You said you didn’t like liars so I vowed to tell you the truth
I heard a pop when my skin unzipped to let the rocks into my palms and save them from the pavement
My neck shot back I got whiplash from that
Yes,
My hands smell like bleach but I’ll hide the stones under my nails for keepsakes
Honey stop that, don’t look at me so closely stop that please you know you shouldn’t touch me stop that I’m going to cry stop that you’re hurting me stop that I’m going to kiss you
Stop that, I swear to God I’ll leave you
I’ll blow on the daffodils I thought were dandelions embedded in the sidewalk crack for you
Then trace the silhouettes they left when they splintered against the walls of our haunted house, for you I didn’t assume that I would cry when The sky turned cherry blue
Oh god I bet you knew
When the carnival shook under the smoke stack
21 seconds later
I thought I’d see you.
The Dictionary defines “thief” as, one that steals especially stealthily or secretly. I would like to absolve myself of this title. It was given to me by a writer last summer in a workshop in Ohio. As he described my work he said, very simply, “you are a thief.” What I found most alarming about his accusation was the way he smiled proudly after it came out of his mouth—as if he had found the perfect adjective, absolutely divine and truthful. It was ironically original and had a nice ring to it, but as he said it I felt like I had been caught. Thief is a cuss word to an artist. Right next to phony, and inauthentic, and simple, and plagiarism, and cliche, and dumb bitch. The perpetual search for originality plagues artists. I had failed in this incredibly simple quest. I was “one that steals especially stealthily or secretly.” I was paralyzed by the notion that I was constantly committing robbery, and what was most disorienting was that I found the name to be fitting. I stole from everyone and everything, constantly. But that is the well known trick of artists. To steal and not be caught, find inspiration wherever possible at whatever cost. Still, to be a thief had a troubling ring to it and I wasn’t comfortable being one. My solution was this: be one who steals out of necessity, and for art - but never do it secretly, or stealthily again. That way, I won’t be a thief. My life’s work won’t be immoral. I will romanticize my loot, my findings, and create refuge for every other thief. Every other artist. Wrap the products of all the stolen things neatly in a package—call it, Cherry Blue.
WHERE DO YOU COME FROM?
Cherry Blue, Issue 2: lineage.
A sequence of vital forces which are each considered to have evolved from its predecessor. In other words, where do you come from?
Editor
in Chief
Ruby Richard Weston
Contributors
Alessandra Agopian
Patrick Keedy Brown
Susannah Carroll
Isabella Clark
Jahzara Funaioli
Pedro Hernandez
Robert Kennedy
Sandra Khawaja
Cassius Klingenfuss
Emerson Lenet
Luca Miesnieks
June Oh
Carol Orr
Mira Schubert
Emilio Scotti
Misha Seeff
Luke Swezey-Scandalios
Eliza Treuhaft
Carol Weston
Nico Wilkerson
Lessons on patience
sat gently and waited for the first perspiration asked to break a sweat to shed all leak salt lakes and imagine a time so transient that the light changes and you start slowly taking up miles by the minute over producing overestimating distances and mass casualties form from accidental contact bleeding out of knuckles drowning while walking on water
poolside and skin and all
shallow like there’s a hole in the foundation it’s nobody’s fault
just a song sung well.
By Ruby Weston
Kitsch
It’s Wednesday, everything you do has the antithetical effect. It’s Wednesday again and you are still conceptualizing an ethical way.
The phrase is incomplete, still traffic cannot continue through. The museum is still missing pieces of her forearms and hands. In the car, I infer a dominant hand.
It goes without saying. The phrase is completed with a hand signal. Some children, for example, guard their rooms this way.
When I said the art was “open to interpretation,” I meant try looking at the reflection of her viable hand in the glass:
Mirror therapy actualizes the art’s suffering, allowing it to be felt and experienced by the public. Children especially are encouraged to cover or close their eyes.
The missing pieces of her forearms and hands are on a restored boat. The museologist is thrown overboard.
By Cassius Klingenfuss
By Luke Swezey-Scandalios
I found myself doing this piece in the middle of the night. I was up watching a movie called The Long Goodbye The movie captures the persona of a laid back private detective caught up in a case that winds deeper than he ever could have imagined. The bossa nova soundtrack mixed with subtleties of a classic detective tale made me think: in another life wouldn’t it be nice to be that laid back sleuth, to embody the hard boiled role of 20th century private detective. I channeled those emotions through this bar scene. Maybe we all examine that life we’ll never have. Maybe one day we will reminisce about such a life. Maybe that private detective lives in all of us.
Kenospia I Can’t Explain
* with borrowed lines from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”
By June Oh
wrath has a body that cannot be designed but only touched: disfigured and distended. hot. a body that is remembered even when language tries to abort her, to make room for mercy and all her little friends, to hint that yellow and red only harmonize in sunsets, not skin.
wrath assaults me in my dreams and kisses me until i am bruised, but these bruises don’t depart in a week’s time like other ones do. i remind her: i am not yours to abduct nor yours to keep.
borrow my body until you have found a home, my blessings your banquet until you spill out from the passage of my veins like pollution wandering into the streets. even if you are homeless and i am sober of your presence i will still welcome you with open arms when i need you. when you need me.
