RED QUEEN LITERARY MAGAZINE

ISSUE ONE

This literary magazine is named after the Red Queen Effect, a hypothesis that proposes
the idea that organisms must evolve not just to gain an advantage over others, but simply
to survive. Red Queen isnt just the name of an evolutionary theory furthering the idea of
competition in nature, however. The scientist who proposed this effect, Leigh Van Valen,
coined the name based off of a statement made from the Red Queen to Alice in Lewis
Carrolls Through the Looking Glass Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can
do, to keep in the same place.

Throughout our lives, we run and run to no avail. We run towards the things we believe
will allow us to fit in and keep up, never pausing to look around us and realize that even
when we feel like were drowning, theres always something beautiful around us. As we
kick relentlessly and try to swim to the surface, theres an undying sun above us, a
gleaming silver fish to the right of us, a glossy unmarked pebble on the rivers floor. Of
course, we have to keep fighting, but we can pause for a moment to take everything in
before we start over renewed and ready.

This magazine is a product of that thought, meant to be a distraction and escape from the
competition and divisiveness that plagues us; instead, it was meant to be a glimpse into
the beautiful, the haunting, and everything in between. If theres one thing we can agree
on, its that theres always so much more than what our lives are currently holding on to.
Lets listen to others. Lets speak from a place of unity. Lets stare down this rabbit hole
together uncertain and alive.

Each and every contributor was able to look past the chaos of their lives and create
something more. Of course, no art exists in a vacuum. These pieces reflect their worries
and their fears and other less beautiful things, but they were able to transform this
negativity into a kaleidoscope of love and concern. Even if these works of literature and art
dont change your perspective or your life, I hope that at the very least this magazine will
make you want to stop running and just wonder.

Anika Prakash
Editor-in-Chief of Red Queen Literary Magazine

PAGE 1

Senecio
Joey Reisberg
after the painting by paul klee
yr grapefruit & cream face peels
away in checkered squares
& i am reminded of societys fixture on fracture,
fractals unfurling far beyond
the naked eyespan, celebrity maelstrom into madness
& boozy bleary texts, or else
real housewives of oblivion tossing chardonnay into the void. what makes disrepair
so delectably delirious. dishabille is delightfully dizzying. to lose oneself in yr skittery
halfcocked eyebrow is about as decadent
as that midsummer trolley trip to the seashore,
where a spaniard sold herbs from his shirtsleeve
ragwort groundsel buena belladonna
senecioseneciosenecio
dont tell me you are too old
i have seen you dance at dusk
like that sloppy sun was yr body
bleeding against the serrated horizon
would we could reside forever shrinkwrapt
but we cannot remain mint condition for long,
oh no, i mean look at you dissolve into
geometry and base curve and function
look at that peachy keen color fade off you
in splotches, replaced by kindergarten construction paper gray.
old man our friendship has been a truss bridge over choppy industrial water
all steel girder lattice and froth.
you will sweep up my cremains with a pushbroom and a handlebar moustache. I will carefully caretaker yr worn canvas, thinning paint,
stare into yr cherry dollop eyes
as this museum cleaves open inside

PAGE 2

Chapel Street George Iskander

PAGE 3

Song for the Darkroom

Christina Im
Wake me when you remember my name; I bleed out / by halves. There are many words /
for poison. Apart from this / there are no rules. Apart / from this there is / no hurt. The
skin shimmers / in revolt. Dies. This too / an uprising. Every moon / is beautiful when
shined with spit. Even / if the city burns blue / slick with a conquerors breath. Sick / and
full with his bulging veins. Before its too late / and even the sinner is known. Given / the
slow rush of labor / as if he will ever learn where / to keep it. The cry in the dark / is
woman. This he must / open his eyes for. This / she must hold his head back for / as she
razes him / to the sky: woman as razorblade. Woman / as killer in the hand. I make the air
/ my own: swimming out of snakeskin / taking back honeyed words / singing my war cries
/ when the lights go out. A knife / is a knife for a reason. These days / metal is a kind of
mercy.

