Symposium Spring 2020

An Arts and Humanities Student’s Council Publication...

Volume 7

Issue 2

Spring 2020

Copyrights remain with the artists and authors. The responsibility for the content in this publication remains with the artists and authors. The content does not reflect the opinions of the Arts and Humanities Students’ Council (AHSC) or the University Students’ Council (USC). The AHSC and the USC assume no liability for any errors, inaccuracies, or omissions contained in this publication.

Cover Art by: Dhvani Mehta

Letter from the Editor...

As I am reaching the end of my term as Editor-in-Chief, and the end of my time at university, the theme of Transformation feels more and more relevant to my life. Walking through the university buildings, still and silent now that classes have been cancelled and most are self-quarantining in their homes, feels like the most shocking transformation of all. It’s a strange time and a stranger place to be writing my final editor’s letter, but also one that makes it increasingly clear how valuable all the work put into these Spring 2020 editions of Semicolon and Symposium, by both our talented contributors and our amazing pubs team, has been.

The works in these publications represent some of the best writing and thinking on our campus, and it has been a privilege to be involved in any capacity. In a time of deep uncertainty, it is heartening to see the creativity, the generosity, and the care with which our faculty has taken on the work of looking critically at our world and imagining new paths forward. I witness us doing this work. I see the writers, artists, and activists of our faculty taking the best of what we are learning and creating in class and taking it out into the world around us. I see us take up that work. I see us take it up tentatively, excitedly, with exhaustion, in tension, in the shadow of personal and historical trauma, with grace, with shame, with guilt, with anger. I see you take it up.

Thank you to the Publications Team for their tireless work this semester, and to the greater AHSC for their support through this process. And thank you, reader, for picking up this publication and allowing it into your world.

Best, Roshana Ghaedi Editor-in-Chief

What we’re about...

Symposium is made of a collection of short stories, creative nonfiction, artwork, and poetry that are original, innovative, well-written, and allow a variety of personal interpretations. Symposium is accepts creative work from any Arts and Humanity undergraduate student within the University of Western Ontario.

Symposium is published bi-annually by the arts and Humanities Students’ Council of the University of Western Ontario. Semicolon is generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Student Donation Fund. The Publications Team would like to thank the Donations Fund Committee, the students who submitted their creative works, and the rest of the Publications Committee who volunteered for the creative review board.

To view previous editions or for more information about Semicolon, please contact the Arts and Humanities Students’ Council in Room in University Collage room 2135.

Special thanks to the Publications Committee...

Editor-in-Chief: Rose Ghaedi VP Communications: Shelby Hohmann Academic Managing Editor: Courtney WZ Creative Managing Editor: James Gagnon Copy Editor: Neha Khoral Layout Editor: Jess Attard General Members: Amelia Eqbal, Denise Zhu, Francesca DeNoble, Lela Burt, Mia Sutton

Untitled

By Rowan Mcready

Beautiful Shit Show

By Chelsea Hitchen

The Hour Glass

By Kaitlyn Lonnee

The moment she was born, the hourglass turned over within the fourth dimension, the first

celestial grain gently falling to settle in the centre of her forehead. Her wails reverberated around the glass chamber as she drew her first breaths, the sand irritating her infant eyes.

At first, she was only able to squirm and wiggle, crying out at the rough and grainy blanket that swaddled her delicate body, but soon she began to crawl, testing what it meant to be confined.

She learned to walk, her first steps aided by the flawless walls of the hourglass, pudgy hands searching for a grip when there was none, unsteady feet the author of tiny footprints.

As a toddler, she built castles in the sand, babbling about kings and dirty rascals as she shaped ramparts and drawbridges, great halls and watchtowers, dreaming of princesses on horseback and thieves in the night. Boundless and wild, her imagination was the best company she could ever ask for.

Her childhood was spent in ignorant bliss. The trickling stream from the upper bulb of the hourglass was nothing to concern herself with. There was no thought as to what would happen when the bottom was filled. The only thing that mattered was the present.

But with age came apprehension.

As the first decade of her life came to a close, she began to prowl the edges of the glass, eyes narrowed, fingers trailing along the cool surface. What does it mean? she wondered.

It was becoming difficult to keep her footing on the shifting surface, and there was always dust in her eyes, her nose, her mouth.

Slowly, and then all at once, the sound of the sand became unwelcome; it could have been musical, in perfect rhythm with the beating of her heart, but instead, it was the restless sigh of something impossibly old, burrowing deep into her brain.

Three months before she turned fifteen, trembling beneath the torrent of tumbling sand, she dug to the bottom of the lower bulb. When she finally reached the glass, fingers scraping away years of built-up sediment, she gazed out at the empty expanse of the universe beneath her, and it stared

back at her with such naked intensity that she could not help but cry.

She refilled the hole and stumbled to the edges of the glass, desperate to evade the trickling stream of fate. It was there that she hunched for the remainder of her teenage years, and when she couldn’t take it anymore, tried to bury herself alive, just to see what it would feel like.

Then, before she knew it, she had matured into a young woman, and the pile of sand was now at her knees. It had become heavy and dense, and with every movement, she sank deeper. She felt breathless and weak, like she was suffocating, like she had been suffocating her whole life and had only just realized it. In the reflection of the glass, she noticed, for the first time, deep lines carved into her face, the skin not as tight as she remembered, and all she could taste was sand: gritty, and bitter, and old.

She began to pound upon the walls of her cage, reaching out to the stars, screaming for the universe to spare her from destiny. The hourglass shook with the force of her emotion, and her knuckles split, painting bloody streaks across the walls of her glass prison.

Still the sand fell.

As she grew older, entering middle age, and now buried to the waist, she cried grainy tears that burned as they slipped down her cheeks. The struggle to stay above the surface sucked her energy deep into the heart of the growing mound.

And yet, one day, she found the strength and courage to ask, in a voice like a raging sandstorm, “Why?” And for a moment, though she received no answer, she almost felt free.

The years slipped by.

Her hair turned grey, her bones grew brittle, her movements slowed to nothing, all while the sand continued to pour down. However, she no longer fought the inevitable, and eventually, only her head remained exposed.

She could no longer hear the thumping of her heart, the pulsing of her blood—just the sigh of the shifting sand, slow, deliberate, and inexorable.

And as the final grain came to rest upon her head, covering her body utterly and completely, the hourglass slowly turned over once more.

Atlantic Sunrise

By Lela Burt a single direction gradient

sea foam glass

the unprocessed and pilled

that begins with the sea

corn flowers

coat of a sleepy black sheep

an ambiguous pitch horizon

lost sailors tears

of waves separates the night

and rich blots of ink

from above

from the pending day

clouds appear as waves

dark morning fog

that defy gravity

to dwell inside each hew

settles in the middle

water given wings that

is not a dissection of a whole

of the sky

evoke liminality

palette or scheme

and turns light

both enhancing

but a memory of another

into magma inching

and obstructing

at a distance

an Atlantic sunrise.

the Veldt morning mimosas

waves crash

fallen oak leaves

into a bed of clouds below

a female finch

a worn wool blanket

The Tree that Fell at Fall

By Aruljothie Muraleetharan we are as trees that fell their leaves in fall; bare brown branches entwine… each twig connects to a branch which interwove with another twig from another branch with a likeness to a cunning spider who weaves another web while the trees swayed to a summer breeze; such are the passions that send colourless tears streaming down our faces; neither end or beginning is fathomable and both abhorrently absurd so we try so arduously to find all the leaves that flew from the branches; bottomless worry leads to one tear after another, tearing our hearts apart; the pieces were like the leaves that fell at fall...

Birth of Unnamed Woman, & Killing Eve

By Rylee Loucks

Primary Colours

By Rylee Loucks Her favourite colour was yellow. Not because she ever told me, but because that’s how she acted: brilliantly vibrant in everything she did. She always liked sitting on the deck of the boat, feeling the rays of the sun touching our skin as we listened to Florence and the Machine, and drank Dr. Pepper. It was always the two of us, acting like sisters, but really only cousins; from sunrise to sundown, sitting at the edge of the water, laughing and drinking in all the yellow around us. Here I endured, standing in the back and always trying to be something more like a cool, calm blue.

