Volume 49 Issue No. 2

Front Cover: Tork Lewinsky - Abby Henderson

Anna E. Ulrey Editor-in-Chief

Olivia Blanton Managing Editor

Audrey Womack Prose Copy Editor

Bryce Hampton Prose Copy Editor

Yesha Vyas Prose Copy Editor

Robert Rawlins Prose Copy Editor

Liz Murray Poetry Copy Editor

Caylin Kyzer Poetry Editor

Kaitlin Harris Prose Editor

Elaina Solano Submissions Editor

Emma Lewis Digital Manager

Faith Williams Art Editor

Cheyenne Hollowell Website Coordinator

Hannah Enskat Art Copy Editor

Savannah Williams Art Copy Editor

Dalia Arafat Poetry Copy Editor

Camryn Reese Events Coordinator

Kafui Sakyi-Addo Website Author

Will Cooley Podcast Coordinator

CONTEMPORARY JUICE

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

Dear Reader,

The phrase “contemporary juice” refers to the intricacies which compose life today; it is synonymous with “the essence of now.” It is a celebration of uniqueness and a safe place to be eccentric. Anything that can be labeled as “contemporary juice” might also be labeled “weird.”

Volume 49 Issue No. 2 intends to communicate the essence of contemporary society through highlighting the abnormal, strange, and electrifying elements which compose it.

Thank you to my staff, who stuck with me even when we landed on the theme of contemporary juice; you’ve all left an indelible mark on me. Thank you to Olivia and Emma, who have let me lean on them since the beginning.

Sincerely,

Anna E. Ulrey Editor-in-Chief

Scan to listen to Aura’s staff-curated Contemporary Juice

playlist:

Left: my mother (in her arms)

Right: parentification

(Rust-dyed

Wes

Ladner

Ceramic & Faux Fur)

Bipolar II as Birth Control —A Pantoum

Cheyenne Hollowell

The incandescents flutter, and I’m cold. I know he knows I’m crouched in the shower, shellacked in my cream rinse and baby hairs. I tell myself that I’m not disgusting.

I know he knows I’m crouched in the shower. I hate the faucet, the waiting, the lie I keep telling myself: I’m not disgusting. Twist knob. Pick up soap. Everyone else can.

I hate the faucet, the waiting, the lie he tells me when he says I’ll have babies. Twist knob. Pick up soap. Everyone else can. My body isn’t even a home for me.

He says I’m meant to have babies someday, as if this flesh can be forged into a cradle. My body isn’t even a home for me. The incandescents flutter, and I’m cold.

Huan (Acrylic & Oil on Wood Panel) - Caroline Myers

Multiplicity

Avi Goldberg

TW: Mention of Suicide

1. Bring hydrangeas to his funeral. He finds that roses are played out and tacky, and who are we to question him because he’s gone and never coming back.

2. The goat cheese wrapped in walnut leaves that my grandfather discovered in July of 2014 which has since made its way to every family gathering.

3. That vanilla scented candle that saturates your clothes every time you walk into her house and when you get back, you can still smell it on you. It’s not the regular house smell; it’s vanilla.

4. The cup of coffee that keeps you from killing yourself (P.S. - Maman died today).

5. The taste of the stick after you finish the cherry lollipop—sad that it’s over and cardboard.

6. That little feeling of nerves when the car’s going a little too fast for your liking but you just got into an argument with your mom and you can’t say anything because as per usual she was right and you were wrong and you want to save as much face as you can.

7. The fake flowers sold for 75 USD.

8. The roaring in your ears when you sit in your room and everything is too quiet and you try to put your mind to something else but it keeps getting louder. You try to put something else on to muffle the sound (your phone, the fan, opening a door) and eventually it works but it sounds too electronic to be from your subconscious. What is that thing about ear fluid anyway?

9. The entry in your notes app which is simply titled “There’s not a lot of yogurt in prison.”

10. “What did you get for easter?”

11. “Guys, he’s Jewish.”

Nick Dies and Doesn’t Come Back.

Nicolas Recalde

I have about three garbage bags filled with feathers I’ve stumbled on over the past decade or so. My father told me when I was a child that they were signs from God, but I can’t remember what the sign was exactly. I think it’s something good; I’m just glad that God notices me. I’m too afraid to ask Dad what he meant. So whenever I leave class or go to eat, I’ll sometimes see a feather on the ground: they’re always a mix of white and black. Sometimes they’re mostly black or entirely. Sometimes I get hesitant to pick those up since I’m afraid it could mean something bad, but I usually do so anyway. I always find them on campus. I don’t leave it much, but I never see a feather whenever I do. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I keep the bags near my room door which I leave open when I sleep because I’ll get scared that when I wake up I’ll never get out. Even if I do somehow get the door open, I’m afraid it’ll just loop back into my room. One time I woke up to the door closed and rushed to open it, almost knocking over my roommate who was trying to get to the shower. After that, I could barely look at him again. Whenever I’d hear him coming, I’d rush to close the door.

