Nightshade

SUMMER 2024

THE AUBURN CIRCLE

1

"As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence." - President Dwight Eisenhower

2

When coming up with the idea for this summer edition of the Circle, there was no shortage of issues to consider. It seems that in any place you look, there lies some problem to solve, some unanswered question being asked over and over with no solution in sight, like a middle school algebra class.

And like my experience in algebra, I instead found my attention drawn to books, as it always tends to.

I’ve always been an avid reader, which may be obvious from my position as the head of a literary arts magazine. But they’ve always been a safe haven for me, an escape from my reality as a queer kid in rural Mississippi. And this is no original experience by any means—since we were drawing on cave walls, humans have found solace and comfort in art and literature.

There’s a reason why most of the world’s population was illiterate until a few centuries ago: art has power. It always has. It always will.

I think about the banning of books in schools, being ripped off shelves and from students’ hands by the dozens. I think about a kid who didn’t always have money to buy fresh books and relied on the school library. I think about how he would’ve turned out if he didn’t have access to that oh-so-important literature. I think about, and fear, what the world would be like. Sorry, what it will be like.

The silencing of art is not new. The banning—or burning—of books is not new. So this issue of the Circle is dedicated to artists. All of them. It’s dedicated to art, and to literature, and to the freedom to create what we yearn to. It’s a celebration of human creativity, not diminished by law or by norm. I named it Nightshade, after the family of plants all assumed to be poisonous without realizing they’re everywhere: from petunias and potatoes to tobacco and belladonna. We cannot survive without the nightshade family, just like art, no matter how dangerous.

I hope you enjoy this issue of the Auburn Circle. Thank you to all of my wonderful staff who helped put it together, and as always, thank you, reader, for supporting Auburn’s art. On my watch, it will not be silenced.

Cole Anderson, Editor-in-Chief

3

4

A Meditation | poetry Spotlight | visual arts

6 7

plane lanes | visual arts A Poem is a Prayer | poetry

8 9

Into my own | visual arts I can't write a poem today | poetry

10 11

Andromeda | visual arts Setting Sun | visual arts

12 13

Indulgent | visual arts leave me unpeeling | poetry

14 15

Across Campus 3 | visual arts I want to love you like mercury | poetry

16 17

I wish I could hold onto you forever | prose Ode to Childhood | visual arts You've Been Here | visual arts

18 19 21

Spatial Surface 1 | visual arts Spatial Surface 2 | visual arts

22 23

perhaps not all are meant for companions | poetry Chrysalis | visual arts

24 25

Poem about Maggots | poetry Back we Think | visual arts

26 26

Summer Skies | visual arts Yacht Club | visual arts

28 29

Illustrations sans titre 2, 3, 4 | visual arts

30

Smiling at a reflection in the bus window | poetry Something New | visual arts Something New 4 | visual arts

32 33 33 5

Caid Pitman A wicker lamp-shade swings back-and-forth.

The shadows it casts are confused, muddling.

I knew a woman once, some time ago.

Who challenged how I thought, what I felt.

Her hands struck out, and her eyes betrayed a fierce fire.

There’s claim that we are stardust, that we are past made manifest; that we are sin and ego and ape.

There’s claim that we are poor, decrepit souls staring at a wall.

Watching shadows.

That we’ll never see what reality really is.

That we can never know another person; our connections as impossible as the infinitude of space between us.

I watched so often, seen but not heard.

The murk of my surroundings illuminated only now-and-then; as the lamp-shade swings.

I wonder why they can’t all be true.

Why, with the way the light played across her face, her still bright eyes couldn’t contain the memory of a long dead sun.

Her thoughts always laid just beyond the veil where I could never reach.

Yet she remains unique amongst the shadows, beautiful and strong and delicate.

And still all too human, still the need to eat and breathe and do all those things we animals must do.

The scars that ran along her arms, the veins which flowed beneath her skin; more real than reality is, sometimes.

