Junction Magazine 2023

ENGLISH MAJORS’ LITERARY MAGAZINE

EDITORS

Jasmine Elazm

Dean Lorentz-Perrone

Eliel Mizrahi

Kinza Arshad

Joseph Edelheit

Faith Cummings

Danielle Rogan

Yitzchak Friedman

Abdoulaye Diallo

Katie-Anne Howell

Grayson Scott

FROM THE EDITORS,

Things are never really complete until you’ve sunk your teeth into the saccharine tang of closure, even for just one bite. Until you’ve pulled yourself out of the depths of tragedy long enough to really think about the events with gritted teeth and a stiff jaw; secretly only wanting a release from the pain that still lives inside of you as a reminder of your journey. Closure only feels achieved for some with time, as you’ve grown farther away from what is familiar, but toxic. For others, closure is a figment of their imagination that can only be embraced when penning deep into the interior of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and everything in between.

Our goal here at The Junction is not to be a timekeeper, a massive wielder of judgment, or a face of the past, reminding you of its grooves and structure at every turn. Our goal is to be a mirror, a mere reflection of yourself as you contemplate life’s deepest questions; love, spirituality, death, coming of age, and discovery. Our goal is to celebrate your raw, unadulterated story that is woven together from your hardships. To celebrate you for being so strong, for living to tell the story, and for penning something so magnificent that will be immortalized for generations to come.

We encourage you to dream big. To allow the stories to manifest themselves all over the walls of your brain, to sit in the still of calming silence and actualize a body of work that is like no other, but also inspired deeply by the people, environment, and situations around you. We encourage you to keep writing. The world is waiting for your story.

With fondest regards, Riverrun

English Majors’ Counseling Office thejunctionbc@gmail.com thejunctionjournal.wordpress.com

Follow us on Facebook and Instragram - @thejunctionbc

Kinza

Nida

LOSS SOUL PRESENCE

Explore the universal experience of love through heartwarming stories and poems in our love category.

Experience the haunting beauty of human suffering in our loss category, featuring powerful stories and poetry.

Delve into the mysteries of faith and spirituality with our thought-provoking soul category, featuring poetry and prose.

Explore the joys and challenges of contemporary society in our presence category, featuring diverse perspectives in fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

FIGURINE OF CLAY

Iris Triunfel

A few weeks ago, she forced dentures into my mouth.

My cheeks stretched over the asymmetrical teeth and my gums were sensitive under the pressure until I felt used to them. She dressed my body with clothes that layered over wrinkled skin; a long dress and a cardigan that had been pilling on the sleeves. Thin streaks of gray hairs flowed from my head and some strayed loose onto the pads of my shoulders. When I tried to talk, my voice was not my own, but more breathy and slow. I was propped onto the couch that occupied the space in front of the window. And she kept me like that for the rest of the day, walking by me with so much disdain. She said to me that morning;

You sound just like my grandmother; always disapproving of my choices.

Recently, she chopped my hair; so close to the scalp that she nipped me on the back of my head. The discarded pieces were pressed into my face with the pad of her fingers to simulate a beard. I was hidden in oversized slacks and a t-shirt, distant from my own body and lost under the haze of her vision. My calloused hands felt rough against my hips as she set my back against the wall; stubborn like my brother was, she said.

Oftentimes, she molds me into the people that have crippled her in life. Slowly chipping away at the parts of me that harden every time that I reflect someone else. Perhaps, she will never see me as simply faulty from my own actions, but a copy of betrayals. Will I always be a stand in for people of her past? Yet, I can’t help but understand her, because a cautious person was once vulnerable after all.

FOR THE PESTERING BEES AROUND SUMMER WOMEN

Iris Triunfel

If you were so funny, I would probably offer a laugh to the cyclical jokes kept in your back pocket, or a smile for your cheesy lines. No no, scratch that–

If you were so funny, I would just about offer you nothing–for being bombarded on my way to wherever the hell it was I was going because even now, it’s none of your concern. To have your incessant buzz operate over the melodies of my daily music, like a commercial interrupting the best part. So I stare, and just offer an irritated look for the grotesque language coming from you.

The look that you call a resting bitch face–because this is your egotistical demise, right?

How I gave you nothing in return for your lousy attempts of fulfillment. This is what set you off, to retract the shallow compliments in your efforts to obtain me.

The world doesn’t revolve around you. And if you hadn’t known, I’m glad to burst your bubble. I didn’t dress while thinking of you or for your amusement, much less walk down the street for you to circle me.

And you’ll most likely tell your friends how stuck up women are today or how you miss the old days. I’d advise you not to, I won’t permit you to have more of me. Perhaps I should carry a swatter in an attempt to make you come to your senses. Would that be too much to ask of you?

Who am I kidding, I don’t need more of your disturbance, much less your permission.

BURNT ORANGE

Sam Patrick

Our love is Spanish saffron; shots of bourbon in the backseat

Of your station wagon.

It’s more flame than candle; a pinky swear with salted fingertips.

You are my marmalade Easter in the tropics; my microcosm of nirvana.

We fell like Autumn maple leaves, staggering in skies, over-ripe with guava; like pollinated petals in my morning coffee. You kissed me like soap on fresh knee-scrapes; like warning shots in the suburbs.

We spoke in the mating calls of cardinals… about rubber in rimmed nets, and morir soñando in the solstice. We talked until headlights hit the gutter.

Mary Jane tickled our throats, and purposefully pricked our taste buds with crafty excuses.

It felt like tap-dancing in a kumquat—

My diaphragm in fistfuls; your hands holding my narrow avenues.

And just like box-braids before vacation, the sex is fresh every time.

THE CURE FOR A LONELY HEART

Leon Crews

Late at night I’m surrounded by the bitter cold of loneliness. Let me escape the jaws of darkness. Does any soul hear my prayer? I wanna ride the lightning, Frolic on the moon, Fly among the stars, Cruise the rainbow road, And dance under the supernova disco ball.

The daily gloomy life is a black hole to my soul. Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, a woman after midnight. A woman to unleash my desires.

A silver tongue, spherical, ebony….Cosmic girl!

FREE MINDS WONDER

Delasia Vanterpool

They say the past stays in the past for a reason. Thinking far back will be committing Treason. You swore an oath to protect yourself. Your own well being.

To keep yourself out of harm’s way.

But

A Free Mind Wonders

Even to this day.

I walk in the streets like a MAN

Because I was nourished by his Right. Hand.

A mothers love never carried me.

A Free Mind Wonders

What would it be like as a whole?

I am only half of what I am meant to be. My childhood fades away into oblivion.

Trapped.

In Hatred. Bewilderment. Guilt. Envy.

Poison Filters my blood stream.

I laugh believing this is the end. How could you watch someone you love perish?

For years I’ve been trying to grasp the understanding of abandonment. But I never came to any conclusions. When I was a little girl all I ever wanted was a family.

I cried until Tears weren’t enough.

I grew depressed until I was NOT immune to depression any longer. I slept outside for hours on a cold bench right next to the homeless, until I grew tired of being alone.

From that point on I knew you wouldn’t come for me.

A Child’s song is a Dove’s Cry

But

Not even my heart could witness how much I love you.

Free Minds Wonder

How to become a better person than the one that left them behind.

I Am Not Alone.

For the Little Black Girl in me has learnt How to fly all on her own.

THE BALLROOM

Angelina Lambros

The aurora came the next morning. So long had Adelaine been in solitude. But the incoming night at the ballroom Gave her quite the euphoria of a mood. Some said her personality Was incandescent. She had so many infatuations; They came and went.

She was not the least bit demure, And to her ambitions there was no cure.

For Adelaine was always dreaming, With a plethora of thoughts Filling her mind. The sparkles that adorned Her hair pristine, The languor she felt when Sorrows turned her blind.

On this day,

She had found a feeling of angst, Concern, and worry Of how the day would be. Soon enough, She arrived at the ballroom. The waltz brought more life Than she ever did see.

Adelaine seems to have found a partner With whom to share a wondrous dance. They both love history and the arts. The extent of their intellect is a Perceived myth.

In a room of golden light color pastel, Gowns of white flow about the scene. In a room with grandeur Practically ineffable,

In a land filled with enigmas and Mysteries, serene.

EYES OF WATER

Diana Athena

a copper coin flicked through still air, landed in the pool of my mind, a tenant without a lease filling my body with the smell of roasted beans

it is not the conversations that I miss, but the silences between us, where my life flapped to the boundless breeze of your gaze & you are

a past tense under pastel sky a doll house where dreams were bright & pink & unavoidable

you are a helping verb unattainable binding my voice with barbwire— & you hold my face in every life—

wilting but willing to be water in a fountain to flip another coin

WHAT A TIME

Katie-Anne Howel l

The sun is laying herself to rest

After a long day’s work

Burning herself at each endless end

She runs in circles

She runs circles around me

While I break the laps of my daily routine

Percussion beats and resounding music down

Below the window, laughter, and words

In a language I don’t know, except for cussin

I listen while my lover makes each

And all my introductions

Through a smile and gesture and

All the kindness man can carry

And I try to be perfect in two places

All at once, and I wonder how he makes it seem less scary

Like the sun, he moves in two spaces at once

So I turn and I fuss as I work

At all the things I carry

Without a shout he relieves me

Brushes the sky off my shoulder

And my tongue in its holster

“We have all day tomorrow”

SENSELESS

Rachel Pearson

Touch my bare skin and i will burn, hold me in your arms and i will b r e a k, kiss me and i will die— but i don’t care!

Be the artist i give you control— mold me with your passion, hold my soul in your hands, let me be your greatest accomplishment. You spark in me something i can’t explain— a simultaneous feeling of overwhelming happiness and sheer terror— it sits heavy on my chest disorienting my mind. You bring out a side of me i didn’t know i had the animal— i didn’t know i was.

Around you i lose all sense of self— lost in a wave of infatuation. You are everything i think of and everything i don’t want to think of— i should stop but i don’t want to.

