January 11, 2023 - “Before I Leave” by Rahil Najafabadi
Him: Don’t you wish you could transform into a squirrel to leave class earlier?
Her: I wish I could make time move back and forth.
Him: Where would you go?
Her: Not here, maybe a time when I was unaware.
Him: That’s not enough.
Her: Nothing is. Nothing ever is.
Him: Time is too much.
Her: Why do you want to leave?
January 10, 2023 - “I am dabbling in being devoured” by Elizabeth Lerman
Still, I am dreaming about the gators, I am dabbling in being devoured, and I am trying to figure out when this started, the fear of floating, because at one point water was meant for me and I miss swimming in my sleep. The moments of calm are so quick, I don’t even know if I can call them moments, and if I’m not being pulled down, someone else is, and I know it’s coming, when we jump off the dock, and I want to say stop, this isn’t ours anymore, and really, it never was, but I can see them now, all the sun soaked scales, and I am always so scared of slipping. Still, I am dreaming of being prey, of panic and its purpose, of being held under for a long time, then coming up for air, of saltwater and sand and the sort of skies I know nothing about.
January 8, 2023 by Jordan Myers
When it gets cold here the streets turn white. It doesn’t have to snow. If you watch day after day (after day) for a while you can see the concrete turn from black to grey to white. This is how to tell time inside of New York’s cityscape. In other worlds, you can observe the changing leaves, watching them sprout for the first time on buds in the spring, descend into yellow and red hues in the autumn, then fall away and swirl with the wind come winter. And yes, the trees tell time here . . . but still, the concrete, which changes from black to grey to white to black again, has a voice as well, and speaks.
January 7, 2023 by Jordan Myers
It’s tough to describe what dawn looks like here. Every morning I’m heading west along 55th Street’s bike path I see something different. It’s not possible to look up at the buildings in the distance while still watching the road, but when I can, I do. Way up there, as I’m getting closer and closer to Lexington Avenue I notice for the first time three columns, blue and white, topped by red blinking lights, which sprint upwards toward the sky. Yes, they’ve stood there for a small eternity –––– twenty, thirty, forty years or more . . . but it’s just so easy to keep cycling by.
January 6, 2023 - “I Stopped Thinking Until it Worked” by Rahil Najafabadi
I STOPPED THINKING UNTIL IT WORKED
I went to the car wash in the city,
and I don’t even have a car.
Everything was simple when it rained,
when the night blurred at the same pace
as me.
Now we don’t agree, the pollution
comes to take a few more days
from my time to try to stop thinking.
I wonder what the air tasted like.
Like life.
January 5, 2023 - “Beach House” by Elizabeth Lerman
“That’s a nice color on you,” mom says and she is there in the doorway, in the mirror, where I do not expect her. I feel myself flinch. I turn around and know I’ve missed my mouth because she is laughing now, plucking a tissue off the counter and closing the door behind her.
We sit together on the bathroom floor and draw lines in the sand. We play a game of tic-tac-toe and she wants to be circles, she says, because exes feel so violent. She doesn’t vacuum in the summer, she says, because that’s the point of a beach house.
“It’s supposed to be sandy.”
“I know.”
“He complains.”
“Yeah.”
“I wish you were here more.”
“I know.”
“Can I fix your lipstick?”
“Okay.”
“It really is a nice color.”
January 4, 2023 - “It’s Just Us” by Rahil Najafabadi
IT’S JUST US
The ones that bent the grass hoping next year would be gentle—
We palmed the soil with its cold demeanor like we are not all Earth.
I’m wishing the longest night will last the whole year.
I’ll wake up when it’s light again, the sun has said hello to the tiger.
A scratch on my forehead bringing that spring to my attention.
It is the first morning since we brumated and became the rain’s draft.
I was gone for a while in a fold of the winter that had its last warmth—
My blood and bone became the pomegranate seeds, and we could see
the night long awakened is the shortest day,
But light was enough to see the loneliness of the air.
January 3, 2023 - “I read my book in bed” by Elizabeth Lerman
I read my book in bed and pinch my toes between my fingers so I can feel the joints shift and flex beneath the thin skin. I twist and bend and wonder what it might feel like if they were to snap, suddenly, and my curiosity is just that, since something stops me from finding out, but still I can’t stop squeezing, and I like to think about what we are made of, how muscle and bone bind and break, the way bodies are meant to be, and there is a certain smallness that comes with the meat of it, and it is almost close to comforting, knowing, so surely, how malleable we are not.
January 1, 2023 by Jordan Myers
The stars do not twinkle: tucked beneath clouds, buried above the skyline, they hide. Those blinking lights are airplanes flying low and antennas above buildings, signaling. If you ever see a shooting star above the city, make all of the wishes in the world.
December 23, 2022 - In Migration
We’ll be back January 1, 2023. Issue No. 10 will be available on or around January 15, 2023. Thank you to all of our contributors and readers; have a safe and enjoyable holiday season.
December 15, 2022 - “We eat and try to remember everything” by Elizabeth Lerman
She tells me I used to dream about a woman crying - wailing, really, and I would wake up with the same scream in my mouth, and I don’t think she knows who it is but she doesn’t ask if I do, and so I think maybe we both do. She tells me the photo albums are still on the bookshelf in the basement, that I can go look before dinner, if I want to, and I do want to, have been waiting to, actually, but then I don’t and dinner comes. We eat and try to remember everything.
December 13, 2022 - “In the heart of the hushed hour” by Elizabeth Lerman
The cold is changing and it takes a turn every time, a week when the air feels sharper and the wind starts slicing, and there is a certain type of quiet that wraps itself around real winter, during the stretch of season when snow is waiting to fall – the silence tends to start slow, takes a while to settle down and spread out, but when it does, nighttime does not stand a chance and now, in the backyard, it sounds like the evening is echoing into itself and here, in the heart of the hushed hour, it is hard not to hear myself think.
December 9, 2022 - “There in the Dead Dream” by Rahil Najafabadi
THERE IN THE DEAD DREAM
The swallows aren’t free, they belong to people.
They are held by palms of dust and the sand
falls from our fingers that aren’t interlocked.
I breathe, I know this day ends and another ends too.
The dream that never begins traps the childhood
of many people who grew to be children.
December 8, 2022 - “Once I see the bend” by Elizabeth Lerman
I forget that Union Square is a little slanted, inside, down the stairs, where the subway is - the tracks turn where the 4 pulls up and it looks too much like the caricature curve of the one I see in my sleep, and after that, I am not so sure what’s real and what isn’t, because once I see the bend, the one that looks like it should be at the bottom of another world, I start to see other things too, like the alligator on the ad in the train car, the way the windows in there look like the ones missing from the planes in my dreams, and when asleep is just as vivid as awake, I start to wonder where the former waits when my eyes are open.