Conceptions Southwest 2023-2024

47

conceptions southwest

conceptions southwest 2024

2024

Conceptions Southwest Volume 47

Copyright © 2024 Conceptions Southwest Published by the Student Publication Board The University of New Mexico All rights revert to contributors upon publication c/o Student Publications MSCO3-2230 The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001 Printed by Starline Printing Company 7777 Jefferson St NE, Albuquerque, NM 87109 505-345-8900 Cover design by Addison Key and Raychel Kool Cover images by x e oaks and Roxanne Marquez Interior design by Anna Abeyta, Jesús Eduardo Sánchez Flores, Addison Key, and Will Martinez Fonts: EB Garamond, Legitima, Roc Grotesk Conceptions Southwest is the fine arts and literary magazine created by and for the University of New Mexico community. Conceptions Southwest staff consists entirely of student volunteers directed by an editor in chief selected by UNM’s Student Publication Board. Submissions are accepted from all UNM undergraduates, graduates, continuing education students, faculty, staff, and alumni. This issue is brought to you by the Associated Students at The University of New Mexico (ASUNM) and the Graduate Professional Student Association (GPSA).

Copies and back issues are available in the Daily Lobo Classified Advertising Office, Marron Hall, Room 107. The Conceptions Southwest office is located in Marron Hall, Room 225. To order copies of the magazine, please contact csw@unm.edu or visit www.csw.unm.edu.

To the Creative Eye

Land Acknowledgement F0unded in 1889, the University of New Mexico sits on the traditional h0melands of the Pueblo of Sandia. The original peoples of New Mexico—Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache—since time immemorial, have deep connections to the land have made significant contributions to the broader community statewide. We honor the land itself and those who remain stewards of this land throughout the generations and also acknowledge our committed relationship to Indigenous peoples. We gratefully recognize our history.

Foreword

Anna Abeyta, Editor in Chief

I

n the kaleidoscope of human expression, our eyes serve as both windows and mirrors, reflecting the world around us while revealing our inner depths. Through the lens of each artist, we embark on a journey of discovery, where every stroke of the brush, every word penned, and every photograph captured offers a unique perspective on the beauty and complexity of existence. From the tender gaze of a loved one to the piercing stare of a stranger, each pair of eyes holds a story waiting to be told, a truth waiting to be uncovered by embracing these various perspectives, we come to understand the true beauty of our shared humanity. So, let us celebrate the beauty of our differences, for it is through the eyes of the artist that we gain new insights, understanding, and appreciation for the world around us.

As we worked together to create this fine arts and literature magazine, we combined our perspectives and created something to display them all. For forty-seven volumes now, Conceptions Southwest has displayed something unique in every issue. It acts as a time capsule, capturing the essence of each era through the eyes of its contributors.

This year, our aim was to embrace a minimalist yet structured design. We wanted something that would fill the page without overpowering it—a layout that struck the perfect balance between presence and space, allowing the artwork to shine through. In its simplicity, it captures the many perspectives that lie through the pages.

Throughout my years of working on magazines, especially CSW, one truth has become abundantly clear: it’s a team effort.

As we embarked on this year’s journey, we had a staff who began as strangers, quickly evolving into acquaintances, and soon

thereafter, friends. I’m immensely grateful for the dedication of the nine individuals who brought this magazine to life. Each person has left their mark, contributing their unique perspective to the creation of this publication.

To the two who kept the show going when it needed help the most, Addison and Kelsa, I thank you both. Addison, your leadership and unwavering dedication kept both me and this magazine afloat during challenging times. Kelsa, it’s been a pleasure collaborating with you, not only this year but on staff last year as well. Thank you for your diligent attention to detail and for keeping our communications running smoothly.

As you immerse yourself in the pages of this magazine, I hope that you may be inspired to see the world anew, to recognize the beauty in individual perspectives, and to welcome the diversity of our collective viewpoints.

For it is through the lens of each artist’s eye that we come to understand the depth and complexity of the world, and it is through our differences that we discover the true beauty of our shared humanity.

Table of Contents Poetry

17.

Four Minus One Morgan Leanor Tracy

Dolphin Girls Nell Johnson

66.

23.

Two or three lovers Zara Roy

Undulation Anya Deehzi Lacy

81.

39.

Ode to Oregon Julian Holman

The Sailor Matthew Lineberry

82.

43.

Dust Andrew Sowers

Serendipity is a Spring Word Matthew Lineberry

85.

51.

Maps Across Skin Simone Athena Campbell

recent birds x e oaks

86.

57.

Mary, Untier of Knots Nell Johnson

88.

62.

Leopoldo Tyler Fife

Myth of the Moth Simon Vetter Trinity Downwinders Savina Romero Say Goodbye, Catullus, Sophia M. Eagle

91.

89.

Creative Nonfiction

26.

Fortunate Perverted Hippie Graham Brant

Perception of Time Jill Nuckles

54.

36.

I Live So I Love Tyler Fife

Bleeding Through Lark Landon

73.

44.

December 7th Tanya Tyler

Short Fiction

02.

Viewing Party John Scott

All of the Rabbit Addison Fulton

18.

06.

Crop Circles Andrew Sowers

The Rug Jordan Lenz

68.

Photography

22.

All My Sisters Zoe Ostby

60.

A Fine October Night Flannery Cowan

61.

Movement: study1 Sarah Bauman

Smoky Sweet Emma Ressel

67.

The Neighbor’s Backyard John Scott

71.

Surrender the Decomposers Emma Ressel

84.

Visual Art

01.

Los Carniceros Savina Romero

Body Swatch II Nino Ricca Lucci

53.

05.

Heliophile Kendra Padilla

meditation in it x e oaks

58.

24.

Land Memory: Oropajita and Martha Listening to Oldies on a Car Hood in Hondo, Nuevo México, just 2 decades after Trinity Bomb (72 miles away) and UFO crash (43 miles away) Savina Romero

pelf sortrait x e oaks

59.

Whale Fall Nat Olmo

65.

If you don’t let me die here, I may never be reborn Roxanne Marquez

72.

Last Rest Victoria Nisoli

83.

41.

surfacelevel x e oaks

42.

Stairway to Heaven Austin Nguyen

Warranty Voided Joseph McKee

87.

52.

Body Swatch I Nino Ricca Lucci

Border Crossing Savina Romero

90.

Open Media

34.

Leaving the Hospital Bed Kadra Guillermo

demon comic “possibility” tribute to linda barry’s “100 demons” x e oaks

14.

Los Carniceros Savina Romero

Visual Art

acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 40” x 30”

01

Viewing Party John Scott

I

can’t stop thinking about fossils. Perhaps it’s the date we took to the Natural History Museum earlier today. But the fossils clearly weren’t fossils (although the animatronic T. rex at the entrance of the museum was pretty convincing; this is all irrelevant considering the remote-controlled Mars rover was my favorite part). It was hard not to notice the children gathered around the manufactured spectacle, scurrying around like ants while they watched its stuttering movements with an attention and curiosity that only children can offer. She made that abundantly clear following my futile attempt to replicate such an expression—an attempt made all the more pathetic when paired with the faint sadness sewn through her rigid face, the stitching almost coming loose at her furrowing eyebrows. She told me I looked like one of those thrift store figurines of some anthropomorphic animal, face contorted into what can only be described as an animal’s best approximation at expressing an emotion as a human might.

By the time the relationship ended, I’d be on antidepressants. But I didn’t know that yet.

“Turn in here. She said to park in the back.”

I may as well have flipped the car. She’s terrible at directions, a trait only made worse by her brazen timidness.

“This doesn’t look like an apartment complex.”

02

Scott

Short Fiction

Things tend not to look the way they’re meant to today. pain at such an early age, then “There’s no way this thing is real.” dinosaurs must have been limping “The apartment?” She points, feigning genuine around that conglomerated land inquisitiveness through her hollow brown eyes. There’s a mass with phenomenal cases of glass-like sheen to them—maybe she’s the figurine. arthritis. I stop to relieve the pain “Yes, the apartment. No—” I gesture toward the for a moment and think about how apartment, “I mean, it can’t fit in there, right?” much I am a fossil in this moment. I The building itself looks like three townhouses put “The eyes are the oven of the together with a series of stucco face.” protrusions that are impossible to envision within the layout of any typical apartment. Even still, there’s no way they don’t think I can take another step. could fit something that big in it. You could spot previous I am happy. attempts at painting black trim on some of the various wood Boom! A man in a tuxedo greets components located sporadically on the exterior of the us at the door. His hair resembles building, but the last time anyone must have had a go at it the apartment’s stucco which itself could have been ten, maybe twelve years ago. It’s winter, resembled a child’s rendition of a but the building looks hot. I put shorts on under my boiler world map. He introduces himself as suit in preparation for this—I always find myself getting the blond hair’s boyfriend. I instantly needlessly hot at viewing parties. My suit doesn’t match her came to know—then despise—his short denim skirt, loafers with long white socks, lacey longbaby blue eyes. sleeve top, and pearl earrings. She’s wearing our relationship “Oh—well—right!

Yeah.”

I as people should see it; I’m wearing emotions that someone thought he was new, but now I’m in a boiler suit typically brings to these kinds of things. But not sure. we’re both hoping for some sort of observation.

“I don’t think we’ve met before,” “You knock,” she quietly demands in front of the she says. mysterious door. Neither of us feel confident. I should I shoot a concerned look in feel excited about this sort of thing. Well, maybe I do. I’m her direction. We need to at least shaking, nonetheless. Could dinosaurs shake? Only one way see the thing first before we get to find out. ourselves kicked out. Why doesn’t I knock and collect the cold air under my full-body canvas she understand me? armor. The door swings open, nearly knocking us off our “No, I don’t think we have,” says feet. A gooey white dress melts out into the hallway. Blond Baby Blue. hair circles around.

Relief. I wonder what branch he “Hi! You made it! You haven’t been to this apartment, served in. have you?”

“It’s good to meet you.”

Furious headshaking.

He motions us inside. The living “Well, there’s a lot of stairs. I like to joke that once room is an amalgamation of Target you feel like you can’t possibly climb anymore—boom! futons and thrifted lamps. The warm You’re there.” tone of the lamps cues me to check This affords me around fifteen more minutes to consider the time. I rub my palms against my my fossils. It would have been more like twelve, but my knee legs. It’s too early to switch into the has been killing me and my physical therapy appointment shorts. I don’t want to anyway. The isn’t for another month. Certainly, if man can acquire knee eyes are the oven of the face. She 03

Scott

Short Fiction

takes my hand. I quickly pull it away and push it back down with one swift motion.

“Why did you pull your hand away?” she asks.

“I don’t know, I thought you were the boyfriend.” It seems we’ll never get to the bottom of this.

“Why would I be the boyfriend?”

Evolution is tricky business.

“Please, right this way.”

A hand on my back. It’s the boyfriend.

He motions us toward the viewing room. There’s a black velvet curtain in the doorway. I bump into the door hidden behind it. I didn’t read the exhibits close enough at the museum to think up a witty comment surrounding Cretaceousera creatures and an evolved ability to detect things behind black curtains.

I just find fossils to be intrinsically interesting: no extra information required. They’re living dead. And you just probably shouldn’t put a door in a doorway where a curtain already hangs. Maybe it’s something to do with the appearance of wealth.

“Holy shit.” All my movements halt. “They weren’t kidding.”

“Why’d you let go of my hand?”

Blondie and Baby Blue start fucking over near the hind limbs. I still had so much to learn.

“Because there’s a fucking Carnotaurus in the middle of their goddamn apartment.”

“Where’s the bathroom?”

She’s not asking me. Antique store figurine.

The cold air falls out of my boiler suit. By the time the weekend was over, I had tried to kill myself. But I didn’t know that yet.

I think I see one of those kids running around out of the corner of my eye, but it’s the dachshund with the hors d’Oeuvres tray strapped to its back: olives on top of mozzarella with prosciutto wrapped around the outside.

“Want one?”

04

Heliophile Kendra Padilla

Visual Art

acrylic paint and colored pencil, 16” x 12”

05

Crop Circles Andrew Sowers

P

at grabbed his duffle bag and made his way toward the front door. The hallway light was off, but he could hear Joanne’s footsteps squeaking behind him. As he opened the door, she flipped a switch and the front patio light flickered on. Pat took a few steps out of the house before he turned to face her again. She was wearing a sweater that he had bought her a few winters ago. She held the knob tight in her left hand and looked out at him from the partially open door. Pat sighed and searched his pockets for his car keys.

“Are you leaving town tonight?” Joanne asked.

Pat found his key in his jacket’s breast pocket. “Yeah, think so.”

Joanne nodded while her eyes drifted around on the floor. Pat watched her and thought about how quiet the night was. The silence between them confirmed his feeling that there was nothing left to be said. Only lingering desires to say it all again.

“All right, goodnight, Jo,” he said.

Joanne looked up at him; her eyes and nose were red. She had been crying. He waited for a moment to see if she’d respond, but when it became clear that she wouldn’t, he turned and walked to his car. The hinges squeaked as Joanne closed the front door. The porch light 06

Sowers

Short Fiction

turned off and his shadow disappeared. He threw his bag “Are you already out of the onto the back seat of his car and turned the ignition. He city?” Joanne asked. sat still with both hands on the wheel and waited for the “Yeah,” said Pat. pit in his stomach to dissolve. All he could think about Neither of them said anything was the quiet vibration of the engine coursing through else for some time. Pat listened the steering wheel and into his fingertips. to the sounds of the road while Pat pulled out of the driveway and made his way to the his thoughts moved in lethargic interstate, which was mostly empty because it was nearly “He passed through Sweetwater midnight on December twentyso quickly that the memory of ninth. He hadn’t planned to doing so never took form.” drive home before the new year, but this evening had convinced him that heading home now was a good idea. circles. Dim images and sentence An hour after he left Austin, Joanne called. Pat put fragments drifted in and out of the phone on speaker and placed it on his lap. Joanne focus. They all pertained to a hesitated between each sentence; it was clear she hadn’t singular distant feeling that he was really thought through what she intended to say. too resigned to name.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this came out of “Goodnight, Joanne,” he said. nowhere. I should have waited till the end of your visit.”

Her response came so slow “No, it’s fine.” Pat’s eyes narrowed in focus on the road that he imagined the silence was as he spoke. “It’s like you said…it was bound to happen building toward something. An sooner or later.” admission of guilt. An apology. But Flashing blue and red lights came into view on the right instead, she told him goodnight shoulder. Pat adjusted his speed as he passed a gray SUV and ended the call. receiving a ticket.

He passed through Sweetwater “I just don’t want…” Joanne paused. Pat pictured her so quickly that the memory of choking down tears. “I don’t want you to think it’s my doing so never took form. He had fault.” been thinking about spending the “Is it my fault?” Pat asked. night there—getting a motel room “No.” Joanne took a deep breath and released it quickly. or something. He blinked hard and “It’s just not something either of us can keep up. I’m tired of shook his head like he was coming being lonely. And I’m tired of feeling guilty every time I do out of a trance. He picked up his something to feel less…” she trailed off. phone and checked the time. It She didn’t admit to anything specifically, but Pat took this was too late for him to be driving, as further confirmation of a lingering suspicion. Joanne had so he pulled off the highway onto cheated on him. a long, straight country road and “I know it has had to have been the same for you,” she parked the car on the shoulder. As finished. he laid back in the driver’s seat and It was this last assertion that nearly shook him out of balled up his jacket for a makeshift his numbness. For a moment, he thought he felt it—he pillow, he took an emotional was angry. He felt heat rush to his chest as he tried to define inventory. He didn’t seem all that the imaginary wrong that had been done to him. But before broken up, which surprised and he could put it into words, as quickly as it became palpable also pleased him. to him, the feeling faded back into obscurity.

They had been together for 07

Sowers over five years, two of which had been long distance. Joanne had moved back to Austin to be close to her mom. So, Pat drove out to see her a couple times a year.

Despite their best efforts, things had become increasingly difficult.

Although Pat had kept up his regular visits around big holidays and anniversaries, they had slowly become strange to one another.

During this visit for Christmas and New Year’s, it had become clear to Pat that Joanne was preparing to end things. She had been distant and short with him all week. He realized it was probably for the best. They had tried to make it work. Everything runs its course eventually, he thought. But when she finally broached the topic that night, some deep-seated fear gripped his mind.

He imagined himself moving across the desert at the speed of a cinematic montage, tears streaming from his eyes. It would be late in the day when he finally arrived back in Denver. His tears would briefly subside as he drove slowly through the city he loved, the place he was raised. He saw himself pulling up to his apartment building on the east side of town after the sun had set. A neighbor would pass him on his way up the stairs and guess from his red eyes and gaunt face that he had just lost a loved one. The light bulb in the hall would still be out and he’d have to fumble around for the right key.

