Pandora's Ink Digital Magazine

Written by Alvin Su from Benjamin Franklin High School in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States The basket’s ribs remember: how calloused hands (cathedral pillars) cradled each golden globe like communion wafers, how the command was Take Eat This is my body, never this is my leaving. Five years, seven months, thirteen days since teeth last split peach skin, since the attic swallowed every promised return. Now the fruit swells with unspoken law: she is fading. The trees bow lo

Written by Alvin Su from Louisiana, USA I Remembrance - 缅怀 Monday, June 26th, 2023, Taipei Accompanied by my father, we landed in Taiwan under a soft, grey sky. The air, thick with the smell of rain, clung to our clothes as if it too remembered things better left forgotten. The old days are woven in like a piece of brocade with faded patches here and there, certain memories now unclear and worn out. As I stood, the wind whispered through the willow trees like a gentle l

Written by Lauren Zheng from Canada “Stop talking, young lady, or you’ll be out in the hall.” That’s my first memory of you, terror of the second-graders. I was sitting on a lint-covered blue carpet with the others. (Except the carpet wasn’t quite blue, and I wasn’t quite with them.) You were watching us make paper stars. (My paper wouldn’t fold the right way, my star deflating and crooked.) I was terrified of you. (I was terrified of being less than them.) But my mom forced

Written by Iris Zhu from California, USA One blazing summer after the school year ended, I left America and returned to my mother's hometown in Changsha, China. Along the Xiang River and capital of the Hunan Province, Changsha comes from a Mandarin word meaning “a long sandy place,” and it is average-sized. In China, this means around 10 million inhabitants. The city is known for its local, spicy cuisine and small, meandering alleyways teaming with bustling stores and restaur