SUNHOUSE Summer Writing Mentorship ✺ 2024 Mentee Folio
Ever since we introduced them to their mentors, we knew that this year’s cohort of mentees, our first ever cohort, would be an astonishing one. Many of them explored authors such as Solmaz Sharif, Dana Khoi Nguyen, Paige Lewis, Jamaica Kincaid, Jenny Zhang, and more, while others learned about the workings of the publishing industry or tackled projects such as their first chapbook. Regardless of the individual pathway each mentee found with their mentor, their learning has not only been a creative endeavor, but also a personal one. We hope the experiences accrued through SUNHOUSE will continue to invigorate, challenge, and inspire this cohort of writers throughout all of the worlds they enter and spaces they touch. And we hope this folio illuminates that, too.
- Ruoyu Wang, Director of the SUNHOUSE Summer Writing Mentorship
Aigerim Bibol
American Sonnet for My Grandmother Across the Ocean
Әже, the last time I saw you was the day I boarded the plane
to America. Morning light spilled through glass panes as you
stood at the stove, frying shelpeks. Golden brown edges sizzled
in hot oil. I breathed in traces of buttery warmth, air thick with
flour & farewell. The aroma will reach our ancestors, you told me,
kneading dough with practiced ease. Needing strength, I pressed
my fingers into the soft mass & mimicked the stretch of your hands.
Molded the future with each fold, home in every bite. Homeland
starts from the hearth, so I find solace in the dying embers. Untether
ghosts in the attic, unbox memories in a land of promises that don’t
belong to me. At night, I lean out the window of this empty apartment.
The stars here are dimmer, mere pinpricks against the dark. Still,
whispers of steppe & sky guide me home. Each step brings me closer
to your voice. Сен әрқашан менімен біргесіз—in my heart.
Akshita Krishnan
hymns: a triptych
i. to god
i hang myself against the open mouthed valley of Babylon, in silence, solace. i scream alphabets in looped letters, bury my words in sarcophagi because no one here can hear it anyway.
god, god, god if you hear these prayers like everyone says you do, please kill me for the amount of space i’ve taken up and wasted. lay me on the ground and take me to heaven because i feel my insides turning into soft, rotted peaches, and i can’t look at anybody when it happens.
use my mother’s knife when you do it: hold me tight like your child, whisper into my ear sweet nothings, and rob me of a lifetime—i promise i’ll make you proud in the ether.
ii. to you
underneath the crown palisade, insurmountable marble, i become a mapmaker, take you in my hands, holding you: i become a child to an ice cream cone.
floral patterns drown in my chubby fingers: i grant myself a hallucination: my inner voice rings.
i feed you aam, plump and fresh, sweeter than kheer, and there is something about this that makes you magical. sweet old child of mine, please love me like i don’t exist.
there are slow ropes forming across the curvature of my wrists, crimson: rivers flow out, like the color of the junami apples from the trees that your acci brought to us.
you speak to me in sinhala: i say i don’t understand, that tamil is not similar enough, so you learn to speak me instead.
iii. to thatha
i tell everyone that you are the greatest storyteller that i know of, but i hope you know that it is not all i will remember. i reflect on the history you have, cradle it in my palms ever so delicately.
of you, i remember, in soft evenings, the warm cups of chai we drank, the monsoon rain we watched drip, the carrom games in which we held the board up with patti’s old spice jars, the peanuts, shells on the floor, near the bank, and the beaches we walked when they dried up. i remember your kind eyes, our days spent at the bazaar, the temples around Trichy.
i haven’t found the time to see you, and i don’t think i have any excuse to cross oceans, continents, countries, and states, and you.
i hope that, once, when everything is closed, my epitaph could be mistaken for yours.
Akshita Krishnan is a South Indian writer who studies English and Economics. Her work has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, amongst others. When she isn’t writing, she plays with her dog and enjoys coke floats.
Amy Lin
the orchid
butts her head to my cherry-tipped nose,
tongues inflamed violet, petals a roaring
mane, veins popping like Father’s tree-
bark hands. back when she was transplanted
last April, the moon broke its curfew to
watch her scream: maggot-fingers clutching
her plastic cocoon, infants wrenched from
cradles, howling curses at the marbled sky.
pity how she sways by the edge every
night, how she swallows water like wine.
i grab a fistful of her face, tongue on
tongues, petals dripping from my teeth.
tears like dew on scrubbed wounds;
i smile with violet-stained lips.