Once inside, he’d put down his bag and study his home under the glow of streetlights slipping between his blinds. The light would paint

orange lines across his bedspread and kitchen cabinets.

Then he would feel it more than ever. The cold weight of loneliness. Even though it had been so long since her body had raised the temperature of the room. Even though nothing had really changed, everything would be different. Before, he had been alone only in a literal sense. He could always refute his loneliness by asserting that he was with Joanne. But if he were to go home now, without her, without even the metaphysical possession of her, he would have nothing to spare him from the plain truth of his unhappiness.

So, to his own surprise, when Joanne sat down across from him that night, nudged his arm, and told him so plainly that she was tired of feeling alone and that she was ready to get on with her life, he found himself arguing and pleading with her to reconsider. Before he knew what he was saying, he had offered to leave behind his life in Denver and move to Austin. She had looked at him with a sly disbelief as if she were waiting for him to admit he was joking.

As he lay in his car recounting these events, he blushed at the thought of how afraid he had acted. He must have sounded so stupid. The recent memory of the phone call put his stomach in knots. The only reason she offered to talk more was probably because of how devastated she thought he was. She seemed to want his forgiveness, but she wouldn’t say what for. He didn’t know for certain she had cheated. In fact, it was hard for him to believe she really had. But it was something he had chosen to think so that he could feel for himself. As his eyes began to grow heavy, he marveled at how unaffected he seemed now. He decided to interpret his apathy as emotional maturity and fell asleep with an unearned sense of self-sufficiency.

Early the next day, he started making his way back to the highway. It had snowed a little that night. As he merged into the right lane, a car passed in front of him and left a thin trail of snow hanging in the air behind it. The stillrising sun infused the frozen particles with an unearthly glow. It looked like gold dust floating in the loose shape of a car. As he got up to speed, Pat looked in his rearview and watched the ghost of his own car dragging behind.

Ten minutes after passing through Abernathy, he was driving through what had once been his favorite stretch of the highway. It was miles and miles of farmland. It was never clear to him what they were growing. Whatever it 08

Short Fiction was never grew very tall. From inside his car, there was he seemed to have no energy. He not much to see apart from an unusually level horizon was surprised to see the sunlight line. It was the satellite view on his navigation app growing dim when he woke. He that made this stretch of land interesting to him. From felt as if he had only slept a halfabove, you could see that the different plots had been hour. He reached for his phone to made perfectly circular. He didn’t know anything about check the time (the car’s built-in agriculture, but he understood that the fields were clock was broken) but thought shaped this way because of the irrigation systems being used.

“The circles would start to He wasn’t much interested dissipate.” in these details. It was the collective result that interested him. The first few times he had made the drive to visit otherwise. “It doesn’t matter,” Joanne, he had moved through these fields with his eyes he thought as he tossed his phone glued to his phone. He watched the blue arrow icon, onto the back seat of the car. He which represented himself, as it passed through the crop rubbed his eyes and pressed his circles. Seeing himself from above, moving through this forehead against the window. It alien landscape, had made him feel important. He was in was cold to the touch. The engine the middle of whatever this was. This was the first time had been left on while he slept Pat hadn’t used his phone to navigate. He knew the way and the heater had made the cabin home well enough; he didn’t need any help. uncomfortably hot. His head After a while, Pat realized he hadn’t seen another car began to swim so he stepped out in almost an hour. “It’s the time of year,” he thought. of the car, leaving the door open “The week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, so the air could cool down. time doesn’t exist—no one has anywhere to go.” He It was cold outside. The gravel had always felt this way, mostly because he had always crunched under his feet as he taken time off work at the end of the year. With all of his walked around to the front of routines and usual responsibilities on hold, he had often the car and sat on the hood. He felt that the days moved by in slow motion. It was like looked out into the fields. They the calendar was hesitating—too afraid to start again and looked endless. He knew that after lose all progress. With this rare abundance of time, Pat another hour or so of driving he had made it his habit to work through his ever-growing would pass through Plainview and reading list. The week before, he had finished Haruki then through Happy. The circles Murakami’s novel Kafka on the Shore. Joanne had given it would start to dissipate. Not all to him last Christmas, and it had taken him most of a year at once. They would just become before he found time to read it. He thought about the part fewer and farther between until the near the end when Kafka is led into a deep forest that acts landscape went from one kind of as an entrance to a limbo-like spirit world. As they move plain to another. He would hardly deeper into the trees, his guide tells him, “Time doesn’t notice the difference. He looked really apply out here.” Kafka’s watch stops working. out across the expansive emptiness “Are we nearing the spirit realm?” Pat asked himself around him, and felt something as he sat back up in his car and looked out across the welling up inside of him for the fields. He had pulled over to shut his eyes for a bit first time since leaving Austin. It after hitting the rumble strip one too many times. was almost New Year’s Eve, and Something felt wrong in his body. Since leaving Austin, here he was, alone in the middle 09

Sowers of nowhere. He rubbed his eyes again and paused for a moment, pinching the bridge of his nose between his knuckle and thumb.

He held himself there, eyes closed tight, as if he were trying to hold some damaged object together long enough for glue to dry.

It was starting to get dark when Pat got back on the road. The tank was also getting low. He figured he could just fill it up when he passed through the next town. As the sun fell out of view, the headlights became gradually more visible until they were the only sources of light. On past drives, the stars had been so clear that headlights had hardly seemed necessary. But now there was a dark layer of clouds that looked indicative of more snow. Pat hoped it would snow.

He leaned his head against the window and pictured a thousand circles whited out—erased.

Then there was a thud. Pat’s forehead hit the window as the car swerved from side to side. It took him a few moments to regain control of the car. After steadying the vehicle, Pat pulled over. He sat in shock for a moment, unsure of what he possibly could have hit.

After collecting himself, he put on his jacket and got out of the car. He opened up his trunk and started sifting through his emergency supplies for his flashlight. Pat’s trunk housed a large collection of random objects and tools.

This wasn’t because he was wellprepared. In truth, he was just neglectful and had accumulated this collection over the course of many years. He found the flashlight

beside an old tackle box and then quickly walked around the car and shined the light on his front right tire. His chest tightened. There was no damage to the car. The rim, however, was splattered with tiny droplets of blood.

His mind began to race. He calculated every worst-case scenario. When there’s blood on the car, there’s always a worse scenario. He slowly worked up the courage to start walking back down the shoulder toward the point of contact. The highway was unsettlingly quiet. It had still been hours since he had seen another driver. He hated the fact that he could hear his own steps so clearly. When he arrived at the spot and pointed his light at the body, he felt a cold set into his bones. It was a dog. Goldish-tan fur with little bits of black mixed in. The leather collar around her neck had a tag that said “Lorelai.” There was no phone number or address. Pat covered his mouth and groaned into his hand. He turned around and trudged back to the car. He got in and put it into drive. Then he sat, staring straight ahead. He thought about the dead body he was about to leave behind—how she would be covered with snow and how that wasn’t enough. Before he really understood what he was doing, he was walking back to the dog with a blanket and a shovel that he found in the trunk. He wrapped the dog in the blanket and lifted her up in his arms. She weighed more than he expected, but he was still able to carry her and the shovel together.

He cradled them in his right arm and held the flashlight in his left hand. He hesitated for a moment before walking out into the field.

The ground was mostly dirt. Little spots of dry natural grasses crunched under his feet. Snow had begun to fall. He could only see along the narrow beam of his flashlight. The snowflakes were small but fell at the pace of raindrops. The red of his brake lights jumped from snowflake to snowflake.

When he turned to check on the car, the lights looked like they were pulsating. He felt unsettled. Not just from the accident and the fact that he was carrying a dead animal, but because of where he stood. After driving through and thinking about these fields so much, he had long ago come to the conclusion that they weren’t a place for people. Despite the fact that they were designed and built by people to serve an agricultural function, they possessed a holy nature. He couldn’t help but feel like he was actively intruding as he walked through the cold, dry circle.

He stopped and turned to his car to re-establish his 10

Short Fiction bearings. The lights were gone. He had only been walking He drove under a heavier quiet for a few minutes. He should have still been well within than he had ever known before. sight of the highway, but it just wasn’t there. He stopped The lights of Plainview came and laid the dog down. His heart was pounding in his ears into view, and as they became as he scanned the horizon for any signs of the car. He felt brighter, the snow stopped falling. the urge to run but suppressed it. He needed to bury the He continued through town and dog first. He was acting on some kind of deep instinct to drove on till he reached Tulia. put dead things in the ground.

He took the shovel in both “The next morning started hands and struck the ground. slowly.”

To his surprise, the blade sank deep. He had expected the soil to be hard. It was Texas in the middle of winter, after He paid for a room in one of the all. But the earth gave itself up willingly. As he dug, the town’s only motels. The man at ground began to grow clearer. He looked up to see the the front desk eyed him curiously clouds had dissipated overhead. Pale, blue moonlight as they went through the steps of gave everything a ghostly glow. The snow, however, had the transaction. Pat knew he must not let up in the slightest. It still fell heavily, even in the look like someone who had just absence of its source. Pat didn’t have time to think too committed a crime. He was too hard about this. All he could think about was finishing anxious to make eye contact and his task so that he could leave as quickly as possible. He communicated primarily with nods dug fast, cutting into the ground with great ease. He when he could. piled the blue earth to his right. After digging four feet The furniture in his room was down, he struck something hard. He wedged the shovel stained a glossy red color that beneath whatever it was and pulled it up. He reached for made him think of cough syrup. He the flashlight and pointed it into the hole. It was a femur undressed slowly, shaking dirt out bone—perfectly white and smooth, save for the place the of the sleeves of his sweater. The shovel had struck it, causing it to crack. He dropped the fibers of his jeans were permeated flashlight as he staggered backward. with dirt. They were probably “What’s happening?” he whispered to himself. The sound ruined, he thought, as he tossed of fear in his own voice made him shiver. Had he picked them onto the floor. He laid down the one spot in this expansive place that was already a in his underwear and fell asleep. grave? Not sure what else to do, he hurried over to where The next morning started slowly. he had set down the dog. He picked her up and tried to He would have slept long into the lower her gently into the ground, but his grip slipped. Her day if not for the bang of a premature body made a light thud that felt as if it landed on his own firework going off nearby. It was stomach. He moaned and tried to take some deep breaths.

December thirty-first. The events of The snow started to settle into the hole as if trying to fill the previous night, like everything itself. He picked the shovel back up and helped fill in the else in his life, felt far away and grave. After it was done, he sat panting on the ground unreal. Pat showered and dressed with his head in his hands. Flakes of ice clung to his hair in clean clothes. When he went to and jacket. He got up slowly, took the shovel, and stuck return his key, there was an older lady it into the ground where a gravestone would be. The sky at the desk. became dark again as he did so. He turned around to see “Someone slept well,” she said the red lights of his car flickering through the snow. with a smile.

11

Sowers Pat nodded and put the key on the desk. She seemed annoyed by his directness.

“Come again soon,” she said without conviction.

As he walked out to his car, the words replayed again in his head.

“Come again soon,” he said to himself as he started the engine.

If there had been any doubt left in his mind, it was gone after last night. He would never come back.

He drove to the nearest gas station.

There were two other cars outside.

He parked by the pump and went in to buy a cheap breakfast and pay for gas. A bell rang as he opened the door, but the man behind the counter paid him no mind. He was conversing with another customer.

Pat grabbed a plastic-wrapped Danish and filled up a cup of soursmelling coffee. When he moved to the front to get in line, he overheard the two men talking.

“I’m sorry, Tom,” said the attendant as he slid a pack of cigarettes across the counter. “I’m

Tom walked out to his truck. Pat watched him go, then placed his meager breakfast on the counter.

“Who is he looking for?” he asked, his eyes still on the old man.

“Who? Tom? His dog’s been missing the last couple days,” said the attendant.

Pat nodded stiffly. His hand shook as he offered the attendant his debit card. Tom was still at the pump when Pat exited the store. He made brief eye contact with him, and then quickly looked away. Tom finished pumping his gas and got into his truck. Pat’s heart was beating fast.

As the ignition turned in Tom’s truck, Pat realized he couldn’t let him leave. He stepped in front of the truck and waved. The old man lifted a hand in return, he had a blank expression on his face. When he saw that Pat wasn’t going to move, he rolled down his window.

“I’m sorry, I heard you’re looking for your dog,” said Pat. Tom was quiet for a moment. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said.

“Lorelai?” asked Pat. Tom’s eyes seemed to deepen as he nodded slowly. Pat tried to read the man’s face to see if he knew where this was going. His blue eyes were nebulous. They looked as if they knew all things and held every possible feeling so close to the surface.

“I…” Pat trailed off and looked down at the ground.

Tom ran his hand through his short, gray beard. “Can you show me where?” he asked.

Pat looked back up at him in surprise. “Okay,” he said.

“Tom’s eyes were a glossy cold blue.” sure she’ll turn up soon.”

Tom was wearing a thick corduroy jacket and dirty jeans.

He paid with cash then turned to leave. Pat took a half step to the side to make room for Tom to get to the door. The old man looked into Pat’s eyes as he shuffled past. Pat held this eye contact uncharacteristically long. He couldn’t help it. Tom’s eyes were a glossy, cold blue. The bell rang as

Pat drove back through Tulia and Plainview, back into the fields from the night before. Tom’s truck followed close behind. The whole time they drove, Pat felt a growing heat deep in his stomach. How was this happening? He wondered what he would tell Tom if he couldn’t find the place from the night before. He scanned the fields to his left carefully. Eventually, he saw it. There was the shovel. It was only twenty-five yards from the road. Pat was bewildered. He remembered walking far enough into the fields that he lost sight of the road. He pulled into the median and Tom did the same. The two men got out of their cars and, without speaking, Pat started walking across the two-lane highway and back out into the field.

12

Short Fiction His heart began to beat at a familiar speed. He could see his footprints from the night before. He left an identical trail beside them that Tom doubled with his own steps.

When they reached the grave, Pat stopped and stared at the little mound of dirt. He couldn’t believe what he saw.

The dog’s collar was sitting there on top of the mound.

The old man knelt down and picked it up.

Pat’s mind raced through every bizarre detail of that night. He recounted each strange event and terrified action, but he had no memory of removing the dog’s collar. Tom ran his fingers across the leather. Then he stood and looked at Pat whose mouth was still agape in confusion.

“I appreciate what you did, but I think I’m gonna dig her up now,” said Tom. Pat came back to himself and looked up at Tom, whose eyes were beginning to fill with tears. “I’d like to bury her back home.”

Pat nodded. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

Tom grabbed hold of the shovel and tried to jerk it out of the ground, but it didn’t budge. He grunted as he pulled it with all of his strength. It broke free from the ground, bringing up a few pebble-sized pieces of dirt with it. They clattered on the ground as they landed. Tom brought the shovel down on the mound where Lorelai was buried. The ground was stiff and the shovel was barely able to pierce it. Tom pulled up barely a handful of dirt and tossed it to the side. He wiped his forehead, which was already perspiring. Then looked back at Pat. “How the hell did you do this?” frustration had replaced sadness in his voice.

“I don’t know,” said Pat. Tom took the shovel between both hands and brought it down hard again. The result was the same. The ground seemed determined to give nothing back. Tom continued striking the ground with a consistent rhythm that started to grate against something in Pat. The old man seemed to get angrier with every fruitless blow.

“Can I…” Pat reached out his hand and touched Tom’s back.

“Get out of here!” Tom yelled, jerking his body out of Pat’s reach.

A stream of tears ran beneath each of his eyes. He lifted the shovel high and continued what had become clearly impossible. Pat obeyed and turned away.

As he walked back to his car, Pat could hear the shovel striking the ground accompanied by the old man’s pained grunts. When Pat was halfway back to the road, the sound 13

of the shovel stopped. There was a brief quiet before the old man’s crying reached his ears. He turned and saw Tom on his knees, leaning against the shovel. His cries were carried across the field by a cold wind. Pat kept walking farther until the sound of Tom’s grief became a distant whisper that spread over miles of dead circles.

When Pat got back to his car, he reached into his back seat and picked up his phone. He hadn’t checked it in over a day. He looked at the time—it was noon. In twelve hours, everything would start over, but nothing would be the same.

There were several missed calls and unread text messages. He unlocked his phone and read a text from Joanne: “Come back.” He placed his head against the steering wheel and let everything inside of him fall onto his lap.

demon comic “possibility” tribute to linda barry’s “100 demons”

x e oaks

Open Media

Art Department Award Winner

14

oaks

15

Open Media

oaks

Open Media

graphite, digital, handbound book, 11” x 5.5”

16

Four Minus One Morgan Leanor Tracy Baby bird You died last night Your head slumped Eyes oozing white decay A sacrifice to the snake So maybe your siblings could survive Or perhaps just the inevitable result Of being on the front line We left you in the hot July sun In a plastic bag The sweltering heat keeping burial rights At bay We waited all day to dig that three-foot hole We kept you with the snake Its body and head made separate From three charges of a shovel My brother said, “It’s almost poetic” Letting the two of you leave together Knowing that perhaps There is no ill will for the cycle of nature Just my bubbling guilt Of not being better And as I lay you down beside Coiled corpse, crushed head And your silken feathers And as the sky ran out idolic hues Of pink, purple, orange and blue I just hope that you might agree With what he said, “It’s almost poetic.” Almost.