She used to lay with her hair dangling over the edge of the boat, wisps of yellow golden dancing in the air as we skipped just over the surface of the water. She used to stretch her arms out towards the deep blue, fingers extended so that the tips pointed down, and her back arched; a thin smile decorated her face lightly as the water splashed over the hull and onto the deck. Sweet summer sweat clung to our skin as we consumed our dancing queen year. It was always warm there, just like the shade of red in her cat-eye sunglasses.

She loved those sunglasses. She always said, “These are made for summer, it’s the red you know? Some people think that red is dangerous, but I’d rather think of it as emotionally intense.”

Emotionally intense. When I stood next to her, in her glow and brilliance, the everlasting warmth that came with her presence, I felt small. I felt miniscule in person, and in radiance, shrinking beneath her constant and ever-present yellow; this must have been what it felt to be too close to the sun.

She never let anything show other than yellow. Nothing but pale-yellow smiles and mustard yellow laughs, and nothing shone more brightly than the way she sang off key to her favourite songs.

Not that she didn’t want to try, but they were so perfect that she didn’t want to do anything but have fun with them. Especially when Grease played, Summer Nights always got her on her feet, and me on mine when she pulled me from my shady perch. I was always Sandy and she was always Danny.

We would dance, twirling and singing off key to the highest degree, reaching out into the air as if it

could at some point become tangible in its existence. We laughed together as she spun me, our hands clenched tightly, as if letting go were to mean losing a part of each other forever.

Meaning that there was something to lose.

Even on the boat I could see that bright yellow was fading. It was like clouds that block the sun, the sun still exists and it’s still shining, but its rays are fragmented; withheld from everything around us; withheld from myself as I drowned in yellow.

I’ve always been waiting for something to relieve the ever-present stinging of the sunburn on my skin. I wait for something to help me deal with her constant ray and vivacity of yellow.

Eventually, yellow faded to grey, and hung in the air. After our words refracted in the water, never truly hitting their marks, I hoped there would be more than grey between us.

The yellow had always been my favourite thing about her.

Boarding Pass

By Augustine Mendes My language feels foreign in my mouth My tounge is a brick in a suitcase My skin does not serve as a boarding pass I traded in my rupees for dollars years ago I never understood exhange rates A thousands rupees was just a penny for my thoughts

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By Eva Alie

A Siren of Their Own Making

By Eva Alie Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.

-Scott F. Fitzgerald They loved beauty, but more than that, they loved convenience. And that is where the problem started.

Shiny things held their eyes captive from the very start of time. Minerals from the earth were ground into fine powder, and used to decorate cave walls, bringing sophistication to a time most well known for woolly mammoths, cave dwellings, and dim-witted men. Scarab beetles, and their chromatic exoskeletons, then became the beautifier of choice; their ground-up bodies adorned the eyelids of Egyptian aristocracy. This satisfied them for a time, but they soon longed for more. More shine. More splendour. Less work. The beetles and the mica soon lost their lustre, and they began to look for the next better, shinier, cheaper, accessible option.

They tried to achieve the glimmer they lusted for with broken bits of metal and glass, but nothing came close to the splendour they envisaged. And then she was born: aluminum metalized polyethylene terephthalate. She came into this world as a silver streak in their consciousness, an inevitable collision in the making. They had never seen anything as beautiful as her. They made her into a million colours, a million shapes and sizes, each time falling more in love with her hypnotic shine. At every turn, she blinded them with her luminosity and adaptability, as they stood back to admire their glorious creation. They irrevocably fell under her spell, knees bent at the altar of her opulence. She was too incredible to just be decorative—they wanted her in everything. They wove her into their clothing, stamped her into their money, and even put her in their food in the hopes of one day shining even half as bright as her. She flourished under their care, growing larger and stronger every day; she became a part of their physical forms, and their very identity. Soon enough, no one could remember a time or a world before she was born and changed the course of destiny.

Entire cities were devoted to her care and growth. They lived to serve and nourish her, and she in turn

blessed them with her radiance. No matter the item or setting, she was there. The humans and their stunning daughter became one and the same; everything she touched was made more beautiful, more comfortable. And they adored her for it. They inhaled her, letting her coat their lungs, caressing their larynxes. She coursed through their veins, enveloped their capillaries, and claimed stake over their cells. The daughter who was once dependent on her creators had now overpowered them, enslaving them in chains made of miniscule beauty.