Previously published in Rust & Moth
Amy Lin (she/her) is a writer from New Jersey. Her poems have been recognized by YoungArts and are featured in The Penn Review, Rust & Moth, and elsewhere. When she is not writing, she enjoys word puzzles, animating, and eating home-cooked meals.
Brian Chan
Revival
By the time New York is dead,
a eulogy is graffitied on
the cavitied walls of Chinatown.
Once, our parents sailed through oceans to this surgery
of a land; their hands sugared
and ready for harvest. Tonight,
we choke on mother tongues, our hunger
insatiable. There is no space
for songbirds to cry morning. Nobody notices
the infant,
its swollen head tipping like
a fat palm leaf, creased fingers clutching
concrete dust as if it were
sugar. This sky was once
a fluorescent sign: one that read
Taste of China, leaking neons
onto heads of compressed hairs,
faces washed with silence. We exchange the word tenderness
for survival,
our mouths permanently etched
into pursed figures.
We shape our calloused fists
into o’s to rebuild
shards of home,
our arms reddening, pressed
against rotting metal. Here, where even color is a
gateway, we can build stars from all this rust.
Cararose Vitale
One Giant Leap
The mother stared into the sky as a space shuttle disappeared into its depths, and she held her children tight. Tomorrow they could be crossing that wide expanse. She could offer to work on a shuttle in exchange for their transport; most of her friends and relatives had done that. She could sneak aboard someone else’s spaceship and hope they didn’t get caught. Either way, the mother and her children would leave the earth behind. They were already miles away from home; they had been forced to leave after her orchard had failed, her trees burnt to stumps in the wildfires that got worse every year. What was 240,000 miles more? There were never any fires on the moon.
The mother sat down on a crumbling sidewalk, and her children plopped down next to her. As they drew stick figures in the ash that blanketed the ground, the mother surveyed their surroundings. A few other travelers walked through the streets, a minute fraction of the population the town used to boast. The shuttle launch pads just ahead were perpetually smoky, and the town around the pads wasn’t much better. Almost everything was gray, though there were still some weeds in the sidewalk cracks providing a touch of color. She even saw a dandelion.
Her youngest child’s whine broke the silence, asking, “When can we go home?”
“Soon,” the mother said softly. “Soon we’ll have a wonderful home, and we’ll feast on steaks every night and eat pancakes every morning. But tonight, let’s eat peaches and toast.”
The mother handed her children some bread, untoasted and almost stale, and rummaged in her bag until she found the last three tiny, discolored peaches. Most of the bioengineers had left in the early days of the moon colonizing, and while crops hadn’t stopped growing completely after their departure, they were smaller and more susceptible to blight. When the mother was a child, her father would bring her peaches from the family orchard that were larger than both of her hands. She would always start eating ravenously, juice running down her chin and coating her hands as she attacked the peach, but the fruit was so filling that she would eat barely half of one before tossing the rest of it to the birds. Now her children were always hungry. The mother tried to pretend that she wasn’t hungry too, but her stomach’s growls betrayed her.
There was no produce here. The only meat around was that of rats. Nobody stayed here long; the shuttle systems were automated now, and most people left for the moon as soon as they reached the launch pads. But if the mother took her children and turned back, she was sure they would find some crops, abandoned, not yet rotten or burned. More and more people were fleeing the earth, and leaving everything behind, including food. She didn’t have any way to store that food, but maybe they could make due. Maybe they could survive on scavengings for long enough for the land to heal, and she could start a new farm, and her children would know the bounties of the earth as well as she had when she was small. The moon was cold, and distant, and everything on it was artificial. The earth was natural, and dying, and still so beautiful.
“Okay, time to walk again,” the mother said, and held both her children by the hands, gently tugging them to their feet. “We don’t have to walk so far this time, but I can carry you both if you really need me to.”
Her children grumbled softly and dragged their feet, but neither of them asked to be picked up. The mother worried sometimes that they could tell how tired she really was. She wasn’t sure how far she could’ve carried them, if they had asked, but they didn’t ask.
As they walked, the children made a game out of naming every animal they could remember seeing since they had left the orchard. “We saw rats as we entered the town!”
“I saw vultures by that old gas station.”
“We definitely saw mosquitos. I still have bug bites on my legs.”