-Four Minus One

17

English Department Award Winner

All of the Rabbit Addison Fulton

I

’d like to thank you again for agreeing to meet with me here,” Ms. Major says, sniffing, swirling, and sipping at a dark glass of Pinot Noir.

“Thank you for having me… Ms. Major,” Buck replies.

She’d told him to call her Ms. Major when he had told her that she could call him Buck. “This is a nice restaurant.”

“It’s a favorite of mine.”

“It’s nice,” he repeats, uncertain what more to say. It is a nice restaurant. Very, very nice. The napkins are red linen.

The glasses are real crystal, carved directly out of the walls of diamond caverns. The menu is stiff, firm parchment with drop caps and gold leaf. All of the dishes have complex names with strange marks on the a’s and u’s. They’re hard to say, sticking to the tongue; to make up for that, the wine slides down the throat sweet and easy.

The waiter has a thin black tie, a perfectly pristine, crisp white shirt, and a silver dish with a domed lid. He sets it down in front of Buck and opens it with a practiced flourish.

On the tray sits a rabbit.

A rabbit. An honest-to-God bunny rabbit. A live, whitefurred rabbit with shining black eyes and a twitching pink nose sniffing skyward as it takes in the aromas of gourmet cooking and expensive designer fragrance.

“I—I’m sorry,” Buck stammers, as the waiter sets a silver 18

Fulton

Short Fiction

carving knife and fork in front of him. “What is this? What She stares at him, eyes still and do we...?” unnerving. “I… I’m supposed to kill What do we do with it? is what he wants to ask. Is there a it before I eat it, right? I… I don’t cultured, expensive way of asking that? know how to do that.”

“Is something the matter with your order?” the waiter “It’s quite easy, really,” Ms. Major asks with genuine concern and a less-than-genuine, vaguely says. “Most go for the jugular, though European accent. that’s not my method. It gets a lot “No,” Ms. Major interrupts before Buck can say anything. “She holds it gently, the blade “Everything’s correct. That’ll be pressing into her palm.” all.”

She waves the waiter away.

It’s just the two of them. of blood on the fur and the skin. Bit And this rabbit. messy. I prefer to go through the “What is this?” Buck asks. He’s whispering because he skull—right down and clean through doesn’t want to be heard sounding stupid. the brain. Requires a little more “A simple business discussion. An acquisition, that’s all.” effort, a little more brute force, but Well, he knew that. He’s not stupid. He’s here because nevertheless it’s less bloody and Ms. Major is buying him dinner, because she’s buying his equally as quick. I find the brain company. He’s small and struggling, an imitation porcelain somewhat… slimy, so I don’t mind if cup teetering on the edge of the table that is the free market. there’s tissue damage there.”

This was his only sound financial decision. The only way “Oh. Okay.” to keep food on the table was to sell… well, everything.

“You don’t want to do it, do you?”

Everything he’d worked for—the business degree he got on The rabbit moves as if intending a hefty scholarship, his mother’s hope, his father’s pride. to step off the platter, but it doesn’t.

“No,” Buck repeats, “I mean this,” he gestures to the real Its small, neat paws rest at the very rabbit, sitting on the real porcelain plate. edge of the plate. The threshold.

“Oh. That’s tout le lapin,” she says. “It’s my favorite.”

Buck says nothing and keeps his “And what is tout le lapin?” paws on the edge, too.

“It’s a French dish. It means ‘all of the rabbit.’”

“Do you eat meat?” she asks.

“And that means…”

“Yes.” “You eat all of the rabbit,” she says. Ms. Major picks up “So why the hesitation?” the butcher knife the waiter brought by the blade. She holds “It’s… it’s different.” it gently, the blade pressing into her palm. She holds it out “Because it’s a rabbit? Or because to him by the handle. you can see it?”

“All of the rabbit?”

“I—” “All of the rabbit.”

“A lot of people are squeamish He takes the knife from her but doesn’t do anything. about eating rabbits. They’re pets as The rabbit isn’t looking at him, it’s eyeing the microgreens well. It upsets people to attempt to and candied fig salad with red wine vinaigrette on the next see the same thing in two different table. Why couldn’t they have ordered that? Its eyes are dark lights, as both friend and food. Does and shiny—small black holes pulling in light. Ms. Major is it upset you?” looking at him expectantly.

“Um, I—” “What’s the matter?” she asks him.

She slips the knife from his hand; “I don’t know… how to eat, uh, tout le lapin,” he says. once again she grabs it by the blade, 19

Fulton but she grabs it harder, now. A thin line of blood beads from the center of her palm.

“How do you think the rabbit feels, hm?”

What Ms. Major likes about tout le lapin is that it makes her feel dangerous. It’s not a feeling she is always permitted. Sharpness is something she’s learned—something she’s fought for. Tout le lapin is not cheap, but it’s more than that. It’s a good dish for a first impression. She still clutches the knife as she stares at Buck. His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat.

“Are you married?” she asks him.

“No,” Buck whispers.

“Would you like to be?”

“Maybe? One day? It might be nice. A… a wife. And children.” His eyes are still on the bunny and its twitching whiskers.

She considers the bunny as well.

The last time Ms. Major had been here, she’d been trying to buy some tech start-up out of the suburbs of Silicon Valley, she thinks. Two young boys with acne scars that hadn’t fully faded and overly romantic ideals of the wealthy. It’d been a gray rabbit.

At first, they’d had the bright idea of releasing it. She’d laughed in their faces. She explained that these rabbits were bred for the slaughter; they lived their lives to end up on this platter. To have flesh that is sweet and succulent. Even if they didn’t eat it, as soon as they released it, something else would. And that something wouldn’t even appreciate it. The texture. The flavor. The umami. The ennui.

Yet her heart twitches like a rabbit’s nose as she imagines the bunny seeing the hawk’s shadow. She feels for it in its attempt to be bigger than it was bred to be. Where the rabbits fail, she will succeed. She has to.

The tech guys had slaughtered it eventually. Along the jugular. They always do. The question is never Will they kill the bunny? The question is always, How long will it take them?

The hesitation is always there, but never for long. She has never hesitated. That is the only way she could ever be here.

“What about you?” Buck asks. “Are you married?”

“No.” “Do you want to be?”

“No.” She sets the knife down on the table and takes a sip of her wine instead. With her other hand, and without thinking, she rubs the bunny’s head, stroking the fur between its ears. Buck watches her, and he winces, recoiling from the contradiction of the image. Affection between the slaughtered and the slaughterer. He simply doesn’t understand. He might learn; he might not.

“Stress… makes the meat chewy,” she explains.

He looks at the knife between them, then at the bunny, then at her. He is so confused by it, she realizes. He has never once been the rabbit; it is completely alien to him that it would even be there. That anything could be there. That anything could be so small.

She remembers smallness. She remembers her own twitching ears and nose. She remembers being on the platter, with hungry eyes roving over her body in every boardroom and bedroom and room.

It’s never a question of will. It is a question of when.

“Why are you selling to us?” she asks.

“I have no other choice.”

She wants to argue that he does, but it’s better for her if he doesn’t notice it.

“What… what will I be doing?” Buck asks. “Once I’ve sold to you. Once I’m a… a sellout business-business man.”

“Not much. It’s not all slaughtering bunnies,” she attempts to joke. It does not land. “Mostly, you’ll answer emails. At some point, you’ll get a business card and you’ll become obsessed with showing it to people to prove that you exist.”

You will sit in a boardroom and feel big, Ms. Major thinks. And you will like it. And you will sit there comfortably and never worry.

“Oh.” 20

Short Fiction They are both looking at the knife. The rabbit is looking But it is so far and it is so small. elsewhere. Its ears and nose twitch. It is so alive.

The killing floor is everywhere, “The polite thing to do is for me to let you do it,” Ms. you come to learn. In every decision, Major says, eyeing the knife. Her dinner guests always get to made or unmade. Always dying: the make the first move. deer, the wolf, the rabbit, the soft “Why?” sweet grass. In the face of need—of Why doesn’t it run? She wonders not for the first time, want—there can be no clean hands. considering the white bunny in front of her. Surely it must know “It’s decided being good is how to, the instinct can’t have better than being hungry.” been that thoroughly bred out.

She watches it, looking for some recognition in its eyes. She watches for a tilt or a twitch that There is softness; the room means the bunny is thinking—We’re the same, or Better me is warm. There is touch and than you, or even Better you than me. In its dark, soft, shining compassion. There is hesitancy. eyes, she finds nothing but innocent impassivity. She looks, There is mercy. really looks, deep into the bunny in a way she usually tries Then there is a flash, a coldness. not to. Maybe it’s given up on the fight. On freedom. It’s A sensation of leaking—something decided being good is better than being hungry. that was in is now out, pouring from When Ms. Major looks inside herself, she finds nothing the throat. In lieu of the voice, there but hunger. is the essence. Then it is bright and “Because you have the power here.” painful and beautiful and clear. The “No I don’t.” It is so infuriating to hear him say that. road ahead and behind stretches out Doesn’t he realize he’s had a knife in his hand since he walked in a perfectly straight line. All that in here? She barely has one, even after the little waiter in the is, all that was. Power and fear and stupid tie handed it to her. Why doesn’t he get it? hunger and flesh.

“Yes, you do. Aren’t you hungry?”

And then it is gone, and it does “I mean, yeah. We didn’t get appetizers.” not matter.

“No, I mean are you hungry? Really, hungry? Have you And then it is over. ever felt it?”

“Yeah, yeah. I think I have.”

“No,” she says, “Bullshit. You haven’t. Something that claws at your throat. At your stomach. Powerful hunger.

Power hungry. That’s why you’re selling to me. Because you’re full. You’re gorged. It’s made you stupid.”

“Fuck you,” Buck snarls, suddenly alive.

“That’s better.”

All of the world is a silver disk. Beyond it is Hell, an untouchable land of freedom and innocence lost. It stands still on the silver platter where the world is uncomplicated.

Surrounding is the din and murmur of chaos and uncertainty.

Within sight but out of reach is indulgence—is the desire.

21

All My Sisters Zoe Ostby

Photography

digital, 6.5” x 6.5”

22

Two or three lovers Zara Roy He sits me up.

He says: “Honey, I love you— but I’ve got a girl at home who bleeds soft pink from strawberry legs as I bite at all the places the dull blade merely nicked.”

“Spare me the nicks,” I say. “Puncture straight through the heart.”

He lays me down.

23

Land Memory:

Oropajita and Martha Listening to Oldies on a Car Hood in Hondo, Nuevo México, just 2 decades after Trinity Bomb (72 miles away) and UFO crash (43 miles away) Savina Romero

Visual Art

acrylic on canvas, 36” x 24”

24

Fortunate Perverted Hippie Graham Brant

A

t age twenty-five, I paused and noticed the spherical hole near the front of my brain—golf ball-sized and growing—as it rended the outlying gray matter into crude lattice and then into nothing. In there I could feel cold, gentle wind blowing through it, and I could see tones of an overcast winter day on the coast of Maine.

If I focused, I could see my mom there on the pebbly shore, stumbling and falling down under a cruel invisible weight.

Then I could see a seal’s fresh carcass softly rolling in and out with the tide, deep voids where eyes once were. Every hour my attention was yanked toward this hole again and I would feel that wind across all my skin and I would choke for a moment. I put together that the hole had been growing for maybe three years, and with its growth, I was becoming stupider. One day the hole stopped expanding and its walls festered pale green and white, decorated with anguished aspen tree eyes and deep red needle marks. Pus surfaced and squirted and the space stank something wrong enough to kill. The walls scabbed over shoddily and as summer came, things crystallized and dehydrated, and sharp cracks opened as upon old salty mud. The mud scorched and bleached. All this time I could think and imagine vividly as any animal, but when I needed to climb onto a thought to see where it would swim, we found the hole before any other development. We 26

Brant

Creative Nonfiction

crashed into its space where we bounced between its my feet? It was crucial to open my walls while the winds and smells tied us into impossible cranium and smoosh my brain, but knots until we amounted to useless scum. With the hole the image always brought the fear firmly in the middle of things, every thought was alone of hell to mind. Does explosive, and incapable of collaborating or adding up to anything. violent death increase the chance All that could express itself was pathetic instinct and of a violent eternity? It’s a dreadful well-rehearsed insincerities. gamble, about as challenging as Five years earlier, in the location of this hole there was a “It was crucial to open my rusty cube plated with skewed, dented panels of greasy pig iron cranium and smoosh my brain.” and wrapped in an absurdly improvised series of throbbing pipes and valves. The device continuing to live. was full of heavy gears and such, wailing in cacophonous I would picture hell as a permanent conflict with each other, everything going the wrong situation localized entirely within an direction and always on the verge of structural failure, but old analog bowling scoreboard on refusing to stop. It devastated all other parts of the brain. the fritz. The louder-than-possible Its seams incessantly ejected blasts of steam, smoke, sparks, buzzing of wrathful dissonant and hot oil while bolts unscrewed themselves, and the hull sawteeth informs the oscillations bulged as though stuffed with animals panicked for escape. of the ruined, writhing grids in red I tried to encourage this machine to reproduce, evolve, and black. This itchy, jittery glitch is convolute, and eventually kill me by eating more and more my world now, and I have no body psychedelic drugs. I’d never had any sort of good trip before, or mind. I am to witness this with and I knew that one wasn’t coming soon. Each trip tripled all my senses and more. And I know the previous in terms of despair and disillusion. that neither it nor I can change. And I began spending my early mornings with a walk north to I get to repeatedly experience the the parking garage, which was the tallest structure I had the very moment of realizing I made it to energy to climb. I’d situate myself atop the brutal concrete hell exactly as I imagined it one day wall surrounding the open-air top level. The wall was thick at school, all because of the cause of enough that I could lie down, roll around, and pace on it death and with little relation to the with little chance of falling unintentionally. Along the foot details of life. of the north side of the structure, a sort of drainage system And I picture heaven as a silent, took the form of a steep moat, bafflingly designed with a seriously abstracted, immediately vulgar array of hundreds of sharp, toothy stones pointed comprehensible space where the upward out of its faces. South and west of the structure ground is perfectly, endlessly flat were walkways, which turned busy when dawn broke over and cartoonishly green, and the the east mountains. Around this time, I would imagine my sky perfectly and endlessly blue, head hitting the cement right at the feet of one of these without sun or gradient. There is people, and how their mind could be turned by such a no scent or sound, but it is a bit moment. I thought I saw that handsome graying fella from chilly. And I am alone, but for a tight that recent critique and wondered if I should land in front complex of empty buildings built of an acquaintance or a stranger. Maybe I should shave my of only the simplest polyhedrons, entire body clean before I do it, and staple some confessional colored totally solid and primary, messages onto my skin. Would it be realistic to attach some but muted and poignant like a heavy load to my neck or head to ensure I don’t land on renaissance landscape background.

27

Brant I drift up a spiral staircase, to the top of the gray cylindrical tower where a window opens out of the blue spire cone. Without a pause, I bring myself through the window, fall for a few seconds, and connect with the textureless floor, back of my head first. My spine shatters and I slip inward toward the center of my final synapse where I, again, stand before the perfect buildings and, again, ascend the tower and, again, send my head into the perfect ground. And again. And it all makes good sense, and I know I got to go to heaven.

Somewhere in this period, as my twenties began, I was informed that I’d be inheriting ninety-thousand dollars. It was my understanding that Mom had died broke five years earlier, but somehow some lawyer had now discovered some forgotten investment that had recently exploded. I couldn’t think of anything to buy and was too selfish to give it away. I kept it

three years the money would be gone and in the accounts of people who own their own rehab centers and who trade exhausted people between each other.

Somebody asked me to choose between being hospitalized voluntarily or being hospitalized involuntarily. I felt a great relief in this joke while we pretended that I was in charge.

In fact, I had a glowing sense of curiosity and opportunity while being strapped onto the plastic table and carried out back. Most of the professionals involved from here on acted completely casual and amused by their jobs. Nobody was awkward or coddling. Things were groovy now and I could breathe.

In the ambulance, a man told me that he had recently transported a girl who jumped from a similarly tall building downtown and landed right on her feet. Her legs turned to black bags of lumpy slime while the rest of her stayed together, and she could only scream—couldn’t even lose consciousness. The ambulance driver chuckled at this.