STILL REMEMBER

after all these years I can still remember what it was like to encounter a moment which animated the possibilities of what could’ve been back then, we stepped in with the intent towards being friends and maybe that’s why everything within that world seemed so natural on the phone, we simply talked religiously about the entirety of nothing, but–that’s what made it all divine and truthfully, I have yet to see any potential masterpiece which could ever contend with the subtlety of your image; hopefully depicting why I initially kept you framed–exclusively in the gallery of my mind

I can still remember–my gentle attraction to the beautiful scheme of your distinct texture as it emanated an illuminating shade–which made you reflect that strange claim to your popular twin, Jhene but to me, your radiance–will always be deservedly placed on a larger stage

in those days we were just kids who seemed to be governed by the sound of our own ancient rhythm and I almost gave myself the license to embellish by romanticizing our inexperience–with a hint of something more, but I imagine that we connected somehow, as we rose from relative pavements making us of those who understood–the silence which was blaring deep inside–each other

you were different containing multitudes of a wonderland, which I never wanted to leave and you often transported me to wherever you were making me fall in love with meeting you across the bridge we built even though it seemed as if the Verrazano was really made–to keep us apart

I never thought that somewhere along the way I’d take a drastic turn towards a few unregretted mistakes which I’m now forced to have to live with but still, I ask for your forgiveness forgive me for walking away–from our friendship forgive me for doing it–without giving you an explanation and forgive me for not being–the person who you thought I was I still can’t tell you how it happened but in that blur … it just did

Abdoulaye Diallo

and my insignificant absence was a result of respecting the wishes of someone else not taking into account the pain that I inflicted until I felt the hurt of also being restricted but I understand, and hope that you can, too because if we were together, and if asked I would’ve done the same for you most importantly I really need you–to please forgive me for harboring all of these recollections which attest to how amazing you are

to me, you just seemed completely original, becoming timeless even after–everyone else had faded these are things that I remember which I never got the chance to say but I only hope that it’s desperately not too late

trust me, by now I would’ve quit because I’ll admit to seeming a little restrained but I didn’t mind being the fool if it meant that my persistence could, in some strange way–land me into the perfection of your grace others have been coming my way, but I’m on this wild chase just trying to reach the heart of an old friend but on that long road, I can clearly see–the distant sign which is telling me to simply turn back

perhaps, It’s because you’re somewhere, with someone whose interest you can’t seem to escape and if that’s the case, then that’s okay–if it’s where you really want to be

but if not and the opportunity still–authentically stands then please, just do me one thing

Remember … and if you can’t then just say that you’ll play–with the exploration which allows us to hopefully find one another, again

right now, it’s evident that you’re not crazy enough to see the promise of our grand memory. but just know, that I will insanely hold on and carry us forward alone, if I have to, because I can still remember.

ESSENTIAL SPARKS

Abdoulaye Diallo

Together

We forged a dreamland

An escape

Which in our prime became a safe haven

At first sight, I slipped

Into a sort of enchantment

Knowing that I was, without question

A true believer

For the brilliance of your imperfections

Continued

To bring about the best of me

I deemed myself the lucky one

And still, till this day

I wonder …

How you were able to see me

So clearly

Within the blinding of that crowd

I can’t recall any hesitation

Because you came to the rescue

At my time of need

Turning out to be

The wish I would always want

During the gift of every present

You were the guardian of my heart

Existing solely

To protect the motion of every breath

The choice

Which was so easily made

To alleviate the burden

Of other choices

If ever a playlist

You were then and remain to be

The last song

Which would put me to sleep

And infinitely revive me for the return

In voiced letters like Dear John,

We talked religiously

Trying to paint a portrait of the wedding

Which was beautifully hung

Within our imagination

But without caution

Time

Made us take a bend in the road

I can’t say that I’m bitter

Because my soul has embraced

The imprint of your memory

Placing it up front

For what may be

The longest ride

Where the remnants of what we were

Floats

Aching to be found

Hoping to be defined

As the message in a bottle

Calling for the firmness of many others

But, what has passed

Is all written and dried

In the notebook you left behind

Which always takes me

On a walk to remember.

ODE TO MY MOM

Sharmin Akter

I glance over

At your gentle sewing

Needling a new dress for me

I never appreciated it ‘til now

The fine detailing

Hand-stitched

By your bare arms

Filled with scars

A burn mark from prancing oil

A birthmark yet

I’m shielded from your childhood

Never a mention of your hardships

Never a mention of your dreams

Did you have any?

The wrinkles on your face

The speckles of gray on your head

Written are years of experiences

I glance again

Trying to find what you’ve passed on

The beauty mark next to your nose

Now sits on my cheek

Your soft eyebrows, mixed with dad’s full ones

I’d like to say we have the same smile

But mine seems brighter

Your curly locks still intact

While mine are strayed

A quick glance at you

And I’m reminded of

Sleepless nights in the hospital

Waddling to follow you around everywhere

There will never be another like you

Constant nagging to eat

Hourly checkups swinging the door open

Enduring the drama and the screams

But I’ve never doubted

Your unconditional love

I owe you everything and more

YOUR GIFT

Edward Severino

Let me take you to the moon, As soon as noon arrives, Adrift together and always, But the stars I see in my reflection in you, Will be better than those around us.

As that one white flower Blooms in the center of the moon, It is like the heavens calling. But do not fret as our time has not come, We will see it through as one.

KISSING YOU GOODBYE

Kinza Arshad

I emptied your pocket today. What I found was: your blood pressure pills wrapped in an old tan colored Circus Fruits receipt. Those prices have faded. Two sample fragrances: Dior’s Homme Intense and Sauvage. Those bottles are nearly full. They are waiting for your return. Three quarters, two pennies, and four dimes: I donated it, Put it in the Sadaqa box so you’ll forever benefit. As I stored the only memory of you away, I kissed it goodbye. I kissed you goodbye for the last time. She emptied herself today. What she found was: whispers of her past. Her innocent, naive self crumbled in pieces, paralyzed on the cold, hardened floor. A daydream that once shined so brightly in her eyes— bound to be evanescent— deteriorated into another disenchanted dream. I constructed a geodesic dome outdoor to protect her from creating cruelty with every chance, but when I comfort her, her thoughts remain caged with her, and my words slither through, like your last pump of blood to an astray web of veins, keeping her from kissing you goodbye.

TO YOU

Kinza Arshad

I chipped away at your mild exterior, dodging shards of ice until you were no longer soft, and still, despite shattering your surface, your heart chose to remain delicate and persistent, trying again and again to contemplate and understand the universe I hide underneath my skin when I’ve given you every reason to leave, so, before I unveil the splinters embedded on my surface,

I need you to know, I am a recipe for disaster.

I am raw and flawed with a taste of trauma I never asked for— one that comes with a need to alienate in times of comfort and happiness, one that comes with a need to consider and fear every possible thing that can go wrong, and one that comes with a need of wanting to let go of what’s not good but not being able to.

I am raw and flawed, so please, I beg you, think twice or thrice before you say yes.

Rachel Pearson POETRY

POETRY isn’t words, it’s a feeling it’s my “alter ego,” my personality the part of me that gets to live— to break away from my shackled thoughts to escape from my cluttered mind it’s my darkness that never sees the light.

POETRY is whatever i want it to be— or don’t want it to be it’s expression and emotion pleasure and pain it’s the truth i can’t admit and the thoughts i cannot form.

POETRY is the *poof* of an epiphany the ink of my consciousness spilled on the page it’s my passion possessed by freedom a gutsiness to open up to strangers and pour out my heart and soul.

POETRY is a lifestyle that i live and breathe it’s the unstructured perfection— or perfectly imperfect sensible gibberish that gets put on a page.

POETRY is the off switch—that turns the real me on.

COMING DOWN

Chemo Emo

A light has returned from purgatory

Arriving with the beckoning of reaching arms

Yet I am not of this flock

The outsider somehow still in

And I want to cover

The approaching glow

With hands no longer suited for loving.

Change has been constant

A constant made habitual

And yet I despair

For this change has been long-in-making

And I wish for its denial

If only for slightly longer

As courses made in the mean-time

Have been too pleasant

To give up easy.

This home-bound somebody

Attached to me

By blood

By birth

I hold no resentment to

Besides the revised routines

I am forced to make

And to this person

Addition to daily living

I am trying so hard

To hug genuinely.

I hate that I hurt

Hurt from them

Hating that I hold them

In such contempt

For nothing more

Hope has been brought to many Them most of all

Yet I take none

Choosing instead the hopeless

And investing in ideas

That days ahead

Will never again

Allow for my happiness

That has

In a way

Forsaken this person

That I should love

But feel little for.

Then being alive.

Мой друг,

my mental health is a b r o k e n porcelain urn puzzled together, filled with ocean kindling its way through the cracks

March 10th, 2022

MY FRIEND

Diana Athena

don’t ask me about my mental health,

Мой друг

I am choking on dust of proud land that follows blindly until it doesn’t have it’s own identity culture people shame rains over me in stale hearts which defended themselves too long all they want is war

Мой друг, you are closer to me, than the nation that raised me and I no longer know if the New World will spare memories families my ego Soul wounded hearts are crying over me in spring air spiced with triggered rage of the lonesome Spirit – searching for Silence since she no longer believes in peace

WOULD YOU LOVE ME NOW?

Faith Cummings

“if i showed up at your doorstep would you turn me away? oh or would you care to see a stranger whose eyes are still the same?”

i want to ask you the same question with white headphones dangling against my sagging frame— metal tasting my forehead as it leans against the cool feeling anything but,

sobs intake as i wonder would you love me if i stripped away who i really was and just became a trinket ornament a toy someone who existed solely for your enjoyment— it’s something i’m willing to do and that feels desperate but i can’t bring myself to be prideful when your ruptured moonlight shines in my

eyes don’t feel the same. they’re darker— and calling onto something more aching to feel anything deeper than indifference

i know you can’t fix them and yet i want you to try

would you love me now? joshua bassett asks and i wonder the same thing after i’ve given you all you’ve asked of me

would you still walk away like you did taking a part of me everytime like a trinket ornament a toy leaving the unwanted rubbish in your wake leaving the needy soul behind

“take me back to when we were young again, darling would you love me now? after everything would you let me in and love me now?”

we were so young— are so young and yet it doesn’t feel that way; it feels like the fusillade of a thousand love affairs and lifetimes but nothing. empty barren and nothing. all at the same time. you feel like nothing. just like my eyes— and yet

no. and i know the answer you’ll give with sour wording and broken straight down the middle in a piercing throw of your sword that delves into the depths of my heart with nothing there to slice into—

it’s all splintered away like the old kindling of our past sparked along with this trinket ornament, doodah, toy.

joshua bassett’s melodic voice makes me lose my resolve and my stark resistance to your brown eyes and why i was ever ignoring you is consigned to oblivion and i give the hollowness in my chest over to you yet again to be pummeled to pieces would you love me now?

