Atrium Issue 04

Cover Art by Natalie Meyer

staff list

editors

Aashi Parikh

Abinayaa Murugupandiyan

Gabriella Smith

Helina Li

Natalie Meyer

Sania Choudhary

Saniya Pendharkar

Sarah Adler

SJ Guo

Soumya Rai

artists

Alyson Yee

Carmen Berry

Celeste Edell

Danielle Gomez

Grace Garcia

Kevin Wolf

Nesyah Galatin

Shaila Sendan

writers

Crystal Chavez Barragan

Divya Venkataraman

Kate Trout

Kristen Li

Mel Dueñas

Morgane Fiorentini

Niveditha Sukesh

Tiffany Yu

event planners

Leslie Lopez layout designers

Celia Ruiz

Charlize Lee

Dream Lopez

Johanna Liu

Navya Singh

Editor’s Note

I’m not the same person I was in middle school by any means. In fact, I don’t even think we’d get along now. Middle school, for me, was nearly ten years ago at this point. How did I let time slip by like that? How did I get from there to here, and change so much along the way, when every day felt painfully uniform? How subtle the differences must have been day by day - in my appearance, my style, my demeanor, my personality, etc.it’s almost impossible to detect, and a bit jarring when I think about it too much. But somehow, I went from wearing Twenty One Pilots t-shirts from Hot Topic and religiously watching Steven Universe to… not doing those things.

Continuum (kuhn·ti·nyoo·uhm), noun. Definition: a continuous sequence in which adjacent elements are not perceptibly different from each other, although the extremes are quite distinct. A slow, creeping change. Day by day, nothing really changes, but when you look back several years, everything is different. Winter gradually warms and progresses into the rainy spring season, but we never really notice until suddenly the flowers have started to bloom. We evolved from monkeys, but not much is known about the now-extinct intermediary species.

In Issue 04: Continuum of Atrium, we explore the past, the present, the future, and how all are inextricably entangled with each other. Within this issue, you’ll find stories of climate change’s slow but sure destruction of the earth, poems illustrating the life cycle of butterflies, musings on how relationships change over time, and much more - all coupled with beautiful illustrations from our artists.

As always, thank you for your continued support, and I hope you enjoy this issue.

With love,

Gabriella Smith Editor-in-Chief, Atrium

Continuum

Turritopsis Dohrnii

Immortal, they called you

A delicate creature of mesoglea;

Jellyfish, they dubbed you

Encased in a soft epidermis, translucent to your core

You were unable to hide, Battered by waves and torn by the tidal pull.

Medusa, they called you

The final form of life before death and uncertain reincarnation; You are granted another chance – only if you are able to withstand

The sea’s weathered malice. Your tendrils grasp blindly

Searching for a ledge, a hand, Something to tether onto; And yet the current is still as unrelenting As it was eons before.

Oh Medusa,

Brainless and heartless as you are

Why do you insist on coming back? They shun you. Your prayer goes unanswered. What is it that you’re searching for?

Oh Medusa,

Eternity is a long time to be put on hold for salvation.

Let’s take a rest, For the seafloor beckons sweetly; Perpetuate this everlasting continuum And return to your youth, Innocent and fettered to the corals; Let this round at life be just another tally in the sand And have the waves efface the markings That you do not wish to remember.

Immortal, they called you

A polyp hidden in the reef’s embrace, Is it a curse that you have to spend Such an eternity in Poseidon’s domain?

Marred with the ghostly scars of lives past, I wonder if it’s a blessing That you are unable to think Unable to feel.

Medusa, they called you

Unbound by time, Yet shackled by the sea. With each death, You’re granted a new chance at life – Olympus owes you that much at least.

breath/breadth of time

WrittenbyMelDueñas IllustratedbyCarmenBerry

metamorphosis of time and space, you who evolves this body from the first gasp for air to the fizzle of my dying breath: your rhythms make an instrument of me.

I cry when my lungs are so new that I don’t know how to use them; I cry when growing pains stretch my toddler body into another year; I cry when hormones shapeshift my chemistry just when I thought I had this figured out. and I laugh when gravity throws me off my balance; yell when anger demands the most from me; sigh in between the solitary moments; sing when I am open—

—until this breath returns to zero and I wait to be respun: new energy new pulse new spectrum of emotions, through which you, metamorphosis of time and space, build a lifetime for a body.

Uncovering the Unexpected

WrittenbyMorganeFiorentini

IllustratedbyGraceGarcia

The sun illuminates her reflection, tracing along the burgundy freckles of the fruit of last summer’s month-long pottery class. At first glance, this vessel is only the product of a few hours, a few disdainful comments when I couldn’t successfully cone up and down, a few drops of sweat as the one fan in the far corner of the studio works overtime trying to combat a room that felt more like a hot pilates class than a calming clay workshop. But its story is much more involved – the combination of an interstellar explosion and extreme luck.

