EARLY AUTUMN

Cassie Churchill

She watches, rubbing her eyes, tired of lying alone. It is a passive fight. She picks herself up, she leaves, out from under the wizened tree and into the evening’s shallow growth.

Combing out the summer’s bleached growth, turning her sun-blazing eyes to the hollowed, chirping tree, savoring the moments alone, the last of fresh-green leaves quivering on the branch in futile fight.

Laughing, crying, a fight against the season’s steady growth. Change marked by leaves leveled by time’s unsentimental eyes. Nothing is left alone under that old, old tree.

Even in the beginning, the tree knew the future–the fight–and the safety of being alone. Moving forward defines growth. The girl closes her eyes. Branches let go of their leaves.

Eventually, the ground embraces the leaves, and she sees herself under that tree. She watches through dry eyes the exhausting, all-encompassing fight against what she knows to be growth but leaves her always alone.

She learns the comfort in being alone, breathing slowly in the leaves that dissolve into new growth not too far from the tree. There were no winners in the fight; not in the girl’s new-calm eyes.

Closed eyes press skin together, alone in the fight against time, against leaves falling from the tree. It is lonely, growth.

Villanelle

Anjali Lal

Teach me to write a villanelle Like Sylvia Plath, trapped It’s a song I know too well

They told me, come out of your shell I read, rapt Teach me to write a villanelle

Raised on the same street, same cell In the same bubble, perhaps, wrapped It’s a song I know too well

Teach a man to fish on the sea swell By hunger, love, and fear kidnapped Teach me to write a villanelle

To rage and isolation we fell As the bungee cord snapped It’s a song I know too well

Every bell rung like a knell They told us to the world adapt Teach me to write a villanelle It’s a song I know too well.

ODE TO LONELINESS: THE SENTIMENT THAT IS NOT SOLITUDE Sunny Shi

Prelude

Oh, for centuries poets have sung solitude— they seek it; they learn from it; they write about it. A cave in the mountain, a cottage by the pond give birth to remedies that heal the body and prose that cleanses the heart. Noble as these romantic men are, they forget solitude is no loneliness. And between the two, loneliness I praise more than solitude.

I

Solitude one can find in the attic, in the forest, or create: imagine an empty classroom as the attic, a backyard as the forest.

No matter how solemn and sacred, its magic ends within men’s reach. But loneliness exists only in the loss of agency, ludicrous to an observer, for I surround myself with objects and humans, yet my heart is hollow, my joy taken away by god. I let go and surrender to this feeling bestowed upon me: though unbeknownst to me yet, meaning lies in this agony.

Loneliness I want more than solitude.

Ii

“He who, when trafficking with men, does not occasionally glisten with all the shades of distress, green and grey with disgust, satiety, sympathy, gloom and loneliness, is certainly not a man of an elevated taste.”

Oh, what pride philosophers hold!

How interesting that pride derives from not their works but the condition they are trapped in!

“But if he does not voluntarily assume this burden and displeasure, if he continually avoids it…then one thing is sure: he is not made, not predestined for knowledge.” Oh, what paradox philosophers yearn for: to suffer and to embrace that suffering! How wonderfully Nietzsche describes loneliness, and his words should echo with so many lonely souls! I wonder if loneliness inspired his philosophy, if he thought it a gift or a curse, if I could ever understand, undertake his journey.

Loneliness I admire more than solitude.

I packed loneliness with me, along with half a suitcase of books, as I traveled to seek anything that would calm this stubborn creature. Yet the moment I closed my book or left a conversation, it crept back up, daring me to scream to call for someone like me. So, I open a new chapter, full of another lonely soul’s prudent pondering. Finally I see this pain can never be appeased. It lives with me, with my desire for knowing—my curiosity. Loneliness I love more than solitude.

To Immigrant Mothers

Jana

Husami

This is a tale of an immigrant mother–she who turns heads as she walks into any room. She endured so much hate but didn’t even shudder.

Heard chimes of hatred spew from mouths like distant mutters, enriched her kids in culture with Umm Kulthum. This is a tale of an immigrant mother.

