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.
Brilliant, she thought, studying her own face. Following
the lines like little eroded paths down a hill of dirt.
At the bottom of anything is the top of something.
Before bed she pulls the blinds down in specific order,
then she taps each wall three times with her right pointer finger.
Grief invades
the thin columns of days. A phone
rings. Tree bark flakes
away. I become
salt on tongue, raw
That August I chewed a pill
and slept. A green dragonfly lit
my daughter’s hand on fire. Her new
school planted tens of thousands
Because all the birds do not fall
frozen from the trees,
and the squirrels do wake in time, most of them,
from their torpor, to the memory of nuts
under the snow lying inert for the whole bitter season;
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
Calm app, chiropractic, codeine, Coke (the drink, not the drug, although Freud took cocaine for his), coffee, Compazine suppository (anti-emetic), counseling, craniosacral therapy, dairy-free, darkness, denial, driving myself to the ER with a barf bag, earplugs, energy healing, exercise, Fioricet (butalbital, acetaminophen, and caffeine), Flonase, ginger ale, gluten-free diet, hot bath with ice pack at back of neck, hot shower
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.
Through the tender bone
you only see a gaping hole,
point out just how hollow
this pelvis is—so full of sky,
the moon phasing,
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
in the dark, i find a new boy’s tongue in my mouth like the searching hand
of a clock: the witching hour, the rhythm of his hips, magic
against mine. sweat pools at his nape, soaking his dress shirt,
but i grip a handful of hairs, pulling his sour heat into my palm.
when he tucks his name into my ear, the syllables bounce from me
“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.
Exercise: v. middling, meddling, 500 years ago—To put into action. Circa 1340: to raise from the dead. Circa 1729: to exercise one’s tongue. To practice one’s genius. To exercise one’s pipes. To bring to bear. Circa 1738, of Psalms and Hymns. A prompt of no serious exchange—except one’s rights. Take advantage of property laws. Speak out. Hear me out: i.e. to exercise power.
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.
The year I turn 9, my father hurls a telephone across the kitchen. My dad has just received news of a friend’s death from brain cancer. I suspect he figures the receiver might as well die too, and wound the kitchen on its way out. By the time he is shoved up against his own cancer diagnosis, 17 years later, my father is too weak to weaponize telephones.
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.
It was a sluggish day at the salon. Raining outside; a Saturday. The boss lady was on edge all morning, going on about the taxi strikes and the Arab grocer up the street. “Mariana!” she snapped at me twice while tugging a boar-bristle brush through a woman’s gray bob. She doesn’t like when I stare out the storefront window, gnawing at my cuticles.
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.
I met Lia in an ad for her Haunted Doll Hotel. I suppose I didn’t meet her, but her personality was clear:
YOU’RE SEARCHING FOR A HAUNTED DOLL COMPANION.
THESE ARE MY HOURS: WKNDS, 8 P.M. / 4 A.M.
PINE BARRENS. FOLLOW SIGNS.
She was right, and I wasn’t busy, so I drove down there.
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.
At the beach house, Mama cooked whole crabs alive.
Through the steam, we watched them slowly seize up
and stiffen like the dead fish that washed ashore
the day you cut your foot on shattered glass.
When sand stuck to your weeping wound, I couldn’t clean it
the Russian train runs on only time
bones come from its exhaust pipe
we twirl our black umbrellas
and there is no dream
You’re waiting tables in Gunnison;
Grand Junction. Fruita is blood-orange dark.
Your hands are covered with silt, dry from the hard water
as you scale the Book Cliff mountains. No matter what
“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
When the apocalypse comes, I won’t be allowed to have Cheerios anymore. Not because at the end of the world, there will be no breakfast cereal, but because if the world doesn’t end, my sister actually thinks there will still be beds to make and carpets to vacuum, and she says she’s tired of stepping on the little O’s that I just can’t seem to keep in my bowl.
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…
A paradox is something that contradicts itself. It seems that all human beings are a paradox within themselves. People hold on to their own moral sense of right and wrong, yet go against it every day. This pattern unleashes us to many different paradoxes of human behavior. We see this loop show itself in many aspects of life, such as defense mechanisms, hypocrisy, and the commonly known paradox of choice.
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
When she died, they were buttery smooth and still, and buried under mine, palms pressed flat against dry, cotton hospital sheets. I suffocated them with my grief, pressing the fear of going on living without her into the skin, into the stiffness of the bed. When she entered the hospital just days before, they had been trembling…
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