GRIEVING FOR THE DEAD, THE MISSING, THE LIVING

Michele Sherman

he’s been hollow for a while, like a gaping wound he’s sewn up countless times that can’t quite seem to close, can’t seem to heal.

it’s not that easy to be whole these days, anyway.

grieving for the living is a full-time job, like a graveyard shift that’s just open graves, burying the loss of innocence and childhood and something soft, something so young and unprepared for the kind of horror that snaked its way into their lives, settling uninvited in their bones like an october chill.

grieving for the dead, thoughthat just leaves you empty;

empty like a casket with no body in it, empty like his house, all year-roundbig and dark and always so fucking vacant, and the silence is so sharp and so constant that the pain is welcomed, the sting is nice, the only semblance of stability a boy like him has ever hadwhether it be monsters with teeth or his father’s fists.

grieving for the boy with the matching scars was never going to be easy, but god, this feels like burying a body that never seems to die, like coming back into the world, right-side up, but missing a piece you never thought you needed, like he can almost see himcrooked smile and bloody wounds, laughing in the face of death even as it claimed him; nothing but the cold dark to keep him company.

some days it’s hard to breathe, when grieving for something so bright, so unfairly snuffed out, like someone threw a blanket over the sun and demanded that he learned to live in darkness.

that’s what it feels like, anywaya cold shadow unfurling over him that he can’t seem to shake.

but grieving means he’s there, right there, the ghost of a memory tucked right inside his chest, keeping this beating thing inside him warm, like a phantom touch from a phantom boy that he swears he feels, swears he sees, swears to remember.

so he’ll keep on grieving, knows he will, because being made of memories is better than being nothing at all and he’ll be damned if he forgets him, this phantom boy with phantom limbscrooked smile and all.

PORCELAIN CASKET

Danielle Regan

I do not recall the last time I bathed in that tub. I think it was three-or-so years ago. Its porcelain, which my father tells me, in pride, is rarely used today as a raw-bathtub-material, dulls the grime and filth that repeatedly washed off our bodies but never fully off of it; the drain had blackened in mold, likening its condition to a portal to the underworld; the beige tiles surrounding the porcelain began to crumble long ago, pettily reminding me of its presence as it fell into the hot water and floated toward my toes; and what was the most terrible of it all was the shower curtain: always its plastic was mangled, yellow in color and unruly in its length as it was barely attached to the rod, and the rod itself would occasionally fall and hit my head, leaving me dazed as I held on to it in shock, wondering if it was the result of an unsuspected earthquake or the consequence of the shitty set-up altogether. It was always the latter.

There, in that tub, I felt as though I was being suffocated. First it was the point of my limbs, my fingers and toes, that would be captured by the water. Then, as it creeped toward my torso, up my thighs and past my hip, the heat of the water would somehow make its way through my skin’s epidermis, drowning my organs and replacing the blood in my veins with its dirty water. It felt like I was losing war, for every passing minute I was in there another naval ship sank to the sea floor. It was odd, however, the claustrophobia endured that met the paralyzing inertia that made me stay there, in that porcelain tub, for some hours when I was younger.

Whenever I confront it today, when I wander into the bathroom at my parents’ apartment, I always likened its sturdy body to a casket, a porcelain casket. I was never tall enough to force my knees to my chest—my stubby legs were afforded the length to stretch out as my shoulders shrugged against the swallow of the porcelain stump. With little effort I dropped my shoulders and my neck would follow to solemnly rest below the water’s surface. It was that easy and nearly compulsive. Then, with my brother’s pounding on the door to “hurry and get out,” the dread of before overwhelmed the calm of near submission. Half-empty bottles of VO5 fell to the floor as I’d lift my heavy foot over the porcelain barrier, separating my body from where I imagined I would be laid before burial.

At the wake, I’d be adorned in the same wrinkled towel that hung on the door’s hook before the “accident,” my eyes sutured shut as estranged family-members and old friends shuffled in my parents’ bathroom, taking turns to say goodbye while kneeling over an old bleached towel with their wrists supported by the tub’s upper-body as their warm fingers grazed my cold dead skin in prayer. Still water would surround my body though the faucet would be turned off, soaking the towel covering my corpse and pruning my skin. In this romanticized image of my death, I’d look like that painting of dead Ophelia floating down the river but with Irish Spring soap surrounding my body instead of seasonal flowers.

Once my brother and I had a horrible fight—for reasons I can no longer recall—where I, trippingover my feet as he chased me into the bathroom, fell and hit my head on the side of the casket. It resulted in a large, bulbous bump that did not go away for many days. After the incident, my brother was screamed at by our father and I was ordered to sit and return to the place where I was hurt, the tub, by my mother. I fondly remember her taking the same pot she cooked dinner in an hour before filling it in with the water before and

filling it with the water I was sitting in, pouring it over my head and down my back to soothe my pain. We did not talk much as she did this, I was probably too concussed and she was too perturbed at the lengths her children’s anger would go in angst of one another. In hindsight, however, I think this was the closest my mother and I have ever been in not only proximity but in intimacy—in the obligation of a mother to help her hurt child and the perceived want she had to help while I was suffering. I still have a dent on the left side of my head and my mother and I no longer speak.

I do sometimes wonder what will become of that tub. Will it be replaced when the new owners purchase the apartment after my parents’ death? Or will it be refurbished, kept as a testament to a cliche of its sturdiness, the “they don’t make them like they used to,” that my father would go on and on about? In his dwindling health, will he end up having a heart attack while taking his routine nightly bath, it actually becoming an apparatus for the transition of my family’s death? I’m unsure. I don’t live there anymore, and I left the porcelain casket behind to stand in the shower. I think it’s less likely I’ll drown, because, if I do, I’ll probably fall over and wake up.

TRANSPARENCY

Tishana Chapman

Wandering through a forest of misguided hate

A construct created through lies, pain and fire from within Desperately looking, no searching for the shred of humanity that remains

For if I find where she resides I shall put an end to her misery She doesn’t know it yet but I’m paying her a kindness

Trading her words for my actions I put an end to the assault

Revoking the trust we once built replacing it with dishonesty

While I shrivel with every shot to the gut she thrives in the laughter breathing in the joy

And honestly When she thinks of the light in today I can only see rain in tomorrow

Only one of us can survive in this cramped up mind

Feeding into the desire to murder each other

Letting the energy of my enemy flow within me

Freeing the captured from the captor

I am bound to this cave unable to leave while she is free to come and go willingly

How can any of this be right , fair, just, or even true

Warping my sense of reality as I come face to face with her sights in my view

Launching myself forward her hair in my hand and my dagger on her neck I see her gentle smile as she whispers “It’s okay” slowly caressing my face

Even when death looks her in the eye she still looks the same: happy and cheerful Ready to give every ounce she has compelling you to smile with her, for that is all that u can do As I blink the tears away I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror

Still holding the dagger

But it’s against my own throat she’s disappeared back into the forest Waiting for another round of hide and seek

Or maybe waiting for me to realize there was never an enemy

YEARNING FOR CLOSURE

Sharmin Akter

The nerves pierced through my heart

Walking through a gateway to

A detergent swept clean page

A fresh start for reinvention

Yet my past calls me back

Each time it rings

The part of me I’m unable to escape

A new beginning, cut short

From a former friend

A stand-in takes the place

For my ticking chest bomb and I

Sky-high as the sunset closes on the skyline

Down below, familiar faces drown in colors for a change

While I’m stuck as the sunrise

Takes me back to an ancient era

Barricaded in as the old lingers on

Unable to escape what once was

I continue to search for strings to tie together

As the future holds the answers to its ending

No longer a newbie

Years that have blurred by

The anticipation is gleaming off my face

Soon I’ll be moving past and starting anew

Months pass without a disruption

Enjoying final moments before departure

Filled with joyous days that last a lifetime

Soon enough the hourglass begins its effect

A silly temporary strain on excitement

An immediate loss of connection

After years of bonds promising forever

Blue was the color

I would’ve paraded across the stage

My achievements slipping

Through my fingers like silica sand

Confidence now vanished

Accepting the fate that comes with this new reality

Time gets shorter as this chapter comes to an end

A true ending is rarely obtained

From heart strains to graduation pains

My lasting wave to my prior dismays

And a handshake welcoming the modern triumphs

DAYDREAMING

Dean Lorentz-Perrone

I’ve been having these nightmares where I’m lost in the streets of a city I don’t know, and all the buildings are looming white boxes as far as the eye can see. I always find myself in the middle of this grand boulevard—a lush park shaded by trees and blanketed in beds of grass sandwiched between two lanes of traffic on either side. I sit on a bench in the grass watching the cars whiz by, examining the rare and peculiar pedestrian.

In the park, a woman approaches me in a ball gown, furrowing her brow when she spots me. She scrunches her nose up as though she smells something foul, staring me down as she walks past.

There are no storefronts on the avenue. Only luxury lobbies for luxury condos or luxury offices. I cross the street to reach the sidewalk and take a walk down the avenue, looking for a block that may seem familiar. But they all look exactly like the last. The trees and benches in the park are even placed in exactly the same spots—just so. At intersections, I look down the side streets; I see the same white buildings lining a regular single lane street, white bands stretching into the distance until they kiss each other at the vanishing point. I see this several times before I stop bothering to turn my head at intersections.

Continuing down the avenue, I’m shocked by the familiar sight of a beggar on the street, but he’s on the other side of the boulevard, across the park and four lanes of traffic. I want to approach him and ask him where we are and how the fuck we got here because all the pedestrians glare at me with disgust, and I’m too scared to ask them.

As I start crossing the street, I see another cordially dressed pedestrian on the sidewalk approaching the beggar. The suit-and-tie type stops in front of the beggar, reaches into the inner pocket of his teal velvet Yves Saint Laurent sports jacket to remove a pistol, and uses it to shoot the beggar in the face. Twice. Pop. Pop. The birds flutter to the skies out the tops of the trees, and the gun wielder walks on as though he didn’t turn a man into a corpse two seconds prior.

The very first emergency sirens I hear—the NYPD rushes to the scene and promptly removes the body without a word, dragging it legs-first across the concrete and throwing it in the backseat. The cop car wooshes away, leaving behind only a red puddle and an attached band of blood staining the sidewalk where the body was dragged. Next to the murder scene, a man wearing a white button down shirt with a black bowtie, vest, pants, and dress shoes comes outside of the nearest lobby’s revolving doors with a mop bucket and works at the stain for a good minute or two before going back inside, leaving the sidewalk sparkling clean. All evidence of a man ever sitting on that sidewalk was removed in under 4 minutes flat. Just like that.