Made sure her kids never saw her suffer–masked the scent of racism with Arabic perfumes; She endured so much hate but didn’t even shudder.

But her daughter was just as protective of her mother, fight or flight since she was in her womb. This is a tale of an immigrant mother.

Taught her family never to cower because of their darker color. Instead, like the olives from her father’s orchid in the spring, they too can bloom. She endured so much hate but didn’t even shudder.

Gave up everything for a country that detests her, Praying to God every night as she looks to the moon. This is a tale of an immigrant mother. She endured so much hate but didn’t even shudder.

Blue Sky

Claire Kostyk

Too many did not know about the language. the food, the music, or the people of Ukraine. They were unaware of their strength, but this ignorance would not last… Images of a blackened building and smog-filled sky filled the world’s eye as tanks invaded the land.

Our eyes witnessed the charred land and Ukraine became part of our language and of the news as images of plumes of fire up to the sky filled our screens. Many doubted the Ukrainian people–how could they outlast the Russian army’s strength?

Like David fighting Goliath, the strength of the Ukrainian people protecting their land shocked the world. They would last. Their food, their music, their language would last. The collective strength of the people, their willingness to fight, filled the hopeful sky.

As I looked up at the clear, blue sky, I asked my father about Ukrainian strength. Our relatives were still there, people we love living at the west end of the land. We live separate lives and speak a different language, but our family connection continues to last.

My father spoke about the last time he looked up at the blue Ukrainian sky. He used to speak the language. He has forgotten much of it, but the strength of his culture remains like roots deeply embedded in the land. He imparted to me what he knew: the fortitude of the people.

The flag represents the resolve of the people. A reminder to all that the war will not last. The wheat that they grew on the land contrasts with the bright blue sky, and became their flag, now a symbol of strength. They continue to raise their flag and speak their language.

People now know the land, the food, the music, the language. Syla in Ukrainian means lasting strength. Once again the yellow wheat will fill the fields, and blue fill the sky.

Criminals

Sara

Lopez Alvarez

You say we are criminals

As if we run in the streets from a crime we are proud of

As if our youth only consists of gang members

Who traffic drugs to make cash for the exotic cars that are used for races on our streets

As if the only thing we hold in our pockets are guns to shoot anyone that comes our way

You say we are dangerous

So you forced our high school to get metal detectors

And our students to wear blue uniforms, as if we are in jail

Because in your eyes our dark skin of past ancestors

And our eyes filled with pride from our countries

Make us seem like we threaten our city

Prisoners, trespassers, hooligans

That’s how we are seen in your eyes

But in reality East Boston

Is a place filled with vibrant colors of different ethnicity, races, and families

All cramped into a couple of blocks, amid the ocean and the towering buildings of downtown

A safe haven for immigrants who traveled from faraway lands and called this place their first home in America

This land once consisted of three islands that become one land from the trash of the rich

In order to make more space for the poor to live in

We individuals who live here are islands too

We have an island of Colombians, Mexicans, Dominicans, Brazilians, and Central Americans

Different personalities

Different languages

Different cultures

All blended to form one community

You see us as crooks

But look again –

We are warriors who have fought the racism of our country

We are students who have fought against all odds and have become people for their parents to be proud of

We are survivors from wars that we have abandoned in our own countries

We are filled with pride in the accomplishments of building a new life in a new world

But most importantly we are a community in which the American dream becomes a reality

You say in 20 years the ocean surrounding us will swallow our land

Leaving behind a puddle amidst the rumbles of our neighborhood

But in reality, the real threat to our community is You

The white men who construct tall buildings on our harbor for luxury living

Which only the rich can afford

You who used to see East Boston as a threat, you now see as a cheap place to live

You have stripped the color and Latin pride of our streets

You push us away with skyrocketed rent prices

Now only the rich can live in our lands

Stripping us from our home

From our people

And most importantly from our culture

Before I used to hear people in the streets talking about the new Panera

But now I hear you talking about the new espresso cafe in your building complex

Or the new rooftop bar, with drinks the same price as the average hourly pay for people like me

I used to call this place my forever home

Even if the rest of the world thought of me as a criminal

Now I am not sure what the future holds for us.

