The Greatest Play in the World

 By Jenny Chu

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Years later they’ll giggle at the redness of it all. Your ankle sprained in November, 41.54% of a flag on TV, the party 99.99% of America isn’t invited to. At home I wake to snowballs of texts on a blue-lit phone & shoot off more texts & read backlogs seeming at the seams. There’s this girl on my for-me page I keep seeing, the one who says she wants to become president someday. Brown hair, brown eyes, a wide mouth to swallow all the hate. She’s got these manifestos, these singsongy slogans aimed at the cynic’s bullseye. Another comment, not a suggestion: don’t you think that this is much more suited as a monologue, not a poem? Before her, the research was set in the stoners: colored writers are brokies, get it? We’re so in on the joke we became it, six decades deep. Our fellows, shipped & brokered by the promise of American gore. Time to re-edit. [x] Reddit. Once again red did it because in this space-time what won’t they do? Nowadays empathy is not strength but a slow leak of shame. Eventually you need to become hard-hearted, cream-solid, able to knock against your lover’s chest & breathe in the newly rugged, international ballpark. Soon you’ll get married in the greenery as the formerly impossible looks the hell on. So often we have asked ourselves what home means. So often we talk about the melting pot but not the way it sizzles its last watermelon tuna. So few times we say No, this can’t become a musical.

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Jenny Chu is a Chinese-American writer from Dallas, Texas and the founder and editor-in-chief of Rosetta Lit. She really loves Swedish Fish.

A Constellation of 500 Loosely-Connected Day-to-Day Memories Never to Be Seen Again

By Stephen Zagala

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You swore it’d never happen again, but you ran out of Black Label at the end of the week, third time this month. Where else is there to look but the bottom? A middle-aged has-been raises the question of novelty in the worst possible words, gifts of articulation peed all over the floor, barely missing the ears. LRT1 doors in the dead of night, sirens wailing, call your name from beyond before slowly coming together behind you, almost snatching your bag. Against your bones crying to run through the rocky, fragmented, spectral city sidewalks, you’re somehow convinced that this is living. Mornings spent in questions, afternoons without fanfare to answer them, evenings a far cry from epiphanic: you take a shower instead, convinced you can wash the clinging static and watch it slide down the drain. Flip lights, re-clean dishes until mirrored surfaces, sanitize. set sugar mix to slush, repeat, repeat, repeat until you aren’t sure what is getting done anymore, you or the chores left in the sink or the lingering image of some words you can almost mistake for a poem from far enough. You reconsider buying the three-liter bottle with a paycheck, the details of which you still aren’t sure of. There is a non-zero chance you now find yourself at home in transition, no, in transit, the loving embrace of the ghosts of station to station shadowing you. Dancing with train poles, attempting the world’s sorriest pull-up on the horizontal bars, riding from end to end forgetting where exactly to get out, these are what you dream of affording on the LRT2, where the empty seats are somehow even fewer and the standing room closing in on you. This has to be. Do words still come to the waiting? Homecoming, therefore, remains foreign to you, a station the LRTA has not yet completed. Lifting your eyes to scan for what passes for inspiration these days, there is nothing left you can say about a sky of powerlines or a hanging forest or the degrading, decaying concrete monuments to power some Spanish guys had built on family money. Nothing that speaks, anyways. Another comment, not a suggestion: don’t you think that this is much more suited as a monologue, not a poem? You recite every landmark on the jeepney ride home to yourself, hoping to be wrong, or to at least forget. There’s nothing else you can think of that comes close to it. Don Bosco, drive-in motel you can’t name, hospital named after the mother of Jesus: even at night, at least to you, nothing about Manila can possibly change. How about creative non-fiction: what about it? Save for the people, perhaps that’s change enough for one commuter. Wondering about the wandering warrants willful wistfulness: quick, what are you doing dulling the already-narrowing sidewalks of this Frankenstein city? Surely this must be fuller living, right? This has to be what it means to live.

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Stephen Zagala is a Filipino poet who loves to experiment with form and language. He is currently completing his MA in Literary and Cultural Studies in Ateneo de Manila University. He enjoys playing poker, going to live music gigs, and walking through Metro Manila.

Concession Stand Sonnet

  By Amanda Trout

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First: finicky lock, the slate-grey door

swings open to air-conditioner gales

and the lights of the Coca-Cola fridge

we sold our souls to receive. Next,

flip lights, re-clean dishes until mirrored

surfaces, sanitize. set sugar mix to slush,

bag cotton swirls in cherry red, citrus yellow

and let each floating wisp dye your hair.

End with popcorn kernels laved in butter

whose yellow flowers have only just appeared,

whose smell skips through the air—scrumptious

summoning—and calls customers to us

early. Hear the rattle at the door, past echo

Hello! What can I get started for you?

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Amanda Trout is a Midwestern US poet with a love for sound and form. Her work has been published in Apple in the Dark, Zaum, the Northwind Treasury by Raw Earth Ink, and other publications. Her micro-chapbook, Still Life, was published by Yavanika Press in 2024. Find Amanda on Instagram @atrout2972