“I can’t think of any more.”
“Oh, we saw all those dead cows! Does that count?”
The mother remembered the myriad of animals she had encountered in her youth, birds and foxes and deer and fish and goats and cats and dogs and so many more, and tried not to despair. She tuned out her children’s game, focusing on scanning the streets for a building that seemed habitable, testing each door she came across. Each metal handle left a different impression on her palm. Most people had left these houses for good, but many had still locked their doors behind them. Other buildings had had their windows smashed as similar travelers sought places in which to sleep or shelter from storms. The glint of glass littering the sidewalks outside these buildings held strange reflections of the grayed out sky. The mother gazed into these shattered pieces, and lost herself in the motions. Try to open a door, fail, avoid the glass, and move onto the next door. And again, and again, and again.
The mother was brought back down to earth by her oldest child yanking on her arm. “I said, are there lots of animals on the moon?” the child asked, staring up at the mother intently.
“Well, there’s many people there, but I don’t know how many animals they brought up. Maybe there’s loads and loads of animals. They could even be creating new species of animals up there, with all of the advances we’ve had in bioengineering,” the mother said. She did not think that there were many animals on the moon.
“But how can there be room for new animals?” the oldest child asked. “The moon is smaller than the earth! You told us last week that the moon was like one giant city now.”
The mother finally found a door that opened, and the conversation was forgotten as they entered the place that would be their refuge for the night. Every inch of the building was filled with cobwebs. Fraying carpets that had once been vibrant covered the floors. Photographs covered the walls, films of dust across their surfaces rendering the subjects of the photos indistinct and faceless. But the bedrooms had clean mattresses, and some old crackers in the cupboard which could be their breakfast, which was all they really needed. The family climbed into their borrowed beds and drifted off to sleep.
The mother rose before dawn. She checked on her children, who were still resting peacefully. Then she walked outside of the house and stared at the horizon as the sun slowly rose. A space shuttle streaked in front of the sun, barely a blip on its surface, and the mother decided that they would not be leaving earth today. There was always tomorrow, after all.
Cararose Vitale is a rising senior in high school. She is an avid writer who mainly focuses on science fiction and fantasy. In her free time, she loves to read and paint.
Emily Pedroza
Fiona Jin
Grace Marie Liu
Laundry
Mondays are for trying
on dotted nightgowns: no mother there
other than our mothers. Eight
ounces of orange juice, our necks in circles,
affirmations strung
onto a clothing line. It’s winter and I am
tired of silent letters and rubber
bedpans. Another
bout of bad weather. Another
half-cleaned tray nailed
onto the bulletin boards. Saltines
and minestrone sweat
into the tablecloth. Everything
is either boiled or steamed:
eggs, cauliflower, cod. Always
water rising in our bellies. The nurse
comes in one morning and says
This is no place to grieve, slaps
the laundry schedule on the walls.
Elton John is still standing
but only because he has to.
I find myself the king of the grit,
yellow bathrooms, girlhood
ticking between my thighs. I stop
calling. I do not understand
how to gut this phantom
hunger when wet socks flap like mouths.
In summer, this is all I’ve got: The lilies
perched in the crossing, migrating.
Previously published in Sundog Lit
Grace Marie Liu is a Chinese-American poet from Michigan. She is a 2024 YoungArts National Winner with Distinction in Poetry and an alumna of the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program and the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Minnesota Review, Sundog Lit, and AAWW, among others. She serves as an Editor-in-Chief of Polyphony Lit and The Dawn Review.
Hallie Dong
Hans Yang
Irisa Teng loves a good physics metaphor. A young poet from Washington state, their work appears or is forthcoming in The Cloudscent Journal, Sophon Lit, Frighten the Horses, Evanescent Magazine, and others. Beyond writing, they can be found reading Wikipedia, playing devil’s advocate, and musing about the ever-expanding universe.
Ivi Hua
THE WORLD, UNMADE: DREAM (I)
in the face of apocalypse, even sleep touches malfunction:
the pavement cleaned of birds, vehicles choking
into silence. buried, i forget summer: how i wept soundlessly.
how the insects plummeted, scarred by heat. instead, i uproot
the suburbs. i revert houses into trees, dig through concrete
& glass, broken windows sharp, to reach a past where our hands
are only hands—not the weapons of our bodies—where we were once
loved softly. the water left by the bedside table shrivels & rots. decay
is the art of rebirth. i wish we could all be born again. i wish
we all had a chance to live this life once more—not to make up for our regrets,
but to taste the sweetness of the earth like when we were new.
