why I don’t sing in public

October 2021 | poetry

Tiffany & Annie & me are playing on the swings.

they’re singing a Taylor Swift song I don’t know yet,

and so I wait two verses before joining in,

think I can try the chorus the second time around,

but then, it’s just me, voice quavering, me and

all these words I don’t know,

two girls silently staring at me:

stop acting like you know the notes.

 

Tiffany comes back from vacation

with one lollipop for Annie.

Tiffany plucks my hair at lunch

and asks why I got split ends.

Tiffany says I have to walk behind them

so we can be a triangle.

no one knows loneliness like a 7-year-old girl.

 

I saw her once, last year, draped on the arm of a friend

of a friend. drenched in holiday party sparkle,

a little red blister of a person.

she giggles as she tells her date:

oh, we used to kind of bully Juliana.

 

I don’t sing in public, but god, I wish I did then,

slung my fat tongue over her stupid little hoops

until it made a shiny pink welt on her eardrums.

yodeled until a chandelier fell on her head.

funny how new wounds sound like old wounds.

 

I wish I sang then,

but what I was scared of was this:

I open my mouth, and nothing comes out

but two giggles, two sets of rolling eyes,

one single searching note

wandering quietly into the rafters.

 

Juliana Chang

Juliana Chang is a Taiwanese American poet. She is the 2019 recipient of the Urmy/Hardy Poetry Prize, the 2017 recipient of the Wiley Birkhofer Poetry Prize, and a 2015 Scholastic Art & Writing Gold Medalist in Poetry. She received a BA in Linguistics and a MA in Sociology from Stanford University in 2019. Her debut chapbook INHERITANCE was the winner of the 2020 Vella Contest and published with Paper Nautilus Press in 2021.

Marcia K. Bilyk

October 2021 | visual art

Ganden Monastery, Ulanbaatar, Mongolia

 

Marcia K. Bilyk

Marcia K. Bilyk lives in rural New Jersey. She loves to explore and photograph sacred spaces around the world. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Brevity, Tiferet Journal, Adirondack Review, Split Rock Review, Cold Mountain Review, and elsewhere.

Apologia for the Undeniable

October 2021 | poetry

Baby, baby, baby, light my way. In Anno Domini 1991, that lyric

was universally liked. Liked like butter is liked. And what’s the deal

with spider eyes anyway? And why is it considered weird to go to the zoo

by yourself? None of these things seem contradictory. Or an appropriation.

Or approximate. Or anti-anything. Sweet multiplicity. Sweet butter and honey.

 

Todd Copeland

Todd Copeland’s poems have appeared in The Journal, Southern Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, California Quarterly, The Dalhousie Review, Christianity & Literature, and Sugar House Review, and his essays have been published in Literary Imagination, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, and Media, War & Conflict, among other publications. A native of Ohio, he lives in Waco, Texas.

Heather Bourbeau

October 2021 | poetry

Smoke

 

“I do not see the need to burn the houses of those slaughtered;

everything has already been taken,” I say over strong tea and thick porridge.

My colleague says I will not make a good bandit, that I do not understand the effectiveness

of hideous acts to achieve future obedience. And I wish that were true.

 

In this dust and smoked-filled harmattan night, with a moon blood orange and near full,

my breath is shallow. I cannot avoid the greedy sucking of shisha by expats—

some false sophistication of those closer to death by lungs marked and rotting,

like my grandfather’s at the sallow, emaciated end, despite decades free from the habit.

 

Before me, one man swims laps methodically. Up and down the middle of the pool.

Hardly a ripple. His broad back barely rising to allow his mouth to draw in air.

His arms deep beneath him to glide scarcely seen. The thick water calls me, to dive, to crawl,

to sink into oxygen free of carbon, to savor moments free of fumes and dust and pain.

 

 

Wolves

 

In Guam, invasive tree snakes invent a new way to slither.

Good news for their survival;

bad for nesting starlings.

 

In Washington, men with furs and Molotovs storm the Capitol.

Coddlers and goaders slowly renounce them,

try to make themselves palatable in the new light.

 

In my garden, overrun with green,

a juvenile stag, nubs where horns will be,

curls himself to sleep. Back so thin I count each vertebrae.

 

They become a rosary. Hail Marys replaced with silent thanks

as I breathe with this deer, safe here and now from wildcats,

as the hummingbird circles for sage.

 

Heather Bourbeau

Heather Bourbeau’s work has appeared or will appear in 100 Word Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, The MacGuffin, Meridian, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and SWWIM. She is the winner of La Piccioletta Barca’s inaugural competition and the Chapman Magazine Flash Fiction winner and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia and UNICEF Somalia.

The Tree of Life

October 2021 | fiction

The mangos were rotting—that’s how I knew she was going to die.

Doria Day was a simple woman—some people are just like that. She would get up in the morning and walk her three miniature poodles, shower, and drink coffee while she read the newspaper. Doria Day still read the newspaper.

When she’d moved into town, there was already a mango tree in her backyard, right in the view from my window. I’d lived there my whole life, and there had never been mangos. The day after she moved in, there were plenty. She would pick them, placing them delicately into wicker baskets—but there were always mangos.

My grandmother had taught me about the trees when I was young. She’d said they just wait for the right person, like a soulmate. That’s why some people called them Soul Trees—my grandmother had called them Trees of Life. These Trees of Life say a lot about a person—what they’re thinking, how they’re feeling. They droop when the person is sick, and they flourish when they are well and happy. Everyone has one, somewhere—we had one for me in the front yard, but it was apples. Bright, shiny red apples, growing since the day I was born.

Doria Day’s mangos were rotting. The leaves were still fine, implying she was in good health—an accident then? Supposedly, they could tell the future like that.

I made plans to see her—we agreed I would take her to do her weekend shopping, after she walked her three miniature poodles, showered, drank her coffee, and read the newspaper. She insisted on reading the newspaper.

That day, I put on shoes and a light jacket to protect against the morning chill, and stepped out of my front door, stopping only to take in the presence of my own tree—sometimes, it just felt comforting to see my thoughts and feelings, my health and wellbeing, reflected in the tangible world, something to remind me that I was doing okay. Reaching up into the branches, I plucked fruit from between the leaves, taking a bite; I’ve always loved the taste of apples—it was like the taste of existing. I’d been so busy with school and work lately, it was a relief to finally stop and savor the sweet fruit for the first time in over a week. Delicious juice dripped down my chin; I licked my lips clean as I stepped away from the tree, tantalizing flavor bleeding over my tongue as I chewed.

Thoughts turning to the day ahead, my foot caught something soft and unnatural. I swallowed the fruit in my mouth, and looked under my shoe to see a rotting apple, oozing into the grass, brown and rancid.

 

KJ Angelo

KJ Angelo is a queer Latinx writer, editor, and translator living in Portland, Oregon; KJ is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop.