art by Sahbad Singh
Composite Executive Board Leila Pagel Isabela Gomez Saeed Jude Samra Cecilio Sandoval Aguilar Charis Suh Thea Jacquand Angelena Bougiamas Blake Bertero Isabella Pamias Chloe Pascoe Rachel Miyamoto Max Larock
Digital Platform
Layout
Mia Lumpkin Shabad Singh Cameron Mirmelli Hannah Chu Zarin Rizvi Paloma Gomez Nathalie Trigo Lopez
Eva Misso Felicity Misse-Ekwa Ceyla Karabulut Jingwen Yuan Serene Pai Lily Deng Ariana Ng Angelina (Ang) Zhao Madelyn Kausch Francesca Hales Anna Lim Gemma Bucci
Outreach
Editing
Resident Creator
Gwenyth Prince Shailey Pratt Brynna Paige Biehle Maria Halter Paige Gilbert
Itzel Solis Ayesha Murtaza Camille kelly Lauren Frank Natalie Price-Fudge
Writers
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CD (+ Art Director) executive editor IDEA Marketing/Social Media Outreach/Events Outreach/Events Editor Layout Digital Platform Mini Zine Finance Finance
Jacob Gardner Hayley Lee Paige Benish Christina Gomes Natalie Shaw Lauren Santoro Ula Ekmecic Una Mekic Rachel Parks Fiona Naughton
Julia Chen Mina Zhang Maya Singhal Hayley Young
INDEX Page Cover City Girl 1 Table of Contents 2 Editors’ Letters 4 Defenses 6 5.29 8 What even happened that night 10* Res Creator 12 Side Profile 14 Brain Damage 16 Kill all Monsters 18* Flick 20 ATTF 22 05.07 24 Beggar, son, and holy Subway 26* Just a sip 28 Georgetown 30 The rain falls gently 32 Thank you god 34 Res Creator 36 Impact Assessment 38* My Notes App 40 Golden Hour 42 Bite the Hand 44* Mirrors 46 Song about myself 48 An apple 50 Girl Math 52 Ill always find love again 54 I’m here 56 04.13 58 Peeling off 60 Letter to the Pond 62 Snow 64 Back * = Trigger Warning
Layout Designer Paige Gilbert Shabad Singh Blake Bertero Anna Lim Ceyla Karabulut Gemma Bucci Lily Deng Ayesha Murtaza Blake Bertero Eva Misso Gemma Bucci Anna Lim Added to the File Jingwen Yuan Ceyla Karabulut Blake Bertero Itzel Solis Ceyla Karabulut Blake Bertero Leila Pagel Francesca Hales Isabela Gomez Blake Bertero Lily Deng Zach Zinober Jingwen Yuan Paloma Gomez Blake Bertero Ceyla Karabulut Serene Pai Lily Deng Gemma Bucci Francesca Hales 5 Shabad Singh Paige Gilbert
Dear Bossier, Writing to you now feels bittersweet. I just reread the letters I wrote to you as Mini-Zine Director, Director of Operations, and Creative Director, and realized this is the last letter I will write you. You’ve watched me grow up in college, been there for me when things were hard, allowed me to express myself in ways I never thought I would be able to, and introduced me to some of the most wonderful and talented people. This semester I am especially grateful the amazing members of the Bossier Team who stepped up and went above and beyond, pouring their all into this issue. Their dedication shines through every page, so I hope you’ll feel it as much as I do. I’ll miss you, Bossier. Thank you for letting me be a part of your story. All my love, Leila Pagel Creative Director Dear Bossier, I have been delaying writing this letter because once it is finished, I will be closing one of the most meaningful chapters of my life. You have held my hand since I was a freshman, and in so many ways, I have felt you carefully guide and shape me into the person I am today. No words can capture the lifelong debt I owe to this collection of artists, creators, writers, visionaries, and pages that have carried me here, but that is the wonderful thing about a place like Bossier: no one is keeping score. What matters instead is the giving: of time, of love, of imagination. Bossier has taught me that stories are not simply read; they are shared, nurtured, and carried, and that art is not just made, it is breathed into life by the community that believes in it. These lessons, and countless others, are ones I will carry with me always. So goodbye, my forever home and my truest love. I will miss you with every breath. Lastly, I want to thank the entire Bossier community who has made every page, event, and issue possible. You have all worked so hard to build this magazine into what it is today, and it is you whom I trust with all my heart to continue the Bossier mission. I cannot wait to see what you will create with the next blank page. With all my love and more, Isabela Fernanda Gomez Executive Editor