Ivi Hua is an Asian-American writer, dreamer, & poet. A Pushcart Prize & Best of the Net nominee, she is the author of Body, Dissected (kith books, 2024) and cofounder of Young Poets Workshops. Ivi believes in the initiation of change through language, & you can find her @livia.writes.stories on Instagram.
Jacob Jing
park bench boyhood
seventeen & I still watch the men play basketball
in the park. their skin slick & their hair
nestling against their shiny necks & their eyes glassy
from mistaking hoop with sun. they are radiant, pressing
& pushing against one another, their veined hands
brimming with hot, thick blood. too close
& they will splatter into each other, man into
man, brother into lover. too much & I begin
to wonder if they have ever thought about tasting
each other’s rubber-soured palms. or if they
have ever imagined cupping each other’s balmy, beating
breasts, if only to familiarize themselves
with the heady rhythm of someone else’s living. or
if that’s just me, a boy only. for years I have nursed
an inherited shame, a heritage of averted eyes.
I have been trained into silence, my need translating
into observation. whenever one of the men dribbles
up to the net, their near-victory wreathed by shouts & stretched
palms, I weave my fingers over my mouth & think about myself
among them. would they love my clumsiness, my small hands,
my soft legs? would they buttress my feeble defense
with their bronzed chests? or would they see themselves,
silent spectator overbrimming with precipitous desire.
my ancestors want me to look away but I do not. my eyes
were made to witness the light spilling across every single
muscled body below. something unnameable
shining around them. the court christening the men beautiful.
Previously published in Eunoia Review
Jaeho Lee
Tomorrow
The word yesterday having been spoken,
I ask after it.
In reply: after a long life, the next dawn
becomes today.
Then suns may rise, nights may fall,
but a closed eye
will prove now is still yesterday. Let
futile mornings pass.
In the mist, night footsteps are found. A green
bottlemouth whistles
at your kick, rolling drunkish into the sewer. Sip these
heavy eyelids away.
Taking you as this world’s center—yesterday you were dead,
and today too.
So it is yesterday still. Do not pour a drink in my honor;
do not desire me.
//
But just say my name once, while I still live. Let it pull like honey
from a cloud, and
wet your lips with it. Only then will you have loved me,
only then will it be—
Jaida Yao
Among other things, I'm afraid of change
Buckets catch water beneath the ceiling leak—
rusting—and the birds drink from them regardless.
It started as methodic droplets seeping through
weathered oak floorboards turned dirt beneath our nailbeds
but I still wince—as if my clammy hands can still get splinters.
We had trespassed, withdrawing to wild grass and obsidian spirals
of fallen tree trunks. I recognized lingering damp moss underneath our soles
and continued to pinch my nose—disdain locked love in a distinct metallic smell—
You, Gunpowder, roses—gluttony, told me to forget it—reckless abandon.
Then, once, you tried to feed me ripe fruit of thorny thickets, but I’d never get to taste—
Because I was unnerved by the putridness of sweetness and the embrace of monotony.
I admitted—that one time—I was long lost. You said if so, it would be both of us.
So we sat, two monogamous birds precariously perched on this tipping railing
Pecking the other, unable to soothe with shrapnel-made feathers.
Joanna Liu
Julia Liu
I Dreamed // I Lost
After Gabrielle Bates
for a conscience:
baby teeth, cleaved like splinters
for a pesto pasta recipe:
an ability to compound ‘salmon’ or ‘centimeters’
for a mother tongue:
fistfuls of Ama’s natural hair, sink spilling black
for revival in rain:
Ba’s lungs, housing a cathedral we could never fund
for a house of cards:
the jangle of rusted keys
for light in a bottle:
a war, fire the only state bodies collide in
Julia Liu is a Chinese writer based in New England. A Pushcart Prize nominee and an American Voices Winner, she has received recognition from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Pulitzer Center, and the Connecticut Poetry Society. Her work appears in Eunoia Review, CUTBOW Quarterly, Hot Pot Magazine, among others. When not creating, she enjoys cafe hopping, doing crossword puzzles, and watching too many films. Find her on Twitter or Instagram @byjulialiu.
