Dear Reader, I cannot in good faith begin this letter without acknowledging the war on Palestine and her people. I cannot publish a folio on issues of danger without acknowledging that there’s yet to be a ceasefire, there’s yet to be a serious account of what it means to watch the world burn on our…
Category: Issue Fourteen
Editor’s Note | Place
Dear Reader, Often, our encounters with place can be misconstrued simply as background or setting. This issue seeks to redefine place in multitudes. Place, in this issue, is a rich texture of landscapes. As you peruse this issue, you will find yourself in mosques, tea shops, rivers, wild fires, filipino supermarkets, classrooms, garden soil, homelands,…
Mayn Kaddish
by Judah Greenberg In [the Jewish] view of the world, though, liking is the first step to losing: if “they” know that you love it, “they’ll” try to take it. – Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch Rabbi Ezra Lewicki was seventy-seven when he died in January of 1935, his fingers dyed black and blue from…
Come to Mama
by Mimi Manyin As a first-generation refugee, Z. had never stayed at a resort before, let alone one filled with ghosts. All she wanted was to experience the grand luxury and comfort enjoyed by well-to-do Americans, dead or alive. She wanted to feel their soft beds, drink their fancy teas, and admire panoramic views of…
Kerosene
by Meghana Mysore The sky in Oregon blazed orange. Lakshmi looked outside, and thought of her mother’s kerosene lamp burning on through the night’s darkness. In India, she kept it on her nightstand, and left it on when Lakshmi’s father was out late at the neighbor’s house, chattering away. Lakshmi could hear the whispers of…
Tree Witnesses: True Crime Stories
by Petra Kuppers One origin story of this essay is the fall of a particular tree on social media, and that tree’s roots in ancient empires. In September 2023, the Sycamore Gap tree in the UK died under an axe, fell across social media horizons around the world, and provoked tears in many who had…
Barbarian
by Chris Campanioni It is getting harder and harder to tell the colonized from the colonizers. Today one wore blue, the other white. Three days earlier the outfits were reversed. Who was it who was it that said revolutions repeat themselves, the same fantasies played out by different characters, on a revolving stage. It’s true,…
This Place is a Lottery
by Leila Barghouty I woke up this morning, and I stared at the ceiling. I wasn’t afraid of it. I didn’t think it might be the last thing I ever saw, that I might wake up in a pile of rubble, lungs filled with the pulverized powder that was once my home. My ears didn’t…
Hop Alley Heartland
by Kathryn Hargett-Hsu That the first Chinese immigrant to St. Louis was Alla Lee of Ningbo, arrived 1857; That Alla Lee acquired English while accompanying a missionary as a translator who ministered in Gold Mountain to the Cantonese railroad laborers & weaved his passage east through church & business contacts like a spider trail tracking…
Summer Conjure
by Shakeema Smalls The grave I dug for my mutt. The roses I stake at his head, its petals falling over the red brick, his favorite washcloth strewn across the back rail, covered in pine straw and refuse. Rain seeping between the shingles of the roof, booming humidity, steam rising from it as if one…