The Nueva School Litmag 2025
letter from the editors
In the face of change, it is easy to fall into fear. The world is always on the move—we exist in departures and returns, in cycles of coming and going. Though it can feel isolating at times, there is a kindness found in transitions and the promise of impermanence. The phenomenal pieces we’ve collected here showcase this truth. Our contributors confront reality, bury themselves in their art, and challenge themselves to create the best they can.
In this issue, we saw change. We saw a grappling with the ever-present tide of transformation, but also a reckoning on the meaning of change and reflection. We witnessed artists confronting mortality, identity, and the tension of existing in a transient world. From them, we saw resilience, connection, and the desire to live fully.
We hope what you consume here follows you, that it inspires you to live intentionally, with care and a remembrance of how fleeting our lives are and how we must make the best of it. Don’t let this scare you. Though the world is always on the move, constantly shifting back and forth, there is a thread that ties us together. Between uncertainty breathes a space for growth, light, and an embrace of the new.
We would like to express our immense gratitude to our faculty advisors, Jen Neubauer and Amber Carpenter. Your encouragement, patience, and unwavering support helped guide us through the process of publishing this edition. Also to LiAnn Yim, thank you so much for your time and guidance while we navigated this journey.
Thank you to all of the incredibly talented creators featured in this issue–please keep writing, painting, taking photos, and submitting to LitMag. To our readers: thank you for reading this year’s edition of LitMag. Buckle up and prepare to appreciate the incredible talent harbored in this issue. We hope you enjoy our contributors’ pieces as much as we did.
- Sebastian J. and Senna H.
LITMAG TEAM: Eloisa L., Eleanor A., Sierra E., Raya I.
routinely
by anonymous
AFTER MARIANNA MOORE
i, too, feel it: the incessant drum against the back of my skull; voices ricocheting like bird cries across an empty street, elastic reverberations and stillness. in the end, the closed doors and dimmed lights will mean nothing, and so everything. the rhythm grows as the sun stretches beyond the barred windows. forgotten footsteps. remembered smiles. you could call it hypocrisy, this re-remembering— like ants marching in circles to death, each action echoes through the calendar before fading, copy by copy, into that everywhere space old ghosts must inhabit. a presence forgotten but felt. yes, i have forgotten how to be one, seven, fifteen. a self shed like snake skin but carried like a snail shell, ever-present; lives lost in bark broken from a sapling’s trunk as it reaches, fingers outstretched, to the sky. yes, the present is an ocean and i am only myself. yes, i am alive.
by cameron m. I Dream of Cages in my Cage of Dreams
Joni stood and turned, brushing her chair away from the table and sashaying in doll-like movements down the smudged corridor. She beelined to the rounded brass doorknob of my basement door—that wasn’t smudged. That was glossy and gleaming in the clarity of her determination. Her curled hand encroached on its own brass reflection, like an eagle’s claw over prey.
Wayne’s square body blustered from out of the smudge of my periphery. He moved from the kitchen table at which we’d been sitting towards her silhouette opening the door. He spoke with none of the frostedness I felt crystalizing my throat.
Where are you going? What’s wrong? Joni?
Joni had not turned the light on. Wayne’s phone flashlight bit at her heels. Down the staircase, I followed his light following hers.
The darkness was hollow and endless, spots of it stitched together loosely like a child’s sketched out connect-the-dots puzzle. There was no more staircase. There was no more door frame tattling on the hallway’s hoarding of light. I was breathing in hues of indigo and swirls of ink, and knew in an unbearable way that my eyes would never fully readjust to the messy brightness that was. She was above me on a platform of wood, and the gnarled planks were scarred with knots and charred scratches that traveled illusively past, like yellow and white highway lines slipping under the roar of an engine. An electric blue light bathed her and rioted through her layered gushing hair, and she was stronger in that instant than I had ever seen another person be. Her hands closed tightly around a cold and hard mystical thing which was not meant to be caged but which she was caging anyways. It tantrumed against the pads of her fingers and the plush of her palms. Her eyes watched it and nothing else. Her body worked to contain it and nothing else. My eyes could not look directly at her, she was the sun, and my body was nowhere within me, I was my own shadow, trapped in her world of ink.
For the better part of my childhood, I’ve been staring at walls thinking of something else: fleeting moments turned over and cleaned obsessively in the laundry machine of my head, then finally dried out on that healing clothesline of time. Coming to myself in flashes of clarity, and then lapsing back into the smudged flurry of the past. When I came to again, with blackness pulsing around me audibly, my hands were frayed and curled around a spider web of tattered rope spilling down from her wooden platform. My neck was strained with craning, and the rope was swaying softly. Wayne was there, on the platform beside her, reaching his strong hands toward her, whispering through a face of concern. I didn’t understand how he knew to follow her, how in one fell swoop he ordered the blubbering mess of his body to hoist him up beside her, close enough to see the turquoise ricocheting through her purposed eyes. How he didn’t get lost in the chemical pool of her gaze, or grow wayward amongst her sweeping emptiness.
She opened her palms like an oyster, and her fingers gently held the rusted chain of an indigo locket, trimmed in a web of iron and cut in the shape of a heart. With the flick of her wrist, it swung back and forth. The locket lazed from side to side and Wayne stood there dumbly staring at her and I wanted to tell him that I was right, that she spoke in languages that no amount of love or time could translate.
The locket, possessed by a rash fit of gravity, tumbled apart from her in a mess of trinket and chain down towards the rope against which I was frozen. I was a broken clock behind broken eyeglasses; time yanked itself towards me and I could not focus on it well enough to understand what it was trying to say. Suddenly, my hand was outstretched and cupped—suddenly, the locket crashed into the flesh of it—suddenly, the chain slithered through my fingers and away. I felt like a kid in Little League, paralyzed in the outfield with a baseball whizzing towards me and past me. The crowds winced. I felt like a kid. The darkness hypnotized and engulfed me, speeding through me in a blur of dotted lines, and I understood that I was too trapped in my mind to fathom the trap of hers. With that, sleep took me back thickly.
