“I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world.” -Frank O’Hara

We drift between our areola outlined pupils
expanding with flickers of artificial sunshine in Third Ward where the dead are buried

in gun cartridges

splintering into my city’s veins plump with cracked open IPAs and discarded plastic bags

choking baby turtles.

At midnight, you will find me nestled behind my crumbling apartment building from the 80s. The lady above me has a neon blue Christmas tree on her porch year round. My neighbor deals drugs. At 1 A.M., I hear her muffled steps in the hallway. When her mother died, her brother turned her eye into a decaying orchid and I swear it bloomed enough for pollen tears to leak the way her father’s veins did when he jumped out the window

rolled up in an Italian flag screaming, “Merci!”

(It means thank you.)

According to Google, the word Texas originates from the Caddo word taysha, meaning friends or allies: there is a war in Houston’s pot belly.
We shave fat from organs and stuff it into grandma’s cookies, but only if you’re white.
Abuela serves me turkey bacon baked in the oven. We bathe our chilaquiles in tofu sour cream.
It took approximately 30 missed calls before Abuela stopped calling me Isabellita and just

“Isabella, why don’t you talk to me?” an aria in Spanish,
piano keys screaming Clair de Lune every time I had a panic attack,
I would fall to the floor sobbing I can’t I can’t I can’t
and use every muscle in my trembling hands to cover myself in a thick blanket.
I would touch the edges so lightly I swore it was a butterfly wing.
In the confined space, there was safety. When people ask me how to trust, I am torn between
my mother’s delicate, painted fingertips gliding across my brown skin
the burgundy velvet pout of her lips twirling into an awkward smile
eyelashes reaching like ebony spider webs for a single light blue teardrop
her hand contorting into a paintbrush and every stroke is violet flower petal on my skin

When I applied to be the youth poet laureate of Houston, I was asked to write a poem about it. I sat on my bedroom floor with unwashed black ocean wave hair, laptop nestled against my

unshaved thighs.

They wanted love poems, wanted to know about Houston’s big ass and her redneck blush and

how she moans like black coffee brewing every time a steamboat rolls into her port.

They didn’t want to know that she is the sex trafficking capital.
That women with foreign tongues lay stripped in those boats, bones poking out of oiled skin.
That I was one of them               in my own way                                              in my own way

I see my hand alight upon my face.
The fingers find the biggest pustule there
And squeeze. Another YouTube video plays.
Why is it that I only pinch myself
When idle or at play? Distracted age!
I crave a second task. For that I pick
Myself. I hurt, I granulate my face,
Make pus give way to bloody crumbs and scars.
Damage despite—because—of pride in looks.
Who dared to mar this skin? Oh yeah. Myself.
Regret the squeeze, forget the squeeze, repeat.
I see my hand alight upon my face.

Joi Massat

“Check this out,” you say to the woman beside you, nibbling on a chicken salad. She drags her eyes from her phone to yours.

“Serial Killer, 81, Sentenced to Death”, the headline reads. It’s not the most remarkable
headline in your feed, but you’re caught by the image of the man being led to trial, back hunched and skin blotchy like thin chorizo.

“Hm. Serves him right,” the woman says. You know her name is Jane, but you’re not
sure she knows yours.

“He did it a long time ago, though,” you say, searching her face for any sign of give. “Do
you think he regrets it?”

“People like him can’t regret,” she says, molding her sharp features into a polite smile
before turning back to her lunch and phone. You tap her elbow.

“Do you think age has mellowed him out?” you ask. “Age changes brain chemistry.”

Her eyes drift up to yours. For what feels like a second longer than normal, she stares at
you with light blue eyes. You are filled with hope that she does know your name.

She looks away.

“Not for people like him,” she says, and resumes her nibbling and scrolling. You think
about prodding her once more, but she’ll probably say the same thing, like a video game
character who’s reached the end of her programming.

Yes, serves him right, you think, but the words sound false in your head, as if your brain
forced them there. You stare at the man and his moist, shapeless eyes and feel the need to tell him it’s okay. The thought disturbs you, so you quickly scroll past to an article on Prince Harry and continue eating in silence.

Lisa Zhang

There are many ways to arrange money. Pennies become nickels, nickels dimes, and so
forth. Or one can care only about size, starting with dimes and ending with quarters—half dollars, if you have them. That spring I usually began on the left using coins tarnished with the patina that makes pennies as green as though they were abandoned in the forest to grow—which, really, they had been, abandoned in someone’s pocket or the deepest cavity of a register. The coins increased by shininess until the one on the far right, no matter its value, could cause temporary blindness.

One Thursday I learned about vinegar solutions in school, and then I cleaned all my coins so that I could no longer arrange them based on quality. I told the teacher about my experiment on Friday. She looked at me, her glasses sparkling like a newly minted dime, and said, “I’m glad you tried it at home.”

“I make artwork,” I told her, “with the money. I can make spare change imitate the Mona
Lisa, not because it looks similar, but because it captures the same meaning.”

