Category: Selected Writings

Heirloom by Masfi Khan   you are ten when a teacher says to untie your bengali accent like an iron necklace. you dream of a voice that slices oceans like wind. of being an autumn-crisp american, even if it means silencing the pulse you’ve carried since birth. you unhinge slanted vowels, punctured consonants, swinging cadence…

Reflections on Trauma over an X-Axis by Rachel Litchman   This essay will appear in New South, 10.2, in the coming months.     Reflection When I study calculus in eleventh grade, my math teacher tells me that a reflection of a function is a type of mathematical transformation. An x-axis can be a mirror,…

Magic by Ella Lerner   When I was younger I liked playing the game. I liked teasing and being teased and how my knees shook and how his hands trembled. I liked feeling like a princess from the fairy tales my dad used to read me; when I was six in pink tutus and braids.…

Home, Oven by Farah Ghafoor   Your sister is baking — the heavy banana and nut moving viscous through the hallways for hours. The bread rises warm and supple until it is split for tea, shards of almond peeking out of the crack in its chest. It is another evening you try to settle into.…

The Semester of Fading by Michelle Chen   Dr. Mary Ren Contact: mren34@longinghs| 728-843-2732 Office: 246 (a room I haunt with a swivel chair that runs ridges into the carpet and four people whose backs of heads I can recognize on sight) Office Hours: Late afternoon, sometimes in the deli a few blocks away where…

Misfire by Kathryn Hargett July 6-12, 2016 I am a terrible person because when my friends talk about their mental illnesses, my chest coils like the mud nest of a sparrow and I vomit. Even the word “health” can sometimes nauseate me, or the way facial muscles contract when someone is incubating an egg under…

  I: Will said something about an explosion. He was lying in the Chrysanthemums in the sun while his partner was blown to pieces. He stayed for the full tour anyways even though Cara said she wouldn’t be there if he made it home. Six months later she showed up at the airport, with an…

   My grandfather’s lap shakes as he sings to me. “Yasmunti, Yasmunti. Faynma mchiti tkun benti[1].” He hums this to me over and over, rocking me back and forth from the brown-checkered lounge chair by the door. I am six years old; he is sixty. Somehow, in my eyes, we are still the same age.…

0. There are the little blessings. On the stretch of road between my grandparents’ apartment and the city garden, I buy a jar of suannai – Beijing yogurt – from a wayward street vendor for only a handful of mao. “Visiting from America?” the vendor asks. Plumes of fog expand on the cold surface of…

  “Lian Sheng Lu’s work captures the nature of the written word.” — Shandong Daily News (trans. Chinese to English)   Here is what I remember: the soft curves of a branch, fitted and formatted into a phrase— “friend,” 朋友. His weathered hand holding his chin gingerly, head tilted in rumination.   My grandfather searched…