Author Archives: GINAMC

Photograph: June 22, 1984

by Darien Hsu Gee

Of course we would go. We cut jagged strips from dishtowels to wrap around our heads—my mother stayed home. In Tiananmen Square, three weeks earlier and 7,200 miles away, other headbands bore phrases like liberty and hunger strike and denounce butcher regime and all power belongs to the people. Days in, student protestors sprawled limp on well-trodden paths, burnt eyes cast on the Monument to the People’s Heroes, the Great Hall of the People. Almost a million bodies packed into 109 acres of city square, a portrait of Mao gazing from the Gate of Heavenly Peace. June 4 had come and gone, image after image a totem to that day—the stark white 33-foot Goddess of Democracy, born from foam and paper mache. CNN’s Bernard Shaw’s breathy voice—Fifty-eight minutes from now, the government will pull the plug on all transmissions out of this nation. The lone man, plastic shopping bags in hand, fixed in front of a column of tanks on the Avenue of Eternal Peace. Continue reading

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Noise and Water

by B. B. Garin

When the first swimmer disappeared, everyone blamed a shark. Even though environmentalists had been warning about decreased populations and disturbed migratory patterns. Then a paddleboarder vanished inside the sandbar. Tourists milling through Sun-Cream Gift & Dessert Shoppe speculated about freak high tides carrying a shark into the shallows off Folly Beach. No one mentioned the lack of dorsal fins spotted along the coast.

I was fiddling with the churn in a soft-serve machine when Jon brought the latest news.

“Three high school kids,” he told me, rearranging the personalized lobster keychains so they hung out of alphabetical order. “Took a canoe out on the Sandy last night. Never came home.” Continue reading

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Hotpot for the Hungry Daughters

by Sammi Yamashiro

I swore I would never return.
To the kitchen, I mean. Where my mother fed her cranky children
a preview of the meal to come. Why did I? Well, because

the spoon she used to feed me with, she lost.
Her pots and pans littered the floor, creating a landfill my height.
How could I ever reach the dining room table?
I will find a way. Continue reading

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My Mother Jerks the Wheel Left Then Right

by Esther Sadoff

stops in the middle of the roundabout
under the pretense she wants to make
sure oncoming traffic has stopped
and I’m not sure anymore whether she understands
the purpose of the roundabout
or whether she’s stopping for spite,
to prove to us she really is the queen of the road. Continue reading

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Octopus

by Taylor Light

She crafts her ruses for survival:
camouflage, a severed arm,

distracting patterns, expulsion of ink;
or how her soft body can squeeze

through small holes for hiding spots.
This is her daily practice: play Continue reading

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