Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Summer 2026
/ zugunruhe
a flock has like a million birds
synced up with their neighbors,
knowing precisely the distance
between them, before they even
move. Home for the holidays,
I saw this. Stopped on Pendleton
Pike, tittles on all the powerlines,
a murmur above the trees, charged
up like mallets on a batterhead, drum-
rolling up under the setting sun.
Too far to crack if they were
grackles or cowbirds, but they all
looked black to me. Oh starlings,
it is so hard to pick one of you
from your crowd or congregation.
Then a thunder without rain, they
hang out suspended in the air. They
lose each other and themselves, but
the distance is settled, by something
they know by heart. Suddenly, they’re
all coming or going the same way.
Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
By no means is this a famous story. It takes place in Huntsville, Utah, a small town of under six-hundred residents, located in Ogden Valley on Pineview Reservoir. Surrounded by three ski resorts (Snowbasin, Powder Mountain, and Nordic Valley) there is no shortage of idyllic views, nor a shortage of seasoned skiers wishing to park amongst these idyllic views. This is observed by the abundance of Parking by Permit Only signs that prohibit parking west of 7300 E Street, made possible by the Huntsville Town Ordinance on April 19th, 2018.
Fiction • Spring 2026 - Fear
Big John stood near me with the electric blue above us, screaming out with its shine for everyone to drink it. Lines of neon stretched and twisted into a beauty of advertising brilliance. We were drinking it and the bottles were sweating and it made me feel good for the first time all day.
The fresh online pieces we experiment with outside of our print cycle. Formerly known as Blog.
From the Archives
Features • Winter 2017 - Cell
A spindly peninsula juts off the northern coast of Greece like a bony nger exed in the Aegean. In pictures, it looks otherworldly: lush, lonely, and alpine, azure tides battering against ragged precipices. An edice that resembles a decaying fortress languishes at the edge of a cliff in sad decadence as if threatening to slump into the ocean. It looks like the sort of place you would expect to find the last living dinosaur, huge and decrepit.
As secluded and ancient as the Greek gods themselves, the peninsula is called Mount Athos, named for the Giant upon whom Poseidon spitefully launched a mountain. Today, it is a solitary bastion of Orthodox Christianity. Twenty turreted monasteries litter the coast of Athos like anachronistic watchmen. Within, hundreds of robed, Rasputin-esque men murmur unintelligible prayers, rapt in their piety. They pray for the world, they pray for salvation, they pray for mercy. Their lips tremble unceasingly under the weight of holy words.
The monks have tasked themselves with the deliverance of the human race, waging an invisible war against Satan that keeps them anchored on Athos for at least a lifetime. Leading a mean, spartan existence, their aesthetic is ascetic. When they die, their humped and tired bodies unceremoniously rot beneath the mountain before their filthy skulls are exhumed and pitched into an overowing catacomb. Here their lifeless mandibles will surely continue God’s industry amongst thousands of departed brethren for centuries to come.
***
Mount Athos exists exclusively, and quite literally, in the past. Thirteen days to be precise. It is the current time discrepancy between the Julian and Gregorian calendars, the latter of which the monks have declined to adopt. However, for all the fanatical infatuation with tradition, a gap of thirteen days may as well be thirteen hundred years on the mountain.
Eastern Orthodoxy prides itself on ironclad adherence to archaic praxis. Unlike other branches of Christianity, virtually no aspect of the Orthodox liturgy has changed since Judas the Apostle turned Judas the Apostate. The arcane murmurings of the Athonite monks are the same ones that dribbled from Jesus’s own holy tongue in the first century. They boast their antiquated practices with an ecumenical smugness, reveling in the moral purity of their beliefs.
The monks’ rigidity does not subside for the mission of inclusivity. Despite their professed dedication to the supernal, loving ways of Christ, the monks of Mount Athos have unapologetically shuttered their doors to women. According to an Athonite edict termed Avaton, females are forbidden from encroaching on the mountain and must keep a distance of at least five hundred meters from its shores. The prohibition goes so far as to extend to most female animals; neither hen nor heifer is permitted to roam the mountain. The monks revile transgressors with solemn delectation, dispatching the women to prison, where they are welcomed more warmly.
To the monks’ displeasure, a woman will successfully breach the perimeter of Mount Athos once every few centuries, an onerous task given that the peninsula is only accessible with written permission from the Patriarch of Constantinople. Many suspect that the first time was during the 14th century when the Serbian Emperor sought to shelter his wife, Helena of Bulgaria, from the plague by sequestering her upon the mountain. While the undertaking was a success, Helena’s feet never once touched the ground – the monks forbade it. Instead, servants toted her body throughout the peninsula in a hand-carriage like large, unwieldy cargo.
More often than not, female visitors are intrepid woman who steal onto Mount Athos in male guise. In the 1920s, French writer Maryse Choisy, in a demonstration of journalistic devotion, donned a false mustache and underwent a radical mastectomy in order to breach the walls of Mount Athos. In her book, Un Mois Chez Les Hommes, Choisy chronicles her successful month-long sojourn posing as a male servant. Upon inquiring about the apparent lack of female animals on the peninsula, a Vatopedi monk explained to her, “The day we possessed a hen, some brothers would argue that we should also accept a she-cat, a ewe... or even a she-ass. And there is but a step from a she-ass to a woman.” To account for the dramatic exercise of principle, the monks have maintained a biblical defense of the mandate.
As Athonite tradition would have it, the Virgin Mary was sailing to visit Lazarus of Bethany (newly resurrected, feeling like a spring chicken) when violent winds beat her ship off course and dumped its holy cargo upon the shores of Mount Athos. In a par- oxysm of divine inspiration, the pagan peoples of the region suddenly abandoned their godless ways and converted to Christianity. Enamored by its strapping, Mediterranean splendor and the spontaneous religiosity of its residents, Mary prayed to her son, the recently Ascended Jesus, that the land be gifted to her. Evidently, being the mother of the Christian messiah is not without its advantages, as God obliged, proclaiming, “Let this place be your lot, your garden, and your paradise, as well as a salvation, a haven for those who seek salvation.” From that moment on, Mount Athos was consecrated as the garden of the Virgin Mary and thus, the patriarchs of Orthodox Christianity determined that nary another female foot was to tread on the sacred land.
Surely, such measures seem like an overreaction to the words of the blessed Virgin Mother. Perhaps, Mary just wanted a building to bear her name. At the very least, it is more probable that she would have liked to create a sanctuary for the veneration of women, not an exclusionary pulpit from which haughty, near-senile monks pray for the salvation of a world from which they are utterly detached. Alas, generations of pious men have discerned otherwise.
***
On its face, Mount Athos appears to be an aberration in its staunch, and arguably contrived, exclusivity. In reality, its extremity is indicative of a larger, resilient pattern of gender segregation across religions. Almost counterintuitively, a plethora of holy places have become reserved for people of a particular gender, as opposed to people of a particular faith. Sacred sites like Mecca and Medina, which only permit entrance to Muslims, are exceptions in their brand of exclusivity, not the rule. The evidence for this is both profound and plentiful. Until 1983, the sanctuary of the Catholic church was a space reserved solely for males, with women forbidden from approaching the altar. In traditional Jewish synagogues, it is an enduring practice that a mechitza separate the sexes during prayer. Similarly, women in Islamic mosques are often obligated to pray in separate rooms from men, or divided by partitions, all in the pursuit of a nebulous benchmark of modesty.
The unifying theme is religious tradition with a deeply rooted distress regarding the company of women. On Athos, the monks have deemed female-kind an insurmountable impediment to spiritual enlightenment. The last time an Athonite monk was ques- tioned on the subject—less than ve years ago in a feature for 60 Minutes—he protested, “Here we’re concerned solely with purity and our elevation to eternity. If women are permitted they would bring their families and children—this place would become a tourist attraction and no longer a place of silence.”
The monk’s tone, steeped in polished condescension, would seem to imply that tourists, too, are barred from Mount Athos. This is certainly not the case. As a matter of fact, one does not even have to be Orthodox Christian to gain visitation privileges; simply an adult male or boychild in the company of his father. If you fall into the fifty percent of the population who happen to satisfy these genetic requirements, you are at least eligible to apply for a visa granting access to approach the sacred mountain.
In truth, the grievance seems to lie with the acute sexual anxiety induced in spiritual men by the presence of women. Rites of separation, in most religions, exist for the purpose of sparing males from the temptation unwittingly offered by the female physique. On Mount Athos, the Avaton is a bulwark protecting the monks’ celibacy. Their mortal bodies are, after all, imperfect: mercurial and plagued by weakness, naturally in the business of sin thanks to our forbears, Adam and Eve. Gender segregation ensures that the monks will never, “defile their eyes with the sight of anything female,” as stated in the charter of The Grand Lavra, Athos’ first monastery. Women are vilified as impure, corrupted ribs of men, so that the Athonites may more easily conserve their delicate purity, until death allows them to shed their nefarious human suits and clear the sill of this universe for a more divine setting.
***
In 2003, the European Parliament formally requested that the monastic leadership of Mount Athos renounce its ban on women, citing the United Nations’ core principle of equality between the sexes. Needless to say, the Athonites declined. Technically, it was within their rights to do so, given that Athos retains a “special status” as an autonomous polity of Greece. In recent years, the monks have argued that the monasteries and land that surrounds them are all their property, giving them the right to exclude whomever they please.
An Austrian politician named Walter Schwimmer defended the reasoning of the monks in 2012, writing, “One of the most essential aspects of human dignity is the mutual respect of human beings. Someone who demands the end of the ban of women on Mount Athos simply lacks respect for the way of life the monks of Mount Athos have chosen as well as for their religious beliefs and convictions.”
The errors with this logic are both glaring and manifold. Unless Mr. Schwimmer considers females to be a lower caliber of human being than the Athonite monks, it remains to be seen why this all-important sense of “mutual respect” should not extend to the devout women who wish to visit Mount Athos. Furthermore, Schwimmer’s “right to discriminate” rhetoric is morally bankrupt, reinscribing traditional hierarchies of power and creating areas of entitlement for already privileged parties. The problem with drawing arbitrary, heavy-handed lines in the sand arises when one’s liberty to exercise religious rights greedily envelops another’s freedom from oppression.
This is not to say religious tradition ought to be ung haphazardly from the monastic window. No one has asked that the monks surrender their opulent collection of invaluable artworks, deteriorating tomes, or ancient manuscripts. Ultimately, the Athonite monks are at liberty to practice their religion as they please. Nonetheless, it is imperative that we question the value of antiquated practices which exist solely for the sake of orthodoxy, especially when those practices are exclusionary and have the tendency of reducing women to mere sex objects. It appears that there is virtually no benefit in barring women from holy sites at the expense of their right to experience spiritual fullment and unity with their favored deity. If the monks who rule Mount Athos with such an unforgiving iron fist are so salacious that their unswerving commitment to God should falter if they so much as glimpse the sleek, wild flesh of woman, that seems to be indicative of a larger, deep-seated problem with their faith. Eve may have offered Adam the forbidden fruit, but he could have easily denied her.
For all its earthly pulchritude and divine treasures, the outdated exclusivity in which Mount Athos languishes is undeniably ugly. Perhaps more alarming, is the notion that Athos is far from an unhappy idiosyncrasy. On Mount Athos and beyond, reclusive men of piety, drenched in an articially divine light, cast the shadows of giants in whose cool silhouettes women wither.
Fiction • Spring 2017
I was slain by the spirit when I was only ten years old. This is not a story. This is not hyperbole. This is only the fact of a hand I can see and resee whenever I need to—a nun’s hand, looming softly, rippling towards my face as if on the quietest gust of candlelight. This is the last thing I remember before passing out.
Archived Notes • Winter 2021 - Fast
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year. His new book of fiction, Cleanness (2020), was published in January 2020. A finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, it has been longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and France’s Prix Sade. Cleanness was also named a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, a New York Times Critics Top 10 book of the year, and a Best Book of the year by the New Yorker, TIME, NPR, the BBC, and over thirty other publications. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, he lives in Iowa City with his partner, the poet Luis Muñoz.