My walking and walking and walking through this maze makes a difference, eventually. Same buildings, same park, same exact block over and over again. But now I’ve made it to a subway station. Hardly recognizable except for the steps descending into underground darkness. In a whisper echoing out of the tunnels, I hear the bing bong of a New York train punctuating the announcement: “This stop is Grand Concourse. Stand Clear of the Closing Doors Please.”

I wake up so happy to see my city, my real city. Still covered in bricks and flavors and blood and soot and I could kiss the shit stained sidewalk. I look out my bedroom window to see they’re erecting a new slab of luxury housing with a white facade, a new box of gray dreams. It contrasts starkly with the colorful facades lining the rest of the block.

I WALK FREE

Haikeda Hillman

You walked like a wounded negro, with shackles, that connected you to your future near the red river. There, your people drowned in bravery. You walked in strength, through the veined paths of the sugar canes, So they can reap what you sowed, so they can reap what your heart sowed.

You walked with bloodshot eyes, eyes of the bullet that pierced through the hearts of your sons.

You walked tired of walking in fear.

So you

walked with steps lighter than the shoe scars in your back, to brew your pot of revenge for the injustice of your past. You walked for hundreds of decades, like a stallion with the voice of a lion, as you spoke to those who have stolen your sanity. You walked until they acknowledged your humanity. They freed you, but without their heart, so they made you

walk 50 miles to find a restroom suitable for the glory of your skin, for you couldn’t sit on the likeness of their mental throne. ‘Walk with your free feet which we have granted, For you are not worthy to sit beside us on a ride home’.

With the will of your words,

I will

walk the streets with placards to defend the death of the fighting souls. I will walk with a raised chin, without the aggression, of your oppressive hands. I will walk right past you, as you step aside to acknowledge my presence.

I will walk in glory among you.

I will walk in glory ahead of you.

I will walk with confidence and excellence, free of the past and free into the future. I will walk in freedom.

WHITE FLAG

Michele Sherman

in a whisper softer than that of the cicadas outside your bedroom window, you press your mouth to the raw skin on my neck in a silent plea that begs, stay. before i can open my own to protest, to take one last look at you to drink you in, you whisper, hold your tongue.

you ask me to hold my tongue as if that is not asking the world of me, as if the words sleeping at the bottom of my rib cage will not wake and scream in their own twisted protest, will not rumble and shake until they force themselves out with little help from me, like the ocean calling the shots, and to hell with poseidon.

you say, you think too much to the crook of my neck, like i am unaware of the clockwork chaos that lives inside my brain, like i am anything besides a machine that can hold a pen for the bees that make up my anatomy.

these are the words i write on the white flag that i will never wave, because surrendering means an easy death and i am not the kind of woman that dies.

in your last ditch effort to tie this anchor around my neck, you whisper, you know, we don’t need words.

how foolish to think i do not need the rattling of the bees to keep me upright. how foolish of you to believe that the words don’t come first, well before i do, but

how easy, it must be, to see a white flag and think it just that, not the shotgun barrel with my name on the side, with the bullets all lined up like way of a battalion; doing what they’re meant to.

NEVER ENOUGH

Wali Mohammad

Colored sparks and loud bangs at New Year’s Eve

For a moment the dark is no more

But that moment is

Never enough

Why does farewell exist?

It makes leaves shed

It makes roses wither

It makes and eternity of love

Never enough

But maybe if we always woke up from our eventual eternal slumber

We’d be no different

From the mountain

It bore witness to the empires that rose and fell at its feet

The planted seeds, the uprooted trees

It saw all the love, all the hate

The kisses and the hugs

The executions and the murders

All share the mountain in their periphery

But the mountain looks at me with despair

As the world will mate it with farewell too

And as its peaks crumble, rock turning to wool

The mountain will cry that its eternity was

Never enough

ALL CONSUMING Tishana Chapman

It was almost midnight when Katharine finally arrived home from the hospital. The scent of grief clinging to her as she stepped out of the taxi cab. Within seconds of catching a glimpse of her house she was filled with a sense of dread as she began her walk to the front steps. Sighing deeply, she stuck her hand in her bag several times to look for the house keys and, to no avail, kept coming out empty-handed. A wave of unacknowledged emotion overwhelmed her as she threw off her bag and kicked the door. “Fuck this stupid house,” she banged on the door, screaming as tears welled up in her eyes. “I hate this house,” she yelled again, continuing her abuse on the door. After a couple more screams and kicks, whatever energy she had left was severely depleted. She slid down the door, breathing heavily, hugging her legs close to her chest.

Through her glazed eyes she saw that the keys landed next to the welcome mat among the contents that fell out of her bag. Wiping away her now-fallen tears, she sniffled, snatching up the keys and turning to her knees to open the door.

As the lock turned, she rose off the floor; glancing at her surroundings. The mess left by her outrage sprawled all over. With little care for the rest of her contents she kicked stuff around until she found what she was looking for. A tube of bubble gum lip gloss that her 13-year-old sister, Patricia, loved to wear because she liked the taste of it. A dinosaur blanket her 5-year-old brother, Nelson, couldn’t sleep without, and a box of matches her mom would use to light candles. There were a lot of papers scattered, some condolence letters, death certificates, and other things she would have rathered left at the hospital. She left those at the front door. Only picking up the lipgloss, blanket, and box of matches. Blinking rapidly did nothing to stop the tears that wanted to fall, but she tried anyway. Failing miserably. Instead she let them continuously roll down her cheeks, sparking an untapped rage in her heart. Ripping all the frames off the wall and flipping over everything in sight did little to calm her down. So she pondered how she could take it a step further. She walked up the stairs and into her mom’s room, looking for something she had stolen from repeatedly, the liquor stash. Right under the bed was where her mother would hide her rainy-day bottles, and Katharine knew precisely what she wanted to do. Maybe it had something to do about the way the house wouldn’t stop creaking with every step she took. Or the narrow halls that smothered her in memories, but all she wanted to do was burn it all down. She looked at the six half-drunk bottles at her disposal and proceeded to throw one bottle down the middle of the stairs. While taking another bottle and smashing it at the very top of the stairs, letting the alcohol roll down. The other three she opened and began pouring it out all around the house upstairs and downstairs. After emptying the bottles, she stared at the last one taking a sip before pouring it out in the hallway leading up to and out the front door. With a dino blanket over her head, bubblegum on her lips, and candle matches in her hand, she stood at the front door fiddling with the packaging.

The first two matchsticks broke in half due to the sheer force she used against the box. The third match burned brightly between her fingers, and she couldn’t let it go despite her desperation to let the fire do its job. Only released the flame once it began burning her fingertips, and by then, it was out of her control. The various wines with different alcohol percentages mingled into one fire accelerant, and within seconds, the fire began to spread. Her eyes widened as she fixated on the pictures on the floor and amidst the flames. She swiftly looked around, grabbed a family picture that didn’t have any char marks yet, and began walking away from the house. Holding the photo close to her chest, not daring to look back at her childhood home now engulfed in flames.

CANCER

Yitzchak Friedman

The doctor shows me a picture of my brain. It’s shapeless, murky, like a puddle of melting black snow.

“You’re so very special Robert,“ he breathes, his hand trembling slightly. “You...you have...something remarkable.”

I swallow hesitantly, feeling cold and alone in the bleached white office. My feet wave impotently from the starched crinkling examination table paper as the white-cloaked doctor steps closer his eyes aflame.

His smooth hands slowly caress the back of my head. “By all rights, you shouldn’t even be here. It’s...it’s a miracle Robert.”

“So I’m good then? No...dire prognosis.”

“Oh Robert you won’t last the month, you know that.”

An empty sensation. Like an old can that’s been sucked dry and left crumpled on the side of the road. “But...I...you...said...”

He laughs indulgently. “You have a tumor the size of a tennis ball. Malignant of course. But it’s a scientific marvel, so perfectly proportioned and wonderfully mutated, I’ve never seen anything like it. You’re a lucky man.

“Lucky?”

“To die from such a glorious creation. Think of the odds. It’ll be in all the medical journals. Your name as well of course.”

My mouth is dry. “Thanks.”

“No matter. All the other doctors are jealous. They wish they’d uncovered this splendid marvel. Naturally, they all want to observe your deterioration. I hear they’re flying in interns from the west coast.”

“I...don’t know what to say.”

“Are you a religious man Robert?”

“I was when I was young...now....I don’t know.”

“For a long time, I wasn’t. You see, I was indifferent to the doctrines they taught me in my youth. But I had an epiphany several years ago, a moment of pure spiritual transcendence. I was walking one day, through a children’s cancer ward. And I saw suffering I had never dreamed of before. People born into this world never to know a day without pain, a moment without the impending shadow of death. Children bald and crippled, pissing blood and sobbing. Parents helpless and terrified, saying prayers that will go unanswered. Nightmarish cartoons playing on a loop over the monotonous beeping of life support machines. Radiation, chemotherapy, misdiagnoses, all the self-destructive vanities of our technological hubris. And as I stood there, in the clinical sterilized halls I realized....how much....how much God loves us. Each and every one of us.”

I don’t have any words, my voice is gone. Tears are crawling out of the doctor’s eyes, small transparent droplets of clear water dropping to the maroon tiled floor. I see every individual droplet descend and join the others in a minuscule splat. That’s what we are. Droplets falling from the sky, over and over again. Dying as we hit the bottom every single time. Tears, from the eyes of God.

“Thank you, doctor,’’ I murmur. “Thank you for everything.”

Gently, he wraps his arms around me in a stiff embrace. “There’s no hope,” he whispers in my ear. “No hope for you...or for any of us.” He smiles, his watery eyes crinkling like paper. No hope.

The city wasn’t made for pedestrians but I walk anyway. Along a narrow strip of cracked concrete sidewalk. Cars fly by, their lights red blurs in the night air. Luminescent strip malls and gas stations dot the endless avenue. An ambulance, its lights flashing silently, softly whooshes by, a cool wind whispering at its back.

A circle of manicured lawns and ranch houses. All dark and quiet. I lived in a building once. On my way home from school, I would climb the stairs instead of the elevator. I remember standing in a stairway landing, catching my breath after running up a flight. Hunched over and panting as if my lungs would burst.

Now there are no stairs. Only the flatness of the suburban southwest. I leave the lights off in my house and wander aimlessly through the darkness. So many things, pictures, junk I’d always meant to throw out but never will. Memories stalk me in the shadows of my unrealized dreams. I’d never been to London. I always wanted to go.