6

Spotlight Greta Schantz

7

Plane Lanes Aidan Berry

8

Abbey Quinn

I have never known a God In any way I could call familiar, But I often stare at the mirror At the girl I am and once was, And wonder who conceived her; Who placed me in my mother’s womb?

And I think: How can I know God If I do not know myself?

There are questions I can never answer, But I try my hand in poems.

First drafts scrape at the unknowable depths Around me– Within me.

But it’s not the words on the page I seek; It’s the ones that have slipped through the cracks.

Beyond language, beyond comprehension Is a heartbeat, A simple pulse of life, Of experience.

And I think a poem is a prayer– A question With no answer, A plea to the universe: Come give me meaning, tell me where I fit in this world.

9

10

Cole Anderson

‘cause every word’s a trial I lose, fingers hesitating over faded keys, jury ruling it’s shit. I don’t feel any big feelings, now— by which I mean I feel the absence of feeling, like one of those Socratic paradoxes that will end up with hemlock in my throat.

The words are stuck in my throat.

I type them anyway.

I’d choose Sisyphus and his rock over stripping myself bare, covered only in ink stains from revision after revision after revision.

So I can’t draft a stupid poem, so what?

Do I owe words dug up, scrounged and polished from the roiling ocean behind my eyes, for someone to read and say damn before returning to Love is Blind?

Why fight to smear ink on paper when nothing my hands type will convert any believers, amend any wrongs? Must I sway the masses to some grand unified theory?

I’m one of the infinite monkeys, fingers clacking at random, waiting for enough letters to string into Hamlet.

But all I can do is this, so I sit, and I type, and I type, and I wait.

Into My Own Johanna Kunz

11

Andromeda Jimmy Fincher

12

Setting Sun Isabella Nelson

13 13

Indulgent Isabella Nelson 14

LEAVE ME UNPEELING do you eat an orange with the same care / check for dissatisfactions / feel it up real nice / squeeze it between sweaty palms / crying for a cause to perform what is ordinary / do you wish you could pull each string of a body made wrong / thread sewn in the places you cannot mold / marinating on the vine / full ripe and blushing / only to hear not this and change that / like a good tester does / like a helpful lover does / like a jealous mother does / stay hungry wishing you talked me down before i got this way / when i could forgive being swallowed / diced / unwhole / back when sour and sweet were just flavors to suit the palette of an anxious world teaching the right way to savor the bitter.

Livi Welch

15 15

16

I WANT TO LOVE YOU LIKE MERCURY I want to love you like mercury The space between us narrowing like blue to green Right around my finger, tied up in your hair I’ll tell you your name and hold you right there Like an endless note Like the April air Chris Barraza

Across Campus 3 Alexander Hooks

17

IIWISH WISH IICOULD COULD HOLD HOLDONTO ONTOYOU YOU FOREVER FOREVER I spend a lot of time driving to nowhere in particular when the semester closes. In Auburn, there’s really nowhere to go; after ten minutes you’ve left the city and there’s a stoplight that's perfectly placed to turn red right when you get up to speed, so it feels like you’re in a bathtub with water sloshing back and forth against the sides, head rocking in the waves. The roads back home are smoother and have a drawl like the people that occupy them; I forget where I am and where I want to be and follow the tail lights ahead.

I think a lot about all the people I’ve loved and all the time I’ve collected and stored. Outside my window the honeysuckle is blooming, and it reminds me of when I was little. My mom and I would go out to the backyard and pluck off a flower, slowly pulling the stamen to draw out the tiniest drop of nectar and touching it to our tongues. And when you taste it, the golden-white petals kiss your nose with the faintest scent of sweet rain.

Last week I had lunch with two missionaries from Seoul – Carol and Joseph. Fried rice with 18

Ode to Childhood Clarisse Nacilla

Chris Barraza

egg and kimchi, covered in ketchup (per their request). I thought it was strange and a little ironic that they would fly 14 hours to be missionaries in Alabama of all places, but I thought it was brave to be so vulnerable.