Though their forms are very dissimilar, one once breathing and the other simply existing, they share similar beginnings, experiences, and trajectories. Like the continuous rhythm of clay as it spins endlessly atop a wooden wheel, their lives are intertwined within each other—colored, chipped, and molded by each and every experience.

My nonna was the product of generations, billions of years on Earth that all merged together to permit her birth and sustain the life she had. She was an old soul with an ambitious, loving, and down-to-earth air about her. She was a collector of any and all things, and walking through the narrow door of her small bedroom invited me to play fortune seeker. Every-so-often, hidden behind well-positioned family photos and stacks of completed sudoku books, I would spot some form of art: her mother’s jewelry, a book she had held onto throughout the decades she graced the planet. Her voice was raspy with age, her movements slower as cancer had raged throughout her body. But I couldn’t tell.

I never got the chance to show my grandmother the handheld vase I had spent six long weeks of continuous trial and error on. But, somehow, lost in the reality that she lived over five thousand miles away and I hardly got to see her in person, it reminds me of her—the cracks and chips along the walls of my sculpture that almost made me consider restarting entirely when seen through a different lens became carvings of small flowers, like how her .. became stronger as her body weakened. I see my grandmother through this vase.

Budding Toad

IllustratedbyShailaSendan

Butterfly

WrittenbyNivedithaSukesh

IllustratedbyGraceGarcia

She launches into each puddle as the rain brushes her baby strands of hair with the gentlest touch, Her excitement evident from the pure gleeful giggles as the water splashes all over her.

It’s day zero for little Rani. She’s out from the hospital, from the continuous treatments of radiation, meds, and vomit. She’s out.

And for little Rani, it’s the first chance to see the world. To see the continuum of life. The other half of the world. For little Rani, it’s her chance to fly free.

As the rain slowly fades, putting on a show for the little girl, and her face tilts up to the warm caress of the sun… She feels the slightest tickle on the nose.

Rani’s eyes squeeze shut for a moment before she slowly opens her eyes. There, on the tip of her nose, sits a gorgeous monarch butterfly, slowly opening and closing its wings. Rani freezes under the sun, her heart thudding with anticipation.

But she won’t move, closing her eyes and letting the moment wash over her…

Being a patient was never heroic to little Rani. It was a continuous and lonely experience that Rani wanted–no, needed, to escape.

To fly away from.

Days on end, fighting her own body and cocooned into a tight bleak hospital bed, Rani yearned for a break from the monotony of a dying patient.

But this monarch, this free entity, represened the new potential of what continuum could mean for little Rani.

She was reborn. She had new lungs that finally fluttered in tune with her body.

A new energy to explore the flowers of the world.

For little Rani, this was the precious continuum of life.

In Perpetuity

WrittenbyKristenLi

IllustratedbyCarmenBerry

He was brighter than the moon, the sun, and light itself. Almost holy in his brilliance. In your dreams you meet him again and you know he is dead because he is dull, his colors muted like in those last days, culled at the edges as he lay shrouded in sterile white, a tomb. Around you is a sea of tall grasses, dark and endless. The sky is a bright gray, a blankness that stretches far into the distant horizon, emanating with cold light–dreamlike, hazy in its intangible neutrality.

A stillness settles over the plains and it is silent save for the faint rustling of leaves in the distance, the shifting of grasses as they waver in the breeze.

He stands amidst the field, waist-deep in the grass, facing you. The ghost of a smile flitting across his lips, brown eyes dark, endless crescents on a face as placid as moonlight cast in flitting shadows. There lies an infinity between you–even as he stands only a breath away–and even when your hands itch, your fingers twitching just so with the memory of his warmth, you force yourself to not reach for him.

You’d never known what to do with your hands. In those last days you didn’t know where to put them because every touch rippled across years of memory all at once. When you reached to wipe the tears away during your visits, you were brushing the bangs out of his eyes in spring rains again, when the two of you were soaked to the bone and sheltering under a dilapidated, abandoned bus stop. You were rubbing circles into his back as he coughed harshly, incessant apologies falling from his lips (always sorry, always so self-effacing) as specks of blood stained the sterile sheets a dark, aching red. You were by his side watching the rain fall outside, fingers laid atop his wrist to feel the pulse. He blurs into everything and nothing all at once, memories bleeding into each other like watercolor.

In your dreams, he laughs as he throws his arms outwards, as if embracing the entire world, clouds looming behind him like towering mountains of snow. And when you move forwards tentatively, a moth drawn to a burning flame, drawn to incineration, the ghost of his touch brushes your skin, tugging at the tubes in his arms, his lungs rattling with effort.