The mirror was warped in the morning as my dreams jumped away from me and I could not understand why I looked at myself but did not see myself, and why the curve of my nose was suddenly so particularly revolting. I heard a
voice—You’ve only thought to look and think? You’ve never thought to change yourself?—And suddenly a shard of meaning was cutting through me slowly as she stood there beside me, lights half dimmed, everything smudged in the background. Her eyes were smudged over, too, far away somewhere else, inevitably. Even before I became so obsessively a thinker and dreamer, I simply wanted to hold her and to know her, and for her to know me. But I know nothing of these dreams of hers that can be touched and chased. I know only of dreams that show me truths and then leave me helpless, passive, and brutally awake.
A Gentle Spill
by maddy s.
by wyatt t.
I wonder what would happen if I found myself with God’s corpse. I think, at least for a little moment, I would be so utterly enamored with the splendor of God’s great body, that I would just sit and stare at it. Even if God was a dried cadaver nailed into the dirt with a thousand pine trees, I would still be enveloped by the damp shade of moss eyebrows and the saline breeze of a river tearing freely from an optic canal.
But the moment I become too curious, I would go up and touch God’s body and lose all the ways I had failed to describe the ineffable spectacularness of God. I’d see that a corpse is a corpse, and with nothing better to do, I would trace out a road carved from a coronal suture, following it until I reached the top of the head, and I would cut that forest of hair and build a cabin on that dirt skull, and make sure it stayed sacred.
Before us came our ancestors, and before them came theirs, and you can trace the endless branches of that family tree, so innumerable and dense that they twist around each other almost like threads on a loom, until they are intricately woven like some tapestry of life. So many people. So many corpses. I wonder where they went, too.
I’ve thought about this enough that I have my own theory as to what happened. We come and we go standing on the bodies of our ancestors, the millions upon billions upon trillions of their remains that have decomposed into the soil we walk upon—their blood water and their flesh clay, mixing and mashing with the next deceased generation—sculpting the mountains we live upon. We are alive for a bit, then dirt forever.
If that’s the case, when I die, I’d like to go find an open field with the shortest strands of wheat and grass yellow enough that I’d think I was always under the sun. I’d set myself down gently, making sure my hands and feet were steady, and become a little stump. Eventually, someone else looking for somewhere else would come by, and they would rest on my carcass for a bit, before they moved on.
gentle-eyed by
miah k.
there’s dust and dust and it’s getting darker and I’m late, so terribly late. who knew august could run cold?
I’m the boy who cried wolf; how long overdue for loving, missing how awfully early for anything but an apology.
I’m losing words in the grass, I just wanted you to laugh, I promise. (I promise)
the wolf went down to the river and knelt in the rushes and the birds make me think of you now. so do the crickets and the ac’s drone and the dogs barking at the edges, the sound belongs in the space between your cupped hands between every freckle on your face.
your epithet would be “gentle-eyed.”
an apology, an apology, for needing you and missing you and for sticking slow like honey and for every time I said “I love you” and for every word that wasn’t that.
and I know you’re flying by, but will you perch with me on the gutter for a while?
I swear the wolf is sleeping, rushes in his coat, time dripping from his teeth I swear it all tastes of honey I swear I did not cry.
Magic
by amalia v.
the second going
by
lily z.
scientists can write the perseverance rover a flurry of electrical signals. they can fire pistons in his head to simulate a Real Neural Network. they’ll slap together a few metal rods to make an arm and lil’ white boy goes slinging his camera to grab for space guts. scientists can send percy pulsing, crawling, smashing rocks. they build him to register signs of life, not ennui. fermi insists, everyone is listening and no one is transmitting—! so percy rolls fistfuls of sand and sprains his ankles all quiet. without vocal chords he doesn’t know to scream, for water or help, so he will rust and be ascribed a myth that exalts his creator
To my Sister, Who Shrieks When the Ceiling Spiders Tumble Down
by rachel a.
A PASTICHE AFTER JAMAICA KINCAID’S A SMALL PLACE
Then, like spilled water, that damned spider descends; its glassy brown legs clumsily topple down, skittering softly across the pale drywall. Smaller than your thumb, its fat-barreled body reflects the overhead light’s pearly shine. There, you stand, silent, as it stills—eight, glittering eyes reflect back your own, a splintered image. You wonder, briefly, how spiders see through their kaleidoscopic eyes. Would the world be that much prettier, fractured?
White tissues slip over your hand like a second skin: padded, thick, and doughy—not so unlike your own. Your hands shake a little, enough to force a shiver down your arms (but only a little because you are just that brave), and you breathe—one—two—three—counting off the little time this little spider has left, damned for being in the wrong spot, for being in the wrong house, wrong time, wrong body. The spider jerks away rapidly from your invading shadow, and the quick-fire movement triggers a visceral disgust that blooms in your chest. Someone cries, Kill it, and you pause a little before reaching out for the poor sucker.
Kill it because spiders are quick to evade and creepy to see and kill it because your sister is scared and kill it because spiders are ugly and kill it because it is your mantra, your normal, your instinct.
You cringe when the tissues fail to protect you against the vile sensation of this living creature crunching in your hand like pine needles, ground tightly between your pointer and thumb, oozing liquid fire, and all you can hear is—this once living creature—and (your) violence (yours) and you find yourself staring at the crumpled ball held clenched in your fist as if you cannot bear to part from it.
How could you? Not after what you did. The sounds rattle inside your mind—a snapping cytoskeleton, and the brittle scrape of your fingernails, and the drying smear of dark goo against the wall only heaves your mind deeper into the hellhole you created, you. Your fingers burn, throbbing, as if the spider’s glassy, jagged legs had torn through your papery skin as you pressed death, firmly,
against its twitching, caramel body.
You are the victor. You are the victor, and you roll this word around in your mouth for a while as if sucking on a stone, hoping to smooth out the grit with time and your tongue; yet when you speak, the word scrapes out warped, fat, and heavy (you, pursing your lips, fishlike and dumb, wonder why it does not feel like victory).
Oh, how lovely it would be if you could claw out the choked, blistering pit forming in your throat; let your guilt beat heavy outside your body, cupped in your raw, fractured palms until ultimately, like ants to honey, it crawls back and nestles itself deeper in your breast bone, fused to your ribs. Yes, lovely it would be, and your sharp nails and calloused palms would finally be of good use, wouldn’t they?