She soon became greedy. They had given her a taste of the world, and now she wanted it all. Her gleaming fingers crept across the globe, scaling every cliff, and skimming each lake and puddle. The humans ignored this invasion, blinded by the comfort of familiarity. Her index finger crushed the ice shelves in the Arctic, crumbling their ancient formations into a fine powder, like a toddler cradling their grandmother’s favourite porcelain saucer.

The humans wept for the loss but changed nothing. They still loved her.

Her middle finger crashed into the Pacific, sending the salty waves onto the shores, flooding their towns, and filling their lungs with the relentless weeping of the planet they had smothered.

The humans cried when they saw the damage. They changed nothing. They still loved her.

The lush forests that once spread across the Amazon like a dense, green carpet broke under the pressure of her ring finger as it dug deeper and deeper into its fertile soil.

The humans wept for the loss. Nothing changed. She was still their beloved.

The hand once fed by humans was now determined to destroy its creator. She slipped into the waters of the globe, filling their fish with her beautiful poison, sealing their gills and clouding their eyes; their fins beat against this attack. Then stopped. And Poseidon floated belly-up to the surface of the sinking seas, surrounded by his fallen wards.

They wept and wept. But they still did nothing. She was their greatest creation.

They wept and bemoaned and called for action and protested and chanted rhyming slogans. All the weeping and bemoaning never stood a chance though. Not when changing the reasons for the bemoaning meant sacrifice. Less comfort. Less convenience. More consciousness. They loved their shiny reminders of superiority and status too much; change was for Other people, not them specifically. This was the fault of the corporations that had overfed her. They had just grown the crops.

The youth begged for their lives, making promises of change and action to her. She laughed away their optimism, the peals of her dominance drowning their futures in mountains of her being; what a beautiful ocean to call your coffin.

For, you see, my beloved, it is easier to do nothing than something even if that lack of action is causing pain. Even if it that absence of change was killing them. And it did.

This is the one song everyone would like to learn: the song that is irresistible:

the song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons even though they see the beached skulls

the song nobody knows because anyone who has heard it is dead, and the others can’t remember.

Shall I tell you the secret and if I do, will you get me out of this bird suit?

I don’t enjoy it here squatting on this island looking picturesque and mythical

with these two feathery maniacs, I don’t enjoy singing this trio, fatal and valuable.

I will tell the secret to you, to you, only to you.

Come closer. This song

is a cry for help: Help me!

Only you, only you can, you are unique

at last. Alas it is a boring song but it works every time.

(Margaret Atwood, “Siren Song” from Selected Poems 1965-1975.)

Alias

By Rachel Turner They say when I was two I used to weep for my old mummy, for a woman passed in another world, another plane of existence, a puzzle piece in a picture I was never meant to put together, caught in a haze of I remember, I remember not. They say I told them my name, not the one they gave me but the one I gave myself, syllables in a teething mouth, nonsense because they said so. I woke up from naps like other lives, weeping for the woman I used to be, for bodies lost, for lives. The doctor told them not to encourage me, not to ask questions, to ignore, and hope it went away. To forget.

So. By the time I turned three, they taught me my name, taught me to wrap my mouth around a new language, a new history. Drowned in identity until it became real. I learned how to be a child, how to walk on new legs, how to run, how to sit in the sun for the first time, and forget all the times it scorched me. My body has grown into itself, finally, but sometimes, at 3am, when the world is piercingly quiet, and the figures hover over me in the dark, I wake up and know it is not mine.

The Muddled Depths

By Aruljothie Muraleetharan Rooted in the mud in the muddled depths of the pond, Yet constantly changing with every ripple in the water‌ Lotus flowers drifted across the calm clear blue water, Masked by the scent of Jasmine disappearing into the breeze‌ Lilypads overlapped each other, Buds bumped into full blooms, Stiffly held hands clasped one another, Till death do us apart...

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By Jacqueline Chenr

How to Move Out

By Isabella Kennedy Look around the room that you and your sister have shared for eighteen years.

