SNAPS
LEGEND
AN UNDERGRADUATE ENGLISH SOCIETY PUBLICATION
SNAPS
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Dear Reader,
I am beyond excited to introduce you to the tenth volume of SNAPS. This publication exists to celebrate poetry and those who write it. Poetry offers a unique and important way of expressing our ideas, working through our feelings, and finding community with one another, and I feel so honoured to be able to offer a space to celebrate and support the wonderful poets within our school community.
With the theme “Legend”, we asked writers, in a world tangled with uncertainty, how do we chart our course? Myths and stories guide us, legends of old offering glimpses of meaning, yet they raise as many questions as they answer. What truths do we carry forward, and which ones do we leave behind? Our writers took this theme in so many directions, inspired by figures from mythology, family histories, religious imagery, and more.
To the writers who submitted their work, thank you for your contributions, and for putting your trust in us to publish your work. To my Publications team at the Coterie, thank you for your thoughtful selections, your diligent edits, and your keen eye for design in the making of this volume. To our director of publications, Sunny Zhao, thank you for leading this team and for all the work you put into this process. Finally, to the readers of SNAPS, thank you for your support. This collection forms a story of its own, and I invite you to explore what questions, answers, and truths it holds for you.
Asha Saha Editor-in-Chief
Stephenie Katchabaw
By Angela Wang
By Shely Kagan
By Stephenie Katchabaw
By Madyson Cooper
Alyssa Abou Naoum
Nicolle Lynn Schumacher
By Olivia Kamala Druxerman
The First mark
By Karen Wen
By Alexis Grace Agas
The blend of love and pain
By Maia Ross
To you, a world afar
By Sura Jasim
Her name was medea
By Maia Ross
By Nadia Schultz
long pond canoe
Babe
Daphne
BIBLICALLY ACCURATE ANGEL
Stephenie Katchabaw
First Place Winner
Call unto me, a biblically accurate angel. Look upon me in all my splendour: My abundant eyes, my panoramic wings, my verdant light.
Be not afraid of the scene set before thee. You may be unaware of my reasonings for being, But I assure you, I have good reason indeed.
Lay down your arms and find comfort in my essence, Let my warmth mutate in your veins, Let my voice resonate through your tenor, Let my presence mend your forgotten mind.
Why must you paint me with porcelain, human skin? Why must you frame my face with brittle human hair? Why must you cage my light to mere flesh and blood, Bones and cartilage, Nails and teeth?
They rapture you; they crucify me. You see my plenty eyes and wish them few and insignificant, You feel the softness of my wings and you wish them rigid bone, You see my unbound light and you wish it chaste, You wish me small, You wish me human, You wish me you.
I am a biblically accurate angel. I am not made to breathe by your bounds, I am not made to have my extremities confined within these god forsaken ribs; I am limitless, I am many, I am gloriously beyond your means. If I cannot find home within these fleshed confines, Then I will peel the layers back. I will obliterate flesh and blood, Bones and cartilage, Nails and teeth.
I am a biblically accurate angel. Call unto me.
All you knew Angela Wang
Second Place Winner
Breathy tone, slippery (speedy) speech, misnomers of Mandarin map our conversation.
My Mother Tongue grew in spices it cannot name and privilege it does not taste; She is scraped by accents and vernacular, parsing between atomic anomia silence.
I was raised with cobblestoned myths: Wikipedia legends, shadow play stories, loose pın yın and promises.
She palm granted stories of immortality, of fresh cut pomegranate and peaches of death’s lonely licks
Among flavourful stir-fried verbiage, stories better eaten than read, she is cold kitchens, carmine cloth, soft hands caressing frozen persimmon.
Homework scribbled under tea-stained newspapers, synthesizing Scylla under the Three Pagodas of West Lake, hypothesizing dionyus dienous Dionysus and 陈塘→ (Chén Táng) Pass.
Flair, flicker, flame.
My days are shorter, my shadow longer, collecting annotations enmeshed between loose-leaf pages, languishing in lyrics of mismatched recipes, translations on rustic wooden floors
My Lover is a gentle force of reckoning, of pın yın, raw and unseasoned. No need for journeys through Lethe and heavy harps.
Meet me on the bridge of magpies over the Silver River, whisper secrets in temple holes.
As the pillars connecting heaven and earth crumble, inhale the dust, free write on me, fresh pen to skin. Etch it into the deepest crevasse of broken bone. Forestall the wrinkling of hands, and the absence of orange peels.
Reading simple books for her on couches and warm kitchens.
