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Content Trail Editorial Hex (Scherezade Siobhan & MJ Arnett) ------ Pg 5
Writing Editor’s Pick Entry Code (Poetry by Nandini) ------ Pg 7-10 Poetry (Roxanne K.) ------ Pg 11-12 Interview (Kalliope Amorphous) ------ Pg 13-22 Poetry (Katherine Osborne) ------ Pg 25 Poetry (Dan Baucom) ------ Pg 27 - 28 Prose (Michal M.) ------ Pg 29, Pg 32-38 Prose (Lavinia Tan) ------ Pg 30-31 Poetry (W. H. Holland) ------ Pg 41-46 Prose (Michael Flores) ------ Pg 49-55 Poetry (Stefan Schulz) ------ Pg 56-59 Poetry & Prose (Aditi Nagrath) ------ Pg 61-67 Prose (Nikhil Mane) ------ Pg 68-73 Poetry (Maya Owen) ------ Pg 75 Poetry (Christopher Morgan) ------ Pg 76-77 Page | 3
Prose (Mary Watson) ------ Pg 78 Poetry (Isla Anderson) ------ Pg 83-84 Poetry (Zaina Anwar) ------ Pg 86-87 Poetry (Rene Foran) ------ Pg 88-89 Prose (Lucy Wainger) ------ Pg 91-94 Editorial Pick Exit Code (Maya Owen) ------ Pg 95
Art & Photography Adriana M. Long ------ Pg 5 Jessi Fikan ------ Pg 23-24, 82 Ben A. ------ Pg 26 Jaie Miller ------ Pg 39-40, 47 Andy Holsteen ------ Pg 48 Sage Charlebois ------ Pg 60 Tiffany Campbell ------ Pg 74, 85, 90 Stimie King ------ Back Cover
Contributors’ Bios ------ Pg 96-100 V1.0 Tractate (Jessamy Klapper) ------ Pg 101-103 Final Notes (Cyberhex Editorial Team) Page | 4
Editorial Hex by Scherezade Siobhan & M.J. Arnett
“A Writer is the shortest distance between two worlds” {Jim Bowler}
You ask us who we are … We, who are the reincarnated snakeoil merchants at the border-towns of Algeria or the gas-mask dervishes dancing in Fibonacci spirals at the mouth of a ripe canon. We, the curios of our own desires as we put the pen to the roadmap of our trapdoor destinies, live relics with phantom limbs brush-stroking the digital zeitgeist; to make ephemera into eons. When you look for us, we are au corant even as we are the archaeological metronome of Time sifting the banyan roots in Sumatra temples. There is suppleness to this space that is sentient within its chaosphere. We are not writing poems, we are flinging coins into the vast inkwell of cyberia as wishes cast to the fountainhead of duende. Is there a form to the beast that flickers its teeth in the razor light of an Andalusian sun? Is there a grammar to the grief of our Nada Brhma? We sit on the cusp of the digital and the tribal. We are half camphor, half rose quartz coruscating in a runic waltz. We are an arts and literature journal dedicated to coloring outside the lines: lines of genre, lines of narrative, lines of language, lines of persona. We are fault lit – asymptotic and volcanic. We welcome breaks in the assemblage. We whisper in the fissures, murmur in the crevices. We want old forms in new storms, visceral and ethereal, incantatory and hermetic. We are Dada. We are OuliPo. We welcome surrealism. We welcome abstraction. We are glitch. We are belle grotesque. We are the thrumming aorta of a hull that believes in the mammoth civil disobedience of its own blood. We are all and we are nothing. The page is white noise & we are bringing a Mariachi band to the library. This is who we are; a disembodied voice crafting operatic undertones from within the void of virtual storytelling.
Pocket sarcophagi hidden in the cracks of the sidewalk, the mourning whisper waiting beneath your fingernails. Sterile incantations stuttered by the white-robed acolyte, his eyes groping beneath the bleeding quarter moon
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Art: Adriana M. Long
Scherezade’s Editorial Pick - Nandini (//Open//) Anonyma : 3 Poems i in osculum : particle systems [1] tactile pieces of direction [2] collective del of low alpha transparency reghost our instantiation. allow me the space to blood let. the space has given copse, like predicate to the ronin. the air is still air (all –ives are still –ives) when the killswitch is employed.
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ii assume the heartscale. pit it of its murder. gut the abundances as if from seasons of press genus; in cycloid of the penny. i drew the magnitude of your deliberate voice as thread of the warp, sigma (my hellion), river particle of hayati parametrics. it is warm in weight and dense with damage. i am taken with ripe horizons (mortal platitudes). i mark you as one. i forge you a new hurt, bane. you belong to me when you give in to your frustration. understand that this does not come naturally for me. i am submitting to you defensively. i work you backwards to my real bed. i inflict each mistake, each reinforced cephei impact. how dare you impose your damage to be mine. how dare you strip me of my defense mechanisms Page | 8
before trying to love me. how dare you disarm me. we lay like wet, enlarged pixels on the process of flowers. a pregnant spider gives birth in the curtains at the same time that our knuckles touch. there is something that comes apart in us both. we wait to see what it is, exactly.
iii My eyes swim every Friday on Bishop street from landlocked November weather and motes of rubble; tokens from the Caterpillar machinery and the incessant drills that multiplies the inkling that I am not living at all, but being lived through by sounds: 
a wail from the docks as a cargo of timber float through a poisoned river,

the echo of a smart-phone falling face-first onto pavement, Page | 9
the tire-grinds of coarse salt and pebbles on winter roads,
the shift of the girl at the intersection rolling a joint before the hand at the crosswalk lifted in front of the business school. I use sounds as a medium to reach no one by talking.
You heard me walk past, from the basement entrance of one of the Irish pubs at nine in the morning. The approaching footfall made you look up defensively,
and you knew by the trajectory of my eyes trained on nothing that I was a girl who always carried a USB key on her as strange comfort and aspiring bitwise beauty. Had you told me this then and there,
called out what you thought my name was from the metal grid,
I would have unclenched the fist in my pocket.
I would have brought to mind the phrase, “…kind of like how you try to resuscitate someone who has forgotten to breathe.”
I would have telepathically stroked your subconscious into
dreaming about the warm rise of golden-brown domes with dark raisins
for minarets. Page | 10
is she salem? then imagination sets in— is she marjorie? is she fran?
is she damned?
is she margarine?
is she midnight-bacon in a pan? is she maternal?
is she nocturnal?
is she owl-contemplative?
does she keep the stars in her girdle? is she caramel?
is she bombshell?
is she ne’er-do-well? is she salem?
is she nightshade meets anti-venom? is she cum laude? is she fraud?
is she beryl, onyx, bent on maraud? is she curls? is she straight?
is she prima donna at the plate?
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is she prude?
is she restraint? is she nude
and primed to paint? does she illustrate your songbook? is she genie?
would her performance clip me?
would she love me, if she knew me? would i love her,
if she did not stir
the worst in me?— envy.
Roxanne K. McClain
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Kalliope Amorphous is a visual artist best known for her
extensive work in self-portait photography. Assuming the roles of model, stylist, and photographer, she uses her own image as a
prop to create the protagonists of her visual stories. A self-taught photographer, Amorphous creates her own alternative processes
and methodologies using handmade and alternative lighting as
well as experimenting with textiles, surfaces, mirrors, and incamera distortion techniques. Much of Amorphous’ work uses reflections, blur, mirrors, and multiple exposure to lead the
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viewer through the artist’s favorite themes — identity, mortality, time, and consciousness.
In addition to self-portrait photography, Amorphous continues to explore various forms of experimental photography and alternative processes in creative, conceptual, and new media.
Kalliope has received worldwide recognition for her work in
conceptual photography and her photographs have been published and exhibited throughout the United States and
internationally. She currently divides her time between Providence, Rhode Island and New York City.