She nodded, waiting for me to continue, and I wanted to tell her more, but her smile had
dropped by the slightest of degrees. I understood by now that people didn’t usually share my affinity for currency. “Maybe you’ll grow up to be a broker. Just be careful it doesn’t turn into an obsession,” she said.

I wanted to tell her that it didn’t make sense how other people could spend money
without appreciating its beauty. Why not put a dollar bill with two dimes on each side and a petal-arrangement of quarters onto a canvas? I wanted to tell her that people were dense and primitive every time they used their savings. What good was the aesthetic magnificence if you gave it to other people? But Mrs. Louis wouldn’t understand. Only my mother understood, and usually her mind was on other things.

When I got home from school that day, I went to my room and examined the treasure on
my bed. Eighteen dollars and twenty-three cents. My heart developed a flutter whenever people rounded to the nearest dollar. They acted as though the change, the decimal points, the left-over sum, were unimportant. Every cent is another cent to your name. And I had eighteen dollars and twenty-three cents to my name.
There was one ten-dollar bill, one five, three ones, a dime, two nickels, and three pennies. The Hamilton had a tear in its left corner, and the paper drooped around the edges like a misshapen flower. The five was so perfectly rectangular that I imagined an architect could use it on blueprints. Each of the one-dollars had its imperfections, but all passed into mainstream currency without drawing attention to itself.

Money wasn’t an obsession; it was a passion. If Van Gough was obsessed with painting,
yes, I suppose Mrs. Louis was right about me.

When the winter sunlight turned to shades of amber and drooped low against the walls, I
abandoned the artwork and looked in the pantry for something to stop the bright magma feeling in my stomach. A single box of oatmeal gave the bad news in its precise black lettering: it had expired two months ago.

Mom came home while I was staring at the box. She put down her purse and looked at the oatmeal herself.

“You wouldn’t want plain oatmeal anyway,” she said, the faintest trace of a smile
appearing on her face. “You’d do better putting honey on cardboard.”

“Did you go to the store?” I asked.

Her eyes slipped from the box to the floor. “My paycheck doesn’t come until tomorrow.
I’m sorry, sweetie. I bet the neighbors have something they could lend us, right? You stay here and I’ll go check.”
I watched from the window as she knocked on doors. This would make the twenty-eighth
time our neighbors helped us with food or bills, if they answered. I loved seeing the cash she came home with, currency that had changed many hands before it came to hers. Mom always acted as though it were cursed, and she didn’t like to look at it for very long. If she did, her face blossomed to crimson and a shallow reservoir of tears formed below her eyes. I kept watching until she knocked on the third door, still without an answer.

I held my phone and dialed my father’s number—I had changed his contact from “Dad” to “Michael Kurtz.”

“Jason?” he said on the third ring. “Hey, son. How are you? Is school okay?”

“School’s okay.”

“Can you believe how cold it’s been? I’ve had to put away all my summer clothes. I think
I’m coming down with a cold.”

My throat ached as all sensation of moisture evaporated. “Listen, Dad, there’s something
I wanted to ask.”
“Of course. You can always ask me anything.”

“We need a little extra money. Do you think…maybe you could give us some money? Or
bring by some food?”

There was a brief silence. “I’m sorry, Jason. Things are tight.”

“Tight?” I repeated. I often fantasized about his income, imagining entire museums filled
with his many thousands upon the walls. “But you’re a psychiatrist. You told me you make—”

“That’s inappropriate. You shouldn’t know my salary.” He cleared his throat. “You’re
being selfish. I give you so much.” The words reverberated through the line for emphasis. “What happens with your mother isn’t my concern. She should’ve figured this out. Goodbye, son.”

My eyes drifted from the screen to the window, where my mom was on the last house of
our cul-de-sac without any food in her hands. When she came back, she opened the door slowly, like something was on the other side pushing with all its strength against her. Her eyes were puffy and tinted scarlet.

“Maybe that oatmeal isn’t so bad,” she said. “They could have gotten the expiration
wrong…”

“I have eighteen dollars and twenty-three cents,” I blurted.

Mom frowned. “No, Jason. I couldn’t ask you for that. It’s your money.”

My mind ran through all the artwork that was yet to be created with my savings. Every
ounce of metal and paper to my name had a deep, intrinsic beauty that few others could
appreciate, if any. “I don’t want expired oatmeal,” I said. “We…we have to eat something until you get your paycheck tomorrow.”

“This isn’t fair to you.”

“I don’t want to be selfish. Take it.”

“Selfish?” She turned her head, eying me sideways. “Who put that idea in your head?”

Without answering, I went to my room and carried back the money, feeling its weight for
what I knew would be the last time. I wanted to give each of the coins and bills a proper
goodbye, a tribute to their grandeur, a passing of the torch, but there was no time. With gentle hesitation, I poured the money into Mom’s hands.

That night I went to bed without hunger.