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spotify: @bossier.mag
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5.29.25, 3:13am the way i am in love with you it sits unforgivingly, decisively on my chest at 3:13am until the ache has nowhere to go but out my eyes, onto my pillow and the gasps for air sync with the stupid debussy i put on to shut you up in the first place the way i am in love with you it nestles itself between my unfinished “i’m sorry, i’m just—“ and your “i know” like we never had to explain ourselves to one another and even if we needed to explain ourselves to everyone else between us, words were nothing but formality the way i am in love with you it begs me to ask you a childish question like “do you believe in soulmates?” as if it wouldn’t make me gag in any poem but here, i must know
8 photography by Anna Lim
Eva Sofia Esposito
the way i am in love with you wants you to answer “yes, i do, and i think we are soulmates” a quiet promise that even if it is wrong right now in 60, 70 years we will die together on a porch somewhere at 3:13am while you point out the constellations that reminded you of me on your journeys up and down coasts and i will finally recite my favourite chapter from the book i gave you when we were young (the one i will know you never finished) and i will pluck a shell from the sand and tell you that i knew we would end up right here because for 60, 70 years every shell like this one reminded me of you
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art by Ayesha Murtaza & Blake Bertero
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ke photo by bla
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bertero
FLICK
by blake bertero
Beatnik think quick dont switch turnip radish hashish raddest gladys sad bitch rabbit stab shit with a quick lick flick-that-blick and let me hit for just a bit so we can sit and spit. shit. one day we’ll win think before you call me twin first speak to quinn my next of kin throw ur trash ass in the bin choose a sin god forbid i trim take a spin drinking slim sip the rim tip my brim flash a grin.
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MY DAD’S
ROCK CD
e.e. you think i run my tongue over your gums and between your lips to memorise your taste? hah! naivété is a cruel partner my tongue just remembers the taste of too much gin and it can’t help it i’m a drunk, you shouldn’t trust me
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art by Paloma Gomez
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Melat Gebreyus
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may you the drive the things no how the is 30
never lose to pursue you love matter bumpy road by Itzel Solis
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I try to introspect I peel layers of skin to reveal the place where nail meets bones and blood turns red I unravel myself all the way back to two years old and the habits I invented to be loved seventeen years later I reveal craters and dead wires of once hanging bridges Only to panic all over again Because there are CRATERS There are WIRES hanging out of me My gut coughs up FLOOD WATER I am beating internal BLEEDING into my veins I peel myself back to reveal only more tears Only more CRATERS CRATERS CRATERS Born into my bone structure What do you do after the impact assessment, Knowing what is wrong what you can’t fix
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IMPACT ASSESSMENT BY SANIYA SHAH
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Strangeness August 13, 2025
the flip side of a coin, the back of my hand, i know a lot of the story, you aren’t a stranger to me, and i am not one to you, but there is no interface anymore. what do you do with all the knowledge, of someone from the past? they still could be with you now, and be the one you see so often.
making sense: my notes app poetry
by Thea Jacquad
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but you are on the other side of the room, you know my fears and source of smiles. you were close to me once, i remember, part of what everyday carried. and i changed a lot, i’m assuming you too, and, and, and, and, and… there’s nothing enough to justify or explain, how there’s more risk in breaking this intimate estrangement.
