Because that summer my arms finally grew long enough, my grandmother showed me how to brace myself for the shot. With the butt end pressed against me, I stretched my fingers to the trigger, positioned my target in the valley of the site. I stared down the gun barrel at an Orange Crush can propped…
Category: Issue 7
Issue 7.4 – Nonfiction
This essay was first published by Left Hooks. After the last out was announced by the smooth baritone of Bob Sheppard, the crowd wearing team jerseys and hats moved slowly down creaky escalators and steep ramps in the old Yankee Stadium where Babe Ruth walloped home runs and Yogi Berra wondered when it would…
Issue 7.4 – Nonfiction
At 25 years old, Hillary Rodham received her law degree from Yale. She began work at the Yale Child Study Center and published her first scholarly article, “Children Under the Law” in the Harvard Educational Review. Her boyfriend of two years, Bill, proposed. She turned him down. At 25 years old, I quit my…
Issue 7.4 – Poetry
The word fernweh means I miss places I’ve never been Cities I’ve never explored And foreign roads I’ve never wandered through. I miss the simple wanderlust of it all Of waking up and not knowing what awaits Carelessly meandering and finding beauty in the pleasure of the unknown. And yet I still have an…
Issue 7.3 – Nonfiction
It’s a story that my sister loves to tell. “Remember that time you ran away to the library?” She laughs about it, because she thinks she understands what it is to be me. Or, rather, what it was like to be me, at eleven, nearly twelve, but going on thirty. She laughs like she understands—and…
Issue 7.3 – Fiction
Most girls don’t venture below the waist. They play at it and they feel safe with me. She was the exception on all three counts. She fastened her denim shorts and curled a hand across her stomach. Her shirt was drawn over the hungry yawn of her ribs and knotted above her belly button. Her…
Issue 7.3 – Poetry
I am a little girl kicking suns I am an old woman sitting in a pool of laughs I am the sun coming up every day to harden your heart There’s a call to arms in all our red glass mouths white hot dripping glass blown by some kind of angelic thing …
Issue 7.2 – Nonfiction
“Girls, make sure your clothes are ready for tonight,” our mother hollers down the stairs in her native tongue, Gujrathi. “Ok, Mom, we got it,” my sisters and I reply in English, as we finish our breakfast. Crisp gold and crimson leaves fall in our yard signaling that Navratri is here again. Loud prayer music…
Issue 7.2 – Fiction
All she wanted was to get out of this artificial and confining airport. It smelled too much like the menacing city she had just left. She struggled to remember the name – Toronto? Maybe. After running away for years, Cadence just wanted to get back home. If only she could click her heels three times…
Issue 7.2 – Poetry
After you were a no-show, I walked home in the dark. As soon as you saw the time, you ran to my front door. There you stood and said sorry, and I pronounced you forgiven. Then you invited me out, into the evening hours remaining, but I had already changed, into…
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