SOFIA HINCAPIE-RODRIGO
1. It’s a hot one, even for the South—the kind of summer where we are sticky with sunscreen and smelling like a flurry of coconuts and careless adolescence. I tell you I’m not jumping off the cliff unless you’re at the bottom waiting for me. You don’t hesitate—you never do. Escaping the heat, I watch you dive into the lake, shattering the stillness it held….Continue Reading Flashbulb Memory and the Things I Have to Remind Myself to Forget

SARAH WU
On the day my brother gets his college admissions, he picks his envelope up ever so gently, drags a finger across the edge of the flap, and peels back the white like he would peel back the skin of a banana. The envelope bulges with expectations, ripe with the fleshy substance of letters, words, sentences, paragraphs; if he could slip the paper into his mouth, the faintly salty tang of sweat from his upper lip would mix with the dryness of the paper, letters blurring together into inkblots indistinguishable from each other. …Continue Reading my brother gets his college admissions letter

CAROLYN THOMAS
The winds howl outside, and the rain smacks the ground with a heavenly force. Although it is nighttime, the lightning strikes illuminate the sky—the clapping sound of thunder echoes outside. The weather creates an unstable atmosphere inside Riverbend–a suburb of Silicon Valley. It does not often rain here, and rarely does it pour like this. …Continue Reading Pause and Break 

TIIA MCKINNEY
Sparkling dark blue waters violently crashed over my head, / They pinned me under their strong currents, forcefully grabbing me in a chokehold / I desperately inhaled, trying to taste the salty air on my tongue, / Instead salty water crashed past / my lips, over my tongue, to the back of my throat, past my tonsils,…Continue Reading Sea of Sorrow

ZOE ALARCON
You would approach your mother’s bed / Afraid of an intruder / Now you approach it / Afraid of yourself  / Hoping she can save you from eternal tinnitus / Drown it forever with a peaceful sonata …Continue Reading Ruminations

SAM SPRATFORD
before i learned to swerve down / narrow city streets— / i fell / i fell in love with the existentialists’ sooty prose / peering into an opium abyss and seeing my reflection in obsidian and…Continue Reading the breakfast date (break, fast!)