Issue 36

(Inspired by Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong)

Sosi, run. Adulthood is chasing you
later. Don’t eulogize your
fish before its belly points to the future.
Stand skinned, tall and limp. You’ve
earned the loss of ‘i’ in your name. Now
it just reads “S.O.S.”

Maybe if we burned through the
treadmill, we could live in the space between
‘i’ and “S.O.S.” before the ‘i’ dissipates and
it all sneaks its way back onto your body.

Sosi, come
Here. Be Here. You’re tomorrow—you just need
to know today is a shadow of your forgetting. Years
will bead your necklace. Today, the charm.

 

Sosena Audain is a writer from Washington, D.C. She is an alumna of the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop and the Sewanee Young Writers Conference. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, Fleeting Daze, and Disjointed Magazine. She has a novella entitled The G.I.V.I.D and is working on a novel entitled Address. When she’s not matchmaking words like people, she is listening to music and she is probably singing along. She likes cats, philosophy, and life itself.

It’s cold enough that both
my obligatory huff of an exhale
and that of a dumb dog
remain visible, lingering stagnant
and momentary. Blossoming in
front of me
then, gone,
as whispers straining away
on the biting July wind.

I draw in; feel a tightening
in my trachea.
Hold – something putrid and coiling is
birthed in my stomach
creeping upwards as if water
in the xylem of a rotting flower. Against every
natural law it blooms into my
mouth, claustrophobic. Leathery
petals press against my tongue
and crowd my gums. Threatening my throat.

I exhale, and frown at my living.
Seeking some bittersweet comfort,
that my quivering fingers are
so frozen that they ache. A ritual,
a ceremony made up of twigs and
spikes. I swallow and it feels
like a seed pod has lodged itself
inside me. Like I might start
crying pebbles any minute now.

Like this,
I burgeon another cranberry hour away.

 

Lotus Das-Hyland (she/her) is an Indian-Irish student from Melbourne, Australia who recently completed the International Baccalaureate diploma program. After graduating high school in November 2024, she is looking forward to growing and improving her writing at university. When she’s not busy studying, she enjoys visiting new places, making music, and writing stories in her Notes app.

Dear Susie,

Blue night creeps over me here, a closing door. Today, from the sky, I watched a hawk scrape gray dawn. Tried to imagine catching something so quick in my palm – in my dreams I pull it from the air and know what it feels like to change something with my hands. So far, all the damage I do is from the heavens. I’ve nothing to haunt me but imagined faces. I didn’t want to be a cruel God.

Your pale hands lie gentle, two white birds on the table in the church in my mind. Memory crumbles quietly into Newburgh rain and the tobacco blossom fog of your mother’s house.

Strange honeymoon. I’ve stolen your face cast in moonlight away with me, carry you every night long as this war. Close my eyes and I’m just blinking under the officer’s club awning and if I opened them, I’d find you beaming a pearl-glow halo into the dusk. I’m always wandering around that night in West Point, where the streetlamp ponds of warm light are always kissing and I’m never in the dark.

Susie, the sky sprawls a thin purple line above me, I am just twenty-one – it hits me, a quick white sound.

Home, I could have touched the brick just to feel grit real as anything beneath my fingertips. I didn’t. Here is nothing but the shrill cries of birds and the sob of the atmosphere parting around the plane which devours me, a cold steel death.

Susie, everyone here calls me boy. I forget my own name, become nothing but boy, nothing but body. Get lost in all this blue. We’re supposed to be men and women by now but my body lives around me – I walk around inside it. I didn’t think it would be like this. Always I commit the crime of living inside the shudder of the engine, the cold silence of the lonely night.

Send me another letter along the wire we climb towards each other – In my dreams, you fall away into bitter violet ocean, your voice fades into a distant hum I can only hear over the radio.

Speak to me, Susie. Tell me this was not a mistake. Tell me when I return to you and the New York snows, flying over vast blue night, we will still be young, and I will not have killed that too.

All my love,

Richard

 

Lawson N. Lewis is a Florida poet and prosaist. She is an intern for the Jacksonville chapter of Women Writing For a Change, a former staff member of Élan International Student Literary Magazine, and a recipient of the Dr. James Robert Cobb Student Writing Award in first prize for page poetry. Her work revolves around themes of familial and personal relationships, shifting identity, and the dissection of ideals like freedom, inheritance, and femininity.

and no bare face. it is unreal reality
in this room of mirrors, your ease is
magnified. look how you triple, quadruple,
how the light plays with your eyes.

it’s four a.m. and you wonder where you
are—how long it will take for the sun
to rise, how long the sun has held
you in its grasp. it drips from the
ceiling, the smell of wet grass, everything

is chopped, diced, served to you.
where is your face if not in the mirror?
where are you if not in a room? the flowers
are dying—it is unreal reality.

 

Jack He is a high school writer residing in Miami, Florida. His work has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.

My brother carries in raspberries from the garden, his palms stained red. I do not think about mango, my mother slipping slivers into his mouth like a bird. A car engine is left running outside. The cycling group advocated for a stop sign, advocated for a one-way street on Fifth, advocated—the city didn’t quite comply with all of their demands. A wandering cat used to play soccer with me in the driveway, he’d roll the ball under his paws, before jumping into an open car door. Herdless deer are more prone to accidents. There was no smoke. The driver didn’t know, leaving the intersection, my brother’s body was under hers. The pond at the end of the street is only a puddle on the outskirts of the park. With the weather turning, the mosquitoes blacked out the clearing and fireflies opened their abdomens. At dusk, the sun bled out, leaving the purple of my brother’s sweater soft in my hands.

 

Greer Engle-Roe is a student attending Bennington College majoring in literature, with a focus on creative writing. Their work appears or is forthcoming in Palette Poetry, The Albion Review, and Neologism Poetry Journal. Along with poetry, they spend many hours watching soccer, building model planes, and painting miniatures.

The night rolls in like a slow, sad song,
A lonesome wind, where I belong.
The moon hangs heavy, just out of reach,
Casting shadows on an empty beach.

The guitar hums, a sorrowed tune,
A broken heart beneath the moon.
Every note a sigh, a quiet plea,
For the things that never came to be.

The streets are hollow, cold and bare,
Echoing dreams left in the air.
In the corner, a trumpet cries,
Telling stories of goodbyes.

But there’s a beauty in this pain,
In the silver threads of rain,
That wash away the hurt, the loss,
Beneath the weight, we bear the cost.

So, sing the blues, deep and low,
Let the sorrow ebb and flow.
For in the heartache, there’s a spark,
A light that flickers in the dark.

 

Crislyn Lance is a literary artist specializing in writing fiction and fantasy. She uses her imagination and love for any and all things magical, to create new worlds and characters to show off her creative skills. Crislyn has been creating works since she was eleven years old. She has been featured in the Mississippi School of the Arts literary Journal. She has had an Honorable mention in the Eudora Welty Contest in 2023. She also has gotten a silver key in the Scholastic writing competition in 2023.