You say we are the criminals

But in reality, you are the convicts who every day are stealing our neighborhood

By forcing families who raised their children in East Boston

To move away to a place where they are met with cold greetings from unfamiliar faces.

Sunny Days

Anjali Lal

It ’s a shame to die on such a sunny day. That’s what I thought to myself, walking out of the appointment. Of course, I didn’t die that day, and I won’t for some undetermined number of days yet. But Death finds us all in Samarra, as the saying goes. I wondered bitterly if Samarra was sunny.

I went out that night. It was a beautiful evening, cool and crisp, the black blanket of the sky studded by stars, with no threat of rain. As if rain were a threat, as if anything were a threat to me now. There’s an invincibility that comes with knowing you’re going to die. Five to six months, they said. I could do anything. There were no consequences. So I went out, and I don’t remember much more of that night.

I called my mother the next day. The morning sun seemed to illuminate the shame bubbling hot in my stomach, the hangover pounding at my forehead. It felt wrong to wake up like this… My poor mother. She cried softly over the phone, trying to hold back sobs, trying to hold herself together for me. The birds sang outside my kitchen window. The world continued to spin.

I threw open my front door, wanting to shake my fist at the world, the garbage collector in his neon vest, the kids at the bus stop with their tiny backpacks, old Mrs. Clapper pruning her petunias. I never thought she’d outlive me. The superior looks she always gave me when she saw my overgrown lawn now seemed to sting a little more, each one saying, look, this condescending cow has more time left than you. My world was collapsing in on itself, and I wished I could drag everyone else into this black hole with me.

I used to write and illustrate children’s books, back in the days when I would sometimes eat microwave ramen for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I sat down at the desk again that day, hoping maybe the acute awareness I felt of every second that passed might lead to a stroke of creative genius. Isn’t that what always happens? The dying find a new lease on life. They create something beautiful; they find meaning, but all I drew were children dying in various improbable ways against a bright, cloudless sky, as if spelling out their short, doomed lives might make mine a little longer.

I picked up the phone again a month ago. Clarity, that’s what people always find in their posthumously published memoirs. They realize what’s truly important to them in life. I thought of calling Mac. I broke up with him with no explanation a week after I got the news, telling him I didn’t love him anymore. Of course he begged me, pleaded with me to stay, told me we could work it out, asked me what was really going on. Maybe I needed to hear someone say these things to me so earnestly and so mundanely. Just another breakup for both of us, no guilty shadow of grief and obligation hanging over it. It had been raining that day, perhaps the first day it had rained since the appointment, and I cried for the first time in a long while. I scrolled to his contact and hovered my thumb over the telephone icon, hands trembling. His name still had a heart emoji next to it. Before I could bring my thumb down onto the screen, I heard a muted knock on the roof. More soon followed until the air was awash with heavy cracks and bangs and thumps as the late August hail fell in clumps from the sky. I put the phone away in my pocket. Perhaps this was a sign, I thought.

There are no windows in this hospital room, and the TV plays only reruns of Survivor. Maybe God has decided to vote me off the island of this world. I swear, this show is rotting my brain. Sometimes I can hear the rain drumming on the roof, the only reminder of the outside world. They won’t give me a date, but I know it won’t be long now. I can’t breathe well without the mask over my face, and the pain turns my bones to lead like some kind of twisted alchemy experiment. You know, when you really believe that you won’t live more than another week, you feel unmoored from reality. You’re spinning freely, tumbling through space, and nothing can touch you. People who aren’t living in death’s shadow seem really far away. I am my own planet, and they are distant moons orbiting me, bringing me cards and casseroles and those stupid fruit flower arrangements. I pick the chocolatecovered strawberries off and ask the nurse to throw the rest away. The hospital gown is paper-thin, and the blankets are scratchy. The room is sterile, painted in shades of gray, as if everything is designed to remind me that I’m dying, and short of a miracle, I won’t see the sky again.

