ButterMochi Journal
an online journal amplifying Asian and Pacific Islander (API) Youth
Welcome
We are ButterMochi Journal, a youth-led literary and arts journal based in Honolulu, Hawai'i. Our mission is to showcase Asian and Pacific Islander (API) youth through the publication of writing and art.
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Our name is inspired by the Hawaiian dessert Butter Mochi, a delicious blend of Asian and Pacific Islander cuisine. Similarly, our journal aims to blend our cultures to create something delightful in the existing arts.
What's your inspiration?
Inspiration comes to us like a fleeting star, or a gust of wind. ButterMochi Journal hopes to capture that in our following issues. Here is some writing that inspires us:​
Tell me it was for the hunger
& nothing less. For hunger is to give
the body what it knows
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it cannot keep. That this amber light.
whittled down by another war
is all that pins my hand to your chest.
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On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong (2016)
Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.​
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The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison (1970)
That's why no matter what world i'm in / I navigate by satellite
Vernon
Dylan
and you in your madness
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two trains running
through your cool blue eyes
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The Land of 1000 fires
Lana Del Rey (2020)
But I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I guess I was crying because we had nowhere else to go, no choice but to go on living in this world. Crying because we had no other world to choose, and crying at everything before us, everything around us.
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Heaven
Mieko Kawakami (2009)