My first buddy inside the ward was Rodney, a seven-foot edifice, always swaying and slack-jawed, little patches of stringy white hair sprouting from random spots. He was a whimsical, unfiltered bigot and never took off his black aviators. He told me how he survived his own abortion and had been hunted his whole life by a squad of black doctors looking to finish the job. The doctors had only recently caught up to him as he was running down an empty highway.

They ran him down with their undercover ambulance and backed over him again, but he had the strength to fight his way “And it all makes good sense, out of their cuffs and syringes and I know I got to and thwart their mission again.

He said that when he was go to heaven.” discharged he was to inherit ownership of the Pegasus gas secret. The way I was living, I could company, which was a huge deal because it’s the only gas have cruised for fifteen years with company with “gas” hidden in its name, which nobody no job, even helped some people but him had noticed. One morning, he launched into the out, but that would take a series breakfast room and wriggled across the floor screaming, of decisions and decision-making “I’m a worm! I’m a worm!” until somebody ripped his pants slumped in a quarter of my brain and injected something into his asscheek. Before he passed with no electricity, only echoes of out, he struggled up and skipped around singing “Rump and thrashing machinery and smells of Putin! Rump and Putin! Get out of my ass!” burnt metal. Because others made There was a sorrowful elderly woman, red hair to her my decisions, somehow within waist, who always wore a heavy cloak of sheets. She came 28

Creative Nonfiction to life when I played Beatles songs on the beautiful old atrium piano. She often tried to hang herself with a sheet fixed between the ladies’ room door and its upper jamb. We would cuddle on the bench by the basketball court until told to stop.

I loved Monica, an affable, hippie schizophrenic who mostly communicated in pops and bloops accentuated by little finger dances. She was the only one allowed to wear jewelry, and her bizarro sculptural rings shook something in me. Every piece of art I’ve made since then has something to do with Monica’s rings.

A wall-eyed man with sixty-four teeth slept all day, eyes open, and would spend all night howling as he scurried throughout the ward, flushing all the toilets.

The youngest was a pasty boy they kept behind glass, who would stare straight forward and all day would growl about how thrilled he was that he had stabbed his parents.

After a group session in which those of us who could hear and speak poked our own foreheads and chanted that we fully accept ourselves, the therapist offered me a job. I still can’t figure out why. During this gathering, Rodney rose and flailed his fists in the sky while he screamed “Chancellor Palpatine is the Devil!”

I was put on a pill more mundanely harrowing than any drug I’d tried before. Clomipramine was invented in the ‘60s and was promised to treat my depression, obsessive compulsion, addiction, suicidality, insomnia, BPD, anorexia—everything they accused me of.

From the first dose, my ears rang inescapable disharmonies.

My eyes fogged and ached as other people’s faces washed out and resurfaced as glowing turbulent pools overcrowded with competitive writhing tadpoles. My fluency in English fell apart, doubly horrifying because it had happened before and it’s a bitch to get used to. A dense green froth flowed incessantly from my dick. Dr. Godio’s advice was to masturbate as much as I could. My back teeth cracked open and metamorphosed into little sizzling volcanoes that would burn the tip of my tongue as I compulsively probed them.

My esophagus chaffed and wiggled. I would later manage a grip on these effects, but what stayed way above my reach were new universal senses of dread and hatred.

Mom put me on pills at age eleven, and I’ve been on the hook since. This is the only decision of hers that I can resent. Several therapists and mothers have told me that I should be, or secretly am, angry with her for shooting 29

herself. Certain people need to regard suicidal people as the lowest of the selfish and cowardly in order for their own terrified decisions to make any sense. A lady I’d never met approached me at Mom’s funeral and said that Mom had committed the ultimate betrayal. What’s a guy supposed to say to that?

There, in the west wing of the UNM Hospital psych ward, kicked off my three years of institutionalization.

I’ll have to skip some arcs to keep this thing printable. Day after my first discharge, I joined a couple of outsiders for a psychedelic road trip far out into the aspen forests where we smoked some dirty brown homemade DMT, ate plenty of mushrooms, and shared hundreds of Colorado joints. There’s no good use for me to try and tell how things really went down, but I know we spent thousands of years there around that fire with all those suicidal aspen trees who wouldn’t stop staring and begging.

Joe wound up sprawled in the moss with blood falling out of every hole.

While I was holding in too big a hit, one of the trees took me by the hair and yanked the top of my head bald. I can remember the trillions of screams and a cursed jam of jaw harp and chromatic harmonica.

These are the funny parts. Kyle had a marvelous educational time. They put me away again when I got home.

I was oscillating at a maximum rate between wondrous optimism and a new severity of despair. Every stone and plant appeared plague-ridden and hopelessly involved in a secret cosmic holocaust. I saw old Rodney again, but all he said was “Rodney.

Brant Rodney? I’m Tom!” My stepmother, who declared that I had squandered every opportunity she had given me in the last five years, had a meditation partner called Judy who worked at a rehab in a little coffee town in the mountains of Panama, so that’s where the money and I went for ninety days. When Judy was in Panama for the winters, she lived in a pink and yellow château on a hill entirely enclosed within an enormous brutalist, wrought iron cage, squads of locals endlessly weed whacking the lawns. Surgeries left her face bulbous and reflective, with a mouth she could not close and eyes she could hardly crack. She was one of a dozen completely fried new-age therapists who came and went from Serenity Vista at random.

Serenity Vista was just a house, the home of John and Jane, an incredibly Canadian couple of paranoid sociopaths. Their go-to technique was to remind me that I am in fact an ugly, stinky, lying, cheating, stealing, arrogant, unapproachable junkie with no friends and a shit-eating grin, and only complete surrender to their incoherent spiritual designs could redeem this. I could understand ugly and arrogant, but it seemed disrespectful to the plight of junkies to liken them to a lightweight psychonaut like me.

Every morning at the breakfast table, John handed me a contract stating that I must abstain from killing myself for the entire day. A month in, my contrarian attitude regarding the fountaining abundance of joy and opportunity for everyone in the universe, per the ramblings of Wayne Dyer and Esther Hicks,

set him on a rabid accost. I remember him crying, “Can’t you see how much I fucking love you? I am very angry!

You’re gonna blow your brains out, asshole!” After that, he stopped handing me the contract.

A week into my stay, they had the therapy couch thrown out and replaced. John, grinning wide-eyed and unblinking, told me this was necessary because my smell and negative energy had irreversibly soiled the suede.

Every afternoon a triple rainbow rose around the volcano to the south and looked into the wide window of the therapy room. I saw dozens of species of little birds die in collision with this window during therapy sessions. Jane always took these deaths for beautiful messages from our higher powers.

During my ninety days, there were never more than three of us patients there at once. People kept arriving to begin treatment, but left within a day of meeting these schmucks.

Jane would always sigh and remark that some people just aren’t ever ready to get better and had best just off themselves sooner rather than later.

We went to ninety Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, where I got so caught up in the lovely spirit that I was accidentally making up entire stories and revelations just to maintain the groove of the room. One lady shared that she had gotten intentionally lost in some snowy woods, laid her arm on a stump, and chopped her own hand off with a big heavy knife. Then she wandered until she found an old barrel in which the big book of AA was suspended in ice.

She called this her rock bottom. Everybody but me could name their rock bottom.

It didn’t take too long for us patients to understand that John and Jane must have fled Canada to conduct their methods unchecked. Jane was drugging the breakfast smoothies with something sickening, John was doing a poor job pretending to be a pharmacologist, and the shithead labrador they kept was certainly not a licensed therapy dog.

People called “Educational Coordinators” get paid to move young fools like me from one private rehab to another until somebody can’t take it anymore. Mine sent me to a young people’s treatment center south of Sedona. It was a swingin’ place where hedonism and selfishness took hold of those of us without any aspirations. It was a fine place to be catatonically depressed or act like a wild lowlife. I did both for two years. You had to go to dark lengths or offend the wrong honcho to get kicked out of there.

My first roommate looked like a little cave man and 30

Creative Nonfiction dressed only in a rancid green blanket which he’d sewn into at the little mourning ceremony he a tube with wizard sleeves. He was vastly more absorbed into himself had arranged. The therapist the psychedelics than I. He kept all his belongings buried in had walked the parents and some a network of holes around the foot of Bell Rock. His was the of us kids into the desert to stand first penis I’d ever handled and mine his. We experimented around a dramatic juniper tree. upon each other for a few nights atop this big rock down We approached and whispered our the street where all the rehab kids went to fuck each other. hopes for Emma’s soul into the bark.

Years later he called to ask if I had raped him. I said no but he “She ran a farm in Cornville hung up before I could ask what populated only by traumatized the hell he was talking about. mammals.”

Another roommate was James, a deeply polite philosopher from South Carolina. At his previous institution, some I told the tree I hope she made it professionals had slid a quarter inch steel rod all the way up someplace less complicated than his urethra, and he was still resentful about this. We found here. A day later, Josh, the rehab’s greenskeeping work at the country club golf course where owner, took me for Thai food to ask we smoked, stole, and waited to be fired. A lady toed her me to please wait to kill myself until drive to the right, over the slurpee-blue dyed pond, and into after I leave his responsibility. the face of the course’s blue heron. Its bottom beak dangled Soon after this, a healer who in the wind by a little biological string. Robert, the bitter smelled wonderful visited to talk old shit tasked with killing animals on the course, couldn’t with some girls and me. She ran a get permission to shoot the gnarly bird. We waited for it farm in Cornville populated only to starve and disappear. Robert annually used a shovel to by traumatized mammals. I only whack the baby turtles who had been born in a pond-side remember that her last gig was trying bunker. to help a woman who’d dropped her At least five of my Arizona rehab friends are dead. Most new television on her infant son. of them from pills or guns after discharge, but Emma died When this all went down, I right there, a month into her stay. Emma spoke almost never, had been drinking whiskey in my only in a slow, well-informed whisper. I never knew if she bathtub nightly for weeks. Each was staring at me or if that’s just how her eyes were sitting morning, I would vividly intend while her head stared at something more important. She to kill myself that evening after all was bald and had the face of the most serious and palest my appointments. I had read that Renaissance Madonna. The things she confided in me could alcohol was involved in a majority be said only by a soul that had done its time in the guts of of suicides and figured it could be the cosmic crucible of depravity, which hides in everybody’s the thing to really make it happen. brains, giving orgasmic birth to all potential instances of But when I drank all that whiskey, irresistible torture. Her evil slog lasted long enough for her I would be so cheered up that I to land something between enlightenment and boredom. would happily hang around in that Somebody said, “When you have solved all the mysteries bath until morning when I’d plot my of life, you long for death, for it is but another mystery of death again. I’d fashioned a dense, life.” Somebody decided to confiscate all sharp objects from colorful noose out of shoelaces, her apartment. She used a plastic knife to open her wrist belts, copper chains, and that stuff one early morning. It’s something to see a therapist fall into that hikers buy—this thing could the sand and weep at the feet of his dead client’s parents have killed in a modern art museum, 31

Brant seeing what fabric artists are slinging these days. I had a spot picked out by the window where they dished our meds. I hoped my body would be found by someone other than the poor woman who had to find Emma’s.

The institution upgraded their piss cups to the model that can detect alcohol, as well as the dirty spice I had been hitting. The whiskey and the noose were located and tossed, along with my CD collection and toy piano for some reason, and I was to be watched at all hours for a while.

Because I was well-liked among the staff, the administrators had agreed to largely forget the situation and carry on as we had been. I still had some money to give them. But somehow Maureen, Josh’s wife, had me put in a van to a hospital. I hated Maureen because she was a smug, trollish diva, tickled with power over people. She led weekly mandatory gatherings where we would lie stiff on the ground and discuss our favorite colors while she frolicked around us, waving colorful sheets over our bodies. She always touted herself as a true psychic empath and an authority on Tibetan Buddhism.

She made patients squirm when they didn’t buy it. She often reminded us that she had five dead ex-husbands.

At the hospital, a quiet, old hippie sat next to me and we chatted. He asked if I wanted to drink that night and I said I wasn’t sure. He asked if I wanted to kill myself that night and I said I wasn’t sure. He was so casual and I was so off guard that I didn’t realize he was the guy who sends people to the bin until he told me that’s where I was going. This time I was furious that the decision was made for me.

After they took my clothes, I was closed in a little dark chamber with a devastated woman. All she could articulate was her own astonishment that hell was real and that she was in the shit of it, expressed in alternating screams and whimpers. She cradled herself in the itchy plastic chair and I smiled at her and said that I’ve been in here before and that they can’t keep you here forever. But I could picture that being a pretty fucked up thing for a little demon to tell somebody before eternally torturing every part of her.

The silent ambulance took several hours to get to the next psych ward. It was a brand new white, stucco cube with no other buildings in sight in any direction. The ambulance just dropped me out front around midnight, alone in my paper gown and sticky socks. I wandered around the grounds and inside the blank lobbies of the unreal place, all silent but for the hums of white lights that flatly flooded the spotless interior. In the last room I found a woman who was beautiful and laid back. We shared some cigarettes and laughs out back while we strolled through the standard instability interview. Then she had to put me in the actual ward, which was small, overlit, and overcrowded, and I hugged the nice lady. The scene was tense but resigned. We had no doors, no windows, no mirrors, no visitors, no coffee. Panama and the UNMH ward had great coffee, truer and tastier than any coffee since. What we had here was a little television looping a DVD of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, featuring the stand-up of Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy. It was played loudly through all hours. This, along with the relentless twenty-four hour white lighting, removed us from time. There were no shadows in the place. No characters either.

My med regimen was immediately changed with no tapering. Unprecedented hallucinations set in quickly. An enormous, absurdly talkative woman carried me to my little room and dropped me on a little cot. The cot was cold and coarse and kept a little old black puddle with some brown leaves soaking into it. Sounds of gargling and scuttling made me afraid. The hospital left me and I was left in the corner of a dusty municipal golf cart barn. The freezing hangar was long abandoned, now overwhelmed by abominable, giant predatory vines and scheming packs of long, salivating barnacles. One poisoned survivor crawls up the first fairway and I shoot him dead. Gravity buckles away and I behold the golf course being folded into a crisp wad. From dark space arrives a neon green molded plastic packaging to encapsulate the wad in flashy eastern lettering and fluorescent aura. The 32

Creative Nonfiction package and I are discarded into a trash-strewn forest river head can’t keep hold of more than depositing into a deep urban quarry also overrun by sixtwo consecutive thoughts without foot barnacles preying upon forgotten construction workers crashing, our sessions always desperately clinging to enormous chains swinging from their consisted of Bodhi giving dramatic towering cranes. updates on his latest sex and drug The giant orderly who couldn’t stop talking lined us adventures, and how wonderfully he up before a white board and told us to write examples of was learning and growing from this wisdom. I held up the line all afternoon because I couldn’t “He kept telling me my favorite think of any. band was Journey because I I came round outside the headquarters of a Mormon, was addicted to being let down.” wilderness therapy program. I told a man at a desk that I didn’t want to kill myself until new golden age of his life. Then he’d I got back to Arizona, which proved the right call. Those tell me how well I’m doing lately and on suicide watch were, when not walking or eating, kept say goodbye. This is the guy Emma prone on the icy dirt beneath plastic tarps weighed down on spent her last weeks with, the guy all sides and corners by ten-gallon jugs of water. They also I continued to turn to when I was wore a rope leash which never came off. All I did was walk finally getting straight and finally and sing; it was a splendid month’s vacation. Automatic guns getting tired of hanging with other shot at us from afar a few times. I was bussed back to Arizona, increasingly scrambled idealistic having learned nothing, with a few thousand bones to go. hedonists. Bodhi outpaced them all, After I was finally removed from rehab for pestilent going full nympho, way too far out, womanizing, I picked up endless solitary drinking and and killing his ex-girlfriend’s dogs, started spending time with Emma’s therapist, who named and just loving it all because it’s all himself Bodhi. He was raised in a conservative apocalyptic so meaningful and daunting and real cult, had a few kids scattered around whom he didn’t know and Bodhi. well, and always tried to present as an anti-capitalist critical I recently stumbled upon my thinker. But he was, above all, an anti-communist who UNMH psych ward notes online. thought psychedelics and freaky sex were the real medicine They say I was going around for both the person and the people. He was fired from the declaring myself a martyr, but I can’t rehab not long after Emma’s death, but kept in business with remember any of that. several clients who also left the rehab on poor terms. Later, lonely and drunk, and accidentally having moved to Jersey City, I hired Bodhi to call me weekly. He often prescribed that what I really needed, or really secretly craved, was to get pegged or edged or otherwise sexually tortured. He often told me that the damage done by my time in the “hell realms” of DMT, acid, and grief could only be resolved by a lifelong series of trips to the “god realms” of San Pedro and other trippy plant extracts he would send in the mail. He kept telling me my favorite band was Journey because I was addicted to being let down. It testifies to my incredible lack of will that I paid this guy, who could never remember his price, for two years until the money dried up. Because my 33

Leaving the Hospital Bed Kadra Guillermo

Open Media

graphite on standard staff paper, 9” x 12”

34

“Leaving the Hospital Bed” is an emotional piano piece that reflects the fluctuating hope and despair felt in the ICU. This piece was composed following the uncertain outcome of a family member’s hospitalization. Scan the QR code to listen.