I dreamed of flying across the Atlantic. Walking in the city of fog and rain, among all the streets and people I’ve read about my whole life. Then, the train to Paris. I would’ve sat in a cafe overlooking the Seine and basked in the solitude of complete anonymity. That’s all gone now. Washed away with the wonders of modern science. Carefully, I put my hand above my left ear and feel the bulge of a tennis ball pulsating in my ruined brain. Cancer. The banal death of the bourgeoisie. If only I’d blown myself up or died in childbirth. One month. Four weeks. Thirty days.

There’s fear but above all disappointment. Disappointment at the plainness of it all. Nothing great had ever happened to me. Nothing terrible. I had never saved a life or taken one. Never accomplished or destroyed anything meaningful. I’m like a dog who has barked and ran in circles until he died with his tongue still lolling contently.

No hope. I think of all the happy people I ever knew. All the children and the elderly. A bus driver who said good morning to me. There’s no hope. A friend who always called me. No hope for him. My family. No hope for any of them. One month or ten years there’s never any hope. I smile. God really does love us all.

COWBOYS DON’T MIND BROKEN STRINGS

Katie-Anne Howell

The sky moves with Purple waves

And graceful caps Of orange

White stars all wait

To cut the night

Like plastic

Sinking into the earth

Where a man sits still In his chair

Only moving to Bring beer to his lips

And stare At false fireflies

Soaring up and dying In fire smoke

They move north tomorrow

In pistol smoke

Hard stomps And another swallow

OH, MIDDLE EASTERN SUN

Eliel Mizrahi

Sun sitting on Shoulders, Heavy. Sultry. Unexplainable. Sweat trailblazes down the spine –leaving chills, across the path it carves.

Yalla I hear echo across the desert called a beach, Draped by sunray instead of sunscreen, But what is it even like getting burned? I don’t know –Yet I know the Middle Eastern sun.

Sun-drenched; Sun-drowning. Drowning into a fiery fever: Basking in the glorious heat, Charcoal cracks, Embers burn Searing every footstep buried as I run On the sand – like a relic it fades, leaving a mark. It’s not easy playing beach paddle ball.

The distant crash of waves Ignites the passion of Thought; The gentle breeze carries BBQ. Meat. A desire to eat. Hummus bowls ready.

Parched, I breathe fire –Seeking a cure, I reach my hand out –Allowing my body to expand to relax, to absorb the beauty in the chaos; To accept the warmth of another –Summer, oh how much I will miss you.

SWEETER MEMORIES

Wali Mohammad

The october winds shrivel the leaves and wither the roses

The emerald cascade stops flowing and the sapphire lake freezes over

The sounds of sunshine dim, grey skies announce winter

But the sweeter memories of summer echo those sounds

The blizzards of despair blow harsh, skin pierced, hearts frozen

But the sweeter memories of summer give warmth

The trees, leafless and lifeless. The frost denies sustenance

But the sweeter memories of summer sustain me

The stench of fear rises, Wolves devourer lambs

But the sweeter memories of summer protect me

The night is dark, the sky starless, the path unseen

But the sweeter memories of summer shine bright

The song of spring shall end my toil

And the sweeter memories of summer shall take me to that warm march morning

THIS SPACE CALLED HOME

Jasmine Elazm

hey, dad.

i know you’re here.

i hear you calling me from this ancient and powerful thing – your blood of my blood rises out of the veins of my memory like a phoenix – thousands of grains of comet ash rise and twist and turn into your living image of flesh.

not much has changed – space remains a husk of starlight and pain, and angels disguised as astronauts orbit around your coffin’s axis. at the family dining table, mom talks to us about the latest roadkill she spots on her way home from work, we pray to a terminally-fucked father and feast on his bread and body, we laugh hysterically at ourselves to ignore the black hole where your chair once was.

sometimes i forget that i’m forgetful – that when you bury language in some forgotten compartment, some spaceship turned meteor off to the uncharted, memory becomes a mere twinkle in the stream of distant and unnamed galaxies. when i feel myself forgetting the sound of your voice, i bury myself in your language — because to remember is to let yourself come back down to earth

earth. i remember now that you were never perfect – that you never taught brother how to change a tire, that you shattered mother’s plate from the world trade center, on purpose –that you were just like the rest of us, who make it a point to amaze ourselves by how hurt we are.

still – so very still – i remember how you would serenade me with arabic psalms of chocolate and silk as your fingerprints grazed my temples. i remember how you always kissed my forehead when i was half-asleep under the enfolded veil of a million planets. i remember you, your voice, that you were – are – really here. so, dad, remember. remember that even if you went unheard, even if you were a ghost in your own house, like supernova, i am your boundless echo –i am your boundless echo

“GUARD YOUR HEART, FOR OUT OF IT FLOWS THE ISSUES OF LIFE”

Renisha Conner

Yet there she lays with an unguarded heart

Trying to gather the fragments of it as the consequence

And though she tries, the shards pierce intensely through her soul

Sabotaging her emotions

She bleeds

She bleeds the more she tries

But she keeps trying

This is the life she now lives

Stuck with the wounds of a shattered heart

Who can make it better? Who can trade these pieces for a new heart? None other than Jesus

But she’s scared that He’ll be the hydrogen peroxide to her wound

Revealing the infection and causing her to bubble over in agony

She cries out

It stings, it burns

But it’s part of the process

She knows that’s the only way to heal

But she dreads it

What did she do to deserve it?

She left herself unfortified

Now she’s left to pick up the pieces

Lord, to the new heart you’ll give her, help her to guard it the next time around.

THE MULTITUDES WITHIN ME

Angelina K. Lambros

I, as all folk, am a storage unit of knowledge and experience, on a journey of peaks and valleys.

Among my forebears, there are laborers, painters, sculptors, poets, dancers, and musicians.

As dreamers, they took to riding stars, even if it meant a simple life.

I too manifest my sentiments creatively, for poetry is an extension of the physical being.

At times I develop fixations, which can be exciting and awkward all at once.

I have taken ideas that stuck in my mind, the thoughts that failed to leave me.

The stories that never stopped intriguing me.

The all too real contradictions that drained me.

That made me rock like a pendulum.

That made me lay on the floor, staring at the ceiling,

Envisioning new perspectives and new vantage points that I knew to exist

Whether I chose to resist or dared to persist, only to stand once more.

It was just like reading, which can be quite arduous, even though I desire to take it all in,

To uncover bits and pieces of a puzzle and put them together as a cryptanalyst does.

Years have built fruitful outcomes from an immature life form.

Though I have never ventured to another land, I have found beauty everywhere.

Once upon a June, I was a princess dressed in radiant blue, staring at brilliant lights.

Soon I found myself in a society of scholars–

A small ring of striving students, we prepare to build for ourselves futures that gleam,

As we engage in seminars and attend events in the city that never sleeps.

Together, we took pleasure in the experience I’ve always imagined, to be in the loge,

To gaze from up above, at the view of the majesty of the opera singers

Who evoke tension and drama that captivates and transfixes the immense crowd

With sorrow, fear, and glorious passion, as it is mirrored in the audience.

Riding to the academy, classical music and jazz floods my head, transcends my soul.

Arriving, I find a picturesque campus of green grass, daffodils, and a quaint clock tower.

What would it be like to paint it en plein air? Or perhaps a most elaborate castle?

For everyone has an inner life, but we artists long to share that inner life with the world.

Singing before a crowd, oh, such a magical moment!

For we are all songs that if expressed can be a symphony transformed from the spirit.

Thank you for carving my story in moss with steel words— Now I silence the washing cycle rinsing on repeat. Until the thread is thinned. Replaced with water.

FAREWELL TO THE FAUX AMBER

Diana Athena

Thank you for wrapping my name in sky secrets for seeking distance not from me but from your snowing mind dressing every morning in ashes— Now I see the faux amber.

Thank you for not looking beyond flushed petals for stopping at the blushed rose— Now I admit the distortion of scarlet illusion.

Thank you for dropping my white flag at the diamond sea edge— Now I feel the scales under my skin. I learned to swim.

Thank you for burning my trust— Again— Still I choose to fertilize dry soil to plant linums in empty fields.

Thank you for shutting me outside the iron gates of closure— Now I will write my own—

I am tenfold softer. I am letting you go.

ETYMOLOGIES OF LONELINESS | CANCER INTO WATER

Narisma

the bulging black sky, crying itself to sleep. my name is synonymous with ‘knife’. like ink bleeding through paper, a vein propagating the family curse. i water in the street outside and no one speaks a word.

my mother once compared her menstrual cycle to a holy stoup: changing the way all beautiful things do. blood as language only people like us can speak. citizens of the moon, spirits of the dark. uterus as throat to the second mouth, whispering God’s name. the way we dream of safety lost to love. two worlds, one for descendants of the water son. cancer is only cancer until it becomes rivulets of blue light. but even then, when the water breaks, rushes into the cracked vessel, threatens to eat you whole — just know that you’re still alive. if only briefly, in this small present. i am the fleeting secret in a vast library of salt. waiting for the day we become healing water on an open wound

SPRING DOES NOT WAIT

Martyna Miller

April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain...

In my patience I wove his journey home. My walls became a history made up of tapestries. Ones I reread over and over again. The print so worn I had to rewrite the stories over again from memory. The stone dropped from a great height the folds of water lessened became the hour I stitched and unstitched. Between a hundred lives... from time to time I hear

The sound of sails catching the Aegean, which shall bring

The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring which shall bring

The sound of aged artillery, which shall bring silence to the native birds in the winter. The sound of muddled feet, which shall bring... Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug

My tongue was cut and I’ll still tell a new story. A familiar song not o the record that kept spinning, we always found other means, because time is not a wife that waits for her husband to come home.

VENUS RIDES THE MTA

Martyna Miller

Apocalyptic beauty rides out from Ancient Brooklyn. She waves her finger as if to scold some unseen force. She does what she wants, unafraid of the consequences. While peeling porous citrus with elegant nails popping the tiny pockets of pulp, the sweets fill the cart. She’s been to purgatory and the inferno, the first and last stop on this ride. Plump lips filled with red lipstick applied unsteadily, a good song has entered her playlist as she bites her lip and bursts. And along with her, fawning, spilling vanity like hot coee on sticky nora. Dashed tailored suits and vests with gleaming eyes and whiskered casual carnivores blow the bugle horn starting the hounds on the unbarred track.

PAIN IN A COMPOUND

Hard to truly define pain

Described as:

The bad always comes with the good? maybe

The conscious feeling of something that harms Temporarilyor forever

What about the existence I have: Is it worthless to another person?

If I leave this earth on their terms

In bloody cold-hearted fashion?