You walk to the bathroom and open the toilet lid. You swallow hard at your deformed reflection in the water and quietly wonder if killing has made you uglier. In the palpable silence, like breathing, your watery features gently swell, growing too many eyes, too little eyes, two eyes; your pink face distends and deflates, warping into a kaleidoscopic nightmare. Glamorous, but pulverized. You had asked if the world would be prettier if fractured—smashed—and by now, you have reached your answer. With an unceremonious plunk, the spider and the tissue and the blood and your victory hit the water and slowly sink under.
As you watch the spider slip down the drain, you ask yourself why. Why do you immediately reach for the broom or the tissues or the vacuum, rather than the cup? Why feel remorse only after the fact, after the violence?
If anything, the spider was more afraid of you—you saw the creature run, desperate and frenzied, before you snatched it up and fed its body to hungry white paper flames. You find yourself wondering why you have never felt like this before. You’ve seen your parents, your friends, your aunties kill spiders before, so why is it that you feel this gnawing uneasiness now? Was it because, for the first time, it finally clicked in your mind that, perhaps, mercy was an option?
You shut the toilet lid with a soft, final click. How many times have you pulled that handle? Isn’t it strange, that no matter how many times you see a spider, that regardless of your profound understandings and decided epiphanies, your first instinct will always be to ground your heel down, hard, against the creature’s pulpy, thrashing body? You know it is wrong, yet you kill anyway, except this time, whispered apologies fall from your lips like prayer. And maybe, just maybe, there’s knowledge in that—a lesson you’re not ready to face.
On the Platform
by raya i.
“Will you please stop, Anna? Just stop! I don’t have to tell you anything if I don’t want to! You have your own life!” Valerie screams, her small hands waving above her head. She recoils from her own outburst and turns away so Anna can only see a dark sheath of hair and the corner of her eye, glistening. Anna backs away slowly, saying, in spite of herself, “You can’t just act like everyone serves you, Valerie. You’re going to need to learn how to be a real person soon enough.”
She hears her own voice, low and condescending, and hates it. A real person. Her sister is a real person: look at her slinking away, shoulders tense, casting one glance back at Anna, energy flashing behind her eyes. Valerie has a sport and a report card of good grades, which is more than Anna can say for herself at the moment. Anna knows she seems like the antagonist, questioning her sister, telling her I have a right to know what is going on in your life. But how to explain to Valerie that their mother came to Anna’s room crying last night, saying she was losing her baby, they were all growing up and Valerie was becoming selfsufficient and pulling away and she was worried, and please would Anna do something about it? So Anna asked her some questions, and now everyone is unhappy, and it’s Anna’s fault.
While Anna stands staring at the space her sister left behind in the living room, the front door slams and Valerie storms past the window, gymnastics bag slung over her shoulder, determinedly splashing in sidewalk puddles. Anna prickles with rage and watches her until she disappears out of sight, then grabs her own backpack and walks, seething, to catch the train that will take her to school.
By four in the afternoon, the sun is already going down and the temperature is dropping. On the platform by the train tracks, Anna’s phone vibrates. Her hands, already freezing, are jolted by pain. She fumbles the phone and nearly drops it. Her mother’s face, a photo from ten years ago, lights up the screen, and she swipes up. “Mama? Hello?”
“Anna, honey.” Her mother’s voice crackles loudly in the cold, empty air.
“Yes?”
“You—your sister—Valerie. I’m taking her to the hospital and you need to come
home.”
“What?”
“She’s hurt—well, sick—I don’t know. Can you please not go to wherever you were going.”
“I—yes. Okay. I’m coming home. The train is late but I’ll get on it and come home.”
The call disconnects and she removes her stiff fingers from around the screen. Her voice is still in her throat, wanting to ask what and how and all the other questions, but the connection is severed, and she is alone, staring out at the rusting sheets of steel and graffitied trash thrown on the other side of the tracks. A light mist of rain brushes her face when she leans out to look for the train, which is veering into the realm of seriously late. She sees an endless track. No pair of yellow lights. No hissing, squeaking hunk of metal. No whirring wheels.
Valerie. Oh God, what could she have done? She is never sick or hurt. Anna’s older sister, Lidia—yes. She is a hypochondriac and extremely fragile, and attends her college classes online half the time because of a mental or physical ailment. So rarely does her internal barometer tell her that everything is in an equilibrium strong enough for her to function. The rest of us, Anna thinks bitterly every time she sees her, keep going anyway. We function at half capacity.
But Valerie is a gymnast, and she always seems strong and ready, getting up at the same hour each day, keeping a rigid schedule of school and practice. Hitting the bar of achievement every time. Anna has watched her practice before. Her sister looks tiny from up in the bleachers, but powerful, her small body hitting the mats with a steady thwack, again and again and again. She falls more in a single practice than Anna has fallen in her entire life, but always falls perfectly. The other girls at her gym are constantly getting injured and going to physical therapy and missing meets but Valerie is quietly consistent, stretching and exercising and always landing in exactly the right way. She is indestructible and obstinate. Anna can’t even picture her hurt. Her brain shrinks away at the impossibility, banishing the thought.
Anxiously Anna checks her phone. The train schedule hasn’t been updated at all: it still says the train will come on time, twenty minutes ago. Her hands are numb, and when she tries to move her arms, bolts of pain sear her muscles. She is too tired to start her stagnated blood flowing again. She opens her messages, debates texting her mother, and decides against it. Her body, a sealed package of organs, muscles, and bones dressed in layers of cloth, is a motionless little block on the train platform, underneath the awning. The rain beats with even,
consistent rage on everything it finds. Her brain, floating somewhere inside its chamber, feels fuzzy and barren and brittle, throwing unhelpful thoughts at her like pellets of hail. She begins to panic at the fact of her situation: that she is counting on a mechanical beast to come lumbering up to her and take her home, but the beast has simply failed to arrive. The train is late but I’ll get on it and come home.