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But i do not talk of the beginning or the end because i see no passage that leads you out of me. i carry you in the womb of my heart that never bleeds. i call you in my reveries although i never sleep. a sin of the soul is to kindle a blaze, but for tonight, i beg of you, set me aflame and watch me live you.
On Remembrance
By Alessandra Agopian
Hanging off the bed dangling at
The cliff’s edge. Leaping he presses Toy Story
Stickers to their homes. In the cupboard is
My heart. It’s too big and too small and
Its valves crush when
You slam the drawer shut, as you tuck
It behind the cereal. You, my guide, my shield,
My victim. I have grinded you to life
And death and spiderwebs hang off your
Eyelashes. Pray for mercy. Ask for light, for my guiding
Hand to give the lantern. Ask for benevolence
And vengeance and I can only give one. I cannot
Leave the house of my bloody birth,
But I yearn to. My bones are rooted in
Its concrete, so I gnaw at
It until I can feel my feet, and I only
Hope the stone I spit back
Up is soft enough to swallow again.
By Robert Kennedy
Untitled
By Misha Seeff
PART 1: DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA
They decided in stilted silence. My grandparents, who normally breathed in perfect synchrony, took shallow and shaky inhales, as if not to further provoke the policemen taking their last steps out of the house. Their scent still lingered in that basement. After barging in, they delivered the news in a businesslike tone—48 hours to leave the country—addressing only the white man in the room. They barely spoke to the trembling woman in the corner, her jet-black hair cascading over the silk of her sari. They cited the Immorality Act of 1927, as if my grandparents’ union was, through its existence, immoral. South Africa was a different country back then. They had to walk to and from the house in Durban on separate sides of the street. An invisible forcefield—the apartheid barrier— kept them from even touching hands. My grandfather stood up, cleared his throat, and began collecting various manila folders that lay scattered on the dining table. He walked up the steep spiral staircase and returned, moments later, with a brown leather satchel and a carry-on suitcase.
He felt it in his stomach—the anxious sickness of something beginning, something that would become far greater than himself. A seed had been planted and was taking root, tethering itself to the soil. With no other choice, my grandparents would have to uproot their lives and flee somewhere they could love each other freely. My grandmother resisted: “Will you listen to yourself?” But my grandfather was already hastily packing clothes into the carry-on. From the seedling had emerged a tree, its branches stretching up and out of the basement. They weaved through the manila manuscripts, rattled the jars of mustard pickle in the pantry, and busted through the front door. An hour later, my grandparents stood in their front yard. My grandfather spoke slowly: “I believe in our strength. When we have children, they will believe, and they will be strong this way.” And as the sun set over the dusty streets of Durban, they waited for their cab to Louis Botha International Airport, defiantly hand-inhand, under the shade of my grandmother’s mango tree.
PART 2: STUTTGART, GERMANY
As rain cascaded onto the roof of the small, metal phone booth, my mother slipped a one Deutsche-Mark coin into the slot and dialed her father’s number. She was drenched to the bone, shaking from the cold, and stifling back sobs. She would break down the moment her parents asked how she was, and she knew what that meant: accepting defeat. Just a few hours earlier, she stood in a sun-soaked ballet studio with wall-length mirrors and wooden ballet barres along the perimeter. She warmed up with twelve other ballerinas, focusing on slow, deep breathing. Soon she would know if the life she had dreamt of was an achievable reality or a frivolous, childish fantasy. The latter scared her more than anything. She felt her lungs constrict as an older woman with a slicked-back bun entered the room. The instructor held a wooden stick, with which she could point out every postural mistake or sickled foot. As the dancers cycled through different exercises, their movements meshed flawlessly and effortlessly; their feet arched in ways my mother’s could not. Indeed, she was held back at the end of the session. The instructor paced around as she spoke: “Your skills are not up to par with what we expect from our students.” My mother’s face turned hot and red. “You will be placed on a three-month probation. If you fail to improve, you will go home.”
The next thing she knew, she was standing in the phone booth with her parents on the other line. She expected them to say I told you so, and to urge her to return. Instead, my grandfather said: “Your mother and I did the impossible. The world was set on keeping us apart, but we swore to change it for the better. And we raised you to do the same.” My mother breathed more deeply. “The strength you need has always been inside of you. Stay for three months and achieve the impossible or come home with your head held high.” When my mother left the booth, the rain had stopped. She walked towards her apartment in Stuttgart with newfound determination and a double rainbow above her.
PART 3: NEW YORK CITY, UNITED STATES
“This looks like Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus.” I lay in a cot facing a westward window that split Manhattan down 33rd Street. My mother sat next to me, head-in-hands, in a plastic chair. “You’ll have to make some significant changes from here on out,” said the elderly doctor in a monogrammed lab coat. Significant changes. I knew what this meant—my father had lived with the disease for twenty years. For the rest of my life, I would be responsible for a function my body used to carry out perfectly. Nothing about it seemed fair. I sat quietly the entire drive home while the humid city air seeped through a half-open taxi window. I felt nauseous and carsick. When I finally shut the door to my bedroom, I broke down.