Artist’s Statement My images reflect my love of mythology, paradox, and the
juxtaposition of light and dark, beauty and beast. I am
continually drawn to concepts involving the subconscious, alienation,
time,
memory,
deconstruction,
duality,
and
transcendence. Rather than approaching self-portraiture from a purely autobiographical perspective, I enjoy exploring the boundaries between "self” and “other” through the creative
interpretation of identity, archetype, myth, and memory. By embracing the roles of stylist, photographer, and model, I can
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more deeply explore my conceptual ideas as the subject that is integrated into, rather than separate from the photograph.
I am interested in the visual representation of states of
consciousness and ephemera, and the ways in which the deliberate invocation of entropy can create beauty.
My photographs represent my desire to integrate and contain opposites, to drop form, and to question temporal reality.
My non-self portrait bodies of work express similar sensibilities, and are explorations and aspects of the same world.
Cyberhex’s Visual Editor Jim Bowler interviewed Kalli recently and the conversation was as expansive as it was fluid. (JB stands for Jim Bowler & KA is for Kalliope Amorphous)
JB : Was there anything in particular about photography that
drew you to it, some quality or capability that other media lack which made it better suit your artistic intentions? KA :
I was drawn to photography mainly
because it is rooted in time, in freezing
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time, in preserving time.
Photography is able to
literally capture and preserve time rather than replicate it. It also
plays with life and death. As Roland Barthes said, the photograph produces death while trying to preserve life. There are so many
paradoxes and contradictions in the poetry of the process and I love that. I am always finding new poetry in and through the process of working with images.
My attraction toward photography is most strongly rooted in my desire to translate the
transcendental into something tangible. Photography is the language through which I feel I can most articulately and creatively do that.
I also love the unpredictability of image making. I have tinkered with film periodically as a hobby because I am interested in it for all of these same reasons. In the future, I'd like to put more time into seriously exploring experimental film.
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JB : Have you had any formal training in photography? KA: No.
Formal training in art has never
made sense to me.
I am more interested in
exploration, innovation, and experimentation because those are the things that I believe create unique vision.
JB : How does your process affect your body? Does it change the way you feel physically, or the way you present/carry yourself in general?
KA: No. I can’t think of a way that it affects those things.
JB: What is the difference between a self-portrait and a 'selfie'? KA: A selfie is an amateur version of a self-portrait taken with a mobile phone, with either the arms outstretched or in a mirror.
The selfie is more about informal selfdocumentation and play. Self-portraits have traditionally been artistic in nature, with focus on technique and composition.
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JB: has your work with self-portraiture altered your identity, or the way you think about identity in general?
KA: It has altered the way that I view identity in the sense that I can peek into my subconscious through my own work. Much of my work is unplanned, and like my poetry, is produced in what I can only describe as a mild trance state. Because of this, the themes and archetypes that emerge are often a surprise to me.
Through the images, I have come to know myself better. This wasn’t always the case, and I think what has most drastically changed is the way that I identify with my own work.
In early interviews, I recall stating that I was simply acting as a
screen for various archetypes and characters to play on. That’s still true, but what has changed is that I no longer see myself as
separate from the work. It took me a while before I was able to
recognize and acknowledge myself behind the shapeshifting that happens in my photographs.
An integration happened where I realized that no matter how much I think I am avoiding autobiography, every image contains
elements of my inner world, someone I have known, an interpretation of an emotional event, or a memory. And the interesting thing about this is that it’s completely unconscious, which is probably why it took me six years to notice it.
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JB: Are you very comfortable in front of cameras? KA: Yes. JB: How has your relationship to cameras changed as you work with them, or is it any different from other tech/materials you work with?
KA: My relationship to the process and the work has changed,
the work itself has changed, but I don’t think that my
relationship to or my understanding of the actual camera has changed.
JB: How do you feel about things like Photoshop, versus analog props? Preparation before capture vs. manipulation after capture? Also, at what point does it cease being "photography" and become something else, or is there even a definite line?
Photoshop skill is an art form and I appreciate it as an art form. I
am not usually a fan of highly Photoshopped photography, because when it’s overdone, it no longer has the feel of a
photograph to me. When it’s done well, I can of course appreciate it as beautiful art, but it’s difficult for me to identify with it as a photograph after a certain point.
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I am more fascinated by in-camera work and I enjoy the challenges it presents. For example, look at the work of Sandy
Skoglund. She creates all of her scenes and
tableaux vivants meticulously by hand. Sure, you could sit and render similar elements in Photoshop but it
would not have the same type of soul that the actual work as
produced in reality has. It may result in a beautiful image, but to my eye, the heavily Photoshopped aesthetic is a genre all its own.
I am definitely not anti-Photoshop. I use it myself for basic things like tone adjustments and texturing. I have also done
some experiments with cloning/doubling using it and I think it’s a fantastic tool. The oversaturated digitized look though, is not
something that personally appeals to me, and it seems like 90%
of photographs that I see lately have this sort of hyperreal,
digitized look. Aside from a handful of photographers creating incredible surrealist imagery in Photoshop, I find the bulk of it
boring and repetitive. I am much more drawn to raw, handmade surrealism and I am much more interested in physically creating
live art or performance in order to capture it as an artistic still image.
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JB: Who has influenced you the most, creatively? KA: I am not influenced by anyone, really.
I am
influenced primarily by intangible things:
memories, music, visions, experiences, feelings, and emotions.
My influences change
constantly. Sometimes I find myself influenced by films, songs, or books that I'm reading.
JB: How has social media helped/hindered your career? KA: I have always had mixed feelings about social media on a personal level, but I don’t think that it has affected my career one way or another.
I dislike sites like Pinterest and Facebook which allow for the rampant pilfering and hoarding of artwork and I
don’t like
the sense of entitlement that certain aspects of social media has bred. But all of this is more of a personal distaste, because I doubt that the majority of people who make boards of my work on Pinterest or Facebook have any
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interest in actually purchasing my work anyway. To my
knowledge, the people investing in my work are not finding me on sites like Pinterest. So, no I don’t think it’s helped or hindered, but it’s definitely something that I get irritated with on a personal level. I am a strong advocate of creator's rights and copyright law.
I'm not heavily involved in social media because I find most of it
uninteresting or time-wasting. I also don't understand the
chronic photography of Instagram, where people photograph themselves constantly and share everything they eat, see, or do.
I'm definitely a curmudgeon when it comes to these things, but I am also a very private person and I don't feel the need to broadcast everything I do with strangers on the Internet.
JB: are there any subjects, themes, or methods that you haven't explored yet but would like to?
KA: Many, many things. I have a notebook filled with ideas,
methods, and potential experiments. Right now, I am interested in expanding my work with mirrors and mirror distortions.
Kalliope Amorphous’ new photography portraits of Marina Abramovic can be found via her website: www. kalliopeamorphous.com Page | 22
Photography: Jessi Fikan
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Photography : Jessi Fikan
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Your Part Of The Country Doorway mossing over my mouth he opens it with the pricey part of the gun
I couldn’t keep my first baby alive
his eyes in a country lit by the faulty wiring of its only lake
I am down in the silverware
breaking Judas apart line by line whisper something in dark-type I want to lean my head back this kind of trouble, I want
something to wash up on shore
make it impossible to look away I want to be solved for zero I keep asking for more ice
Katherine Osborne Page | 25
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Photography : Ben A
Moccasin Medusa Medusa, with the moccasin follicles;
wonder if ill thoughts ever beget angry serpents and the headdress riddled the skull with fangs. Such is cynicism. Revolution is weightless and the zephyr’s proof
was in turning over leaves without hands. So I’ll bag a hurricane
for those that find it hard to breathe, hook ‘em to the valves
and IV drip a second-wind,
and the next time they speak the weathermen will name their voices.