My mother tells me that the air is growing colder and the leaves are turning. It seems fitting that I should die in the autumn, in this season of withering change. Her voice feels far away and distorted, as if she’s speaking to me through water. She tells me that the Patriots beat the Miami Dolphins on Sunday and that my parakeet is molting. I want to stop time, to cry out, wait, wait, I’m not ready! I am afraid of the dark again, the fear that dogs us as children, abandons us as young adults, and creeps in again at the end. I am everything I will ever be, as if my whole life I’ve merely been marching towards an inevitable end. I’m so afraid.

Holes

Layla Anderson

One wrong move and I’ll be the Black girl on the news, Shot by a cop, Just one shot and the beat of my heart stills. Unarmed, we say, A threat, they say, Just a kid, we say, A Black kid, they say.

A bullet was shot–another story of injustice will soon be told. The pain we feel is worse than a gunshot because There is nothing left to heal.

O ur Voices Matter, too.

When we protest, they call it a riot, Guns blazing.

We try to fight it–with our words, Our words go unheard,

O ur voices are muffled by those afraid of the truth. When we bleed, they see red, but we see flashing lights of red and blue.

We can’t breathe.

Our blood runs in the streets like red crayons that melted in the heat, Under the eye of the people who are supposed to protect, The eye of the people that watch our communities like they’re Alcatraz Step out of line and you might not make it home to Mom and Dad

The holes put in us make our families grieve, can’t you see? The holes being put in us have been happening for centuries, I’m scared every night my brothers are out of sight, I’m scared that they’ll be next, I’m scared that there is always a next, Slavery may be over, segregation may have ended, But we are not free, we are still caged mentally, We are the blackbird that sings in the dead of night, The only difference is we scream. We scream but our voices still aren’t heard over the whisper of the white man.

They say it’s not all of them and that’s true, But if you say nothing, you’re no help to them, me, or you, They say all lives matter and that’s true, But if an innocent man dies for the color of his skin, Does his life not matter enough for someone to save him?

An everyday activity can turn into a wrong place at the wrong time -Jogging.

Buying skittles. I can’t breathe.

I can’t speak.

All I can do is choke in the silence that should be my screams. But I’m just being over dramatic, right? It was just another Black kid off the streets, right? It was just another family now left without a parent, spouse, sibling, right?

Black Lives Matter, Too.

We are strong, but we are hurt.

How many deaths will it take to see that we have worth?

How many Black children will have to be taught how to speak around police, In fear that they won’t make it past 18, In fear that their blood will stain the streets just as fruit punch stains a tee shirt? Will there ever be a time when we can feel safe, a time when there aren’t invisible jail cells caging us in, Invisible cells that can turn into real cells with just one accident or decision.

W ill we ever feel safe enough to drive our car without the fear of it ending with a bullet to the face? Safe enough to walk the streets with ease?

Safe enough to feel free?

Our blood runs red in the streets, Your blood runs safe beneath your sheets.

INHERITED TRAGEDIES (EXCERPT)

Yufei (Caitlin) Kuang

We are in the year 1898, in the twilight of the Hapsburgs.

And the emperor looks at Erzsi like he has seen things, like he knows things. His eyes are worn by time, his face imprinted with wrinkles. He is more than sixty years of age, with hair drained of color—strands of white losing their battle with the decades. He speaks, and his voice is heavy as his crown.

At times, when he looks at Erzsi, he grimaces like he’s in pain. His eyes flash shut; his brows furrow. When he reaffirms his love for his granddaughter, he says it with so much force that young Erzsi feels as if he’s making up for a past regret, as if too many have drowned in ceaseless torrents of time, and now he’s determined to hold on to one last person.

Throughout Vienna, the knells sing for the deceased Empress Elisabeth. Tides of men flood behind the funeral lines. The masses scatter around the bronze coffin like waves shattering around a shore. There is an uproar in the crowd: The queen of Hungary! The queen of Hungary! Voices weave and heave into a thunderstorm, roaring and chortling and devouring the remnants of their century.