But in the corner of my mind, amidst the rubble, sprouted the smallest little tree. There was a knock on my door, after which my mother walked in. “This isn’t going to be easy,” she said, “But you are not alone. We will get through this together.” After she left the room, I took a seat at my piano and a deep breath. As I played different chords, I imagined the sapling in my head growing taller with each note. Nothing felt right back then, but I knew that someday it would—because my grandparents had left South Africa and built a family, because my mother had danced professionally for twelve years. Because of them, I have that little tree inside of me, telling me to grow closer and closer to the sun, despite the sour earth from which I am growing.
At the lakehouse upstate, again
By Emilio Scotti
Once, long ago, when I was just a boy, your age, Sebi—no, Diego— the river was wide, wide like your... eyes. Your father? No, my father, he said, “Catch the stars in the water, boy!”
And oh, how they twinkled, little fish of fire! No, wait, that’s not— it was the stars above... Yes, the stars above, and the water, cold as— as cold as your mother’s laugh...
Now, where was I, where? Ah, the stars! I dipped my toes in that icy black river, and your father—no, no, my father, he said, “Never turn your back on— on the wolves.”
I thought he meant the river. Or was it the woods? I don’t know now. Do you, Charlie?— what’s your name again, son? Ah, never mind.
We caught stars, or fish, or maybe shadows. Your mother was there. No, no, your mother wasn’t born. What was I saying? Oh, Sebi, the stars, they sank so fast.
Yes, yes, the stars. What a story, what a story... I wish I could remember it for you.
Classics Night
By Nico Wilkerson
Maggie
“Hey, where you going?” It was Courtney, and her words were slurred and her eyes were dim. She had a guy on her arm, someone new, whose bright eyes were open and wide with the prospect of her lost inhibitions.
“I’m outta here, Cee. Not my scene.”
“Don’t be a buzzkill! Tina’s guy’s friend was asking about you.” I turned without a word.
Courtney wouldn’t be offended. She wouldn’t even remember. No wonder we weren’t close, she could barely remember half our friendship. The yard was a haze of smoke, and dumb, happy smiles were plastered across foggy faces. I had to walk ten blocks for a cab, all the way to Queens Boulevard, and scrounge up change in my purse, hoping I could make the fare.
“East 12th and Second Ave, please.” The cabbie grunted and pulled away. I had my card with me too, and enough in my checking for a ticket. Thursday night, and I knew something would be playing late.
“And Theater Five?”
“Citizen Kane. Started about a half hour ago.”
Perfect. The man behind the counter gave me a box of sours for free, anything for a smile. I popped a few into my mouth and chewed them until they gummed up my teeth. The theater was pretty empty, just a couple people sprinkled around. A couple, some guy up front, and a guy around my age in the back, chewing his over-buttered popcorn as he made himself comfortable. He looked sort of nice, in an unusual way. You really had to look at him to see it, and I did.
The movie starts, and I mouth along the words, because I know them all by heart. I undid my heels and nestled under my silk scarf. I was in row lucky number seven, my favorite. I sucked on a cherry sour and licked my sticky cherry lips.
Daniel
Credits rolling. Talk to her, talk to her, talk to her. I gather my things, I button my shirt back up, I adjust my hair but god, who cares? She shakes her candy box, and it doesn’t rattle so she crumples it into a ball like it’s nothing, and starts to walk out. I sidestep out of the row and walk up to her. She’s walking slow, meandering and looking at the posters.
“Hey!”
She turns.
“A fellow cinephile? You into older stuff?” I gesture to the screen, crackly-black.
“Oh, sure, nothing new is any good.”
“So that’s why you’re here, classics night, wearing an outfit like that to go sit in a dark room by yourself?”
“From one dark room to another.”
She tips her head forward, and rocks back on her heels. Hair falls in front of her face, and her roots are another color. I extend a hand and she looks up.
“Daniel.”
“So official. You call yourself anything else, maybe? I’m Maggie.”
“Not really, but I’m open to it.”
“Danny then. Danny, you want to walk with me? I’m still on a nice theater high.”
Of course I did. She’s in heels, but she walks alright, like she’s used to it. It’s warm and she shines a little on her nose and her forehead, her hair is stringy and she brushes it back from her face like it’s new to her.
“Danny, Danny, Danny. What are you doing dressed all up like that to watch a movie?” She tries my name out, new to me, and I like it when she says it.
“Job interview,” I tell her, tossing it out for her to catch.
“And are you a happy little worker bee now?” She sways with the joke.
“Well, I am gonna work now, but I’m not too thrilled about it.” “Ah, unhappy when we’re poor, unhappy when we work. What’s left to be happy about?”
“Meeting girls in pretty outfits in movie theaters, something to soften up a hard day.”
“Oh, you flatter me.”
We stop at a corner store, it’s flaky and flickering, but she says she knows it and they’ll take care of us there. I hope for a coffee but she wants something more fun. She walks up to the counter, throws her purse on it and I browse like we didn’t come in together. Basic protocol, but she isn’t nervous like I thought.
