Non-Fiction
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Cabbage
Written by Susan Stone I used to be able to smell grandma’s house walking up the back steps to her covered porch. The house always smelled the same, like cooked cabbage, even though she now only made golumpki for holidays. Christmas night was our annual celebration with the Zechlinski family. We would have already been…
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Two Rituals, Two Days, Same Me
Written by Corrine Hickey It is a summer afternoon in Westwood, Southern California, and I am 19 years old. The air is hot, no hint of a breeze under the broiling sun. I walk downhill over jagged sidewalk, terraced by roots, to Ike’s Place, a sandwich shop. Sunlight streams across persimmon colored tile as I…
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Let’s Not Keep Him Waiting by Allison Zheng
Nestled in between where Chinatown ends and North Beach begins is a humble-looking bookstore — now infamous for its progressive politics, arts, and literature. Growing up in San Francisco, I spent every Saturday morning accompanying my parents on their grocery-shopping trips in Chinatown. We’d park on Broadway Street, near the strip clubs and tourists, and…
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I Loved School, but School Did Not Love Me by Don Collier
I loved school; impatient for school breaks to end; first day of school was another Christmas, new textbooks, new teachers, new clothes and shoes, finally, a new lunch pail. My love of learning grew as I aged into a firm belief that learning was lifelong; if you stop learning you are dead. I loved school,…
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Sestina by Amy Miles
“Sestina, is that a family name?” people ask about my youngest daughter’s middle name. Usually, I plunge into the literal definition of the word; it’s a poetic form—six stanzas, each with six lines, the end words fixed and rotating. Or, I summarize Elizabeth Bishop’s 1965 poem: a grandchild sits with her grandmother in the kitchen,…
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Meditation by Laura Oikawa
No matter what happens, I know that if I combine butter and water in a pan and bring it to a simmer, the two will eventually come together, forming a lovely emulsified sauce. I can, with great certainty, confirm that with enough vigor, cream will whip into stiff solid peaks. And further, that if I…
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The Dress Code by Sarah Johnson
The end of middle school had finally arrived and with it, the freedom to ditch our uniform and wear whatever we wanted for the last month of the year. The shedding of the school skirt was our most iconic rite of passage into high school. We chatted for weeks about which outfit we would wear…
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The Undrowning by Faith Hanna
Take a little life out of it; it’ll make it feel more real. I was drowning in the criticism. In criticizing them. The others. The ones that wouldn’t lose. The delusional. The ones we meme against. My judgement is a shallowing of breath. Tense chest. Constricted fingers. Clenched gluts. Holding in. Outside, the rain makes…
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The Fairy Garden by Walliann Wisniewski
It is hard to create something from nothing where something already exists. So, with a bit of sadness, the bright pink rhododendron bush that outgrew its space, the rose bush that had been groomed once too many times and any plant with thorns was pulled. Fairies don’t like thorns. A blank space remained. A canvas…
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Pandemic From California by Kiran Bains Sahota
August. The haze in the sky is thick, like a slate smog stretched thin over a blaring sun. It looks as if heat will rain. I can picture it: sizzling bolts of light touching down, the earth jittery from its touch. Some gnats collide into the glass of my window, as if they seek shelter…
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