By Makai Andrews   When she was in grade school the boys would make fun of her because her thumbs looked like toes. She painted them orange and dotted them with silver rhinestones to prove them wrong. No one would waste that much time on a foot.   Mother was having an affair with the pool boy when she was eleven. He was a young man from Arizona, moved here in hopes that he’d get in with some celebrity housewife who needed a pool cleaning and an actor for her next movie. He wasn’t having much luck, so far. Mother had the gardener drive in a big tree on one of those trucks that are too big to turn at normal street corners. She planted it next to the pool, where she was sure dozens of leaves would fall everyday. She shook a branch to make sure, dumping piles of leaves into the crisp water. Now the pool boy would have to come four times a week, not two. There’s just so many leaves in there, silly me for planting a tree right above it, she tells Father. Oh, but isn’t it just beautiful.   Father liked his whiskey. Liked his whiskey with ice. Liked whisky with ice that looked like little islands of glass were floating up from a pool of golden mud. Sometimes she thought if she stuck her finger in the liquid, it would harden around her finger and she’d have a gold-capped nail. She tried it once, but instead of a special finger she got broken glass in her arm and bruises from Father’s hard day at the office. She wiped up the golden mud after he was finished. Brother was born when she was thirteen. He had eyes like hers...

The Deep End by Annalise Lozier The sun bobbed in the sky like a peach in the water. We sunk below the surface and you were the apex of a triangle. With the light slicing past you, I was hidden in your faded glow, a planet in the dusk; and my fingernails, which my dad said made me look like a homeless goth looked to you like worn-down continents hidden in the binding of an atlas. Your face falls apart like tissue paper, dark purple and melting in the past. I can never really picture your nose and I can’t say how often I’ve mistaken your smile with the pointy chin of the man in the moon, but your silhouette still burns on my eyelids. You’ll be relieved to know I don’t love you, cross my heart and burn out my eyes. Your fingers pushed through my chest like it was so much dust, you tapped the metal hatch to ask if anyone was home, but there wasn’t-- it was only me and a few gray teeth. underbridge she had a face like sarcasm, her teachers said she scraped the paint off the walls when she skirted too close to the edge of the room under her shoulder blades she could pull back the muscle and untangle the tendons the tendons wrapped around her bones played with her joints like a rubik’s cube                               when she spoke she looked               towards the windows or at the wormy yarn knit its fingers into sweaters she laughed loudly to cover the cracking sounds her spine made she laughed with her teeth bared she had a face...

Emily Zhang’s “History of Navigation” received third place in the 2015 Glazner Prize for Creative Writing contest, sponsored by SFUAD’s Creative Writing and Literature Department.   On Atlantic Street a girl lies on the street with vultures in her throat, the moon melting into the eggshell of her eyes   melting into me. I don’t know if she swallowed the sky or if the sky swallowed her, but she is spilled like a run   on sentence, preserved in past tense and the holy glow of streetlight. An exercise in forbearance. Two months   after my grandfather said the name of what would kill him, we spilled salt on our tongues and drank soup too sparse to be   unstill. My uncle drove without a seatbelt swathed across his shoulders. He drove until he saw a lake that wrapped its fingers   around the sky’s neck and exhaled while the sky inhaled. Until he saw a bird and tried to catch it, but its wings broke off   when he grazed it, and he closed his palms over its eyes and pressed, learned that he couldn’t protect anything anymore.   Six years ago a man on the telephone told her to put her hands between her thighs and squeeze and she told him nothing.   A ritual in reverse. All I know is that we all have the animal want in our stomachs to float, that they are burning newspapers   on Atlantic Street now. When the universe was first beginning a bird took a flashlight from a trashcan and dropped it   into a beautiful coffin. In five hundred years someone will unearth this moment without the girl, in the wicked heat of June,   tucked in concrete like an exhalation. I wish I...

“Hair” by Joseph Jordan-Johnson received second place in the 2015 Glazner Prize for Creative Writing contest, sponsored by SFUAD’s Creative Writing and Literature Department.   Roots I have my father’s hairline. A widow’s jut in the middle of my forehead. I have naps—scalp clumsy.   His waves were smooth, current-cut, razor-precise. He never told me how he keeps the gray from creeping in.   He is 53, a silver fox smile cutting from ear to ear. My scalp is too oily, lacquered, pore-thick.   My hair runs bristle wired, strung, dry and clumped. I have ignored how he taught to keep it clean.               Cut They are rigored, the coroner’s faint clipper buzz is a lullaby.   There seems to be less hair on the floor each time I cut,   less tufts to sweep, less bodies to hide.                               Shower It is hot, in the way that pain cries. Holy, in God’s new breath,   it is His steam that will bring more wrath than Murray’s wave gel,   the things my father always used. The things I learned to hate.               Shave More scratch than bite— less rough along the grain. The basin of the tub   runs black and red, nicks of hair crawling to the drain.   I hear them howl, there is wrath in each pull each razor-tear each   pore less bloody than the other. They are him, not His.               Dry Fresh. Something God has assumed. Something only death can say. I am bulbous, not whitehead, not ready to pop.   There are years I have shaved– fifty-three bags all in a pile. The buzz has stopped. The wrath looks less bloody. The zipper closes.   Joseph Jordan-Johnson is a senior at...