Editors’ Picks
We’ve loved every piece we’ve published, otherwise we probably would not have published them. But to celebrate our first one-hundred features, we figuratively twisted each others’ arms and forced everyone on the editorial team to select just a few of the features that resonated most with them.
Universally, we all struggled with this one, but these selections just represent pieces that each of us felt we had a particular connection to, or that had a special meaning for us.
Faith Brown
Poetry Editor
Sheltering with Late Husband (Annecy Báez) — There's sadness, love, and hope all in one piece. A raw glimpse of love and its cycle. It brings tears to my eyes.
patrick (Melissa Frias) —This piece brings me back to the start of it all, when no one really knew what was going on and we were all just trying to make it through the days and the changes. As a student, it's a piece I see so vividly: watching my classmate's faces on a virtual platform I’d never heard of until the pandemic—all of us wondering what was happening, and what will happen next.
Four Glimpses (C. Adán Cabrera) — I love the storytelling and imagery in this piece. I could see and understand the speaker's whole life story with just four glimpses.
Stephanie Gaitán
Editor and Social Media Manager
There is a Chorus Line Somewhere in this Poem (Darshita Jain) — A young Indian woman's stark awareness of her home country and how life functions there: white is preferred and praised, she ought to be "respectable" and "neat," the train she rides may have struck and killed migrants. Jain makes vivid the realities concealed behind headlines, realities that are often dismissed once the shock subsides. She humanizes migrant workers, and in doing so, reminds us that their stories matter.
the expanse of me (Nila Narain) — A brief but heart-wrenching poem exploring sorrow and loneliness during four minutes and thirty-three seconds of yoga. We start with a breath in our chests, end up in the universe floating among stars, and come back down to Earth, back to the discomfort.
Floating Bodies (Itua Uduebo) — This poem takes to the trauma of chattel slavery and runs it in parallel to the atrocities Black folks in the United States faced after both forced and "voluntary" migration. Uduebo's eerily illustrates this juxtaposition and leaves you with a lasting impression.
Loops (Hedayat Reda) — A ride into Reda's unorthodox, but relatable, thought process. We learn about how COVID-19 has affected her life at home in Egypt. We learn about her grandmother's obsession with Turkish Chris Hemsworth and Reda's disdain for zoom calls. In part, she can’t help but feel numb, having lived through a revolution.
Patrick Pawlowski
Founding Editor
Elasticity (Shareen K. Murayama) — A rare poem. Like reading E.E. Cummings for the first time, this poem forces a caesura into your mind as it constructs each image, making the journey from heaven to nature to the honest self.
Fruit Flies (Schroeder Barteaux): - Gives the feeling of Orwell's "A Hanging" with the same eye toward society's values and with a necessary message: keep banging the drums.
John Cages (David Groff): - Because it rages and bucks in its seat like so many of us, stuck here in the stasis of safety. This poem is my anger at the "droning gimmick of the show of silence" we live as the death amounts, and I fear the poem will remain relevant for a while.
Stewart Sinclair
Editor-in-Chief
Unscheduled Time (Veasna Has) — Veasna was one of our earliest submissions, and her essay so beautifully incapsulated what I hoped we’d find in our inbox: a single moment captured in the middle of a pandemic, full of love, tenderness, fear, and so much uncertainty. And she provided us a beautiful image of “gin blossoms.”
Two-Cry Minimum (Brooke Ethridge) — I don’t think we’ve published another piece that felt quite so much like a gut punch. Even now, reading it again, I feel as if I’m right there on the floor, watching the ceiling fan go ‘round, trying to tabulate what tore my love apart.
Self-Portrait with Birds Chirping in One Ear & Lil Baby's "All In" in the Other (Justin Rovillos Monson) — When I worked for a traditional lit mag, we'd receive submissions from inmates, and were told to trash them, unopened. Like all subs, most would've been rejected. But it illustrated how, even in "progressive" spaces, we remain unwilling to extend a fair shot to the incarcerated.
Justin's piece is a reminder to me — as someone with family and friends who have been in one form of incarceration or another — of how much potential is locked away in the U.S. penal system.
