The Official Literary Journal of the City College of New York

Poetry

Mar 25, 2026

Where it Counts.

Mar 25, 2026

In school he was brave, bombastic, hyperkinetic.

Mar 25, 2026

Prose

Mar 23, 2026

Gills

Mar 23, 2026

I always knew drowning was the way I’d go. When I was a kid, I would park myself in front of the refrigerator in the dead of night, a plastic cup in my hand. Over and over I would refill the cup with water and empty it down my garbage chute esophagus.

Mar 23, 2026

Prose

Fiction

2026, Eve Greenlow

Gills

Fiction

2026, Eve Greenlow

Fiction

2026, Eve Greenlow

Creative Nonfiction

2026, Emily Polson

Neostalgia

Creative Nonfiction

2026, Emily Polson

My Neopets have been dying for ten years. I forgot the password to my account and the associated email address no longer exists, so my colorful pixelated friends are stuck in a prolonged state of suffering.

Creative Nonfiction

2026, Emily Polson

Fiction

2025, Ripley Mandanis

HUNTERS

Fiction

2025, Ripley Mandanis

I blink once, twice, then six or seven times back-to-back and re-grip the steering wheel. Don’t even know that I noticed when I zoned out. Highway Hypnosis, I think they call it.

Fiction

2025, Ripley Mandanis

Fiction

Malky Gestetner, 2025

Story Hunter

Fiction

Malky Gestetner, 2025

Do you want my story? Turn away. I have nothing to offer you. Nothing spurious. Nothing enchanting. I know stories can corrupt me, so I have surrendered them. I have become an ascetic. I have chosen an austere, circumspect life. I am no legend. I am no parable. I refuse to be a lesson. My greatest accomplishment is my anonymity. It is required for my line of work.

Fiction

Malky Gestetner, 2025

Creative Nonfiction

Cat Perry, 2025

Here Is a Story I've Been Dying to Tell

Creative Nonfiction

Cat Perry, 2025

It’s July of 1979. I know it’s July because I don’t have to go to school, and I know it’s 1979 because I’m nine years old. It’s easy to tell the years because it’s my age, and I just have to add up from 1970. I’ll say it now: I’m no good at math. I’m glad I don’t have to do anything but add my age to the year.

Creative Nonfiction

Cat Perry, 2025

Fiction

Ethan Brown, 2025

This Immortal Coil

Fiction

Ethan Brown, 2025

I don’t remember my dreams. Peaceful sleep is a void. Gaps in time. Sometimes, though, I’ll be out somewhere, doing something, and think: I’ve been here before. Cycles. Circles. Rings and spirals. Déjà vu. That’s how I know it’s not real.

Fiction

Ethan Brown, 2025

Creative Nonfiction

Lewis Wright, 2025

Lost One

Creative Nonfiction

Lewis Wright, 2025

I hate tradition, that is exactly what I have found out about myself over the years. I would say it all started when I was around ten or eleven years old. I was still living in my cozy little childhood town of Peine, Germany.

Creative Nonfiction

Lewis Wright, 2025

Fiction

Meg Pickarski, 2025

Pink Clog Fantasy

Fiction

Meg Pickarski, 2025

Helen sat on the toilet in her workplace bathroom with her black denim jeans pulled down to her ankles, checking her oxygen with an oximeter she had purchased over the pandemic. There was no reason for her to be checking her oxygen this early in the morning, except for the incessant worry that she could drop dead at any moment.

Fiction

Meg Pickarski, 2025

Fiction

Jonathan Carillo, 2025

Sutter Street

Fiction

Jonathan Carillo, 2025

Mini was the first schizophrenic person I ever actually knew—besides my Uncle, who I only really knew of, and the people on Eddy Street that talked to themselves, who never really knew anybody. When I met her I was living in Daly City, renting a bedroom from a man I pretended to be Republican for; in the rental listing he stated he was looking for someone with “strong family values.”

Fiction

Jonathan Carillo, 2025

Fiction

Griffy LaPlante, 2025

Collect

Fiction

Griffy LaPlante, 2025

This is a story about compost, and it ends—fittingly—with death.

It begins, however, on a Tuesday: the first Tuesday of the month, at six o’clock in the evening. Six o’clock in the evening on the first Tuesday of the month is a time which, if you were in the know, would signify to you that the residents of 77 Lilac Street are almost done with their House Meeting. Outside the moon takes its time to rise, cannot be rushed.

Fiction

Griffy LaPlante, 2025

Nonfiction

Susannah Pitmann

Earning your Lighthouse

Nonfiction

Susannah Pitmann

There was no time for tears when your bilge pumps failed. Somewhere about two hundred miles off Cape Hatteras, where the HMS Bounty sank and left its captain drowned. You tried not to think of him, swallowed up in those same waters. All you should have been thinking about was keeping your heading, two hundred-five degrees, with some variance to take the ocean swell on the boat’s quarter.

Nonfiction

Susannah Pitmann

Fiction

Fran Kurstejn

Elisabeth's Leg

Fiction

Fran Kurstejn

We named you Elisabeth after this street, Elisabeth Street—look where I’m pointing now—on the south side of the city, starting at Fifth National Bank—that’s the square building with the bronze cuckoo on top—and it ends somewhere around the big convention center—the glass circle building where they hold the dance recitals and the spelling bees—where it becomes Convention Center Dr. and no longer Elisabeth St.

Fiction

Fran Kurstejn

Poetry