By: Madison Reid

 

By: May Hong

Content Warning

You remember calling him Watermelon Head when he got a bad haircut in the second grade.

 

Him scribbling your Chinese name on a piece of scrap paper and you

vigorously crossing it out,

silent-giggling

until you were both kicked out of the classroom.

 

Smoking your first cigarettes together at 13, behind the 7-Eleven where you threw up

and he laughed a little but also

held your hair.

 

*

 

Your grandparents comment on how much he has grown over the summer.

 

His mother asks you to tutor his little sisters in math.

 

It becomes trendy to list friends as siblings on Facebook so you do: brother, sister.

 

Brink of 15, him cross-legged on the floor of your room and you

on the bed, reading—a familiar scene.

 

You do not see him lunge but you feel

the sudden shock of his shoulder ramming into your jaw, the blur

of his shirt—a deep red—and then the smell

of lavender detergent as he pushes your face into the pillow. Confused

at first, then light-headed, you grapple for your phone but he snatches it

out of your hand and flings it

across the room.

 

You feel him through your shorts.

 

Fighting but staying

quiet, sour eyes, tearing

at the sheets for some whimpering semblance of why when abruptly

he pushes himself off of you and says

okay, okay.

I’m leaving.

 

You get in the shower.

You scrub yourself with soap, twice.

 

You go downstairs, tell your older sister. She says, sometimes when boys do this,

we have to forgive them.

So you try to unknot your insides.

 

The next morning

on the school bus,

he hands you a bottle of iced tea and says sorry and you say what you think is right.

It’s okay.

By: May Hong

 

1

My first perfume was Kenzo’s Flower, the one in the waveringly thin bottle with a single red poppy printed on top. I was 12, and had discovered it in my mother’s makeup drawer. I remember rubbing it between my wrists and then behind my ears, like I had seen Audrey do in the movies. I looked at myself in the mirror.

I did this for about a week, snuck into my mom’s bathroom every day to spray press and dab the perfume, until one day I came home from school to a brand new bottle on my nightstand.

 

***

I grew up in an apartment complex called Qing He Yuan—a small oasis of foliage and ponds within a metropolis—with a handful of other kids my age. There were two lifeguards at the communal pool, a tall lanky man and a shorter man who was for some reason nicknamed Fat Cat. The two of them taught us how to swim, first in the kiddie pool then eventually the big pool, holding us by the waist while we flailed and kicked our little arms and legs. Then they’d play Marco Polo with us, pretending like they couldn’t find us then all of a sudden lunging at us, making us scream and giggle.

I got older, and their gazes changed as my body did. One hot day when I was 14 I strolled in with a towel and waved at them, and they asked me what the RO-XY on my bikini top meant.  

I moved away for college at 17, and only came home once a year during the summer. Each summer they would come over to the chaise I was laying on, cast their shadows on my body and say things like look at you all grown up, you’re the prettiest girl in Qing He. Each summer it was less friendly and more insistent. Last summer I stopped going to the pool altogether.

 

2

At my first college house party, I met some guy.

That night we sat on the fire escape chain smoking cigarettes and he said I was “interesting.” We exchanged Snapchats.

He Snapped me a dick pic while I was in the dining hall. I had no idea what to do, I had never gotten a dick pic before. So I Snapped back a picture of the plum I was eating.

He was two years older, and went to a different college in the city. The first time I went over to his dorm, he said you’re wearing lipstick. I said do you not like it? He said no, it’s hot. I sat down on the edge of his twin XL. He picked up a red flannel shirt off the floor and threw it over the standing lamp, and said this is the mood lighting. I said that’s a fire hazard. He said let’s just have sex, okay?

Our “come over” exchanges were always very curt. Plans would be made in three Snaps or less: come over tmr nite; time?; 12 ish. We started doing this thing where we’d Snap a close up of our eyes, then place the white text right on our pupils. His eyes were even darker than mine were, which I found to be novel.

The fourth or so time I went over, I asked him as I zipped myself up, if he had any real interest in getting to know me. He said, a mild interest, I guess. I felt my guts slump, but I nodded and tried to look unmoved. I wanted to cry on the Lyft back. Instead I wrote a poem about him and the flannel shirt and the dark eyes for my poetry class. The instructor said to me, don’t believe him for a second, and I thought, Rachel, you don’t know shit.

 

3

As a child I pretty much always had some iteration of the Chinese bowl cut, per my mother’s edict. I don’t know what’s the average age a girl begins to desire hair autonomy but for me it was in the fourth grade when the barber took off an extra inch past my limit and I started bawling uncontrollably in the chair. The barber was terrified but when my mom came to pick me up she reassured him it’s fine it’s fine just a little girl and shuffled me out the door. All the way home I hadn’t let up on the crying so when we got to our front door my mom said okay, you can punch me right here, in the shoulder, then we’ll be even. I hit her in the shoulder, as square as I could, and she laughed and let us in.

 

***

Each time I visit home I leave with something heavier. My mother likes to hand pick from her closet clothes that she wore when she was my age, vintage clothes she no longer fits in, and tuck them meticulously into my suitcase. Sometimes, she would come across something that would make her pause and stroke the sleeves or straighten the lapel, as if there were a body in there. Sometimes yet, she would hold up a dress against herself and pivot slightly in the mirror. We do not speak during this.

