Dusk is drawn down to the horizon like a bleeding sheet and there seems to be a serenity to the way the world around you quiets − headlights fade from the streets, pedestrians pull back into homes, windows dim. Outside, the only cadence is from the call of the cicadas and the rain that sprinkles from the darkened sky.
Here, you stop in exhaustion and let time play before you:
Perhaps you remember your failed relationships, and your heart turns a little. Then you think of the loss of innocence, when you moved on from that wide-eyed childlike look. Death, prejudice, forbidden love − somewhere deep in the back if your mind, you sift for hope. Beyond your mind’s to-and-fro, you have somehow reached a conclusion. You remember how the droplets fall and form a serene puddle on the concrete.
Drip, drip…
In light bouts, the wind eases in to tuck away the remaining nightlights behind its slate veil. The smell of rain seeps into the mist, and the cement gleams with the melted moonlight the sky once held. Splashes of speeding taxi cabs and a distant firecracker’s screams for light coalesce into a dull ocean roar. And a white one-way sign, the only one of its kind, stands stained scarlet by a single stoplight frozen in the middle of the highway, in the middle of nowhere.
Drip, drip…
And so, at the birth of night, you close your eyes and surrender to the clairvoyance that envelops you.
—the Editors, Summer 2016
Table of Contents
Poetry
Tiffany Tzeng: A Crown of Wheat
Aileen Lu: A Pigment of Your Imagination
Jenny Wu: Diction
Blair Chen: Eclipse
Raksha Narasimhan: Lost and Found
Andrew Kou: Mirrors
Sally Kim: Run
Julia Jin: Sanctuary
Alina Ying: The Wrinkled Sun
Maya Sabatino: What People See
Katherine Hu: Windows
Prose
Asma Mammootty: Alight
Niyaza Mammootty: Flies of the Night
Joyce Zhang: Hunting Season
Saniya Doshi: Let the Ocean Take Me
Katherine Xiao: Pricked