Apogee Journal is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of Apogee Journal must be made payable to “Fractured Atlas” only and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. Apogee Journal’s operating expenses, and this issue, were supported in part by the New York State […]
Contributors Elinam Agbo was born in Ghana and grew up in Kansas. Her work has appeared in American Short Fiction, The Bare Life Review, Nimrod, PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and the Clarion Workshop, she is currently the Kenyon Review Fellow […]
EVERY BALIKBAYAN IS IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER FOR MY MOTHER Dujie Tahat Forgiveness is laborious that way. A never-ending line of empty boxes so long, we forget—I pin my awards to the fat bellies of stars. She pulls stitches from the spaces between. The thread is black, the point sharp. The odds […]
Like All the Red Things We Say to Describe Blood but Blood Itself Sydney Jin Choi It’s nosebleed season. The air is dry, and I wake some mornings to liquid rust spilling down my cheek. I shift to my back, flatten my body, take deep swallows to keep blood from leaving me. Funny […]
Elegy Spencer Williams 1. The day she passed, the rain grew bored of streets in my city. After the brief phone call, and the dull click at both ends of the line, I went for a walk among the drying worms and watched as a bird careened against the square trick of a […]
Tommy Kha Tommy Kha, Installation of Guise Like Me, NYC, 2021. Courtesy of Nathalie Karg Gallery I’m a cut of my mom. Every photograph I make of her is a Half Self-Portrait. Older Country / China Old Country / Vietnam New Country / _______ Translate: The photographs of my mother is a collaboration, and […]
Chinese Drama K-Ming Chang The last time I talked to my cousin, she asked me if I’d seen the latest episode of some period drama she and my mother were watching every night during their shift at the retirement home. She told me that their latest task was to check on all the […]
LATE SUMMER 2020 mai c. doan part 1 after a dream, a scene opens. meaning, a vision arrives. inside my third eye. trees stretch up and fill the scene. cottonwoods. the grandmother trees of the bosque. also (in the) opening: a girl in a red dress, curled up in dirt. budding against roots. […]
Masculine Sonnet Sreshtha Sen In the end, all the men I know turn out to be just that: men. How they hurl fear under fists raw. Their kempt torsos stay shy of softness. For him I grew two mouths so I could be hole without. He said, “All that matters is you can […]
Starspella Diana Veiga Whenever Daddy took my waddling self anywhere—a bookbag on his shoulder substituting a traditional diaper bag, a pacifier in one back pocket and a pair of dice in the other, and me dressed in the freshest baby tennis shoes cause my daddy knew a booster, with matching hair bows cause […]