The skepticism that comes with the deity In situations like this Makes it difficult to believe

The good pain we acknowledge towards expressing your creative self Showing dedication to your craft

The will to keep going admit struggle

Does this pain ever go away?

Is it like life?

In the sense that we don’t appreciate it when we’re at our worst state

And quiet when we’re at our best should it be like sitting in a room with complete silence surrounded by your thoughts with nobody to speak or judge?

Or I’ll do you one better

With the lights turned off

May it be a domino effect of an issue that’s generational in your family’s bloodline

Do we turn numb when it’s not pleasurable? then praise when it’s a necessity for satisfaction

Is pain just a constant reminder of who we are as people? a feeling welcomed to us from birth to one that erases us completely in the end

A sadistic nature that resides in the brains of those who have no care for the world

To souls that come in contact with it

For elevation of their character

Sayquan Wooden

FULL METAL CALVINIST

Jasmine Elazm

private joker, this is my final prayer. it is true there are only two kinds of people — those who kill and those born on a cross.

in our calvinist corps, where imams of christ name their rifles — mine is called margarita, and yours, master.

i know you don’t believe in the virgin mary, private. i’ll believe in you when you conceal your pin of peace with your right hand — when you sink your thousand-yard stare like a diving albatross, headfirst into the purgatory of my white womb, and believe in me.

private joker, my truth is predestined — i believe in prayer by not believing your prayer. prayer is the living word twisted into ammo, the cross is our collective gun wound. you see, we’ve all got wood and nails and vietnam in our guilt arsenal — but we can’t keep fighting our wars just to kill or be killed, for here i am that i am

of every protestant church window with his communion of unleavened wafers and store-bought grape juice to get the kids to grow up quick and drunk, with his commercial rock hymns which screech and beg to give him sloppy wet kisses and crushing ourselves with sledge-hammers, who ordains the floridian preachers that gaze at their only sons and daughters longingly in the comfort of their mobile home pulpit, leaning towards that supernatural dark to

come. let’s shoot jesus down with the bible, and mercy, and prayer, from the heavens above into the trenches of phu bai below — we will bury him next to that little sniper girl, who got a shot like häyhä and got spit and shit on, who prayed and prayed for you to wipe out her pain and fire. in three days, yeshua will lift her from the ground, to rise again among the pitiful ashcans a phoenix.

what is a soldier, joker? it is an exarch of the homeless and hastened —

a murderer of vodka kneeling in the dark alley rubble and cigarette butts of nazareth, it is your double barrel tubesteak shoved and shot through the gut of john calvin — come and see. it is you, john calvin — it is me.

private joker, hear me. like children — little mustard seeds guilty of nothing — like us, the mountains of guilt which move for them to grow, i believe we are born and born again.

THREE SCIENTISTS GO TO THE FOREST

Dean Lorentz-Perrone

Where willow tree branches graze pond scum, out where oaks and evergreens blanket the forest floor in cool shade, you can hear wind dancing between leaves—birds send songs flying on that breeze. An RV sits lifeless in the valley, encroaching vines of ivy holding the front half entirely in its green mouth, enveloping the door and the windshield. Inside, a child is born. It wails in mourning, air splitting and ripping the tissues of those tiny lungs for the first time. Lying in a dog bed of mangled grass and roots, the baby knows no mother, no father.

Three scientists can hear (with their future technologies) a human heartbeat from the remote wilderness, and set out on a days-long hike through mountainous terrain. Wading through shallow rivers, summiting steep cliffs, and losing their sense of direction, they come upon a muddy ridge draped in a dense milky fog. Not being able to see their arms grabbing the trees pulling them up the slanted and slippery mud, they keep falling face-first and sliding back down the slope. This goes on so long they begin calling out to each other in urgent pleas (Did you make it over? Are you still there?) and wondering if it is still daytime, or if it is nighttime, because they don’t even remember which one it was when they first got eaten by the fog.

Nothing left on these people—not a device, not a map, not a ripped cloth of shirt or skirt left on their bodies—mud-drenched and dying of thirst, they all at once burst out laughing like music when they can see their hands again! And the growing roar of water crashing upon itself becomes visible, too—a waterfall. They run under it and clean themselves and turn upwards their open mouths to drink and laugh because, “God, this is the best water I ever had in my fucking life!” and because they realize they’re all naked and not one of them is ashamed.

Through the woods, naked skin kissing luscious flora as they fly by, the three reach a clearing: the downward sloping side of a valley coated in plush neon grass, the bottom of which holds a thick bed of brush shaded by more trees. They stop, drop, and roll down the pillowy green fur—no indication anymore of where they are outside their intuition (and maybe no concern, either) —laughing and shrieking with joy the whole while. At the bottom, they come upon the RV wading through the dense brush, almost walking into the metal box since it was so integrated into the surrounding ecosystem, now completely swallowed in ivy.

One of them—the bravest—gropes the side of the RV for a door handle, gripping it tightly and yanking it open, snapping the obstructing vines and making them fall limp at their feet. Inside, they find the lone baby suckling berries on a vine, drinking the rich creamy nectar of the forest. Remembering their mission, one of the three wails in agony: “God, how can we rescue this child, when we are the ones who need to be saved?” And so, with no knowledge, sustenance, or supplies needed to make it back to the nearest road (was it days or weeks they hiked, now?), they pick fruits like mangoes off the vines lining the walls of this RV and sink their teeth into the juicy sweet flesh with abandon.

IRREGULAR AMETHYST

Sayquan Wooden

Human transition into a crystal gem

Beating at an unorthodox pace

Bursting into lavender beauty

The heart once supplied

Succumbed to luxurious mess

As diamonds shine expertise for violet

Showcasing source to aid nature’s organic connection

To our gemstone body

MESSAGE THROUGH TIME

(Framed on the wall, in the year 2073)

Dear Student,

Welcome to Brooklyn College. And, thank you for being here. Just know that you have made the right choice, simply because you chose the pursuit of a higher education. You are a rarity, and the cascade which led to your presence is nothing but a smooth projection— one that is truly paramount. Beyond the threshold is the essence of a different world. This is where dreams are forged. Within these walls, you have the potential to become the best of who you’re meant to be. But, that discovery can only manifest if you remain firm upon the exploration of who you are. If you wish to move forward, you must learn to leave all the burdens of the past where they belong. Know that things are always scary just before you start, but once you do, it only gets easier. Here, there is no room for dogma, because the sacredness of this space is reserved exclusively for the minds of critical and creative thinkers. To survive, you need to maneuver through the graceful act of reading and writing a lot. You are encouraged to thrive by transforming the novelty of your world into a life of poetics. No matter what field you intend to graze upon, invest and cultivate yourself with ‘Bird by Bird,’ which is the book of Anne Lamott. That way, you will always finish what you start, and you will also come to know that anything worth doing is worth doing well. Empathy through diversity has proven to be the key which opens the way for a prosperous community. And, in this place is where strangers become friends. In this place engagements are solidified. In this place talent is detected and refined. These halls have unequivocally experienced the possibilities of Serena Burdick, Robert Jones Jr, and Ocean Vuong. This place will also remember the brilliance of your every step, as it did with us before you. Trust me, I know how you feel, because at this very moment, while writing this, I am you. I know that, one day, my time will inevitably fade, then it’ll be your turn to hand the baton to someone else. To do for them what we have done for you. Our voices have echoed as interns, moved by the light of Roni Natov, with the hopes of reaching you, who is now a student of tomorrow. At this moment, no one really knows, but there are names that have shown immense promise: Khloe, Dean, Faith, Annalene, and Grayson … Jasmine, Adelisa, Kinza, and Angel. They have participated, told their stories, and became infinite, in their own special way. They are legends. And, I am a fortunate witness, attesting with awe as they simply write and share with one another in what is now the golden memory of 3416.

Never forget that ‘we do not remember days, we remember moments.’

And, everything has been written and dried. This is to say that we were here, and now so are you.

In this place, just know that you are within full right to pursue your happiness. So, continue to blossom and allow the scent of your unique fragrance to emanate into the world.

Keep going.

And, remember, that through the fleeting storm will always be the celebration of a brighter day.

From a student just like you, Abdoulaye Diallo 2022

ATTEMPT #3

Chemo Emo

And yet

There’s still so much to hope for

Still so much to know

And try to know

And try to try

And some of it’s easy

And some of it’s hard

And it’s a true pleasure

A real relief

To know there’s hope for it all.

Still

The sun can go down

The moon can cry

It’s craters like eyes

The love can be lost

The dream can die

The mentor can leave

The night can end

Because stories of life

Are not always good ones

And they don’t always have

Happy endings

Simply because

Someone wanted to live.

For what it’s worth

The journeys are good

The music is comforting

The breeze feels nice

And there’s always sleep

For when the heart and mind are too tired

And aren’t we all

After falling so hard

From rising so high

Meaning to touch the sky

But our feet

Our bodies

Always return to the ground.

Isn’t it so comforting, then

That the hope is there

Hope for the passion

Hope for the beggar

Hope for the mother

Hope for the peace

Hope for new days

Hope for old nights

Hope that it all works out

Just right

As bad as it is

Good is there too

And sometimes

In-between the lines

Of some broken-up poetry.

FOURTEEN STOPS ON THE TIME TRAIN

Haikeda Hillman

“Stand Clear of the closing doors please.” -

What’s my purpose before the final strike?

Am I meant to shed my skin each season, like these lifeless trees, Or am I returning to the dust, forgotten, by the slaves of time?

‘’Dad where are we going?”

“To visit Mommy sweetie.”

“But Mommy’s not here.”

Am I alone, like the silhouette of that single soaring bird, Mourning against the thin misty layers of the heavens?

Or am I missed, like every heart placed concrete, sealed, into the earth?

One shouldn’t be afraid of the fall of their time.

For no one knows of the bliss or blister of the afterlife.

We will all go out like these blinking lights.

“Stand clear of the closing doors please.”-

No one knows the very reason for their fright, Of our great friend death.

“Daddy, Mommy isn’t here anymore”.

“And the Lord Said,”

“Every action has a purpose!”

“Every life, every death, There ISSSS a purpose!”

“There is a reason for your cries, your tears!” He could be as tranquil as midnight snores,

“Daddy, answer me!” Or as dark as midnight dreams.

“ANSWER ME!” Death chases those who run.

“There is a reason for life as much as there is death!”

“Can I get an Amen!?”

Amen.

ASSORTED WORDS FOR MOTHERHOOD

Jose Sanchez

Where written

The book to mother

Wounds and Godly womb

And mother, see?