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My Papa’s Shoulders The rain-pecked promenade, the decking-board nailed smooth
and sound as my papa’s shoulders since eight. The
browned fallow folding chair resting rusted and inviting in equal regard, the
testy reticence of bricks of pumice, pocked piranha,
nipping at nude feet for none being all provocation necessary. All of the hands.
Is there nowhere soft anymore?
Dan Baucom
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Photography : Michal M
none worse for wear i boy with shorts and pulled up pink dolphin socks does not give a shit. watch him walk to school late and uncaring and wonder at what point do fucks begin to be given.
ii how to retender a similar apathy about opinion‌ what is its dollar value and how am i willing to pay - paper or plastic? too many questions. i write a mental check and double-back, go home to consider my fashion choices and how they might appear to strangers. discover the dog has eaten a hole in my jeans, perhaps something meaningful about his feelings about black denim.
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iii i dress in something unexpected and head out concerned about professional attire. i’m always older than i look. my socks are too short and navy. i hide in my office.
Lavinia Tan
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Book Pitch "I read your life story." "And?" He braced himself for the worst. He was never one to doubt his own work, but being faced by such a remarkable author, he couldn’t help it. He was shaking and shivering, he thought he was going to vomit. "It’s quite remarkable, actually, I was very impressed!" He cracked a huge smile, he couldn’t help but smile back. "Tell me though, Will?" Will nodded, "Why not put yourself in your own life story?" The question he was waiting for. The one that would make him or break him. The one question he actually prepared answering over and over again in his head— "Um, sir, I am actually not so sure." "You’re not sure? Of your own writing?"
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"No, wait, I didn’t mean that, I meant to say that I am not sure of where I belong in that story." "But this is your life story, is it not? It says it right here, The life of
William Graber.” He began sweating, he wasn’t saying it right, he was getting it all wrong. "Hold on," Will put his hand up to him, pause. Dr. Cooke waited, he folded his arms, checking his watch. Will breathed, he gathered himself, he needed to get it right. "Sir, I’m not in this book because I am not in plain sight." Dr. Cooke nodded, continue. "The whole book IS my life story, you see, I am just in between the lines, waiting, hovering, observing my own work. If you turn to page 20, where the main character, Sheila, is looking into the ground, covered in snow, she tries to observe the grass, right? But where is the grass? Beneath all this layer of white, of course, so what does Sheila do?" "She kneels down and digs with her hands," Dr. Cooke answered. Page | 33
"Right! She tries to find the element that she most remembers, because snow is not something that stays for that long. It’s as if it doesn’t belong. Though, the most continuous thing in our life is the ground, the mud, the soil, the green. In my life, I am the snow, I am the thing that doesn’t stay for long, I hover, even if I try to stay still, even if I keep coming down, I don’t stay. I absorb myself more and more into the ground. I become one with the Earth, and I become more diverse that way.” He looked up at Dr. Cooke, feeling relieved— but another question erupted. "And why make your main character a female?" "Easy. The thing I want most." "I see, so you are manifesting yourself in this book as something that you are and something that you want, through the life and struggles of a woman." "That, and her happiness in her surroundings, and the pain in which she learns from her surroundings."
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"You. You’re the surroundings. That’s what you’re trying to get out of this book— for people to understand their energy around them." "Yes." "And you made yourself this energy because you wanted to learn from it yourself." "Exactly." Dr. Cookie nodded, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "You, Will, you have brought to the table something that will keep a lot of people confused, but at the same time balanced. Almost like having chicken with a side of maple syrup. Two things that I like very much, but do not mix together all that well." Will felt defeated, and then— "But I would be happy to be adventurous. It needs a chance." Will let out a huge sigh, “Thank you, sir! Oh lord, I almost lost my lunch there.” Dr. Cooke laughed, “Not today, son. Not in this lifetime.” Page | 35
Systematical His sweat was thick dripping onto the pavement. He was thirsty, but couldn’t get himself to leave. He had to watch her breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe. She was clinging to the ground. Her nails were chipped from the cold. He reeked of annihilation—dawn was sneaking in behind him. A clock ticked in the distance—presaging doom. He knelt down beside her and she quivered. Breathing in, breathing out. He asked, “Where are you going?” And she closed her eyes. Always breathing in. Always breathing out. He took her hand He squeezed her hand. He asked again, “Where are you going?” Blood oozed from her left ear. He wanted to touch it, to wipe it away, to make her perfect for her departure. Instead, he gripped her hand harder. Finally, and very slowly, she said, “Into you.” He smiled, “Into me?” She nodded slightly, causing more blood to spill.
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He smoothed out a hair behind her ear, “Tell me what you mean?” She breathed in, breathed out. Her teeth were stained with life. She brought her free hand to her mouth and rubbed her fingers on her lips, dipping them in the red. In a split second there was no sound, and then— She struck him across the face, causing their bloodline to mix. He licked his lips; tasting her. Now it was her turn to smile, “Now you will carry me into you. My sins will be yours. As heavy as they are, as heavy as you are, you will be slowed down. Satisfaction will not follow you to the grave. Now I am absolved, for you will die a million deaths more than I. You will feel my sorrow and pain. You will go nowhere I am going. You will not follow me. I will not leave bread crumbs. You will not know peace nor will you know death.” He frowned. He spat. She breathed in. She breathed out. Yet she breathed. Page | 37
And he became hollow.
Michal M.
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Photography: Jaie Miller
The Day of Looking Past the Aerosols The day of the Kool Aid night & we stood at the brink. The day of nodding along to insurmountable beats beyond bunched neurons & the cry of babies. The day of sagging breasts, Gaugin’s coffin, remembering tree houses in the 90’s, an apexed night howl indicative of the emerging persona. The day of fire going out like glue, bent forever seeping sweated lungs; the tongue-lashed forget that swelters as the wind rises to sound. The day of Josephine: clandestine apron to the star struck boys dancing to Prince & never knowing a single word to say. The day of flossing your teeth with sticks & calling it miracle. The day of elapses in the paradigm scheme that took an apprehensive daywish to elongated
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epiphany of depression woes. The day of Wellbutrin, Celexa, Zoloft, Lithium, Lamtical, Risperdal, Lexapro, & Klonipin at the same damn time. The day of giving up on statistical analyses on qualitative trauma functioning through trauma of centuries past. The day of wearing suits for no reason but the feeling, a tie for the father who built the building. The day of indefinite leaving, animated sin storms, your face like old Methuselah next to the light lamp. The day of keeping up appearances for the sake of not dying too soon. We hugged our destiny in bricks. The day of knowing no one like Salut Mon
Reve! The day of copying my face onto the paper, fleecing little radical sunspots before the police would ever think to arrive, finding the grace of failure as a trinket to hold until dusk. The day of meeting your corpse as a buddy pass, feeling light, Page | 42
& not knowing the right tense to put your emotion into. The day of singing without words; the day of wolves at every window & door to the past or present future; the day of recombinated belief: heretofore Eastern appendix drafting. The day of creating a sky with pixels & grafting your iniquity solitude into a small crematorium with the initials hello. The day that became the day that never ends except for small pauses in dust. The day that serpents went home. The day of parsing my liminal faces between the warm brown look of your eyes. The day of missing every point & not stopping to relish the radish because it is too sweet. The day of quashing any realistic expectations for anticipating any linear pattern to the being. The day of bursting bubbles & crying, crying. The day of all days lined on their heads. The day of years collected in bright red thread.
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The day of knowing sympathy through dogs. The day of feeling for the exit without fear. The day of scant disbelief. The day that relinquished grief. The day that remembered itself and laughed. The day that frowned in the mirror tomorrow. The day that smiled for whatever yesterday. The day that ate itself. The day that prays to us.