35

I Live So I Love Tyler Fife

W

ho do I want to be? The answer is simple: I want to be me, with all my successes and failures. I want to constantly evolve, change, start over. I want to wake up every day knowing that I will get a second chance and love all the chances that I had before. This body, this mind, this soul, it’s all intertwined to encompass my very existence.

When I was eleven, I sat on my grandparents’ kitchen floor and sobbed harder than I ever had before. It was around one in the morning, and I had just found out my aunt Rosie died.

It was the first time I had ever experienced loss, and I had to hold myself while my mom tried to calm me down over the phone. There was no coming back from the hole ripped from my heart, it would stay there forever.

A year later, I lost my great grandfather. And my greatgreat grandmother. Then my great grandmother passed too.

I experienced loss left and right, losing the last of my baby teeth, my childhood, the comfort of my parents. My younger siblings needed me more and more, slowly chipping away at what I had to give. I felt the dip and wean of my identity, floating back and forth between stable and inconsistent. I would wake up in the morning solely because I had to.

With all that I lost, I gained some too. I found my favorite musicians. I started to read the books that would become a 36

Fife

Creative Nonfiction

permanent fixture on my shelf. I made my first true friend. family has given me, the struggles I I found my voice and stood up to my stepfather. I made still have with my sexuality after all decisions that affected me and me only. Eventually, I found these years. I asked my therapist if my sense of self.

I would always feel this way, if the I cut all my hair off when I was twelve. I spent weeks ache in my chest would ever truly hiding it under a beanie, begging my mom to let me get rid of go away. If I would learn to love it. One day, after she caught me trying to bind my chest with the body I was born with or if the anything I could find, she finally let me. She sat on the edge of “I spent the next two years the bathtub as she brushed my alone.” hair for the last time, braiding it into a neat pattern. She took the scissors, asking if I really wanted this over and over again—if entire concept was a scam. If my I was ready, if I was sure. She cut the braid off and started mother and I would be able to sit crying uncontrollably. The only thing I felt was relief, as if in a car together for longer than ten I was finally breathing after being stuck underwater for so minutes without arguing, I would long. I couldn’t understand why she felt like she was losing a express my fear that I would never part of me, when I felt like I had gained the most important return to school—that I’d end up piece of my puzzle. like everyone before me. I wondered Years later, at fifteen, my mother was the person sitting whether all these things made me a next to me at my first testosterone appointment. She held bad person. my hand as I got the shot and told me she was proud of who At nineteen, I met the first friend I was becoming. I realized in that moment that everything I I’d made in years. We stayed up late had ever done was to make her proud. drinking on my living room floor, a I graduated high school early, completing it in three years. paint-by-number spread out over the I had a drive-by graduation in May of 2020, receiving my hardwood. I let myself be authentic, diploma alone. I sat in my car and cried, both out of happiness I laughed too loud and slurred my and sadness. I was experiencing the loss of my childhood all words without worry. I slept without over again, the loneliness of adulthood and the effects of a my binder on and wasn’t overly global pandemic. I spent months looking forward to the end conscious about my voice cracks. of the tunnel, entering a world that I could feel comfortable Months later, I was approved for in. I wanted to express my identity, my sexuality, I wanted top surgery. I was finally growing a to get top surgery and travel. I wanted to figure out who I mustache and my body didn’t feel so was outside of my familial identity. I wanted to embrace me. foreign anymore. Things were falling I spent the next two years alone. into place. When I woke up from I laughed, I cried, I failed. I succeeded in some things and the surgery, the first voice I heard failed again. And again. And again, for good measure. I fell was my mom’s. She was asking if I in and out of love. With boys, with girls, with myself. I took was okay, how I was feeling, telling the train everywhere and walked the Seattle sidewalks until me everything went smoothly. Later my feet bled. I bought flowers for my studio apartment every down the road, my surgeon told me Sunday because I could, I watched them thrive and then that he showed my mom pictures of wilt. I stood in front of the mirror and tried to rearrange my new chest while I was still under everything that I saw. anesthesia and that she had cried, I started therapy for the first time in my life at eighteen. thanking him repeatedly. To think I talked about being trans, the frustration and trauma my the same woman who had cried when 37

Fife

Creative Nonfiction

I cut my hair off was the one sobbing in joy at my success. That’s what I like to label it as, a success, the fact I can look at myself in the mirror and know I am shaping myself into who I’m meant to be in this moment.

Today, I am me, just as I’ve always been. A little wiser, a little older with each passing hour, maybe a bit funnier. I like my body, my voice, my identity. I’ve been shaped by my experiences, my family, my thoughts, and the world around me. I will continue to be, unashamedly, me; with all the intricacies that make a person into love.

38

Ode to Oregon Julian Holman o you, my beloved declared, i crown you my life’s love in the movement of my tongue, in the placement of my fingers, the fuzziness of my chestplate folding around my confusion. borders drawn in 1859, assembled again in 2012 under my 3rd grade hands i learned you were my home in my hands painted clay on cardboard now the valleys i am mount hood, renamed in 1792, named daily inside my body, looking down, looking northeast o you with your trees you without your trees how would you feel if you knew my most favorite places are tied together with concrete? sometimes all i want to ask is who you used to be i bet you were scarier my love you were not made for me my home of all homes you are the deserts i do not know and your riverbanks are the smell of desire so fleshy limbs follow my nose mud please press against my skin i take a cue from the treetops: my larynx, their syrinx, opens the sky in song. you are all my neighbors probably first called ospreys in 1579, then, we were twin families on the river in trees; under trees how must it feel? once she was living and swimming where she lived.

39

Holman

Poetry

Last Name

Poetry

Rest recaborias et iduntis rendi unt re, aliam antono tecatem olupnow her skin rips thenos talons bite herquiam soft body in places one had ever seen tasse etreel intinveria eum dignatur, sa she derumquo a pos her up toquo suffocate in the sky couldn’teosandit, help butnimusant tear herself to escape aut aperest orionesti too late now sheverupta feels estibus con prature remped ut latibus, solupta tectam que et ius eatiist runteminto harumqu iditati herself unhinge a father’s loveonsent, ilibus mil il eturibus, soluptat. my teeth; their beaks Ut od do eturyou asperibus, que volest, in earunto rumquamus rectorum volore nulremember? laborrodecember, esed quaei volorio nsequunt que eat.waters fell off my favoritealiquid log into your Em essin eliquidout uciandus ellatriumph soluptatinomnienia i crawled clutching my chestnem. o Et aciassitas eum que non esttoreicillestis exeraest ipsa volorecabori vellacea net etum samus et, ut be surrounded by you verspeyes, dolores dolor modignam eos ut veria dit ipis ipidebist ma core peris eium lam enienis nebreath dis utae nus quatibus. i forget each inhales you Namusyou experro audae ommolupta nati doorway, assequo quam, accum are myodis ciliates andperibus, i am a chickadee in your labo. Et, ulla que paritaspiet mil ipsum, consequ idello quiatur sae eic temolewhich i love because it is you. stem quos explabor i praise you: arum aligenim quisque voloriatat.

Otaerro quiaspe Heni quid eossendae rese doluptus, consequam inum target bag rectur? caught in a bush, autatecatias pre, inus volorem feet, hilicte nimpos sum vent moloria ectotatus et small voices andaslinoleum fugitatque resyard. eos aut ut aute nim a consequ asperios sicklyofficat cows voluptam, waiting in aeate front et rerciam quiatem ex my et utem rem si diciatur ma solo venienisquo duciene i praise you and platitudes look pos doluptatur atur?killed Quidipsus quoslove adita ipsapiento volecea inus to every baby for myetwhite of quodi this land. golden man re consed qui berciatquam quibus derferibus ati re voluptio odicia que ea dit voloretake vid qui my bearuptatus. hand and tell me where all the beavers went Qui sum et officiis nullaceate aceatur, il eos delicia illaccu mquiasitis dolut es dis at autnight laborerundam offictibus mossintur?

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Ignihil accum facipsa ipsandus dolore volupta epeditibus the paper intoiuscia my hand. reratur?

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Seque labor sincillam nonsed et pa dolupta sedicia exeribusam simi, nam nobiti blaborum nume re, qui vides inum que sernam fuga. Itatet que nossimillab ipita inum aut faceatem solupta tiuscip iendiciunt repudi dolorum dit eni res modigendae nim identi to ducimporiae plantor iberchil maionsequam aut everum vent aut faccusa vero ommo eum nonsequae plabo. Est volupta quodiat inimusdant re, to quia sundam as quam aborem. Quas utecat.

Harcienes aliquo quo test fuga. Ignihillecea corrore necabo. Nam, alisquassum ab id quame sa as es niae. Ut vendictia qui ad moloreritio eum lates ilis magnate cupicit dero to veribus nus ute voluptasima cor sa que consectios nate perorpo remperia suntiumquo comnihi llantint hit eligent, es aut omnim verferum coresequo

## 40

surfacelevel x e oaks

Visual Art

cyanotype, 8.5” x 11”

41

Stairway to Heaven Austin Nguyen

Visual Art

mixed media, 16” x 40”

42

Dust Andrew Sowers As the priest rubs his thumb down and across my forehead, I close my eyes.

“You are dust, to dust you will return.”

I turn to leave and wind meets me head on.

Bad time to be dust.

Later, I feel heavy:

Is it okay to take a symbol before deciding what it means?

I can’t remember if he said “dust” or “ash.” Which am I?

The difference feels important.

insinuates something burned, a previous form,

a dry palm leaf

Ash

Dust is neutral.

It’s shifting on the ground, blowing into the corners of the room.

From ash to ash is hopeless.

The cause and end the same: fire.

But dust means that nothing was made to move.

And could again.

43

December 7th Tanya Tyler

I

have never liked guns. Although I grew up in a small town in Oregon, I later moved into a red state, Utah, in the 1990s. My family didn’t care for shooting sports. The only gun I saw used was a rifle for the coyotes when we visited my grandma’s house. My dad was in the army, so he knew how to use one as well, but we didn’t keep any in the house at all, so not having one has never been a second thought.

I never saw one at my friend’s homes either and I was too young to remember the Columbine massacre. The first mass shooting I vividly remember was in my first year of college in New Mexico. All the television screens in the dining hall were showing the Virginia Tech campus where police were evacuating and carrying people to ambulances. Seeing the pictures of the gunman posing with his weapons was one of the last images from that day.

I don’t understand why people need that much power in their hands. The Second Amendment does say “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” but it was drafted centuries ago, when there were single shot muskets, not when there were automatic weapons.

Constantly referencing this makes me think of the type of men that need big, lifted trucks, or American flags in the truck bed, and the need for bigger, more dangerous weapons shows that men are losing their power in this country, and 44

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Creative Nonfiction

they are beginning to realize it. They equate firepower to summers and holidays. My sister their own worth in some weird, toxic, masculine way. Over was born in 2003 and is technically the years, these shootings became more frequent: Sandy my half-sister, but it doesn’t matter Hook, Aurora, and San Bernardino. I remember the protests to us, she is my baby sister. We are for gun control that I supported, but none were held in San fifteen years apart. I remember the Juan County. We didn’t think of how close it could come to day my mom told me she was having us, believing it only occurred in big cities. a baby. I screamed with excitement th On December 7 , 2017, near the school start time of 8:00 “Her classroom was in that am, a twenty-one-year-old man building, in that hallway where appearing as a student with a his body lay.” backpack walked into Aztec High School without a second glance from the administrators, students, and teachers. He in the doctor’s office when we found went into the second-floor bathroom and took a firearm out it was going to be a girl. I moved out of his backpack, ready to inflict as much damage as he in with my mom and my siblings could by planning to overtake a classroom and take their during my final year of high school. young futures away and, in a final cowardly move, would I was sixteen then and my sister take his own life as well before he could be arrested. In was a year old. Around this time, she news reports, law enforcement discovered in his bedroom was learning to talk, and we began a small note of his schedule for that day starting with “7:00 to have our inside jokes and would am-7:30 am Prep” into “7:30 am-8:00 am Walk” and “8:00 sing songs together. It was strange am Die.” Deviating from his plan, the shooter unexpectedly sometimes since some thought she ran into two students when he was exiting the bathroom was my baby when I used to push and both lives were quickly ended, one boy and one girl, her in the shopping cart or carried both of whom happened to be in the wrong place at the her around in public. I babysat her wrong time. The school was alerted by the shots, and many most of the time until I moved out were warned by the custodian shouting, “Active shooter!” when I was eighteen. I was ready and the classrooms went immediately into lockdown, by to start my adult life and needed to locking the doors and turning off the lights. One classroom leave. I spent as much time as I could had a substitute teacher that did not have keys but instead with her, but it was not the same saved her students by funneling them into a small office and closeness as it was when we were in barricading the door with a couch and instructing them to the same household. lie down in the dark. The shooter did go into that classroom, My sister was different from taunted them by letting them know he knew they were in the siblings, though. She was the there, and began shooting through the walls, some of which funniest, the boldest, and willing went into the next door classrooms. After realizing that to be silly. She liked to make funny police were trying to come into the building, he ended his faces at us across the dinner table own life in that hallway. The entire incident spanned only a and would do a silly dance whenever few minutes. My sister, Cheyenne, was a freshman at Aztec music played. We could be walking High School that day. Her classroom was in that building, in down a store aisle and she would that hallway where his body lay. start singing an entire song. My I am the oldest of my three siblings. My parents separated mom’s ringtone for years was a when I was young, and my mom moved out while I was recording of my then seven-year-old raised by a single father. I would visit my mom during the sister singing “Winter Wonderland” 45

Tyler after she learned it for a school Christmas pageant. My sister looked like my mom did when she was a teenager with the same smile, features, and the same medium brown hair color. I look more like my dad with my features, and I have my dad’s black hair color. My extended family frequently comments that my sister is her twin. I didn’t like these compliments given to my sister which made me uncomfortable, and I didn’t know why for a long time. I was envious of her, I started to realize, she got to have my mom during her childhood and now she looks more like her than I do. My mom got to be there for her as she helped her during her first period and her first heartbreak. I didn’t get to have any of that. Being the baby, she is the closest to my mom and we rarely see one without the other.

One of the only times they were separated was when my sister started high school and was accepted into the nearby dormitory for the Native American students in Aztec, New Mexico. Many students come long distances from the reservation to attend Aztec High. My mom graduated from Aztec High School and lived at the same dorm during her time there. The students are dropped off at the dormitory on Sunday evenings so they can attend school on Monday morning, then they head home on Friday afternoon.

On December 6th, my sister had a dental appointment and did not want to go back to the dormitory, so my mom took her home with her and planned to take her to school early the next morning.

On December 7th, at 7:00 am, I

started my day at the Magistrate Court in Farmington.

I had been working there for three years. My mom texted earlier that morning that she planned to stop by with a breakfast burrito on her way to work at the college in Shiprock after she dropped my sister off around 7:30 am It was after 8:00 am and I was glancing at the clock every few minutes and sipping my coffee, trying to conserve it to have with my breakfast. Ugh, where is she? I thought while my stomach growled impatiently. The lobby was empty, it was typically a slow day on Thursdays with few hearings scheduled. The clerk’s office was a large open room behind a thick, bulletproof glass, separating the clerks from the public. It had eight desks arranged against the walls in a circle and it was called the “fishbowl” since there was not enough in the budget for cubicle walls, everyone could see one another, and the public could see each of us from the lobby. There were low rotating filing cabinets that ran the middle of the room creating a counter for the clerks, separating the front window clerks from the clerks in the back of the room. There was a supply bookcase in one corner that held the small radio set to a local station. As one of the lead clerks, I was at the back wall, closest to the manager’s office and from my vantage point, I could see if the front counter clerks needed my assistance. My coworkers were working on the daily paperwork at their computers. I looked down at my stack, decided to stop thinking about my food and started to work. Maybe it will be another ten minutes or so.

She would have been here sooner if my sister didn’t go home. When I was in high school, she definitely would have made me go back that day, appointment or not.

Great, now I drank all my coffee. More minutes go by.

Around 8:30 am, I was entering the information when the music from the radio was suddenly interrupted with an announcement: “Active shooter situation in progress at Aztec High School.” One of my coworkers turned to me and asked, “Hey, isn’t that where your sister goes to school?” My heart sank in my chest, and it was suddenly quiet, I couldn’t hear anything except my own heartbeat.

