by 2026 Editorial Assistant Interns
Contributors: Alina, Anushka, Bella, Claire, Emily, Josh, Koa, Loryn, Marie, Mylee, Posy
And suddenly, she sees herself.
Skin with no colour, just gray and recessed
as if fruit had been left out, forgotten to rot.
Her eyes are gone, merging with her eyebrows,
turning into two twin pools of blackness.
My childhood is waking to Chinese coins beneath my pillow
after losing a tooth.
Born with the clock ticking in my gummy mouth,
hope is a killing thing.
Leaves your baby teeth rotting.
The tree sung at night, a chorus of wings;
in my childhood home, I dreamed of many things.
I boil bow tie pasta on the burner
while Clarice Lispector stares at me from the kitchen counter.
I rejected math,
trading division for
psychology and
language and
swimming in mountain streams.
I find my crowd in writers,
in people who are politically curious,
in historians,
in people who are much older and wiser than me.
Walking barefoot on the once hot pavement
that was now cooled by the moonlight,
everything has changed but nothing at all.
The sweetness still lingers in the air around me,
that warm, sun-ripe scent of my homeland.
We do not exist in the grandeur of the universe,
we exist in its simplicity.
Red Bank, New Jersey
Bridge Ink 