Preach about your Father

And tell me can you be forgiven Or at least pardoned into Heavens delivery room

Matriphagy is it

Or just family traditional

Left home to get disorder

Of children failed or faith ungifting

Sleeping Beauty still retained, well, Beauty

And a human put to sleep before their Innocence, Is an Innocent Sleeping Beauty. Perhaps.

INSPIRATION FROM

Eliel Mizrahi

A small place in Alphabet city

Located in the Lower East side;

A place where Change is not foreign there –

Gentrification: Skyscrapers changing the landscape

Shaping Immovable Spaces

Making no Sense

Erasing History

Yet, even when the weather turns for the worse, And storms of change prevail,

A small corner stands still – Tall.

Holding onto timeless history a fountain of inspiration: that subverts Change that forgets we Exist; we are here.

Steadfast – in the space – suspended at alphabet city.

ON THE CORNER OF BROWN STREET AND TWENTY BROKEN AVENUES

Michele Sherman

i want to write a poem for the women on brown street, the ones who work at the diner i go to every sunday with my parents, the ones who keep the dulled butter knives hidden up their sleeves and the cans of mace hidden in their aprons.

i want to write a poem for the women making minimum wage like they drew the short end of the stick, like they’re trapped in a cycle filled with nothing but cracked plates and wandering hands.

the women on brown street know that the customer is always right, but i’ve found them wondering when they’ll get their turn.

after all, how can the customer be wrong when you just moved the wrong way, darlin’. how can the customer be wrong when they leave a hearty tip and a vulgar message on the receipt? how can the customer be wrong when the women on brown street never get a chance to be proven right?

the women at the diner on the corner of brown street and an avenue where nothing bad ever happens keep their purses clutched so close to them that they become a second skin when they walk to their cars at night, to their bus stops, to their train stations.

these women mold themselves into their bags because that’s where safety lies, hidden in the can of mace or the switchblade they felt too silly to order online but can’t help finding useful more times than should be normalmore times than they can count.

i want to write a poem about the women at the rinky diner because they are the unsung heroes, folding their capes down to apron-size to fit around their waists, snug enough that the regular at table eight can’t force his sticky fingers under there again, tight enough that he can feel the safety click out of place and the thump thump thump of his own heart falling into the pit of his stomach when it becomes all too easy to forget how the predator becomes the prey.

i want to write this poem for debra and connie and margerie and erica, who greet every guest with a watery smile and a tightened grip around the coffee pot, because lately, filling the coffee cup up to the brim never gets past half-full.

PANTS ON, GUN ON AT THE ROD OF IRON FREEDOM FESTIVAL

Grayson Scott

Last Saturday, I took the four AM train from New York to Philadelphia. I hadn’t slept. It occurred to me that Philly, from the tracks, looked like it was built by a nineteen-year-old who can’t tie his shoes but whose parents still let him use power tools, and that this was somehow preferable to New York, which can look like it was made out of Duplo blocks by children trying to derive 421a from first principles. After disembarking, the directions on my phone indicated that I should step off the overpass I was walking across. I was there to join my friend at the 4th Annual Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, billed as “the largest open carry rally in the United States.” Eight thousand attendees were projected. The festival is held outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania, in a parking lot behind the Kahr Arms warehouse. Kahr is owned by the late Reverend Sun Moon’s progeny, Justin Moon, who also owns the Tommy Gun brand, the rights to the Desert Eagle pistol, and a “value” line of concealable handguns. His father became famous for the new religious movement the Unification Church, which held mass weddings for tens of thousands and was the subject of a Don DeLillo novel. Justin’s younger brother Sean, following a schism over his mother’s revision of his father’s sacred texts, broke away from the Unification Church. He founded a competing group, claiming it was the true successor to his father’s movement, and called it Rod of Iron Ministries.

This is an anti-gay, anti-immigrant, pro-Trump gun cult. Sean Moon took the stage for his opening remarks carrying a gold AR-15 and wearing a crown made from spent bullet casings. In his speech, he explained that Satan, the “original groomer,” makes teachers “push sexual licentiousness and pedophilia” to children. Marxism is literally Satanism; the specter of communism named by Marx is a real spiritual force active in the world. Joe Biden and Jeffrey Epstein, Marxists both, labored in concert with the Democratic Party to undermine democracy and buttress China’s plots. Covid is a hoax, and a smokescreen for “Nazi-style” socialist domination. The vaccine makes you “25% more likely to die.” “Illegals” are part of this scheme too, somehow. If you’re looking for hope, the January 6th protestors and Alex Jones are held up as exemplars of principled resistance.

It was effectively impossible to understand. It struck me that everyone in the crowd, now on their feet and cheering, had been radicalized by Facebook memes. I was past thirty-six hours without sleep and tried to take a nap in my friend’s car, but the sound of gunfire from the shooting range carved straight through the Prius’s skeleton.

Both brothers are totally lacking in charisma and completely humorless. It’s possible that those qualities would actually be drawbacks when you’re doing things like holding a blessing ceremony for married congregants and their AR-15s, wearing crowns made of bullets, and saying things like “Jesus invented the first assault weapon.” That comment, from Pastor Moon’s speech, was a reference to the whip Christ wove to drive the moneylenders from the temple. This strikes me as an extremely wobbly bit of exegesis. More to the point was this citation: “’Let the one whom has no sword sell his cloak and buy one.’ A sword is a military-grade weapon, and was illegal for Jews to own.” His brother’s gun warehouse had extended its retail hours during the festival, and did a brisk trade.

I’m pretty familiar with guns, and, as a corollary, with gun cultures. I have a class called “Rifle Safety” on one of my college transcripts. When I worked on a ranch as a butcher, I often used a small collapsible rifle to shoot livestock. I was given a gun before I started middle school. I know, approximately, when deer season is, in the same way other people know when football starts even if they’re not season ticket-holders. I also grew up in a Southern Baptist church which was basically as reactionary and liturgically illiterate as the Pastor’s sect seems to be. This is all to say that while I’m not exactly astonished by what Sean and Justin are up to, it nonetheless registered as alarming when I realized the same phrase, almost without variation, was being repeated by unaffiliated speakers: “We don’t own AR-15s to hunt. We own them to defend ourselves against a tyrannical government. The people should have arms equivalent to those carried by government employees.”

a Southern Baptist church which was basically as reactionary and liturgically illiterate as the Pastor’s sect seems to be. This is all to say that while I’m not exactly astonished by what Sean and Justin are up to, it nonetheless registered as alarming when I realized the same phrase, almost without variation, was being repeated by unaffiliated speakers: “We don’t own AR-15s to hunt. We own

them to defend ourselves against a tyrannical government. The people should have arms equivalent to those carried by government employees.”

How does something like this happen? I was there with a friend who’s writing a book about that question: This kind of thing is research for him. The principals are Korean men raised in America, the sons of one of the twentieth century’s most notable religious leaders. That they align with “men’s rights” advocates, white nationalists, and competing religious movements slots into a line of descent including the John Birch Society, political Sinophobia, and 2A activism that’s as old as the modern American state. Sebastian Gorka spoke, but they also gave prime slots to some Falun Gong nutcases. One of their speakers played a counterfeit voicemail purported to be a genuine threat against him, but was clearly just the same guy on the stage doing a brutal caricature of a Chinese accent and earnestly quoting Liam Neeson’s character in Taken (“We are from the Chinese Communist Party. We have a special set of skills. If you leave your house after 7:00 tonight you will meet your destiny.”) The audience applauded, spellbound, when another speaker averred that the Chinese government has secret police stations in Flushing that have deported 250,000 people.

As we left the main tent, we decided to take a last spin around the compound and pick up some souvenirs. In the parking lot, you could retain Sean Moon’s twenty-two-year-old son as your realtor, buy a shirt with the slogan “Biden Loves Minors” on it, or get Taiwanese food next to the Proud Boys booth. I was once knocked flat by a Proud Boy at a Klan rally in West Virginia, and, despite being unarmed, these were the scariest guys there: The average age across attendees was probably 60, not counting the kids, who were everywhere. The church, distinct from the 2A enthusiasts, is a young movement, and there were teens who wouldn’t look out of place in Soho. Everyone seemed to be there as a couple or a family. People were chatting and laughing. Earlier, we’d watched something billed as a “concealed carry fashion show.” A young mother slid a handgun from underneath her Baby Bjorn, cradling her infant’s head and smiling for the crowd.

A DIFFERENT WORLD

Abdoulaye Diallo

We have come a long way, Heavily stumbling In our divine escape

From the illustrious realm

Of pervasive insignificance

I tend to remind myself

That everything In this essence of existence

Was properly brought forth–

As noble products

Conjured from a single word, The simplicity of Be, and now we Are liberated

Immortalized, and gracefully thriving

As revolutionary moments In response

To those great many days Of nothingness

It was the inspiration, The development And inheriting of language Which has seeped as an innuendo

Becoming but a smooth, imperative tool

Made critical

For the survival of ourselves

Against oppressive storms

That have aligned

With the lingering passage of time

Since the dawn

Of remembrance

There was no civilization

Except that we began–

With the subtle impositions of art

Leaving our distant trails

As a familiar language

For those slowly destined to come

And in time

We gradually grew Exploiting the signs, embedded--

In the act of designing

Something grand Which contained a prevalent beauty Through the reveled drawing Of aesthetic lines in the sand, When painting on the wall inside caves And in dancing with each other To communicate the fluidity Of our vibrant emotions

We articulated

The reflection of our culture

Through the telling of stories Which became a defining arc Toward the horizon Of potential tomorrows

I believe

That we conceived And achieved

A new sense of reformation Through the poetic discovery Of intentional expression And now, we can radically alter The measure which we give To the prolific state our lives Even though meanings Are never finalized Or absolute

In this ever changing age Of post-structuralism

So perhaps it proves Why we choose to rebel

Why we invent, just to learn

And then go on

To break the rules, For willingly do we subvert In order to hopefully reach The heightened scheme Of anything which we aim to be

Our language Is ungoverned by sound But constant with rhythms

A canvas, depicting–The compact image Of roaring colors Without any wonder For decorative need And, there is an exchange Gained from this strange But rare comfortability For language helps us feel As though we’re getting closer To that long awaited landscape–Of home

An everlasting garden Forged from the nuance Which we housed within the bloom Of our imagination

This language Gave us Shakespeare Dickens, Whitman And Twain Can’t forget Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Walter Dean Myers And Toni Morrison If only history was not so cruel To the spectacle Of John Dos Passos Whose experimental style Was but an astonishment Which translated his sanctity Of being truly lost When leading his generation

This language Has shown us that narratives Truly happen–To those who are able to tell them Through the craft of knowledge And love

Without language Without art Without stories We are nothing And so, we strive To write our dreams Into reality

Ultimately, We are a universe Because of the cohesive power Which originates From the diversity of our voices

Language Has made us Infinite.