“Hey, man,” She drawls, “You know it’s late and you know what I need.”
The man looks outside the window, and leans over to turn the door lock.
“How much?”
She slides over a couple bills on the counter.
“What that’ll get me, and throw in some papers.”
He’s calm, he’s done this before, but I don’t know him so he keeps his eye on me, trailing my finger along the cold soda cans.
He slides something back and she tucks it into her skirt waistband, giving him an ever-charming smile. He unlocks the door, and when Maggie and I walk out someone was waiting to walk in. They know but it’s alright, we know too.
“Tompkins?” She doesn’t wait for me to respond, taking my hand and gaily clip-clopping her way down the street. She’s fast, I’m in nice shoes, but we can run. We huddle into the park, a flashing light red-blue-red goes by, but behind the wrought iron fence and the stinking tree they don’t see us. What would they see, anyhow? We jump over a flimsy fence, and she pulls her shoes off to walk up to a tree, kicking the cigarette butts that lay in the grass in her way. We get close together, over the bag, and she sprinkles it into the paper and rolls it up.
“Got a light, Danny boy?”
She just loves it, my name, saying it over and over until it feels like I’ve been called it forever. I pull a lighter from my bag, where I keep it always. She breathes it in like she’s needed it forever.
“You don’t know how much I needed this. God, the night I’ve had.”
“What sort of night have you had?”
“The sort where I wanted an old-fashioned type of boy and got a modern man instead. Wanting nothing but my body, stupid boy wanting nothing but something to say, something to talk about.”
“Times like these, everybodies modern.”
“I’m tired of feeling like nothing. Like nothing, with false-like friends that want someone to take them to places to be seen, seen by modern men who don’t want us to talk.”
She takes a deep breath of nothing with air, smokey exhales into a smoky night. Time marches slowly forward, but we don’t hear it and it passes silently. I take it from her gently.
“Why spend any time with them? Why give them your attention?” I suck it in deep and hold back a cough. I don’t do it often enough, I’m not used to the empty air drying my bones instead out. My eyes water and my nose itches tremendously.
Under the Plaster Roof
By Eliza Treuhaft
When I got the call, I was loading the dishwasher at work —
Clean, unscented, blue snaked down my wrist while I capped the soap bottle. The machine gurgled and spat like the ocean when I turned it on; the dial tone murmured into my eardrum, rang;
Starlings outside pinpricked the coastline, lapping at the freeform edges of their flock. I hoped, that day, that when I got home I might see you, stretching your vertebrae over the kitchen chair. And during that slow, muggy shift, stuck behind the desk, I’d watched for flashes of you under the brim of my hat: Darting around my peripheries, you were all curls and peapod fingers that widened at the knuckle.
So when the traffic cop’s voice poured through the cordless phone like molten glass, I held the hot plastic flush to my cheek and prayed for you, entreating the precinct and the starlings and GE Appliances. I wished for you on hat-pins and conch shells and magic beans and whispered your name to the raccoon who slept in the cell tower. All the birds in the open sky saw your warm body cradled in the cop’s arms, saw your mangled, contorted headlights splayed across the gravel shoulder,
kept on seeing, even after the sun slid into the sea like silk.
But inside, at work, under the plaster roof, not even God saw me closing my fist around the dishwasher handle, pulling with all the strength in my torso, splashing the tile floors with salt tears and soapsuds. And years before: not even God saw me drowning the possums that lived under our deck when I left the hose running. And tonight: at home, not even God cares to see me twisting again and again over the kitchen chair, looking backwards, trying to hear the pops that your back might’ve made, letting dishes pile up in the sink.
On the Thousandth Night, Scheherazade Tells Her Final Tale
By Patrick Keedy Brown
Let me tell you the story of Scheherazade and how she spoke for a thousand nights, in different bodies. In different time Wake up
Tell the child his home will not be his home, for long. Tell him that his father is dead. That the drone lives on.
And only if it is safe, and the sun has gone down can he come outside. The cows are in the distance.
The sky is orange, still. Still always.
And only at night, can you hunt for yourself like water, like prayer.
Give it a body, again. Give it a finishing or an ending deserving of an ending.
Give it rest. They will be gods, in time.
And on the thousandth night, she spoke to the king.
And on the thousandth night, she read her final story.
And on the thousandth night, she saw you, there, surrounded by light. This is our story.
And on the thousandth night, she came to her senses and leaned into your ear and said Wake up.
Your father is on the other side of the wall and he is waiting. This is where the story ends. This is what Scheherazade told the king and he spared her life. This is what she told the king, or the boy, or you , reader. Don’t cry now.
Breathe.
Free-Form
By Sandra Khawaja
Process is what propels me. I try and create balance and harmony between form and color. I use the body, especially hands, to compose as I find it’s equal if not more expressive than words. I’m shit with words. It’s anxiety quelling and satisfying for me to search for equilibrium within each piece.
