Issue 4.0

crocus

Here is a purple crocus submerged and fluttering

By Grace Ma

Circling back, centre of the country,

I find clear skies, to weep under.

Loneliness, I had forgotten,

had not forgotten about me.

feels

it feels so right

By James Stewart

dishwasher song lulls me to sleep

and like always I

grit through the foam gurgles,

syrupy sweetness I

am revolting before dawn,

and in mid-afternoon

a poised child vomiting through the seasons,

writing the apology letters in advance I

am the myth of the impenetrable,

all chunky winter mittens and cheap amateur wine,

all spilt over from laughing too much at the pre-game,

all six bathroom trips and three glasses of water,

all the supposed femininity that was drowned in the river

you’re not my mom, my dad,

don’t sing lullabies in half light

but I drowned everyone who used to love me

so let’s grapple, then hold me tight

queen

Queen of Beans

By Lauren Bullock

Even at eighty, she sells beans in the market. Kidney, black, or just green beans.

Otong, patani, lubyas, mongo. My mother tells me these words all mean beans.

Hello, she says over the phone. In pixels, I cannot tell her mouth from her

nose. Clustered in squares, I think her eyes scan mine from two dark unseen beans.

How long has it been? My mother tells me she wants to know how old I am, so I

line up the rounded beads, pale and tan. I show her my age is twenty beans.

Mom says they are making dinner. She’ll wash the rice and prepare the mongo.

Just rinse them under water, peel them well. That is the trick to having clean beans.

I was there once—I can feel them slip through my hands, peas dropping into the bin.

The seeds crack and sputter when they land on each other. It’s raining beans, serene.

A stall older than me, she has sold them since I was the size of a small

fava bean. Everyone knows there is nothing quite like a Philippine bean.

Does she wonder: What are the beans like there? Processed and sealed in cans or

slathered in syrup from maple trees (sweet beans!), would she think they’re obscene beans?

My mother hands me the phone. We stare. We say hello again because

that is all we can say. But I want to know: what do you love in between beans?

She tells me last night the market was set alight. Doused in kerosene. Beans.

Will grandma be okay? She tells me yes, she’s Apolonia, Queen of Beans.

early

Early September, Nearly Thirty

By Natalie Co

The world waves in the breeze, afloat in a green-gold bath. Passing bikes whir like crickets. In the green, there is a tree, taupe, amputated, no branches, no leaves. A three-pronged ballerina. I think of old myths, of girls chased by the king of gods, hunted down in fury, and immortalized for the lifespan of another living thing. I am in the scene. Because I have left my apartment and walked here, because I have stood still awash with the city, and because I now bloom green with leaves that float me into the world. It’s strange how months of misery shift in a prolonged click, and then I am speaking from my chest. Life has been shit, but I woke up one day and fought to keep my eyes open. Held a smoky quartz in my hand, hung it around my neck. Sat on the sofa in her office, and as we spoke, the sun was finally streaming in, and she was saying, “there is light.”

time

time-space compression (at the alameda county fair)

By Jessica Bakar

my memory melts in omniscience⸻object permanence⸻midnights, websites, plein air pride flag in the garden⸻this is a morbid curiosity, to wonder if all fireworks have the same lifetime⸻lifeline⸻language feels like your tongue only more forgiving⸻a sunburn peeling into before and after, the moment in your palm⸻it’s 102° and 3:03 and pigs fly past the place my childhood best friend left me⸻they say writing is talking about one thing while saying another⸻I mean that the kissed mouth spells virtue when I say there’s a butterfly collection in⸻O, delicate delusion⸻the cupid’s bow is a dilution when lips have two sides, two wings, six-three⸻Elenis, let’s not get political now⸻a No-Face sculpture in C⸻black-robed beauty⸻I supplicate to say Amen to, the Arbiter of⸻the truth is: my wings are tethered to your ribcage where safety pin cuts skin⸻how the pin becomes you⸻cradled in the corner of the parking lot I call the womb⸻it is 94° and 3:04, and time to go.

summer

Summer Sometime Elsewhere

By Zosia Stevenson

You and I, barefoot

through creeks and loamy conversation;

splitting the bottom bunk,

cussing through braces,

guzzling budweiser from locked fridges

only to kick the thumb-pierced cans and hide.

Barefoot,

pissing between slivers of

starlight and birch.

Time became liquid

so we drove rusty skiffs across it,

trapping butterflies in fishing nets

and eating them—one after the other

until our stomachs fluttered out

of our bodies.

Sun-baked memories—

a red plastic frisbee fading in the grass.

clean

Clean Ponds

By A. Daniyal

The other day I was remembering, after class we used to hang out at the student bar to trace the shape of our hands on the wall with chalk, and we used to pass beer through the broken window to our friends who had already been kicked out. Then we would walk back to our dorm through dark playgrounds and sleepy residential blocks.

This was just after the leaves fell, but long before the bombs dropped.

Now that the natural order of things has been broken, we can see through the tears in the
wallpaper into the fissures of the universe. It’s like when we looked at ourselves in the mirror of ice that had formed over the Clean Ponds on a particularly cold night of October, and through the thin sheet you could see fish swimming with cadavers, faint streaks of blood flowing from the shipwreck of a sunken world.

In my memories it always rains with blue snow. I would have never believed all this back then. Had I known when I left that it would be my last time, maybe, I would have cried a bit more.

I know I can never again go back to Moscow.