She tries to scream those words into the silent air but only a little sob comes out. It kickstarts her system and she turns around, scanning the platform. Her eye lands on a dark hunk in one corner that she realizes is a man, with three tired and gnarled fingers exposed. She stares at him as a wave of fear, then guilt, then sorrow, crashes over her. Then there comes the hot, prickly sensation of returning to her body, and suddenly she is very warm wrapped in her jacket when she looks at the haphazard collection of blankets covering the man. Valerie is hurt, her mother is distraught, a man is sleeping in the cold on the train platform, and Anna is—what? In temporary discomfort, waiting for the train, where she will board and thaw and forget.
Her phone rings again. It takes her three tries to swipe up, but she answers. “Mama?”
“Honey, where are you? I told you to come home. Lidia says you aren’t.”
“I know that. I’m still—I’m still, um… waiting for the train.”
“You’re still waiting? Are you sure?”
“Yes, I am! It’s late and I’m freezing! I am still waiting!” Anna gulps and cringes as soon as the words are out of her mouth.
Her mother swears. “I’m at the hospital and I can’t get you. And you know Lidia hates driving in the rain…I guess you’re just going to have to keep waiting. Actually, come to the hospital, please. You’ll be of no use at home.”
Use? What does her mother think Anna can do? If she needs to do something, maybe Valerie is more hurt than she imagines. She’s barely even considered the idea, so preoccupied with trains and weather. What kind of person is she?
The lump of blankets in the corner stirs, and Anna watches a head emerge and rise on top of its body to stare right at her. The man’s eyes are deep blue and his face is dark and grizzled and impossibly exhausted. She doesn’t know whether turning away would be more rude or not. She doesn’t know anything anymore. The man stands and slowly walks towards her until they’re only a foot apart. Shivering, he extends his arm to point to the tracks and she looks. The train is hurtling towards them, screaming, growling, breaking all the silence and stagnation that was building.
It shudders to a stop and the doors peel open, revealing, inside, a flood of light and warmth. The man gestures for Anna to go first. She shakes her head and hangs back, and finally he grumbles and steps gingerly onto the train. She looks back at the platform, dirty and empty save for the pile of blankets, and then hops onto the train and climbs the steps up to the second story.
Sitting in a bench-seat, she feels warmth worm its way painfully back through her skin and into her body. The train is slow, but at least she is moving. Her phone pings: from her mother, Has it arrived yet??
Yes, she types. Just got on.
Okay. Please get off at Shirwood so you can walk directly to the hospital. ok.
Anna glances at herself in the window, shimmering and half-translucent. She scans the train car for the man, but he’s nowhere to be seen; he must have gone the other way. Why does she have to go to the hospital and not Lidia? She was the one who yelled at Valerie this morning—oh God. She yelled at Valerie this morning. She was cold and waiting, and she forgot, but now the whole scene replays in vivid detail. A few innocent questions and Valerie shut down and turned away. What if she was concealing something, what if she was already hurt, what if she was preoccupied with Anna’s words at practice and she fell—and gymnasts can die whirling themselves through the air over and over again, or what about that girl who broke her neck and became paralyzed, or all the hundreds and thousands of girls who must have quit, over the years, because their bodies said no? Her little sister has always looked so strong, but what does she know? If she’s injured and it’s Anna’s fault, Anna will be the devil for the rest of her life. She remembers an instance a year ago when Valerie said, emphatically, if I can’t do gymnastics, I don’t know what my life is for. And Anna, talentless and passionless, had just nodded, wondering how it was even possible to live with and within something so all-consuming.
The train finally clobbers to a stop at her station, and Anna stretches and gathers her bag and steps out. She has only a vague idea of how to find the hospital, but it’s raining and dark so she just walks as fast as she can in some direction, and after fifteen minutes of frantic turning and running, she finds the glowing white H on a blue sign and stumbles through a set of doors.
She enters Valerie’s room wet and dripping, breathing hard from running through hallways and taking elevators and becoming overwhelmed with her own ineptitude. Her mother is sitting in a plastic chair, looking small, tired, and angry.
“I’m sorry, the train was so, so late, it’s literally never been this late before,” Anna says.
Her mother, usually so vocal, just sighs, nods, and shrugs, and Anna feels immeasurably guilty. She turns towards her sister, lying motionless in the bed. Her thin face is turned away, so Anna can only see her cheekbone and her dark eyelashes brushing her skin. There are no casts or bandages, just a little patch on her wrist connected to a bag of fluid by the bed. Somehow, though, it looks more dire than if she had been covered in slings and plaster. Anna shivers with alarm and looks to her mother. “Mama? What happened?”
“I barely even know,” her mother says, voice cracking. “She fainted and when we took her here, they said she looked malnourished and weak, but—how is that even possible? I feed her. She—I’m not a bad mother.”
“You’re not,” Anna says softly.
“I’m not,” her mother repeats, sobbing. “I swear it. I’m not a bad mother.”
Anna kneels down and holds her mother’s hand, breathing shallowly. She wants to be back on the train platform, her eyes never having witnessed her strong, capable little sister hollowed out in a hospital bed and her mother’s cries bouncing off every clinical wall in the room. She would take numb hands and an incorrect train schedule, all of it, selfishly. How despicably selfish she is.
Gently, she lets go of her mother’s hand and walks on shaky legs to her sister’s bedside. Valerie’s chest rises and falls in a tiny motion. Anna looks at her, the fragility of her collarbones, her little fingers clustered together around the blanket, her dark hair let down on the pillow. How has Anna not noticed how young and delicate Valerie looks? How has she not wondered about the hours spent each day in that cavernous, cold gym, contorting her body? How has she not asked, not cared? In the beginning of their childhoods their orbits were aligned; they were each other’s companions and friends, they saw each other day. Now they circle two planets that are drifting farther and farther away each year. Valerie’s form seems completely alien to Anna. “I don’t know you at all,” she whispers.
The feeling of being stuck on the platform returns with full force, controlling Anna, shutting her inside her body. The glass walls—between her mind and her body and her body and the world—grow thicker and cloudier, and Valerie is on the other side, lying in that bed, perhaps hearing her mother cry, perhaps sensing her older sister’s wordless panic, or perhaps hearing and sensing nothing at all.
Jewels
by aryan m.
