CHANTER memento
CHANTER memento
(noun): one who sings, or, the part of the bagpipe that plays a melody
Spring 2025: Memento Macalester College Literary and Arts Magazine St. Paul, MN
chanter@macalester.edu chantermagazine.com
Chanter would like to thank the following:
Our generous alumni donor
Professor Emma Törzs
The Mac Weekly and their office
Hozier, our patron god
Graduates still on the mailing list
Our GOATs, Public Safety
Those damn bird trips
Kelsey’s speaker
Kien (Mom)
Ian UP, Kelsey DOWN
Teddy and Panda
The walls
The Pope Mobile
Editor-in-Chief: Nguyễn Trung Kiên
Literary Editor: Rosie Smith
Art Editor: Ellen Pendrak
Submissions Managers: Ian Glejzer, Jamila Sigal Vásquez
Public Relations Coordinator: Kelsey Blickenstaff
Editor: Charlie Gee
Staff:
Sayuri Cumaranatunge
Basilia Cruz Blue
Sarah Gray
Jane He
Owen Larson
Colin Massoglia
Sophie Okite
Ava Ortiz
Elena Ortiz-Fishman
Paul Wallace
Ike Wicht
Writing
~ when swallo
Kiss like al8 Lucy Clementine
The DJ Plays
“Dancing In The Dark” 9 Sarah Tachau
Carry Us Away 10 Violet Stepen
Strawberries 11 Lily Salazar
Horseshoe Crab 12 Charlie G
knowing/seeing/nothing at all 13 Hayden Chapman
Disillusion 15 Natalie Mazey
AUTUMNS 16 Owen Larson
Uncareful Indulgence 17 Eva Markham
First Pit! 20 Sophia Woods After Sappho 24 21 Andy Zhang
My Morning 22 Colin Massoglia
Empty Nesters 43 Ellen Pendrak chewed over with time, 45 Elena Ortiz-Fishman a hanoian diptych 46 Nguyễn Trung Kiên
This July 47 Marley Craine the field 48 Gavia Boyden the water tower 49 Gavia Boyden for dust you are and to dust you will return 50 Hayden Chapman On Blue 51 Calliope Coney curiosity killed my cat 52 Sophie Okite (content warning: pet death)
Springtime Degeneration 53 Violet Stepen
A Walk In The Willows, December 5pm 55 Sarah Tachau
In the event we did not meet for coffee 56 Natalie Mazey
Rotten Gardens 57 Emma Gonzalez Cueto
Emilina 58 Lucy Clementine Art ~
El Chaltén 23 Ayuna Lamb-Hickson
thresher shark 24 Asa Rallings
Serenity Meow 25 John Bunting
Lone Bloom 26 Nicholas Lobaugh
Gossamer 27 Marty Stoner
Feminity’s Mask 28 Annie Hsu
BARREN EPICENE 29 Bryant Juarez
Suns and Stars 30 Aahanaa Tibrewal
The Lidless Eye, 5/5 31 Nicholas Lobaugh
Who brought the chairs? 32 Eva Markham bugs! 33 Asa Rallings
Sway Sway Indigo 34 Marty Stoner
Underneath in the Afternoon 35 Ayuna Lamb-Hickson
Portrait of a Ukrainian, Serhiy Kuliaso, who stayed in Kyiv with his wife to help feed the army
Grounded 36 Megan Precopio 37 Natasha Tomlinson
The Bund 38 Emma Gonzalez Cueto
Portrait of undocumented immigrant mother, Jeanette Vizguerra, with her daughter, Luna Baez
MARK MY WORDS 39 Bryant Juarez 40 Natasha Tomlinson
Gallery 41 Leah Long
A Home 42 Aahanaa Tibrewal
Cover art: Sisters charcoal
Ruth Lavan
Editor’s Note
As the snow thaws and the flowers reclaim their place on campus, Chanter returns with our usual offerings of literature and art. Every spring edition is a send off, not only to the trials and tribulations of an academic year, but also to our seniors. The frequent submitters and often published, the staff members who never cease to stay past the late hours of lit and art meetings, and, of course, the editorial board and our generational feud with InDesign. It is especially sentimental for me as I finish my fourth and final year as a board member. I’ve witnessed the evolution of our little magazine across the years, perpetually nurtured by the creative force of the student body. And as the year comes to an end, I do hope that Chanter can be a time capsule, for all our amazing writers and artists to leave a piece of the passing year.