As we finished, Carol emptied her bag of Korean snacks onto the table and I fished out a yakgwa – a soft cookie no bigger than a quarter with raised bumps along its edge, so when you put it in your mouth, it rolled along your tongue like a mosaic of tiny riverstones. The same stones that lined the creek behind the house of a best friend I haven spoken to in years.

The yakgwa tasted exactly like a Krispy Kreme blueberry cake donut – the exact same one my mom and I would always get for my dad when I was little. Everyone else wanted chocolate glazed, but he always got this blueberry cake one.

It was always so dry but also kind of damp, like clothes that are so cold you can’t tell if they’re wet or not. And it had this thin layer of glaze on it that did nothing for the dryness except make your mouth water, so you’d think it was better than the chocolate glazed or hot n’ fresh origi-

nal my mom ordered. When I was little, I would request a blueberry cake donut so we could share in that experience, despite not really liking it. I sat there chewing on the yakgwa remembering all this saying, “It tastes like a donut!” Everyone agreed, but it didn’t really taste like just a donut; it was specifically that blueberry one, despite its lack of any fruit flavor whatsoever. But how can I explain that this quarter-sized cookie tastes like a blueberry donut? I finished it and made a large circle with my hands so they could understand in their broken English. “If it was this big, I would eat the whole thing.” They laughed, agreeing it was good. That one little bite was enough.

Enough to conjure something that is endlessly forgotten and returned to me.

There’s a moment in the movie All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt that says, “It doesn’t end or begin… it just changes form.” The honeysuckle outside my back window is starting to wilt and melt into the foliage, just like the wisteria did in March and the goldenrod did in October and the maypops did in August. I told Carol and Joseph bye and made plans to go see them in Seoul, each of us knowing they would never be fulfilled. Do the flowers ever really wilt? Or do they change form? Maypops bearing fruit to be eaten by the gulf fritillary caterpillars that unfold their orange wings with the sunrise on their way to the coast. Goldenrod stems cascading over the hill that pours water onto the street when it rains too hard. The trees dripping so heavily in wisteria that their branches become obscured by purple blooms and get lost in the blueness of the sky.

I drive to the other side of town to pick up medio-

cre sushi and watch the sun set between longleaf pines, still listening to the same songs I did when I was 14 – "Ribs" by Lorde. When I was younger, I used to take this big striped picnic blanket and my speaker outside at dusk and watch the sky deepen to that song. Somehow at 14 the line “It feels so scary getting old” resonated with me, and unsurprisingly, it still does.

I would lie on the ground – still warm from the summer sun – and think about people I now wouldn’t recognize as the air became brisk with a silent combativeness. I’d think about how timelines intertwine and pull apart as the sky turned from orange to blue to black. Then, I’d light an old citronella candle that had probably expired and seemed to attract more mosquitoes than it repelled and watch the stars come out, looking for constellations I still don’t know by name. Something about their arrangements seemed familiar, so I would point to one in my mind and think, her face looks like someone I used to know.

And as I drive, the sky turns from blue to purple and then to black just like it always has. And the streetlights around my apartment are covered by oak leaves, so their light filters onto the asphalt in jagged lines. It is scary to get old. To see everything transform around you into something uncertain. Something that will come back like the sky always turns back to blue. Never in the same hue.

I think I’ve mourned the passing of time for as long as I can remember. I think about the people in my first drawing class — a dozen faces simmered down to just a couple that I can still remember — and miss the way we would stay up 19 19

till midnight finishing a piece together. I miss the guys I used to swim against. After every race, smiling and talking about our futures and goals that were never fulfilled in the ways we dreamed they would. I miss the people I’ll never see again. All the people who’d tell me they could hear me coming from my laugh echoing down the quiet floor of the library.

I sometimes joke that I have low standards for the people I love. That someone can be nice to me one time and I’ll give them a thousand chances to break my heart. How lucky am I to love like this. How heartbreaking it is to love like this. And maybe I am so full of this pain because I let myself love like this.