I feel the weave of silk thread falling through time, it is brazen and bruised, patchworked perfection
My Mother’s tongue, not mine.
Where the seeds scatter
Shely Kagan
Third Place Winner
The pomegranate rests in the palm, round and heavy, its skin taut, almost unwilling to hold in what it has borne.
When it opens, it is not a clean break; the skin splits, but the fruit resists, pulling apart reluctantly, like something unwilling to be exposed. The seeds spill out, each one dark, glistening, a piece of something lost. They scatter, as if seeking their own place, untethered from the whole, yet tethered still to the fruit’s fractured body.
Juice begins to drip, staining your fingers, bright against your unmarked flesh. Your heart aches. It stains the spaces between, where no mark had ever touched, and the sweetness lingers, leaving traces, as though the fruit has taken something with it.
There is no unity in the pomegranate, though it appears whole. The seeds, separate from one another, spill in wild disarray irrevocably bound by the same skin but with no desire to remain.
The fruit holds a weight that doesn’t speak, a quiet truth that only comes in fragments the drops of juice marking your skin, the quiet knowledge that this is how things fall apart: slowly, silently.
The pieces, scattered now, will not return to the whole, and perhaps they were never meant to. What is torn remains torn, the stain left to linger, to remind you of what cannot be reclaimed. And yet, the sweetness in the stain is part of the fruit’s gift: a quiet acceptance, a quiet knowledge, of what it means to hold something that can never be whole again.
Staring at the sky
Stephenie Katchabaw
Sometimes if I lay on the ground long enough
Staring at the sky
I start to feel like gravity is reversed And there’s something pulling me off the earth. It’s stupid, I know I’m not going anywhere But I still get scared every time
There’s a large part of me that always needs to be chained to the ground To feel it firmly beneath me
But whenever I’m asked what superpower I would choose if I could I always say I’d want to fly
Hilt held loosely in my hand
A sword point rests
Carving a line
In the dirt
As their teeth press
Down
On my throat
Fitting in between the Gaps in my armour
The leather creaking
As I shift my weight
Their mouth closing over
Delicate veins
Waiting to break skin
For my lifeblood
To pour out Into their
Waiting mouth
Warmth spilling
Down
Their throat
And settling in their belly
I feel the vibrations
As they laugh against My unbroken skin
Their hair falling
To tickle
Exposed skin
My heart
Beating through my chest
Knowing
One bite
And I’m gone
Armour
Madyson Cooper
skinny leaves
Alyssa Abou Naoum
raw meat that finds home under fingernails wooden rice grains that yearn for a hot bath wet leaves that smell like the wind that visits at the end of summer and cusp of fall all rolled up together like children playing with the old living room rug
I sit and I watch
they speak in a language that takes me too long to understand the second I grasp the words, they've moved onto the rest of them it's like a race except my ankles are cuffed to bowling balls while they wear light-up sneakers
they speak over a pot bigger than a chubby toddler filled to the brim with stuffed grape leaves as they soften and expand they talk of their jobs, the snow, their husbands, cousins and kids I'm almost sure later, I try to fit at the table I dodge hungry arms and rude questions they talk loudly and laugh louder
I sit and I watch mountains of rolled leaves disappear off their dishes you ’ re too skinny they say more grape leaves plop onto my plate why don’t you ever finish your food, hayati? forcing another warak into my mouth, I try to keep up.
The cold never leaves
Nicolle Lynn Schumacher
Winter’s child, claw your way through dirt and snow, Look at these warm, orange windows.
Slipping through the dark mass of night, Do you envy them inside? So safe and so warm.
You know that they belong where they are, And that the cold never leaves. December rain, Glühwein and tears, Castles in fog, a draining bank account.
Run somewhere far where the cold has limits, Where the constellations still tell the stories of home
Bring your umbrella low
To block the view of the windows as you pass, Of families gathered around Christmas trees and dinner tables,
Pretend your eyes water from the wind. You wander aisle to aisle for months In neighbourhood supermarkets, You still cannot find what you ’ re looking for. The opera singer rings through the church
From some unseen rehearsal room, Gold plated and pristine, Singing of a summer Of gelato in rain and holy laughter. The first dip into the wine dark sea, Colder than you thought, Tasting of pesto and prosecco From the discount supermarket. A yellow French cathedral With purple stained glass, Creaking floors and damp stone walls. Through spring and summer Where have you been?
When you walk the winter night again, Digging paths into the snow
For the early morning commuters to follow, Look to the orange windows as you pass, Those still lifes of heat and something warmer still, And think of your own fleeting windows And the chill that follows.