One time she gave me a small gold ring, visibly worn and no longer a perfect circle. She said, I bought this for myself when I first started working, when nobody else would buy me a ring. It’s too small to fit my ring finger, so it goes on my pinky. A symbol of good feminism, I said. Proof that I was skinnier than you, she said.

 

***

My annual pilgrimage home marks the annual meeting for the committee of relatives who like to gorge themselves on my body. It’s just how they say hello, my mother says. Right. Hello, mister, your receding hairline reminds me of the record low tide that year in Hainan before the tsunami hit, when all the unforeseen sea trash was exposed.

 

4

Someone I’m probably going to sleep with called me “skinny-thicc” the other day and I wanted to uppercut him.

 

***

I get grossed out when I watch people eat, especially finger foods, where they would press too-large bites onto their tongues and then meticulously suck their fingers clean.

I cannot eat in front of other people, with the exception of apples, because apples feel so unplanned and casual and American, pulling it out of my bag rubbing it on my shirt and biting with that slight grimace that’s unavoidable when eating whole apples, pretending as if I wasn’t going to log the calories on MyFitnessPal in the bathroom as soon as I was done.

The other evening, I binged an entire box of Trader Joe’s ginger snaps, just popped them whole into my mouth one after the other. I knew that if I had stopped and had a glass of water I would feel full but I couldn’t stop it was mechanical.

Later I went to the gym in my building at 1 am because I didn’t want anyone to see. As I did squat presses in front of the mirror, my eyes appraised my body. I think the only reason why people think I’m thin is because I am never not sucking in my stomach.

After the gym I showered and climbed into bed. Five minutes later I get a text from “skinny-thicc” that said wyd, come thru and I thought not this time, just this once, stay in bed. But I lost to myself, again, redid my make up, then called a Lyft to his place. When Lyft tells you “this is a good deal” are you just supposed to take their word for it?

By: Holly Yates

Content Warning

I bend my arms up and inject the needle into my right pupil

life is so much fun when every breath tastes of bleach

does god laugh at my unmistakable, beautiful insanity

as I’m hands deep in this little make-shift lobotomy?

I know they’re all on the stakes again, too many saviors

standing over bodies and I can’t feel where I put all the bandages

 

doctor! doctor! attendant! you will surely need more dressings

because blood always streams downward from the eyes

did Jesus die for men in lab coats carrying pills, self-proclaimed liberators?

my brain oozes in my bare hands with all its eroded peroxide

in the end nothing matters except  psycho-drama, psycho-surgery

watch me as I extract my misery because they name it hysteria

 

I take the tissue and place it in the landfill of mental disorders

I remove the rod, and ask myself: when did I fix myself with plaster?

I glued myself together, but never get it right with each leucotomy

tell me, mother, sister, father, brother, where am I? and can you even see me?

I’m tired of fallen angels, I’ve already fallen on the filthy floor, praying for light

parts of me in arms of scalpels when I just want arms of an embrace

 

so I’m here moving my tongue but no one hears me scream out:    s a v e m e

I can see God spelled backwards in the words attendants use for depression

the black dress of an attendant blurs, I see her big eyes in fluorescent gleam

she pulls out a needle from her pocket, syringe stuck full of glue

injections never change because tears still reflect inside mirrors

doctor knows, attendant knows, precision proves hard in a 300 second procedure

 

strange and stranger to think doctors won’t ever request lobotomies

attendant injects needle into my arm but I’m full of novocaine and don’t want help

I stare at the pools of blood on the floor, surely they will need more bleach

but you can only find it inside of me because I’m doused with pure insanity

so take apart my head and say it’s alright because doctors here use sterile gauze

maybe I’m just a little girl soaked in screams and God never even notices

 

but I’m laughing because God is dead and no one cares because believing is seeing

which one sounds the best, transorbital, lateral, frontal, prefrontal?

I’m only asking because this morgue needs more press coverage and bandages  

and everyone around me is sewed together, their outside haphazardly salvaged

I hear them scratching inside chrome compartments and scraping their rotten minds

except I’m laughing and crying because I force- feed myself expired peroxide

 

and lobotomy is the only word that matters in this story, it pierces the white of my eye and I saved the doctors all the trouble, keep all that precious plaster! for I’ve already taken myself apart, brain underneath floor, because I won’t let them touch my mental disease anymore.

 

 

By: Hannah Kahn

 

When you leave me, I will try to remember your face in pieces.

I can only hope it will elude me in its entirety,

At least translucent im my viscous memory,

A vision of your visage dipped in sweet, sweet honey.

But I’m sure certain parts will come back to me:

The corners of your raspberry lips dripping with golden laughter,

The black curl of your hair flitted with backlit sun

And your bright eyes flicked with amber light

When they held my gaze on sticky city nights.

But honey, if I’m lucky,

Lucky like I am with you,

I will only remember your face in pieces.

The same way I shield my eyes from blazingly bright sky

To let in finger-filtered specks of finger-licking light,

Looking at you now I already know,

It will be far too painful to picture you whole.

By: Aberdeen Bird

 

I don’t remember

when I started writing “God”

with lowercase g