Issue 17
Contents
Fiction
I. Lexi was reluctant to be Matthias Gerner’s accompanist for the gala concert, but not for the reasons her colleagues at the Manila Youth Conservatory imagined. It wasn’t that she missed the limelight and wanted center stage for herself, or that she had nerves about performing. She simply didn’t know if she could trust […]I Justine is nineteen and living in Toronto when she learns her mother has been killed. It’s November and she’s pretending to love chemistry when what she really wants to do is act. She works at a pub to pay for the scene study classes that she takes in secret. Her sister is the only […]Myra and Tom fanned their faces with wadded newspapers as they made their way through Jaipur’s City Palace. The tour guide aggressively ushered them through the palace, saying “Take picture take picture take picture,” seizing their camera and asking them to “Cheeseburger smile” in front of the marble elephants, Diwan-I-Khas, huge silver water jugs one […]Non-Fiction
Early in the German sci-fi rom-com I’m Your Man, Alma, a fairly nondescript middle-aged white woman, enters a Berlin dance club. Inside, she encounters a crowd of fashionably dressed people smoking, flirting with each other, and dancing to a live band. She isn’t fooled. The people are holograms—part of a meticulously designed romantic atmosphere. They […]Poetry
splice the remaining fragments smell of vodka, basement room filled with debris, sharp pull of hands zippers teethed apart with drunken care what were we supposed to trust but collapsed filaments? we embraced teenage stupidity left ourselves a sticky residue […]I crashed through clouds of insects on my riverside run and carried some away from their copulation and the rising warmth of a sodden bank. Were they me, humans, I’d name the juggernaut of my body a natural disaster … [Click here to purchase a copy of the magazine]we averted our eyes from the blown-out tire by animal instinct, though it was not flesh, its singed inverted fibers waving invertebrate in the blackened wind. at the horse-themed mexican restaurant, i took 1 photo of my body in the mirror and my phone died. body my house my STORMIN PROUD PAPA my HANDFUL OF […]A Dream Where Every Child Gets to Go Home From School
The dark brown doors to the playground are heavy behind our early arms. Without windows. We are used to holding small hands, so, once and a while, a teacher will help us push. To find. If we hide then maybe there is someone counting with their face in their hands / excited to see us. […]Self-Portrait as Another Spring
– after Nancy Reddy I’ve never longed for a longer winter, for those ghosts that bed down with geraniums, then float loose, like early pollen. My father and I flip pennies heads-up when they glisten in our paths to give others better luck. Everywhere, violets. Violets on the sofa, violets in the neighbor’s yard, violets […]She contained innumerable bodies. For ages, she had swallowed our deceased so neatly. With woven roots and grasses, she’d mended shut the million mouths we’d cut and dug into her skin. She’d rebirthed our departed into night-blooming jasmine, cats, avocado trees, snow, razor clams, and delicate blue moths. But hers was the kind of body […]