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© Copyright Aonia Magazine 2022
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Table of Contents Editor’s Letter …………...........................4 Meet the Editors ...................................7 Contributing Writers ...........................8 Acknowledgements …………………………10 Isobel Maxwell Dancer’s Feet …………………..….11 ‘Buck’ ………….........................12 ‘Matter of Time’ ....................14 Will Triggs ‘Sermon’ .................................15 ‘Staying on A1(M)’ …………….17 Isobel Maxwell Adam Bright ..........................18 Libby Peet ‘Stomach’ ................................19 ‘Daze’ ……..…………………………20 Isobel Maxwell Mill Road ..............................21 Sarah Adegbite ‘On Writing’ ...........................22 Maria Koniarz TikTok 24.02.22 .....................23 Famke Veenstra-Ashmore ‘Break a butterfly’ ..................24
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Contents cont. Isobel Maxwell Nude ……................................25 Marta Wolny ‘Splash’ ...................................26 Maria Koniarz Longevial confused. …..………31 Anna Stephen ‘To the Drinker’ ………………..32 ‘The Birthday Party’ ………….33 Isobel Maxwell Water …..................................34 Delilah Dennett ‘On visiting the Grant Museum of Zoology’ ................................35 Zadie Loft ‘Summer in the City’.....……….........................36 ‘Immortalised in writing’…..37
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Editor’s Letter When the Aonia team first got together in the spring of 2021, we could never have imagined such a warm and engaged response from our contributors and readers. In a world of increasing individualism, self-sufficiency, and isolation, building creative and supportive communities seems impossible. But thanks to all of you, we’ve proven it isn’t.
This magazine was
A little bit about our story. As with most of our generation
born out of Covid,
of artists, we were formed online. Tanya reached out via a
out of a world
Cambridge creatives group, and both Alessia and I were
confronting its
quick to reply. Aura joined us later after we reached out
problems, out of a
again for some additional team members. All four of us
desire to create
shared a love of literature and art, and a desire to
something
contribute to these fields. We are so grateful we have the
beautiful.
opportunity to do so with this small, independent - Zadie Loft
magazine. It was Tanya who raised the idea of Aonia. Fascinated by the idea of the nine Greek muses, who embodied and inspired art in all its forms, she suggested it as our name. As a Classics student, I was equally as eager for this title. The idea that our magazine would take its name from the home of artistic knowledge seemed perfect for what we were hoping to create.
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‘The name Aonia comes from the nine Greek muses, who embodied and inspired art in all its forms’ It also gave us space to play with ancient, mythological
To all our friends who have offered their services here and there (Alessia has given you proper credit in the Acknowledgments), thank you very, very much. It really does take a village!
poems, and prose. We are excited to explore this further with later editions! We’ve faced quite a few
much of our initial meetings were over Zoom, and distance kept it that way. Tanya, Aura and I have all now left Cambridge, so we’ve had to continue our work online, relying on Alessia to maintain our Cambridge roots! In efforts to keep our magazine free, we’ve had to work hard to
coherent whole was not on our agenda. There is something powerful in a community composed of preferences, lives. This is
‘We wanted the idiosyncrasies of the individual pieces to be part of the charm’
what we present to you In times of great change, we turn to art. We turn to the sense of immortality and permanence that
obstacles to arrive at this publication. Covid meant
differences to create a
different forms,
themes alongside our contemporary artwork,
Ironing out or erasing
poetry, paintings, and We really envisioned this
prose can offer, in ways
magazine as a pool of
other things can’t. This
artistry to dip into at your
magazine was born out of
own pace. Each of our contributors had a personal vision for their own works of art, and while we have thought hard about the order, we wanted the idiosyncrasies of the individual pieces to be part of the charm.
pool our resources and rely on each other’s distinct skills and contacts.
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Covid, out of a world confronting its problems, out of a desire to create something beautiful. We are so grateful to our contributors who have done just that. We really hope you enjoy.
Meet the Editors
Alessia Mavakala
Anna Trowby
Alessia is a film and tv student, theatre
Anna is one of the co-founders and editors of
producer, aspiring director and she is currently
Aonia Magazine and she is currently a writer and
working at Balik Arts as a project manager. She
theatre-maker with a specific interest in First
has found that she is constantly inspired and
Nations advocacy and indigenous writing. Her
motivated by the diverse and innovative pieces
favourite authors are Hanya Yanagihara, Joy Harjo,
of art that people submit to Aonia Magazine.
