Ode to a Vivisection

Beating Heart beneath the skin, Did you know what was to come? Gills on fie, water’s liar, Oh God, I hope you’re numb.

Beating Heart on full display, Did you know you’d see the light? I apologize for curious eyes, I know this isn’t right.

Beating Heart whom I deluge, Can you feel the biting cold? Slowing down, wholly drowned, My sins shall go untold.

Beating Heart now snipped in two, Did you know how you’d expire? Severed head, now fully dead, No harmony from the choir.

Josephine Hodges Class of 2025

2023

The Long Goodbye

Strapped into the seat, I am ready for lift off o the sky above. Soaring higher and higher, the ground farther and farther from my sight, my touch. Looking on over the grassy hills with a light picnic strewn about is my family, waving me goodbye. A final goodye, unbeknownst to either them or I. Before I have time to dwell the ship climbs, claws, grasps towards the edge of the atmosphere trying to break free. The darkness above becomes ever closer to the glass between itself and I. The engine continues to howl for a time, and then nothing, silence all around me.

…

I look from side to side, I hear Houston calling out, “All clear, ready for phase two.” The command center’s voice gets quieter and quieter as I fade in and out of what’s going on. I suppose it is time to sleep, to dream, for the long haul ahead. As I get up from my seat and lie down in the pod all I can think is oh God , it’s time, time for the past to blacken and the future to flicer forth.

Closing my eyes and shutting this casket-like tube, I feel the engine roar once more, the metaphorical green light, the signal for leaving my giant blue and green light behind. Forever.

Colin Dixon Class of 2022

There is Still Hope for Us

We rose from the ashes of your nightmares

Carved out a life for ourselves

Amidst toxic gasses and polluted waters

Sacrified upon your superficial altar

We choked on all your expectations

While you worked to stop the interventions

Now that our strength has grown

You fear that you’ll reap what you’ve sown

Too late. Your control has shattered Your forces have all been scattered

You cannot hope to defeat the shunned

We were the ones born from your blood

Jessica Cordova Class of 2023

Butterfly Eect

Bryn Jenkins

Photography

SWORDS, III-VI III

The shock, more than anything. The abrupt intimacy. There’s something clever about the way the blade slots between my ribs, true as a smile, something adjacent to tenderness: a perverse kind of proof that you know me after all.

How easily you find our way to my heart!

I’d be impressed, if it weren’t for the distraction of the pain—

IV

There comes a point, during the murder, where I am tempted to aid in the disassembly if only to get it over with more quickly.

Indistinct, I weigh the idea: my mind on all the better ways my time could be spent but my brain wasted on the pavement. Ultimately, it’s easier to settle in to the reassuring press of steel on tendon.

There’s a certain relief in being laid out: the world becomes very light when you realize you have nothing left to carry.

V

This is not the irritation of an oyster incubating its pearl or any other precious injury borne for love. This is a rage that has been punctured into me:

I am not a coat rack or a key bowl or a catch-all. I am not a knife block.

You will not crowd the soul out of me to carve a space for whatever bitterness you’ve let outgrow your hands, not without my own curling back to tear the same out of you.

VI

You can’t reason with ivy as it smothers the flwers. The universe is finie and there is not enough sunlight for everyone–It is outgrow or be outgrown. I know this. I have learned. I am wilting now, overindulged, and I see clearly with my head downturned.

If I have been chokeweed, I am sorry. If you are the scythe, don’t be.

The Open Road

A tiredly overplayed 2000s song crackled through the long-blown-out speakers of the car I’d paid for entirely with cash off of raigslist.

The tips of my fingers ere still stained with remnants of the hair dye I’d raked through my curls not even an hour beforehand. Mousy and brown: common. More importantly, forgettable. I’d have to bleach the steering wheel before I ditched the car.

I daydreamed about change, careful to keep up with the traffic without speedingoo much. Any attention was bad attention. I had to project myself as an ordinary Jane without coming across as a cardboard cut-out. She would be a nameless face, yes, but who would she be?

Should she smoke? It’d be a good excuse to people watch, and I’d always wanted to pick up a bad habit, but I was too afraid of losing my image. Ironic how in the end it was me, not the audience, who killed her. Then again, smoking had a smell, and smells had memory, and memory meant sticking out. Maybe I’d start drinking again. No one remembers the lonely girl at the back of the bar.

How would I take my coffee, now? I paused. No, how would she take her coffee? I no longer existed. I installed myself inside of her, therefore she was real. I was a fading idea.

I smiled for the first time in moths., I’d decided to keep my smile, the one reminder of what I’d left behind and what would soon cease to exist.

A fresh start.

Reece Maguire Class of 2024

Florida Diner

Lost

Thick fog obscures perception and blankets the street as mothers, during that frigid night, tightly swaddle their children. Nebulous black stems rise from the endless sea of gray, caging light, in an attempt to imitate the free floting nebulas one might see in a world with more clarity. Pale orange balls glow like Will-o’-the-wisps, and one can hear the click clack of work shoes as they keep a lone man, as gray as the sea he drudges through, aflot. He takes a long drag from his nearly burnt-out cigarette, the acrid flvor giving him a taste of something beyond the bleak gloom, however fleetin. There is an illuminating moment where the embers of the cigarette cast light upon the man’s face, revealing bright eyes and old scars imperceptible in the dark fog. The worn leather briefcase handle contrasts against the man’s soft, smooth hand. He feels its weight pull on him, an enlightening thought, he mumbled to himself on that icy night. The tempo of his click clacks becomes syncopated, due to a dull ache in his sole. The cigarette now merely a smoldering stump, giving none of its former warmth, merely swaths of smoke dissipating into and strengthening the fog, the man casts it into the nothingness, engulfed. He breathes—the cold gray invades his lungs— he drowns.