Category: Essays

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    Rachel Carroll

    The Magic Structure I’m going to take you on a little walk around this structure, a structure that has a magic to it. A hemispheric surface of connected triangles or polygons, sheathed in glass, aluminum, wood, or synthetic skin, enclosing the most volume with the least surface, strong and light, its symmetry mimicking the geometry…

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    Ilana Bean

    NORMAL FEET I watched the bottom of my toenails grow out beneath purple nail polish this summer, which thrilled me, like marking the height of a child in a doorway and deciding the gap is too big to account for by hair volume or posture alone. The growth also disgusted me, partially because my cuticles…

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    Virginia Lee Wood

    GHOST COLLAGE When Dad was very sick, in the last winter we could keep him, a black snake came into the house and Mom said, “That’s his Dad,” and that we needed to catch it. Coming to take him before we were ready to let him go; it lay on the floor beside his hospital…

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    Han VanderHart

    CONFEDERATE MONUMENT REMOVAL …natural monuments remind us of the presence of the past, our connection to it. Their ongoing presence suggests continuity, a vision into a future still anchored by a would-be neutral object of the past. Man-made monuments tell a different story. Never neutral, they tend to represent the narratives and memories of those…

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    Kat Moore

    TREES, MONSTERS, WITCHES: FRAGMENTS OF BEING A GIRL Taylor’s cute and kind. He’s seventeen, I’m sixteen. He’s the valedictorian, I’m the weird girl with the dead brother, dead from AIDS, back when so many gay men were dying. One night, we sneak out and meet each other at a park. We walk through the tall…

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    Andrea B.

    PETALS While my body was still pulsing with private pain, you sent me purple flowers. In a translucent fuchsia vase, tinting the water the color of blood, hardly concealing the wounds of the twisted, severed stems. I turned them again and again, there on the edge of my desk, to face the pink daisies instead.…

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    Miah Jeffra

    A FICTION MORE REAL (after Pink Narcissus) A smooth twink with an enthusiastic butt crawls nude through a technicolor garden. The sky is dark but the world gleams with a glitter-light, the camera gliding over him, as if the lens has fingers. The twink ponders animatronic butterflies, his nipple with a blade of grass, his…

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    Erin Slaughter

    EVIDENCE OF BURNING In a movie, this would be the place: The pockmarked road from truck tires tilling thorough bramble. Lavender sprung up like stray hairs among browned-out winter weeds. The moon-carved shutters, half-stolen by vandals, filtering damp, gray-golden light. My sister climbing the gnarled tree in the front yard, paper flowers in her hair,…

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    Erin Marie Lynch

    Not Inside or Outside, but Quietly There On the third floor of the boy’s house, white picture frames line a long hallway. Each frame holds a photo: the boy, his father, his mother, his sister, his brother. No dust lingers on the frames or glass. The boy’s father hires women to clean their faces; absence…

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    Brenda Venezia

    PHOTOGRAPHS OF YOUR TÍAS ii. Your tía hates to have her picture taken and she’ll leave the room when the cameras come out, even for family pictures when everyone gets together—well, almost everyone. But she helped raise a lot of the kids in this family, including you. I don’t know if you think about that.…