Haruki Murukami and Audre Lorde.
Zadie Loft Zadie is one of the co-founders and editors of Aonia Magazine. Zadie is a recent Classics graduate from Cambridge, now studying for an MSt in Creative Writing at Oxford. She is also a frequent book reviewer for Litro Magazine and Dope Readers. Her favourite writers include Italo Calvino, Toni Morrison, and Natalie Diaz but always looking for new recommendations!
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Contributing writers and artists
Maria works with collage and drawing to
Sarah is a final-year theologian whose
recreate sensations, impressions, memories
poems are deeply intertwined with her
from which she naturally extracts her palette.
Christian faith. They explore a range of
She approaches her feelings in colour and gives
issues, from police brutality to
form to candid, self-absorbed faces, embedded
motherhood. Her collection ‘Creatio Ex
in cultural or social realities. Maria draws
Nihilo’ was published in February 2018,
inspiration from her upbringing in Poland, a
and her works appear in zines like
country hostile to public discourses regarding
BAIT, Notes, and The Dial.
sexuality, ableism and mental health.
- Maria Koniarz
- Sarah Adegbite
Usually as a creative outlet Libby writes
Isobel Maxwell is a painter and writer
songs under her moniker Lord Bug, but
at Queens’ College, Cambridge. They
has recently enjoyed blurring the lines
have been published in the Mays, Bait,
between music and poetry. She
Notes, and Screeve, amongst others.
particularly appreciates poetry that flirts
Their painting focuses on colour and
with cynicism, includes unusual
materiality; re-creating domestic
metaphors and speaks to the delicacy of
scenes coloured by emotional
human life. She is currently studying
perceptions.
Philosophy and Linguistics at St Hugh’s College Oxford.
- Isobel Maxwell
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- Libby Peet
Contributing writers and artists
Anna Stephen is a final-year
Will Triggs is a Norfolk-based
English student at Merton
poet, currently finishing an
College, Oxford. She primarily
MA in Creative Writing Poetry
writes novels and for the
at Durham University. His
stage, but has had poetry
work has been published in
published in the Cherwell, The
Horizon Magazine and From
Isis and Green Ink Poetry
the Lighthouse, and can be
magazine.
found on his Twitter @willtriggspoet.
- Anna Stephen
-Will Triggs
Famke Veenstra-Ashmore is a Welsh-Dutch writer, poet, and
Marta's digital footprint is
journalist. Her poetry is informed
rather small, but she hopes to
by lenses such as memory, gender,
publish something with a
and mixed heritage. Her work has
spine that's slightly bigger.
been published in Varsity and she was highly commended in the
- Marta Wolny
Magdalena Young Poets' Prize.
- Famke Veenstra-Ashmore 9
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to the
for future editions of the
wonderful people who
magazine. We would like to say
supported the first edition of
thank you to Milan Kovacevic
Aonia Magazine. It’s been truly
for designing our logo. I hope
humbling to see how much
that you are inspired as we are
support a newly established art
by everyone’s work of art and
and poetry journal can get. We
we are looking forward to
thank all the contributors who
seeing more for the next
shared their art with us and we
edition.
hope to see everyone’s new creations and writings -
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Alessia Mavakala
Dancer’s Feet
Isobel Maxwell
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Buck Your wow hands like gosh I must like the smell of your jacket, Probably fox pee, do you know that foxes scream When theyre having sex, wow, what a Scream they must be sexing. Gosh. I like the way your hands fall like leaves Onto my hair and sit there gentle I am so lucky to be here Smelling of fox pee and looking at With our bellies against the black dead earth We are anemic, we are worms, we are Gosh look at that, a deer What did you say, I can barely hear you And you look like the landscape so completely Silent and crisp a photograph you can touch it and smell it Or I should be able to if your jacket didn’t smell so strong You say it isn’t pee, it’s blood, that dark patch A sort of smear that could be soil, but isn’t, Your hands aren’t on my hair anymore and the cold seeps in Should have brought a hat, left the crocheted one on the table, it looked oh Your fingers snicker snack crack gentle stroke Sounds like a shiver Explosion like a And the collision of earth and small pop. Deer collapses Totally with its legs underneath it, akimbo A weird electric dance, and it’s wow
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Bleeding And you look at me, quiet, shift your dad’s gun on your shoulder And kiss me afterwards Only yards away writhing with your earth-dirty hand Underneath my jeans - Isobel Maxwell
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Matter of Time
The scratched polish on my nails, the Knots in my shoulders and my hair, the Half emptied bed Lie testament to the thing I know Pad pad, barefoot, It hurts to see you half-lit, preceding half-phrased Framed by the doorway like a dirty secret Looking in the mirror, hips cocked, that expression on your face And you know too.
