You’re used to looking from afar.
In a glazed gaze, your eyes see in rose. A white pink world that blooms between your brows, resting in the bridge of your nose — a spectacular set of spectacles, and inspect you do. What marvelous beauty lies within each shimmering world, a perfect utopia.
But as you draw in, your breathe seems to dissolve the blush haze. As you watch it recede, wondrously bright, you feel the magic losing its charm. You blink, and something compels you to look again.
Up close, her lips are a wilting of crimson, a voice of chapped promises against a background of concrete and fluorescence. Up close, his lilting fingers are brutal, carnivorous, his canine nails scrape clean ribcages and hungers still. And a gold helmet brays a crass sheen, refracting a tyranny of sun.
It happens in the dark, that one witnesses the silent shattering of the ideal. Out of the memories that come to you in pieces, one shard at a time, you are left to assemble your own perception of reality.
What would you like to see?
—the Editors, Spring 2017
Table of Contents
Poetry
Chris Wang: A poem about eggs.
Irene Han: Ancestry
Katherine S. Li: Lunch with Two
Jenny Wu: our laws of motion
Joyce Ker: Rhapsody
Johnny Wang: SHE
Andrew Kou: state of us
Alina Ying: The Lifetime of a Heart
Rida Khawaja: The Guardian
Prose
Joyce Zhang: A Sound So True
Kasey Chuang: A Spare Light Bulb
Amberli Chiang: Aged Memories
Maya Sabatino: An Apocalypse to Remember
Sahana Ilenchezhian: An Insight on Dreams
Niyaza Mammootty: Bound to Light
Justin Chu: Control
Asma Mammootty: Eyes in the Winter
Blair Chen: Hills
Caitlin Leong: How to Become One of Us
Raksha Narasimhan: I wish
Marilyn Zhang: In Sync
Christine Cheng: It’s not kleptomania
Grace Tian: Lingering Souls
Saniya Doshi: Never Too Late
Lucy Euler: Paper Storm
Frank Zuo: Path Of A Million Graves
Katherine Hu: Petrichor
Xander Tse: The Alley
Cynthia Li: The Sound of Water Rushing
Grace Huang: Thirty
Katherine Xiao: Wish Whoosh
Yiu-On Li: Yore