Contents:

There's No Place Like

 by Ying-Ying Zhang

A
Home: fixed point
address committed in sing-song
so a four-year-old mind
would forget to forget.

Home phone: number eternal
her oldest memory
has a rotary dial.

B
World without change. My mother burning dinner while on the
phone. Dad’s hard hat and sweater vests. Grandma’s peach trees, my
sister’s piano lessons, a Toyota gently rusting in the garage.

A
Home is affixed: star pointing
low towards Appalachia.

she loses her old house, keeps
street name for a security question.

she loses her old number, keeps
boys yelling chink; calling sodas “pop.”

C
On her last day my mother forgot her name. Responded only to “Mom.”
Years later I visited. Grandma’s trees are taller. Everything else is in
the Earth.

A
Home: pointless
idea unfixed but

its memories are
hell on the shoulders.

시나브로: Sinabro

 by E Yeon Chang

(adverb) little by little, unwittingly

my tongue is a war child
of forgotten crossfire, a tea-stained
tablecloth pulled at the edges, by the edges
from the edges; I write despicably,
infected by English: like pale skin and

soft hands, Poppa admires the indulgence
of my poetry; forgets he
once had to beat a pickpocket—
pillager with a stick, until men learned to stop
visiting at rude hours; once, twice,

a hundred times, I’ve dreamt of peach
-bottomed babes as cannonades: recessive
nightmares painted over with pretty
colors; I’ve never craved the acidic
raindrops of this haunted promised land

but Seoul is the only city I’ll ever know.

Childhood Sketch

 by David Zumwalt

Two bicycles, one twisted and its back wheel spinning crazily;
one boy limps, the right half of his body

supported by the other’s hip; we grow up separately
and unavoidably flawed, in the way a tomato plant

will bend in the rain until the main stalk snaps
and small black ants emerge from the ground to consume its mess.

The limping boy’s knees are torn to bits.
Scraps of gravel cling to the insides of his cuts.

The other boy (and he is “other”) spots a hose lying unmanned
on a nearby lawn. By tracing the hose to its source,

he cleans the gravel off. This is what love is.
Cleaning up after other people. Neither of the boys

knows this yet, or would find it particularly interesting.
It’s summer. The bicycle is smashed. One boy will implode without the other.

8 times I got to know you

 by Sydney Miller

   1
When we walked under the bridge on our way
to your favorite cupcake place,
I told you that it was the first time I had ever seen
barbed wire in real life.
You told me you grew up with it—
The lace border to playgrounds,
threading over walls so high that
no one would ever think to climb them in the first place.
Background noise,
static against the sky.

   2
I bought you lunch.
I told you not to pay me back.
Later, you gave me a five,
two ones,
a dime and three pennies.
You said you never wanted
to owe anything to
anyone.

   3
When my parents visited, my father asked
what your father does for a living and you quietly
quietly
cried, while my mother held her breath
and her tongue.

   4
You tell me you’re excited,
that you’d rather spend Christmas in New York
than in the southern heat.
I know that it’s really because you
don’t want to hear your relatives say
how proud of you
he would be.

   5
You say it’s not that God isn’t real,
it’s just that God isn’t right
(or at least this one isn’t).
You tell me you can’t have faith in a Savior
that doesn’t save.
Our Father cannot replace
yours.
We hold hands on the walk back home,
imagining all the people
walking with us.

   6
Two years later,
when they needled his Jeep Grand Cherokee
onto the back of your left shoulder,
it didn’t feel as permanent as the crumpled metal,
or as final as the etched granite on the grass that Friday.
You still can’t talk to anyone with
the same name as him.

   7
By the next time we go to get cupcakes,
we have stopped keeping track of our debts.
We take turns paying for desserts and
lunches, holding hands beneath
the bridge, where the barbed wire
still weaves like shoelaces
through the curling metal of the railing.
When we fall asleep that night,
it is not too dark for me to trace the
lines on your shoulder
of the car that you will never drive.