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Bagels for Peace Let’s advance the cause of humans by declining prepositions and praxis. I reach the stars of passed living fly through underworld singing hip hop verses. The sore back, flipping gin, the quiet moral dimension of ghosts,
c’est tout le jour que je t’aime what an awful sound, to know nothing but the way out. I helped wear a path to a bus stop while the Civic sat lovely carport feelings. The little place where a doorbell rings. We raise mini-giraffes in the garage and call them miracle. Where’s the price tag on your divinity? Along reservoir walks that take a mile or more. Let’s advance and recede to particles, red ants in a steel metal drain. Given there’s no recompense, I’ve swallowed my tongue a final second. Daily bread, Page | 45
myths about lovers, recollected texts, myriad birth rights, fleshy grins, bloody arms and necks and speaking lint. I wish this were a drum. The title says everyone’s better now: birds flew the coup, snakes the bed, monstrous elegy to spiderwebs. I have this bone to pick out my teeth. A strong inclination to sieve dust through cloth, whatever sooty morsels we remain they clump into charcoal hand-wringing and meta static fathoming of pain. It’s never over until it ends.
Will H. Holland
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Ashoka's Lesson traces of burnt wood on a Buddhist tiara wolves in hunting grounds splicing the sun in the inner sanctum of your bursting corona we are sorely textured
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Photography : Jaie Miller
Photography: Andy Holsteen
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No Burdens Today The three-month blackout of ‘23 raged like an invisible fire
that summer, a fine way to celebrate the city’s quincentenary.
My options were to read books while baking in the heat or seek
trouble in the streets and get arrested. There was no good choice. Either I get swallowed up by the season or else by the police.
The book was titled Love Charm: For Old lovers, New lovers and
Once-Lovers Looking For Love Again. It explored mixing love with herbs and chemicals, and by love the author meant sex. An old girlfriend bought it for me when we flirted with the idea of
losing our virginity together. We split before it was ever put to use.
Mom’s eyes found the book in my hands as she tried to look busy. She paced the room, tidying up things that didn’t need tidying. She sat down only to get back up. Our uncomfortable silence was soon shattered.
"Get that smut out of my house."
"It isn’t smut," I replied without looking up. "It’s about sexual
identity and freedom."
She stood fast. “Right. Not-smut. Get it out of here.”
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Finally I looked up. The sun’s angle cast an unflattering light on
her face, revealing all the hard-lines she earned across the years.
She was no woman to be trifled with. As it was, my own age demanded a voice of its own, and was prepared to fight to a bitter end.
"Fine," I said, rising to my feet, "but you can’t keep me from reading books you find disagreeable."
"The hell I can’t. You’re my son. I brought you into this world and I can—"
"Take me out, I know. You tell me all the time." The slap across my face happened so quick I felt it long before I heard the sound. Her eyes glinted fiercely. She must have seen
the image of dad in my by some trickery of light and loosed the anger she felt when he vanished from our lives. Then her eyes softened.
"For the record," I said as I placed the book in my knapsack,
"I’m not dad. But if you keep at me like this, I’m going to leave, too."
I didn’t wait for her reply as I stormed out of the apartment. Sexual identity was hard to come by for the son of a single mother with abandonment issues. It cast a shadow from which I
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could never escape, and honestly, I was really fucking sick of being treated like I forever had one foot out the door.
Those people brave enough to hit the streets looked as pathetic as I felt. Such a brutal season for such a massive blackout. I
angled my way south until the buildings thinned and were replaced with saltier air. By the time I reached the shore, I no longer wanted to be outside. But I couldn’t exactly go home just yet, either.
All that water was too personal to share, so I ended up with my
own plot of sandy real estate underneath a distant pier, far
enough away from the people who warmed the lapping waves
with their own greed. A sudden idea seared through me: what if
I just left? Mom would get by just fine. And so would I for the separation. What if, indeed?
"I’m glad I'm not the only one who can’t stand large crowds."
She leaned in with a cautious arm wrapped around one of the
support beams. I shook my head and folded the sand over whatever trench I’d dug. Meeting another person in this heat
wasn’t expected, and all I thought was how I didn’t need another woman to be around.
"I didn’t think the beach would be so… crowded." Page | 51
She laughed. “What else are people in a blackout going to do? Come on, let’s get away from here.”
My first reaction was to decline, but the random encounter gave
me a second thought. All my friends were on vacation as long as the blackout was in effect. Besides, the girl with long, tawny hair
was impossible to resist. In more ways than she knew, she was more than mom and that was the only reason to follow.
"Just so you know," she began pointedly, "I’m a lesbian
vampire slut from outer space and the daughter of an
interstellar god. Just in case you have a weird plan to kidnap me."
"That’s exactly what I’d expect to hear from a lesbian vampire
slut from outer space and the daughter of an interstellar god who planned on kidnapping me."
"Then we understand each other perfectly." She was right. We did.
Perfectly.
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The rest of the day passed in a gleeful blur. We visited just
about tourist attraction along the southern tip of the island, her
hand taking mine when she saw something of interest and hurried me up. She stole glances at me like the most intimate kisses never shared. We were a traveling secret place. Just two kids escaping the heat.
She moved deliberately the way a person in hiding might, if only to stay an inevitable conclusion. Intimate though we were, it had nothing to do with me. I was a means to an end, as was she.
Maybe we both understood the baggage we carried and hoped to lighten the burden, if only for a day.
We were on the steps of a cathedral sipping from the same bottle of warm soda when a man stumbled up to us, a bottle of
something else dangling from his fingers. The haunted look in his eyes reminded me of my dad right before he left.
"Claire, you need to get home now." The alcoholic bitterness
fumed from his lips as he spoke. "It’s not even dark yet, dad."
"No matter," he spat. I heard the grammar mistakes in his
words. "Just do as you're told and don’t give me you’re lip."
He stumbled off without another word and Claire dutifully rose to her feet. I wanted to hold her back, to tell her that we could
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leave all our baggage on this island and put it all behind us. She
read my look exactly and placed a warm hand on my cheek.
"As far as interstellar gods go," she whispered, "he’d track us
down and have us both killed. Thank you for sharing a day I won’t forget."
Before she walked away, I pulled out the copy of Love Charm from my knapsack and gave it to her. She examined the front
and back covers and then gave me a quizzical look. Perhaps she thought I suggested something by the book’s subject matter. I
chuckled. "So you’ll always have me around." My finger reached out and tapped the book’s edge. "You’ll have something to accompany the memory of today."
She kissed me on the forehead and then she was gone. I
finished the soda before wishing we made a meeting place for
another day, but when I ran to catch up, Claire and her father were nowhere to be found. Perhaps she really was a lesbian vampire slut from outer space. I never saw her again.
When I got home that night, mom was asleep on the couch.
Candles lit up the apartment, all nearly burned down to the
ends. Our earlier blowout gave me a bad taste in my mouth, both for what I said and how I ended it. I kissed her on the forehead and put out the lights.
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In the creeping darkness, just before sleep, I absolved mom and dad of their burdens. And Claire, too. Even myself. We all sought
an easier path, heaving some or all of our loads onto the
shoulders of others so our travels might be easier. Anyone who was okay with that was okay with me. .
Michael Flores
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From a tailor and a part-time psychologist Have it not grown, but chiseled to wear. We can find adjustment; but inseam requires measurement;
but lucky for he I spent some years
in Europe under Mihaly’s arm. I won’t approximate unless needed.
Now to start: The trousers need to be turned inside out. We can use pins from here and mark his line.
A small incision, avoiding his initials,
taper tight. About there—that is right. We are done; original receded.
Have it not grown, but chiseled to wear. We can find adjustment; but inseam requires measurement;
but lucky for him, I spent some years
in Europe under Mihaly’s arm. I won’t approximate unless needed.
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Now to start: The trousers need to be turned inside out. We can use pins from here and mark his line.
