The Alias Magazine x The Writer’s Den

why i skip steps

Michelle So

i’m not one for grandiose i’m not one for fell swoops or magnifcence small strokes speak volumes i say through the plumes that otherwise limit then present myself the conundrum of stairs and greater mountains skip two my brain urges and i do.

Layers

Abigail

Rodriguez

The whole you made in my vanity

The warmth of an entrusted coat will never fll

My wardrobe shall be too cold or much too flled with purity

I can feel the nip of cold air beginning with rigidity I search for sweaters in my closet, leaving me feeling vulnerable and ill

The whole you made in my vanity

My mother can see me at her feet somewhere she has yet to be She takes me shopping, searching for the light in the domicile

My wardrobe shall be too cold or much too flled with purity

My legs look too pretty to cover, like the produce of a honey bee

The shortness of my skirt, a thrill that can never be killed

The whole you made in my vanity

My sister always said that we together stand in solidarity

But these days all I see of her is not enough to fulfll

My wardrobe shall be too cold or much too flled with purity

I can now see the intent of the surrounding society

It is not my fault that there is a need to feel the chill

The whole you made in my vanity

My wardrobe shall be too cold or much too flled with purity

Philia in the Time of Pre-Calculus

Annette Lin

You told me in middle school that the world is just one huge Venn diagram of infnitely many independent units, crossroads opening at every decision. Today I am trying to fgure out where we lie. The intersection of our circles is three hours long and thirteen inches wide, fguring out sine and cosine graphs two days before the fnal. Deriving identities late into the night.

I still can’t recall what you look like when we’re apart. Six years of studying math together on the green picnic tables and I can only confdently say that you have glasses. I never learned to remember in images, just as you never started to remember in sounds. We had a conversation about those fve love languages, as if there were only fve ways to understand love, as if there were only fve ways to love! I am beginning to think that we need eight billion love languages for eight billion unique people. And two of those eight billion belong to us. Here is what I’ve come up with. Here is where our system of equations lies on the cartesian plane of the universe; these are the intersections of our circles, the cognates of our love languages: the playlist titled “philia” that you listen to when you’re doing math homework (referring to platonic love for the ancient Greeks and pretentious students like us), the fuzzy image of your silhouette in my mind, and the colorful waveform graphs we sketched, oscillating in opposition, stretching to infnity in both directions.