Issue Eight

January Night

By Hannah Gold

I remember the weight.

I remember asking myself—

“Have you ever felt

This much on top of you?”

On your thighs on your shoulders—

Pushing your knees apart?

Have you ever screamed so internally?

I remember the sounds.

His tongue on my neck beating

My throat was shaking.

Hits 96 moaning in the background,

My choking echoing in the bass.

Screams would be preferable.

I remember before.

The drunkenness the smell of weed

And the car horn outside.

The weight and the thighs—

Sounds my neck him beating.

I remember his hand and the fear.

I remember the shaking the blood.

But I could not tell you what happened.

Hannah Gold lives and writes in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She hopes to attend Boston University next fall and study Russian Literature.

erasure is

By Stephanie Chang

erasure is

conviction boiling / at the line of screams

over autumn bruises / our faces

caged in river / this is where i weave ruses

& tell you how i collect rust in the barrel

of my throat / when i look you are de-aging

/ permafrost on lips / pretend that

only the earth is chapped & we are not

full of fangs / bottle-glass for teeth while

you mourn our bodies long buried

in a windowless room / a pool of slaughter

tugs at my ankles / garden snakes coil ‘round calves

/ i lose step & watch

the whining of wings: blue jays bleed open

egg shells & fall out of the sky

/ what kind of death omen / tastes like apple cider?

requiems have no place here:

remember softness / tell me how you

fractured your arm singing from

the cliffside / did you taste the spill

of ocean like

grandiose rainfall or

did you drown in its yolk? / i ask

what you found on the hillside

& you lie / saying / nothing.

Stephanie Chang is a fifteen-year-old high school student from Vancouver, BC. Her work has appeared in The Penn Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Horn & Ivory zine. When not writing, she enjoys competing in debate tournaments.

Burn

By Nandita Naik

At eleven, the burn left a dappled sea

across my legs. Picture body as terrain: swordfish threading

through reefs, divers rubbing their eyes in sleepless wonder.

Nurse told me to hold still. I couldn’t.

Mako sharks were circling their prey;

how they laced my thighs like silvered scabs.

There is coral under my fingernails

from kneading burn cream into the reefs.

These hands of mine raised tsunamis, banished

the anglerfish to its cave. Tell

the electric eel it is no longer safe. Tell

the skin-bubbles that Nurse’s needle

is baying for their blood.

(Like any good shark, it could taste fear.)

Five years later I pour green tea, unscathed.

A fly drowns in my cup. White hospital walls

dissolve with the tea leaves. Still I am afraid

of fish markets. Still it is not easy

to walk by rows of gutted eels and think:

Look at you, brother. They’ve got you now.

Every time I look at the sea, it muscles

into something colder. Seabirds are sent to pick apart my thighs, dark burn-spots

evaporating, smoothening.

The pebbled waves wouldn’t know me now,

the way any good shark would call me alien

even though, I swear, I was animal once.

My skin wore bubbles like scales.

When I stole my body back from the tides,

I shook out the crabs from its pockets, listened to its pulse

the way fanged things fall in love with the night.

Nandita Naik is a junior at Proof School. She is published/forthcoming in the Rising Phoenix Review, Canvas Literary Journal, and Polyphony HS.

When Crisis Strikes

By Brooklyn Manga

When crisis strikes, the British put the kettle on. But for me, when crisis strikes, I reach a 3.0 GPA after years of hard work, graduate high school, and get accepted to my dream college all in one fell swoop. It was in January that the proverbial skeletons that hid in my family’s closet made their way out into the light, and I found out for the second time about my father’s infidelity. The first time I had found out were not factual occurrences but things that when looked back on in retrospect in the very instant that I learned the truth made it easy for me not to be surprised.

I had heard from my friends their own war stories of when they had found out the same things. They warned me that the divorce would be messy, told me stories of how their mom’s became, and where their dad’s went. But most of all, I was told that it was okay to fall apart a little bit in order to deal with the monumental brokenness that I felt inside me. Except, for me, that’s never been how it works. I had always been more efficient during the storm: I was the person that people leaned on, the one who made sure things were orderly, the defender. It was the last stretch of my senior year, and though my parents fought endlessly over money, over his infidelity, over him going or her staying, I was determined to finish strong.