Despite it all, you couldn’t ever find it in yourself to say goodbye, the words catching in your throat like a foreign object, not even in those last days.

You close the distance between you, infinity crushed and falling apart like pieces of shattered glass, all of time coalescing into one point sharp enough to pierce through skin, arms clutching him tightly like he’s a lifeline. Close enough to merge, intertwined.

His eyes flicker with knowing, a small smile tugging at the corners of that mouth flecked with blood.

Just say goodnight, he whispers, in the field, in the hospital, in that bus stop under pouring rain.

Goodnight, you say.

Adjourned

Writtenby DivyaVenkataraman

IllustratedbyKevinWolf

Above our world, so far away, A distant observer can only wait, For nothing can be done, as day by day, Our world, the Earth, meets its fate.

Both blue and green, once beautiful and bright, Covered with trees and life alike, Now is sheltered in an endless night, Only death and despair allowed to strike.

The observer shakes their head in dismay, For the humans don’t stop, causing more shame, As their actions are the one that have caused this decay, A continuum that ends in vain.

The observer flinches at the human way, With rivers dry and forests ablaze, The jarring symphony of fossil fuels and falling trees, Producing greenhouse gasses and smoke so gray.

Glaciers weep as oceans rise, Mountains crumble and ice caps leak, Yet despite all this, no one helps, Ignoring the hand the world’s been dealt.

Summer, winter, fall, and spring Are no longer felt as times distinct, As temperatures rise they only bring A slow destruction making everything extinct.

And through all this, the observer must watch, Unable to fix what humans have brought, Solemnly watching this cycle of botch, As the Earth fades into only a thought.

As the observer finishes narrating the tale of the Earth, The silence is loud as the lesson is learned, For humanity has killed everything of worth, A simple story now adjourned.

Temporal Kaleidoscope: Microscopy Through the Ages

WrittenbySarahAdler

IllustratedbyAlysonYee

1665.

Three lenses, a stage, a spotlight to see Slices of a cork, Small pores tunnelling like honeycomb What was this tree? Just pores, Or cells - “the first miscroscopical pores Robert Hooke ever saw”

1800.

Tree rings swirl like strings of time

Oak limbs branched out and firs polished

And plated to understand the oblique slices

Of age, “firm and durable” said Van Leeuwenhoek

Microbiology of seeds, skin, bones, scales, shells, spermatozoa

And the serendipity of revelation of the miniscule 1893.

Köhler convenes with microscopy, Rings of light instead of the glowing glare

Of zirconia light and Auer gas lights,

An evenly lit cell of golden green as everything begins to clear

1852-1941

Stoke’s fluorescence adds a bright glow to each cell

Antibodies clinging like neon wings, with Coon’s immunofluorescence

Joseph von Gerlach’s nucleus and cytoplasm gleam And silver staining allows samples to scream with shades

2024

Green fluorescent protein from Aequoreavictoria allow proteins to present

Like fluorescent figments of the wildest imagination 50 million magifications multiply from electrons flying through like little beams of energy breaking through barriers

And all we wonder is what else is there to see?

Deoxyribonucleic Artwork

IllustratedbyDanielleGomez

You are 4.5 billion years of evolution, 550,000 years of ancestry, and 1 in 8 million possible chromosome combinations. You are a work of art.

The Acolyte

WrittenbyCrystalChavez

IllustratedbyCelesteEdell

Muse, lead me now to the beginning, wherein Chaos ruled the heavens, and man— diligent, ruinous man—was but a distant dream in the Godmind.

The cathedral of eternity, still and constant, does not exist. This is true. One theory: a spark, a fragment, a speck of dust; It was a flash of light that took the whole universe and made chaos order—formed, at last, the ancestors of our earliest days in a great clash of noise and color.

Not a spark in Prometheus’s fire nor a vision branded in Athena’s eye.

Studies drawn by the minds of our strange philosophers, Scientists, say we came from the sea, where life was first possible. It is visible in the script of our being, made not by the hands of an omnipotent sculptor but by the conditions of our upbringing—survival. Drypithecus, Australopithecus, Homo Habilis, Homo Erecuts, Homo Sapien…

Let me hear not of human Tragedy.

We have grown from our mistakes.

O’ Muse, make me deaf with the harmony of a chorus and the wolfsong of immortality— for Reason is corruption.

Reason is conversation without bloodshed. Archimedes, Hypatia, Michael Servetus, Giordano Bruno, Andreas Vesalius, Galileo Galilei… Hang your head.

More than Pandora’s delicate touch or the corrosive edge of rage, the mind, electric, sways the glutton.

