University of San Francisco's Student-Run Literary Magazine
by Aria Shum all those years you spent watching your life pass by from the attic, wondering when it would start breathing again. When it would start wanting again. If happiness would show up at the door like it used to, perhaps disguised in a hat or a coat or the face of somebody you used to know. In a dream, you wake up… Continue reading THE WAITING &
by Steven O. Young Jr. I can’t remember where I heard it, or how I learned to define the obvious,but my notepad begins in avowal: Philtrum | means love potion | in Greek. I want to claim it came carried in on your lips,a sumptuous goblet brimming with morning glories gathered from the pastel garden planted between your edenic senses, but… Continue reading Greek to Me
by Aidan Cox Turning your head, hair ablaze in the morning sun like a lit match. And in conversation, in the old, gold frame of a faded painting. That landscape, the little brown stork, those oak trees.The late night of a party and all the warm, glowing bulbs behind his head. You will be reflected in… Continue reading I want you, for the last time
by Sarah Bess Jaffe We watched Bin Laden get shot through the window of an Irish pub in Queens. Well, we didn’t see it but, you know. I thought you were such a big deal. We were sunbitten that day. Remember when we liked the guy in charge,in spite of everything? We rode our bikes everywhere,stuck on the BQE’s hot ribbon,for a daylong noon… Continue reading Dive Bars
by Sarah Inouye Content warnings for extended exploration of grief, death, and loss of autonomy. Briefly, disordered weight and body thoughts. What I knew of love, in my final year, coalesced in my green truck. It had been abandoned after the flood that one summer. It was a Californian miracle, both truck and overflow. No… Continue reading The Transfer
by Jessie Jen The itch is somewhere deep inside. I like to imagine it’s a living creature that needs air, that absorbs the oxygen in my blood and releases little burps of gas that drift and drift to just beneath the surface, dotting my fingers with little blister-like bubbles. They ooze clear liquid when I… Continue reading Some Kind of Parasite
by Matt A. Hanson from a dimming bow the high bright clouds cumulate / shades of light orange descending / gray blues / mountains faded against sharp stone bare seafront foundations giving way to the dark green / dusk-lit forests as still as the mast of a lone sailboat / white in the distance, surrounded … Continue reading Blue Voyage II
by Ingrid Marie Jensen ‘Where’ve you been all my life?’ Jack Harris asks with a crooked smile, both incandescent and terrifying, that’s real charm along with eyes like Lake Michigan in a storm and an expensive suit. he’s somebody special and don’t he know it! song slides off slick vinyl, filling the air like a… Continue reading Billie, 1933
by Dahlia R. Trigger Warning: Alcoholism/Emotional Neglect Head pounding and bones aching beneath those bamboo sheets— just a sip would turn the throbbing into a dull ache, but the shelf was right by your room. By that hallway and that photo of me holding you on our stone steps at 5 pounds and 2 ounces— … Continue reading Erysichthon
by Colten Dom My hands turn to your back like tonight’s sky, gleaming somewhere in an ancestral skull revealed by a retreating glacier— reconvened after a cloudy evening, squinting, kneading familiar structures, lines of gravity placing each stain as I find it. Freckles metastasize; stars pull and are themselves pulled. You touch my skin to… Continue reading Constellation
Ignatian Literary Magazine 