20

And so I wander through the town carrying a mixture of emptiness and love and looking for something to hold onto. I’m sentimental like my family raised me to be. I clear off tables in my heart to pile up names and faces and people I’ve just met in an effort to preserve them. And they get buried and smothered by the hands that want them protected. When my great-grandmother died, her house sat for months before my grandmother could open its door. Every time I would visit, she would make tea cakes that were airy and dry and would melt on your tongue. And when my grandmother went to sort her belongings, a batch of stale teacakes sat in the cookie jar on her counter, the lid covered in dust like everything else in that empty house. The old taxidermied animals that used to scare me when I was little and the miniature coke bottles my cousin and I fought over when she died. Once, when my mom and I missed

her, we tried to make her tea cakes. But the recipe wasn’t written for anyone but her, and they came out of the oven as puddles of sugar and milk the first time. We made batch after batch, delicately adjusting the ratio of flour to liquid until they came out just like we remembered. And when we looked at each other, I could tell she had the same ache I do.

The ache that prevented me from eating the last bite of my food or peeling a sticker off its backing because I knew I could no longer keep it safe. Like when my dad and I say bye on the phone and neither one hangs up. How we sit there in silence waiting for the other one to break the stillness.

And maybe I am just a form of my parents and grandparents and those no one remembers – changed and returned to them. Maybe my ancestors walked across dusty fields as the sun set behind them, watching the same sky I do with a longing to remain in its orange glow. Only to yearn for the time passed when it turns to black.

I go walking with no direction in the afternoon sometimes, losing track of time as I watch the kudzu take over the side streets.

They’re undiscerning in their sprawl, climbing up oaks and metal poles. Power lines covered and sagging under the thick blanket of invasive vines. And when it gets too late and I’m stuck miles from home with the last remnants of light, the kudzu softens like a dark green duvet – the same one that covers my bed – over the trees. I wish I could crawl inside and preserve myself in this moment in time, but the heat is rising from the red clay

You've Been Here Allison Fincher

dirt and being replaced by the chill that April refuses to forget, and I must get home before I lose track of where the sidewalk ends and the asphalt begins.

In my bed, the duvet looks like those vines covering my body. I think about the people I have grown to love – those I have planted roots in and covered with my arms. I won’t cry, but inside a chasm recognizes its emptiness just like it has for my entire life. There’s a hunger I hope you never know – to hold something so tightly that it turns to dust. I’m afraid I will forget what car they drive and the way the sun reflects in their eyes like I always have. I’m afraid I will forget their faces; looking at a picture and not recognizing their smile like I do now. I’m afraid their love will change form like it always does and be lost like seafoam at my feet. I just want to hold onto something forever, but there is no such thing. Waves crash into an immovable object and slide back into the sea. I crash into the walls like the afternoon

sun and slip down into the floor. The places where I stood slightly indented in the carpet – a million little things I cannot touch.

And yet it always returns in its changed form.

The wisteria comes back in white clover. The sunflowers grow up from where the birds let them fall. Love enters endlessly in ways that cannot be written down; there are too many to count. Nets are cast and candles lit and stars named. When I walk outside and the air is perfect, I always check the temperature, making note to remember what degree it is for the future. But I never do, and every time I am surprised and in awe that a day could be so perfect. My phone is full of pictures of the most beautiful flowers and skylines and smiles, but I never remember to look at them. And when I do, they look foreign. They come back again and again, and I take a photo each time to be loved and forgotten.

21 21

22

Spatial Surface 1, 2 | Aidan Berry 23

Livi Welch

PERHAPS NOT ALL ARE MEANT FOR COMPANIONS to have a body pushed next to yours on a squeaky couch that notes every nervous shift you take to be far, to be near; to learn the way a pair of jeans can hold thighs, hips, and ankles when kicked off at the day’s end; to know anger in organization, we will speak of this later; for now we separate; to sit among others, to sit in conversation lusting for the mind of someone starting to know you best, starting to know your changes.