Memento, something to hold, to keep, to remember. There is truly no better way to capture a single moment in time than through poetry and art. Be it a rotting strawberry, a horseshoe crab, a chance meeting with a cute barista, or just a single kiss. There are memories of sadness, sure, but there will always be plenty of hope and joy. I know I will look back at all the past editions of Chanter with fondness for my time here, font errors and all. So let Chanter be your memento, to collect in monochrome both the sweet and the bitter, knowing that you can always look back and remember. Just as all good art is supposed to do.
Without further ado, I present to you Memento, the Spring 2025 edition of Chanter.
Nguyễn Trung Kiên
Editor-in-Chief,
2024-2025
Kiss like Lucy Clementine
The kiss was like something I’d never felt before and never want to feel again, it was the kiss of too soon, of dry lips and in my country, we don’t really ask. She kept her head turned down and her fingers crawled across my lower back, like the grip of sweetness, but I was desperate for her to let go. My stomach stumbled down the stairs, crashed into the corner between carpet and door, the exact spot where I scuff my shoe every day, kicking it closed. The collision was a slow rug burn, and I came down with the flu that weekend, from the nausea. It’s only two weeks since you held my hand, trembling and trusting, told me there is someone whose heart I’ll excite — like the day I kissed you, drunk, on your tippy toes while I stood on a chair. The evening you cornered me, giggling into the kitchen counter, and said I think I just fell in love, a little bit. And I nodded and grabbed your face because you didn’t lie, you have never lied and in your sincerity there was ecstasy, kisses like thick red wine and a grip around my back like an elephant’s gentle trunk. This kiss was like something I never want to feel, it was the kiss of get home safe so I can throw up in peace, alone, and I am not angry, simply thrown off by the way she kept her head turned down like we were the only people in our only world, and it was nauseating, not because she tasted like cigarettes and frozen skin, but because we were perched at the top of the stairs. You always waited until we were safely down and grounded before centering me against your hip. Though there may be nothing to forgive, all I can do is silently beg for your grace.
The DJ Plays “Dancing In The Dark”
Sarah Tachau
After Hanif Abdurraqib
& finally I understand the Teenage Dream. I’m twisting cherry stems in the mouth of 18 & I’m prom night, spot lights & a body flailing to beat back the hours & as a fact of life there is always something happening somewhere so DJ keep it spinning won’t you? because my future is a strobe lit night & this floor is clearing out but that’s just cause the kids want some katy perry wait until they hear the thump shuffle thump like heels skipping & twirling over cement licked fresh by june rain & sweating pigmented innocence & its a shade of swelling cerulean blue one hue lighter than the indigo of my friend anushka’s gown & per her request I’m lifting my damn feet off the floor & I’ve quit the soulless bobbing of my knees & my hands are sand bags tied to rope & flinging from side to side & rib to rib & I’ve never started a fire too busy worrying about my little world falling apart or who might see the smoke but tonight I’m burning & crumbling & shivering & scraping the sky & so what I’m trying to say between the eclipsing suns above our heads is that to be young on the cusp of a little less young is to be kindling or the cobalt river’s shallow breath before the flood & my chest rises like the water wearing the banks of this night away & my longings are pooling from my pores & leaking all over the glossy floor & the sax is calling me into the golden heart of the night & out of this well-to-do suburban town where they’re carving me, you, us up alright & so DJ spin it once more, won’t you? I’m sick of trying to write this book in a language other than swinging limbs.
Carry
Us Away
Violet Stepen
In motion, I always imagined myself a bus-caught corpse, muscles slack, lolling head, eyes dead and stretching for the one thousand miles between my seat and whatever there is after death. Death is such a trivial concern now, now that I’m bonded, allotted, peapod-ed to the first of hopefully many I may fancy a friend. We talk — I point at the autumn-tufted trees, they love them too — and there are so many airy vibrations I could make with these cursed chords but laughter is one I thought I couldn’t, not until now. I think of myself as moss and my friends like flowers — there’s no chip nor crack I can’t crawl my way through, but they seem so ready to wilt or cry and if I don’t do things right then maybe they’ll die — but with a hiss and a clack we’re moving, and what could we ever be but the two of us, traveling together somewhere new, someplace wonderful? I think I’ve found it’s not good to stay still, to live a vegetable life — and that air is better disrupted by that lazy wave I give to them across the aisle.