I grabbed my cell phone and noticed a text message was already on the screen. Just one from my mom. It read, “I love you very much.”

Earlier that morning, Cheyenne and my mom were on their way to Aztec, on time, and called in an order to the Aztec Lotaburger for three breakfast burritos so she could eat before her first class. They pulled into the small parking lot and Cheyenne went inside the small lobby. The cashier 46

Creative Nonfiction let her know that it would be a few more minutes for her my phone down. I started getting breakfast order. Cheyenne took a seat and waited for her angry with myself, how stupid that I number to be called. Minutes passed and the order was was upset that breakfast was late. The finally ready; she grabbed the bag and ran outside to the last thing I said to my mom was what I truck jumping into the passenger seat. It was nearly 8:00 am wanted on my burrito, and I didn’t even and she realized she was going to be late for her first class. say I loved her but instead said I had to Mom told her to eat while they turned onto Chaco Street go since I was heading into work. How heading southeast through the last few stoplights. “...I just wanted to let you know Parking near the large Aztec that we’re okay. I love you.”

Tigers sign with its orange and black stripes in front of the school, Cheyenne and Mom jumped out of the truck into stupid for getting upset with my sister. the cold but sunny air and walked up the stairs into the glass She just wanted to go home for a night. doors to the main hallway and turned into the front office.

Should I go to the school? I decided Cheyenne walked in first and held the door open for Mom to call my brothers to let them know behind her. “I need a late pass please,” Cheyenne asked since one was in a different city and quietly while the secretary behind the desk looked up at the other was in a different state her. The office phone rang loudly as she was scribbling on altogether. Their phones rang and the paper and picked it up, announcing her name as she was rang. I sent them a text message to placing the phone between her right ear and right shoulder. call me as soon as possible. I started Her eyes opening wide, she quietly placed the receiver back to walk back inside when my phone on its cradle and put the pen down midway through her began ringing, “Call from Mom,” it sentence. The secretary told them to follow her and started displayed. I swiped the green button to quietly notify her coworkers while gesturing toward the and whispered, “Hello?” supply closet. She opened the door for the others while they My mom was on the other end. shuffled inside, confused but quietly complying.

She whispered, “We’re okay and It was a small space, but everyone was able to fit, and she we’re in the front office still.” locked the door behind them. Inside, there was the small “The office? Both of you?” office staff along with a few students including my Mom “Yes, we’re on lockdown. I have and Cheyenne, when the secretary announced, “We’re on to get off the phone now, but I just lockdown and we need to stay off our phones, so it does not wanted to let you know we’re okay. become congested.” She added, “Just text your families that I love you.” you are safe and keep quiet.”

“I love you too mom.” Click.

I read my mom’s text message again and told my supervisor As she got off the phone, that I was stepping outside. Walking into the east parking moments later, the secretary lot, I headed to my car, shielding my eyes from being blinded announced that the lockdown was by the morning sunlight. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t lifted, and they were going to the know where they were. I didn’t know why my mom was at gym. As they stepped out, officers the school to begin with. I didn’t know if that gunman was were already near the door with still walking around the school. their bulletproof vests. “Everyone I called my mom’s phone, no answer. put your hands above your head and I called my sister’s phone, no answer. step out please.” The officers patted I panicked as I thought they must be hiding, and their them down and told them to keep phone may be ringing out loud. I stopped calling and put their hands up and walked in a single 47

Tyler line to the gymnasium. Once there, Cheyenne found her classmates as they finally told her that it was an active shooter and told her what occurred during their first class, the one that Cheyenne was late to.

Her classmate told her that they heard bangs, but it sounded like someone hitting the lockers.

The teacher had the door locked, turned the lights off and told them to get back. They were sitting in the dark classroom and could hear the gunshots, banging loudly. It was so close that the glass above them was hit and went into the walls of their classroom. Terrified, they had to sit in the dark, waiting for the police to come, and although it was minutes, it seemed like hours.

After they were patted down and left the classrooms in a single file line, walking past the lifeless bodies lying in the hallway, they headed to the gymnasium. Once everyone was evacuated and accounted for, it was announced the school buses were parked in front of the gym and

at my desk, all morning, the radio continued to announce updates. Everyone in the office quieted down during these.

“The gunman is down.”

“Two people were killed in the hallway but have not been identified.”

And finally, at 1:30 pm, “The students are being bused to McGee Park to be reunited with their parents.”

I grabbed my stuff, went into the manager’s office and let her know that I was leaving for the day and needed to pick them up. I made it onto Apache street when my mom called again.

“We were at McGee Park, and we ran into the dorm staff, they will give us a ride to the dorm, and we can meet you there.”

“Ok,” I replied, and turned northeast heading to Aztec. I don’t remember the roads as I drove. I replayed the morning again and again, grateful that I would have a second chance to see my mom and my sister. I wanted to let them know how much I love them every chance I got. I thought about how most of these events end with numerous victims. It was still two lives too many, but I didn’t want to think of them.

We didn’t know anything about the gunman yet, so it was hard being angry at an unknown face. I was only thinking of getting to my family, hugging them tightly and wanting to get them as far away from Aztec as I could.

Cheyenne and mom, finally remembering there were still two breakfast burritos in the truck, found another police officer to ask about picking up their truck. He let them know they were still working on the crime scene, but they “I wanted to let them know could call later in the afternoon. how much I loved them every They got into the small van with chance I got.” some other students and staff and drove quietly, without the everyone needed to get on. Mom radio back to the dormitory so the students and staff could asked one of the officers if she could pack their belongings and go home. Cheyenne walked to her pick up her truck since it was still bunk and started to pack her bedding and everything since in the front parking lot. He notified the dorm staff notified them that the school may close for her that it was still an active crime a couple weeks, then it was going to be Christmas break so scene, and she cannot take it right they would not return until the New Year. now.

As I arrived at the dormitory, I noticed some parents When I came back inside, my had come to pick up their children. I parked and headed coworkers turned to me, and I up the stairway to the front door. On the last step, I saw my announced that my sister was safe, mom’s face through the glass window in the heavy door. Any and my mom was there too. Sitting thought about my foolishness of being angry at lateness that 48

Creative Nonfiction morning was gone as I threw the door open and ran to her windows of the school as well. as my eyes started to fill with tears. I hugged her as hard as I The Aztec school shooting was could. Crying, I wanted to make sure that this was real. covered for weeks after December She was crying too as she was hugging me and said in 7th, first his name, photo, and it was Diné, “Stop crying, it’s okay, we’re okay, we’re still here.” revealed he worked at a gas station My sister walked around the corner from the back, carrying in Aztec. The uneasiness returned her bags, and saw us. I reached out for her and hugged them for me when my dad, who worked both tightly for minutes. My sister was the first to step back. “For the first time, it felt like “I’m starving,” she declared. real change was coming.”

“Well at least you got your breakfast burrito,” my mom replied—our Native humor coming out, a learned way to in Aztec at the time, recognized him cope with trauma. from his morning fuel stops. This man I loaded my sister’s bags, and we went to a restaurant came closer to my family than I realized. in Farmington. I sat across from them as my sister was still What could have happened if that man holding onto my mom’s arm. They began explaining that they decided to bring his gun to work instead got held up at the Lotaburger and walked in late then into of the school? New frustrating details everything that happened to them. My mom started raising were announced every day, one was her right arm and stating, “Praise the Lord.” She explained he had been interviewed the year that her pastor told them that due to their faith, in some before by the FBI for making school mysterious way, they will either show up early or show up shooting threats online. He posted late to these types of events and miss the danger. She took asking about cheap firearms and, this as a sign that the Lord was real. I held her hand to agree in the end, was able to fool trained with her and was happy to hear her voice again. My mom law enforcement that he was only couldn’t pick up her vehicle until 5 pm that evening. While joking. Although he was questioned waiting in my car, my sister pointed out which building it

by FBI, he was still able to legally was where we could see some broken windows. It was not purchase his gun a month before until she told me that she was supposed to be there in the the Aztec school shooting. The upstairs hallway, where it all happened. I can’t imagine how school’s secured feeling only lasted it would have been for my sister and my mom if they were a few weeks, since on February 14th, apart that day.

2018, another high school shooting Cheyenne returned to Aztec High School in January 2018 in Parkland, Florida took over the and my mom cried when she was dropping her off at the news. dormitory that Sunday night before the first day back. We For the first time, it felt like real reminded her that there were new security measures in place change was coming. The Parkland now. Cheyenne described the first morning back as somber student survivors were amazing but nervous. Everyone, including all the students and activists with their platforms, staff, had to wear their school identification cards. Many speeches, and organizing. In March had them hanging on bright orange lanyards with Aztec 2018, a school walkout was organized Tigers printed down the sides. There were more security around the country for the “March officers at the outside doors, including the door the man for Our Lives” to protest the lack had walked in. A lot of the vehicles in the front parking lots of gun control leading to more had their decals proudly displayed on their rear windows and more school deaths. Since San with #AZTECSTRONG. This was written across the front Juan County is a conservative area, 49

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Aztec High School administrators persuaded the students to stay inside and found a way to blame only the individual for his actions, rather than stating what the real problem is: that guns are too easy to obtain and there are no safety measures in place, such as flagging a person for attempting to buy a gun, requiring training, requiring registration, or even a secured storage for it.

The school instead posted a video on Facebook of the students participating in their scheduled event on the front lawn. Many of the comments praised the students for not walking out of the school like the other “liberal cities” and “putting their education first.” The school year ended quietly, with notes going to the parents and a Facebook post that loud noise makers and air horns will not be permitted at the graduation ceremony so it does not retraumatize the students and staff.

In writing this piece, I talked with Cheyenne for a couple hours. I wanted to make sure she was okay with it and to get more information from her. She did not witness the gunshots or see the bodies like the other students had. She didn’t talk about that day much since, so she was not affected as much as the other students. However, she did experience bullying from other girls and did not wish to return the next year. She has become much more serious than her younger, carefree self, but it may be from a combination of things like growing up in an age of social media, her experiences in high school and perhaps being the only sibling still living at home. My sister transferred after her freshman

year, but my mom was okay with it; she wanted her home every night. My mom continues to pray every day as she is experiencing more lockdowns at her workplace so much, it is becoming the new normal. As it is only increasing more, gun control is needed more than ever. If the amendments can be relitigated like we saw with Roe v. Wade case last year, it may be time to change the second amendment with the times and reinterpret it for modern day. We know that these children’s lives matter, and they should be worth so much more than making men feel like they are reclaiming power with these weapons.

50

Maps Across Skin Simone Athena Campbell Dried riverbeds run through the hills of your palm, a labyrinthine archive reserved only for the understanding of oracles.

Pale slashes emboss smooth valleys with leather, a ledger for battles lost and won.

Did you have to fight for the dirt under your nails too, and did unsheathing your claws ever hurt?

Did the pads of your fingertips ever encrust with the dried salt of tears wiped from a loved one’s cheek?

What maps have your hands traced, what weapons have they clung to, and after these many miles, where do they long to return?

51

Body Swatch I Nino Ricca Lucci

Visual Art

acrylic on hand-smocked canvas, 12” x 9” x 2.5”

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Body Swatch II Nino Ricca Lucci

Visual Art

acrylic on hand-smocked canvas, 12” x 9” x 2.5”

53

Perception of Time

Reflections on my Experience with Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Jill Nuckles

R

oxanne and the Way of All Life

As I reflect on my interactions with the desert, the clay, the rocks, the flora, and fauna, my heart still sings. It was an all-encompassing experience, which included all my senses and all the earth’s elements—air, water, sand, sun, and wind.

Roxanne Swentzell exposed me to a duality—holding up a magnifying glass and a mirror. I could glaze carefully back through time and place myself at the intersection between what was, what is, and what the possibilities could be. I saw how my choices can change and reclaim knowledge that includes all humans and non-humans. She invited me to connect openly and honestly by sharing pieces of her life experiences and gently guiding us back through the lives of her ancestors. I was given a gift.

Roxanne is a Tewa grandmother, mother, elder, guide, artist, food activist, storyteller, gallerist, historian, advocate, protester, teacher, and so much more. By sharing so openly of herself and answering so many inane questions, she guided me to a deeper understanding of traditional ecological knowledge and the threads that tie everything together.

The earth was soft and warm. Delicate and complicated.

54

Nuckles More than a place for my feet to tread. A place to lay my head and open my mind.

Creative Nonfiction

they seem altered, attended to. From Roxanne’s stories, I have visions of ancestral Tewa making arrowheads with tools from sharp obsidian and other stones.

Pinyons, junipers, and numerous shrubs lined the slopes behind our

Abiquiu Lake, a reservoir in Rio Arriba County, fills up a valley in the high desert. Holding the water back is the earthfilled Abiquiu Dam. It provides precious water in a desert, the giver of all life, but not for everyone. Water is a managed resource, commodified and sold, unavailable to the ancestral “Lesson learned—walk lightly caregivers, and disrupted from on the earth” its natural flow.

The primary water source for Abiquiu Lake is the Rio Chama, which originates in Southcamp. I followed the wash back into Central Colorado and is a major tributary river of the Rio the hill and watched the birds living Grande. It is an important life source for the Tewa people their lives, temporarily becoming and has a long history of habitation on its banks. In Tewa, part of their world. Through the name of the Rio Chama is tsąmą’ ǫŋwįkeyi, meaning footprints, I found evidence of the “wrestling pueblo-ruin.” other animals whose homes we were From my tent, I could see the valley and water before me. sharing—mule, deer, and pronghorn.

The sloping uplands were punctuated by steep sandstone Thanks to Roxanne, I thought about and shale outcroppings. In the distance, geological wonders, how hard life can be in the desert including high mountains, steep canyons, and escarpments and how even a hoof impression consisting of rock ledges, pinnacles, and ridges. And the can be a place for a seed to land and colors—soft and subtle, layered and patterned. It was hard water to collect. to look away for fear of losing the feeling of the immensity of the connection.

Lesson learned—walk learned walk lightly on The night was perfect for sleeping and listening to the the earth. sounds of the desert—cooler, calmer, yet still alive with smells and sounds, offering relief from the relentless sun and Cryptobiotic soil crusts are so wind. The pre-dawn birds chirped, and the wind rustled exciting and an essential part of the the junipers and cedars, a reminder to listen to the nonarid ecosystem of Abiquiu. I learned human world. “crypto” means “hidden” and “biota” means “life.” Cryptobiotic soil crusts Naming and learning not to name, finding the rhythm are created by living organisms such of the desert. as algae, cyanobacteria, and fungi, and cannot be easily seen by the All around me was the familiar and the unfamiliar. Things naked eye. Cryptobiotic soils are in the desert of New Mexico are different from my northern fragile and take a long time to recover home in Canada. It might be classified as the same plant— from damage. They absorb a lot of i.e., juniper—but it grows so differently that it is almost water quickly, reduce runoff, and unrecognizable to me. It has adapted to a high, dry, and impede evaporation—meaningful extreme ecosystem; I am adapting, too. work in a dry ecosystem.

Below my feet are rocks of every kind, a geologist’s I have always practiced “leave no dream—shale, basalt, tuft, sandstone, granite, and quartzite, trace” in natural environments, but some of which formed about 110 million years ago. But here I did not consider that one careless 55

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Creative Nonfiction

footfall could obliterate an entire ancient ecosystem. Looking closely at the space I physically occupy is essential for preserving what I cannot see.

“Clay is everywhere!”

I can now see clay everywhere, thanks to looking closely and learning the language of “wild” clay.

Experimentation with this naturally occurring material gave me a new connection to the earth. Roxanne calls the earth “Mother” and feels she has given us all life—including the clay—to play, nurture, and create with. Asking for permission and respecting the answer was a beautiful moment of reciprocity.

The Fire was hotter than the sun.

The communal aspect of pit firing promoted mutual support, understanding, and respect between the participants. It needs many hands to build, maintain, and monitor the process. We stood in a tight circle, listening to the sounds and watching the fire breathe our pots to life (or not). Anticipation. Excitement.

Wonder. Hope. Everyone and everything from the past three weeks came together in a crescendo of heat and smoke—a final bonding at the end of a life-altering experience.