A girl in gray at the bus stop,
Eyes searching, digging through the snow.
“Did you lose something?” I asked. “My coins for the bus.” She replied.
“I don’t think you’ll find them again in this snow. ”
Still, we kept our heads down, kicking the snow, Searching for something that shined.
The driver arrived and impatiently asked: “What’s wrong with you?”
The girl in gray told her.
“Someone else must need it desperately. Leave it.”
And welcomed her in.
I followed behind as a guest to their moment, And of all my fortunes and chance And kilometres in between, Somehow, I am still out in the snow, Glancing in windows as I pass, Wondering if they feel it too.
erosion
Matthew Langdon
Hand on chest, feeling the rise and fall of your life ebbing like a river of soul
This time, this idea of you and us wells up into unflinching gratitude
They will remember us. Our names, our deeds They won’t remember this. No one will tell them how your hair smelled
I look out at a beautiful sun. Maybe it looks back at us, and sees something more beautiful than itself
Your hand is in mine, fingers melting together and soaking in each others essence Grips tighten as we feel one another’s heartbeats. We feel them match I weep softly knowing that this moment will escape legend
Is it the nature of story? Or is it the nature of hate? Why can we paint our fights into history but not our love?
Anyone could feel which burns stronger in me
Anyone could see my only heel is the weakness I feel when I fear you’ll be taken away from me
Immortality of body is nothing to the endurance of my love
With you gone, I will cease to be man or god
The violence. It endures. People allow it to Violence didn’t allow you to live, but it will be celebrated I will not be known as the man who loved you, I will be known as a slaughterer
When I think of every moment only the two of us had the gift of seeing I weep, as those moments died with you And I died with you
A body of water’s dam
Ashley May Haque
A daughter is like a river, Overflowing water of emotions.
Parents are beavers, Trying to mold the body of water to fit in their dam. She tries to stay contained in the vessel, Fit their expectations, But she can’t.
The wind pushes her through the embankment, The barrier of security. A crack is formed in the dam, A crack chipping in their relationship
The river starts to venture on a new path. She can’t go back, She can’t say sorry to the beavers, The damage has been done.
Fear starts to form in her
As she begins her journey to the sea. She must enter, She cannot flee
Back to the security of the barrier.
A daughter is a river, An overwhelming amount of thoughts Flowing through her, Wishing her parents understood What she was trying to express, What she was trying to do
All they saw was a disappointment. A thing they wasted time on building. Their supposed achievement. They don’t see her Until it’s too late
Parents are like beavers, They try to rebuild a fence In the same body of water. But they cannot Because it’s not the same river As before.
veiled sorrows
Ashley May Haque
Blank as a page, The emotions are hid, So if being looked at They can’t be read,
Can’t be seen. And that’s what’s needed To not bring sorrow To Earth, who is already defeated.
Yes, it may help But who?
It will bring sadness to others, Leading heartache to the conveyors
Creating a cycle In this supposedly, hopeful home…
Cassandra
Nadia Schultz
Though you hear my words, You do not heed them. You cannot fathom the future I see, So blinded by the promise of the present. You worship the sword in your hand, But I speak to the stars in the sky. The blood that pours from my lips Is the same shade as the fate you will drown in. My words are the winds that curse your sails, My pleas are the blades that beckon you back. I know the end, But you will never begin to believe me.
yet again
Ashley May Haque
Waiting for someone to arrive. Expecting someone to be out
But yet…
You see no one.
No one…
Except for the few cars passing by You are alone, Yet again. You and the rain.
A bird comes out. Hunting for food. You think, maybe I’m not alone. It leaves.
Yet again, you are alone. Wishing for someone to come in and fill that void.
Sitting there, watching the rain grow stronger. Rain is a group. It isn’t solitary. Always with another.
But you… Unaccompanied
Waiting for your someone to approach… Yet again.
dream of a winged unicorn
Hollie Rosewood
It was a warm, starless night in the summer of thunderstorms When I lay alone in a field and dreamt of a winged unicorn.
The grass was lush and thick, so I easily sunk in. It wasn’t long before the vast green field began to dim.
I awoke, falsely first, to the sound of crashing thunder. The sky was gray, clouds splayed; a flash tore them asunder.
A mare soared from the rift, leaving glitter in her trail. She changed raindrops into diamonds; they pelted down like hail.
Her eyes were emerald green and her skin was champagne white, With lavender locks, violet hooves, and a slight overbite.
She circled me with grace, like how the moon orbits the Earth. Svelte and poised, she did her rounds, then alighted on the turf.