Try to, carefully, slice everything you own into perfect halves.

Run your finger over the broken spines of old friends; wonder if half a book is better than no book.

Would you want an end with no beginning? Or a beginning with no end?

When you realize that the knife you brought from the kitchen drawer wasn’t meant to cut through most things, abandon the pursuit of the perfect halves concept.

Look at the room again.

Sigh at the black-framed pictures on the walls. It had taken you so long to arrange them with each picture in its own exact spot.

Wonder which memory to take.

Bicycles parked on a grimy road?

Black and white Eiffel Tower with five sleepy smiles?

There’s one of you two laughing; eyelashes frozen and snow caked gloves.

Take that one.

Start piling your clothes into three separate sections.

Wash. Take. Leave.

Take only what’s yours… and maybe that light pink shirt she never wears.

Pack them with your new crisp, white sheets that smell like bleach, lavender fields already washed away.

Wrap those framed smiles carefully with a scarf; store them deep inside your heavy winter coat.

Glass is easily broken.

Next, strip apart the walls.

Find any trace of you left squished between the drywall or under wire bed frames, and take that too.

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By Lele Lin

Memories Worth Keeping

By Jenny Yang His empty, hazy blue eyes were staring at the screen when she entered, his metal limbs plugged into the computer with snaking red wires.

“Djinn?” Her soft voice was a firecracker in the stillness.

He turned his head slightly, gaze resting on her for a second before landing on the floor.

“I brought you something.” She didn’t wait for a response—probably knowing he wouldn’t— and lifted her hands.

Cupped in them was a little flower, its white petals drooping downwards.

Djinn scanned it with his eyes, the central processing unit inside his head whirring.

“Snowdrop. Winter plant.”

“I saw it and thought of you. You’re both so perseverant.” She smiled now, almost hopeful as she approached him. “I thought it would look nice by your computers—” “Pointless. Androids like us do not need such frivolous things, EMA.” He turned back to the large screen where footage of familiar faces flashed.

She ignored his steely remark. “Who are they?”

He opened his mouth to reply, but something stopped him. It’d be pointless to tell her. It would break her. “Put it on my desk. I’ll handle it later.”

EMA brightened immediately. In the eerie darkness, with only the artificial light of the screen, her freckles seemed like stars, shimmering beneath the planets of her glowing pink-brown eyes.

Something inside Djinn’s head clicked, whispering that space was often associated with dreams.

An android’s purpose is the will of their master. We have no use for dreams.

“You’ll love it! I think it really makes the room less gloomy,” she said cheerfully, setting the

flower down.

It looked like an upside-down star.

As she left, Djinn could feel his CPU working overtime to make sense of the sparking feeling inside his chest, pitted against the dark blue of his uniform. He took in a sharp breath for his fan, and felt his CPU cool, but it only made him more aware of his own artificiality.

He watched hour after hour of footage, barely registering any of it, even as the images of expressionless androids being smashed apart were stored in his head.

All pointless, his master had muttered over and over again. All so useless.

“Djinn? Come to my office, please,” a voice called over the PA system loudspeaker installed in his metallic, barren room.

“Yes, Dr. Hopewell.”

The loudspeaker clicked off. He could hear EMA’s singing, sounding as if it was filled with stars. Even as an android, he felt a little chill crackle under his skin.

As he approached his creator’s lab, he could hear frustrated admonishment: “You keep making these damn ‘human’ robots only to scrap them again! When will you be satisfied?”

“When androids with empathy don’t drive me nuts.” Djinn could hear Dr. Hopewell’s annoyance.

“The MOB is both a scientific facility and a business! You are given resources as long as you produce results. Logistically speaking, you’ll always end up with someone too human to be of use—” “Thank you for your time, Maxwell.”

Djinn moved aside, watching as a large, round man stormed out of the room. He peeked inside.

“Hello, Djinn!” Dr. Hopewell grinned as she set down her screwdriver, and lifted her goggles over her red hair. A metal body lay at her feet, its head a few metres away. While the right side of it

was torn metal, the left side had little tufts of hair and a large blue eye, looking uncannily human.

