Opening Statement

I’ll keep this short because I have so many pieces to show you this month!

A common theme I’m noticing throughout the contributions this month is longing: longing for a person, a place, a trait, an accomplishment. I am no stranger to it, so I know that yearning, as painful as it can be, breeds hope. That’s what I wish we all do with these feelings, to turn it into inspiration to seek out what we long for, to ensure a better, happier existence. To the people who contributed, thank you for sharing your work, it’s a very vulnerable thing to do and I’m so proud of you all! Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoy!

– Sal Francis, Creative Writing Editor

The Small Death

Elsie Duque Hills

Staff Writer

You don’t want me,

Rather this body I must condemn.

The small death

Candied exhilaration

Yet,

I am a vessel of hatred

For myself,

For the world.

Lust embodies us as we intertwine,

erasing our intrinsic selves

A dulcet coalescence.

Speak to me.

Speak to me.

Acknowledge the words spilling from these withered lips

I try

For you.

My soft breath

A saccharine morning

new days laced,

By the burden of first wake.

For I yearn to be precisely what I am not.

I can’t stand this soiled husk

Not anymore.

Tired eyes blush

hues of soothing tides, indigo twinged.

Searing tears kiss my frigid face.

Tangle your hands in my heart

For I am unfeeling

Hold me gently

Before I let go

Don’t love me.

Find solace in my brittle skin.

pallor mortis

The one I condemn.

Maria’s Tacos

Orion Peyrol

Managing Editor

I think of you on cold nights like this when my stomach rumbles and my mind wanders

Maria, your doors were always open to me. When we stepped in the warm air and smell of spices guided you to sit at a sticker and graffiti covered table.

You could see you from the highway, a siren’s call on the way home from school. On the roof of your building, you stood proud, large and imposing, arms outstretched to bring us in.

When my heart feels empty I think of you and how I’d fill my days within your walls. Playing boardgames while salsa and lime dripped from my fingers. 

I think of you when I read the words of Richard Silken, he speaks of want and touch. The dirty and the sex and I relate it all back to you.

You

You

You

You’re gone now. No more shall your taste rest on my tongue. I think of you again when Richard speaks of missing. You are no more. No more afternoons spent dancing in the sun to live music or gossiping about the ever rotating knitting group or the waiter who knew my order by heart. 

I am adrift without your lighthouse presence and I am left remembering what was. Sitting in the dark within this emptiness. I know nothing but this without you Maria.

Death to virtue signaling

Alessandra Mercuri

Contributor

I possess esoteric knowledge no one else knows. 

                                   ***

I know the entire tracklist to Midnight Marauders by 

A Tribe Called Quest. 

I am way ahead of all of my peers. 

Buzzword, Buzzword, Buzzword. 

I took a philosophy class in my first semester.

Allegory of the Cave. 

I know (think) I am smarter than you.

Whoops, Freudian slip. 

              – “Faux intellect quote”

Forty-Eight Hours

Toranj Najafi

Contributor

From the moment I was born, the world around me had already been claimed. For forty-seven years, the same cruel forces called the Islamic Republic have latched onto our lives like a relentless tick, taking away our freedom with every passing year. While their children traveled the world with the stolen labor of my people, I had to learn how to protect myself from this cruel regime long before I learned to tell time.

My grandmother always told me about the bravery, courage, and drive of my people, the people of Iran. I used to listen to those stories and hope to see them for myself one day. In January 2026, I finally did. My people decided that enough was enough and stepped outside with empty hands and open voices. All they asked for was freedom.

The streets became alive in a way I had never seen before. People sang, shouted, and held nothing but their reunited voices. And yet, the response was not words. It was bullets.

In just forty-eight hours, the streets of my city were soaked in blood. Ask for a better future, and you would get shot. Hospitals became waiting rooms for grief. Mothers ran from one body bag to the next, hands shaking as they pulled at zippers, praying it wasn’t their child inside.

More than 43,000 lives were wiped out in just two days.

This is the cruel regime I lived under, a regime that takes the lives of its people as easily as it takes their voices, their dreams, and their right to simply exist. 

Those who were not killed were taken. Prisons overflowed with people whose only crime was asking for basic human rights. Families weren’t given bodies. They were given prices.

Pay, or your child is erased.

Pay, or the earth refuses them.

Even the protesters who survived the streets and made it to hospitals were not safe. After dark, men came, not with medicine, but with more bullets to finish the work.

And yet, my people did not give up. They returned to the streets day after day, with empty hands but unbroken voices.

The internet went dark. Phones stopped working. The media said NOTHING. But the truth does not live online. It lives in empty school desks, in shoes left by the door, in mothers who once dreamed of watching their children grow up.

They called this “order.”

Quiet streets. Dark screens. Fewer questions. Countless lives erased.

But I have learned that order built on fear is just another kind of violence.

Stories have power. They can teach. They can hide. They can make people obey, or force them to remember. Once a story spreads, it decides what is feared, what is forgotten, and what survives.

This is my story. Whether it preserves silence or reveals truth, I leave for you to decide.

But stories do not end the way regimes hope they will.

One day, Iran will be free again.

And when that day comes, because it will, the world will remember that my people were never silent—only waiting to be heard.

Oh! Montreal

Colm Griffin

Contributor

Oh Montreal, you’re killing me

Your long, drawn out winters

Your curious, communist boys

Your blacked-out, bisexual girls

They’ve put me in a trance

Oh Montreal, you’re making me upset

Your shady street corners, free of judgement

Your mysterious, sadistic lexical hypocrisy

Your assorted staircases leading nowhere

They’ve sent me spiraling

Oh Montreal, you’re killing me

Your poisonous river that flows like oily hair

Your secret, alluring, homosexual underbelly

Your hill busting upwards, pierced by a cross

You’ve put me in a trance