University of San Francisco's Student-Run Literary Magazine
by Mary P. Chatfield Dear Mr. and Mrs. Mansfield, I am writing to thank you when I want to be writing a poem for your generous gift to our year-end appeal. my appeal is always for a poem about how the streetlight turns the snow the color of lemon sherbet, how the geese honk and… Continue reading Charity Case
by Siavash Saadlou My cousin Meysam says that my father wasn’t exactly made for war. “He would get misty-eyed,” he says, “as soon as you read him a poem.” My eyes glaze over a photo of Mahmoud with regret as I hear These words—in the photo he is standing on a rooftop in his Uniform,… Continue reading Words and Lives
by Chisom Okorafor Brown is the color of flesh, I say, And everyone nods. That makes sense, After all, your flesh is brown. And other have different colors. But that's not what I meant. I know flesh exists in other colors. Yet brown is the color of flesh. Flesh is meaty and fatty and sweaty,… Continue reading Brown Flesh
for Chole Kerney by Daniel Barry i remember a runny nose, texting my roommates i’d be leaving and trading them for a suitcase with wheels. i folded all my socks and felt the loneliness, the quiet, the misery of feeling i was the only one in this lone room world. dad tried to book a… Continue reading Scaling My Mind and a Sickness
by Sam Moe 1. Two places I can’t trust you with my heart: here, between wet cove rocks, you’re working through the idea of strelitzia reginae in the afternoon, I’m distracted by flower, leaf, low reef, the spindlebeak is blue and between the two of us I think we could outlast the storm. Will you… Continue reading Reckless Compression
by Alex Starr Time has not even started to take the sky through gradient from absence to navy blue to cobalt already slapped together cars puttering along or behind motorcycles with women sitting both legs on one side as in effigy or remembrance of more than one past century of echelons leaving puffs of smog… Continue reading Rush Hour in the Persistence of Memory
for Philip Levine by Stephen Barile His name is sewn in script On the oval patch over his left breast, Lemon. The shirt-pocket bulges With something kept hidden. Machine oil stains his coveralls. Under a cap, with a metal-buckle, He smiles with very tapered lips That grip his bulging cheeks. Reflecting the sun from a… Continue reading LEMON
by Johnny T. Chaos what else but chaos spinning around my head in the back of the chapel of the school where she pulled me not her first kiss but mine her pulling me alone by the hand my first time holding hands even the soft fingers stuck between mine soft and wet and warm… Continue reading The Creation
by Derek R. Smith Nothing hits harder Than cold waves on rocky beaches Except maybe a poet who’s Inspired by this whole well-trod Metaphorical scene where Ocean kisses land. Then when the poet spots A single clear blueish chunk of Beach glass underfoot Amongst the gray rocks It all appears, the movie montage, How an… Continue reading Breaking
by Zachary Hodges the lilac of his touch, ever-cream skin glistening as we bask in the light of a newly dawned era. the lives we’ve lived through the men of the past, loving strangers not safe for the average lambda lover. and the black and white photo rolls, the delicacy in their hand holds, how… Continue reading pink triangles
Ignatian Literary Magazine 