What I Didn’t Know Before
by anonymous
What I Didn’t Know Before
is how long it takes for rocks to move downstream and how the most venerable boulders inch after the tumbling sediment centuries longgone pace of leisure unhurried by river rush cascade-tumble-push so imperceptible and I didn’t know how those brooding masses drifted so far while I was rooted to unchanging tide and yet those dark hints under whitewater frenzy those hulking sages still shape still displace the same way of flow that weathers us smooth in its frenetic scramble towards— the sea, or something greater, and I wonder what it’s like to be so limitless, so insignificant, so fast toward this vastness, but I’ve been stuck here for so long
How to Stay Awake
by vinca l.
I know, your eyelids are heavy. Past that time of day and all you can or will yearn for is the denouement into endless dreams. You start to see every surface or wall as something you can rest your head against: bumpy drywall, messy desks, even the cold wooden floor. While your prefrontal cortex protests, your hypothalamus scrambles for anything at all to reset your body.
Do you have a big test tomorrow and need to stay up all night? It’s ironic how this all feels like a dream as you sluggishly scratch your pen against paper, notes blurring unintelligibly. You grip your hair in frustration. How to stay awake: upbeat music, streamlined attention, Pomodoro, an unholy overdose of caffeine. You’ll get through it. I promise.
Sometimes you can’t help but let a bit of your precious concentration slip. Sleepiness leads to erraticness; thoughts jump around. Do yours? They lead your eyes to the window on your right. Peeking your head out the window for a breath of freshness, the beats of the music fade into atmospheric noise.
Do you become drawn to the lonesome yet unwavering street lights down below, the rhythmic cricket symphony, or the scent of chilled Bay Area air? Maybe the distraction wasn’t such a bad idea after all. These sensory stimulants make you think. Make you feel something other than bleak lethargy.
Breathe in, out. In, out, count to four.
Stay awake.
Look around you: right, left, down, up. Up at the sky. Your sleepy vision finally sharpens at the little pinpoints of light above.
Do you ever gaze up at the starry night sky in these hours past midnight and wonder what else may be so real and visible yet just out of our reach—a splattered, ethereal canvas of broken promises and unfulfilled dreams?
These scintillating stars represent eternity to us. To you, they also represented the search for knowledge, for truth, for meaning. Do you still think of them in this way? The edge between the known and the unknown, empiricism and hypothesis, reality and imagination. The illusion of a linear path forward. You could stay awake for hours simply staring.
But eventually, all stars fade away.
They die a magnificent death, scattering themselves into trillions of tiny parts of what could have been. The light from stars born far enough away will never even arrive at our lonely human eyes—lost forever. Meaning itself is lost forever to the cosmos when humans reach their ultimate finality. Your own legacy will be lost forever once you draw your last breath: your purpose wasn’t to impact the world, but to ponder about stars.
Do you simply feel a bone-deep exhaustion? Life wears you down, and you’re weary of life. Do you remember a time when the stars used to stir such aching emotions? You tell yourself, What foolish ideals, what tragic hope. All that remains: a hollow shell.
You just want to sleep.
Do you spare a glance back at your notebook, back to grounded reality, back to the pursuit of staying awake, or has the hazy memory of former dreams kept you awake enough to continue stargazing and only to stargaze? Staring up, you gravitate towards those dreams, not toward dreams born of slumber.
And when you relive the bittersweet euphoria of past memories, back when everything was simpler, do you feel yourself falling to sleep because there’s no point in staying awake, because Time Herself has stared back at you long enough and compelled you to break your stare, or because the night sky now only ever stirs the faint echo of lost passion and joy?
Do you desperately wish to stay awake, even just a while longer?
untitled by stella c.-c.
Lost in these Cerulean Ponderings
by senya s.
by aurelia f.
glass clock
by sofia
r. Hello, dreamer
Have you any dreams you’d like to sell Dreams of loneliness
Like a heartbeat drives you mad
- Fleetwood Mac
You’d be surprised how many times they first answer yes. People with holes in their hearts. Well, I guess that’s not the right way to say it. People with hearts that have been so covered in pain and wishes that they hunger only for a chance to start over. I take nightmares too, so that explains some of it.
My wrists trail heavy with them: I wish she loved me. I dreamt that I made it out of here. I hoped, in my heart, that we could start over. Silver shackles of dreams turned sour. But that’s not what they are to everyone who comes here. I am the savior, but an ethereal one. Perfect in my silks and bracelets. They don’t need to see the truth. Sometimes I don’t see it myself.
But you have to hear it before you make your choice. My name is known to no one anymore, I am The Dream Collector. I used to be Nina. Before this blessingcurse rained down upon my head.
“Nina dear, go fetch that plate that we lent next door!”
“Nina, go pick the rhubarb for supper.”
“Nina! Will you get your brother to stop crying?”
And so I did. I confess I was always a bit of a people pleaser, but the tasks never bothered me. Day in and day out it was busy. But I had Kate. Whirlwind Kate. We were two hurricanes and our bemused parents were always left with rattling cups and startled chickens when we tore through. she was chaos, and I was happily swept along in her wake. We made the hens scream and the lizards scuttle. We spent our free time running down to the river. Her skirts were always muddy. We were best friends.
I haven’t seen her for 50 years, and I have no right to remorse. It started when we were sixteen, with an idle comment from Kate.
“Liana seems cool, right? She invited me to a party tonight. I think I’ll go.”
Now to understand this next bit, you must understand that Kate was my only friend. Had been my only friend since the age of five. I had never felt the need for more. And I thought she hadn’t either.
“Sure,” I said, “she does seem cool.”
That night, I cried. I cried until my mother told me to stop, and then I shook silently. I thought Kate was going to leave me. I thought this was the end of us. She wouldn’t say it, of course, but I was convinced she had grown tired of me and that soon I would be nothing more than a stranger to her, her life would move on. And so I focused on the dream she had. The dream that led her away from me. And I willed it with all my might to go away.
The next day I woke up sick to my stomach. I also felt a little foolish. One party wasn’t going to lead my best friend away from me. I dressed, tried to smooth the dark circles away from my eyes, and resolved to be better.
When I met her by the river that morning, I resolved to ask about the party. If it made her happy, I reasoned, I should be happy too. and maybe if I showed interest in her new life, she wouldn’t leave me out of it.
