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 2008
They tell the phone not to worry,
they lock up the doors.
Then, they tape mouth of the mailbox shut,
thinking: who would write? There is nothing
to write home about.
The address is hard to remember.
On weekends, they take walks.
It helps them
stay young, they say, and they forget
what they meant, where they were.
The house breathes out,
the window rests its head
against the mountain
they are climbing, opens up, swallows.
The nearby church rings its bells for dinner
and they eat bread on a bench.
She cooks by a dictionary.
He watches television, grows a beard like a newspaper pile,
he speaks very little. He throws the leftover pages
at the cat. It walks away, its steps
are stamps on the carpet.
They go to sleep still dressed and with the radio on.
It plays sad songs, then good ones,
then the news, then it listens
to the raucous laughter of late guests coming in,
sitting on the upturned chairs by the table.
After they leave, the window is unhinged
and the mountain
can leap out again.
Fiction • Summer 2015
Where does Marcia from Minnetonka go at night? Who’s the lucky man?
Mindy and I say things under the jasmine trellis during lunch break. Where does Yvonne from Iceland smoke? Does Katherine from Texas spend tip dollars on cocaine, or is that a lie good as any? If Talia from Denmark and Mark from Boston are fucking in the swamps, where do they fuck, and how? Does she lie on her back, does he? Who takes the weight, is what I’d like to know.
Poetry • Winter 2018 - Noise
I can’t have peace til I get what I want no more desire not now not now only after
awhile we needed a witness the water couldn’t wait underground another minute
before becoming spring I’ve never broken a bone before except when twisting it out
of a bird I am not a patient animal not now not now all the while you were dying all
the while you were overcome by radiation broken light *s**till light *you said *same*
*ocean *more than my fingers you said you wanted my fingerbones *this skin *
Poetry • Spring 2021
One of the horses was dead and it made for a
start to the day. Warm for the month for the year
so far. The kind that comes with sun and rain and
rain with lightning. That kills horses. Apparently.
I didn’t see the horse. I saw your face cave and
saw it come back. There’s no good antonym for
caving. Some things take work and time. You
narrow your eyes when you look far ahead. Your
pupils contract in the sunlight. Then you smile.
The future is mostly a whole lot of physiological
change. And expectation. And then some. When
I think about death my stomach hurts. When I
think about horses I am usually wrong. I thought
horses stood while they slept, but they can sleep
lying down. Bodies at rest become bodies at
work. Even decay can be no easy feat. Requires
work and time. Are we like or unlike horses. We
are not like this horse. This horse is different.
This horse is dead. But the field looks greener
than it looked before. The water pools where our
feet have moved the earth. It pools on the road. It
doubles us. I want to know if there is ever
enough symmetry. At Trader Joes the answer to
symmetry is lots. Pastels, gold lettering. I want to
buy an orchid. $12.99 in a ceramic, purple vase.
It feels like they’re reading my mind. When my
card is declined the staff is kind. They say it
happens to all of us but it’s happening to me. I
feel like I’m watching myself watch the horse.
But the grass is very green.
Poetry • Summer 2024
Leaves of trees were more alive
than the birds, as my mind went
back to the chauffeur kneeling,
waving his wand—the detector
for explosives under the sedan,
saying, “Just in case.” Then after
checking into The International,
I go upstairs to a room, & I ask,
Have I been here before, standing
at this mirror? A shadow of birds
in trees outside the park pulls me
up to the window, & then a voice
saying, “Do not go to the park.”
Those birds tell all of us to look,
& then I feel as if they are woes
disfiguring the sunset, or lovers
of those gone into Kenyan bush.
My face here on a windowpane,
seeing them as part of myself.
They make the trees smaller,
divined by a lifetime of pleads.
A silhouette of them in the trees
moves with me toward the park,
but before I enter a voice says,
“If your driver had not waved
the wand beneath that sedan
maybe you would not be here.
You know, timing is everything.”
I stood again at the window
as if only waiting for someone
to stir up that cloud of wings
waiting for the world to end.
All at once, I wanted to hug
someone, or to just hold her
against me, breathing as one.
Their skullcaps of pale feathers
became too much to believe in.
Such a ragged hour of half-dead
dreams & deep longing. Maybe
if not the park, I’ll go to the bar
on the corner. I stop at the door,
turn, & walk back to the hotel.
A week later, a grenade is tossed.
Three Aussies die in the Jericho,
& I try to say what turned me
around at the door but I can’t.
Their gaze on me, & half-dark
wings writhing into specters
or deep eyes of prophecy.
Fiction • Spring 2023 - Decoy
Mirrorselves
At nine years old, I sit at the bathroom mirror and open both sides of the medicine cabinet to reveal my infinity self. In a long identical row, I am transfixed by the other mes. We are in the same stretched-neck candy striped shirt, our mouths full of the same funny shaped teeth, topped by the same blunt bowl cut. When I blink, they blink. When I stick out my tongue, theirs follow. Until, in the back row, one stands up confidently. In my own reflection me and all the other mes lock on her as she stands, pulls her shirt over her head and wraps it around her fist. She cocks back and with one hit, shatters the mirror. She crawls out of the cabinet, bare chested and bloody, leading all of my mirrorselves, running like hell out of the bathroom and down the street. I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to find where they’ve gone, wondering if I should be there too.
2026