In this faded, deafening grief, Erzsi moves through like a stormy petrel cleaving the tumultuous sea. Her gaze follows the ripples in the crowd, landing on the hunched figure of the emperor at the head of the procession. Amidst the din, her grandfather seems smaller than ever—a mere memory of his former glory.

They say a final goodbye to the good empress before her coffin is lowered. The emperor stands, still as a lone, weathering statue. Veins snake across his skin like vines. Erzsi knows he’s lost negotiations and wars and people. She knows that he had lost his firstborn infant daughter, that he had lost both his parents by the end of his fortyeighth spring, and that he had lost his wife long before she actually departed. Another lost figure lurks behind the shadows in Erzsi’s mind, a phantom of a person who once existed in her memory, warm and radiant and, oh, so alive.

Back in her chamber, Erzsi lets down her hair in front of the mirror, and stricken by epiphany, she remembers.

The emperor’s lost Rudolf—his son, her father—whom everyone calls a rebel and a reformer, who flew for paradise and never returned. Bang! A drinking glass shatters against the floor, knocked over by a movement of Erzsi’s fidgeting hand. A shard cuts through her skin as she collects the fragments, recollects, and she wonders if her longgone father had bled the same.

JUST IS Talia Loevy-Reyes

Run, ahuvi, from the charred bimah we stand upon, through shards of stained glass to the red-stained dawn. Pogroms can’t reach us in the ghetto of milk and honey: only cigar butts and kerosene lamps and a ghostly Klan. Lower the shmata from your crumpled keppy; the G-d given gift of a newly loving land awaits breathless for our footprints upon its sopping shore. American Dream, goys call it… see them gated ‘burbs?

Lady Liberty calls: give me your tired, poor menches and yentas fresh ‘cross that pond. If we can make it past the quota’s clutches, perhaps… If we can slip past fanged hateful ports into deeper depths…?

America waits just outside phantom windows; glimpse Her as we trek through the dark to piss. Listen, bubala, through the swarm to Her altruistic oath of sweatshops and pretty pennies.

Feel Her salt-worn fingers as She fondles our face and whispers Her goodbyes: “G-dspeed.”

“It just is, child… it just is.”

She leaves us to our barren scape of dumbbell cells; so American, this reek of rot within our rotted roost. Redlines like scars cross haggard, goy flesh of our new breathless motherland.

Whiteness, She wishes. Well, aren’t we vogue with our windowless pallor of sunless ills?

Well clearly not, sneers She, for racial restrictions, redlines, revulsion, is crafted for you too. Stack us high, higher than the pyre for witches crafted long ago, higher than our mashugana dreams, higher than the flames…

See, we Jews don’t believe in Hell but as the fires roared ‘round we thought we ought to. Death by gas and guns, poverty and punches, starvation and swords: we fought through.

Through the sea, from home we flee to dreams we see, living we’ll be. Yet somehow we end up here…

“It just is, child… It just is.”

Deserters of the ghetto have found a new one to dwell in. A mezuzah on a door frame and gentiles flee She says we, as a blood, are foxes, waiting for the tender flesh of pretty blondes in snowy silk stockings.

Tell that to poor Leo Frank, barely twenty nine, still innocent when She slaughtered him, Tell that to all of us, and to the ones devoured by smoke of loathing, the battered, lost names police won’t write, Tell that to the murmurs of elders at night, whilst children are too far lost to sleep, and tell that to the children that will one day be elders.

Our cities got no funeral baths, merely murky waters too dark to glimpse lost punims.

Like the Great Flood, your hatred sweeps across the world. Will Noah, zayde of the Jews, build an ark anew?

It is a cowardly beast that devours the exile of many millennia, the scapegoat of many murderers and malingerers. Perhaps we belong in this ghetto, away from the knives that slice a thousand boys’ pe’ot; Perhaps, these crimson walls are it: enshrouded by the tallitot of holy men, we live our American Dream: “It just is, child… it just is.”