AFTER WORK, I GO TO SLEEP

Martyna Miller

and repeat the day once more. I put a quarter at the laundromat watch the lingerie tumble.

Bodiless clothes rapt waded together— a sea of dull silver strewn on the floor.

My mind is a washing machine sopping wet bundles of heavy people locked in a clasp. The load finished the soaked wad clumped tired in a wet ball at the bottom of the drum.

Ready for the dryer—I think I’m strung out for love.

There’s a photo of a girl, smiling, unaware. Does it matter where you sit as Ma prays?

Do you love that girl?

The answer inches closer— lips between a bridge of air.

I will ask, but not beg. Do I dare devour the ravenous flesh, juice, and all?

Goosebumps arise, peach fuzz, as our arms graze the borders of the sweetest music.

Notes eager to the meter they prance across the bar, so close to the surface—measure for measure, so keen it ties the arms, closer to the resolution a climactic round-about coda repetitive.

Love is now an algorithm— a binary code.

After work, I go to sleep and repeat the day once more.

A DAILY RECORD OF CITY TRAFFIC

Iris Triunfel

Perhaps I was always meant to be a witness, to feel a tenderness only attainable on the sidelines. Witness to things that happen organically, but somehow out of my reach; a bittersweet dilemma.

It was Saturday evening, raspberry and orange strokes settled in the sky. The summer heat was dwindling a couple degrees every hour or so, but I felt my forehead moisten with the tasks of today. I was in the backseat of a car, the voice that came through the speakers muffled while I daydreamed, per usual. As I stared out of the front window, a couple approached the corner across the street. Yellow. Young and with attire that was visually appealing, but their expressions were serious as though alone in this world. How can one feel solus in the presence of companionship? Red. Both of us were waiting at the stoplight. One by choice, one by commitment. They stood side by side. Then, in front of one another like dancing with light feet to ease the ache. They exchanged short words, but longing stares as if in repair; repairing a dent made earlier today. Diverted their gaze at the ending of each phrase. Although they were two feet apart, they were still comforting each other. In a way not understood by other passing people but noticed by me, the witness. He reached for her hand and intertwined their pinkies; unity even after a crash. Green. They were silent, and then a monosyllabic farewell. Perhaps, a promise as time closed to a change. She walked to the right, he jogged across the avenue. I had seen their departures simultaneously and no one looked back, not even me.

And I testify that there’s a cynical beauty in holding this memory outside of those who are able to experience it.

PANACEA

Joseph Edelheit

The dead have risen. This much is clear. The cause for their presence is of course up for debate. Some argue that this is a manifestation of some core sin of our modern age; be it consumerism, environmental collapse, our incapability of responding to modern health crises, our overreliance on technology, our underreliance on tradition (and vice versa), the hubris of this new millenia, some extremely evil necromancer who just happened to decide today was the day they would ruin everyone’s three-day weekend, or whatever else have you. This is all the space that will be given to this concern, for it is in truth utterly unimportant. Whatever the cause, there are now zombies, and they are spreading.

A far more important concern then, is what we are going to do about this. Some say that through our superior firepower, we will return these once-deceased back to their graves in a timely fashion. Others say that through the fervency of faith we will open ourselves to the Heavens and from there be redeemed from this End of Days. Others will have us hole ourselves up in secret bunkers, as they argue that there is in fact nothing to be done, except turn back on connectivity and ride out the end alone. They are all wrong. This is not some insurmountable threat, not an unstoppable wave of annihilation whose destructive capabilities are matched only by its cunning intelligence. Nor is it the sign of some divine cleave of the universe. It is in truth, a simple conflict of applied physics. Legally, if you bite a zombie, it must become a person. According to Newton’s Third Law of Motion, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. If a zombie’s bite has the transmogrifying power to propagate its undeath, then the inverse must also be true. The bite of a human, according to physics, and therefore all of our laws, must turn any zombie back into a regular person.

It is physically impossible that this will not occur, as science and the natural philosophies are on our side. This, and only this, is what we need to prevent disaster. But this is not foolproof. It is extremely likely that the zombies either have not learned nor remember Newton’s Third Law, and as such may be ignorant to the fact that they must transform back into people. If so, they will not transform, and then this ignorance will inspire more zombies to not transform, making this strategy utterly useless. Their consensus reality, inspired only by ignorance, will overtake objective reality, putting the stability of all things into question.

But this can be stopped, especially now, at the very beginning of this conflict. We simply must remove the potential ignorance of the zombies. While it may seem unfeasible to enroll all the zombies in our entire educational system, this should not be immediately discounted. A quick refresher seminar on the basics of reality could be designed and be given to all zombies immediately upon their zombification, and this may save both time and effort. With this, we will pull ourselves out of the apparent apocalypse, which will not be characterized by chaos, fire, and brimstone, but by knowledge unending, and perhaps equal compassion.

VOICE OF GOD

Samuel David Shepherd

Paul Willis awoke in the darkness of his cabin aboard the steamboat Forrester. He turned over, felt the damp cot under him, the steady rumble of the engines farther down, and the languorous swell of the Mississippi beneath it all. Across the room he discerned a softer square of black within the utter black, the cabin’s single window, like the inverse of a keyhole in wrought iron. Beyond the window and across the eastern bank of the Mississippi a bolt of lightning rent the sky, silent and quick as thought, like a golden fissure upon a flawless pane of jet. He fell asleep counting off the seconds to gauge the distance of the storm. Paul awoke to the sound of a gunshot. Across his bed, the cabin door was ajar and Mr. Downey, captain of the Forrester, stood within the threshold, holding a lantern.

“Mr. Willis,” Downey said, “Ye told me to wake ye should anything occur. I can’t take the boat no further, not till them Union barges clear the way of rebel wreckage. Meantime, it’s quite a thing, pon’ the banks. Newsworthy.” Downey was a big man with a deep voice tattered from a lifetime of orders shouted from the wheelhouse. A tangle of five brass lockets hung from his neck, all but hidden in a thick mat of black chest hair.

Paul sat up and pulled his boots on. Outside, men cried out for water. Smoke hung in the air, stinging his eyes, and a strange sound was coming from outside the cabin. “That I did,” Paul said. Paul was a war correspondent with the New York Herald, and with the Confederate city of Vicksburg finally under Union control, Paul’s editor sent him south for something more detailed than a body count. “What’s that noise?” Paul said. It was like nothing he had ever heard. A guttural cacophony, with intermittent cracking sounds as if from dry branches.

“Victory at Vicksburg,” Downey said, handing Paul the lantern. “I’ve no desire to look upon it again. Godless. Seems He’s gone quiet. S’your duty to bring the story home, but my daughters will get naught from me.” Downey turned and left, boots thudding on the weathered boards as he ascended to the wheelhouse. Lightning flashed as Paul stepped out and the dreary overhead of the cabin gave way to a sky split between uncountable stars and the reaching veil of dawn. Another gunshot cracked nearby, closer than the last, and a warm wind carried the stench of blood upon it. The uncanny sound grew louder as Paul discerned upon the bank dozens of low black figures. Near the shore, a warhorse dragged the muddy corpse of its rider, its leg caught in the stirrup. Paul stood at the starboard rail. All around the dull crunching sound. A squeal.

When Paul was a boy he’d been terribly afraid of storms, of the senseless crashing all around. His grandmother, who as a girl had lived among the Indians, had taught him that for each second between the flash of lightning and the crack of thunder was a mile’s distance between him and the storm. This had been Paul’s first and most well-worn prayer.

Paul thrust his lantern forward, throwing light upon the blasted field. Dead bodies lie on their backs, torn and bloody, mouths agape and eyes unseeing or facedown and motionless like drunkards. Some sat on their bottoms, slouched forward and heads hanging. They were slung across smoldering pieces of artillery or poking from beneath dead horses and shattered wagons. Many were missing limbs or scorched by fire. Some were still alive, gutshot and doomed, crying out for water and for God. And they were being eaten.

Hogs swarmed, devouring the corpses in trembling clusters or darting about with eager speed, scattering crows upon leafless branches to perch hunched and gorged. The hog’s heads were coated in gore and their bellies were distended, scraping the mud. The lantern’s light struck eyes like black gems.

Paul fumbled in his breast pocket for his notebook. He set the lantern down. The sun had risen enough that the field began to take shape and the scale of the carnage made him grip the rail. The dead upon the field resembled a tattered blanket, torn in spots where the mud and ruined equipment poked through, but was a nearly unbroken weave of corpses. The hogs had no preference between the dying and the dead, and the screams of those being eaten stilled Paul’s hand.

He turned his eyes up towards the sky. The dawn revealed in the distance a gathering of grim thunderheads. “The Lord hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet.” A bolt of lighting snapped to the earth like a golden fissure. Paul closed his eyes, dry lips counting off the seconds.

Bang—A pistol shot.

He opened his eyes, looking in the direction of the sound. A lone, bare-chested figure made his way across the battlefield. In one hand he held a red cavalry saber, in the other a smoking pistol. Upon his head he wore a queer hat, a beret, which Paul had seen upon the heads of French mercenaries.

The Frenchman stopped, nudging a prostrate body with his boot. Paul watched as the Frenchman raised his sword high, then slashed it down. A mercy killing. He reloaded his pistol. The thunderheads drew nearer. Another flash of lightning.

Crack—another shot.

The Frenchman wrenched his saber from the corpse and slashed at an approaching hog. The beast fled, there was no shortage of meat. The Frenchman pulled a gray-vested man with a bloody leg to his feet. They briefly exchanged words, then the man began to remove his jacket. The Frenchman waved at Paul. “La vie est une bataille perdue d’avance!”

Paul furrowed his brow, then he began to write. Life is a battle, lost in advance…

“Monsieur!” Paul said, finding his voice. “Monsieur, are you a Confederate? Who’s side are you on? For the papers!” he said, raising his notebook.

The Frenchman grinned, mirroring Paul’s gesture with his bloody sword. “Certainly not on ze side of ze pigs!”

The wounded man laughed. Paul smiled.

Thunder roared, scattering hogs.

Rain began to fall.

VOLUME 14 | SPRING | 2023

Supported in Part with Funds from Riverrun