A small incision, avoiding his initials,
taper tight. About there—that is right. We are done; original receded.
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An August Atlas It is me you want in your virtuous dismissal of orthodox wisdom to Tyson
the seemingly cureless (& nappy) manifolds of the country to which we were instinctive, extinct. An atlas at last O’wonderful! along where the road has left its faithful (hitchhikers in reminisce)
to bathe the slender shoulder with their own adversary, hopeless
rainfall to arrêt more
from returning sentiment of the surviving Earth to Earth. In totality great totality imitable totality, Johan’s clarinet [sic] plays per se a cleft, a classic etude,
and I share with you what you cannot always comprehend;
Today I am this man and tomorrow I am proposed to be alike but, with good fortune,
I may carry the monumental bearing as no other contemporary
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of mine can dream to bleed (let them will with their admirable need).
Atlas, alas,
hitherto my thwart of all early embrace, defying endurance,
the shelter of the heavenly affiliation around which the poets revolve,
you can wish for another escort as I but I assure you they know nothing of all the forgotten places.
Stefan Schulz
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Eic tosh spoon feed that
perpetually recovering
suburbanthai stick revolution cheesecake flavored
metamorphic saccharine dig down
(armpits deep) into hot secret cobra dens
stuttering by rote
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Photography: Sage Charlebois
//I// I— the Fisher King— with a wound in the shape of a Grail legend, with a balm in the shape of the right question. I— the chattering teeth— with thoughts that peel off like the skin of clementines. I— the citrus fruit— with bitter seeds, foreshadowing an ugly progeny. I— the tightrope walker— with callused tiptoes and hardened dreams. I— music in the dark— brilliance without light. I— the space between paragraphs— lingering between two stories. I— the only character. I— the writer. I— the world within one letter. I— undreamed. I— unread. I— scar tissue— signs of a battle won. I— the firefighter. I— the difference between getting burned and burning down. I— the sore mouth. I— the sore tongue. I— the words that run. I— the hands pressed flat onto a universe. I— the parallel world. I— the other, other side. I— understanding, standing under the sun’s acceptance. I— the prayer that starts with an insult. I— the anaphora— repeating (repeating, repeating) on paper. I— the stopwatch. I— the rush hour. I— the list. I— the Page | 61
definition. I— the verb ‘to be’ conjugated in an unspoken language. I— the endless clatter. I— the windchime— sounding only at the nudge of air. I— the idea, unbounded. I— the rattle— melodies created by trepidation. I— the undercurrent. I— the windowsill. I— the semi-colon— the sentence that willingly goes on. I— the last fallen leaf of autumn. I— the sharp teeth of winter. I— the poet— with fingers heavier than bones. I— the space between paragraphs. I— the leap— the disconnection with ground. I— the back-space. I— the secret— written, and then erased.
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Unnamed born a ballad of the modern wars-- battle upon battle against the self
and all its cause,
solidarity disunited from solitude
out of envy. the poem begs: befriend me, I am pity. I am orphan of estate,
disowned by all parents:
two mothers with ovaries, maligned and dragged out scrawny animals of the flesh; two fathers with unbounded tempers and leather belts; all four of them rotting at the core of haggard sex, forgot that a child cannot exist in such toxic substance. the poem begs: gather me, I am spread. I am widow of guilt,
knew death before divorce:
had no choice in what I let go, thighs ripped apart in full show, here, look at me
menstruate [a dark crimson] on this page.
the poem begs: extract your own from this,
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I have much to confess without
the burden of your experience weighing down my words.
lonesome and spent
I am a bachelor from success,
unable to curate effectual syntax.
the poem begs: remember.
dubbed the president of this democratic poet, I am the ode to
all others,
I am the acned face of this nation.
the poem begs: remember.
neither Calliope nor Hera know how to stomach my apologies; perhaps
I was not meant to be.
I am growing closer to the margin now, cowering behind my
shame of
dependency;
I do not know whether
I was birthed from the carelessness of my ancestors
my own angry
or from
hunger of existence.
and then it tires,
retires again.
a beggar dressed in dissonance,
a mouth dry, gulped down its own tongue out of a thirst Page | 64
of resent.
and now
the poem shrivels in the corner, devoid of pleas by the end.
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Untitled / Quite the shame when we dwindle down to it: no poetry now is being written of Picasso— how this unwistful youth forms no bridge between this age and that— who asks, how is it that we do not dissolve into our bath? who asks, what were those days before umbrellas? At breakfast, we talk of the bulging pockets of politics. At lunch, we talk of suicide. At dinner, we talk of breakfast. And so walks today, too, into the past. Picasso, who knew— the difference between the naked and the nude. Picasso, who knew— the months that come with their mouths taped shut. Picasso, who knew— the refrain of promise: we will meet we will meet somewhere again. Picasso, who knew— all litanies and truth, uncouth. Picasso, who knew— what fork to use, what spoon. Such a pity; such a blot— who asks, what use are words when paint has more vermilion on its tongue? who asks, why does the Page | 66
moon have so little to speak of? — And now, the women come and go, no mention of Michelangelo, no mention of Picasso, no mention of what should be known— It is no wonder why we are so doomed! (dry leaves in a book will not blow) //
Aditi Nagrath
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Mario's Brother "Questa non è una pipa!" It was a sunny day and he was having an acid flashback with his breakfast. He was also watching something on YouTube which is why he said what he said. That morning he had received a call from his mother and, as anyone who has ever gotten a call from their mother on a particularly fine morning will tell you, he was not feeling adequate. Something was always the matter with mother. He took another mushroom, smashed it flat with the back of his spoon and ate it dry. His friend had promised that they were great but his friend had been known to lie. That was the third mushroom, he thought or maybe it was the second one. He was not entirely sure. He sat in front of his computer wearing only the height of American fashion - the white underwear. The clock struck hunger. He got up and that was when he felt light-headed, like he could jump right now and clear an Olympic record. He jumped but he ended up banging his head on a wall that perhaps was not Page | 68
paying attention to where it was going and he ended up on the floor. He did manage to find some money down there but as people often remind you, you can't eat money. Then he jumped and found himself in the kitchen. He opened the fridge and groped for food but there was no food to be found. I have no money and I am ugly and I have no job and my mother thinks these things of me so obviously they must be true. I cannot go out. I must cope. He looked around. There was a plant on the table. He did not know this plant and he did not care about it and therefore he concluded that he could eat it. It was a nice plant. It looked like it had a halo and it glowed and he ate it whole. The plant must have been made from fire because the very next second he was dousing his mouth with as much water as he could find. Then, he burped. Shit, that shit is good. Shit. Shit. I am so high. Shit. Duck soup. A progression of words ran through his head. He remembered his mamma's favourite duck soup. A mad frenzy gripped him as waves of nostalgia washed over him. He was the younger son but he had never been loved as protagonists often Page | 69
remind us. His parents loved his brother more. His brother had done everything the family had expected of him. His brother had dropped out of high school and started a garage rock band and his brother had gotten a good Italian girl pregnant before marrying her and his brother had joined the family business.
And here he was. He was educated but he could not quite recall what he was educated in and he had no woman to love and no woman loved him. He was smart but only enough to know that he was not going anywhere. He was clever but that only meant he had no friends and he delivered pizza for a living. He could have been happy but that only meant nothing. I fucking deliver fucking pizza for a fucking living. He had a vision then. One in which he leaped across a bottomless pit. Only the bottomless pit was his stomach. He realized he was losing control and desperate as he was, he searched the bin and found a chocolate wrapper with a little chocolate in it. It tasted good.
