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In TJ he downed eight shots of mezcal, ate the worm.Two prostitutes and a hellhoundStole his skateboard and hundreds in cash,Stabbed his friend, while he blacked out in a ditch. His mother wired me five thousand to bail him out.He’s an animal, a jackass, but he’s my student,If he dies in a TJ prison, he’llContinue reading “The Ballad of Student X”

The Abigail Adams Institute and The Veritas Review are primarily focused on students at Harvard and students in schools in Cambridge and nearby. We are happy to extend outreach beyond; regionally, nationally, and internationally as appropriate. In each generation, it is generally difficult for the young to get a start, and therefore the chief aimContinue reading “Editorial Statement”

Eggplant Your mother’s eggplantYou kept on the vine too longIt is black now, cracked and overripeShould I throw it out? Please don’t, let’s make use of itFor the autumn equinoxWe’ll dry the belly in the sunAnd replant the seeds Suzie Asado Suzie Asado, bitter green teaPlease add honey and make it sweetShe was afraid ofContinue reading “Folksongs, Revisited”

a blues sketch, part one Russell C. Leong, 梁志英 Russell C. Leong was chief editor of UCLA’s Amerasia Journal from 1977 to 2010, and later founded and edited the CUNY FORUM: Asian American/Asian Studies for the City University of New York’s Asian American/Asian Research Institute. His collection of stories, Phoenix Eyes (University of Washington Press),Continue reading “Azure in Angel City”

Education is difficult and rare. The AAI seminar on Plato’s Republic, a small group studying and discussing the Question of Justice in a spirit of friendship, is more in keeping with the Socratic view that true education is not a pouring of knowledge into empty minds, but rather a “turning around” of the mind andContinue reading “The Question of Justice in Plato’s Republic”

Translated by Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander You draw water.Yesterday as you did today, today as you will tomorrow.The headwaters emerge from a range of calm mountains,fish course through its pools.As though deflecting the flow with your palm,you draw wateras though your palm is deflected by the flow.In the north, water runs thin.So the vaseContinue reading “Ritual Utensils, Shuri Kido”

Translated by Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander NOT NONFERROUS, all colors mixed to render the color “gray”. The river bites into the land and “geological memories” surface. Plants with a grayish tint, Tillandsia, or remnant snow. Nothing swaying, nothing wavering, not a thing too complex to grasp. Grayish prosaic phenomena, afloat at the horizon, aContinue reading “Nonferrous, Shuri Kido”

Translated by Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander “Ara-Mitama (The Wild Spirit)” who puts curses on people. The sun burns over this wasteland and its few creatures, the outline of some object coming clearer and clearer, which you recognize as: “the default” of yourself. Though there are those who yield it to others. An “existence” akinContinue reading “The Direction North, Shuri Kido”

In nature, there is nothing contingent. the ink of your traumas bled into these sheets long ago it cannot be erased or rewritten as I read those pages, I think a monster wrote this story. But it is absurd to affirm this of a Being absolutely infinite and supremely perfect. this is how it wasContinue reading “Was This the Only Way?”

Alyosha was the younger brother. He was called the Pot, because his mother had once sent him with a pot of milk to the deacon’s wife, and he had stumbled against something and broken it. His mother had beaten him, and the children had teased him. Since then he was nicknamed the Pot. Alyosha wasContinue reading “Alyosha the Pot”