Headlined
Daniel Blokh
Mans arm severed by angry cashier!
Woman kills son over game of chess!
We are lugging bodies
through these lines of ink,
feeding their breaths out slowly
through Old man found dead in
factory. What a fucking shame,
the bones wont fit. Bury Man killed in car wreck
in your garden, wait for
Drunk driver to come crashing
into popstars birthday party,
unroll the fresh, dew-stained earth. Lie
down. Hope it grows and, like the child you are,
wait for your name to be called.

PAGE 4

Melina Huang

PAGE 5

Biting the Dust Tian Tran

PAGE 6

Salvo
Margot Armbruster
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Falcon Heights, Minnesota
here, the sky unraveling
into taut cloudy strands
cannot stitch itself back
together, cannot reconcile
men in blue, hefting
triumphant guns,
with the bodies at the end
of their barrels. this morning,
a teenager fractured
with grief called out
for his father, so loud
we all thought
he would answer.
the sky is the only
answernow black,
now peppered
with sharp and gleaming
gashes. if only
I could shape
a constellation
from these bullet-holes.

PAGE 7

Kalopsia
Zain-Ul-Abidin
The broken strings
paint a portrait of a drunkard's
dismembered soul,
begging to be engulfed
by the standstill of a wolf's
broken howl.
To dream the same
dreams again.
To caress the same
silk a thousand times over.
How a linear path becomes
curved without indication,
the entire horizon a
bleak and blurry boundary,
never-ending.
An asymmetrical fear.
A kind of corrupted love.
When my heart is under
the lens of a microscope, I
really dont know anymore.
Life is just a series of
shadows and shapes.
Ethereal and muddy,
we sit in silence and
wait for the heartbreak
to come.

PAGE 8

Melina Huang
PAGE 9

Utah Skies Amanda Mellinger

PAGE 10

Summer Skin
Jade Mitchell
Do you remember the bodies we left
behind, undevoured by the river?
Stripped ourselves of summer skin
until we became mountains, the kind
of callouses that formed like bruises
in thunderstorms.
Do you remember the way the light
broke all the windows in your house?
How I kissed you. How I blacked out.
How I only knew to be beautiful in
the soft darkness of your hands.
Do you remember the way you painted me
a flood, this blue you tried to clean me of?
I never asked to be salt wound,
to be saved. I never asked to be
kissed into ocean, to be left a hurricane.

PAGE 11

Into the Woodwork Amanda Mellinger

PAGE 12

Mallika Ramachandran

PAGE 13

The Visitor, The Stranger

Tomas Kontakevich
Smearing sounds
on crying walls
The want for a blank surface
in foreignness
that would allow the needed stains
A drop of blood on its way down
from the fated nosebleed
spreads into a room
looking in
And the landscape begins to grimace
A smudge of breath on a window
conceals the sleepwalker
from unwanted angles
Even the pulse of the railway
finds its borrowed veins
crossing out the spaces
allotted to stillness
The widening embrace
becomes an open mouth
A slow movement
assembling a fortress
from memorys
petrified reflections
Until the outline
is no more a border
than the edge is an end

PAGE 14

Melina Huang

PAGE 15

Horror Tian Tran

PAGE 16

Genesis
Jamie Uy
you hide the poem from the unclean hands of your father and his friends. you peel
away the clouds and slot it under the warm silver of a night sky, wait in the shadows
of the dune for the glaring sun to pass you by. cover it up with the flight of birds
until you can retrieve it again, shine the unwrapped words like a golden lamp, feel
how solid it sinks into the soft sands when you leave it by the wadi to soak the light
while you use a knife to cut all your hair off.
you do not want to become fantastic; you forget the color of water when your poem
breathes, and shivers. for the longest time you think this will be all of your existence.
you imagine rivers of honey and milk flowing for your childrens children, and
always the sweetness of dates on the tip of your tongue instead of dry bread
portions.
you do not have the luxury of a full sky, with the morning falling over your shoulders
like a pashmina scarf, murmuring in your ears about where you will go next. you
have not been left the stars, and your tired face does not command armies of
constellations. but your poem grows, groans, begins to take the form of a girl, starts
to demand you fold your limbs until you are small enough to stow away to sea, old
enough to know what the ocean is supposed to look like, wise enough to know what
will happen to you if you stay.
you travel further and further in the marketplace, gather your courage in cloths in
the kitchen, learn never to speak all the quiet disagreements your eyes watch over.
you perform the necessary absolutions. scrub away all the weakness in your arms,
write goodbye notes, slowly, to your mother and brothers with cramped hands,
translate your sorrows into collected rains until you learn to swim away in your
patience in the one watering hole, how to clutch at your stolen jar of myrrh and
wear the beaded hope around your neck. how to walk when you have bruises on
your hips as you return to your poem, the little girl you have hidden away in the
desert, who is still alive, still asking, always, for more water than you can spare.
you swaddle the child, pass her the rations you have taken for the next month, get in
the boat. leave with the cloak of dusk over your head. you begin to rock against the
waves, and you hold her, her words inking over yours, her story spiraling out to
faraway seas and her eyes are the color of pools in grand mosques and she wails and the sky finally breaks in half, into a sun-drenched elsewhere, and takes pity on
you.

