Sweet Dreams // Alexandra Fryman

9/18/18 // Niah Tobarri

you google search the differences between love and infatuation. scroll down, click through the sea of results. articles from the odyssey and cosmopolitan but they are anything but. you google search webMD symptom checker but you know. it’s like when you go to the eye doctor and they tell you that your astigmatism is like, really bad. you know. you’ve been down this road before. of being so blind but feeling every minute detail. you know, you know, no, no, no-- you Are. but you don’t want to be because you know how it all ends and somehow, you’re not afraid. like a fine wine, or maybe you’re just old. maybe you’re old and wise and your bones are weary and you’ve lost your mind but you know you’re in love. you know you’re in love because it makes you want to cry and you remember that you have a heartbeat.

To Sing America // Jade Fiorilla

She is in the mirror again, The girl with silk hair and slanted eyes, Her flat face the color of sand. I jab my finger at the reflection Until her eyebrow blossoms In a pearl of black and blue. I know my hair is strawberry blond, I know my eyes are wide like quarters, And yet she haunts me. A stock image of the exotic, the foreign, The non-white, the non-American, But I promise I am not these things. Tears stain her cheeks, my cheeks Wet and flushed, I shiver As though her own skin isn’t enough. We want to laugh but my chest It collapses from so much longing— We, too, are America. Under the Bridge // Ben Landsberg