Strawberries
Lily Salazar
I left the strawberries out to rot — again I am ignorant — again I am the wrecking force but it is only that I am busy waiting for something to rot me, too, leave me out by the fridge and finally feel some sort of guilt about me and the way my edges fold in on one another turning gray, green, brown — everything but the colors of fire — anything but the sun bleaching skin soft, melting again(st) myself
Horseshoe Crab Charlie G
Forget, Remember.
My friends and I get high and watch dinosaur vocalization studies. I sit in the dark wide-eyed and am certain that no one has felt this before.
Perspective is important.
This morning while putting on my socks, I realized that horseshoe crabs survived the asteroid that wiped out an entire planet. This is almost unfathomable to me, but I believe.
Despair, Hope.
When I was ten, I saw thousands of their hardened carapaces on the beach of Assateague Island, and I walked among fossils. I need to learn how to etch the tender folds of my flesh into sturdy stone; I need to know how an ancient arthropod answers God and says no to death. I want you to live beyond the anthropocene. Surely, something must survive this hellscape we’ve made, and you deserve to outlive me.
knowing/seeing/nothing at all Hayden Chapman the plastic sinclair dinosaur ace hardware the sign’s been out for years since high school at least reach out your hand feel it in the world feel the air conform around it reach, reach push, shove find the place designated for you and see that it is yours oh, a new parking lot they’re digging up the old sidewalk and building a new theater it’ll be good i think aldi’s hasn’t it been waiting for you? yet you oscillate between living and unliving all the while death creeps in fill yourself with stagnant air pick a side and walmart right across the street the casey’s by truman that has e85 but there really is no death here rather a death-shaped detachment the sound of a closed door the pervasive stillness that is home they changed the sign on the gas station by the strip mall on patterson but nothing else got renovated it used to be a clown themed something or other your room is thick and stale time does not move here
it holds you tightly it molds you and you are comfortable you learn yourself by its guiding hand it still smells like smoke the slots still spin and ring out they put in a park by church that old building on that old lot there is a brief moment crossing over state lines you feel that air again this is your place beyond just knowing it you feel it intrinsic shift innate to you the you beyond self too much asbestos to be worth anything anyway uptown keeps growing uptown, downtown if you can even call them that but uptown keeps growing further and further north, along 63 you cannot choose it for yourself you breathe that air it is written in your skin in her skin, the skin you inhabit it is said that you exist here ozzie doesn't have a tesla anymore he sold it i guess but he still works at the pool there’s a new candle shop downtown and a diner that ripped off diner 54’s menu pick a side feel something even if it is your own teeth in your own skin digest, reduce become shit and become rot but become something the big screen at downtown cinema 8 broke the other ones work fine though
Disillusion
Natalie Mazey
You tell me you first notice people’s teeth. I look at mine in the mirror, crooked like the cracked sidewalks where I shook away your palm. Where I turned and gave my smile to the moon. I trace the stain on my incisors, rub off my enamel with my tongue. I pour myself a cup of green tea, whispering tendrils of steam washing my mouth in goldenrod. I imagine memory as film, yellowed in cages of clear tape. I dream of my teeth crumbling like sandcastles, my mouth pooling with the fall of your empire. I spit you into the sink, pick out your words with toothpicks. I write you a story by grinding my molars. In it, we are pearly white. In it, you say I look beautiful.
AUTUMNS
Owen Larson
After Gertrude Stein
HOT-COAL BUGS.
A side to fall to flocking to a flight a wide flight and a swaying and a dirt smell, swell and blister in two time. This makes an afternoon chitter.
GREEN.
A precious green is much and it is not a mulch, it is yellow in a manor. It is not a depth but it is not a depth that has no complacency and a morsel of orange makes it sweeter. What is the point of a line without softness sputtering a passing in slow patches. Which half fiercely, when ever has there been right.
A NOVEL.
There is no use in perusal no use at all.
SIDEWALK.
Weed warm wheat worn, pass by here, here hear, hear step warn. There is a pleasure in cracking sprouts.
Uncareful Indulgence
Eva Markham
Self sufficiency runs in the veins of rural New England. Self sufficiency and prudence. The two flow like sap in March and only sometimes clot, or bubble. And even then they trickle through. The fields — full of bears and mice and spiders and crows — are dry and resourceful. Indiscriminate grasses — there are so many kinds of grasses — and prickers and sneaking suspicion wild blueberries and tiny bluets and Indian paintbrushes fill up the sprawling spaces like broom bristles. The earth beneath it all is no more rich or rocky than you’d want or expect it to be. The worms like it well enough. So does most everything else.