- Isobel Maxwell
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Sermon [I] I am locked in dark, barefoot on the stone my mothers laid and their mothers prised from the near face of the moon’s light. I have nothing to carry but my feet are bare and I have nothing but my desire to be altared, hopelessly waiting on the blink of something great and chalky and irreversible. [II] I am a person who is thinking about light. And the sound it will make when it faces me, and what happens when it comes to rain, and the tenements filled with golden hours. It is so quiet here. You can almost hear the heaving of the air, you almost ask it questions [III] There is no seam to be traced here, or backstitch in thickening green. My father will one day take me to the house where they lived, and where it still smells of the elderberries they picked from the leaves amongst the piles of young fresh petrol. [IV] What if I wrote a garden. There I would press myself up against the right words, unbordered by the weight of pages, combing the trappings of clay and carbon for a graceland. In the furrowed brows of autumn when the hours are heaviest who could tell me that this is a graveyard?
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[V] Or that I am locked in dark, starving and dreaming the washlands as I marble into silence. Don’t tell me to remember myself to you. My father will one day take me to the house where they lived, and where we will have more to say between the two edges of home. And where in the smoke of things we pyred I can barely see to the door - Will Triggs
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Staying on A1(M) I forget myself as miles and minutes fall away pulled taut behind mirrors where it is not yet evening and where sky and its dust still forgive light its last reaches though my next glance brings twilight and halogen darkness pyrrhic in white and red and streaming two tides the red departing the white caught still in silvered glass though betrayal is apparent in the windscreen where I chorus red among taillights following in the triptych arcs of cats’ eyes through new night and pushing away rain as it comes
- Will Triggs
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Adam Bright
Isobel Maxwell
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Stomach couldn’t stomach what he saw so then he went and blew it all swallowed the metal, still felt poor saw the light so he shut the door some would say that he lost his mind frozen reel, lost track of time memories are vivid, even when you’re blind but through it all, remained quite kind - Libby Peet
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Daze Nothing yet breaks your slumber not even golden arms the sheets will save your dreamy dribble and save you from any harm eyelids flutter lashes sweep awake but still, you taste like sleep bright sweet sticky wands down your wrist they drool suffocating lycra a plaster in the pool the water weaves through your feet a cold but sultry flirt you brace yourself for breath to seize This is going to hurt. - Libby Peet
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Mill Road
Isobel Maxwell 21
On Writing I lay before you an image of a girl running through grass. Slick and cloying, her body arched towards the stars… record of skin-filled bruises. Scars, there is something primal, and annoyingly powerful, about screaming into the night to prove you are loved. When the bread rises, what remains in your hands but flesh and blood? Throughout her time here she has been imprinting the world onto the backs of her eyelids to remember that holy feeling; I can’t be bothered to write such things by hand. The ecstasy of this music moves me to a moment without pages, only cursive and expletives, only truth – which reconstructs itself there for the reader in revolving, recurring patterns. Again I repeat the words I am supposed to write out loud: a kind of catharsis purges the drunkenness of last night, removes the debris/defilement that settles like sand under my heel, the stone stuck in my shoe. Once found and dislodged, I will swallow it whole. - Sarah Adegbite
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TikTok 24.02.22
Maria Koniarz 23
Break a Butterfly I want to see how you might break a butterfly on its back press its wings into pages which crave your story, which call for you peel off its scales like petals. A measured voice that inscribes those glossy lights as if born from hand – we’re sat on the edge of the grate, those iron bars bending, and layered, a path we never travelled now reformed. We share whispers and a soot mirage: two empty cans rattle with our voices, a chiming arrangement, ourselves as hands, our feet in lines, meet eyes, roaming in circles: become pretty thoughts streamlined, pretty thoughts on an amber string against a white board, strung along. Say I want to be your pretty thoughts fettering your neck and ankles.