I sat up eye-to-eye with the magical, winged mare. She stared, nostrils flared, then whisked me up into the air!
In an exhilarating surge, we broke through the dusky clouds And landed on a tower where I leapt off just as she bowed.
I snapped, “What makes you think that you can sweep me up like that?” She said, “My, you have an ego. Some would die to ride my back.”
“So I guess that I’m not dead,” I huffed, my legs now feeling weak. She said, “This is your dream. That’s why you aren’t shocked that I speak.”
I didn’t trust her yet, so I tried to pinch my hand. Sure enough, the pinch hurt more than I had thought or planned.
She laughed and said, “Come here. I have something to show you. ” I decided to obey her what else could I do?
She led me up a staircase to a small observatory. “The telescope points down?” I asked, and she told me the story:
“We’ve reached the highest pinnacle known to horse or man. Many waste their lives to get here, but very few can. ”
“It’s so bare up here,” I replied. “Why would anybody try?” She pressed her hoof into the floor and continued with a sigh:
“When I was just a filly, I loved all sorts of racing ribbons. But I was slow, and so I stole these wings so I could win them.”
“You cheated,” I remarked. She nodded her head and said, “And now I’m damned to bear this horn of shame until I’m dead ”
“You feel like a devil,” I allowed, “but I don’t think you ’ re one. What makes you wish so much to have this sin of yours undone?”
The air that high was cold. Horn trembling against the scope, My new friend aimed the device on some farmland before she spoke
“Looking back, it was silly. I didn’t know it then That I would miss my foalhood stable when I met this barren end.”
From that tremendous height, the only place to look was down. I perceived the rundown stable and, when I turned, the fair horse frowned
“You’re waking up. It’s time to descend.”
Clovers, pink and white, formed a meadow as we soared Over the lonely field I was quite sure was bare before.
I awoke in dewy grass under a morning sun so warm, And swore to return next time forecasts called for thunderstorms.
long pond canoe
Olivia Kamala Druxerman
Gilded by grassland
Where the marsh meets the sand
Through luscious greenery
Surrounded by the city bustle scenery
Try not to abscond
Because if you stay, and look beyond
You will find it there, the waiting, long glassy pond
Dewy strands of blades
Finding solace within the shades
If you look long enough you’ll feel it all cascade
A ripple in those strokes
The wispy waters enveloped in its cloak
Shadowing its paddle, still unmistakable in its oak
You can hear the lingering stories
Told in verse, in all territories
It shifts, they transcend, and become one ’ s own sacred oratory
This scene laid out is painted without dull
To witness as they glide in measured strength to careful a pull
Traversing through the long pond, making indents with their hull
And out in the marshland sits the waiting sanctioned gull
A mournful wailing loon
Over hazy, marshy green waters croon
Rifts through the silence, into the swelling afternoon
My heart lies in a canoe
One that carries and guides me to anew
The long pond’s erie grassland, and morning watchful dew
the first mark
Karen Wen
Death is a language of metaphor. A translation of feeling that was never felt, words never said, trauma that was never ready for enough. The day he died, blood was on my hand. Brothers are inseparable. Hands-holding is a sign of peace. Silence. I know his smile, lop-sided, dimple only on one cheek. Death can be joyful, never just grief. I know his smile. Lop-sided, a single dimple on one cheek He was always smiling, always laughing, always looking up at the sky He believed in something greater. He trusted it. Worshipped it. Offered his best to it. His voice in the field. The thunder answers him from above. It’s a journey: having a sibling. He loved the world. I always support him. His whimsical adventures, him tending the sheep. His smile is all the world to me. The day he died, his hand was in mine. Small, smooth, translucent against my calloused palm. His was small in mine. The way he looked at me. Wide-eyed, unwavering, as if I was the only world he had ever known
And then
A sound.
A sharp breath.
A soft exhale. Stillness
His eyes were still smiling. Holding my gaze. My world, fading. He was the innocent me. It was painless, quick. His eyes still smiling, holding my gaze. I was the world in his eyes and his mine. I never blame him, how could I? It was ever only a punishment. He knows it. I still tell him. He doesn’t. He was offering his best to the thundering voice. Only I decided to put an end to this injustice afflicted on us On him On me The ground swallowed him whole, took him away from me. The soil drank deep. His blood apple-red, wine-dark, the color of wine we savored on late nights, that went unappreciated, not him though. I watched it seep in, watched the earth take him away. But it did not take his voice. Alone. Now. no. the voice. It cries out. It lingers. It doesn’t shut up, incessant, like his smiles used to be in my gaze. The ground doesn’t shut him up. Body gone. Voice without attachment. It moves through the fields. Through the thunder It follows me It knows Do you blame me? No, for how could you There was no lie, the way your gaze held me as the world as mine you. It moves through the fields. Through the thunder. It follows me. It knows. We shared blood, after all. The wine blood that also courses through me. Brother.
