Issue 40
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Twins
art by Kevin Wei
by Minyong Cho
The first hotel was small but pretty with a garden behind the decorative wrought iron gate that was firmly closed. I found a piece of paper on the gate with the handwritten English word, “Closed.” I didn’t know a hotel could close. If they were full, wouldn’t the gate be open to let the guests come and go? I still had two more to try, so I moved onto the next.
Either Heidi was considerate, or cheap hotels were clustered in Jerusalem, because it only took ten minutes to walk to the next one.
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36 Hours in the Strategic Crescent
art by LEGEND BARD
by Adam Day
With lines from Philip Levine’s “Angel Butcher”
Joined by friends from Musayyib, we wandered down narrow lanes through which a union strike had rushed earlier that evening, to Hanh Men’ Panjshir, a cozy restaurant known for its steaks. Today, the dark, stone dining room was crowded, so while we waited outside for a table, a blind man regaled us with a snippet of a quaint folk song: “Man, shed thy clothes, cover thy head with ashes, run in the street and dance in thy madness…” Then,
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Early Bird
art by Jacelyn Yap
by Cameron MacKenzie
When we were pregnant with our first child, my ex-wife and I began to dig back into our family history in the hopes of clarifying the medical record. How prevalent were cancers and which ones were manifest? Who died of heart disease or a blood disorder? Were there any birth defects?
It was a strange process for many reasons, but it principally led me to think, for the first time in a long time, about my uncle. He had what is now called cerebral palsy but,
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Apples in the Garden
art by Jacelyn Yap
by Jo Galvv
A Magnetic Kiss, A Jawquake Headline, and the End of PossibilityI stood under the pulsing strobes of the year’s largest LGBT party—a labyrinthine
industrial maze, spanning three floors that vibrated with frenetic energy. I had dragged along
a reluctant fellow student, the only one willing to venture into the scene with me. The crowd
crackled with elation; each nook teemed with strangers in their universes. I couldn’t shake the
hollow ache for connection.We approached a pair,
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Hello, Goodbye, Hello
art by Thomas Vogt
by Adam Peterson
That the dream of the new world was another’s nightmare—
We were taught not to worry too much about that, and now it’s our nightmare.
People arrive on our shores from across the ocean. They plant flags in our malls and rename our restaurants like they discovered them. But we did! And we told all of our friends smugly about them as if they should have already known.
What a strange new world this is,
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Snowblind
art by Jacelyn Yap
by Mar Koren
The line for the Reading Station stretched three blocks, and rain dripped from the awnings in a constant tempo.
Marion fiddled with his watch impatiently, as the woman in front of him berated her child.
“I don’t know, Jack,” she said for the fourth time, grabbing the child’s shoulder to pull him more evenly into line.
Stop trying to reason with him, Marion thought, shifting from foot to foot because his Converse sneakers had soaked through.