Features • Winter 2017 - Cell
-*Venice, 2016*-
We met the soldiers twice that night, first at the bar and later at the pizzeria. They were American, stationed in Vicenza, and out of uniform for the night. We all lingered in the *campo* for a while, surrounded by old buildings that shrugged like sandwich bread in a backpack.
Talking small and drinking large, we organized ourselves raggedly, partaking in the rituals that make us human: mating and idol worship. The Harvard boys wanted the servicemen to know *just how much respect* they had for men in uniform. They would *never *have the guts to do *anything* like that. A strenuous week of training meant that the army boys were itching to talk to some ladies—particularly, the lovely Harvard ladies they were *so lucky* to meet that fine evening. I whittled the word “infantryman” with my tongue until it felt like a normal word that could exist outside of a history book. I feigned a shadow of interest in their guns. Then, laughably and inevitably, came the question.
First, the innocuous “Where are you from?”
Then, “New York is great. But your family, where did they—”
And lastly, “Wait. I’ll bet I can guess.”
There’s a dreary kind of comfort in the time-honored “ethnic dartboard” tradition. The army boys guessed quicker than most—Charlie’s brothers had both married Filipina woman, wink wink, and Ed had *a real thing* for Asian girls. I thought about my grandfather’s limp and the history of blue eyes on brown skin and then I laughed like 1848-1946 never happened. The soldiers bought another round of drinks and showed us their tattoos.
Soon, the other girls were gone and I felt their absence like a fishbone in my throat, and I watched the army boys and Harvard boys smoke their cigarettes, and it all swallowed me, that white American maleness that fills a room like steam in a shower.
-*Manila, 1945*-
The Republic of the Philippines took a 10-year breath of independence before the Americans came back in 1945. The whole thing (and by “thing,” I mean imperialism) really got started in 1521 after a visit from a fellow called Ferdinand Magellan, who led the first European visit to the strange little Eastern archipelago. Over the next four decades, other Spanish explorers came knocking, with Catholicism and a colonial regime tucked into their casserole tins.
The revolutionary stirrings began in the 1870’s, a Republic was formed in 1898, and said Republic was crushed by the end of that same year, after the Spaniards handed off the colony to the Americans. After a rocky adjustment (read: famine and war crimes) to American rule, the Philippines was granted Commonwealth status in 1935, marking the beginning of a supposed transition to full independence. This plan was thwarted by the worldwide ruckus of the 1940’s, and in 1942 the budding nation once again found itself under siege, this time by the Japanese. MacArthur and the rest of the American boys were back in 1945, recapturing the territory until July 4th, 1946, when the Philippines celebrated its first Independence Day.
My grandfather was born in 1937, and he limped for his whole life after being hit by shrapnel during Japanese occupation. He had been standing by a small bowling alley near his house when a bomb went off, and after some makeshift surgery in a makeshift medical tent, he never walked the same again. He was carried around on a stretcher until he could get back on his feet, and passing American servicemen would drop chocolate candies into the stretcher to cheer him up. He would make a peace sign with his fingers and shout, “Victory Joe!”
“Cute, right?” my mom quips as she relays this anecdote over the phone, and I say yes, because it’s as about cute as those kinds of stories get.
-*Cambridge - Harvard Kennedy School Library, 1962/2016*-
*SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY IN UNDERDEVELOPED COUNTRIES: *
*The Philippine Experiment*
*by Roman A. Cruz, Jr.*
*a paper presented to*
*The Science and Public Policy Seminar*
*Government 260*
*Harvard University*
*1961-1962*
* *
* *My grandfather smoked cigars at the Manila Hotel with painters and politicians. He was Jesuit-educated and light-skinned—*mestizo*, meaning he resembled the colonizers, not the colonized. He studied at the School of Public Administration at Harvard, which wasn’t called the Kennedy School because JFK wasn’t JFK yet.