Brandon Schettler

People expect funerals to be cinematic, like in movies. Dramatic, tense, and gray. Gray skies from which gray rain pours, gray tears cascading from an actress’s gray eyes. Here we have the grieving widow, the now fatherless daughter.

It’s beautiful. Melancholy. Picturesque. Wet.

Today, we were submerged.

Our skins were soaking up the sunlight like beach towels hung to dry in the salty sea wind. Though perhaps soaking wasn’t the right way to describe what my mother was doing.

Her flaxen hair and porcelain skin threw the sunlight back up to the sky. She was a pillar-mirror of reflection, a beam of brightness undaunted by the clothes that embalmed her torso, hips, thighs. She wore gray, not black. Not even a dark gray, like what I wore—the color so deep that only I could know of my secret rebellion against the uniform. I’d dared a small smile to myself as I dressed that morning.

But when I saw my mother, she made my already subliminal defiance seem corrective,
apologetic by comparison.

She wore gray, yes, a gray cashmere sweater-dress the color of the winter ocean. A gray so pale it was almost blue, or lilac, or what I imagined a soft sigh released at the end of a novel, or a finished cup of English Breakfast would look like. It was the gray of an April morning, misty meadows and dew-basted succulents.

It was so welcome a surprise on my part, that I nearly tore off my mourning gown in favor of a bright red pea coat and pants, but I knew that this day was not about me, and some pretense of blackened grief and despair, despite the history of this house, was imperative so as to not raise questioning eyebrows.

Now my mother wore on her face a careful mask of quiet acceptance.

But there wasn’t a single cloud in this November sky, and most of the snow had melted
away in the four days since we killed that wretched bastard. And we were exposed, the two of us, in a sea of black bodies with red, weeping faces, but it was all right because no one knew and no one considered to pause and take a glance.

I glanced. And my mother was glowing.

Toni Gentry

medicated & crackling anthems
drowned by anticipatory cheers
anxious fingers unwinding
crisp layers of hamiltons

gut-wrenching piano solo
fingers illuminated with flashlights
transforming the city purple
scarcely capturing each posthumous lyric

horrified gasps beg for almighty protection
pounding whispers of east coaster insults
criticize each foul play through groans of grinding teeth
clicking liquor-soaked tongues

leprechauns bawling & ripping victory tees from shelves
the riotous shrieks extol the city of brotherly love
smashing cars & shattering windows
surrendering the birthplace of america to flames

tom brady blames the ball

Spates of rain assail the shoreline,
dousing its surface in rivulets of Pacific salt.

I tiptoe into the deluge, a scene
bathed in muted daylight.

Blades of river reeds graze
against the shore, thickets lilting

with the rise of the autumn wind,                                                                                                  an air already drenched in angst.

Clouds tinted with charcoal unfurl
into thickened crescents, swelling

with each palpitation. Swaths
of darkness nestle further into doubts

Darting into the shrouds of gray,
the sensation of an uncanny calm emerges.

Grace Xu

Known as conjoined twins or brother and sister,
parking meters have stood together since birth.
Their looks diminishing as time ticks by
through each rain, hail, sleet, or snowstorm.
They’re robbed daily of their coins,
maybe tickled by a credit card or two
if they are technologically advanced enough.
With their proper religious tendencies,
they refuse to clock in on Sundays.
Days, months, & years go by
as they patiently wait, only four feet high.

Elysia Utech

I stare at everything I own then put two pairs of jeans into the box. I remember how Nana used to wear linen suits, and how the fabric looked like it forgot she was inside. She was beautiful once, with deep red hair that barely moved when she walked. This, I’d heard from Mom, because Nana stopped coloring her hair in 1998 when the president got impeached. I could picture all of it; her whole life, I mean. The lump of burnt grits on the stove. The prickle of wet grass on her feet in the morning. The damp hem of her skirt after crossing the river on her way to school.

Mom’s sending me away because she’s afraid I won’t have children. She worries about how much family we’ve lost lately. I say, it should be qualitative not quantitative, but she says that’s not the point. In those last weeks, Nana spoke only to me. Said that she liked my pants, my new short hair, the friend I brought by last week. Once, when she was asleep, I told her about Deb, about where my parents are sending me. But mostly, I talked about the house Nana grew up in. The flush of red on the porch during sunset. The sound of the river at three in the morning. How it pushes and pulls against rocks, fallen trees, the garbage that washes downstream. All of it, in the way. And all of it, loud.

Grace Gruebmeyer

Your hands were meant to cradle babies’ heads,
catch flower petals falling from the sky,
and hold onto great-great-grandmother’s china.
Let them fall to your sides, and spirits will reach out
to grasp them. Cup them, and they might pool liquid sunlight
or at least attract nesting bluebirds.
When you put them in my hair,
they feel like Mary’s hands searching for wounds
left by the crown of thorns. Soft as the robes of kings,
as the linen worn by monks as they peaceably
burn alive. A purity, finely crafted,
that I couldn’t possibly deserve.

Jackson Newbern