Amuse-Bouche

I was the only one of my friends without a cassette player, except for Lily, whose father was the head of the Party’s neighborhood branch. Even if they had the money, he would have never allowed it, fearing that music from the West would poison her mind with capitalist ideas.

Grief invades

the thin columns of days. A phone

rings. Tree bark flakes

away. I become

salt on tongue, raw

The colorful balloons

above the baby’s head.

He reaches out

for his mother’s face.

Listen, my dog likes to stare
into mirrors. She’s not narcissistic—
she believes her reflection’s a captive
companion confined behind glass,
a trouble-free and safe friend

Thursday nights are always a little tense, but especially now, less than a week before Christmas. We are on edge; the clots of snow in the road, the family time, none of it helps. We meet in a classroom in the community center at 8pm. The rest of the building is dark, yawning shadows cast over our faces. It smells like paint and gym ball plastic.

Rx:

men’s daily multivitamin/one per day in the morning

Zoloft/100 mg per day in the morning, watch for signs of hypomania

Atenolol/50 mg per day, perhaps at night, for blood pressure

monthly massage membership: $60/one hour session, once a month

“When did you start climbing?” Evgeniy asked me while we lay in his bed after showering together. One of the things that kept me coming back to him was how he liked to clean up immediately after we were done. He did not linger in filth.
“Come with me next time I go,” I said instead of answering, taking on the active voice to combat the antisocial, post-coital placidity.

Isabel Yap is a Filipino writer of fiction and poetry. Her debut short story collection, Never Have I Ever (Small Beer Press, 2021), contains thirteen unique and extraordinary stories based on Filipino culture, history, traditions, legends, and mythology. Full of monsters, magic, and miracles, each story has its own touches of fantasy, horror, mystery, and/or hope that will keep readers enthralled.

Young Adult is a privilege. When you write for them you have to be hopeful because your audience still has a lot of living to do. When a kid reads my work I feel lucky that they read my words, that they entered a small world I created for a little bit.

I write for children and young adults because I see in them the greatest capacity for change. And that’s what we need in this country and in this world. We need informed youth who can take action that will build better communities. The level of ignorance in today’s society is astounding, and a lot of that has to do with what we had—or did not have—available to us to learn from when we were growing up.

For twenty plus years, Lise Quintana has worn numerous writing-related hats: author, editor, publisher, book reviewer, educator, and more. She’s the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Zoetic Press, which publishes cutting edge short-form literature. Zoetic is the home of the award-winning journal NonBinary Review and the fiction and poetry podcast Alphanumeric.

the Russian train runs on only time

bones come from its exhaust pipe

we twirl our black umbrellas

and there is no dream

“I wish I could say I had a strategy. I clung to poetry like a lifeline in my grief, and what got written, got written. I will say that, early on in the grieving process that followed my boyfriend’s suicide, I wrote a lot of catalog poems. Writing in lists at that stage makes sense.” – Jenn Koiter

As a child, my oldest sister kept a cage of guinea pigs in the garage, and she’d made a deal with the produce manager at the Lucky down the street—well not really a deal; he just gave her all the expired lettuce, which she fed to them. On weekends, she took them out of their cage and let them run around on the lawn…

It must have been hard, growing up with transparent skin,

when even then, no one wanted to look at your still-beating heart,

your outstanding insides

rotting in rainbow colors.

Everyone else was getting X-rays