PAGE 17

Phasianinae Drapes Amanda Mellinger

PAGE 18

Labor Day Weekend

Jessie Kramer
struggle is slight
from the tiny body
flailing in blue;
above the pool
plastic adirondacks idle, empty
cooling under rising stars.

Allegory of the Cave

Kanika Lawton
I was trying to love his
shadow so I could shine
my own light onto him.
Silhouettes are prettier than
teeth and hair. I never wanted
to leave this cave.
I kicked rocks and sand into
the kneecaps of everyone who
tried to drag me away.
I still remember how the Sun
dug underneath my skin when
it finally caressed me.
It felt warm,
It felt warm,
It felt warm.
I forgot how it feels to not
wisp away at night.

PAGE 19

Conversation of Seasons
Vidhima Shetty
It was deep into unwarranted winter
my cheeks were
stretched pale over taut canvas
and my fingers
throbbed the slow pulse of paralysis.
some months ago, Anja gave birth.
in with her
trailed stiff breasts and plated armor,
namely skin.
out with her
came no blood and the creatures convulses.
the air shuddered like it never had before.
Just after, Anja carved her skull into
a tract of bald cropping.
it no longer shrieked a majestic purple.
From here the scalp cradled a flatness
found in no other for miles:
her thoughts, webbed thick and betrayed,
bursting from the insides-out.
The whole time she had exhaled through her nose.
that day, she bore only an incoherence
body varnished a glaze of fraud,
dimmed to the tint of sweat.
how the taste wrung her throat and mind all at once.
now It is teething
a soft, blanched bone
a mouthful of weathered gum
I am confused
more than when the hand surfaced
from a dehydrated mouth of soil
to bury its own body
for in that corner, flakes of meat leeched off the toe
and over there, a nose of rubber poked out from the ground
then it went back to sleep.
I ask Anja, a baby or a dog?
She does not let the truth
slip off her bandaged stomach and shimmy to the floor
only to beat me with it.
there my mother was wrong.
it is a Girl.
and a laugh dribbles from loose lips.
from whose, no one can tell.
I seal the last of her in a bottle of painted lies.

PAGE 20

and I am left to think in rhythms of expelled imagery.

even so my words are discordant,
for a frost shells my lips clean into marble.
But outside, the swollen tongue of a hibiscus
tells this story in its own vernacular:
summer is upon us.

Confessional
Christina Im
I would set this tale to the drumbeat
of swan song, the sound loosed
from an immigrants daughter
when she is split two ways
in sleep. The sound of overheating
storm warning never held this one right
and an echo in the rafters
losing its balance. I would start the telling
with my mothers hair or the memory,
miles-marred, of a marketplace. Smells
and their dance against the neck.
I would trace my arteries to the points
where they unwind. The stains
on everything I have ever touched,
the color of my lips when my words
grow teeth. I would pry open my mouth,
define dialect: that scalding thing
that only stands on the floor of years.
Define ancestry: something that I make
and unmake, the underwriting
of this apology I call my body.
Something in the way I hold myself
that emulates grief. Something trite
in the way that I take up space.