“Oh that?” she said “Nah, I didn’t end up going.”
Privately, I was elated. Out loud, I questioned her.
“Were you feeling OK? Were any of them mean to you or something?”
“No,” she said, “I just didn’t think it sounded that fun.”
I smiled. “Well, you want to go catch rock crabs instead?”
Our life was fairly normal after that day, for a while. it was so long until the next incident I almost forgot about that day. Almost.
“Hey, Ni? I’m gonna go stay with my cousin in town for a bit, so I’ll see you next week okay?”
My heart dropped.
“Okay,” I whispered, although I’m surprised she didn’t comment on the tremble in my voice.
I cried that night too. There was no mistaking it this time. She was leaving me. It was only for a few days she claimed, but a few days could turn into a few weeks could turn into months could turn into her staying there, or going further away. And how would I cope with that? That night I hoped fervently, with my eyes closed and my pillow stuffed against my lips, that she would just forget, forget about wanting to leave me.
The next morning, I asked her when she was leaving.
“I ended up canceling it, it just didn’t seem that important.”
My eyes widened, and my smile could’ve split my cheeks. It was all downhill from there.
It could’ve been a coincidence, I told myself as I lay awake at night. But then I thought about that other time, months ago, the party that Kate ended up never attending.
It was little things, I told myself each night that I lay awake swiping the dreams
from her mind. A friendship here, a trip there. An internship in the next state. Artist fame, because then she would go on to exhibitions all over the globe and I would be left behind. It was little things, I told myself as my friend stayed with me, unaware that she ever wanted otherwise. it was little things, I told myself as she grew more sullen, without ever knowing why. I told myself I didn’t know why either.
I thought I had fixed it, fixed her. But one night under the stars, Katr whispered to me that she was going to leave. She was going to run and she was going to get out of here. She was going to go far far away and start a new life. That she had talked to her friends- what friends? -and they were going to leave tomorrow.
That night, I didn’t cry. It was one easy wish away, and Kate would never remember that she wanted to leave. I could even wish away anything that had ever made her want such things as that. And I wished with all my heart. That could’ve been the end of it. We both grew up, and my family and hers passed into the sunlight together. We took over our farms, and we stayed in that little sleepy suburb. We could’ve lived the rest of our days in peace. But Kate was never meant for quiet peace like I wanted, and even if her mind didn’t remember it, her heart did. Her cheeks grew hollow, her skin drab. though she smiled at me still, her eyes didn’t sparkle anymore. We went through our motions, but something in Kate was gone. One day, she stopped coming to the river with me, and said it just wasn’t that exciting anymore. That’s when I knew. My Kate was gone. This woman who’d grown with me into her twenties shared nothing with the bright child I remembered. The one who used to roll around in the mud, and chase crows, and laugh with her mouth hanging open. The one who painted and sang and filled every room with color. The one who knew she deserved things, and had the fire in her heart to get them. that fire was gone. And it was my fault. I loved Kate, and so I had made a terrible mistake.
That night, I ran home. I had been waiting by the river all day. Hoping I was imagining things. Hoping that she would come and say that she had just been tired, and had come to her senses. But I think I knew that I would sit there, the water eddying around my feet, my skin crawling with bugs, and that she would not come.
I cried that night, cried for the first time in years. I wished with my heart, my soul, with every cell in my body to put my best friend back the way she had been, that bright child who I used to know so many years ago. And as I fell asleep, I thought that even if she hated me, she would at least be Kate again.
The next morning I tumbled out of bed and ran to her house, screaming her
name. she opened the door with a faintly concerned expression.
“Nina, are you okay?” she asked.
I grabbed her shoulders. I shook her, and her expression turned from concerned to scared. Her eyes widened as I whispered forcefully at her.
“Do you remember when you wanted to go to that party? When you wanted to move to town? When you wanted to run away and become an artist? Don’t you still want to do that? Why don’t we go travel? You always wanted to travel, right?” My words tumbled over one another, desperate and searching. My fingernails dug into Kate’s skin.
Her voice was very small as she said, “Nina, what are you talking about? You know that was just a phase and my art was never worth anything. Being here suits me just fine.” Her eyes were tired as she said, “Why don’t you come in and sit down?”
And I knew. I knew I hadn’t fixed anything. Each dream I had torn out of her heart was gone, and there was nothing I could do to bring them back. I had torn out all of her hopes and aspirations until the root of it all was gone, and I thought that would make us- make me -happy. My Kate was lost to the wind in snatches, and the world would never get her back. And so I ran. I whirled around right there at the door and ran.
I’m sure she searched for me, but I think eventually she must’ve thought me dead. I know there were times when I thought that myself. But I wasn’t ready to die, and so when I stopped running, far from anyone, I stayed here. I didn’t trust myself around people anymore. I have no idea how the idea of me spread. Maybe something in Kate made her create a story, which turned into a rumor, which led everyone before you to me. I looked into the tearful eyes of each one of them, and I felt I could try. Try to make this curse into something that I could look on with at least an ounce of satisfaction when my time came. I offered to use my wishes, those awful, sticky, stealing wishes to take away pain. Some dreamers are trapped, I knew, and so I thought I could at least take away their longing, stabbing them in the heart like shards of glass. Provided the person asking for one the price. After all, I could never be trusted with any regular work again. Work leads to people, people leads to attachment, and attachment leads to Kate all over again. It leads to wasted promise, and broken promises. It leads to a life spent in a way that it was never meant for. Be careful what you wish for, and what others wish for you. But the tale is done now. It is your turn.
So for a bit of food and some cloth, dreamer, you can decide. Have you any dreams you’d like to sell?
How to Save a Sunflower (with Dungeons and Dragons)
by lucas
y.
Sunflowers have cloudy days. Days they can’t find the light. In times of need like this, their long green necks bend to bring their golden faces together. They become each other’s sun. But what happens to a sunflower when it has no other sunflowers to turn to?
I was Sidh’s first friend when he came to my school. He was a ball of light and joy and energy condensed into a little 6th-grade boy. We spent every other lunch walking around the local park. Well, he never walked; instead, he skipped and hopped and danced around me. The sun warmed our backs.