I’m okay whenever the door is closed during the daytime. I just hate when it’s closed at night. You never know what’ll happen when you’re sleeping.

I often look toward the sky and stare at the cloudless blue parts. I’ll sometimes flex my right arm or ear just to guarantee the future is alright. I’ve been on this earth for nineteen years, and I’m still not satisfied with it yet. I always hope for more. So whenever I can, I try to secure that spot. I hope it works.

Whenever I’m watching videos on my phone, I’ll sometimes hear the quick but faint sound of breathing or some dialogue I don’t like. Then I’ll have to rewind it just to make sure I heard it correctly or to undo the possible fate the video gave me. I sometimes spend minutes doing so, going back ten seconds at a time until I’m satisfied. I don’t want to be stuck here and I’m not taking any chances.

The new YouTube update makes this trickier as you can’t just rewind ten seconds anymore; instead, it either takes you back nine seconds just after the line is said and then you have to go back another ten seconds or so, or it goes back too far, perhaps 11-12 seconds, and you hear another clip you don’t like, so it takes you down this rabbit hole of trying to undo this mistake you made. I know it’ll be worth it eventually, but I can’t deny it really annoys me.

Cowboy Rat (Silkscreen Print) - Abby Henderson

Go Play With Your Dolls (Acrylic & Barbie Accessories on Canvas) - Hannah Levins

Dear Montgomery, Alabama, the Deep South, USA

Susie Paul

Thanks for putting up with me, for your tolerance, courtesy, an ideological foreigner in her own home town. I mean this. I have been known to strew invectives like chaff, behind your backs, in places you won’t see. You can speak more openly, at home here in the land of “look away.” And so you do.

But you smile at me in the grocery store, stoop to collect my spilled change, sweetly mutter over the soaring price of meat we all cook down or grill or fry, teach me how to know the cantaloupe is ripe, the watermelon sweet, a broom straw in your pocketbook, agree our kids are all one tribe, apart from us, in their obsessions, our sons, we moan, especially.

I can’t be sure you are one who dismisses like on like as unnatural, the immigrant a criminal, moms on subsidies a plague of deep dependency spread by a metastasizing fed.

You can’t be sure I am leftish in my leanings, though my clothes are sloppy strange, bohemian; some lipstick and a comb pulled through my hair would serve as an improvement. You do have a sneaking feeling. Who was your mama? you don’t ask. Who is your Jesus? I don’t ask.

Still, thanks for your civility; I answer with mine. This dance, I have decided, is not hypocrisy. I accept your practiced steps as patience. And I do love you of the broom straw spinning, telling of the sweetness we both can read in the red heart.

I’m Perfect Arden Tapp

They sent me to a therapist because I’m perfect. Of course, they didn’t say it in quite the same words, but I knew what they meant. I’m perfect; I’m flawless, so they sent me to a therapist, and then that therapist said I should visit a psychiatrist—I guess I’m just too perfect for one medical professional to handle. I’ve made the rounds before though, this is not my first rodeo. I know what it takes to be perfect and I know how to skirt the line between perfection and insanity.

It’s hard to be perfect; I don’t think people realize just how much work it takes. Hard work too, never easy or simple—if it’s easy you’re doing it wrong. Perfection should never be easy. I think that’s what my therapist doesn’t understand. She just can’t quite wrap her head around how difficult it is to be perfect, so she misjudges all of my hard work. They call my perfection obsessive. They say that it’s unhealthy. I don’t know who lied and told them that perfection should be healthy. Perfection is, by necessity, unhealthy. Haven’t they heard the phrase ‘beauty is pain’? It’s not just about cutting cuticles or brushing through tangled hair. Beauty is perfection and perfection is painful. It should be painful. That is why it is perfection.

I have spent hours, so many hours, inundated with pain. I’m perfect.

Aren’t you proud of me?

Of course, I would never presume to be perfect enough—I don’t want to worry you, I’m still working on my perfection, I will always be working on my perfection—but it would be nice to know that I’m on the right track.

I don’t want to pressure you though! Only answer if you’re comfortable. I wouldn’t want to be greedy or pushy, or give our community a bad name, so let me know if I’m asking too much of you.

Of course it’s also okay if I’m not on the right track; you can be honest with me, I promise. I won’t lose sleep over it—or maybe that’s not the right phrase to use. I’ll definitely lose sleep over it, but that’s by necessity. I don’t sleep, even when my body aches and groans with exhaustion and my mind starts playing tricks on me. I don’t sleep because I know that my dreams will be even worse. I know that I will be awake but not

awake, paralyzed in my bed, staring at my blank white ceiling, and then suddenly I’ll see movement out of the corner of my eye. You get the idea. A living nightmare. You understand. Perfection never rests, and neither do I. It’s by necessity.