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He stood in the kitchen and the mushrooms had kicked in good and proper and he did not know where he was standing and why he was standing. He knew only the hunger and the hunger knew him. It was an uneasy acquaintance – both afraid to disturb the status quo. He walked about in a haze vaguely aware that he was looking for something. There was a weight about his neck and he shook his head to shake the weight off. He ended up hitting his head against a wall, possibly the same wall that he had initially hit. There was no money to be found this time though. Money, what use are you to me? I cannot eat you, go away. He returned to his den which was a bed and a computer and an unclean toilet. He crashed on the bed and instantly fell asleep and in doing so started dreaming about the bottomless pit. Only this time as he jumped the pit grew like a mouth and he did not make it across. He fell and he fell in his dream and he fell in his sleep. He hit the ground with a thud. It had only been an hour since he had hit the sack but he did not know that. A waking anachronism. He sat up groggily and got on his feet. Page | 71
He remembered falling and sleeping and he remembered the mushrooms but he did not remember much else. The computer screen blinked. He switched it on and there was a YouTube video staring at him. It was porn. There was something in the video that had worried him when he saw it. He may not have joined the family business and he was no plumber but he knew that was not a pipe that the young blond showed to the burly plumber when she asked him to take a look at her plumbing. You get the idea? The phone rang. There was one mushroom left. I can feel the chemicals moving behind my eyes in a slow sluggish orgy of oneiric goodness. He was surprised that he had such a large sentence hidden somewhere in his mind. The phone stopped ringing. The answering machine went, "There's a pizza to be delivered. It's one of them crazies. Calls herself Princess. Fuckin' New York, I tell you. Get to work." He put on his thrice-unwashed green long-sleeved shirt under his blue overalls, the ones with the yellow buttons. Brown work shoes and white gloves. Weird uniform but a job was a job. Page | 72
On his first birthday, his mother had given him a green cap with the 'L' on it. His brother had gotten a red cap with the 'M' on it. Super they called his brother. He remembered his mother's call in the morning. She was drunk again. "Get married, work with your brother. That is all I ask. Why could you not join, Mario? You know how much coin he makes? Look at yourself Luigi! You are a disgrace." He popped the last mushroom as he stepped out. My life is mine and only I can make me feel bad.
Nikhil Mane
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Photography: Tiffany Campbell
Nomads i. we arrive in jerusalem without a god—
leave barefoot, maddened drunk, holy. ii.
we arrive in babylon without a phrasebook— get tongue-tied asking directions to the sky. iii. we arrive in the promised land exhausted, forty years later wide-eyed refugees— milk curdled, honey thick as tar.
Maya Owen
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If I change my mind It shouldn't surprise us that we prefer the furnace to the dungeon. There’s something unbearable about the long linger. Heat’s so much quicker— accommodation comes in the form of a candle’s tip. What I mean to say is that I’m too much of a coward to watch us die slowly. So now here I am, riding my conveyor belt. There’s a red pit ahead of me but I don’t care. I’d rather read your letters. You write to me, saying that you miss our time together. That the dungeon has plenty of room if I change my mind. Page | 76
That there’s always time to talk. But not if I wait too long.
Christopher Morgan
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The Girl Who Ran Away Each year on the night before my birthday, my father tells me with a twinkle in his eye that today is my last day at home and the new Mary is going to come replace me tomorrow. You’d better pack your suitcase, he tells me. We don’t need 6-year-old Mary anymore because 7-year-old Mary is going to come live here now. He can sound so serious sometimes and I used to believe him, my eyes widening wondering who this new girl was and where I was supposed to go. Now I just giggle and throw the couch pillows at him and he laughs the way he always laughs when he thinks his jokes are funny while my mother rolls her eyes. I imagine being replaced and a new strange girl coming and being my parents’ daughter and me going to live with someone else’s family. I picture myself leaving dressed in a skirt and oxford shoes with a brown suitcase like a British schoolgirl seeking shelter during a war like in my chapter books. Somehow it doesn’t seem all that bad; maybe I’ll find a nice family or a magical land in a wardrobe. But then I remember all the presents I’ll get the next day, and I’m glad I’m not really leaving. Page | 78
As I grow older I grow crooked front teeth and body hair and the new me has replaced myself on my birthday a few more times. I’ve supposedly had eleven replacements so far, and there are also a lot of new kids at school now who have ideas about life and talk about things that I’ve never heard before—adult things that they’ve seen on television. Friendships are different now; the girls may or may not like each other on any given day and the boys say things to me I don’t understand. You’re a frump, a new boy says to me across the table, and then laughs like a hyena. I stare at him, too shocked to respond, and then doodle in my notebook for the rest of the day, not listening to the teacher. I’m so embarrassed that I feel like I’m falling into the floor, and I hope I disappear forever.
In the evening I sit on my bed looking into my hand-held mirror. You’re a frump. My new best friend at school is always sad, and cries almost every day. She says she is confused being in a new school and misses her old friends, even though she is a stylish, pretty girl who makes friends easily and already knows everyone. Page | 79
She’s depressed right now, she says, and I wonder what she means. I’ve never heard that word before. When I’m at home I listen to my new pop music and some of the songs talk about people who are sad. I never knew people who were sad all the time, but I think I am, now. My mother is, too. We are alone in the house this year because my brother is at college for the first time and my father had to take a job in the next state over. He sends home the paycheck and my mother mopes and is crabby all the time. I am crabby all the time too, because she is never happy and my friends are never happy and all the boys at school throw things at me and their ways of describing my ugliness are growing increasingly vulgar. I want my birthday to be here so a new girl can come and replace me; a real one, this time. I rock back and forth on my mother’s lap, even though I am probably too old. I tell her I don’t know how to be happy anymore and she listens, tears pouring down her cheeks. I don’t know why she is crying. I go to my bedroom and pack my blue duffle bag with all my best things like the girls who have run away in my favorite books. My fantasies about running away Page | 80
have stretched out for months now; half romantic and half desperation and growing more elaborate each day. I have a plan: I’m going to hide in the forest behind my house for the first night, and then set out on my journey the next day. I want to go south—it seems warm and exciting and I will be alone so no one will ever call me names anymore and I will live an exciting life and finally be happy again. I have no more fear or hesitations. My bag is packed. I walk down the hall toward the kitchen to quietly thieve some dry food for my escape. As I pass through the living room I see my mother sprawled across the couch, listening to the radio with her swollen eyes squeezed shut. I stop and scrutinize her; in this moment she looks so incredibly tired and alone and all of a sudden I remember how much I love my mother. I can’t leave—she would be hurt forever. I walk back to my room and shift things about in my bag. I’ve always wondered if I’ll ever become the girl who ran away. I am ready.
Mary Watson
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A woman with coarse hair and heartbreaking skin writes, “I
Black or fifty perce
am not fifty percent
nt Asian. I
Photography: Jessi Fikan Page | 82
Photography: Jessi Fikan
Retch The body exists, and is terrible. Is always open-mouthed. I have seen it, crouching with its empty chinaware and its osteoporosis and its heave.
I have tried and tried to make it let me leave, but how it clings! How it cheats and begs and masquerades my name upon itself, and how it splits
my silken selfhood at the seams. The body exists, and is volatile. Is knuckle-kissing-tooth; is always soft and folded over on itself, like ruined gauze; is always seeping, breaching crimson; coming loose. Sixteen years I’ve worn this skin: a dreadful body-bag, and it has swallowed
every morsel of my youth. Page | 83
Benthos The Self is no pearl, no breath-holder’s prize, no ornament salvaged from kelp
and surface-borne, and bathed in light as treasure swollen, bright and holy in the fleshy lap of life. No— the self’s a thing that crawls, cavern-deep and scuttle-limbed through scattergrams of sand which hang, suspended in the dim and stagnant depths where it is hatched;
where every oyster lies, dissected on its back, The Self emerges: stiff, thoracic, from its jutting ledge of rock, and learns to navigate through hunger, trench-like blindness, skies of sand.