One day, Sidh’s advisor told me that Sidh didn’t feel like he had a place in the school. What? So I walked with him more often. It wasn’t hard; I liked being around him. He hopped and skipped more, and his lips were always tilted up in a smile. Sometimes he’d make little squirrel noises. His coffee brown eyes had a mischievous gold glint to them. He was never on the ground for long.
In 7th grade we drifted apart. There was no falling out. He had just found his place in a trio, and I had found mine in a dungeons and dragons group. I wasn’t mad or sad that he hung out with me less. I was just glad he had found his sunlight. We’d catch a glimpse of each other at Wednesday morning choir, or across the sunny park. When I saw him, he always had an unquenchable grin on his face, dimples carved deep, teeth gently resting together for everyone to see.
So we remained like parallel train rails, close in proximity, serving the same roles in our respective sides of the track, but never crossing, unless something went horribly wrong. 8th grade. The two friends in his trio started dating.
All they could see was each other. I saw Sidh. His feet stayed planted on the ground now. At lunch he’d sit on the couch as his two friends cuddled, and silently stare at the window on the other side of the wall, lips pursed and teeth gritted, smile lines turned to a tightened jaw. He’d press his eyes closed as hard as they would go, waiting several heartbeats before opening them again. The flecks of gold in his big brown eyes were hiding.
Wilted sunflowers hurt me. Little leaves browning and shriveling on the edges. Once yellow-gold now bruised-brown petals droop sadly. But the sunflower still tries to stand tall for as long as it can. It tries to endure the weight. But someday,
something snaps, and it becomes unable to hold its head up. Even if the sun is shining, it doesn’t have the strength to see.
So I approached him and invited him to play dungeons and dragons.
Sidh’s dungeons and dragons character was a monk who trained against his father to become the perfect fighter. Day by day, until he trained so hard that he lost his emotions. But his father couldn’t see his strength, only his flaws, and he abandoned him. So the lost monk stumbled his way into the underdark, a cavernous, echoing place where even golden eyes couldn’t find light. By a stroke of luck, he found an adverturning party. And so over the course of their many adventures foraging for mushrooms, and going over waterfalls, and nights by the warm campfire together, the monk found his new family with them. Day by day he found his emotions again.
At graduation Sidh said to me “You started as my first friend, and ended as one of my best.”
We had a favorite song from Wednesday morning choir: “Here comes the sun, do ‘n do doo.”
Eroded Memories
by senya s.
by anonymous my eurydice
writing is breathing: the rush and color of it, a sweet gust of words blanketing the world in newfound light; myself a perpetual prism that refracts each shadow and sunspot, each person who lingers or has left, a gold-soaked horizon behind hummingbird-heart clouds only visible through a window. i cannot be without my fingers dancing along the keyboard rainfall-soft, self trickling onto ink and canvas like the snow-melt brook i swam in last summer feeling my form gently renew itself; new growth after a wildfire. life is burning and renewal, newly realized truths tangling with roots of old stories under the soil of our collective imaginations.
i used to be endlessly reaching, sun-warm fingers stretching towards sweet fruit, and still now, i watch figures flit and flock wondering how they can see the world without clutching familiar cloaks of wordwork or blue light or a dust-encrusted tome, without tenderly repotting the forests in their throats onto paper with meticulous hands— how can they live and love without sentences bridging the lakes and seas where memories and feelings inevitably fall and fester? perhaps this desperation makes me weak: hunger is cliche, and yet its drumbeat has sunk deep into my marrow. yet, the ceaseless rhythm is beyond blood— i will always turn back to its song, glorious even phantom, a melody more beloved than daylight.
this is who i am. with words, life becomes a tapestry woven in kaleidoscopic loving, and truly, what more could i wish for?
The Mars’ Last Sunset
by zach m.
“This is the last airworthy Martin JRM Mars, the Philippine Mars, just prior to her final flight to Pima Air and Space Museum. The Philippine Mars (Mfd. 1946), is a WWII-era Navy transport seaplane. It is one of seven Martin JRM Mars (Mfd. 1945-48) ever made.
She was awaiting ferry flight to AZ for many years until Feb 9 2025, when she finally, after much struggle (engine refits, restoration, failed attempts to fly out of BC, Canada), flew down to Alameda, her original base, to clear customs and refuel.
She pulled into the seaplane harbor at Alameda, where the sun set on her for one last time before she took off for her final flight to Arizona, where she landed in a lake and was trucked to Pima. She was the last of her kind to fly. There are no longer any airworthy 4-engined piston powered flying boats left.”
by anonymous star charts (abecedarian)
Always, I find myself thinking of you in the liminal—those spaces between breaths. In my head the cut of you warps, deafening, fragmenting itself into something god-like.
[Have you ever thought of me, too?]
It used to be so simple: a new coat of paint shimmering iridescent on the school walls, jam sandwiches under the old oak tree, kids’
laughter echoing off the blacktop. You appear in my head an angel, halo glistening in the afternoon sun, never facing me. That must have been why I forgot your eyes or your smile but never the phantoms between us—my quicksand heartbeat has always been my empire, my Romeo, and why I swore I’d never lose sight of your comet’s tail streaking across the night sky—even after. Even after the bags under my eyes. You could have (you did) destroy me down to the very core of my weft and weave.
X marks the spot where a god steps into the purification chamber and you finally turn away. I try to zipper the wound shut—but it burns, and this orbit is inescapable.
by anonymous What I Want
to hear is her voice
Like chimes played by soft rain
Wishing for me
To go to the mall after school
To see her eyes, chai brown, a swirl of spice and sweet
Their glow dances with the gleam of the morning sun
When caltrain doors part and I see her waiting And she tangos with me to school, backpacks and all
To feel her smile
Her sleepy Cheshire cat grin
That makes cooing little doves made of fire take flight
From a place in my chest I didn’t know I had
That shy smile, blooming rose cheeks like a kitten hiding under a blanket When her hand brushes mine then pounces on it
Warmth I can’t possibly deserve
To see her perched on a stage or table
Elegant as a glissando
Gifting her notes to her world
She fills my ears
Or maybe we’re being House cats lounging on the rosenberg grass
It’s dark out, we can only see each other she asks me what’s on my mind
Am I a good enough boyfriend?
