Brown Girl

She girdles a hand-woven khadar scarf
Brown skin shimmering through endless fires
Fighting as a crouching tiger
Only to face wage cuts, hijab bans but
Her worn hands clutch the warmth of prayer beads
Timeless beauty and strength still inside her
Through the white noise that whispers surrender
As she embodies the last embers in darkness
She rides through borders sees buried crimes
Her brown virtue is eternal

Survival

representing wisdom from the fallen in her homeland
echoing brown can survive and will survive
waiting for her to turn to rise wild power within
no blood, no sweat or tears will stall her path
hear her grandmother’s tales of submission
with her khadar scarf flapping without the backbone
to vanish in and out of vision just to survive
her grit feeds, her faith breathes, her will survives
her crouching tiger will never fade
she will impel the survival of her culture

By Sarah Fathima Mohammed

Biography:

Sarah Fathima Mohammed is a high schooler from California. In 2019, she received a silver medal for the NJCL national creative writing contest and a gold medal for national Latin. Her work has been accepted in Canvas Literary Journal. She has been accepted and will attend Iowa Young Writers’ Studio in 2020. She enjoys writing various pieces in literature and Latin; creative writing, to her, is a raw form of self-expression that can be conveyed at any depth without the worldly barriers. When she is not writing, she teaches English to disadvantaged students, plays music to raise funds for kids in hospitals and enjoys archery.

Exodus 1949, Shaanxi

for my Grandpa

here the ocean is an entire continent of hunger,
children cup a handful to their mouths to discover
their palms, once an entire grassland grazed warm
by blood, now withering fissures across parched hands.
the ocean is deaf to paper skins shredded against
the wind singing, a melody we devote ourselves
to perfecting. despite our size, we are still very much
mendable. fold our backs into wings and our tongues
into wind. stretch our spines beneath the ocean floor,
to one day be uncovered hardened into diamond.
even in our blood you’ll find traces of steel
from rusting shovels. we have nothing
and everything to give. our tongues growing
calloused from suffocated prayers. bruised
ghosts that hide beneath our hardened skins will break
into clouds and land with the gentleness of rain, of history.
moonlight projecting our shadows into giants. sextant.
compass. some days I swear I’m becoming more of a vessel
for the stars, drifting across skies and oceans for anything
to cling onto, but call it home and we’ll never reach it.

***

we keep our hearts wrapped in our lungs
and lose a little every time we breathe.
you create a new life by erasing the other.
how unfaithful can one grow to their body?
we still carry the ashes of our homes
like a skeleton. there used to be stars where
I lived. we would pretend to pinch them
from the sky and rub them into our palms.
sky full of ash, sky full of dirt, sky full of
charred bonedust. now the stars seem
more distant than ever. now we stretch
the sky into a shadow into our past.
this body is not clean. I’ve been trying to forget
the names of family, even my own, trying to wash
myself of my own blood, until I started bleeding
from everywhere. even in language we’re inseparable.
in chinese, we don’t say goodbye. we say zàijiàn,
zài for again, jiàn for meet: I hope we meet again,
so zàijiàn bàba, zàijiàn māmā, zàijiàn. zàijiàn

By Spencer Chang

Biography:

Spencer Chang is a writer based in Taipei. He is also a dancer and freelance web designer in his free time.

Red Weather

This is where it ends: Limbs unearthed to light,
your breath swelling the laundry— farther, then closer.
If your daughter had returned, you’d show her
to write a real letter, one that is consumed and
never forgotten. If she had returned, you wouldn’t
be standing behind the pool, tinsel scattered
copiously upon the surface. She wouldn’t have
left your arms for the ones of the world, the barbed
wire fingers igniting her hair. She wasn’t a child.
You had taught her about choking hazards and
powerlines, the decadence of pollen on the arms—
the danger of forgetting the body one begins with.
How loneliness hurts, but how it worsens once a
boy can stick his teeth in it. Or if you hadn’t said it,
you had definitely shown it, tied it to your neck,
burned it into the oxygen. Nights drawled recklessly
around the living room, crept everywhere, stole your
things, left her a hostage. But it had been raining.
Things had been falling. You had been forgetting.
Hadn’t you left the door locked throughout the day?
Hadn’t the dishes been half-washed, not too clean
as to attract any wreckage? This is where it ends:
Your hands wrinkled, even before the rain. The rain
leaving, leaving, leaving. The sun returning without notice.