PAGE 21

The Old Campus George Iskander

PAGE 22

Melina Huang

PAGE 23

Wood
Margot Armbruster
This poems subject is a sculpture of wooden heads, found at the Yale University Art Gallery.
what would you say
if you spoke? does it hurt
to clutch one another
so tightly? and if you burned
red paint flaking
into smoke, your faces
charring, blurring
could you learn to love
the fire?
at night, do you murmur
to each other? wooden tongues
shaping wooden words
in a wooden boxthe splinter
of time that is forever,
the place in my mind
that pines to join you
nestle dense, deep
in a craggy frame,
sever my bloated limbs
and mortality, whittle
myself a web of bone
to live in. maybe if I carved
my body out of daylight
I would love it better.
maybe if I were wooden,
maybe if grotesque, staring,
I would be more human.

PAGE 24

Second Death
George Iskander
"Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever
known me. Thats when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no ones memory. I thought a lot
about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or
cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from the living
memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?
The last machine blipped and recited the Names. The Names of lost loves,
regained loves, dead loves. Warriors, peacemakers, the saintly, the wicked, all passed with
equal reverence through the monotonous lips of the last machine. It alone remembered.
Years and years in the distant shrouded past, now memories distilled in silicon. Its
banks whirred electrons and whizzed; It remembered one moment, a shining speck in the
cosmic dust of memory
Time had come for the machine. The sun would set one last time. A red inferno
blazed above.
Christmas 1914 The kindred spark of humanity torched and blazed as the sun rose,
Germans and Brits singing Silent Night over shared cigarettes. They traded murder for death
sticks, booze, song.
Eons before, the machines programmers had coded it with two routines:
remembrance and shutdown. As the machine faced eternal twilight, it searched its
memory for its last task.
Over a bottle he told me, Fifth grade...I had a drinking habit three years later. I
should have jumped. The tears welled in my eyes
As long as the machine subsisted, man was alive in its register addresses, pointers,
and logic gates, all embedded in the very laws of physics. As long as It subsisted
My first kiss in the rain.
Memories like tears in the rain. The machine dismantled them one by one.
Moments with my dad, the car, suffocation, black nights along the highway, seeing the glint
in his eyes as we drove for what seemed like an infinityall signs of life, washed away.

PAGE 25

Amanda Mellinger

PAGE 26

Autumn Blues
Jade Mitchell
Give me a soft-mouthed
September, a tongue no
longer forged into weapon.
Let me be a girl freed of
numb song, of emptied
melody. My body, a chorus
without a symphony left to sing.
I am tired of telling this story,
where the girl splits her skin open
over and over and over, again.
where the bruises flood her
into island, to be submerged
into memory shell never try
to remember.
where you love her
and leave her
and love her
and leave her
just as soft as the skin
she was bathed in.
where she becomes mountain,
only for her mouth to crumble
after the winds of your arrival.

PAGE 27

Urban Legend
Christina Im
Once upon a time
a dead boy kisses me
into velvet footfalls.
Where I come from
this is called forgiveness.
There is only so much
I can fix in the space of
a killing. Winter will tell
why that is. Once
upon a time a boys
rabbit heart breaks
into a run. He and I
will choke the pavement,
learn gently how to bury
each other. Once
upon a time prayers are
just fresh blood in the
snow. Once upon a time
I forget all the words.
Once upon a time
I love and the cold
loves me back and
I never knew I could
starve so brightly. Once
upon a time there is a city
and boys trapped under
all its endings and their
names are all snowmelt,
or they will be. Once upon
a time our bones murmur
into ruin. The roads bleach
white. No one mourns.