Melissa Ng
Body of Water
I yearn to be like water, to flow.
I drink more water than most; not just for hydration, but for feeling, for completion. I like holding a cup in my right hand and sipping from a straw; it can make anyone feel like a business woman.
Just like a business woman, I keep my face clean. The second I get home, I cleanse, cleanse, cleanse. I anoint my face with water and oil cleanser. I scrub and filter until my skin peels off, until my skin burns, but the black, brown dots remain unbothered. Why is the tea tree not removing my pores when it is supposed to, when it works for everyone else? I’ve tried everything: glycolic acid, soothing toner, hyaluronic acid. Maybe I don’t use enough--so I pour, pour, pour and cleanse, and scrub, and cleanse. Acid gets in my eye and it stings like hell. Where does the acid go when it seeps into my skin? Why are my pores still there, even after a year and a half of cleansing, of detaching, of removing?
Facial harmony, the lady on my for you page says– bad features, good harmony. Is my bumpy to smooth skin ratio enough for me to still be pretty? Facial harmony is about the balance among facial features. So I guess the pores fit my face; maybe I was supposed to be freckled.
Water isn't flawed or filled with impurities. Pure water has to be made, found as a distilled or deionized substance. I was made pure— smooth skinned, innocent, soft. Now, my face is dirty, unfiltered, like sewer water.
I am one shape; water is a billion. It takes and adapts to the colors and shapes of everything. That’s what I expected to become when I moved here four years ago, but I am still trying to catch up. I still use the metric system and an Android, I can’t stand glazed donuts, I never know if I’m supposed to tip, I say “bless you” when someone coughs but never when they sneeze, I still have a slight Malaysian accent underneath my wide vowel pronunciations, and I still feel awkward saying "how are you" when I pass by a middle-aged couple on a hike. I didn’t have a choice of where I live; I wanted to live everywhere. If I could choose, I would follow water, because water can flow anywhere, from a tiny pond to a river to an ocean.
Water gets to be renewed. It evaporates then condenses then precipitates back as freshwater. I scrub and I am still the same person. I cleanse but I am still damaged. I want to be renewed, not entirely; just renewed like water. Water is never destroyed; it leaves but always returns better . I want my face to be better , without pores. I want my eyesight to be renewed, to have 20/20 vision. I want to have the hair I was born with, not the broken, split-end, frizzy hair I got permed last summer. I want to return to the way I was before I damaged myself.
Water keeps in this cycle, flowing with the wind, never running out of breath, never stopping. Water can go wherever it wants to go, say whatever it wants to say. But I am restricted; I can’t share too much about myself during ice-breakers because people will think I’m crazy. I can’t pour everything out of me, can’t tell my secrets because nobody keeps them.
Water makes up more than seventy one percent of earth, yet I can only see a billionth of it. I want to drink it all, to become 100 percent water. I am more than halfway there.
When will I become water: pure, clean, free?
Melissa Ng is a Malaysian-Chinese creative nonfiction writer from Massachusetts. She is a prose editor for FOLIO and has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. She was also a SUNHOUSE Summer Writing Mentorship Mentee and a Fellow of the Grubstreet Young Adult Writers Program.
Oyshi Monawarah
Elementary Dog Safari
“Excuse me, have you seen my…”
I never finished that sentence no matter how many times I asked. I was searching for something that I had recently lost—I just wasn’t sure what it was. So that frantic feeling, the sinking pit in my stomach, was very fresh. I searched with my mother, siblings, and another friend who I can’t remember. We would silently enter each classroom and politely ask the teacher or a kid if they’d seen a dog.
I assumed she was a dog because there were slight variations coursing through my mind at any moment. A blanket of golden fur here. Green grass there. They interrupted me while I was skipping, painting the bathroom, or climbing endless stairs. Occasionally, I’d visit the help desk and recite the few digits of my dog’s ID code that I could remember. It didn’t work. That loss was accompanied by others as well. Trivial losses such as forgetting how I got from the bus to the main office. Or major losses like, Why was I searching for dogs in a school? Why can’t I stop moving?