Mother says “don’t consume fruit in the dark,” you never know what mold or rot has clambered onto it. What she means is don’t eat when I’m not there to watch it. Don’t eat when you’re not meant to eat. There’s affliction in uncareful indulgence.
Last July, I deposited my first bundle of treats in the rot hole of an old stump against the stone wall. Cookies and crackers and slices of something or other, folded neatly in the dust blue napkin so long gone my mother had forgotten to wonder about it. Later that night, after clearing the table and slipping just one oatmeal raisin from the jar, careful to hold it in my open palm under her watchful eyes; after folding my socks on top of my skirt on top of my sweater, and twitching my toes against restlessness for nearly 40 minutes, I raced through the busy quiet, back to the stump. I stuck my hand in the soft and wilting wood and touched dry linen.
I have an instinct to eat. Not the way bears do, or mice, or spiders, or crows do. It is not for my survival; it is not for my subsistence. It is for my lack of knowing anything better to do. I spend my passing periods imagining what my tongue might have the pleasure of tasting next; a full belly only inspires me towards the next. Sometimes, I feel like a machine — the mower on a compact tractor — eating everything in front of me until I’m made to stop. And even then, even as I sit cold, quiet, rusting, what am I made for but to eat? A spinning blade does not prance in the wildflowers or talk to little bugs, a blade does not learn or think or make.
When August gave way to September, and summer to fall, something changed. And by that I mean of course everything changed. Flush green bend startled and crumbled into brittle footfalls; squirrels grew more skittish, more foolish, if you can believe that; the air seemed sad and hopeful and drew stars and spirals all over my forearms; I was hungrier.
Settling into the ground and drawing the fresh air into my lungs like a straw through my lips, the earth chattered. My hand had grown almost too large for the hole, no matter how wilting or willing it was, but I fastened on the blue dutifully. Pulling it into my lap I found the cloth itself wilted more than it should. Crumbs clattered from its folds; two dry raisins spilled out and looked at me.
I whipped my head around as if to catch someone lurking, guilty. The maples shivered, their naked bones rattling. The floor cracked and broke under tiny feet. The nasal dee dee dee came again and again and far off a woodpecker was knocking. One bold ant made its way over the hard seams of my denim; I watched him approach the spoils and choose his kill. He did not linger long, and shortly trudged away, a piece of biscuit on his back, seemingly unaware of my held breath and frozen body, watching him.
I shook the napkin and watched my secret crumbs gather round the grass stems like children eager for a story. I tied the cloth to a hanging branch, a flag in the wind. It felt like resolution. Or surrender.
The sun had kissed the hills and the low hanging satellite goodnight, and still I sat. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the porch light flick on. Dinner time. I rose in the growing dark and felt a tug on my sleeve, something small and insistent. A raspberry prickle. Some six or seven autumn berries still hung on the plant. I fumbled my fingers into their shadows and felt them pulse. One red berry turning blue in the falling night; I popped it in my mouth and chewed.
First Pit! Sophia Woods
We are all of us bodies but in a less essential way than they mean
These lyrics lodge between my teeth like only the unfamiliar can but your hand still slips damp from mine & we are dancing
brave like we’ve never been & maybe we haven’t because i’ve never seen the space around the hollow of your spine didn’t know those long lines of pale could unspool like that all ribbonish & shining like this every sidelong glance swallows up
this heat & our history started here straddling the sandy cliche of young & dumb & helium & somebody got it wrong because love isn’t in the heart i know because i feel it when i breathe mingled with smoke that’s not ours & the knife edge of a side stitch
good god but this sweetness swells & we’re belly up & breathing on the only chairs not sticky with sweat or whatever this shiny is & if i could kiss you i might
not as a confession or condemnation or anything else lips mean but when everything sticks to something else & even this music is slung around the tunnels of my ears where it’ll cling come morning my mouth still repels from itself & if the axis we reflect ourselves across is time i’d like to know when you end up keep you close so it’s here it’s now & always with me saying like a prayer i love you and you’re not hearing me i know but every silent god be damned when you spin me hands warm on these hips teeth shining arms cramping & belief is just a sound
After Sappho 24
Andy Zhang
1
Next time you listen to music, you will remember the night we sang on a swing, for we in our youth did these things
yes many and beautiful things. You will remember the air and the bugs and the balcony and the windowpane that reflected early moon.