He tried to ignore the uncomfortable sparks under his fingertips. “You wished to speak to me?”

“Yes, yes.” She shrugged off her lab coat, tossing it onto a heap of other broken parts. “It’s about that damned little robot. The whatchamacallit—the Empathic Mimicking Android 3.0.”

“The organization is breathing down my neck to stop ‘messing around’ with my little experiments. At least androids can’t breathe.” She laughed, poking him playfully. “They want me to keep making models like you. Perfect, unfeeling soldiers for the Mind Observation Bureau.”

“I live to serve, Dr. Hopewell.”

“But what if I could make useful androids who feel like humans? When the H.E.A.R.T model rebelled against me, I thought a childlike mentality could prevent that, but this one”—she paused, and they both heard the singing again—“is insufferable.”

He didn’t speak, even as the sparks worsened.

She grinned, her soft, fleshy face now so close, he could feel the heat of her breathing against his own metallic skin. “Bring her here.”

As he went to fetch the little one, his fan whirred aggressively, as though he were choking for air. “EMA?” She looked up, the head she was holding bouncing down. “Djinn! Are you here to talk to me?

You’ve never initiated conversation before. Oh, isn’t the snowdrop just so pretty?”

Djinn let her chatter excitedly, his gaze following the rolling head until it hit a broken arm.

He recognized where the limbs came from. Housemaid 5.0. And the Humanoid Empathic AndroidRobot Tester—the H.E.A.R.T model—a precursor to the Empathic Mimicking Android. All useless.

Pointless.

All I’ve ever done is serve. All I’ve ever done is be useful…haven’t I? When she stopped speaking, seemingly realizing he’d said nothing thus far, he looked up. “Dr.

Hopewell wants you,” he announced slowly.

“Oh.” Her shoulders slumped. “I was hoping—never mind.”

For the first time, his curiosity got the better of him. “Hoping what?”

She blushed—Djinn wondered what programming made her do so—and she replied sheepishly, “I thought you finally wanted to be friends.”

He paused, turning off the analytics in his eyes for a brief second to really look at her. Her reddish-brown hair was pulled into pigtails, and she wore a simple red gown. She resembled a real girl, with ruddy cheeks and wide pink-brown eyes—and freckles full of stardust. Naïve. Innocent.

Human.

He bent down, hesitating, before wrapping his arms around her. “Thank you for the flower,” he said softly, his coldness cracking to reveal a hint of warmth.

EMA glanced back at the broken robots when they pulled apart. “I’m not so blind that I don’t know what’s coming.” She held out her hand. “But… I think I’m ready.”

And yet, she was trembling.

Djinn took her hand, suddenly aware how frail metal could be as they made their way to Dr. Hopewell’s lab.

The scientist beamed when she saw them arrive. “Welcome, lovies!”

For the first time, EMA’s face remained impassive.

“Quiet now, aren’t ya?” Dr. Hopewell barked out a laugh. She turned EMA around so she could open the hidden compartment of the memory card, tossing it to Djinn. “Come on. Let’s get you on the conveyor belt.”

He helped EMA up, her hand now limp.

Even though it wasn’t him on there, he still felt his power slipping through his sparking

fingers. The cold, black floor was splintering, swallowing whole galaxies. Soon he’d be weightless, aimless, all control of his limbs lost to space.

There was no more gravity—nothing left to create more stars. Nothing left to ground him to the earth. Nothing left to breathe.

Everything organic was dead.

He watched as the giant metal pounder came down and crushed EMA into flattened, broken pieces—shattered stars with jagged edges. He tried not to focus, but his blue eyes flickered involuntarily, still filming her arms ripping open and her head caving in. He couldn’t look away, even as parts of her rolled off the conveyor belt and knocked against his feet.

Goodbye, EMA. Dr. Hopewell didn’t glance back as she evaluated the amount of new scrap metal she had.

“Add the memory card to the collection room. Mark it as EMA 3.0.”

“Understood.”

A beat of silence. “She was quite friendly to you, wasn’t she?”

He paused, trying to breathe through his fan, even though he could still feel the weightlessness threatening to take him. “It means nothing. My life is not my own.”