My therapist got worried when I told her that. She seemed upset, distraught. I was tempted to tell her about my eating habits, just to see her reaction, but I didn’t in the end. I’m too nervous that she’ll send me to one of those places that sucks all of the perfection out of you.

So instead we talked about my sleeping habits; about my stress. My therapist says that I’m too stressed (as if there’s such a thing) and that it’s not healthy. They keep using that word. “Healthy.” I’m getting tired of it. They always say it as though it’s some revelation. Like it never occurred to me before. Like I’m an idiot, but I’m not an idiot, I’m perfect, and I know that it’s not healthy. I never thought that it was healthy. I wouldn’t be tearing myself apart if it were healthy, wouldn’t be tearing my hair out at the roots if it were healthy, wouldn’t be tearing the skin off of my fingers if it were healthy. Perfection is not healthy.

Perfection is lost hair, and bloody fingers. Sleepless nights and growling stomachs. Perfection is the anxiety that rattles in my brain and screams—shrieks —that I’m not good enough, that I need to work harder, don’t waste time, I don’t need a break, don’t lie to myself, I’m pathetic, I don’t deserve a break, I haven’t worked hard enough yet, I’m not perfect enough yet.

I don’t see why my therapist doesn’t understand, why nobody seems to understand.

All of the pain is worth it to be perfect.

To make you proud.

“Look at me!” I nearly say. “I don’t want to be perfect, I need to be perfect. Look at me! Look at who I am! I have to be perfect in order to be acceptable!” I want to say that, and then I want to laugh, and

then I want to weep because it’s true.

I work all day and I don’t sleep or eat. I toil away and steep myself in so much pain that sometimes I can’t recognize my own eyes when I look in the mirror, but I’m kidding myself. I’m not working to be perfect. I’m working to be acceptable, because you will accept nothing less than perfection from me. Because of who I am. Because of what I am. Queer.

My identity excludes me from the freedom of mistakes or creativity. Each word I write must be faultless, each piece I present must be exemplary, each hero I characterize must be representative of our best qualities. I am not allowed to find beauty in flaws because I must be flawless. I must agonize over every word I put on the page. I must torture myself for my art.

I must be perfect.

And the true irony of it is that I will never be perfect. I will waste away the rest of my days trying to be perfect for you, trying to be enough, but I never will be. If we’re being honest with ourselves, my best shot at perfection is to succeed at something great and die. Dead people are the only perfect people because for as long as they’re alive you’ll always ask for more. As long as they’re alive you will never be satisfied because you know that they still have time to become more perfect. For as long as they are alive they are never perfect enough.

I have spent my whole life being perfect for you, and it will never be enough. I just want to be enough for you. I just want you to be proud of me. Look at how hard I’ve worked for you. Look at how much time I have spent in pain being perfect for you. Months made up of days made up of hours and hours and hours—so many hours being perfect for you. Being in pain for you. Am I enough yet? Am I acceptable?

Are you proud? Will you ever be proud? Or will I die trying to be perfect?

I think we all know the answer.

I think we all know that you want me to die perfect.

I think we all know that I want to die perfect.

I don’t see why my therapist doesn’t understand that. I don’t see why she would rather mourn my perfection than mourn my death.

Yes, I’m tired. I’m tired of being perfect for you. I’m tired of being punished, and punishing myself. I want to eat and sleep without it feeling like a reward. I want to keep my hair and skin intact. I want my mind to be quiet. I’m tired—of course I’m tired.

I feel empty, and paralyzed, and worthless and I want it to end. Of course I want it to end.

But doesn’t she see that it would be worth it?

It would all be worth it to be acceptable. To be accepted. I’ll lay down my life for just a glimpse of “enough.”

The Cat Shits in the Box and I Scoop It. —After “Clara’s Dream” by Thornton Dial

Anna E. Ulrey

The cat shits in the box and I scoop it. I pickle garlic, roots and blistered cloves slung into Walmart bags. You ask to leave the porch light on again, but isn’t the sun gonna be up before you get back? The cat shits in the box and I scoop it. I spewed your clothes across the lawn in technicolor vomit—Clara’s Dream and lit a Roman candle pointed down to consecrate the shit-brown grass beneath. The cat shits in the box and I scoop it. I take the kids to school on Monday; they don’t notice that you’re gone. I go home where the cat shits in the box and I scoop it.

Science of Animals

Ashley Seger

Skin of a frog speaks the strength of its pond

Water with the strength to change a bird’s beak

A sequoias’ rings tell stories of past great lands

Standing taller than any history

How animals were once an exotic prize to hold

Until cures were found deep within their bones

To those with fur and scales, life is simple

Yet they teach man how to see through new eyes

The science that moved man forward

Elegy of the Bottlenose Dolphins

Ron McFarland

We deem ourselves more beautiful by far and smarter than our chunky porpoise cousins, but it’s not their snub-nosed bodies that reek and clutter the coast from Chokoloskee Bay north to Tarpon Springs where each year fewer sponge divers descend to the floor of the Gulf, but our corpses.