2 What we had we had to live again and again for life. What life had played was the opposite of the night. How could we be so daring, when we didn’t know anything?
3
The past recoils on the main deck. The sea forgets all. Thirty years. I still know the shadow like an instinct. The song you played, the instrument, the thin voice, coming through me nights after nights.
My Morning Colin Massoglia
The perfect stillness of morning. The water, smooth like mirrored glass. The leaves rest from their eternal dance. Glistening gossamer hung like veils, pearly with the night rain.
The silence, humming, rising up beneath the tattered shadows. Piercing light beams from the sun, flowing brilliantly around the blue painted sky, energy into the still quiet.
The trees begin to rustle. water begins to ripple, wind begins to sing, shadows retreat.
The silence burned away like the morning dew.
El Chaltén oil paint
Ayuna Lamb-Hickson
Asa Rallings
thresher shark linocut print
Serenity Meow graphite
John Bunting
Lone Bloom oil paint
Nicholas Lobaugh
Gossamer
digital photography
Marty Stoner
Femininity's Mask
digital art
Annie Hsu
digital art
Bryant Juarez
BARREN EPICENE
Suns and Stars
bronze, wood, acrylic paint, modeling paste
Aahanaa Tibrewal
The Lidless Eye, 5/5 screenprint, white gel pen, pencil Nicholas Lobaugh
Who brought the chairs?
digital photography
Eva Markham
bugs! screenprint Asa Rallings
Sway Sway Indigo
digital photography
Marty Stoner
in the Afternoon
Underneath
acrylic on skateboard
Ayuna Lamb-Hickson
Grounded lithography print Megan Precopio
Portrait of a Ukrainian, Serhiy Kuliaso, who stayed in Kyiv with his wife to help feed the army
After a photograph by Alexander Chekmenev charcoal
Natasha Tomlinson
The Bund
digital photography
Emma Gonzalez Cueto
MARK MY WORDS
digital art
Bryant Juarez
Portrait of undocumented immigrant mother, Jeanette Vizguerra, with her daughter, Luna Baez
After a photograph by Marc Piscotty charcoal
Natasha Tomlinson
digital photography
Gallery
Leah Long
A Home
intaglio print
Aahanaa Tibrewal
Empty Nesters
Ellen Pendrak
time is spinning on and i am an old cornstalk half-stuck in the ground dead-plant beige and crushed under a combine’s wheel, a couple seasons spent rotting
but my mother just called from Piazza della Rotonda, enjoying her cruise on the S.S. Empty Nest, telling me that they are still selling those light-up toys that cut through an Italian night with plastic wings
there sits a photo album on the coffee table etched with smiles and art and those spiraling lights clutched in our gelato-sticky hands and the family is all younger and brighter through the 2000s camera lens
what is life but images superimposed: my brother and i, damp clothes drying in dense summer air and barely able to talk without bickering, layered over my parents and their wrong-angle selfies that show their age, drinking from near the fountain we had both slipped into before we knew wet marble isn’t great for standing
fourteen years pass quickly when looking through a highlight reel and i had forgotten that picture so easily, like the farmer, forgetting those cornstalks he’d crushed — it used to be important to me, once.
chewed over with time, Elena Ortiz-Fishman
linoleum rot and mold seep under the weathered floorboards. I tiptoe over long-forgotten stains and ignore the itch bubbling under my skin. black fuzz lines the carpet in beautiful embroidered hems and the nauseous yellow wallpaper leaves its reflection on the pallor of my face. the room is an egg yolk cracked, and with its chalky residue on my fingers I slowly fill the tub and line the edges — a scuffed plastic kitten, a rusty wheeled car — now sticky with humidity. I am a childlike haunting, a ghost that giggles as much as it howls. I love it here, and I never want to leave.
a hanoian diptych Nguyễn Trung Kiên
I. did dante leave whenever im on vacation away from home im holding my breath in hotel rooms with never ending toiletries suitcases never to be unpacked closets never to be filled im ready to move any minute and im checking my airplane tickets twice thrice four times just in case i read the wrong date its a different kind of purgatory a breath i never let out until im back home again like a ship that needs to be anchored
II. did odysseus return nowadays i spend ten months a year in a different country a university half a globe away waiting to be anchored in the summer months to a port i no longer recognize a home i only take vacations in wondering if i can still taste the same sweet air
i’m a ship constantly at sea and i cant breathe
This July Marley Craine
The sky keeps opening and I think, if heat lightning is real, nature is a mother because who else would crack like that, so sudden and menacing, devoid of warning and reason, ripping through stars as if to say: I could kill you if I wanted to.
