The 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center has launched the eighth issue of Podium, their inspiring literary journal that publishes student work created during writing programs here. Instructors this year included National Book Award-winner Colum McCann, Terrance Hayes, Jean Valentine, Grace Schulman and many others.

Here is a selection from our personal favorite, the short story You Destroyed Everything, by Meredith Turits:

My earliest memory of my sister is breaking her arm on a seesaw. We were two or three, and I was angry that she wouldn’t keep up the rocking motion. The fragmented recollection has me stomping up to her and using my entire body to push her to the grass in our backyard. I remember my mother, miraculously home at the time, chastising me, sending me back inside, and then ordering the nanny to get Anaïs to the hospital. This is the sequence my mind has woven over time, that I’ve pieced back together from the stories told at family holidays, the photo albums, and the small scar from where the cast dug into her toddler arm. But the sound of her screaming when she hit the ground, her tender bones breaking because I pushed too hard — that’s something I can’t possibly forget.

I have little clips of memories that follow, ones that become entire films as we age in their scenes. Of course we clung to each other from the start; not only were we bound by blood, but the only markers that made us separate people were our differing first names and genders. Mix a brother-sister bond with a birthday separated by only seconds, absent parents, and enough money to buy whatever form of happiness was on tap, and the subsequent interaction isn’t rocket science. It was as natural and expected as anything else on the planet. To find out it wasn’t — well, I was never told otherwise.

Our parents were young, loaded, and deep into their careers in international finance, as well as their self-absorbed storybook romance. My father, American with a mother from France, and my mother, French Canadian, had met in business school in Montreal, married quickly, and planted their shallow roots. When they were barely thirty, Anaïs and I happened accidentally, but our births didn’t stop their business ventures and European trysts.

Read the rest of that story, and more than a dozen other incredible works, in Podium, Issue 8.

If you are interested in learning more about the Unterberg Poetry Center’s writing program, please visit www.92Y.org/writingprogram or sign-up for our eNews for the latest on upcoming events at the Poetry Center.

[Podium Literary Journal]

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