   8
Tonight when you grin I know
that your smiles are reserved,
fit only for moments like these,
when darkness is held off
by a strong outstretched arm,
shaking with the effort of being
(happy).

When Life Gives You Lemons, Find the Grove

 by Jordana Weiner

there is a basket of meyer lemons in my kitchen
bought out of fear of the season passing.

i have stripped them all of peels
& packed the peels into small jars

of clear vodka. i have squeezed
the juice & ground the pulp

my fingertips burned this is all
in the freezer now what a process.

i lick sour from my fingers
shake zest from my hair

& i am green and the grove,
and the bats nesting in the grove,

and the grove itself as lemons thud
down, to the dirt,

the bats flying,
erratic in the dark,

with their strange and echo heads,
their membrane arms wrapped up

as the thinnest blankets, how
has nothing punctured?

i hang upside down
by my knees on a branch,

& think of all the places
i might sink my teeth.

An Elegy for Nathan

 by E Yeon Chang

The yellow ribbon, a prominent emblem for suicide awareness, is also used to commemorate the sinking of Sewol, a South Korean ferry that carried 325 high school students.

Truth is, you asked me to homecoming and I never gave you a dance

In April, I was tying yellow ribbons
thinking about high school kids
on a sunken ship

and I wondered about what difference I could have made
smoking in empty streets and screaming with you

In April, we could have been
teasing traffic lights and
walking bare feet around falling ashes

Instead, I made a metaphor
out of leaving soft things in open waters, tried
to warn people against presenting
shoes to loved ones

Now, I am nipping at disappointing
cherry tomatoes, high off a drug
father would disown me for

Maybe I will cancel and resend the friend
request, like I did the April you died

but when I wake up you’ll still be gone
and all I will see is a tattoo of an origami boat

And again, I will resent being young yet not young enough

Memorial Day, 2015

 by Tia Leilani Ramos

TV pitch for an “oh shit!”

 by Maya LeBeau

The plot twist is that they start making out
Who is “they” oh they are the women
This is 2015 television and there is always
An ex-girlfriend and some kind of lover
These women are crazy bitches they will try anything
This is what strong looks like who gives a flying
Fuck about the main boys I mean enough
Of that we can’t even show ass so what is the next
Best thing to show how they get down this is called
Acting does she have experience who even knows just watch
They are going to fuck yeah they can’t help themselves
And this is going to get everyone running to the fields
And by the fields I mean the Internet and yes
Everyone is running and they are all saying
These women they are all bisexual who
The fuck knew this is world news
She is down to fuck she is gay no she is queer
Whatever she is down for the pussy and that
Is television and that is the plot twist
This is coming out this is the surprise
They are kinky this is about sex let us
Always make it about sex forever and ever and
Let us herald the community we the writers are
Knocking so we are saying let us in hey we
Thought of you and they say thanks and we say
This is great this is representation because
All of these strong women are partly gay obviously
This is turning everyone on look at how confident
They are and I mean what other kinky shit
Do we have up our sleeve this season?

Persephone in Limbo

 by Jae Lee

I.

In the distance, the Verrazano
blinks, reminds me of my mother.
I wonder if she would agree:
fingers interlocked in the metal
strands of a fence is a promise
the way Brooklyn dogs barking
means silence. I listen closely.
I can’t remember the last time
we were two women home alone.
I find her inside the grocery bags,
but the distance never closes.

II.

More and more I am feeling
like a dog by your side, these days
I look out the kitchen window
and see the silent lake you always
dreamed about without the desire
to get beyond it. As it pools at
my ankles, I take the knife and cut
my chest open, feed my pulse
the pomegranates with my fingers.

III.

In our house in Monterey bay,
my father would garden and watch
deer eat his tulips from the window,
and my mother taught me how
to read the weather, how to open
clams and blue mussels. She told me
this was marriage. I believe her.
You keep dreaming about the lake.
I spread too thin, too comfortable.