- Famke Veenstra-Ashmore 24
Nude
Isobel Maxwell 25
Splash By Marta Wolny
There’s no one else in the flat, just her and the room – just her in the room. Husband is out, the morning is all hers: all to herself and practice. She is at home today as it is only solo practice, a piece she wants to spend the next couple of hours running through before meeting the rest of the ensemble. The only breakfast she’s had is the Hungarian contraception she takes, her hair is pulled back perfunctorily, the baby hairs not yet gelled to her forehead; she wears a sweatshirt she shares with husband. Though on most mornings like this one she eschews makeup, she hardly neglects earrings - this morning it’s the discreet studs gifted by husband, but sometimes it’s the other clunkier ornaments she keeps accruing in adulthood. As for other accoutrements: beneath the sweatshirt is a silver chain, and from the silver chain hangs the letter ‘J’. The ‘J’ stands for ‘Jumana.’ Not a gift from husband this time, but one of the step kids. Quite sweet. Being very preoccupied with the ostentatiousness of others Lina always discloses these details of jewellery: the ankle-bracelet, the impersonal chain, or - as in Jumana’s case - the personal chain (though how personal is an initial really?), the engagement ring, the accumulation of piercings. As a masseuse, Lina manages to gather the non-visual details too: whether it’s from husband, wife, whether it’s worn habitually, or on off-hand occasions – I don’t see how she comes by these details. I don’t see why you would wear jewellery to a massage parlour in the first place. Anyway, Jumana is alone practising. The music stand stays standing, still and functional, the morning traffic from the outside is faintly audible. Jumana realises she is having a problem with a bar. She stops and furrows her brow over the sheet music, trying to deduce where she had gone wrong. Once she knows 26
what has caused her to stumble, she applies her mouth to the flute once more and runs through the piece from the beginning – she trips at the bar again. She is sure now that this section requires particular attention and, as if tending to a flowerbed, she carefully plays the bar again. It takes few more reruns of the bar for Jumana to feel the strange sensation on her back. At first, she doesn’t acknowledge what feels like a liquid cascading down her spine. She resolutely plays over the bar. Each time that she repeats this combination of notes, articulating the phrases making up the bar, the feeling on her back pronounces itself more obviously. But Jumana has been prone to back problems for a long time now, back pain and her profession have become synonymous, playing without the occasional bout of back pain throughout the week would have been jarringly uncustomary – it was the back pains , and the modest salary increase which has induced Jumana to start going to a masseuse, this was how Lina had met her. Jumana continues to skim through the bar, it suffices that the sensation in her back isn’t the usual tightness or bursts of pain she is used to. Eager to polish the bar before the morning is over, she continues to play – and then it happens. Rapidly, in the time that it takes her to repeat that bar another half-dozen times, Jumana’s back spews a fin. She doesn’t quite know this yet, though there is no doubt about it. She detaches the flute from her mouth, puts it down and stands straight. A dorsal fin, smooth and almost the length of her entire back now grazes itself against the fabric of the sweatshirt, the contact of polyester and non-human skin startles her. The traffic is now more detectable from the outside and Jumana is still, she clenches and unclenches her hands, she inhales, she exhales, over and over, in awe of how she can still inhale and exhale. She can’t deny the contact between the hoodie and whatever it is that’s on her back, but she isn’t going to move, she swears to herself she won’t move. She hears the door, husband is back – Jumana doesn’t call out, she doesn’t want to know, she doesn’t 27
want a confirmation of whatever just happened. But what had happened? Lina then reveals how Jumana’s husband offered to get some sort of a piercing to make Jumana feel better about the latest addition to her body. Jumana told him that he had enough gold teeth as it is. Though she eventually had the fin surgically removed, she still continued to daydream about what would have happened had she gone swimming in the local canal. She wondered out loud once whether she would have gotten harpooned. Husband was within earshot and reminded her she had not turned into a whale, and that very probably, people living on barges don’t own harpoons. And that this wasn’t Moby Dick, and why would she even consider swimming in the canal? My initial encounter with Jumana was seeing her ensemble play. The tickets were discounted so I decided to take myself out, I had never seen this sort of live music. I could describe it … What I will say is that it was an accompaniment to this art installation at a local gallery. She was with the other wind instruments of course, next to the contrabass flautist. At the end of each piece her face acquired this odd expression, not enough humility for it to be relief, not enough complacence for it to be smugness, rather, it was something in between the two. At her feet she had a small glass tank about two-thirds of which was filled with water, it was carefully stationed so that half of it was beneath her chair, and the other half was just about visible, reflecting the lights like her silver ‘J’ chain - now visible as she wore a low-shouldered blouse. I imagined it going slosh, slosh, slosh to the music, moving at its own accord, a contained sloshing puddle. A neat, cubed puddle. At first I had thought it was part of the performance itself, maybe something to go with the swirling projections on the wall that accompanied the music, but, by the way it was arranged, it didn’t seem as if it was meant to be 28