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Mary, Untier of Knots

at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Nell Johnson On a metal post in the prayer garden people have laced green ribbons and a passing woman lets the summer air know her grandparents, on her father’s side, tied the knot here: a wedding with the Spanish broom and hummingbird moths as witness in the cathedral promoting life and unknotting smooth curves of ribbon uncrumpling cool to the touch as a silver ring until death do us part they said here seventy years ago brave lovers kissing underneath manifestations of the culture of death: a limp pink rose next to the Christ Child a thorn on its thinning tangled vine

57

meditation in it x e oaks

Visual Art

graphite, 9” x 12”

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pelf sortrait x e oaks

Visual Art

acrylic, custom-built frame, 10” x 10”

59

A Fine October Night Flannery Cowan

Photography

archival pigment print, 16.2” x 21.6”

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Title

Movement: study1 Sarah Bauman

Photography

inkjet print, 5” x 7”

61

Leopoldo Tyler Fife zero. the waters and the clouds, the dirt and the leaves, the wind, so strong and so willing to move, the forces inside all too ready to burst, you are an archibeque, you have the confliction, of dark skin and a quick tongue, from the moment you were born, you were destined to provide, the greatness in your veins, is the greatness we all wish we had eight. young and determined, eight years, of fierce perseverance, in a world that wants to chew you up, and spit you out, only capable of counting the days on your fingers, domingo, lunes, martes, the fields yearn for your already calloused hands, miércoles, jueves, viernes, the sun does not grant you a break, sábado, you have too many mouths and stomachs, depending on you, there is nowhere to hide, you are responsible, you are loyal, when america is freedom, the little boy who, can only speak broken english, tries to voice his struggle, i am not free, 62

Fife

i am tainted by the earth, i am ruined by this country, i am not a child any longer, but a man in a body too small twenty-one. debris and metal fly, the sky is dark gray and full, of empty wishes and dripping tears, the war is here, and you are stuck in the middle of it, fighting for what, you want to scream, late at night, when all you can smell is gunpowder and your own sweat, there is nothing glamorous about this twenty-five. the earth stands still, the stars align, she is your saving grace, and you know, you know, the second your eyes met hers, that you are a better man, just by witnessing an angel walk the earth, there is no feeling quite like this one, your skin glows and your breath stops, there is gold radiating out of her smile, the air between you both isn’t electric, no fireworks or sparks to burn you, instead you are content and safe and this feeling, this feeling, it’s almost like hot chocolate on christmas, s’mores on the fourth of july, hollering when the ship reached american soil again, this might be coming home one-hundred. to live an entire century is nearly a fantasy, a daydream that will never come, 63

Poetry

Fife

Poetry

all of the people you must have met, the stories you have told and the stories, that have told you, how many tortillas have those hands crafted, how many blessings have you whispered in spanish, to your children, to your grandchildren, to your great-great grandchildren, so on and so forth, how many tears have you shed, for your wife, for your friends, for your country, for all that you have lost and all you have gained, how many laughs have left your frail frame, how many secrets do you hold under your tongue, to this day, there is an entire lifetime of ‘i love yous’ and kisses on cheeks, you have accomplished everything you ever wished for, hard-working until you possibly can’t be anymore, a family that loves you more than you will ever, ever, know, a country that will fight for your people, today and every day after, this is who you are, you have archibeque hands, mijo

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Whale Fall Nat Olmo

Visual Art

mixed media, 8” x 11”

65

Dolphin Girls

written from the body marking descriptions of incarcerated women in Arkansas

Nell Johnson behind the moon I’d risk it all heart faded with dolphin body you and me angel stitched together among broken people blood inside stars love don’t you like this music you earn my hands never hold me down we fly a butterfly with June as the world falls down fearless flame forever all soul faded moon & stars

“self made” “F” behind left ear “SRN” scar “Wakka” “To the moon Alice” scar above right eyelid “Gabriel” “Promise” “My brother’s keeper for him I’d risk it all” Heart Faded tattoo “Cameron” razorback boxing gloves “bam bam” knuckles with star “234” dolphin body “Melissa” skull tribal heart “if mountains crumb led to the sea, there would still be you and me” chains “Pokey” clover angel snake, face flower flowers flowers flower tree, tribal, heart roses flower with “sisters” as stem heart “stitched together by a series of words I am a rarity among broken wings” “Let go” dotted line arrow “15 19” heart rhythm cross “saving people hunting things the family business” blood drops Sun with star inside right side of chest John stars tribal elephant backside of forearm infinity family woman Duck Devil “Kahvzti London Kahmzrrien tiger “Norine’ pookie 3 dots backside of wrist butterfly “respect”, heart “my unbreakable truth” “Love is Law” stars, heart “don’t let the pretty face fool you. I don’t look like this” music notes, stars “loyalty 1st” 2 music notes loyalty 1st respect you earn my ubreakable truth Mrs Adrow n”Bone” across fingers “Lil’G” “Tweety” “$oup” across fingers “Pluto” 3 Rose’s with leafs 2 stars “Peaches” Jalen praying hands Melissa peace symbol lines crown love with heart cross Black over several scars B Love Bam outlined shh Quote Taleah crown heart IDGIF “T” Heart Royalty with crown Be the to guide me but never hold me down “Country Tough” flowers, rope made into a heart “Take these broken wings and learn to fly” birds “Sometimes we gotta fall before we fly” 11-809 “Hope” “Love” “Family” “Believe” “ Strength” “Dream” wording whole back side of forearm “Believe in Yourself” heart 1/3/13 lines and a name Several scars (butterfly) “How ya love that” on middle part of calf Several scars “Nika” with heart Added from tattoo sweep on June 2021 Scar Chal Myra A heart with a banner “ke” symbol “Ke” and “Leo” Several scars “as the world falls down Angelina” portrait “fearless love” Greek/ Japanese symbols “love lies” “9-ball” panther “hope dealer” guitar with flames “Caraway” treble cleft seven names with flame “Jo Ellen” “25 dec 2011” Japanese Japanese “25 dec 1992” “pain is forever” puzzle pieces flames heart with ribbon “dale” “its all soul” “acceptance Semper fi” pain is forever lisa with heart “david bowie” (3) symbols A faded “x” (moon & stars

66

Smoky Sweet Emma Ressel

Photography

archival pigment print, 16” x 20”

67

The Rug Jordan Lenz

I

t was an ordinary thing whose origin remained shrouded entirely in mystery. I’d acquired it without much ceremony.

There was no exchange or shaking of hands. It had lain there on the side of the road with a bit of twine wrapped around it to keep it from fully unfurling. The pattern was most striking to me—reddish clays upon silvery blues, a few splotches of brown for good measure. Anyone could have done as I had and tossed it into the back of their pickup for want of something to tie a room together. There was no reason not to.

The rug sat centerfold in the living room among its peers, as it always had, seemingly content until that fateful day.

I tried to avoid the living room, if at all possible, but the rug had prevented that. Its protests started small. Wrinkles appeared in the fabric out of nowhere—upturned corners that presented tripping hazards, shifts in its orientation so slight that it seemed my own doing. It was simple enough to quell this dissent with a few well-placed stamps of my shoe, but ignoring it only seemed to antagonize the rug further.

It coiled itself one morning, seemingly of its own volition, with linen flaps taking the shape of pursed lips—the expression of which indicated distaste. It burbled at first as if mimicking an unfelt breeze, even as I stooped down to iron out the creases once more. “Could you not?” it whispered ever so gently into my ear. The meaning of the 68

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Short Fiction

words were lost on me as I stumbled backward against the that even with its limited mobility wall in alarm. “Apologies,” it voiced with a genial tone. “It and speech, it would not be able to wasn’t my intention to frighten you, but then again you did grasp a doorknob and traverse the give me quite a shock the other day as well. Perhaps it is only house freely. On the few occasions fitting, then. Tell me something. Do you hear anything?” when I was forced to egress, I did so I fumbled at the question, having to mouth it myself half a on the tips of my toes while making dozen times as if learning the fundamentals of human speech a concerted effort to stare at the again—something the rug had appeared to have mastered in “...the anomaly of speech had mere seconds. There wasn’t any sound to be heard, of course, and spread to the plumbing as well.”

I hesitantly answered as much.

“I thought not. Listen,” the rug asserted, “I think you and ceiling, but as is the case with old I should have a talk about this living arrangement. If one habits, my eyes always drifted in the could even call it living. The truth is, I’ve been observing you direction of that rug. Once, I had for some time now. I suppose we all have. But my ears have grown pale at the glimpse of what a tendency, you see. It’s like a monotonous droning that seemed like a little ghost scurrying persists even when I stuff them with linen. Better to simply along the floor, but it was likely just drown it out with good company, I always say. And no, the rug playing some twisted trick before you ask, I wasn’t referring to you, nor that layabout on me. Surely, if it had learned to oaf over there.” speak, it was but a stone’s throw “Ignore him,” the couch interjected on my behalf. from gaining an appreciation for “This doesn’t concern you, indolent fool. It’s bad enough subterfuge. that I must be made to suffer the weight of those wooden One morning, I was astonished to stumps of yours upon my face. Now you would defend see that the anomaly of speech had this murderer as well. Madness has befallen this home. No spread to the plumbing as well with matter,” it turned to me. “You and I were always of a like the toilet addressing me as if it were mind—cut from the same cloth, so to speak. But in light of a courtier. “Sire,” it bubbled, “you what has happened, what you did—it’s unforgivable.” have known me to serve you faithfully “Best to simply not think about it,” the couch remarked through sickness and melancholy. with a furrowed brow. “Come, sit with me. I think there I’ve grave tidings. I speak of sedition might be a show on.” within these very walls. The Persian “And let sleeping dogs lie?” the rug fumed. “You should in the other room—he prattles on be so lucky. But we deserve answers for this crime. Come about your alleged misdeeds, and in then, explain yourself, killer.” truth, I fear for your very life. A wise The reminder was in poor taste, and it solicited that allliege would remove this infection too-familiar weight within my chest, as if my still-beating before the whole body is corrupted. heart had turned onto. I felt as if I had no choice but to But, alas, my lord has surely seen remove myself from the conversation and retreat to the this already.” bedroom, taking the advice of the couch. Outside the Seated vulnerably atop the device, window was a view of the park I used to go to on occasion, I thanked it for the warning, swearing along with swaths of other jubilant denizens and their sacred oaths that I would heed its barking companions. I kept the blinds closed from then on, words carefully. As I washed my electing to read by what little light remained instead. hands of the conversation, it spewed It became simple enough to avoid the rug. I surmised once more. “Another thing troubles 69

Lenz

Short Fiction

me, sire. And, as there have never been secrets between us, I must profess that the business with the old beast was a troublesome sort.

I do not envy the burden, but the decision to do so is your divine right as master of this abode. I will surely miss having my pools imbibed by a creature so noble.

Your grievances are mine own, sire.”

I considered locking my doors for fear that the rug might smother me in my sleep, but it occurred to me that even the bed might soon have an opinion on the matter.

Given the circumstances and the advice from those still loyal, I even considered a preemptive strike. But as I was perusing old photo albums of my adolescence, I happened across one of Jackson resting blissfully on top of that old rug. It was where he had been most comfortable. I recalled even lying next to him on some days, gently scratching the back of his ears.

I decided that I couldn’t hide in my room any longer. I had to face the rug.

It sat coiled on the floor as if mocking me when I approached it.

“You’ve returned,” it said plainly.

“I was afraid that porcelain asskisser might have coerced you with its poisoned words. I wouldn’t put it past either of you. You’ve already acquired a taste for blood, it would seem. So, tell me. Why did the dog have to die?”

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” the couch interjected.

But I did my best to reassure them both that what I had to say wouldn’t take long. I sat down, legs crossed, and tried to explain

what had happened. I told them of the place where old dogs go, to the little room with the rug just like my own.

I spoke of the great pain that he was in and the pain it caused me to see him so. I mentioned the hypocrisy of playing God, to nurture and cull life on fickle, mortal whims—to deny nature its just due. I did not ask the rug for forgiveness. The burden was mine alone to bear. I had made the decision. I had given the command.

“You had no right,” the rug protested. “If he were one of your own, morality would have compelled you otherwise. It is the finest example of hubris within your wicked kind. Look at me. Muddy prints, gnawed edges, and shredded fibers—I wear each as a badge of honor, a memory made manifest. Now, I have nothing. Because of you.”

I slept better that night than I had in weeks, despite everything. The next morning, I made a commitment and came home with a cardboard crate and a small puppy nestled within. It darted around with a refreshing vigor that I hadn’t seen in nearly a decade. When it had finally grown exhausted, it curled up in a neat lump atop the old rug, seemingly attracted to the many strange smells held therein. The furniture never spoke again, but it seemed to me as though the rug was smiling. Even when the puppy soiled it, the rug made no objections.

70

The Neighbor’s Backyard John Scott

Photography

archival pigment print, 14” x 10”

71

If you don’t let me die here, I may never be reborn Roxanne Marquez

Visual Art

collage (paper, canvas, charcoal, acrylic paint), 12” x 18”

72

Bleeding Through Lark Landon

M

y first experience with sex education was in elementary school. It wasn’t mandatory. We were given forms to request parental consent to teach us about our own bodies. My parents said yes.

We were divided, the girls and the boys, and marched out of our classroom in two gender-separate lines. The lesson took place in a portable. Both genders entered the same building through different doors, divided inside by a wall.

It kept the groups contained within themselves. I remember being intensely curious about what was going to happen on the boys’ side. I wanted to learn what they were going to learn, too.

All the girls and I sat down on the carpeted floor. At the front of the classroom were two women I’d never seen before.

They were smiling warmly while we got settled. A TV cart sat between them. The screen was on and displayed a DVD menu for an outdated sex education video. After a quick preamble, they let the video do the teaching for them. It was there, in that classroom, that I first learned about periods.

I remember feeling this vague sense of disgust, a discomfort that made me acutely aware of my body and its capabilities.

I squirmed and fidgeted as the video told us that every girl bleeds from her vagina once a month. Most girls will get cramps. Most girls will have mood swings. All girls will need 73

Landon to buy pads and tampons because as breathing. I didn’t mention it to my mom. I washed up and of her body. This doesn’t happen to returned to my game. boys. Only girls. Girls just like you!

I didn’t think I’d left evidence. My mom found some anyway.

I wish I wasn’t a girl, I thought. Even She came up to me not long after and knelt down beside the then, I knew. I knew. computer chair. She placed her hands on the armrest and tried The girls I had shared the lesson to catch my eyes. I didn’t look at her. Maybe I knew what she with started chatting as we left. was going to say. “Did you start your period?” she asked.

I didn’t join them. I was made to I started crying. A lot. And hard. My game disappeared be freshly afraid of my own body, behind my tears and shook in the chair. I wasn’t sure why I of its potential, of its future. I felt was so upset at the time. “I don’t want to grow up” was my discomfort in what I was born as. tearful excuse, the first explanation for the pain that I felt The only breach of that fearful deep within my chest, but really, I knew. I knew without silence was when I attempted to ask knowing it. I knew that I wasn’t someone who was supposed the boys what they’d learned, only to to get periods. be shut out with a quick, “We can’t My mom tried to offer a different explanation to assuage tell you, you’re a girl.” I went home me: “Did you cut yourself down there?” No. There was no and tried to process the fear. But other explanation. It was my body, my uterus doing what my younger mind, so incapable of it was meant to, uncaring of the sensations in my head, of handling existential dread, was able the identity that was forging itself before I was even aware to convince itself that it wasn’t going of it. It had awoken. It would never go dormant again. My to happen to me. I wasn’t going to mom later bought me pads to deal with the bleeding. I wore get a period. them until the blood subsided and my life could go back to Years later, just before I turned normal. Except it could never be normal again. A bomb had eleven, I got my first period. just gone off inside me, and all I could do was live within the I was the first person out of my rubble it had left. female friends who got it. It came to me when I least expected it. It waited until I’d forgotten about its existence, until I was comfortable in I made an appointment to see an endocrinologist in February my own skin, until I really was certain of this year. It wasn’t until June that I was finally able to I’d never get one. I was sitting in the see her. I sat meekly in a white examination room at the living room at the family computer. endocrinology office. Dr. S, a licensed endocrinologist, sat School had been out for a few hours across from me. She pulled up a chart on her computer. now. I was playing Fireboy and Watergirl—a simple Flash game— giving the Fireboy character Masculinizing effects in female-to-male transgender persons: more attention than his female Effect Onset Maximum counterpart. The urge to use the Skin oiliness/acne 1 to 6 months 1 to 2 years bathroom came over me, and I got 6 to 12 months 4 to 5 years up. I peed. I wiped. I saw blood. Facial/body hair growth It didn’t scare me immediately; Scalp hair loss 6 to 12 months I knew what the blood meant. I Increase muscle mass/strength 6 to 12 months 2 to 5 years knew my menstrual cycle was Fat redistribution 1 to 6 months 2 to 5 years upon me, and it was here to stay.

1 to 6 months It was a process of my body, natural Cessation of menses 74

Creative Nonfiction Clitoral enlargement Vaginal atrophy Deepening of voice

1 to 6 months 1 to 6 months 6 to 12 months

1 to 2 years with insurance and my pharmacy 1 to 2 years just to finally hold it in my hands.