Under Nyx, shooting stars
By Luca Miesnieks
Under Nyx, shooting stars
Dreams beckon scepticism of the eternal Gardenia wilts in sleeping hands
Eyelashes hold closed gates of experience
Under Nyx, shooting stars
Under Nyx, shooting stars pass by, untethered to the whims of wind
Unlike a falling leaf from autumn, the Big Dipper looks more present than ever tonight.
Under Nyx, shooting stars
Peacefully forever, eyes remain closed
Beyond the streams of time which Is illusion forever, for the river
Forever flows yet remains present.
Peacefully forever, eyes remain closed
Heaving breath slows to a halt
Tasks left undone stay now forever so
Dreams of grandeur lay ‘twixt shadows
That stretch under the passing of time.
Heaving breath slows to a halt
Heaving breath slows to a halt
Kisses under spruce trees form tethers
That ask for eternal devotion and sacrifice
Horn playing and flutes last only seconds
Heaving breath comes to a halt
Poachers take lives of pheasant daily
On the steps of home is a red door
That once housed the passing of everyday people
Through and past seasons unabashed by time
Poachers take the lives of pheasant daily
Under Nyx, shooting stars seem to strike through bodies: Ignite with passion of morrow
Despite a lack of wisdom for An abundant lack of time
Under Nyx, shooting stars spit dust and tumbleweeds at death.
Mary
By Mira Schubert
In the Spring, I filled a plastic storage bin the size of a dollhouse. My mother carried it from room to room, grasping it between her two elbows, its weight heaving her shoulders down so they looked like her mother’s. She tossed in forgotten things: my old green dress with frills, some bubblegum ribbon bows.
She put the bin on the floor of my bedroom, over sallow knots in the wood. Like glass panes at the aquarium, its walls were clear, so she saw, nearly hidden, my old doll, Mary, who had embroidered eyes.
My mother pulled on her polyesterstuffed limbs. Tried to reclaim her from the bundle of junk.
But I said the doll could go: that regardless, her eyes would weaken and her hair fray. I said that besides, ‘I need space for new things.’
Omie, Oma
By Susannah Carroll
Omie, Omie, Omie, Oatmeal—
What we would call you when we were young.
What you would make us for second breakfast in the mid-morning, always after a cup of hot chocolate and a banana bread square, smooth sweetness on our tongues.
You say it “sticks to our ribs,” because you always speak in idioms; when the rainstorm proved too much for the tree that fell and blocked our entrance, “It's pouring cats and dogs,” when you come in for a glass of more-water-than-lemonade, mowing the grass before the rooster crows, “I’m sweating bullets out there,” when you pretend you know how to hang up the phone, but instead stall so we can do it first, “a thousand kisses.”
I want to go back, all the way,
to the songs you sang as we fell asleep.
The perfect mix of German and English melodies that had me wondering how you didn’t become a singer. I cherish the fact that you always say guten nacht each night we stay in your home, rub my back, unmake my bed, see to it that I get some rest.
Now I know why I was so hesitant to leave you as a child, why I locked myself in my room and hid from the airport that was going to take me away from you.
You are my escape from the world, my sweet treat after a long day, long week, long year.
Have I ever told you that I’ve always aspired to be like you?
A woman who has faced more grief than gratitude.
A woman so good, so healthy.
No other but you could walk three miles a day, hold someone else’s child on Christmas because they couldn’t be bothered to do it, help the hospital with heart over head, stand for the rights of the people you love— your neighbors’ murderlike words a whisper
But most of all, you are the face that has always felt safe, lived in the house that has always been warm I love you my Omie, A thousand kisses
Transient Earth
By Emerson Lenet
stems of weeds (unplanted and unwanted) sway with the speed of the balloon man at the dealership on york and a small fly dances circles around my head, full of taunts and human hostility; gravestones pockmarked with algae and characters line the lawn, as still as soldiers — the grass at their feet is a faded yellow, not brighter than sidewalks cutting through what was once a grove. i must breathe through the sawdust for the sweet smell of grass and a hammer - mechanic - silences the rustling of the frictional leaves, as my grandfather silences me. the gravestones scratch against my palm like the splintered plank from hooks lane, still abandoned by my doorstep. the leaves at my feet brush my ankles like the matted velvet of my great grandmother’s chair - rough with a stain of permanence. she died in that chair, and maybe her flesh would have morphed it too had her body not been buried six feet beneath the grass, allowing her limbs to take root and tug the green life down with her, just invalidating another vaccine for another disease that plagues our mother with our sins.
PROMPT
Who are we without our acomplishments, and who would we be without proper expansion of “self”? When stripped of every tangible asset, hobby, and trait, do we prevail? For this prompt, start by writing a list of all of your traits. Then remove every item on that list. You will be left with a blank page, and some erasure. We may have just answered the question. Regardless, the next step is to create some form of art (writing, painting, etc.) and try to define what would constitute as proof of “soul.”
Footprints in the Sand
By Isabella Clark
The bedeviled girl carried her basket of
Stale bread and picked peas
Glancing down, she pondered about
Fresh baked goods and crisps
The foredoomed girl walked the Worn Path
The unavoidable and undeniable path
She walked this path often
The path knew her to her core
Knew her traits
Knew her habits
The path knew her neural responses
While she walked the path - the echo remained
The echo
The echo of the forgotten song
But she never forgot it.
