10th Anniversary Issue
big anniversary, tiny work
“Favorite Red Blanket”
Cover art by Ryan Singer
Fiction
Mr. Park watches from his seat at the storefront. Images of the aisles flicker in a 3x3 grid on his screen. The cameras were installed last year after six boxes of Wet Tresses Kanekalon braiding hair and X-pression Kinky Twists went missing from the shelves.
POETRY
Gay men, I am told, have no sense of direction—
our feminine instinct relies on landmarks to guide us
Flash
There are things that only people who really love you will tell you. Like, quiet as it’s kept, most of your headspace will be taken up by a seventh-grade field trip, one in mid-May to Water Mania, where all the young ladies will have to wear the same red swimsuit, but only yours will be the one with very pubescent pubic hair seeping out the sides, spirals pushing against the spandex.
Memoir
![Material History of the Closet [Soft Serve Ice Cream]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d122e0d694a030001ef945a/1667071979042-L2S5FHV8SFR3TTJOBMK2/memoir+2.gif)
A photo: me, a high school freshman, blue with joy for making the team, standing flagstill in a parking lot, crumpled eating a soft serve ice cream cone out of a baseball mitt.
Flash
I liked the cover because there was a sexy man on it and I’m easy to manipulate, so I brought it to the register and paid a dollar. In the sun, I opened the book and found an inscription: To Russel, with Love. John.
Poetry
the eyes followed me like a bee starved for honey
with their saccharine solicitations until the time was right
Memoir
Where the roads meet at the top of the hill and you can see farmland stretch as far as the city lights, I become intimate with everything I’ll never know.
Fiction
He’s at the window again when I wake up, all red hair and dents in his skin and eyes the color of browned beef.
Flash
The Mandarin in Aunty Li’s new American neighborhood came in a disordered mélange of dialects. Though she’d learned to find comfort in it, she hadn’t heard a quick tongue carry her childhood town’s flavor of northern China in a while.
INTER/E/VIEWS
“Latasha could avoid some stalkings, but avoid them all? / Avoiding them all could mean a mean vitamin C deficiency.”
Courtney Taylor, “Concentrate”