We sit as a family around the hearth; our fingers run together as we pierce fabric with thread;

Children roll spools; our father didn’t make it through eighth grade before he found the factory floor. Efficiency, She demands, each cog greased, each needle a knife, each spool wound tight.

“How old are you, kid?” She asks without wondering nor caring, so we reply without care nor meaning. They call it a sweatshop, though far more than sweat runs upon our furrowed brows and far less than sweat is returned.

At least we find jobs here. At least they let us through the factory doors. See Her smiling at us from the street? Hear the prayer of the sewing machine, the hymn of hands against brows, the psalm of weary footsteps. And know that Moses led us from the sands of Egypt to have a palm-full of coins to send home to the shtetl once more.

Are Jews not a tired people? From Egypt through the sands, from Israel through Europe and overseas anew. Pick up your thread, shefele:

“It just is, child… it just is”

Is it just? The conditions cut enough tzitzit to wear as a rabbi’s pe’ot, how can it be?

They said a long time ago that the streets were paved of gold, but all we got was filthy pavement. We come for our children, then, and our children grow. Our children enlist and attend college and fight for freedoms,

Our children grow strong and their children stronger, until there ain’t no Yiddish, no tenements, no psalm of sweatshops,

Merely the stories whispered in a gravel voice of a forgotten place, moments lost to the tides of time.

Now we stand, proud as millenniums past even as our temples got metal detectors,

Now we stand, despite Pittsburgh, despite laughable accusations, despite Charlottesville and the boy who felt our head for horns.

Has the American Dream embraced us now, ahuvi? Or are we merely in the arms of an old zayde telling stories?

“It just is, child…”

Glossary:

Ahuvi (Yiddish) My Love

Bubala (Yiddish) Dear

G-d (English) A Jewish tradition to not write the name of our deity as a sign of respect

Goy (Hebrew & Yiddish) A gentile, or a non Jew

Keppy (Yiddish) Forehead

Mashugana (Yiddish) Craziness; nonsense

Mensch (Yiddish) Man of integrity

Mezuzah (Hebrew) Literally means a doorpost, but often used to refer to a prayer scroll in a decorative tube fixed to the door

Pe’ot (Hebrew) The curled sideburns often worn by Hasidic men. Sideburns are seen as one of the many commandments, and to Hasidic Jews cutting them above the Temporal Bone is sinful.

Punim (Yiddish) Face

Shefele (Yiddish) Little lamb

Shmata (Yiddish) Rag

Tallitot (Hebrew) Jewish prayer shawls (plural - tallit is singular)

Tzitzit (Hebrew) The fringe of a talis knotted to symbolize each commandment, meant to remind the wearer of their dedication to G-d. A strand of tzitzit is cut from the talis when the owner dies

Yenta (Yiddish) A common Yiddish woman’s name, used to indicate a Jewish woman. It can also be used to indicate a busybody or gossip

Zayde (Yiddish) Grandfather

To My Daughter On Her Phone

Evelyn Fine

You were watching Tik Tok dances when I told you we were having pizza for dinner. I chose your favorite toppings: pineapple and ham. You pressed the heart on your friend’s Instagram when I said how proud I was of your “A” in Algebra. You’d studied so hard and it paid off. You were playing Crossy Road when I asked if you wanted to watch a movie together. The movie made me laugh so hard, and you would have loved it. You Snapchatted a selfie with butterflies to your friend when I cried after a hard day of work. It’s okay; I never like it when you see me upset. And then your battery died, and you had forgotten your charger. I told you I loved you, and you said you loved me too.

Recollection Is A Forgiving Disease

Yvonne Hao

Recollection is a forgiving disease. It begins when flames smolder left with smoke ice melts left with water…

When frigidity prevails over warmth, Wrecking clouds supersede the blues and Bring some bleached gray from north and south.

Recollection drifts with the breeze, Under extreme degrees, She buries the seas, the trees, Desolate weeping in the freeze She drowns in the disease She coughs in grief.

Rivulets flood in rain, She prays in vain. Disease exonerates her. She absolves herself.

But

Air never decomposes the smoke; Winds never appease the stream.