Where the Caloosahatchee seeps in slowly, guacamole-green these days, the twirling dinoflagellates tint the waters with decadent palettes. Karenia brevis contributes its ominous red bloom, cloudy from a distance and almost beautiful.

For decades we’ve amused you with our play (if you don’t remember Flipper, look it up). We communicate in merry chirps and squeaks. If we could speak your language, understand your neurotoxins, how they affect your brain, we could perhaps explain you to yourselves.

Fight! Fight! Fight! (Oil on Canvas) - Lawrence Schultz

Swimming (Acrylic & Ink on Canvas)

Rachel Armbrester

Protected Species Ron McFarland

As Florida boys we saw no manatees, only sea cows galumphing along the lagoons or lolling unpresumptively keeping their gray lumpish profiles free of ancient mermaid analogies. These clumsy vegetarians, part fish part mammal, we were told were gentle creatures, early Eocene, known for their long-term memories.

We thought of course of elephants, but Mr. Kline, our science teacher, claimed manatees were mostly loners, claimed they slept half the day mostly upside down and grazed the rest. They simply swam or bumped or oozed along. We never witnessed them stampede. But now we wish devoutly they would get a move on, plow their way out of here,

elude the speedboats, red tide, algae bloom, whatever fate we’ve accumulated for them. Wildlife folks say they’re starving from the loss of native seagrasses, so we’re feeding them wilted lettuce and collards, past prime cabbage. Nigerian guy who plays left wing for us claims in old days the Yoruba believed manatees were human, much wiser, and considerably better behaved than we.

Object Permanance

Kafui Sakyi-Addo

The funny thing about my brain is that it encourages me to forget. Some (doctors) would say that I am lacking some of the essential chemicals that encourage memory.

I have lost:

1. hair bands

2. those earbuds from Walmart that I bought in 5th grade

3. fresh vegetables to the cruel black hole that is the vegetable drawer

4. friendships

5. my favorite pair of overalls

6. time

I’ve found so far that friendships are the most difficult to lose. My brain does this fun thing where if a person or object is not right in front of me, I forget about them. Object permanence, it’s called. Something you develop as an infant but for some people, our brains lose hold of it again. Lack of object permanence (really called inattention) means that you shouldn’t be aware of things that you’ve lost, but there’s still that nagging feeling in the back of your head telling you that something is missing, something has changed. That’s why the end of relationships and friendships hurt so much, whether the natural result of time and growing apart or because of a massive blow up. My lack of object permanence should mean that I forget. Forget the friendship, forget the person, forget the good times and the bad. And yet there is still a part of my brain that holds on, reminding me that there’s now an empty space and that I have no idea how to heal it.

One of the last things my best friend of eleven years said to me was “I felt like you injected race into our friendship knowing we wouldn’t be on the same page, which made our years of friendship kind of fade away.”

When I think about the things she said to me in our last few conversations before we stopped talking, I feel this pit in the bottom of my stomach like every word that I almost said to her, every time that the words died in my throat before I could get them out, they all sunk into my stomach like stones in a river. Maybe a lack of object permanence is a defense mechanism. Maybe it protects me from holding too tightly to the things that I’ve lost. What was I talking about again?

Right, ADHD. Last summer my therapist told me that there are signs that I have inattentive ADHD. I told my mom this after my session and she said, “yeah, I know. I have it too.” This, of course, was news to me. I guess she forgot that it’s genetic, and the irony of a mother with ADHD forgetting to tell her daughter that she probably also has ADHD is not lost on me.

Speaking of forgetting, do you ever wonder if you lose the ability to try new hobbies and careers later in life? My therapist says that the average person changes careers three times in their life, but sometimes I don’t believe her. Do people lose empathy for you experimenting with new creative endeavors when you graduate college? At what point do you stop being allowed to make movies with your friends that don’t really make it anywhere or promise to write a musical with another friend that’ll just sit in an unopened Google doc? How long is that considered acceptable?

One of my more chaotic traits is that I’ll engage in something even kind of creative (play a video game, make a short film, watch a musical, play dungeons and dragons) and make myself really sad thinking that I can’t do it. I’m not the kind of person to do the creative thing as a career. But what if I was?

But then I think about everything my parents went through to give my brother and I the chance to pursue whatever dreams we have (within reason of course, the true fine print of the American dream is stamped right at the bottom of your documentation and says that unless you are unbelievably naturally talented, there will be NO PURSUIT OF CREATIVE CAREERS), and I think about the statistics and the odds and the hustle culture and all signs just point to no.

But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the point of my lack of object permanence is that I forget the parts of my brain that are nervous and I just do it. Maybe bravery for me looks like forgetting there was ever a point where I didn’t say screw it and just do the thing.