*A country would be capable of scientific research only after it has reached a certain “stage” of development. We shall be prudent enough to avoid a precise definition of this stage. It will be sufficient to suggest that India and the Philippines are among those who have reached it. Both are predominantly agricultural economies; their levels of literacy, while rising, are in general low by Western standards; their peasants are attached to unsophisticated and inefficient techniques.*
* *
There’s a portrait of him hanging in the National Gallery of the Philippines. His suit doesn’t fit him quite right, or at least the artist didn’t seem to think it did, and he wears boxy glasses. I stumble over his typewritten assessment of the *unsophisticated* ways of the *peasants* in the country he came from. He was *mestizo*. He was *guapo*. He was getting a degree at *Harvard*. Suddenly, the dapper man in the portrait is a doctor in latex gloves and a surgical mask, taking a scalpel to his own mother, pretending he never even knew her.
*The historical revolutions in science and technology in the West have produced a priceless heritage of knowledge and techniques from which the developing countries scan draw: transferring techniques outright or, where necessary, modifying them to suit their own conditions. And the vast resources being poured by the West into research today are continually adding to that heritage.*
* *
I hold his words in my mouth like cherry pits. He describes the American conquest of the Philippines as an *association* of the two nations, cites a *strong influence of American values on Philippine society*, as if the state filled with brown people had any say in the matter. An *association* of two countries, like the *association* between walking and then limping. *Values* on *society*, shrapnel on skin. *Primitive*, *parasitic*, *pedestrian*: I picture myself storming from a Thanksgiving table, yelling, “The Arabs invented algebra, asshole.” When I call my mom to say that I’ve found his old essays, she tells me she’s crying.
“I miss him so much.”
My grandfather became president of Philippine Air Lines when his dear friend Ferdinand Marcos became president of the Philippines in 1977—the company had been nationalized after Marcos declared martial law. My mom and her half-brother Gino grew up flying First Class. Smiling stewardesses pushed carts of ice cream and mashed potatoes through the aisles as my grandfather’s airplanes glided through the Eastern skies.
*Wall Street Journal April 10, 1981*
*PHILIPPINE AIR LINES TO GET $65.4 MILLION IN GOVERNMENT AID*
*MANILA — This week PAL reported a 1980 loss of $51.6 million on a 51% surge in revenue to $430 Million. Mr. Cruz blamed the loss on the higher cost of fuel and other expenses. But he predicted that the airline will make a profit in two or three years.*
* Mr. Cruz's optimism isn't widely shared. Since it began flying to the Philippine mountain resort of Baguio on the eve of World War !!, PAL has always envisaged a brighter future, and since Mr. Cruz took over management of the airline for the government in 1977, the promises have come as fast as the red ink. *
* *
-*Venice, 2016*-
The soldiers were paratroopers, and they were in Vicenza training to jump out of airplanes, and it wasn’t at all like skydiving, because you had 120 pounds of weapons and equipment strapped to your body. *It fucking sucked *and you were lucky not to break your legs while doing it*. *Most of them enlisted because of money issues and family issues and nodded to the idea of becoming a better man, whatever that meant.
“The army sucks dick,” Brandon said. He was nineteen too, and he would have been an English major if the army hadn’t gotten to him first. He touched my knee and smiled. “No offense.”
His fingertips didn’t go past my knee, didn’t even reach the soft stretch of brown thigh that I was too lazy to shave. I felt all my negative spaces, the gaps and gulfs and concavities that made him feel like he had to say sorry to me, because the army sucks dick and girls suck dick but girls and the army aren’t the same.
These are the good guys, I reminded myself, and he bought me a cocktail.
-*Cambridge - Harvard Kennedy School Library, 2016*-
The worst part of discovering my grandfather’s secrets was realizing that they were never really secrets to begin with. My mother’s siblings are of the “half” variety, born to three different mothers. The Philippines is the only country in the world, besides the Holy See, that does not legally allow divorce. My grandfather’s close friend was Ferdinand Marcos, Ferdinand Marcos was a military dictator who was convicted of murder at the age of 22, and the sentence was handed down by—wait for it—Roman Cruz Sr., my great-grandfather. A few cursory Google searches would have yielded all of this information, yet I did not make those Google searches until I was seated in the Kennedy School library, next to an old man who coughed loudly, wetly, and awfully.