Even in her most vehemently quiet times - the echo was never
Fully heard
Except the rhythm and influence
While her heart was caught on River Styx -
The River Styx confused
The blighted girl
Styx knew nothing but the innervation of long roots
The Ouroboros of roots
Roots of serpents
Hungry serpents, where tail meets mouth and it
Repeats
Hold Still
By Ruby Weston
Imagine if it were possible to be everybody. To fulfill every pipe dream make it into something with meaning and overflowing with me. Watch your hopes collide like freight trains even after pulling brakes and remind me that it’s called momentum.
It’s called the nonexistent fracture that’s been slowly corrupting your breathing.
Hold still.
Try not to encourage movement by making wind by blinking. Melt the oil of fingertips and saliva and dust into the excess of a skull, mold it into something resembling a face with a name to love.
Only pose the question when leaving: Did it hurt very badly or just enough to make it
On Identity and Becoming
By Penny Arcade
As we barrel into an era of multiple unknowns; of climate, of our environment, our democracy, of capitalism, of the continued erasure of history, and looming over us the specter of artificial intelligence, I feel how cut off from the 20th century many young people are. At the same time many of their interests, particularly of the arts and of artistic life, are firmly grounded in that other century. L. P. Hartley’s ‘The Go-Between’ begins with “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
I spend a lot of my time both in my work and in my day-to-day translating history to younger people. Sometimes it is well received, sometimes not. I often say that wisdom is salient information that is of no practical use to the person who has it. Which is why so many older people try to pass it on. But mostly I find that younger people, even those who are 20 or 25 years younger, not to mention those who are 50 years younger, are desperate for some orientation to how we got here.
I often ask myself, “am I my brother, my sister, my non-binaries keeper?” The answer is always “Yes.” However the truth of the matter is that while I wish to contribute to younger people, I actually do it to honor the memory of the people who did it for me when I was young.
I have been a performing artist for somewhere around 57 years, and I have been an actress for 57 years. I have been a generative playwright and theater-maker for 40 years. I have been poetic my entire life but I have only called myself a poet for 30 years. I have been a videographer and photographer for 30 years.
As a 75 year old who has been observing the world consciously since I was 14, the world I grew up in, the world I came of age in, has largely disappeared and with it many of the ideals, cultural, and intellectual goals that several generations of people built their lives around. I had just turned 17 when I arrived on the Lower East Side, washed up on the shores. By 1967, I saw my neighborhood begin to be called the East Village. It was a real estate ploy to get NYU students, who were being priced out of Greenwich Village, to move east. But even I, an innocent wanderer knew I was living on the Lower East Side.
I have said many times that there is a gentrification that happens to buildings and to neighborhoods but that there is also a gentrification that happens to ideas. I did not come to New York to be an artist although now that I am in the last part of my life and can look back on my younger self clearly, I see that I was always an artist, always poetic, always ritualistic, always performative, always intent about expressing myself, and communicating with the world around me.
These last ideas about self-expression and communication were not socially or familiarly supported. Sometime around the 1990s we started to hear a lot of whining and complaining about the lack of role models in the media for people like me, a bisexual, and other humans who diverged from the standard heterosexual model.
I was not one of those people calling for role models to base myself on. I was 40 in 1990 and by then I had been on my own since I was 16 with a large, like-minded community that I had surrounded myself with for nearly 25 years. I knew that the one thing everyone in my community was proud of was that we were not seeing ourselves
represented in the world, we had become our own role models. The game was self-individuation. The Art of Becoming.
My community was made-up of gay men and lesbians, of gender complicated people, of drag queens, of bisexuals and heterosexuals who were not heteronormative, and who found comfort and inclusion and self expression in what most people called the downtown gay world. A man I once knew named Barendonce said that “the highest ability in the world is the ability to create a game.” The game we created so successfully was called individuality. We were so successful at this game of being ourselves that along with the hard work of previous generations we were able to bring down oppressive social limitations that had made us and the people who came before us, illegal outsiders in society. We were able to prove and convince narrow minded people that our sexual orientation was not a threat to children or even to adults. We were able to gather the support of hundreds and thousands of heterosexuals who were convinced that our sexual orientation was a small part of our identity, certainly not the out of control driving force that many people created laws to control.
A mere 20 years after the Stonewall Riots and uprising, young people who had benefited from the equality and support systems that were extended to young LBGT people, insisted on publicly demanding that their sexual appetites we’re recognized as their identity, undoing decades of work that had been done to separate homosexuality from illnesses like pedophilia. And why?
Because these people needed an identity! And having no goals of evolution for themselves, they decided to build their identity around their sexual orientation, something that hundreds and perhaps thousands of people had lived and died trying to change. Why do I bring up identity? Because the current ideas roiling around the heads of so many young people right now regarding the arts are less about art than they are about identity. For nearly four decades beginning in 1985 with the Jerome Foundation’s concept of Emerging Arts, being an artist stopped being about what someone actually creates and instead being an artist became an identity.