I really need to find those overalls. Maybe I should empty my vegetable drawer too. I’m probably not getting the earbuds or friendships back but that’s honestly for the best. Maybe someday I’ll find the words to tell that friend everything that I kept to myself. And maybe I’ll be the kind of person to do the creative thing as a career. Just maybe.

I’ve Always Liked Taking the Stairs.

Jessica Harrison

Things to do, places to see, faces to memorize for easy recall if the need be. I have problems with staying still—without consent, my jaw clenches I know I’m not mad. I’m all about wits. Though, I get a tad perturbed, to procure wasted pigments.

Pristine places irk me, Surprisingly true.

Calm down; obscure the shapes; put your soles on the bench.

Limerence and apocrypha and mute shades of blue I’ll take the stairs this time, to make something new.

Nothing is ever silent, and Nothing is ever-lively. Like dissolves like, Then, the stairs will take me.

Recess Fields (Pencil on Paper) - Jonathan Bolton

Sunday Morning AV Vogt

Your words faltered when the plate shattered on the floor Slipped between your fingers plumed in Kerry Gold

butterslick from the eggs you fried in your mama’s cast iron pan,

a consolation prize when she gave up breathing for Lent. You were silent when the shards dashed across linoleum

yolk still an oozing wound on the floor, skin. How would she have been,

barbed wire tongue rusted over, inherited like the recipes shoved

between yellowed pages and yellowed teeth, You’re no martyr. To be shaken down

by God is a gift. Born sucking on a fat spoon, aren’t you lucky? Cher bebe,

You never knew how good you had it she said, her apron choked with flour and a busted Marlboro

halo around her head, hands punching, pounding beignet dough, the loitering patron saint

of broke back bottle caps and lung cancer. You calculated the fragments of bone around the entry hole

in the glass window, the sodden eyed saints wavering watery patterns across your tight-laced leather shoelaces, too tight to inhale.

The Lord knows when you don’t season your pan, bebe, He knows when you let things stick.

Jonathan Bolton

Engager, Engaging (Pencil on Paper)

Gumpendorfer Station

Marco Etheridge

TW: Mentions of Suicide

The snarl of traffic is an unmoving river of steel. Horns honk and frustration echoes from gray stone façades. An elevated metro line runs above the clogged street, but no commuter trains run down the empty rails. At the neck of the traffic jam is a metro station awash in flashing emergency lights.

Several hundred people are not going anywhere, and Tracy Schafer is one of them. She is ragged after a grueling transatlantic flight. Thirty minutes ago, she dragged herself out of the Vienna airport and into a taxi. Tracy Schafer wants to check into her hotel, soak in a hot bath, and then fall into a very long sleep.

She leans forward into the gap between the driver and passenger seats. The driver glances at her and then shifts his eyes back to the unmoving line of vehicles. His thumbs beat a tattoo against the wheel of the Mercedes.

“Is it always this bad?”

The driver grunts, shakes his head. Hazy from travel, Tracy imagines a bear displaced from some forgotten Eastern European circus. When the man raises his big hands, she sees paws. His voice is gruff and his accent not Austrian.

“Yes, traffic in Vienna is bad, but this is different.”

The queue surges ahead, gains fifty meters, then halts. The metro station blocks out the gray sky above the taxi. Tracy sees the emergency vehicles. The strange subcompact police cars, so different from the squad cars in New York. Two fire trucks and an ambulance.

A group of men dressed in bright uniforms ascends the stairs of the metro station. Two of the men carry an empty wire stretcher between them. No one seems to be in a hurry.

“There, you see?”

The bear-man points at the men carrying the stretcher.

“It is a Selbstmord. What is the word in English? A suicide. When someone throws themself in front of the U-bahn.”

A sharp pang cuts through Tracy Schafer’s veil of fatigue. Memories come fast and hit hard. She pushes them away.

“It’s the same in New York, except we call them jumpers. It happens all the time.”

“Here too. Very Often. You come from New York?”

“Not from New York, but I live there, in Brooklyn.”

“Ah, I know it. Brooklyn Bridge and the Brooklyn Dodgers. I go there someday.”

“Yes, except the Dodgers moved to LA before I was born. Are you from Vienna?”

The bear-driver laughs, shakes his head.

“No, I come from Belgrade. Most taxi drivers here are foreigners. The Vien-

nese call them Ausländer.”

“Same in New York. Most cabbies are from countries you’ve never heard of.”

The driver nods.

“Some things are the same everywhere.”

A distraught man bursts from a doorway, trips on the stone stairs, and sprawls onto the gray Belgian block sidewalk. He sobs into the cold rough stone. He is young and gaunt, wearing only a tee shirt and jeans. His feet are bare.