I was pacing up and down the hallways of my elementary school, P.S. 122Q Mamie Fay. The lengthy name was shortened to ‘122’ to better match the daintiness of the building. It was so small that the whole middle school had only half of the top floor to themselves plus two gymnasiums and computer labs to be shared with grades K-6. But it never, ever felt cramped—rather, each class was so absorbed in its own microcosm that students rarely ventured past their floor. But that day (Hour? Week?), it was almost too eerie: was it not strange that my mother, brother, sister, He, and I could run up and down, up and down every floor and not bump into a single soul? That countless cards, documents, and pictures twirled through the knuckles of my hand, yet I couldn’t memorize a single detail? Only now do I question it.
…
Wake up and smell the coffee. I’m splayed over the writing desk caked in crayon wax and scratched names. Calculus sits neglected in the corner. My dribble blurs f(x) and the three integration symbols, solids of revolution spinning my brain on a top. Multiple choice of life. In a minute, I’ll submit the half finished problems as a white flag to signal my woes. For now, saliva drowns the sound.
He rolls his eyes. “There’s a word for this. Testing anxiety.”
I ask for help but he just hangs from the chandelier. “I need to do good.”
“Why?”
“College. A job.”
“You don’t even want to leave, so why try so hard? Who’s running behind you? Do you remember what the gun that started off this whole race sounded like?”
“I think I’m doing this for myself. So that I’m not stuck petting dogs and peeling siblings off the floor like trampled, blackened gum.”
hrumpf! “Well, don’t ask me for a formula.”
(Just take the grade already and let me drown, dammit.)
…
Every classroom was different in little ways. Circular, rainbow rugs with the alphabet and numbers squashed under butts. Neon paper and essays, drawings, or worksheets stapled onto boards. So many Smartboards, too. Quaint desks with the chairs flipped onto the surface. It was time for the kids to leave, then. Despite the familiarity of the rooms, I felt like I had no idea where I was going.
Everytime, all of the kids sat in a huddle before the Smartboard, watching a blank white screen or trembling static. Everytime, the teacher regretfully whispered, “No, I haven’t seen it,” and plucked a stuffed toy out of pity. Sometimes a child would dive into the ceiling-tall mountain of plushies piled in the back, swim through the fluff, and lunge for air with a toy in hand. As if my dog, my achievements needed replacement. Soon enough, I was collecting toys like a videogame character on sidequests. A ladybug plush shaped like a lentil. A shark with white felt triangles for teeth and a bright red mouth. Names, birthday tags, and copyright icons. I was confused as to why they were giving me mementos when I needed a living dog, yet I didn’t complain. I kept them all in my back pocket for my little sister, who at some point started crying for even more toys.
My sister cries relentlessly. She cries when people sit out of order; when the dolls on a shelf don’t match; when the movie on screen has another child on it. I called out to her as she scaled the walls and pleaded with her to quit swinging from the LED tube lights.
“I swear Daria, I’ll leave you here if you don’t stop crawling right now!”
WAAAaAaAAAAHHHHHHHH!
“We have to look for … We can’t waste time like this!”
WAAAaAaAAAAHHHHHHHH!
“Ugh, I’m so sick of this. She needs us, we can’t leave her behind.”
WAAAaAaAAAAHHHHHHHH!
“YOU’LL NEVER SEE ME AGAIN.”
I was only threatening, of course.
“Toys? Toys?” Daria cried.
My brain pounded against the walls of my skull. The staircase started to spin around at a dizzying speed. Please, please. I pushed in the opposite direction of the twirling stars, but even force wouldn’t slow down my beating heart, my rolling eyes. Taking the steps down one-by-one only made the situation worse. I shoved my hands into my pockets and clenched the fabric of my pants, slippery nylon warm to the touch.
I was surprised, however, by the crinkle of receipt paper against my fingertips. Turns out it was an ID card—an ID for a smiling, shiny golden mass. The ink of the name swirled in a blurry mess, as if someone had poured a glass of water just to keep her missing. What they missed was her registration number.
In a trance, I giggled and laughed down the stairs and jumbo slides to the first floor. Arms swinging and head still pounding, I slammed the ID card onto the security desk near the entrance with a tawny victory sigh satisfying enough to make the guard roll their eyes. Well, would’ve. The guard didn’t seem to have a face.
“Can you check the cameras for a dog?”
“Is this the dog’s registration?” The guard gestured to the damp, swirly card.
“Duh.”
The guard typed the number into a keypad.
“I don’t see any dog with this number in our logs. I don’t think a dog ever entered the premises either.”
“We-well that can’t be right. My friend, He, said my dog would be here. We checked every room and didn’t find him, but I know, I just know she’s here.”
