photo collection of the author

by Katiy Heath

A cloud would soon billow out, a considerable mass, smoky red; a disorientating blanket of color, devilish red, divine red,  nuclear and unnatural. Yet nature is what would send red into our tender hearts on the afternoon of this annular eclipse. From the Latin word annulus, meaning little ring. Like a hula hoop, a donut, a CD. A little band of light left after the moon moves across the sun, obstructing all but a six percent sliver. Little—130 miles wide—ring of fire that we didn’t have to put ourselves in the path of,

photo by Tony Wallin-Sato

by Tony Wallin-Sato

Part 1

fukaku irite / kamiji no oku o / tazunureba / mata ue mo naki / mine no matsukazeFollowing the paths the gods passed over, I seek their innermost place; up and up to the highest of all: peak where wind passes through pines. – Saigyo

I was thirteen when I was first arrested. Detained. Humiliated. Treated as if I already hit puberty. At thirteen I still carried my baby fat. Just had my braces removed.

by Lorraine Hanlon Comanor

          “We’re going to get along famously,” said my new neighbor, a realtor in his early seventies, as he bent over to admire one of my planters. “Both of us having green thumbs. But this garden isn’t up to our standards.” 

            He was referring to a ten-foot-wide strip between our two houses of red sage, polygala, hydrangeas, and marguerites that extended some seventy feet back from the street. The bird-and-butterfly-friendly plot, which my former neighbors and I had congenially maintained, was shaded by two ornamental pears and a holly tree. Like all gardens in our public urban development,

by Zia Jaffrey

Excerpt from a manuscript on South Africa

I don’t remember who we were planning to abduct. I may have got it wrong on the amnesty application. Maybe it was K in Soweto…
-(Security policeman, who shot his wife)

On the train back from Nyack to Manhattan, after having dinner with my sister, I couldn’t speak. I hadn’t gone that far in love with anyone, except Louis. My sister and Frank were guiding K on what to expect when he met my parents. That meant that they assumed that this was it for me–for us.

by Clare Cannon

photo by Tungsten Rising on Unsplash

Day 7

“Bomba. Over us,” my friend Anya, who cat-sat for me in Ukraine, typed into Messenger. “Pray. We are in corridor.” I slumped in the wooden chair where I sat at the Spear Physical Therapy clinic in Manhattan as I read, “Rocket was here.” My world exploded. My physical therapist Nada brought me a box of tissues and a cup of cold water. “My friend just got bombed,” I sobbed. 

“Clare, I’m so sorry,” she said in her lyrical Egyptian accent.

by Lisa McMaster

photo by Peter Anderson on Unsplash

It’s a dark November evening and the rain slants across the driveway and backyard. My mom and I have just returned from my piano lesson and I am in a good mood. I am singing something silly when I see my dad sitting at the dining room table, his face drawn tight, eyes down. I keep singing because he often doesn’t smile, or say hello, when I walk into the room. When he tells me to stop, his voice is sharp and I assume I have done something wrong.