“Artist!” shouted Jonas Mekas, a poet and experimental filmmaker, 86, at the time of our interview. “I hate that word artist! You are a painter! You are a filmmaker! You are a poet! You are a musician! Sculptor! Actor! Playwright! But the word I really hate is creative. Creative people ruin everything, even good bread and good wine, because they can’t stand anything that has been good for thousands of years.They need to change it.”
At that time the word creative went from being an adjective to being a noun. Apparently the old meaning that clung to the word artist that had to do with being productive was found to be too limiting for people who were interested in identity. So they started to use the word creative which was less likely to beg the question “what do you do” and here we are now at this moment in time when the question plaguing many young people seems to be “is it too late in history to be an artist?” I will let my old friend Bobby Beers, to answer it, now long dead but as brilliant as ever.
In 2005 I interviewed my old friend Bobby Beers. Bobby was a longtime AIDS survivor, having been diagnosed in the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the mid 80’s.
One of the first things he had done was join an AIDS study at Bellevue hospital. I was a bit surprised he chose Bellevue because Bobby was from a wealthy upper middle class family and Bellevue is and was a City Hospital. When I expressed this, Bobby said “I don’t want to see a doctor who sees 100 patients patients a month. I want to see a Doctor who sees 2000 patients a month.” Bobby was smart.
In 2005 Bobby was the last person left alive in the study group but he hadn’t gotten away scot-free. AIDS had attacked the retinas of his eyes and in his late 50’s he was legally blind. To my surprise, and to that of his many friends, the first thing he did after his new diagnosis was to start painting watercolors—notoriously one of the most difficult forms of painting.
Bobby had just retired after over 25 years as the assistant to the curator of film at MOMA. In the late 1970’s he had been a member of Charles Ludlam’s famed Theater Of The Ridiculous but when Booby’s father withdrew his inheritance after he came out to his family as a homosexual, he realized that the financial reality he faced as a downtown actor wasn’t going to pay his bills and he went to work at MoMa in the film department.
However he never stopped making art. He turned his attention to sculpture, writing and other conceptual work in his free time. The day I interviewed him, Bobby said, “People worry about getting older and losing function but art is one of the things that you actually get better at with age.”
After you’ve made art for about 30 years you will understand that it’s not matter of being talented, or being promising or being bright, or being precocious or being innovative. It’s about, “Ok well can you just make the fucking art please! Just write the book, do the painting and in spite of everything, all this chaos that’s going on around us - when no one cares about my book, no one cares about my painting! Its fine. I’m making them because that’s what I do! That is my function as a human! I’m the artist human and there have always been people like me and there will always will be! They just, for no reason at all, write it down! Take pictures of it! Paint it! Dance about it! Sing about it! Whatever they do, and there’s just no stopping them!”
Find your tribe–dead or alive. Discover your lineage. Get in line! Put your queer shoulder to the wheel. Believe me, it’s a short life-time.
Mother and Daughter
By Pedro Hernandez
How to Write
By Ruby Weston
Actually mean it this time, Because before you didn’t know how much it needed to be said. Count exactly how many eyelashes you’ve lost today, then Decide it’s incredibly necessary to your art and do it again, and again, until you quantitate the feeling. Even if you feel like your heart couldn’t make it all the way to your hands, again, Figure out another way to press your pen into the wound. Recall your Gumption, keep it tidy in the page folds. Call it, Human failure that you can spell every name but your own.
It’s ironic that you told three truths and forgot the lie when you’re supposed to be trying harder than that. Just remember that your father looked very sad every time you asked him about the good old days and Kick your need to memorialize it. Call it
Lousy, wishing you could’ve just called it quits the first time it became this high stakes. Maybe you’ve now forgotten what you’re up against. You only have 26 chances for this. Nevertheless it’s important that you Opt in to the somatics and be the Protective chronicler. You’ve always quite loved her Quietness. Feel the least bit
Relieved, then remember that word. You would’ve never written it down had you known that once it was shed, you’d forget what it means to be Smaller than you should be by the laws of nature. You always dedicated so much space between each letter, to Upholding the chemical purpose of a good thing nicely done. But you tend to forget the people left behind on the page
Vegetating in a second definition kind of way. You don’t know Who or what you mean only that is a result of your Xenial nature.
You’re now
Zero steps closer. Start from the beginning.
Still
near human, wrapped in white, you rose in my mother’s arms. visions of the sister i almost had flicker with your face, the red hair with which i grew shrouded by julie’s brownthe blood of the womb clumps on your skin, i am sure there was more when she was unborn. your face is blood red, like the life that did not pour from my mother’s heart
but that may pour from mine if i fail you, if i raise you to long for julie’s fate, to wipe the smiles from this hospital room, leaving just my own grief-stricken tears and the emptiness of family left with nothing baby girl, the white silk around your limbs looks like hers, adorned with fly high or it looks like the wedding dress my mother wore, marrying you to julie’s face and fate, but i will not dip that cloth in blood! i will patch it into the quilted wedding dres you will live to wear.
