my love
away.
2026