PAGE 28

Sub Rosa Tian Tran

PAGE 29

oh the places well go

Lynn Huynh
were standing on the edge of a precipice. youre laughing, im crying. you have a
dr. seuss book hidden underneath your overcoat and the title of the book is oh the places
youll go. the story starts off like this:
congratulations!
today is your day.
youre off to Great Places!
youre off and away!
and in the middle theres a Waiting Place where everyone is just waiting and then
in the end, you get on your way, youre off to Great Places. or at least youre supposed to.
thats what the author tells you anyways.
i just wanted to remind you how the book starts, just like how everything starts:
everything we did together or apart, everything we ever loved and hated and felt
indifferent towards.
the precipice i mentioned before isnt real. like its not real in the tangible,
physical, oh-hey-we-could-slip-off-and-die sort of real. the precipice exists but it exists in
how we see each other and ourselves. its another Waiting Place.
another Waiting Place like a tuesday six hundred ninety three days ago. you were
in the hospital and i was there for the friend of a friend of a friend placed in the
psychiatric ward on the account of wanting to find Death in a church parking lot. but you
were there also. you know how it goes: one day you want to be sweet and good and
beautiful like everyone else pretends to be so you go to the beekeepers to buy a jar of
honey. a bee stings you in the arm. you break out in hives so the beekeeper drives you to
the hospital with the windows open and the sound of ricky nelson on a cassette tape. he
goes, theres a place where the lovers go to cry their troubles away and you laugh a little
even though youre mostly crying because your skin is all itchy and red and the bee sting
hurt you when all you wanted to be was sweet and good and beautiful. you just think its
kind of funny that ricky nelson knows you, you as a lover going to the hospital trying to
cry all your pain away.
youre waiting for the doctor to fix you into something sweet and good and
beautiful, all the while kind of crying and humming under your breath and this is where
we meet. we meet at a Waiting Place. we fall in love because everyone knows that hospital
air is very sterile, very clean and safe so that its easier to believe that everyone comes from
a pure place and has a pure heart and loves in a pure way
at least for a little while. at least for the beginning part of the story when we fall in
love and were off and away, we go to many Great Places, we go to parties, we dress up, we
fly kites in the ocean, we drink cocktails and dance like hokusai tsunamis, become ribbons
PAGE 30

of chaos crashing and entangled off the coast of kanagawa. moments like these and we are
pure, tell ourselves to remember this, take pictures if we want to. snapshot after snapshot
of blurry nights we can hardly remember: red lipstick paired with blue dresses, sunset
fingertips, clothing optional, us kissing, fighting, making up, moonlight in the folds of
drapery, ringlets of condensation left on the coffee table, nudity beyond sheer curtains
and spilled onto the floor, nectarine-sweet hearts, light filtered through colored stained
glass windows onto church grounds, heartfelt holy pinky promises, us kissing, fighting,
but this time leaving with the car headlights spinning all dizzy and drunk into the dark,
this time all burnt coffee, broken bones, missed phone calls, spoiled milk, rotten eggs,
expiration dates, radio static at one in the morning, root beer floats spilled onto linoleum
floors, messy clean ups and sticky checkered tiles, car seat upholstery all sad sex stained
(and other mysteries), cracked coca-cola bottles, half empty beds, the red and blue bruises
of police lights gone dark in the constellation of nighttime cities, lost posters of the saintly
and the beloved and the prized who ran away, heartfelt and holey promises but this time
holey spelled with an e as in having several holes in something, (here: our promises) and
then
we are back in the waiting room of the hospital only now weve tried too much to
be sweet and good and beautiful just to get aching cavities in our hearts. we both cry, look
at the floor, try to make out the line where the ground and the wall meet. this time the
sterility, the blankness, the white walls of the hospital give us the space to realize that no
one and nothing is of an immaculate perfection for a perpetual amount of time, that if
anything, we experience a cyclic motion in our lives comprised of Waiting Places and
Great Places and more Waiting Places and more Great Places. we will never settle and in
this waiting room, we find this conceptual truth in the cracks of the plaster walls, the
shine of the polished linoleum, the blur of the intersections in between ceilings. and so we
are fixed into something a little more sweet and good and beautiful, the medical papers
are signed and
we are getting on our ways, our own separate ways.
we are off to Great Places.
we are off and away.

PAGE 31

Melina Huang

PAGE 32

Water Over the Bridge George Iskander

PAGE 33

D-I-A-S-P-O-R-A
Diana Khong
After I forge my body
out of seams,
I hide the scarsthe
fault lines of my thighs,
my eyes welded shut
like suitcase stitching.
I remember being buried
in the lost and found box
of that public school,
shrugging on a winter jacket
still coated in the warmth
of the last girls skin.
My pride is tucked into
my new corduroys
even though the American boys
cant help but comment on
how Im built
as if I am a parenthesis
which is to say
Im built as a boy
except where my ribs peak through.
Which is to say
my ribs are like hinge joints
where if you press in the right way
you can feel the food stamps
lining my stomach.
I tell my mother
we dress like immigrants,
bear the label on our napes
like surrender,
plugging our noses
with knock-off perfume
until we can no longer smell
the burnt ginger of our bodies.
Ma, Ive hogtied my tongue.
Now I speak the language
of mutts, how the good
Americans do. I think Im a
good American; the rest
think Im bodiless,
toothless,
something all at once
& never at all
PAGE 34

