35.2 Winter/Spring 2023


The Date

Jessie Ren Marshall

We’re Facetiming from our apartments. I’m up in Inwood, happy that my housemates aren’t home but anxious they might return and overhear our conversation. Angie is in Carroll Gardens where she lives with her boyfriend Kyle, but she’s moving soon because her parents are closing on an apartment for her in Fort Greene. Whenever I express jealousy about this, Angie says it won’t really be her apartment because it’s an investment. Yes, I think. An investment you will inhabit and then inherit.


Poetry, Fiction, & Nonfiction

Self-Portrait as the astral emergency you’re fielding on facetime

Sam Herschel Wein

I’m on the moon / your favorite place, how encouraged you were I left / my safety stars

Mother of Tomorrow

Caroline Plasket

The dogs are bored. The children are bored. I was never / a child

Yukari Kneeling in My Mother’s Garden, 1994

Gen Del Raye

We had been sent out of the house to collect turnips. I was thirteen and Yukari was ageless, I thought then, as anyone above twenty-five seemed ageless to me...

Baby Think it Over

Alyse Burnside

Being queer comes with responsibilities: the pressure to be more steadfast in my convictions than my straight friends, to reinvent relationship models, family structures, kinship networks even if it means disappointing my parents by depriving them of a marriage ceremony and grandchildren, even if it means my life might never feel all that stable, even if I find it all somewhat exhausting.

The Rules for Watching

Melissa Darcey Hall

Ever since Ramona debuted her prosthetic leg at school, she’s walked the school halls with her head a little higher.

You Can’t Go Wrong with Chicken Parm

Short Fiction by Kennedy Coyne

When I ask him what his favorite kinds of pretzels are, he says rods. I tell him those are better than sourdough, but nothing beats traditional. He asks me how I define “traditional” and before I answer he tells me it’s subjective, that it doesn’t matter anyways.

On Trying to Have a Child

Brynn Saito

Days I can’t feel you, I dive my body / into the deep end, pluck golden leaves / from the silty bottom, nearly drown

I Dreamed I Was Venus de Milo

Julia Thacker

A scatter of crows came to me / and I could not refuse them

Evidence

Daniel Pope

With their hands clasped and knuckles squeezed white, the newlyweds descended the church steps. Flashing cameras froze the tossed rice in midair. Later that day at the crime scene, when the detective was handed the photos he could hear the grains clatter to the pavement.

Embodied, Explosive Worlds: Giada Scodellaro’s Some of Them Will Carry Me

Julia Brown

The central event of the first story in Giada Scodellaro’s debut collection, “The Cord,” is so shocking that I’ve been thinking about it for days.

Myth-making and Myth-breaking: An Interview with Jai Chakrabarti

Tayyba Maya Kanwal

Jai Chakrabarti’s fiction has a striking orality to it, a tone that emanates from his characters’ psyche and subtly permeates an entire story. On a 2022…

Pas Encore

Robert Herbst

The violinist made a little speech. “All music,” he said, “concerns life and living.”

Autopsy

Doug Ramspeck

My father / carried me often like a dead deer // on his shoulders up the stairs to bed, / my arms and legs gripped before his body, // my fallen neck bobbing

This is Tradition

Eva Recinos

Music was serious to me — and so was anger.

GOING TO EUCLID

Ali Black

I swear / he yelled at me like I had plans / to set the field on fire in my sports bra

Emily Dickinson Takes Off My Clothes

Meg Yardley

She’s always opening up / spaces in me.

Carrie Buck

Caroline Plasket

I birthed her. And when I think back it is like / a nearly drowned head cutting the water’s surface.

Self-Portrait as Mother as Nature Documentary

Chelsea Krieg

The shoebill pesters its mother for a drink, says David Attenborough.

Every single one

Stephanie Staab

People are afraid of my memory and they should be.

Fruit 4 Fruit

Sam Herschel Wein

I’d always wanted this, I just didn’t know / to give it a / name.

Fugue

Matthew Lawrence Garcia

The summer my grandmother’s fugues started, my mom was working two jobs, one as a nurse at St. Joseph’s Hospital and another as a freelance secretary in a small translation house that sent her home with complimentary poetry collections that she read late at night by the weak light in the kitchen.

Beginning after the End: Allegra Hyde On Craft, Catastrophe and Collectivism.

Madeleine Gaudin

In her newest collection The Last Catastrophe, Allegra Hyde tracks ideas of  apocalypse and collective action from an intergalactic finishing school to…

Still Life of Goat with Junipers, Palace Walls

Avery Williamson

I drank the creek water until my eyes, until my eyes were prayers too.

WHEN MY MOTHER DIED

Ali Black

I don’t ask anyone to pray for me

The Date

Jessie Ren Marshall

We’re Facetiming from our apartments. I’m up in Inwood, happy that my housemates aren’t home but anxious they might return and overhear our conversation. Angie is in Carroll Gardens where she lives with her boyfriend Kyle, but she’s moving soon because her parents are closing on an apartment for her in Fort Greene. Whenever I express jealousy about this, Angie says it won’t really be her apartment because it’s an investment. Yes, I think. An investment you will inhabit and then inherit.

Prince Shakur’s When They Tell You to Be Good

Ishena Robinson

In his award-winning debut memoir When They Tell You to Be Good, author and activist Prince Shakur vividly captures and decodes lived experiences that…

Down in Yellow

Kyle Lung

Either way, whatever the city’s doing, it’s enough to change the color of the sky to this bone-white dome, the color of talc, and if they can take the blue out of the sky, they can take something from me. But it’s weird, not knowing what.

Weightless

Geetha Iyer

If You Aren’t Busy I Think I’m On Fire

Sreshtha Sen

Every Sunday, I practice saying no in three languages.

EXPLICATION OF THE POET’S BREASTS

Kelly Weber

I can’t write about breasts without thinking of damselflies stinging the surface of water.

semi-autobiography as SNL castmember

Anthony Borruso

as i hover above myself thinking about our fathers / how they were ushered from the least to best known borough / how they were fed so soberly into the moloch’s mouth

Remnants

Katie McMorris

The book of Ezekiel opens / with a windstorm.

Like Mother

Crystal Odelle

Time can mean grace for survivors of sharp ends. Like, how one afternoon, god meant finding your eyes. I’m trying to say thank you for teaching me how to quit arching away from the glass, how to lean in.


From the Archives

Oh, The Pretty Boys

Shannon Savvas

Their forever never lasts that long. Gone by Christmas.

The Air Between Us

Kathleen Boland

And the cloud that took over the family’s house that Tuesday wasn’t made of your run-of-the-mill water vapor. It was so humid and heavy you could reach out and shake hands with it, and it would grab your hand and shake back.

My Work

Razi Shadmehry

And yet: my work is labor the way love is labor, is liability, is constant risk assessment.

Father's Day 2009

Alexander McElroy

He wasn’t a particularly good Dad (though we weren’t great kids, either, loud and ravenous, always asking for pizza or pocket change), but the holiday didn’t call for distinctions of merit.