art by Susan Pollet

by Roan Regan

The lake was black, its surface rippled and torn by jutting rocks. Islands were speedbumps in the smooth eyeline that stretched to the sprawling, clean lawns of cabins. Wild forests abutted their properties, threatening to overtake with their unorganized yet elegant, curly-headed blueberry bushes. 

At the time, I kept my hair short, as I have most of my life. The hair stylist at the mall couldn’t make sense of my curls, blaming cowlicks and poor maintenance. They clipped and tucked each lock in an effort to feminize the cropped cut I requested.

art by Isabelle Carasso

by Margaret Grundstein

I get lost. 

My eyes wander from my screen to my bulletin board, resting on a picture of my father taken over forty years, or half my life time, ago. He is cleaning perch in the sink of my parent’s A-frame cabin in northern Vermont. It is evening. My eldest daughter, age four, watches. She, clad only in her white undies, is standing on a step stool, peering over the linoleum counter, her blond curls dangling down her back.

art by Mahmoud Elmardi 

by Casper Orr

1

you don’t have to call. you don’t have to bother with formalities.

8

i’ve written letters before and there’s something beautiful about them. something cathartic in the closure of an unspoken goodbye. i won’t write you a letter. partly because i detest a cliché even more than you do and also because i know there is no such thing as closure.

9

a letter suggests finality.

art by Mahmoud Elmardi

by Tulasi Acharya

1987

My father enrolled me in a country school called Kanchanjangha Primary School, a mile away from the house. I was six. He enrolled me directly into the second grade, as he had already taught me the basics of the Nepali 36-letter alphabet, as well as some addition and subtraction. When he enrolled me in school, he increased my age by setting back my date of birth by one year, because I couldn’t be enrolled in the second grade before I turned seven.