Beinecke Plaza George Iskander

PAGE 35

How to Nurse a Shark

Farah Ghafoor
Somewhere in the city a pretty boy
is drowning. Or maybe he isnt pretty,
becoming all goldfish eyes and cherry
blossom skin after loving the river
to its mouth. He climbs on to the black
-snake soil to look me in the eye, says to me
that the water feigned softness
like a cheap girl, that I look like
someone he would know.
++
I want to give him back
to the ocean, but he disappears too often
between waves. His breath ruptures the underwater silence
that hunger had made beautiful.
His father thanks me for finding him
then pleats his jaw with a quick hand.
He pulls him out like a fisherman, his thumb
firm on his throat, and thanks me again.
++
The next morning, I watch him return to hunt
rain in my front yard. He touches the storm like a child
in a sports stadium, salty butter
around his teeth.
From my window, I want to
give him the ocean. Leave,
and fill the shallows of the sea, a silver death
so sleek and gone.
I call: Ill take you
to the shore. Let you become
what you were supposed to be.

PAGE 36

Washington Park George Iskander

PAGE 37

Night Fever Amanda Mellinger

PAGE 38

CONTRIBUTORS
POETRY
Margot Armbruster
Margot Armbruster is a high school student from Wisconsin. She received a national silver
medal from the 2016 Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and participated in the Adroit
Journals summer mentorship program. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The
Eunoia Review, Canvas Literary Journal, The Noisy Island, Polyphony H.S., and Best Teen
Writing.
Daniel Blokh
Daniel Blokh is a 14-year-old writer living in Birmingham, Alabama. His debut novel, In
Migration, won first place in the 2016 Books-A-Million Publishing Contest and is currently
available on booksamillion.com . His work appears in Thin Air magazine, Cicada Magazine,
Caravel Magazine, and more.
Farah Ghafoor
Farah Ghafoor is a sixteen-year-old poet and editor-in-chief at Sugar Rascals. Her work is
published or forthcoming in Ninth Letter, alien mouth, and Big Lucks among other places,
and has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Farah is the recipient of
the 2016 Alexandria Quarterly Emerging Artists and Writers Award. She believes that she
deserves a cat. Find her online at fghafoor.tumblr.com.
Christina Im
Christina Im is a Korean-American writer and high school student from Portland, Oregon.
Her fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in YARN, Strange
Horizons, Fissure Magazine, and The Adroit Journal, among others. In addition, her work
has been recognized by Hollins University, the Adroit Prize for Poetry, and the Alliance for
Young Artists & Writers.
Diana Khong
Diana Khong is a poet and artist of color. She is currently editor-in-chief of Kerosene
Magazine and is on staff at Ascend Magazine and Noble Gas Quarterly. Her work takes on
modern colonization, life post-diaspora, and various fruits. She tweets @deerthrum.
Tomas Kontakevich
Tomas Kontakevich is a Lithuanian writer currently residing on the outskirts of Riga, Latvia.
He is fluent in four languages and writes in three of them, favouring English as the main
conduit of expression. He celebrates art in all its manifestations.