I’ve never seen lightning like this, born from so many too-warm days. I might be a bolt of heat lightning and I tell Leo: I could kill you if I wanted to. Earlier, I didn’t want to: we were swimming, him wading, shorts balled up and billowing, me underwater where it was quiet.
But now I do: alone, suspended in this womb of heat and Leo’s fucked off somewhere, knuckles bleeding. My keys are lost and all I have is the lightning, threatening to end everything. I think it was concrete he hit, a wall, and we keep hitting the same wall, he and I together.
The lightning tells me: look up here and remember I could kill you, and Leo comes back silent and bloodied and when we get home he sleeps on the floor. Good. I look at my reflection in the bedside window. I might be a bolt of heat lightning and I lull myself to sleep
by listing who I could kill if I tried: Annie because I’m stronger, Becca because I’m more agile. But Leo is stronger and more agile and I’m zipped into him so tight that if I struck we’d both hurt. Up now, I grab him by his wounded hand and I crack.
Look at me, I say. I stand on his toes. Look up here and remember I could kill you.
the field
Gavia Boyden
but i do not love you, and i cannot, and in a field there is a gold snake like a heavy necklace, warm and awful, and that snake and i would look at each other and feel very similarly.
i am saying this to convey something like, you ought to jerk away upon first sight and check your ankle for punctures and sigh with relief. and backing up slowly does not enrage me, and do not turn your back, or the snake will —
and it does matter, i will tell you, that you are listening to me, and that you see clearly the snake and the field, and the gold is saturated accurately, and in the distance there is a tree far enough to lean against without fear.
the water tower
Gavia Boyden
at the end of the road was also the end. the tire ruts slugged muddy into the ditch. they were tired. and the potholes poured over with milky coffee when the rain breached the grassfed mountain. it would roll itself sighing and fat down the whistle-grass slopes, stroking the mountain fur meek and slick. if the elk herd was cold they did not say. just raised and lowered their fortunate heads, blinked slow eyes like washed stones. there was no convenient falcon there. no crescent wheeling eyefully overhead. this is what the water tower would tell me, at the end of the walk when i’d squint silent at the quivered fenceline…
for dust you are and to dust you will return Hayden Chapman
it was night in winter’s deceptive way maybe 4 pm, maybe midnight my grandfather had died the day before you, grandpa, my grandpa and i didn’t really want to think about it and i wasn’t really able to and my mom said i needed new jeans and old navy was doing a sale and why not just go while you’re home
home
i stood in the parking lot my grandfather had died the day before and i went shopping not really wanting to think about it not really being able to and i just stared for a while at a black car in the next row in the parking lot
it had handprints engraved into the dust on the trunk from the people that had mindlessly popped it open popped, you always said popped for shopping, or for packing, or for travelling, or for living in the way that a family does the time was over. the day had passed but the handprints simple storage, proof of life would remain until intentionally washed away, by rain or by human hand everything happens for a reason days long gone but love remains in handprints on the trunk if nothing else stay with me in dust
On Blue Calliope Coney
I colored tears cornflower, and when blood hardened, looking like strawberry jelly spilled on doodled tornadoes, a teacher would crouch down.
You feeling blue, hon? But tears cannot be shaded in by an eight-year-old’s eight-pack of crayons, and sadness isn’t in a box — it’s an octopus on your shoulders marking as it sucks and stays stuck until you have no more saltwater left.
curiosity killed my cat
Sophie Okite
Content Warning: pet death
macy was her name today would have been her first birthday when she went missing i searched for days and days desperation pounding through my veins as time slipped by where is she? where is she? it was day three when my dad pulled her body out of the furnace where she wouldn’t have fit if she was only a few weeks older he went into the basement and told me not to follow said he had an idea where she might be i trailed after him anyway feet thump-thump-thump-ing down the stairs in time with my heart a lamb marching to the slaughter i turned the corner just in time to catch a glimpse through the yawning maw of the half-open door of her tiny body being ripped from the wires she looked like a toy, limbs straight and stiff leaving the steel coffin with a sharp metallic clang one that still rings in my ears as soon as i heard it i knew that was not the sound of a living thing.
