Issue 34
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An Interview with MFA ’21 Gina Chung and an Excerpt from her Debut Novel “Sea Change”
Interview by Jonathan Kesh
Gina Chung’s debut novel, Sea Change, applies a touch of the speculative to a deeply interior story.
The protagonist, Ro, is an isolated, directionless woman in her early thirties who spends her days handling sea life at an aquarium. Her mother is estranged, her father disappeared during an expedition to the climate change-induced “Bering Vortex,” and her boyfriend has just dumped her to join an experimental Mars colonization program. All that’s keeping Ro afloat is her bond with an old octopus at the aquarium named Dolores,
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Two Poems by Pietro Federico “New Jersey” and “West Virginia” Translated From the by Italian John Poch
photos by Giovanni Chiaramonte
WEST VIRGINIA
The shack is like a bone half-buried
in the forest of West Virginia.
The two of them live there married.
How black the pigment of their skin
and the hollows of their mouths.
The wrinkles at the corners of their eyes
radiate like wind-struck tears.
Their clarity the only thing clear.
Angels.
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Kein Baby by S. C. Beckner
Editors’ Note: this story depicts emotionally difficult subject matter. Readers sensitive to topics of domestic violence and infant loss are advised before reading.
It was a Friday night after a high school football game the first time I was afraid of Edward. We’d been matched up as board game partners at a mutual friend’s house ten months before, after briefly meeting in church. His eyes were the first thing I noticed about him while we dominated as Password partners. They were a startling electric blue that I imagined fell somewhere between “B” and “V” on the ROYGBIV scale of the color spectrum−more Halls Mentho-Lyptus Drops,
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Tefillah Ne’ilah by Yael Hacohen
Ten days before Yom Kippur,
God’s night of forgiveness, it’s tradition
to ask it first of my kin.
My neighbors in the south
thirst on your lips lined with dust.
The homes you left in ‘48, I cemented shut
they stand like brick ghosts of the banished.
Our father wronged us both, Ismael.
But I have wronged you more.
Yael Hacohen is a Ph.D. -
Tap Me by Greg Allendorf
like a sugar maple. Break me in,
an oxblood boot; I want it to spurt.
I want tin buckets massy with serum.
I want you to see how, for me,
every raindrop’s a paranoid theorem;
a body bloats in every creek I walk.
There’s a train wreck every time (I think)
a bottle fly dies in Ohio. A fractured
family never formally resets.
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Collecting 92 Years of Wisdom by Chelsey Clammer
Collecting Ninety-Two Years of Wisdom
“The silver Swan, who living had no Note, when Death approached,
unlocked her silent throat.” –Orlando Gibbons
It’s some night we’re fighting—or, maybe it’s after a bite-sized disagreement (just a morsel of our routine arguments, just a crumb of our crumbling marriage)—when Husband asks, “Do you hate me because you think I’m like your father?”