“Didn’t you come in here with a sister?”
Hm?
“The crazy girl flapping her arms everywhere. Don’t tell me you lost her too,” the guard warned.
She should’’ve followed me…
“Why don’t you focus on her, instead?”
The scene ended with me running around the halls once again, looking for a small girl with a ladybug plush. With every step, Daria’s laugh faded away from my memory. The glint in her brown eyes was lost in any image I could conjure of her. Or green? I tried drawing her outfit, if it was the four-leaf clover shirt or her yellow sweater. One teacher asked what color Daria’s hair was. Brown-no, gold. Gold shirt? Fuzzy like fur. Daria liked to run across fields of flowers amidst rolling grass. She liked snacks. She liked crying.
“Excuse me, have you seen my…”
Gulam “Oyshi” Monawarah is a Yale University undergraduate student originally based in New York City. As a political writer, Opinions columnist, and activist, her writing has previously been featured in The Stuyvesant Spectator–for which she was a former editor–and Next Gen Politics.
Precious Foreman is a sixteen-year-old spoken word poet, filmmaker, model, and title holder from the DMV area. In 2023, Precious became the 8th Youth Poet Laureate for Prince George’s County, Maryland, and has performed during various events across the United States. Precious is also passionate about film and has written and directed her short film, Call Me Cleo, and later worked with the PBS NewsHour to produce a feature story. She is a rising Junior in High School and dreams of becoming an Academy Award Winning artist. You can contact her at foreman4bookings@gmail.com.
Rebecca Cai
me versus lips
i. Wendelin Van Draanen: confessions of a serial kisser
i read a book once dedicated to a serial kisser
now that i look back, it may very well be my diary
two years prior to disgust i discovered other mouths with my own
post-mortem, do you one better, post-osculum
latin kisses looks nothing like lips unraveling, tongues
bleeding. an end to noise,
sister to many; family to none
too many; i’ll ask her to leave
a ruined home
ii. who i have already kissed
my record grins warm under lapping tongues
it’s cleaner than you’d think, never
under six foot, vegetarian, nor Christian
though you could hardly be godly mouthing with anyone
the stalks that hum their protest to stroking do so with
felt skin unbearable
when i wrench south the string of saliva between us
it loops around my fingers and bears intimate of its own
iii. who i am afraid to kiss
i am afraid to be a white family that kisses each other on the mouth
every time i watch it happen i wonder if i should dial someone
perhaps for myself, have i ever felt bound by
an embrace rather than bummed,
the truth is i am scared to kiss nainai
because all i will taste is the yellow of her toothmilk,
gripping like buried grease
Rose Raphael
Ryan Chan
Sorry, I Just Love This
I know you do because you're telling me. You apologise, palm outwards, surrendering
your fingerprints. Synonyms include: mazes of matter, vertigo of constellations. It never made sense until someone named it. Do you make sense because someone named you? How do you know you matter if you don't know what matter is? The Big Bang was but an echo from space, an answer with a "probably". Sorry, it probably wasn't that deep. But love is a strong word. Can you just love? The pool always looks shallow from above. Here, on the deep end, where the water pressures our chests, magnetically pulled to our hearts, our fingerprints are allowed to soak - time non-existent, skin already wrinkled. Tell me more. Tell me about the different kinds of apples, and what the aunties in China do, and that talk with your neighbour. Tell me about meeting up with your friends for a picnic, just the night before. Tell me about your favorite things the way Maria did, through a song in the storm. Can't we just love? The best polaroids cannot encapsulate without light leaking.
Ryan Chan (he/him) is a 17 year old student from Selangor, Malaysia. Besides poetry, he enjoys photography, film, art curation, music, tarot and reading on Internet Archive. He is usually found wandering with headphones on, seeking out new adventures, often through forms of art. You can find him on instagram @peculiar.ryan.
Su Thar Nyein
Teeth only become teeth after
Su Thar is a student from School of The Arts, Singapore’s Class of 2025, with an emphasis in Literary Arts. She won First Place in 2022’s National Poetry Competition Singapore in the Senior Category, and 2023’s York University’s YorkIASG Competition. When not writing or reading, she’s often rewatching her favourite films and scrolling on Pinterest for literary inspiration. Her favourite part of writing is explaining her work to her mother in broken Burmese.