father-daughter | September 25, 2025
my new novel‘s pages are sifted through, some stained by greasy fingerprints in their corner. some pages are folded. and the title page is curved, evidence of a book well held. Lu á Georgetown, Août 2025-MJ
he read it in two days. the two busy days that marked the start of my last year here. Je veuz que tu lises ce roman. C’etait merveilleux.
it’s about the battle of troy. about patroclus and achilles. about priam and hector. it’s greek mythology, “where all the lessons of human nature can be found,” he once said. One of the most beautiful books he’s ever read. he read it quickly enough to pass to me, before he went home. I won’t go home till Thanksgiving. it’s difficult. hard to make sense of things. hard to understand the perspective sometimes. and i have my own too. i resent the language. why not just be direct ? i’m on page 15. i don’t have time to read. it sits, dormant, on my bedside table. my bedside dresser, next to my journal, my perfume, my necklaces. i keep trying to pick it up. to show him how much i love him.
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Photo by Karabulut
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Art by Ayesha Murtaza
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Song About Myself Hawkeye Pirtle
My Tennessean father met my Ohio-born-but-really-Kentuckian mother when they were seventeen. She had lived all over the south: Bowling Green, Savannah, Jacksonville…and then, luckily, Chattanooga. They were high school sweethearts straight from a country song, though I was born in Seattle— where my parents spent a bittersweet decade figuring out how to be together, a Tennessee ballroom wedding, then one in a Vegas Radioshack, then me, & my sister, & the apartment in Queen Anne…but as much as I’m anything I’m Midwestern. We’ve been in my second & my best city for seventeen years, and now I’m here, at school in DC… and I like it the people & the town but I’m not quite in tune, I don’t mean to be saccharine just they don’t understand the smell of prairie flowers. Or the lonely majesty of windmills in a cornfield or how the lake gets when a storm gathers overhead…I turned twenty-one a few weeks ago. Told my oldest friend I am trying to try it’s a refrain of our generation, September twenty twenty-five understand I love us & I am scared for us this is far far too much rising action how I am supposed to write my love & introspection & romantic comedy of a family history when the answer we get to every “once in a lifetime crisis” is the young people will save us oh shut the @!$#% up, please—anyway. I had intended to write about finding & being & falling in love with living & my city; my head & heart all summer full of Dearborn Street & honey locust trees
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Photography by Chloe Pascoe
I want to write like that cause I am one who has looked up and out at the end of the day at an indie-album-cover sky and said this is the loneliest part of the sunset & I am one who has stood by the living room window much much too late suddenly heard a motorcycle stunt down State Street and thought it’s like a wolf—like one wolf— & I am one who has talked of trying to find my people by which I mean nerds & poets & anticapitalists, I’ve written so much that’s just gone I’m tired, I’m trying, I’m a little scared of falling in love again but I want to…It’s okay, I think, for our poems to end the same. Even if it’s just we’ll see about tomorrow, the things & the generation I love, trust that we’ll survive the weather & the dictators & timing & air—and that we’ll make something happier, again 49 or for the first time, tomorrow—
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art by Paloma Gomez & Blake Bertero
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I. & im beautiful im blue moonlight tipped, on fire wax wings folding away falling out the sky whisper my name
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believe in angels believe in me as i disappear into the sun sunset drapes over and i am my mother’s imprints on my skin child i don’t need big words to tell you i love you i need three.
I’m Here By: Saeed Jude
Art Credit: Savannah McManus and Shabad Singh
II. breathe. use my chest. im still here. keep your eyes on me. don’t blink. turn over, i’ll hold you; these fears, no longer weapons these tears, just tears. tell me your dreams i’ll be gone in the morning. kiss me like you love me hold me like you need me cry until it’s real you’re taking all i give im giving all i have.
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- Blake Bertero
er
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tog Pho raph
photography by Anna Lim
im
y Anna b L y
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art by Sahbad Singh