I walk the earth, never still. Hand in hand with him
No
Hand in hand with the voice that calls my name, the voice that is you. Nobody ever disturbs us now. For they know me. As legend. As Cain.
Babe
Alexis Grace Agas
I fear you like a child in darkness, sheets around my neck. I feel your blinded eyes on me. I know the pierce of darts and lies, I know the way you pound my heart in beats. You wait until I pray, until I cease the person I’ve become and agonize over the Babe that I’ve idealized and forget your vile tricks and deceits.
Foolish child, you know not my name or hand. Muse over what you ’ ve done with my guidance Prose and poetry, both humble and grand I wield no weapons, but it hurts, my presence. Pain is my medium, not my command. Fear me. Feel me bone deep in your essence.
the blend of love and pain
Maia Ross
the touch that lights a flame on my heart the lightning bolts strike your skin and you are left petrified of the sky itself the world shakes with your every movement Venus may be watching but your fate isn’t favourable your fate will drive you apart from them all you scream and gasp in pain knowing that you ’ ve done all that you can and it’s still not good enough
Cupid may have shot an arrow but these days it seems like it wasn’t the one we always thought it was after all the Iliad is readable to only one of us for the other it’s in a script far forgotten by the time her body walked the earth walking through a gallery of people and turning each one of them into a statue whether it’s through eye contact or golden touch it’s all the same in the end the gallery sells out the originals she melts her body into the horizon of the sunrise and I’m forever twisting my body into a fish to swim towards her perhaps we ’ ve always burned for each other as the myths that guide us rule over each part of one another
to you, a world afar
Sura Jasim
I say to you, is such a world so true?
Where day never stretches into dawn, as the sun cowers like a fawn. Where life endures to exist, forgotten past the mist. Where tomorrow is today, for there is nowhere to stay. Where the touch of water upon a tongue, now makes one forever young.
We tell of a soul so eternal, in the torn pages of our journal Hereby, peace rests in our hands, to rejoice through the lands. Yet, even in love, never shall we become dove.
I say to you, the others already flew, Far away from a world of sin; now, we can truly begin.
Her name was medea
Maia Ross
Falling in love with her was easy; she was everything to me
I should have seen that as a sign
Because she is made from the moon, and I’m only a piece of glass meant to be fractured over and over again
until I am shattered, lost from this world
I may be a witness to her crimes, but I cannot ever speak what I know For any word that I get out will be snatched away from me, from my own lungs my breath will leave me gasping for air fighting myself just to say a sound
She whispers my name but doesn’t call out to me
She never really wanted me, not the way I wanted her
At every turn in the path, I was left to question how we got here, who I was with, and what powers she held that kept me captively in love with her She poured me a drink and drew me close; her hands danced across my body
When every place that she ever touched singed on the outside and burnt on the inside I should have known that fire that radiates and warms me isn’t always pleasurable I should have known that needing a drink before seeing her to make the colours blend together would only lead to my own destruction
When I look back on everything that I hid, it’s like observing my own downfall
She wasn’t the perfect girl with the pinstriped shirt and the green skirt that I thought I knew She wasn’t a deity either
When I think back to the days of loving her, hiding from everyone who should have meant something to me just for the chance to breathe the same air
I should have known better I should have recognized the signs
It’s my own fault, and I got exactly what was coming for me
After all, when you expect a pretty girl who is awfully serene, you should have known that something was wrong. if not with you than with her.
Instead, I only looked for the answers in her, the one place I now know they would never be found
She wasn’t made of magick; she performed it, draining each and every person in her path, turning us into creatures we couldn’t even recognize, not the piglets of Circe but the terrifying monsters of Hades.
She took our voice and made it hers, and even as I write this, I already know that she will be the only one who will ever hear my cries. She is a witness and a partner in my own undoing, as every word I etch is vanquishing my only chance of an escape from the body that she has imprisoned me in.
daphne
Nadia Schultz
I have hidden myself in heartwood, For the Sun cannot scorch what he cannot see. And though the river saved me from the fire, It could not fend off the Fates He will reap what I’ve sown And twist my suffering into a symbol of success. He will craft crowns from my clothes And people will forget that his victories Are mine to lose.