She paws me.
That’s the third time you’ve asked this week. Why?
And I pause for a long, long time.
All my life
I think I’ve been trying to prove I’m worthy To something or someone or some god that I don’t know If what I do is enough Work hard push my limits when will I know when I’m done is it ever enough?
I can picture her chai eyes wide open
Watching me
Like the dilated pupils
Of a frightened tabby I don’t meet their gaze
And there’s this song by Daft Punk that I hate With every fiber of my being
But I can never get it out of my head It goes “Harder Better Faster Stronger” — the story of my life
Because when people I love tell me
I’m enough I Can’t hear them Even when you tell me
What if I can’t hear?
What if I never hear
She rubs up against me
Her shoulder pressed against mine
But a wall of jacket fabric holds her warmth away
She tells me something But I can’t hear it
epilogue with rose tea
by amalia v.
Notes on Tule Fog
by amalia
v.
“The figure of the interior soul understood as ‘within’ the body is signified through its inscription on the body, even though its primary move of signification is through its very absence, its potent invisibility.” – Judith Butler
i think i read a poem about oranges once. i think i don’t know how to write about them, when they aren’t tangerines shared through smoke on rooftops, aren’t the sun or anyone’s eyes. when they stick to a tissue in the center of the table. these are offered largely without words. i do not believe they are for my journey. i have not had papo secos for a long time. my artwork and spellwork reside too deep within myself to draw out into material. the self comes first, then last, takes time with it. all the symbols it knows have worn themselves out, holes in the lace or stains on the rim decorate it like flowers. i try to remember how to be seen. i try to remember how to see.
recognize unnecessary intention texture time creates abstraction creates value it’s not my backstory performance something intangible and unnamed passes through the body lingers where it shouldn’t Stays finish and content intertwined
There is a fine line between a painting that will fail utterly and one that will fail on its way to being something. –Marlene Angeja
what happens when my body is titanium buff, covering whatever haphazard sigil marks my soul? when those layered, hybrid shapes have formed over my chest and not from my shoulder blades? they are heavy in the wrong places. an anchor pulls me towards the sky. i notice a line, maybe all of it is that, not timid enough or too harsh on only canvas. i can’t tell.
i think i should destroy things and i know that i will not. dysphoria dogs my body, but mostly its absences.
i need to make things that i have not planned for. i need to make them slowly. i need to make one small mark and let it stand alone.
This was on my wall for a long time. It says “My goal in life is to do as little as possible.” –Manuel Angeja
these edges are rough and torn and without substance, without material. maybe this is not a bad thing. maybe i should keep looking for wind in the fabric.
by kayla l.
Ripples
by lila p.
this time we learned that boundaries number and change like the waves, mostly and never calculable. so we ask you: watch from afar and chart patterns before stepping in. the difference, of course, is that if you don’t respect the ocean, there is no second chance.
comfort shifts, lining each girl with a frothy rim of curves, treading the beach on cue, and receding at a limit. a woman’s success is defined by her alignment with established rhythms, controlled by faraway winds and high-pressure currents. i’ve practiced flattening my body beneath the exploding cusp, safe. but when i fall i immediately curl, my knees and elbows doubled over so a yank won’t cause a rip. salt crawls through my eyelids and pores, then sinks rancid in my mouth. i’ll roll until i can breathe.
young, i learned to never turn my back on the ocean. i only peeked over my shoulder, noted longshore current and always always left before i hit a rip. but this time months painfully aware of every twinge in my body left me fragile, years training to check in front and behind and inside every unseeable corner left me scared.
this time i learned that years stacking complaints, feeding them through holes in our glue would make them seep everywhere. now they sit humming beneath each thought without reason or our permission.
until today, when pebbles roll. they march down the beach and into the spray. someday they’ll be sand themselves, peeling the ground right out from under you.
yes, we’re ready to take you to the sea. gasp as the wind makes your shirt feel thin, or your skin. now, swim. so next time we’ll know how it feels to be an ocean that curses out your disrespect.
by rachel y. untitled
How to Pray, Second Generation Style
by
anonymous
Incense burns, filling my lungs with a sickly aroma and my eyes with dispassionate tears. A red lantern looms under a roof which slopes like the crashing surf— taking its time on the way down, rising sharply on its way up— an auspicious symbol demanding deference. On the ceiling is a dragon, long-whiskered with the color and countenance of a stormy sky, holding the moon tightly in its silver claws.
Its eyes are like mine— clouded, straining to see through the curling, stinging smoke.
Inside here it is quiet, scarily so, the kind of quiet that suggests people know what they ought to be doing, the kind of quiet which alienates outsiders like me. Amma places a coin in my slack hand, urges me to bàibài —pray— and leaves before I can ask: but how?
So I imitate as best as I can, clasp my hands, bow my head, take guesses at the silent pleas and prayers that fill the muggy air. Thanks for everything, I weakly project into the ether hoping one of my ancestors will somehow recognize my estranged voice shaking with the timbre of fraud.
untitled
by hayes s.
by anonymous kintsugi
AFTER ADA LIMÓN
is it okay to cremate something sacred?
sand slips down my throat—is it okay to break something beautiful in the name of golden veins?
matter cannot be created nor destroyed, and yet the beaches continue to shrink.
hunger is cliche. the ocean beckons shells to be crushed. the waves swallow my feet.
from the maw of some fictitious sunset emerged a gull grasping at nothing, frozen above the cliff face. kites danced above.
some say that dead sailors are reincarnated as seagulls, that touching salt-white feathers destroys a second vessel. how would it feel to stitch
the gaps between skin together with brilliant plumage and seafoam? to call out with a voice not beautiful but wild, screeching
at the sun: i am broken and alive! i am alive! i am alive! grains of sand and fish scales nestled in wide-sharp beaks like the golden glue of a broken teacup made newly sublime. i watched from the shore as they dove, skimming the waters.
i have no wings that beat stronger than the endless yawn of the sea, nor an impure voice which penetrates the fathoms. but hidden in the ocean’s elastic contour
i can still imagine rebirth—to survive for eternity, bruised and magnificent.