His hands are skinned raw from the fall, but he does not feel them. People passing on the sidewalk stop and stare. A woman moves as if to help the fallen man. He waves her away with a strangled keening, the sound of a wounded animal. The woman steps backward, hand held to her mouth.

The young man pushes himself up and staggers to his feet. One bloody knee juts through a tear in his dirty jeans. He wavers on the sidewalk as if he will collapse. His cheeks are slick with tears and snot runs from his nose.

His eyes are wide with anguish, staring up at the U-bahn station across four

Cesar Herrejon

mickey’s trifecta (Plaster, Caulk, Cloth, & Soft Pastels on Tar Paper)

lanes of stalled traffic. He opens his mouth and wails.

“Maxie, Maxie! No, no, no! Don’t leave me, Maxie. You promised, you promised you wouldn’t. Maxie!”

The man throws himself off the sidewalk, lurching through the gap between two parked cars. He screams as he runs, an incoherent babble of grief. He’s running blind, eyes fixed on the station above the street.

Dashing into the traffic jam, he collides with an idling car, falls over the hood, and then rolls to the pavement. The driver is frozen wide-eyed behind the windshield.

Clawing at the wheel of the trapped car, the frantic man pulls himself to his feet. His face is a distorted mask. He screams at the quailing driver.

“Out of my way, you piece of shit.”

He kicks a fender, stumbles, almost falls. Then he careens between the cars and into the next lane of vehicles. He climbs over a bumper, leaps into a gap. A crescendo of blaring horns mark his frantic passage. Across the choked street, a policeman cranes his head to see what is happening.

“I’m coming, Maxie! Wait for me, you hear me? Your Jakob is coming. We promised to be together forever. You said so, you swore it. I’ll always be here, Jakob. That’s what you said, Maxie. You can’t leave me here all alone!”

Jacob throws himself forward under the cold gray shadow of the Gumpendorfer station, but his numb feet betray him. He falls face-first into the rear window of a Mercedes taxi. His face flattens against the glass, leaving a distorted smear of mucus and tears as he slides to the pavement.

Inside the taxi, a woman stares, her eyes wide in horror and the memory of another face from long ago. The face of her dead brother.

“What in hell is this?”

The Serbian driver looks over his shoulder at the woman from New York, then past her to the smeared window. He pushes open the driver’s door and heaves himself out. Horns are blaring all around him.

The traffic jam is inching forward, leaving a gap in front of his taxi. He runs around the hood of the car and sees a barefoot kid lying on the pavement under the passenger door. Then the door opens a crack and the woman’s head appears.

Tracy Schafer opens the door until it bumps something, then sticks her head through the gap. He is there, on the pavement, curled into a ball and moaning. She slips her legs through the narrow opening, squeezes out, and kneels on the gray street. She lays a hand on the boy’s shoulder. When she looks up, the burly driver is standing over her.

“Help me get him up.”

The ursine cabbie looks over his shoulder toward the flashing lights, then back at the woman’s pleading face.

“Lady, you are crazy.”

Tracy cups her other hand under the boy’s face and raises it from the pavement. His cheek is slick and wet beneath her palm. Sobs blubber against her sup-

porting hand.

“He’s just a kid. We can’t leave him here.”

The big Serb stares down at the tear-streaked face the woman cradles in her hand.

His shoulders sag as if he is deflating.

“This is bad. He is just a boy, the same age as my son, I think. Okay, we help him, but we must be quick. Police will see us. I lift him, you open the door, yes?”

The taxi driver squats, gets two meaty paws under the young man’s armpits, pulls him from beneath the door. Tracy opens the door wide as the taxi driver grunts and lifts. Cars inch past them, drivers staring.

“You get in. I hand him to you.”

Tracy slides into the rear seat and holds out her hands. The young man tumbles into her outstretched arms, crushing against her. The driver lifts the man’s legs, bends them into the taxi, then slams the door.

Car horns bleat and drivers stick their heads out of windows to hurl curses. The taxi driver shambles to the driver’s door, falls into the seat, and slams the door. He throws the taxi into gear and the Mercedes lurches forward.

Six men descend the stairs from Gumpendorfer station. Between them, they carry a shrouded body on a wire stretcher. Turning back to the task at hand, the police ignore the disturbance on the street.

The driver steers the taxi past the last of the emergency vehicles and into the clear flow of traffic. Empty U-bahn tracks slide past on the left, a line of gray stone façades on the right. He glances in the rearview mirror, sees the woman bent over the sobbing kid.

He lifts a bottle of water from the console beside his seat and stretches his arm behind him.

“Here, Lady. The boy must drink something.”

Tracy Schafer cradles the boy’s head in her lap. Her skirt is splotched with tears and snot and blood. She holds the bottle of water to his lips, pours a trickle into his mouth. He tries to swallow, coughs some of the water back up. She croons to him, wipes his tangled hair from his forehead. She tries the water again and he manages a single swallow.

“Can you hear me? What’s your name?”