We were so similar, everyone told me. He was a writer like I am, as American as victory gardens and gelatin and ham. I read the damning gossip columns and damning newspaper articles, and an inane but still damning blog post by his ex-girlfriend, my uncle’s mother, written nearly eight years after his death. The coughing at the desk next to mine remained loud, wet, and awful.
*Thursday, September 15, 2011*
* *
*What'll I do when you are far away and I feel blue, what'll I do?*
*What'll I do when I am wond'ring who is kissing you, what'll I do?*
*What'll I do with just a photograph to tell my troubles to?*
*When I'm alone with only dreams of you that won't come true, what'll I do?*
* *
*Those are the words of one of my most favorite songs that later on became the theme song of the film The Great Gatsby. I love that song. It reminds me of my life, which, come to think of it, was full of heartbreak. Some hearts, I broke. Others broke mine. We left a path cluttered with broken hearts so until one day I said, That's it! No more heartbreak for me. I am done with all that.*
* *
And I was done with all that too. We had little in common. The red portfolio that held his essay yellowed dimly at the edges. I handed it back to the archivist and left the Kennedy School library, which did not yet exist when Roman Cruz Jr. studied at Harvard. We had so, so little in common. I never told him that the Arabs invented algebra, asshole, and I never asked why he refused to call imperialism by its name in his paper for Government 260, and I never got to tell him that the army boys bought me drinks instead of chocolate candies. John F. Kennedy Street opened earnestly in front of me, and my mom filled my inbox with more stories while I cried on my way to class.
-*New York City - Terrace of His Fifth Avenue Penthouse, 2000*-
My grandfather and I shared this planet for four years. He liked to pronounce the double-L in my name as the Spanish would, foregoing the consonant sound in exchange for a “y” so that the “ella” ending became “eya.” I have exactly two of my own memories with him: confiding in him while sitting on a bench on the balcony of his Fifth Avenue apartment (I thought my mom hated me because she didn’t let me put ice cubes in my chocolate milk), and eating some white, starchy snack that the nurses gave me, the day before he died.
-*Cambridge - The Walk from JFK Street to the Science Center, 2016*-
Mom
4:22 PM
One more story: when he was growing up, he had a pet pig named Guapa. She was the cleanest and nicest smelling pig, and possibly the only indoor pig in Manila
4:23 PM
When food got scarce, they had to slaughter Guapa. They were all so sad. None of them could eat.
4:27 PM
Now you have me thinking maybe they’ve been playing us all this time and just made Guapa’s story more dramatic than it was hahah
4:30 PM
I think actually food shortage WAS an issue: google japanese occupation, Philippines, and food shortage
-*Manila, 2014*-
I was sitting in the backseat when my mom told me the wedding photos weren’t real. She and her father both got married within five years of one another, and my mother was forced to invite Emilie, the girlfriend who later became my grandfather’s wife, to the ceremony. (Emilie taught me the word “sexy” when I was four and bought me a velvet Juicy Couture purse after she lied to my mother when I was twelve.) Emilie and my grandfather had two children together and married at the same church a few years later. When the ceremony ended, the wedding photographer called out a roster of family members who would be posing for pictures. My mom, Gino, and their spouses and children were left off the list.
No, trembled my mother’s voice in the passenger seat. It wasn’t a mistake.
The wedding picture fiasco had caused such a rift in the family that the bride and groom announced a re-take. We staged a second photo shoot, several weeks after the nuptials. In front of an opulent backdrop of red velvet, we dressed ourselves in wedding clothes again, repinned the stiff white lilies and re-fastened the coquettish strings of pearls. My grandfather had always been called *guapo*, and the fake pictures from his fake wedding suggested nothing to the contrary. A *mestizo* man and his *mestiza* bride, and all of his and their children.
I sat in my mother’s lap for the pictures, and we were smiling and waxy-skinned as if we had been embalmed, and we all were dressed in a dizzying, iridescent shade of beige.
2026