noticed. I could see the water tremble at certain points during the performance, she glanced at it maybe twice but otherwise, no one, including the other flautist next to her, gave it much attention. The second time I watched Jumana’s ensemble play I took Lina with me. We met outside her massage parlour, I waited for her to finish locking up before we made our way to the gallery where the ensemble was playing. Once we got to our seats and the music had begun exuding from the players, I sought out the tank at the feet of the flautist once more. She must play with that tank at her feet every night I had thought to myself, as nobody else in the ensemble paid the least bit of attention to it. I would have raised this to Lina, but there wasn’t much opportunity for further discussion during the performance. Though initially she displayed no recognition, a piece or two later Lina suddenly kissed her teeth and turned towards my ear, hissing, “I know that woman,” nodding in the direction of the wind players. “Which one? The one with the tank?” Lina nodded urgently in response. I averted my eyes from the projections and fixated on the tank with its shimmering water once more. When the performance came to an end, we did the predictable; we went to the bar, suppressing discussion until the drinks were set in front of us. It was then that Lina told me that Jumana is one of her regulars, she told me about the scar on her back and, of course she told me about Jumana’s jewellery. “What’s with the tank do you reckon?” I asked, taking a sip and letting the taste of tomato juice flood my mouth. Lina smirked.
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“That’s easy.” She said, taking a sip of her own drink. “She is worried that every time she plays the piece that caused her to grow a fin, maybe something more drastic will happen.” “More drastic?” I asked. After all, what could be more drastic than having a fin very rapidly, very unforeseeably, gush out from your back with no concern for your daily life. Lina nodded. “Yes, she could sprout more fins, or gills, or,” Lina leaned forward towards me and arranged her eyes and smile into a leer. “What’s to stop her from turning entirely into a fish?” I looked down into my glass as Lina crunched on her celery stick. When I looked back up her bracelet was shimmering pleasantly despite the dim lighting, it was not unlike the glistening of the small pool Jumana had made for herself out of fear. As for myself, I don’t wear jewellery.
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Longevial confused.
Maria Koniarz
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To the Drinker To the drinker, The colours of the twilight slop and spill In puddles, trickling away like brick dust Into gutters. Cracked clouds remind him Of the bottoms of ceramic mugs, Where soaked tea-leaves swill round and round. Candledust, streaming through thinned air, Smells of cinnamon and lust. He supposes that he must, before he goes to bed, Stifle its blast. But he is already lying down In the dust. To the drinker, The colours of the world bleed and are clean.
- Anna Stephen
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The Birthday Party The best time I ever had. Birds behind us making faint taps: Beak scrapes hollow wood, dirty Wood, raked like the bones in a rib Cage, caged up, all thirty Of those bones, which in a single rip Leave hearts exposed, like now in this party That we threw for you on your birthday.
- Anna Stephen
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Water
Isobel Maxwell 34
On visiting the Grant Museum of Zoology A mouse suspended in the liquid animation of time Guts leaking out in all their glory. We rats feast upon this spectacle even as the wincing dawn floods us open. Entrails and blood vessels exploding, a supernova of carnage and busted gore Speaking from its emptied chest. The mouse lies dormant in its amber cage, While we mere mortals seek Another morsel to satisfy us In this house of heaving horrors, Nature displaced from its pure and open places And squished in jars of tepid water, Never to roam the earth, again. While we, the hungry, the insatiable, the ones with unquenchable thirsts lodged in our cadaver throats, Scour the land for further feasts, Butterflies fleeing our trembling fingers.
- Delilah Dennett
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Summer in the City
The night sky blackens the white wings of flies. My eyes light up at explosions to my right. The trains have stopped: tarmac melting into rot. Cars screeching into halts. It’s too hot not to be outside. Two summers ago I lost my keys and my mum. Today I lose my mind somewhere in the pool of London’s biggest sights. It’s much too bright to see: the brightness eats me and in its stomach sits my keys my mother and mind each atop the other’s knee.
- Zadie Loft
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Immortalised in Writing I watched a wave dissolve its nails clipped off palm melted into sweat But my wave sits immobile just as useless as an ocean paused in a painting or reduced to rounded swirls on a page who never trickle back or say farewell I once mistook frozen seas for eternity I never knew the truth.
- Zadie Loft
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