Isla Anderson
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Photography: Tiffany Campbell
Ashoka's Lesson traces of burnt wood on a Buddhist tiara wolves in hunting grounds splicing the sun in the inner sanctum of your bursting corona we are sorely textured by pit bulls & storms denting old stretchers in ruins of Taxila* we lave our fates with magenta and myrrh in Ashoka's aftermath evolving a cuboid we play at our ciphers we cringe at aboulia Page | 86
Note : *Taxila is a famous town and principal archaeological site
in Rawalpindi, Pakistan of an ancient Buddhist civilization as well as ruins of Ashoka's palace.
Zaina Anwar
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epic tosh spoon feed that perpetually recovering
suburban thai stick revolution cheesecake flavored metamorphic saccharine dig down (armpits deep) into hot secret cobra dens stuttering by rote daily corduroy
affirmation sonatas suck the poison out in true novice
still life fashion supermodel swear to god and country you're channeling Cezanne Page | 88
a bazaar dribbling of stolen apples & baskets filled with yarn
Rene Foran
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Photography: Tiffany Campbell
Who A woman with coarse hair and heartbreaking skin writes, *I am not fifty percent Black or fifty percent Asian. I am one hundred percent Black. I am one hundred percent Asian.* That's paraphrased, reconstructed from my wavering memory. I copied the original quote into a notebook that has since been lost. The day I wrote it down, I was fifteen, on pass from a mental hospital in Texas, and my dad's goals were threefold: - To get me out of the hospital, if only for a few hours. - To have some quality father-daughter bonding time. - To help me "connect with my heritage," which we supposed would be good for my mental health. He drove us in a rental to the Asia Society Texas Center, where samples of The Hapa Project by Kip Fulbeck were on display: photographs of multiracial people with some kind of Asian heritage, presented with a short statement about what being "hapa" means to them. We spent an hour or two looking at the photos, took a quick spin through the rest of the museum, and
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drove to a pub for Caesar salad and ginger ale before dropping me off at the hospital. Let's clear something up: everyone at that hospital was white. Even the girl from Trinidad had straight hair and creamy skin. When you dive into the world of mental healthcare, you realize very quickly how fucking *expensive *it can be. Any inpatient treatment that is a) not acute care, and b) actually going to be helpful, costs at least an arm and a leg. Maybe an ear, too, or a piece of your temporal lobe. In Texas, surrounded by America's richest and most traumatized teenagers-- hailing from Oklahoma, Louisiana, Kansas-- I am Chinese. Chinese enough for it to count. Compare this to my New York City high school, a pressure cooker specializing in math, science, and technology, and where over seventy percent of the student body is Asian. Classrooms are filled with first-generation immigrants wearing glasses and blue Hollister t-shirts, I don't know why they all wear blue Hollister tshirts, but they do. I don't wear glasses, okay? I don't wear a blue Hollister t-shirt. In a classroom of glasses and blue Hollister tshirts, I can't tell anyone apart.
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I don't know anyone at my school because I spent so much time in the hospital. My friends are a lil Puerto Rican, a lil Black, but mostly snowflake white. Still, when I hear a racist joke, or see someone using a fork in a Chinese restaurant, I shake my head and sigh, *fucking white
people.* The thing is, assimilation happens. Even when your parents are immigrants. Even when you speak your native tongue at home. Even when you live in a city where there are, if not millions, at least a few faces that share something with yours. Assimilation happens. When your mother is Chinese but born and bred in Pittsburgh, and her Mandarin is below the level it takes to read a newspaper, and she works in an office that bleeds bright electric blue, assimilation happens. When your mother is like this, and your father is white, white, white, assimilation doesn't happen-- it's just what you're born into. For some, to be hapa is to be the convergence of multiple histories. To span centuries of hatred, conquest, isolation. To emerge, not as "half"this and "half" that, but as two simultaneous wholes. It's not like that for all of us. Page | 93
My dad is so many kinds of European I couldn't list them even if I wanted to. He's half Jewish, but he only looks like it because he had his nose broken three decades ago. I know nothing of where he comes from, and I don't care to. And when I was twelve and we took a family vacation to China, my brother and I covered our noses at the Beijing night market, so disgusted by the smell. I am not a convergence of multiple histories because I *have *no history. I am not *fifty percent white, fifty percent Asian. *I am zero percent white, zero percent Asian. I took some notes while we walked around the Hapa Project exhibit, just copying a few of the more interesting personal statements. Over dinner, my dad asked about it. He knew that being the hospital gave me writer's block, said *hey, maybe you could use those to write a poem*. *Yeah*, I said, *yeah, I could write a poem about hapa*, yeah, I could. But I never did.
Lucy Wainger Page | 94
Scherezade’s Editorial Pick (//Closure//) a poem is only a skull licked clean
is only a gutted kill purged bloodless on its back is only the soul yawning
is only a small perforation
is only the language of god
is only a salt-bloated tongue
is only a throat fat with unspeaking is only the same energy converted is only the transient immortalised is only crystallised silence
is only a mosquito jellied in sap
is only a fossil left from before the flood is only a convenient series of words is only a poem is only a poem is
Maya Owen
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Contributors’ Bios (In no particular order) Nandini was born out of her mother’s mouth 22 years ago in a fit of profanity; she has
since achieved machine sapience when she accidentally-on-purpose consumed an entire bottle of sweet-chili. She can be found at www.encache.tumblr.com
Roxie K. McClain is a journeywoman customer service representative with a certificate in computer applications. She is a lifelong Californian, child of both SoCal and NorCal. She is a shy lover of British music; specifically, punk, post-punk, electronic, and industrial. She also loves graphic design, old-school glamour, and glitch art. She is a novice writer. Her blog name is thesingersgirl due to her affinity for song and singers. She writes free verse, because she cannot write lyrics. She can be found at www.thesingersgirl.tumblr.com
Michal M lives in the greater NYC area and is interested in the world of surgery and medicinal research, currently in a surgical program where her favorite instruments are the bozeman and allis. She has a cat named Emmett who hates her guts and tries to smother her in the middle of the night. She likes writing about stuff she sees and experiences in her everyday life, as well as writing about other people’s experiences in the past, present, and future. She looks up to James Tate a lot.
Adroit Journal, Vademecum Magazine, Winter Tangerine Review, Black & BLUE, and The Best Teen Writing of 2013. Lucy
Wainger’s
writing
has
appeared
in The
She is a junior at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. She can be found online at www.ohgd.tumblr.com
Aditi Nagrath is a nineteen year old self-diagnosed poet, born in and brought back to the hefty city of New Delhi, India. She strives to unstring her voice from the many others and
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no credentials to her name other than her mother's dark skin and her father's clenched fist. Her blog is www.esn13.tumblr.com
Maya Owen is 19 years into her human experience, which she has spent so far in London,
people-watching, puddle-dancing, coffee-drinking, and occasionally taking notes. She is perpetually curious, and fond of reading books in comfortable trees. This is her first publication.
Rene Foran was raised in New Jersey and grew up in a large, very loud, Polish/ Irish family. Writing song lyrics, poetry and phony advertisements were her way of escaping them and were usually written on the laundry room walls for which she was
punished. This resulted in yet more lyrics, poetry & phony advertisements written on less obvious walls, where some still remain to this day. She currently resides in New Hampshire and dreams of Florida.
Dan Baucom , author of Smartyr Poetry, is 22 years old and currently resides in North Carolina. Enthused by language, the arts, and thought provocation, he began writing his
own contemporary works of poetry and prose at the age of 17 and has since adopted an abstract stylization for the bulk of his writing.
Christopher Morgan is 27 and the editor of Arroyo Literary Review. He has an MA in Creative Writing and American Lit and is a lover of prose and poetry. He is a workshop wrangler. Sometimes he sits at his keyboard, banging on it like a child at a piano; other times, he’s in bed, not sleeping.