I never told my teachers. At least, not until near the end when there was no more work to fill my time. Instead, I systematically studied, wrote papers, did homework, asked for extra credit where I could, and when I needed to cry in the middle of class, I excused myself to go to the restroom, and I cried. I always chose the restroom downstairs and near the cafeteria. Nobody ever went into that one. It was far away from most of my classes but it was private, and it was only place where I could breathe.

There was a point when things got so horrible that even now, months later; I have no idea how I got through it. My mother had gotten drunk and left home on a mission to die. She didn’t have to tell me for me to know what she was planning to do. I sat on the floor of my room, crying and texting her. But what strikes me now is the coldness of it all: How my father had left texting and calling and praying for her all to me. He didn’t tell me it would be okay. He didn’t drive out after her to stop her. He went back to bed.

But even during this time, I still managed to finish my readings for Economics. I still managed to get good grades on my essays in English. I still made consistent A’s on my Latin tests. My grades were shining, even though I was not. My attention waxed and waned in school. My sleep schedule was gone. I hardly ate. At night, I listened to my parents screaming at each other. My brother drove me to school. My mom left to live with relatives. My dad told me nothing at all.

Then came the part where I was no longer welcome in my own home. The part where I was blamed for things that were out of my control and I decided to live with my mom and our relatives. My school was an hour away. I slept on the couch. I had only a few pairs of underwear. My brother’s t-shirts. Pants that I came there wearing. But it was easier, and though I felt shattered, I didn’t cry as much. It was at this time that I told my AP Literature teacher what was going on. He was sympathetic and kind. As was my Latin teacher.

But it didn’t matter anymore.

Official grades were coming out soon. I had finally achieved my 3.0 GPA. I was going off to the college of my dreams. Graduation was a week away. These things were enough to make my mom get out of bed even when she felt as broken as I had. They were enough to bring a triumphant smile to her lips, and a put a little glimmer of hope in her eyes. Now, I am in college and though the storm continues, I work and I strive and I drive myself to continue to be her pride. I cannot afford much. I don’t have many clothes or any of the cute room décor items that the other girls have. But I have a reason to continue. My mom.

And that’s more than enough for me.

Brooklyn Manga is an Atlanta-based author and poet with a preference for writing historical fiction pieces about queer youth, overcoming trauma, love, and nature. Though she has never been published before, Brooklyn has written two books, many short stories, an abundance of poetry, and is currently in the process of completing her third and longest novel yet. She has been an avid reader and logophile for as long as she can remember.

Wind Vignette

By Taylor Fang

There’s a small tear on the photograph in my hands,

my knuckles the only shapes not tinged

yellow with age: the color of sunlight. My body trying

to step through the film— clouds in the picture,

swallowing. My grandmother, my mother

tells me: black hair against the shining lake spray,

dress in the wind, weeping willow leaves

brushed across the sky like ink. Standing alone,

looking away from the camera, away from my eyes

trying to peel something out of the fragile paper.

Look at me, I want to tell her,

look at the girl who visited your grave while clouds

rolled their bellies across the wet green fields.

The girl who thought in that silence

she could find our roots. In any silence.

But there is none here, only my grainy searching.

Only you, grandmother, so far away

from the girl in this picture. Almost as far as I am

from you, because you died when I was small

and I can only look, trying to hear your voice:

wind rippling the lost reeds. Brushing against your dress,

fluttering, transient.

I think I could be the wind. Grazing against

your cheek, grandmother. The world is silent

just around your face.

Taylor Fang lives in Utah. Her poetry has been published in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Sprout Magazine, HerCulture, and others, as well as recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. She also enjoys journalism, piano, and tennis.

To Tullula

By Heather Jensen

in the carnage across the road

lives a pod of film.

7.99 from the pharmacy, across

from the laundromat,

and i have left it

in carcasses

and skeletons

of foliage.

the travelers who live

behind the thicket of cactus

tell me of subway tile and redwood elevators

but soil takes my tongue

where the highway cuts through my mouth,

and the cicadas leave their skin outside

my bedroom window, where

the moon is

the cold end of an eraser.

opportunity has its own wheels and i either

make my own

or catch on

quick.

Heather Laurel Jensen attends Red Mountain High School in Mesa, Arizona. She is co-president of her Scholastic Art and Writing Awards affiliate, where she has been awarded ten times, and she was a participant in the 2017 Adroit Journal Mentorship for poetry. Her work is published or forthcoming in Best Teen Writing of Arizona and Polyphony HS.