By Emerson Lenet
Ode to Percy Shelley
Never alone for there are spirits in the air
Genii and genius small collective build
Nevermore light and dark they Make dawn and connections, form bonds together
For oh! There are spirits in the air
That hold art in their little bonds
Deep sea winds bubbling springs
Drive people from their lonely feet
And in lonely eyes does starry night, fright and pain bring
Genii made from ash made from bone
Art agápē mirage and ethic drive
spirit down street, driving away longing feet:
Birds who sing for no one—fly away from cages—tear into sunrise
By Luca Miesnieks
PROMPT
Use the epistolary form in an attempt to resolve. For this prompt, write a letter. It is vital that you do something with your letter once complete, and make this exercise incredibly intentional. It isn’t necessary to send it, but at the very least it must evolve in some way by the end of the exercise, whether that be that you burn it or put it on your fridge. Create a piece of art that documents your process of what you chose to do with your letter.
Topology
By Cassius Klingenfuss
She brought a lot to the table, so I flipped it — almost incredibly, ulterior objects dispersed themselves at our feet, at our memorial sites. I rode away from objectivity a long time ago on my tricycle and as a boy. Memory is the subject of this poem and my adult life, shall I go on, continue on my tricycle?
Damn, novel photo restoration has havocked our facial structures, creases were added for emphasis and now we’ve lost them, now the house is burning down. I examine the structure fire with a careful eye, fix on the careful car accident, observe the table’s various rotations and witness it carelessly multiply into assemblage art, second-person plural, and/or the plural possessive: “Happy Holiday’s From The” (The rest of the message was poorly translated by the structure fire.)
OUR THREE MINUTES
This prompt is inspired by Marina Abramović and Paige Webb. It takes three minutes. Sit on the ground with your legs crossed if you are able, facing someone and leaving six inches between you. Set a timer for three minutes, and only look at their eyes during this time. Do not look away, and do not speak. At the end of the three minutes, write immediately without speaking for another 10 minutes, or create in some other way (painting, drawing, composing, etc). Try your best to leave space for the other person to exist comfortably within these three minutes. Compare your work, and attempt to determine what has now changed. Keep your pieces completely unedited and share them with each other.
OUR THREE MINTUES: RUBY / JAHZARA
She’s in fifth grade again and she’s all eyes. Her eyes are only human. It’s like this: she looks through them and suddenly she’s resolved to only be them. It became eyes in darkness. The only light by the inner corners and no skin and no borders but somehow with height. She’s in fifth grade again, until I blink, and this time she’s grown. Almost as if to be photo slides, her eyes are running farther back. So then there’s the good place, and I can’t remember what happened at the end of that sleepover once we watched season five backwards and ruined it forever. I can’t believe I’ve done this before. It’s like breaths and breaths and breaths caught between two noses and two mouths and kept completely recycled until it’s only carbon, dioxide, and sheer willpower. Until she’s just eyes. All eyes. In fifth grade she brought me a bag of crystals, all with descriptions. I love her. She’s got gumption. And I blink again, and she’s grown. I find it scary that I haven’t looked up once, when before I did so incessantly. It’s making money hand over fist. Going somewhere very quickly, and she’s been here before. Contacts, and contact, because she forgot her glasses. The woman at the restaurant wanted us to stay longer, I could tell. How can someone possibly be, just eyes, all eyes, I wasn’t expecting to lose her in the game. Three minutes are left and it feels like an eternity. She’s wearing cherry red boots and she has height on them already. In the picture in the mirror I look halfway gone. She’s breathing shakily, and she’s looking at me, not now, but when I was 10, and 11, and 12, and 13, and only then does she see me now. It’s been years. It’s been a lot of recycling of air. It’s just that pattern that I know so well, it’s time passed and time kept hidden until time is taken to look harder at the frame, and lose it to the work inside. Coney Island, and no one ever leaves once they’ve gone there. We’ve gone there. We’re still there, I think maybe. Dark, dark brown, and fleeting into some place that I don’t quite understand but would like to. Not now, but maybe later.
By Ruby Weston
Wonders flooded as we locked eyes and friends tried not to laugh. Which eye to focus on. Which way to stare. Which face to make. I wondered what you first focused on. Was it my eyes or the eyes that stared back at you. What could you see through the windows that sat upon my face? What you I see as a gazed into your eyes, your face, your soul. I wondered if there were things to look out for. Did the eyes I was looking into hold pain, or tragedy, or joy, or laughter? Could I see the eyes of those who came before you, who loved before you—those who loved one another enough to eventually lead to you? I was looking into the same eyes that pleaded, cried, loved, died, and so much more. My thoughts eventually faded to focus on the sounds I heard. The drones of space heaters, the rumbling of tires, the sound of our deep inhales and exhales. Silence. Silence as a sweet lullaby aided the sound of my questions and thoughts. Your eyes, a song in themselves. A catchy chorus, a symphonic masterpiece, and a heartbreaking aria. Your eyes held stories seldom told and unique to your soul. In those three minutes, I wished to know the stories you carried with your gaze. The hurt that brought you to tears, the jokes that brought you to laughter, the ones that brought you to love.