Nikhil Mane writes code and fiddles with computers by day (where he doesn't fit in) and
also by night (where he surely doesn't fit in) and in the space between (where he might fit in) he writes. He also sometimes refers to himself in the first person.
Katherine Osborne is a writer in Massachusetts. She has been published in Haiku Journal & Plainwrap Press. She is the founder of a new writing magazine called “Little River”. She works with children that have Autism.
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W.H. Holland was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia where still lives and teaches at a public high school. His poetry has appeared in Anemone Sidecar and Loose Change. He graduated from Georgia State University in 2011 with a degree in psychology and briefly pursued a clinical career before committing to writing. He can be found at www.infinitesplinters.tumblr.com
Michael Flores is a poet, short story writer, aspiring novelist and screenwriter whose work has appeared in the online literary magazine Brasilia Review (Vol. 3). When not engaged in writing, he hikes through parks and land reserves, attends poetry readings or otherwise spends his time (and paychecks) at local cinemas. You can visit him at www.mikeyj529.tumblr.com.
Mary Watson is a writer and wanderer who doesn't like answering phones. She lives in Portland, Oregon. Lavinia Tan is an impending mid-life crisis who writes about random matter usually when she isn't but sometimes while she is doing slightly less creative things like science. She resides in a Portland but hails from the Antipodes, and genetically China if you insist on knowing where shereally comes from. LT suffers from considerable existential angst, mild social anxiety and a subjectively incomprehensible accent. Two of these often feature in
her
poetry
and
prose,
which
lives
semi-permanently
at www.syntaxandsemantics.tumblr.com
Zaina Anwar is an artist currently based in Islamabad, Pakistan. Alongside painting which is her first love, Zaina has been writing poetry for the last five years. She has been published in multiple online and print magazines as well as in an anthology. She has strong Sufi inclinations which is probably why her poetry naturally tends toward the
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equally mystical genre of Surrealism. She maintains a website/blog called Indigenous Dialogues : www.indigenousdialogues.tumblr.com
Isla Anderson was born in Surrey and lives and writes as a student just outside of London. Her poetry has been published in Words Dance, HARK magazine and The Adroit Journal amongst others, and has achieved success in several poetry competitions, including Foyle and The Basil Bunting Poetry Award. Her first chapbook, winner of the Vademecum Magazine Chapbook contest, will be published later this year. When she isn’t writing, Isla can usually be found eavesdropping on strangers’ conversations. She loves art more than anything else.
Stefan Schulz is a short story writer and poet who has been published in various literary publications. He received his BA in Communications from The Richard Stockton College
of New Jersey. His poems primarily focus on cultural subjects, reflected through personal experience and imagery. Photography & Art Adriana Maria Long is currently finishing up her B.F.A in Creative Writing at Truman State University and plans to attend graduate school to pursue an M.F.A with a concentration in fiction writing shortly after. Recent publications of her writing, poetry and artwork have been in Windfall, Truman’s undergraduate literary magazine, Poetry in
Motion, The Monitor and The Torch. She lives in Ellisville, Missouri and looks forward to the day she can skip town back to the West Coast.
Jaie Miller is an artist living in London. He takes photos using a 1970s Nikon FE camera for an authentic, vintage, grainy feel. You can find more work, analogue and digital at whoeverswinning.tumblr.com & Instagram: @nolifeinthewest. Page | 99
Jessi Fikan is a native to the Midwest that moved to the shoreline of Northern California. Art for a purpose, not for its own sake, is her rubric and she creates in many accents including photography, drawing, painting and writing. When not in her study, she can be found always near the sea or tucked away somewhere with a beer and a book.
King Stimie is an artist and poet from California. He runs The Howitzer Literary Society. He has been published in the literary journal Keep This Bag Away From Children and has published an essay in Christmas-Philosophy for Everyone: Better Than a Lump of Coal.
Ben A. is an average person going about the day by day. Occasionally I'll cross something
simple awesome, and aim to capture it as I feel it. The visual treatments help push these out in a richness I hope can be experienced. A Sense of being a few places at once, soaking in the moment. Website: www.dirtysoapbox.tumblr.com
Andy Holsteen is a student at The University of Wisconsin. He wants to be an astronaut president
when
he
grows
up;
at www.dharmascum.tumblr.com.
but
until
then,
his
work
can
be
found
Tiffany Campbell was born in 1972 in Chicago. She fell in love with the Art Institute while on a field trip in grade school. Currently she spends her time drawing, painting, taking photographs during deployments.
Sage Charlebois is DSLR dabbler out of Michigan hoping to build a name for herself in photography.
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Vol 1.0 Tractate The Mise-en-scène of writing inside the digital ether Beginning to write into a new space on the Internet is a little bit like singing into the void. It is a public space without a public. We write with a certain assumption of privacy (is anyone watching? no one we know, not yet), a certain absence of direction (if you write for the void, you do not expect requests) and yet, because we are writing on the internet, not a personal notebook, there is always a sense that an audience could arise. Will arise. Maybe the savvier among us are always sure of their audience, writing toward them, aiming every word carefully in their direction, though I’m not sure this kind of savvy is possible for internet-poets, internet-authors. Not those of us who began here, anyway, who build as we go. Maybe this self-consciousness exists in all forms of writing – do we imagine someone reading our journals some time after we are gone? Who do we record these moments for? Ourselves? This is also true on the Internet. We sing for the mirror. And, somehow or other, mirror or void, someone responds. Two classic film scenes fascinated me as a child. One was Snow White, singing into a well that not only echoes her bauble-like soprano but actually joins her in a duet. This voice out of the well even calls a real person into the song; her prince.
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The other was from Mary Poppins, where Julie Andrews sings confidently into her mirror. In this case, too, her reflection is more than a silent shadow – not only a duet partner but a “cheeky” rival. Who sings when the void sings, when the mirror sings? Is it me, or another version of myself – heretofore unknown – called up by the familiar voice? We may know whom we are conjuring – trying to conjure – with our words and chants and songs, but we never know exactly who will appear or where they will take us. I once wrote a line, and a poet responded. I answered; she answered again. A thing was birthed that neither of us would have created on our own.
The echo that answers. Not all spirits in these spaces are benevolent ones. Speaking into mirrors is also a way of calling up ghosts, sad and angry ones, bitter ones, cruel ones. Scary. Bloody Mary! Wandering into a dark and empty space, beyond the city limits, is an invitation to the unknown. In that unknown: beasts, terrors, storms, outcasts, aliens. There is an element of danger; a macabre obra maestra . So too with the internet. You may encounter kindred spirits, fellow-travelers, admirers, healers and grateful, quiet listeners. Or you may find thieves, predators, court-less jesters who mock your words, turn them upside-down and fling them back at you for fun.
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There is something medieval about this space teeming with desires, talk, its silences and its swamps, though the Internet’s conquerors and colonizers are quickly driving it into another age—and all of us with it. In the meantime, though, there is room for roaming. A troupe of vagabond whistlers and conjurers can still get lost, build cities or besiege them, make enemies and friends, leave footprints, be swallowed up. Scrawl strange markings on the wall, to be deciphered by others. Or not.
Jessamy Klapper (Content Editor, Cyberhex Journal & Press)
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Cyberhex Editorial Team Scherezade Siobhan {Editor in Chief} Michael J Arnett {Editor at Large} Jessamy Klapper {Editor, Content} Vincent Philip {Editor, Poetry} Jim Bowler {Editor, Visual Arts} All rights reserved by Cybherhex Press 2014-15. Authors and Artists own sole rights to the actual works. Cyberhex Press reserves First Publishing Rights after which all publishing rights belong to the writers/artists. No part of this work may be reproduced without explicit consent of the owners and/or Cyberhex Press. Front Cover: Michal M. Back Cover : King Stimie Submissions : cyberhexjournals@gmail.com Official website : cyberhexjournals.wordpress.com
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