Me, I know my love grows on a summer vine; a hesitant bloom that asks the right questions before slinking over the wall. bring it out of me, mold me out of that sour slush. test me each turn of spring before I am right; visit the soil I came from, see it as my twin, though I grapple for another freedom.

See it in a togetherness; a warm breath on a bare back an echo of love, of yes.

24

Chrysalis Collin Crowder

25

Caid Pitman

POEM ABOUT MAGGOTS “As” plays on the radio, the car chiming softly as its door is left open.

The birds are singing while the breeze moves through the trees.

Branches rattle.

A few houses down, someone has hung a windchime in the arms of a poplar tree.

There’s a buzz in the air.

Flies swarming around a corpse against the curb.

Unknown flesh and bone; decaying meat and fur.

The smell is dense.

Sick. Sweet.

My best friend moved here recently.

This place is new to me.

New sights, new sounds, new smells.

The neighbor has cut their grass.

Down the street, someone has taken an auger to their yard, the earth has been freshly upturned.

There’s a barbecue place right down the road, I can see the smoke billowing black just a block away.

It’s strange how smells mix into a single, unknowable aroma.

“A fragrant offering;” like a sacrifice, a pyre,

or a pillar of fire.

My friend is a musician; living his life amongst melody and theory, a life filled with beauty I could never hope to understand.

He and I come from similar places, of hardship, and hardheadedness; rooted in hymnals and communion.

Yet different in more ways than we are similar.

26

Back we Think Jimmy Fincher

“I hate maggots,” he says; something like dread pulling on his tone.

His hands moving,

he squirms just a bit.

Their tiny bodies wriggle, their mouths open and close;

never quite in sync.

They thrive in their own,

unsavory little way.

We are creatures of motion, of noise and fragrance, rarely sedentary.

In this, all things agree.

The wind rises, the clouds roll, the sun rises, the moon falls, people get up, and leave their past behind, and flies buzz around a

rotting thing that was, once.

I watch as it writhes and squirms with the first vestiges of life, made new.

Perhaps they too sing a melody, something sweet and sickly.

Unknown and unknowable.

Something lost to us like smoke into the sky, or the momentary fire behind impassioned eyes.

I think I smiled.

Saying, “It’s ok.”

“I don’t mind”

27 27

28

Yacht Club Johanna Kunz

Summer Skies Isabella Williams

29 29

30

Illustrations sans titre 2, 3, 4 Carter Zane 31 31

SMILING AT A REFLECTION IN THE BUS WINDOW Someone’s staring back at me from the sun-spotted glass across the aisle Superimposed in a patch of white clover, I could catch a glimpse of him in the blue, a light-washed denim speckled sky reflecting in the seafoam, and sunrise melting in an eager blur

Chris Barraza

32

Something New Something New 4 Alexander Hooks

33

As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence.

As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence.

As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence.

As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence.

As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence.

As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence.

As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence.

34

Colophon

The Auburn Circle Vol. 50 Iss. 3, Summer 2024 edition was produced by the Circle staff at Auburn University in Auburn, AL. The Circle is advised by Britain Bowen. The magazine is composed of 36 pages in full color, including the front and back cover. All body copy is set in SchoolBook Regular pt 10 and SchoolBook Italic pt 10. Author tags are set in SchoolBook Regular pt 8 and SchoolBook Italic pt 8. Headline fonts were set in Railroad Gothic ATF. This edition of the Auburn Circle was produced using Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. All written and visual content was contributed by students enrolled in Auburn University in the summer semester of 2024.

All contributions and added elements were designed and placed by the graphic design team: Lauren Jernigan.

HOW TO SUBMIT At the beginning of each semester, the Auburn Circle takes submissions for that semester's publication. Categories include fine art, interior design, fashion design, graphic design, industrial design, poetry, prose, photography, architecture, music, or any other documentable form of art or literature. Please visit auburncircle.submittable.com or our website auburncircle.com for more information.

TheAuburnCircle AuburnCircle AuburnCircle 35

36