The driver cocks his head toward the back seat.

“Wie heißen Sie?”

“Right. Wie heißen Sie? Can you tell me your name? It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”

Jakob opens his eyes and looks into the face of the woman floating above him. He sees an angel wreathed in gray light, an English-speaking angel.

“Jakob. My name is Jakob.”

“Everything is going to be okay, Jakob. I’ll take care of you, I promise.”

The angel is weeping now, her hand cool against his forehead. She calls him by another name, but that doesn’t matter. He is lying in the lap of an angel. She can take him to Maxie, carry him up into the gray sky, and then they will be together again. Jakob closes his eyes and listens to the angel’s sobs.

Dunes (Ink Pen on Canvas) - Kara Theart

Engender Growth

Arden Tapp

My nipples became orange slices

Sweet citrus fruit

Suck them dry

Let them rot

Chop them off

Seeing an orchard where no trees should grow

Fertile feminine seeds

Salt the roots

Burn them down Start anew

[I Am // Have Been]

Avi Goldberg

I am a finite area, the small bank upstream where the tadpoles rest and the sovereign of the jungle bows his head with a zebra and gazelle on either side of him, because everyone needs to stop for a drink. I am the ornate tomb of Tutankhamun, filled with cash and lottery tickets, the slot machines at Harry Reid International Airport (LAS). Good ol’ American quarters gushing out of the pharaoh’s coffin. I am the grinding gears of the Vande Bharat Express, surging through the Indian countryside, watching the golden sun melting on the glass panes of the passenger cars, the Ganges lapping at the tracks. I am the Earl Grey in a monarch’s tea pot, glistening with poison, or maybe that’s just sugar. I am the pinky he extends, I am the lead lining his coffin. I am a discount New York City dumpling place, 12 freshly made dumplings for just $3. I am the mural on the side of the restaurant depicting Mount Rushmore, only instead of All the Presidents’ Heads, it’s the members of U2. I am the gap between the windshield and the driver’s side window, the airbag that deploys, the little light that illuminates when you open up the shade visor, the vents for the back seat. I am the little pang in your stomach while you’re in line for TSA, the non-existent bomb in your suitcase, the scissors in your carry-on. I am the plastic bottle of water you used twice in hopes you could save the dying planet but instead you thought that at least you’re not drilling for fossil fuels in Iraq or Yemen so you threw the bottle in the recycling hoping that it will earn you enough karma to buy another bottle of hairspray. I am the Washington Post article with the headline, “Everything is Awful” which describes the ever warming summers and Florida’s toxic relationship with hurricanes. I am the simple life in a cottage somewhere in Western Europe where they still have seasons, enjoying the shade of the olive trees and wondering if it gets better than this. I am a multi-purpose cleaner for the soul; it’s called pills. I am a California redwood turned antique desk; standing for over 200 years only to be haggled over at some avaricious old man’s garage sale. I am the stranger in the night, the wandering soothsayer, the one-footed griot, and the break in your routine you never knew you needed.

Mask of Knowledge (Digital Collage) - Ellie Usdan

CONTRIBUTORS

Abby Henderson is a BFA student graduating in 2024. Her art can be easily distinguished by her use of flat, vibrant color and surreal subject matter. She finds the most joy in oil painting, but she likes to dabble in many mediums.

Anna E. Ulrey majors in philosophy and minors in creative writing and chemistry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She adores studying ethics and is especially interested in narrative medicine.

Arden Tapp is an Alabama native and UAB student. They discovered their passion for writing as a child and empower themself through their literary work.

Ashley Seger is a student with an appreciation for the arts and the sciences that the world has to offer. Biology has interested her as well as being able to create art with both color and words. Her favorite thing to do is combine those into meaningful poetry.

AV Vogt is a creative writing student, avid soup maker, hiker, and tree climber. She’s probably at a concert or in the woods right now.

Avishai Goldberg is a California native and student at the Alabama School of Fine Arts in the Creative Writing department. President of his school’s Genders and Sexualities Alliance, Avi takes on an engaged role in activism. In his free time, he enjoys traveling, visiting museums, and reading.

Bailey Tindell is an artist with experience in drawing, painting, sculpting, photography and digital art. Driven by her love for nostalgia and nature, her work has bright colors, beautiful flowers and insects that represent a memorial for her life. After moving her home studio from Texas to Alabama to pursue her athletic career, Bailey takes inspiration in the nature that surrounds her.

Caroline Myers is a contemporary figurative painter from Mobile. Caroline graduated from UAB in 2021, after which, she attended a residency program at The New York Academy of Art. Caroline is currently an MFA candidate in painting at Clemson University.

Cesar Herrejon’s studio practice explores dualities and conflicts inherent in the human experience and the exploration of textures and feelings between things. Employing the use and expanded approach to processes they use experimental collage, printmaking, and drawing layers to create works that seek to capture ideas that reflect the brevity of life, dismay of institutionalized power structures and mappings of repetitions and personal observations.