By Cindy Xin

Biography:

Cindy Xin a junior in Albany High School in California who enjoys writing poetry, listening to music, and staring at the sky. Her work is forthcoming in Earth Island Journal, Half Mystic, After The Pause, and Glass.

By the Railroad

1864 (Drink)

117 Chinese boys.

Weedy, half-baked men. Egg-yolk
bruises. Butterfly ribs, flat faces. They walked away
from eastern dreamsongs into red America
to grow oil-black dahlias—

stems thick as wrists. They make dough
from dried blood.

Here at the railroad, shards of sunlight
cut their ivory monolids
until the crescents brown. These Laotian boys,
they work alongside countrymen—

their breath pongs of chicken stir-fry & fermented
rice cauterized in dialect.

A Western knife minces their Cantonese, tongues
laden with pork fat, fried, then burned
into metal. English whole,
elusive. Miners, Orientals, Aliens, all Crocker’s pets—

orange peels painted on china.

Tracks chiseled into bone
beyond the marshland, men built
the spine. They labor to one day ride it:
Work every day until you can start living.
I hear it often—

the throats’ filigree
suspended in the tap, on the lips
of our dixie cups,
before we swallow.

By Katherine Vandermel

Biography:

Katherine Vandermel is a writer who strives to use language as a tool to resist the erasure of marginalized ethnic communities. She loves music and a good, warm croissant. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Alexandria Quarterly, Blue Marble Review, Poetry Resistance from Youth, and has been recognized by Behrend College and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.

Vacancy

After Sarah Lao

Come apocalypse
& I unhook the cosmos From its thin air, stitching
Fish eyes for immortality,
Experimental like burning
Incense to suction vivisection,
A hemisphere for a crown.
How incomplete. How real.
At the end of every movie,
The seats soften into
Clay between the sweat
Of my palms & I hold
The universe hostage
If only for a second,
Enough for Jurrassic
Bones to crack my
Ligaments, & for
The first time I undress
From the skin of my home,
The thistle of my immortality
Replaying the timeline
Of the next life. Inside,
The galaxy bathes in its
Threadless clocks, unwinding
The asymptotes toward
Infinity & how the gods
Heaved at their failed
Birth, an act of pure
Creation lost to myth.
How foolish to believe
That paralysis forced
The inertia of this unbroken
Law, the hint of earth
Scaffolding against its
Mold. It ends in salvation,
Somewhere in the tombstone
Of excavated ocean, so please:
Take these broken dreams
& paint the secret sky.

By Serrina Zou

Biography:

Serrina Zou is a junior at Basis Independent Silicon Valley in San Jose, California and a 2019 California Arts Scholar in Creative Writing. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Just Poetry!!!, the Asian Pacific Fund, In Parentheses Magazine, and the Bay Area Book Festival. When she is not writing poetry, she is either catnapping or avidly devouring novels.

We Look for a Ditch

In every direction
the green hills, rolled
for miles
outside the car windows

The sky grew
mountainous,
turning the color of rocks,
taking up space
like a fist

What do we do,
my husband asks,
if there
is a tornado?

A ditch, I say,
we head for a ditch,
and we drive along, searching
through our windows

But the farmlands of Minnesota
on an old, back highway
have other plans,
only pastures,
spanning outward and on

Like edges of the earth,
they curl forever,
and there is no ditch
on this stretch of road

We turn back
to face each other
afraid

By Jess Witkins

Biography:

Jess Witkins is a Wisconsin-based writer, blogger, and storyteller.
Her work has been published in local and national magazines. She is
president of the nonprofit writing community, Mississippi Valley Writers
Guild. Most recently her poems have appeared in *Ariel Chart, and s*he has
an essay titled “The Funeral Photographer” *in the anthology, *What
Remains: The Many Ways We Say Goodbye,* with Gelles Cole Literary
Enterprises.