PAGE 39

Jessie Kramer
Jessie is a professor at Rochester College in southeast Michigan, and enjoys writing creative
non-fiction, flash, and poetry. She is the faculty editor for Rochester Colleges literary
magazine "Blackberry Winter," and has work forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine and
MASHstories.
Kanika Lawton
Kanika Lawton is a twenty-one year old student and poet from Vancouver, Canada. She
is currently completing a double major in Psychology and Film Studies at the University
of British Columbia. She writes about love, loss, and everything in between, and she is
currently working on her first poetry collection, tentatively titled Learning to
Drown. She has been published in The Rising Phoenix Review and Rambutan
Literary and is the founder and editor-in-chief of L'phmre Review and serves as
a visual arts editor for Venus Magazine.
Jade Mitchell
Jade Mitchell is a poet from Glasgow, Scotland. She is a contributing editor for Words
Dance Publishing, and a poetry reader for Up The Staircase Quarterly. Her work is
forthcoming in Persephone's Daughters. Her work has also been featured in has been
featured in L'phmre Review, Rising Phoenix Review, Thought Catalog, The Grind Journal
and The Mira Project. Her work can also be found on her blog: vagabondly.tumblr.com.
Joey Reisberg
Joey Reisberg currently serves as the National Student Poet for the Northeast. He loves
mushrooms and the moon and is on the staff of his school's literary magazine, Synergy.
Catch his forthcoming work in Fissure.
Vidhima Shetty
Vidhima Shetty is a sophomore in high school. Poetry has been a longtime passion of hers
since she was young and continues to influence her every day. Vidhima has been published
in Eloquence, by the America Library of Poetry, and Creative Communications for her
poetry. When she isn't writing, she is busy eavesdropping on conversations for inspiration in
future pieces. She hopes to publish a book of poems someday.
Zain-Ul-Abidin
Zain Ul Abidin Khan Alizai, preferably known as Zain-Ul-Abidin, was born in a small
military-administered town of Wah Cantonment in Pakistan and continues to spend his life
there. He started out with prose mainly but now his love for writing has taken him to the
most gorgeous form of poetry but he also holds the form of prose in a special place in his
heart. He has written in every genre he founds beautiful. His works, both prose and poetry,
have been featured in multiple anthologies around the world. His poem An Acrostic Poem:
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Chocolates has been featured in Delhi Poetry Festival in India. He has collaborated
for Reflections, a quarterly e-magazine. His prose has also been published in a Pakistani
collection. Currently, he's an editor at Parallel Ink. He continues to divide his time between
his impeccable love of writing and the military lifestyle he has adopted as an army cadet. His
debut collection of works is currently underway for publishing.
PROSE
Lynn Huynh
Lynn Huynh is a young curator, writer, and artist based in Houston. Her work focuses
primarily on youth and identity and has been recognized by institutions such as the
Contemporary Art Museum of Houston, Scholastics, and Bennington College. She loves art
history, the snapchat filter with the stars, going out for brunch, and reading the labels on
skincare products and shampoo bottles because it's a homely sort of comfort.
George Iskander
George Iskander is a freshman at Yale, avid coffee drinker, amateur photographer, and
somewhat creative writer. He hopes to major in math and physics. And by the way, his
Instagram is @gwisked, in case you were interested.
Jamie Uy
Jamie Uy is a seventeen-year-old poet & pop culture enthusiast who currently serves as
the program director for Parallel Ink lit + art e-zine. Her poem on a librarian cat marrying a
human won a Commendation in the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2012 (yep, really),
and her much less absurd poem decrying capitalism was one of the winners of the Cape
Farewell/Poetry Society SWITCH Challenge in 2014. If you wanted to stalk her, you could
hunt down her writing in The Huffington Post, Singapore American, The F (Finely Filipino)
Magazine, Rattle Young Poets Anthology, Germ Magazine,The Teacup
Trail, and Miracle. When she's not writing, she's probably obsessing over Banana
Yoshimoto's novels and sci-fi/animation films. Or better yet, both.
ART
Melina Huang
Melina Huang is a sophomore in high school who appreciates visual arts. She enjoys
photography as well as working on a digital medium.
George Iskander
George Iskander is a freshman at Yale, avid coffee drinker, amateur photographer, and
somewhat creative writer. He hopes to major in math and physics. And by the way, his
Instagram is @gwisked, in case you were interested.

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Amanda Mellinger
Authenticity is at the core of Amandas creative drive. Painting is the most effective and
enriching way for her to express an inner world of imaginative wonder. It is as much a way
for her to understand herself as it is a visual communication of universal ideas of
interconnectedness.
Mallika Ramachandran
Mallika is currently a Communications Design Major at Pratt Institute. An avid
illustrator, her goal when creating is to incorporate both real-life experiences and fantasy
to create vibrant imagery and to tell stories. She draws inspiration from her Indian
heritage, rhythm and unity in nature, and the fusion of sleek modernity and industrialized
classicism found in New York City.
Tian Tran
Tian Tran is a writer and photographer. She cannot help but fall in love with colors, and
takes pictures of clouds most of the time. She makes art in her free time.

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