Highlights from our summer issue
3 Snellen Charts
“In Too Bright Light”; “What Can You Say”; “Learn to Speak”
Abecedarian Perplexed by Desire
“So I try / mimicking what my mother did. Endure. Never say / never, I learn.”
Aubade for Eye Doctors
“I / soul-search into corners / that cannot do the / possible ask.”
Beetlemania!!!
“I closed my eyes and caught a whiff of Aiko’s Dove anti-dandruff shampoo. For a second, the idea that my absence hurt her too filled me with a bestial joy, then faded to pain at the idea of her pain.”
chang’e, the liar
“nothing but teardrop comets; tell her i taste her sticky rice, tell her i remember: / her silken-sleeve ribbons, her bamboo biscuits”
chordata
we teach ourselves to crack without spilling over / the egg before it does not hatch
A few pieces we love & think you will too
Severed
Mae’s been cutting off pieces of herself since she was small. The mosquito bite on her Achilles, gone. The thick patch of eczema on her left shoulder, peeled clean. That one tattoo she got at Myrtle Beach when she was drunk on shitty cocktails, expertly whittled from her rib. And her eye. The purple black bruise he left her with.
Secretion
I am a woman more than halfway through my cycle, twenty-one years into a body that has shed 250-some skins through slick, snake-slithering, four-day drains. I grew all the daughters I wanted to conceive and I have borne them into their futures.
Blood Brother
Scoutmaster Justin’s on the pier, leg on a post, balls hanging out of his cut-off shorts like that guy on the Fleetwood Mac album. He has to feel that, has to know he’s flashing the ten of us treading water below. “Dive!” he shouts, all Full Metal Jacket, blows and blows his pink plastic whistle. “It’s cold as hell down there! Watch the cottonmouth nests!”
Sappho and Sappho and I, Sappho
I eat paintings the way a woman eats bibles — in the back corners of used book stores, the cracked leather and faux gilt burn her