Innovation is, indeed, a tempting mistress. She leads, and we follow, running, stumbling, and crawling towards an ever-distant horizon. This is good, and this is bad. One day, perhaps irrationally, I fear the edge will come too soon and too fast, and the fall will be great.

Archimedes, Hypatia, Servetus—we, too, have run crusades.

Sing, Muse, and let us forget our first transgression: the blasphemous son and the Heavens.

To live and to die, reaching for the stars, is the curse humanity is condemned to. Masters of our own fate—fallen not to sickness or nature or the invisible hand of fortune—and bound to happiness. Curiosity is a permanent and troublesome Sojourner, but knowledge is not a sin. Stars, not bright eyes in the dark fabric of Uranus— the warm lights of home, but individual bodies: independent men, fires, self-assured.

Fires, distant. Our imagination runs wild with possibilities. We can, we can, we can—we will, we will, we will, someday in the not-so-distant future, piece together the last fragments of our ancient mystery.

Veil the looking glass, whose shining made us flesh and bone; return to immovable Earth, that bastion Gaia, children of prayer, children of stone.

Evolution in Clay

IllustratedbyAlysonYee

Custos Animarum Amissarum

WrittenbyKateTrout

IllustratedbyNesyahGalatin

The day is hot, and the burning sun scorches the earth. Heat shimmers upwards into the blindingly blue sky. A lone dog wanders the ruins, padding over searing stone in the sun-beaten streets, tongue lolling out of her mouth. She salivates, searching for water.

She has made her home in a city frozen in time, a beating heart amidst the rubble and decay. Slowly she makes her way through the dust-painted debris, finding blessed shade in the bellies of ancient temples. Other strays panting in the shadows growl at her as she passes, but they make no move to attack.

She slinks her way out onto a street that’s bustling with tourists. A woman in a flowing blue sundress stoops down and coos at her, holding out a hand for her to sniff. When the dog does so, tentatively, the woman smiles and babbles something at her in a human tongue. She reaches into her bag and pulls out a bottle of water that glints in the sun. The woman unscrews the cap and pours it out for her to drink, and the dog laps it up greedily. She wags her tail, a silent prayer of thanks.

Soon enough, a particularly large crowd ambles by, staring around at the ruins in awe. She follows them, hoping for food. They arrive at one of the exhibits, and she stares through the gaggle of chattering tourists at the twisted plaster skeletons behind the display glass. They are forever writhing, forever futilely shielding their faces with their hands. Agony written in stone, immortalized in their death throes. There is a dog, like her, body contorted in anguish. And somehow, she knows. She

carries memories that are not her own.

A red-hot blazing inferno tears the sky in two, as looming death-clouds of smoke blot out the sun. The earth shakes and heaves with the wrath of the gods. People run and scream and pray, locking together in a desperate final embrace. They are stripped bare, flayed alive, flesh seared and lungs full of fire, hair burnt away to nothing. She feels the heat and breathes the choking smoke and hears the strangled cries. She fights against the surging tide of ash and sulfur that sweeps everything away.

But it has always been too late. There is nothing left.

As night falls, the tourists gradually disappear, piling back into their rattling buses and their sputtering cars. Darkness settles over the land, and lingering shadows

come to life in the pale light of the moon. Vesuvius looms overhead like a giant in slumber, and the twinkling stars dance in the ebony sky. Lonely souls emerge from the ragged earth, wailing a mournful tune that is carried on the wind. These shades fill the streets, and Pompeii is alive again.

There are mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, priests and soldiers and craftsmen and farmers. She watches, and she listens, for they are not invisible to her. She chases after the ghostly children, barking playfully, and they run with her, giggles ringing out in the still night air. The spirits sing an ancient hymn in a language long dead, and she sings with them, howling to the stars. Some laugh, some weep, some dance, some raise their hands in prayer. She stays with them as they remember the lives they once knew.

A ghostly woman in a flowing blue stola stoops down to greet her like an old friend, holding out a hand. She has eyes of earth and hair of ocean mist. The dog lays her head in her spectral palm and closes her eyes, and feels her warmth across the millennia.

In the morning, they are gone. The gentle light of dawn falls on empty buildings and barren streets. The wind whistles through the ruins, no longer carrying the song of the dead. The mobs of tourists return with their flashing cameras and their widebrimmed hats, and Pompeii is alive, but not in the way it used to be.

Once again, like every day, she pads through the scorching-hot streets, searching for shade. She settles in the shadow of a building that was once a home, many hundreds of years ago. She rests her head on her paws and lets out a world-weary sigh.

Maybe, someday, someone else will know. For now, she wanders the crumbling time-worn city alone, following in the footsteps of the old gods.

IllustratedbyCarmenBerry