Aleah Vega For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be naked. Not like that-I’m not a whore. I just hate wearing clothes. I hate being covered. I like to think I’m beautiful, at least compared to the girls in my grade. What’s so wrong with allowing other people to enjoy that? To… Read More Sasha

Emilio Cabral The first time I met Ben was at a Juilliard summer dance intensive for high school seniors. We were pas de deux partners, and our instructor, a tall Black man with a thin face and close-cropped brown hair, was always yelling at us because Ben wouldn’t stop gushing over the book he was… Read More Pas de Deux

Rebecca Wilson It has occurred to me that I will never know the time at which my mother died. She was always late—to church, to book club, to pick me up for piano lessons. Outwardly this perturbed me, but secretly it was a point of comfort, of endearing regularity: of never taking things quite too… Read More Late

Isabelle Chin Planets are a little like dogs: they all belong to the same general group, but they look so different you can’t always tell. If Jen Li was a star in some distant galaxy, I know she’d be some sort of sun. I think I would settle for being the earth, stuck in her… Read More Green Love

Aleah Vega By nature, most plants are hermaphroditic. Meaning, the flowers they produce may contain both female and male sex organs. A magnolia flower for example, grows with anthers, a stamen, and a pistil and, within that, a style, stigma, and ovaries (A stamen and anthers being male organs and the pistil and so forth… Read More Hermaphrodite

Isabelle Chin My mother used to tell me that when I was still in her womb, we shared one heart. Naturally, I loved the idea, beaming as I imagined our single heartbeat furiously pulsing through chambers of her swollen body, making blood vessels and nerves shake with thunder, rumbling echoes on the verge of bursting… Read More Strawberry Heart

Blake Croft I I have seen my dad cry only once. He cried at a funeral that didn’t matter to me, didn’t matter to him. A funeral that didn’t matter.   II The funeral didn’t matter to me. My great-grandmother, my dad’s grandmother, had passed in her sleep. I say she passed because she did… Read More Cry For Me

Alijah Hill There are lovely little lilies lined around the pond. Peaceful, I sit and eat my lunch, sunken into the bench. The sun shines so softly on my skin, perhaps I hear Robin’s song? Do you see that over there? There! Across the water, there! Tiny little children playing in a sandbox, the picture… Read More Lunch

Yash Markendey I sat there, passport in hand, hopes in another. This wasn’t my first voyage overseas, just the first alone.   “You’re going places, I know it.”   To the synchrony of the seatbelt signs, my eyes darted towards the world outside my window, avoiding the masked stares around me, clouding a homely smile… Read More Midwestern Blues

Gus Moody Mom died in a car accident on the way to pick me up from my last day of ninth grade. Or pick us up, really. I was with Tessa that day, my best friend since preschool. Mom was supposed to sign us out of school at noon so she could take us to… Read More No One Likes to Grieve