Cheyenne Hollowell is a senior at UAB majoring in English and minoring in public health. With a particular interest in the junction of poetry and advocacy, she hopes to use her writing as a way to share her experiences with mental illness and her appreciation for the natural world.

Derriann Pharr is a multimedia artist based in Birmingham. Pharr attends the UAB where she is pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Her works are completed primarily in color pencil, pastel, and acrylic paint.

Ellie Usdan is a freshman majoring in art studio with a minor in creative writing. She has lived in Birmingham most of her life and enjoys drawing, reading, writing, and hiking. For her art, she often draws inspiration from nature, family, friends, and the books she reads.

Hannah Levins is a sophomore majoring in art studio at UAB. As a developing artist, Hannah enjoys exploring various media to effectively communicate through the visual language. Topics explored in her work range from the natural world to personal experiences.

Jessica Harrison is an artist who has been to hell and back (though originally from Millbrook). A senior at UAB, Jess studies English and anthropology with a concentration in literature and a fascination for curiosity itself. Her work is an investigation of derealization and artistic spirit—conducted to help her audience crack the code of remaining authentic in less than desirable circumstances.

Jonathan Bolton is an artist from Greenville, SC, whose drawings explore the allocation of attention, obscuring and isolating mundane scenes within an expanse of dense, graphite marks. Jonathan has exhibited work in solo, juried, and curated exhibitions across South Carolina. Jonathan earned his BFA from Winthrop University and is an MFA candidate of Clemson University.

Kafui Sakyi-Addo is a senior student at UAB. She is studying psychology with minors in film and creative writing. She enjoys writing in her free time, as well as film photography and hopes to write and direct a film one day.

Kaitlyn Avery has been honing her figurative work for the past several years. Avery’s work has developed into a study of the mind; unveiling the intimate space in which the psyche lives and how that has changed with the new age of technology. After graduating in the spring of 2022, she began working as a project manager for a commercial gallery in Birmingham and hopes to continue her studies in graduate school.

Kara Theart intends to make work that is visually alive, both in the fine texture of her pen, and in her construction of mountainous perspectives through figures. Theart is a freshman studying New Media Arts while practicing other art forms outside of UAB such as Metal Arts at Sloss Furnace and independent projects.

Lawrence Schultz is an artist that blurs the lines between abstract and surrealist art by giving form to the amorphous. They bring life to otherwise faceless shapes using abstract expressions to create beings not quite from this world. Their whimsical nature and tendency toward visual storytelling will take you to a world unseen.

Marco Etheridge is a writer of prose, an occasional playwright, and a part-time poet. He lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. His work has been featured in more than 70 reviews and journals across Canada, Australia, the UK, and the USA.

Nicolas Recalde is currently studying at UAB for psychology and English. He was originally planning to just major in psychology, but due to his love for reading and writing, he has started making his own material and decided to go all in for a creative writing degree. He is currently surviving the school year.

Rachel Armbrester is in her senior year at UAB and currently a candidate for a BA in art studio with a focus in graphic design. She anticipates to graduate this summer and obtain a master’s degree in the future. Along with painting, she also has an interest in animation, illustration, and narrative art.

Ron McFarland grew up in Cocoa, Florida, and took his Bachelor’s and Master’s at Florida State before winding up in Idaho of all places. He still imposes on his Florida-born siblings frequently.

Susie Paul is a retired professor of English. She published her first chapbook, THE WHITED AIR, with Finishing Line Press, just last year. Her work has appeared in THE GEORGIA REVIEW, KALLIOPE, NEGATIVE CAPABILITY, EARTH’S DAUGHTERS, as well as many other magazines and journals.

Sydney Marlin is a junior majoring in graphic design. Her works include iconic and well-known objects much like the ones in “To Do: Disco with Darth.” Sydney’s hope is to bring individuals from different backgrounds and walks of life together by finding a connection in their childhood like brings back the fun and warm feeling of being a child again.

Wes Ladner is a junior in the BFA program, concentrating in sculpture. Their work discusses topics like anxiety, the maternal, and the idea of home. They see all their work as pieces of a self portrait.

Special Thanks to:

Jackie Alexander, Director of UAB Student Media

Patricia Martinez, Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs & Director of Operations

John R. Jones III, Ph.D., Vice President for Student Affairs

UAB Division of Student Affairs

AURA LITERARY ARTS REVIEW is printed by UAB Printing Services in the quantity of 750 copies. The editorial process is performed with Adobe InDesign CC.

Copyright 1964-2023 Aura Literary Arts Review. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any way, shape, or form without the express written consent of the artist. All rights to the work revert to the original creator after the publication in this magazine. To reach an artist regarding republication of material, contact the UAB Office of Student Media, HSC 130, 1400 University Blvd, Birmingham, AL 35294.