Springtime Degeneration
Violet Stepen
Somewhere, there is a rose that creeps slowly out from concrete, its ruby-red petals reminiscent of weddings and Valentine’s day bouquets, of the quotidian blood that seeps out from soft skin scraped by a papercut, of the freshest, ripest apple you ever bit into on a gorgeous fall day. I aspire to that rose, though every bit of my body challenges me. I know how my hands can hurt, the potential threat of open palms and closed fists. With my fingers, I make endless imbrications, imitations of the folds of a rose in a forever blush — roses have no voice, only a blush. I know the violence in my voice, how a word carelessly spoken can leap from my mouth, echo and rumble and quake through ruined air, command when it shouldn’t. I know I shouldn’t look at people, how eye contact exchanged contains a conversation about too many things, that all I have to say are false promises, made by a parasite. A rose sees only wavelengths of light all around it, and I will try to do the same.
I have tried, and will try, to be as harmless, as blameless, as a rose. If I am to grow, it will be under the watchful eye of garden shears; if I am to blossom, it must be into a frail, fading beauty…
Perhaps once I’ve abandoned all that I’ve scorned, I can allow for myself for a second a rose’s thorns. A rose is a rose is a rose; and once I am rendered one, rebirthed into a wilting allure, I can be anything, maybe even myself.
A Walk In The Willows, December 5pm
Sarah Tachau
We’ve made it past the solstice arch your head to the 6pm indigo with me and celebrate, the sun has stalled her descent so we pack up and head to the forest to fold our bodies into the crowd of trunks shivering branches catching our scarves asking for company.
The earth is still breathing, though sealed in slumber.
It’s a shame or a miracle depending on the day, how the sun slips, spilling golden or stealing glances through clouds of seemingly sealed fingers, caught in the reservoirs of our cupped hands or pinched between the bars of metal fences, the earth is still breathing.
While we peel the clementine moon another day falls in fragrant sheddings, sweet notes of nostalgia, the citrine saccharine scent stings, an unborn January is ripening in the sky, among makeshift stars with fragile arms, the kind you drew as a child before you knew the anatomy of a star how its limbs and ribs are interconnected, how midnight is no divide but the unheard drop of the hour, light filling our bodies like a leaking faucet
we watch the earth move, a body with no other choice but to dawn from its sealed slumber.
In the event we did not meet for coffee Natalie Mazey
Say I wasted away summer in clairvoyance, baked layered cakes and swirled hypotheticals in Swiss meringue buttercream. Say I idled, let paddles beat butter until curdled. Say I settled, let raspberries rest in pipings like promises.
But instead, I let you plant blackberries in my stomach. Your voice ripened under July’s heavy gaze. It is now winter and I pluck its thorns without thimbles. Saccharine fruit decomposes under snow, fossilizing visions of then.
I love in latency, in the time it takes for spring’s buds to bloom again.
Rotten Gardens
Emma Gonzalez Cueto
Days come and go
Faster than the nights I know
I drift into sleep
Where stories are told
Of worlds where puddles are so much more deep
And mold turns to flakes of gold
I know now that I
Traverse a land
Of misery and things gone awry
A slight of hand
Deception — tricks being played on me in the goodness of dreams
A rotten scum
Forms a film atop my brain
An infestation blooms
Of love and beauty
In their kingdom of reign
Emilina Lucy Clementine
I’ve never savored a blueberry muffin more than the one she hands me across the counter with her name, Emilina And what a world it is, Emilina, how did you get here?
Tell me true, what paint you use to stain & polish the fields here — patchwork tattoos and glistening grin — what romanticized sin did you commit in morning-time like a queen behind the coffee-cornered bar in Ohio? Don’t you know — oh you must — that we are only here for the summer?
Do your worst, Emilina, I beg of you — these Midwest farming blues don’t get much use in the city.
I like my morning grit with something soft you sing between the strings & sinews of my heart like patchwork fingerprints between my ribcage — you leave a trace in these small-town parks, counting freckles on my chest and birds in nests and grinning to know the graves we’re digging for each other in this christened soil will be left stranded, empty —
We have left behind, softly, this notion of possible.
I have never savored, more truly, youth and bitter wisdom in the same sighing breath, laden with departure.