He left quickly, but couldn’t bring himself to go to the collection room. He briefly looked inside EMA’s “room,” the garage. Lifeless eyes on broken heads stared back, and he squeezed the memory card tighter.

What is the point now?

In his own room, Djinn suddenly found it stifling as he sat down in his chair. It was engulfed in darkness, a black hole, even as he turned the computer on, with its whirring fans and bright screen piercing his eyelids.

He jabbed the memory card in, and EMA’s recorded voice filled the air: “I saw it and thought

of you. You’re both so perseverant.”

A point. His eyes fluttered open as he was once more brought down to the earth, a galaxy of lights seeming to flicker above him. Djinn finally felt as though he could really breathe.

She was holding that little white snowdrop, asking, “Who are they?”

His lips curled just slightly as diagnostics began running, trying to figure out why his CPU was overheating. He slowly lifted the star-like flower. Them. Like us.

“You’ll love it!”

Dreaming. Breathing.

The petals soft under his fingertips.

Living.

Taking Givng Root

By Reily Knowles

discarded

By Jenny Yang

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By Jess Attard

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By Shelby Hohmann

Flourish

By Julia Fawcett

Mayfly

By Augustine Mendes Seventh day creation forsaken for a mayfly, they only live until sunrise. I pray to my deaf god that we will have a second sunrise. I pray to my ancestors gods that we are brought back as mayflies. In the span of the daytime, I want to only yearn for you without worrying about the space I consume in a room. I want to be dead by morning. Maybe to you I was always a mayfly: my only purpose was to be inseminated and die. The mayfly is born without a mouth because eating and speaking are accessories that take up too much space in a room. I wish you saw me as a man, and not a mayfly.

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By Carina Pagotto

Lady of the Night

By Nicole Pladino Before

I pull at my black stockings

Mother always pulled up my stockings

Torn, exposing my thigh flesh

White’s cousin Cream, hemmed lace

As if someone ripped a pack of raw chicken.

Like snowflakes holding hands.

My lips are red delicious

A touch of rouge

Staining the mouths of bottles

Rosy red

And the throats of men.

On both my pink lady cheeks.

I smell like stale smoke

She let me have a sip of wine

The kind that wraps itself around you

Red and tart, tongue-smacking

Embraces you

Sloshing heavy in my tummy.

And lingers there.

Because ladies only take sips.

If you taste me,

I smelled like vanilla and sugar

Depends when you taste me,

The scent of sun burning dew from flowers

I am salt

Sickly sweet.

Lighter fluid

And if you tasted me,

Maraschino cherry.

I was buttercream frosting,

My voice, like cracks in plaster

Candied lemon on a cake.

Rough like raw honey, smooth like asphalt,

My voice, too high with hope

Speaks when necessary.

Lips and tongue too small like seeds

When I work,

Spoke only when spoken to.

I’ll make you believe in lace and frosting

When we danced

Be sweet like vanilla and sugar

It was layers of charmeuse and tulle

Talk to you like lovers spilling their souls out to the stars

That swirled between us Like water escaping down a drain.

Now That is all I see.

Rainbow puddles of stormwater Oil slithering on the surface Reflecting the fluorescent lights.

I’ve had the practice.

I know how to pretend to be Know how to act like one Like a lady.

something like birth

By Kathleen Elizabeth Roffey something like rebirth or something like love i’m starting to learn my lefts from my rights i think i’m semi-corporeal now i think i’m slowly becoming or at least my body is finally warm or at least my bones are not so soft anymore the core of me is flash white light i’m hollow from the inside out or at least i’m full and beaming or at least i’m luminescence above all i think there’s something holy running through me i think i’m purification incarnate or something something like that or a close close approximation of

i’m starting to learn how to clasp my hands around but that doesn’t help when i still can’t count my pulse but that doesn’t help when my whole body shakes you can watch me shake from a mile away you can watch me snap my ankles from a mile away when i’m finally coming down to a place solid and lucid or to find a bit of want or to find a bit of grip or to find a bit of soft and clear ground

regardless she grew, & age and wisdom

By Rayne Cauchi

The International Encyclopedia of Magic

By Jess Attard

Somebody Else

By Stephanie Fattori

Kiss of Death

By Rylee Loucks