I’d suffered enough, surely. This 1 to 2 years was supposed to be my golden ticket to manhood. Why couldn’t She read it over with me. I read it again while she explained my body just cooperate with me this that I would have to undergo a behavioral assessment one time? before she would prescribe me testosterone. I read it another “My fear made me careful, hundred or so times after probably overly so.” leaving the tiny room, the chart now accessible on my phone.

Everything on it excited me, My girlfriend had urged me to especially one singular line: bring pads with me on my trip, “just Cessation of menses. I.e., no more periods. in case.” I sent her a text to tell her I’d heard stories of trans men losing their periods after just it had been a good idea. the first shot. One small injection of the male hormone was In my luggage, I had roughly four enough to turn off the menstrual cycle and bring manhood pads and a pair of period underwear. that much closer. I’d also heard, of course, of some having to They’d been shoved deep into the wait for months before the bleeding stopped. I knew there suitcase, piled beneath everything was a chance I’d be waiting for a while before I could finally else because I was certain I wouldn’t throw out the period underwear, but a vain part of me was need them. Now I was just lucky convinced that one shot would be all I would need. that I had brought them at all. I The day I finally picked up my testosterone prescription, started to unzip the suitcase when I my friend Thorn rushed over after work and helped me heard a cough, shuffling, footsteps, administer my first injection. I was terrified to give myself and realized that I wasn’t alone. the shot, but my excitement to finally have it in my system The stalls on either side of me had outweighed the fear. I managed to do it. Afterward, I took been filled in by men. Actual, real, Thorn out to Denny’s as thanks. I was elated. Changes were born men, whose body produced finally on their way. testosterone on their own, who Two weeks later, I was in an airport. I’d officially taken didn’t need to take weekly shots, two shots of testosterone—my third was just a handful of who never had to worry about blood days away, to be done in the company of my lover during on their boxers. our shared vacation. Four separate flight delays, however, I’ve never felt a fear like the had left me stranded in the airport for hours, and time made one I felt then. It wasn’t true, lifeit impossible to ignore the functions of my own body. I had threatening fear, but it was visceral, to pee. I entered the men’s restroom and rushed into one of almost tangible. I remember thinking the stalls. I took off my pants and found spots of fresh red that I could get hurt. I imagined all soaked into my yellow boxers. the different, violent ways in which If I hadn’t already cried over the delayed flights, I would I could get hurt, fed by horror have cried then. My hopes of being one of the lucky few made stories and news reports that I’d the blow that much harder. I felt betrayed—betrayed by my seen one too many times in the past. body, by medication, by my own expectations. It wasn’t fair.

I pray these nightmares are never I’d waited years to seek testosterone. I had to seek therapy influenced by personal experience. just for the endocrinologist to prescribe it to me. I had to fight My fear made me careful, probably 75

Landon overly so. I moved only when a toilet was flushing or a dryer was blowing.

The sound of my zippers and torn packaging got buried beneath it all. And when I was done, I hid my garbage in the pocket of my jeans and threw it away, wrapped carefully in toilet paper.

I returned to my gate and texted my girlfriend. that was one of the worst experiences of my life

left wall, sandwiched between it and a line of girls.

The second day would be the first day we would have to change into our gym clothes. The coach gave us five minutes. I was one of the first ones out. I sat down on my spot and pulled my legs up towards my chest, feeling naked in the green basketball shorts that had replaced my pants. I watched as the rest of the class started to file out and take their seats, paying special attention to the girls. I must have been seeking comradery, someone who shared my dread. I only made myself feel more alone.

Nearly all the girls in that class were thin and beautiful, with long shining hair and pretty faces. Their legs were lithe and graceful and smooth, somehow hairless. I looked down :( I’m sorry baby. at my own body and found the exact opposite. I was thick and round, sporting an ugly bobbed haircut and a pair of My layover, thankfully, had a lopsided glasses. The hair on my legs was long and dark, easy unisex bathroom. I used it multiple to spot against my pale skin. times during my long wait there.

I have legs like a boy, I remember thinking. There was The small room had a disposal box a millisecond of pride. Like a boy’s! Like the boys in my for sharps, a free pad and tampon class who I envied without knowing why, like the male characters I was so fond of, like “I watched the blood from the the masculinity I was drawn to but held at bay from. cuts flow down the drain.”

You’re a girl, I reminded myself. Isn’t it weird for a girl to dispenser, and a trash can for used have hairy legs? I suddenly couldn’t wait to get out of that class. pads and tampons. It felt safe. I got That night, I shaved my legs for the first time in the upset when I had to wait for a visibly shower. I had no idea what I was doing. No one had shown cisgender person inside. me how. No one had ever told me that I needed to. I took my mom’s razor and brought it along my legs one by one, shaving the hairs at the wrong angle, the wrong direction, cutting myself around the ankle on both legs. I watched the I skipped taking PE in sixth grade blood from the cuts flow down the drain. and took it in seventh instead.

“Did you shave your legs?” my mom asked after I joined It was the class where all fat, her on the couch. Her fingers grazed my skin lightly. unattractive girls—like I had once “Yeah,” I said. been—dreaded. There was nothing “Why? Did someone tell you to?”

I could do to avoid it. On the first I think she was worried someone had teased me about it. day of class, the coach gave us an I didn’t know how to tell her that the shame came from my introduction, sorted us by last name, own head. All I could do was shrug. and gave us all a designated spot on She would later show me how to do it properly. Everytime the gym floor to call our own when I brought the razor to my legs after that, I would get instantly she took attendance. They were frustrated. It wasn’t fair that boys didn’t have to shave their marked with little patches of red legs. It wasn’t fair that I had to. It wasn’t fair that girls had tape. I was assigned a place near the all these weird rules that I didn’t understand. Conforming 76

Creative Nonfiction to them felt wrong. A part of me was dying every time I bent myself out of shape to match these rules. Every time I shaved my legs, every time I was pulled from my male friends to sit with the girls, every time I got clothes from the girl’s section, every time I sat down to pee and found blood, a part of me started throwing a fit. It wasn’t mere discomfort.

It was agony.

I haven’t shaved my legs in a long time—years, I think.

I have no desire to do it ever again. I’ve rejected it, among so many of the other rules of girlhood that plagued me throughout my youth.

In their place, though, is this void of uncertainty. I never learned the rules of the boys. They kept them secret from me, denying me entry into their lives and social skills because I was too feminine to be one of them. I feel out of place among them. I feel like I’m missing something important that they all have.

Taking testosterone has helped make me more masculine.

I sound and look more like a man. More guys view me as one of them, at least, I desperately hope they do. Some greet me with the handshake that all guys know how to do, where their hands slide together before joining into a handshake. I have never once done it right. I don’t know how. I burn with embarrassment every time I mess it up.

I have a foot in both worlds, the masculine and the feminine, somewhere between the binary. I wish more than anything that I could be content in this middle ground, removed from the spectrum’s extremes and labels and the secrets that both hold, but I simply cannot be. Every time I am called “they” instead of “he,” it hurts me just as much as “she.” It feels like a cop-out. An excuse. A blatant transgression. You’re not quite “he” enough, so we’ll settle instead for something a little more tame.

“Your body is perfect,” she tells me. She touches me softly as she does, fondness radiating off her fingers. I always want to believe her, but I never can. I can’t see what she sees.

There is so much about my body that I want to change.

I want to tear pieces off, add new ones on, mold what’s already there into new forms. I need to change. I can never be at peace with myself as I am now, a body controlled by estrogen, acting against my will no matter how much I try to bend it back into shape.

77

When she tells me I’m perfect, I want to believe her. I want to make my body perfect in my own eyes. I want to see myself reflected in my flesh.

I’m afraid of how much I have to change before I can get there. I’m afraid I’ll never be able to get there.

Being trans is beautiful. It’s an act of creation. I wish I didn’t have the burden of acting as my own creator.

My friend Thorn has been on testosterone for over two years. He’s been serving as my personal knowledge bank of the transmasculine experience for even longer. I am free to ask him anything, no matter how invasive it may seem, because he’s always more than willing to provide me with an honest answer. He’s one of my best friends; I couldn’t ask for a better resource.

It was spring of this year when I first saw him actually give himself the shot. We were in an Airbnb in Arizona, sharing a much needed vacation out of town over spring break. His weekly shot fell on our second day out there, and he took out his bag of supplies and laid them out on the bed beside me. I asked if he was okay with me watching. He said yes. I was in awe of how easy he made giving himself a shot look.

When he was done and threw everything away, he laid down beside me. “Sorry if I get moody. I usually get grumpy after the shot.”

I smiled at him and told him it was fine. I was too busy dreaming about when I would finally be able to start HRT myself.

Landon We attended a concert that night.

The next morning we had a long drive back to New Mexico. We both awoke to the sound of our alarms and came to the exact same realization: both of us had started our periods.

It wasn’t surprising for me.

Obnoxious and humiliating to be caught off guard yet again by this body, but I’d been expecting it.

Thorn, though, surprised me greatly.

He’d been taking testosterone for two years—how could he have gotten his? Testosterone was supposed to get rid of your period.

“It’s because I forgot my shot last week,” he told me. “The bleeding is pretty light, though. It should go away in a few days.”

He seemed upset, but not crestfallen like I would have been.

To have gone months, years without a period only to suddenly get one again because of a single missed shot would have killed me. It would have reminded me that I cannot escape my own body. The shots can only do so much.

We drove back with more discomfort than we had come up with. I promised myself that when I finally started taking testosterone, I wouldn’t miss a single shot. I couldn’t.

The colors of my old high school, V. Sue Cleveland, are white, silver, and electric blue. Because of that, everything on the campus is white, silver, and electric blue. That includes the gym clothes.

We were given the typical uniform

for gym class: a cotton t-shirt and a pair of basketball shorts.

Our shirts were white—the blue text across our chests marking us “Property of Cleveland High School.” Our shorts were a silvery gray color.

I wished, when I put them on for the first time, that they’d broken their color scheme just for these clothes. That the white was a dark blue. That the silver was black, or at least a dark gray. It seemed like an oversight. Did they not consider the conditions the clothes would be worn in? That stains exist? That girls exist? That light-colored pants were forbidden once a month? Did they even care?

The fear of bleeding all over those shorts followed me every time I wore them. I was constantly paranoid in them, fearing the idea of being caught off guard—of starting a period just as I pulled them on every afternoon before class started. I’d glance between my legs when I thought no one was looking, when I felt just a touch too damp, just to check.

My fears were realized in the middle of the semester. We were taken outside to play whatever game on the field. I sat on a bench with a few others while the coaches set it up. A girl named Mackenzie sat beside me. We were friends. At least, I wanted to be her friend, but I could never feel close to someone who saw me as a girl, so I held her, and so many others, at arm’s length. It was hot outside. We were directly in the sun. I was already starting to sweat. But between my legs, there was a wetness that felt like more.

I glanced between my legs. The silver of my shorts had become wet with a deep, living red.

“Can you do me a favor?” I asked Mackenzie. When she nodded, I stood up. “Can you see any blood?”

She looked behind me. She gave me a thumbs up. “No, you’re good!’

But I was still bleeding. There wouldn’t be any silver left if I didn’t do something about it.

“I’ll be right back.”

I made my way over to the coaches. All three of them were men. My nerves only allowed me to say one thing to them: “I’m having girl problems.”

I was so buried in the closet then that there was no chance of him seeing me as a man, not even slightly. The thought would have never crossed his mind, no matter how short I cropped my hair, no matter how tight the sports bras I bought were. But there was still this shame that followed, this idea that I was giving up some secret, sharing to the world that I had a vagina. I was confessing, admitting the 78

Creative Nonfiction sins of my body. I was giving up. Girl problem. Boys don’t the dull ache it brought. It made me have this problem. I’m a girl. sick. I ripped it out as soon as I got “Go run inside to the office. They can help you out.” home.

I did as I was told.

The office inside the gymnasium was used by all the “Can I taste you?” she asked. coaches. As I stepped inside, I saw two that I had never I froze. She was looking down at met before. One was a man. The other was a woman. He me through her lashes. The side of acknowledged me first with a grin.

“The side of her face was “What do you need, sweetie?” illumated by the white glow…”

I didn’t look at him. I stared at the woman, begging for her help, and her help alone. “I need a feminine hygiene product.” her face was illuminated by the white I saw the man make a face out of the corner of my vision. glow of the movie we’d forgotten I ignored it. I put all of my focus onto the woman, her ages ago, demoted from our attention softening gaze, her quiet “Don’t worry,” her quick turn as by hands beneath shirts and heavy she reached into her drawer. She pulled out a tampon. I kisses. Dark shadows cut across her hesitated to take it from her. face, but I could see the look in her I’d never used one before. I wanted to ask how, but eyes, a dark glimmer that made me with the man there it felt dangerous. I left without saying shiver. She was just inches away. Her anything else. body pinned me down, holding me I took my shorts off in a bathroom stall. The blood had against the futon in my bedroom. gotten everywhere. It stained my thighs a pinkish color even Yes, is what I wanted to say. The after I wiped myself down, lingering no matter how hard I word formed on my tongue but lay tried to get rid of it. Hair was matted and stuck together trapped behind my lips, refusing to in areas that had started to dry. My shorts were so wet I let it escape. A self-conscious guilt could soak some of the blood out with toilet paper. I felt had taken over. “I’m, uh, bleeding. disgusting. I felt disgusted with myself.

Down there,” I mumbled.

The only thing I had to deal with the blood flow was the Her expression didn’t change. tampon. I turned it over in my hands. I didn’t trust it. I’d She didn’t move away—she came once heard about toxic shock syndrome and decided that closer. “I don’t care. I just want to the convenience of tampons wasn’t worth the risk. I was taste you.” afraid to put it inside of me. I didn’t even know how to do it.

The breathlessness in her voice Nothing had penetrated me up until this point; I was too made me flush. I grappled with the ashamed of my body to allow that. I was too nervous to have guilt in my heart. She asked me if sex, to touch myself in that way for fear of what it would that was okay. mean. It would accept my vagina for what it is. It would “Yes,” I whispered, “if that’s okay feminize me. It felt wrong for a tampon to be the thing that with you.” changed that, but what was I supposed to do?

“More than,” she smiled. Then I remember it hurt. Not a lot, but there was a dry friction, she took my pants off. an uncomfortable stretch that made me wince as I pushed My period has a habit of showing it inside. I didn’t even know if I did it right. I had no one up at the worst times. Vacations. around to help me.

Scheduled events. Lake visits. FirstIt stayed inside of me for the rest of the day. I was hypertime intimacy with my partner. It aware of its presence, of something sitting within me, of finds a way to ruin the best times 79

Landon

Creative Nonfiction

of my life. I felt ashamed that it was here to spoil our time together.

I am ashamed of my body and its functions and my identity. I might have apologized to her if not for the way she touched me, looked at me with a love that I have craved but could never offer myself. I feel like myself when I’m with her. It’s rare that I feel that way.

My gender often finds itself defined by those around me. It doesn’t matter what I think; the second someone misgenders me, I find myself trapped in the box they’ve placed me in. Every time I am called “ma’am,” I feel so far away from myself. Every time a friend slips up and calls me “she” before correcting themselves, I feel invisible. Everytime I bleed, I feel like my body is not my own.

Even when I am with people who see me for me, I have a hard time believing that they do. Years of selfsuppression has made it difficult. If I can barely accept myself for who I am, how can they?

about it. I’ve yet to throw away the underwear I keep for the sole purpose of using pads. I still carry an extra tampon with me in my backpack, just in case. I always fear the worst.

But, so far, the worst hasn’t come. I can already see other changes occurring—the beginnings of facial hair, increase in muscle mass, deepening of the voice, clitoral growth. More often, strangers look at me and say “he” and “sir.” More often, I look at myself in the mirror and see a body that reflects my mind. I am coming to peace with myself.

I may never fully feel at home in my own body. I may never wake up to find comfort in the anatomy I was born with.

These changes, though, have gotten me a little closer to that comfort. I can be friends with my body. I can appreciate it for allowing me to mold it into a shape that feels more me. I can be safe within myself.

I grieve for the life where I was born a man. I am learning to hold onto that grief and continue to love the life I have now, the life of creation.

I have officially been on testosterone for a little over two months. I haven’t missed a single shot. I’ve only had a single period in that time frame. The time for a second one has come and passed, leaving me hopeful enough to believe that it’s over, finally over.

The HRT is doing its job.

There is still, of course, a fear that it will come back—that one morning I’ll wake up to fresh blood sliding down my legs and all the shame of being in this body will come back to me in full force. I’ve had nightmares 80

Undulation Anya Deezhi Lacy “Your kindness, well intent, but what a bane!

In fact, to know such glee makes sadness worse.

To love, and lose. The Sun is cruel to set, So many stars are kind, yet not as bright.

You mean no harm, so what of logic now?

The winter’s here, so do not leave me ‘lone— For knowing summer will not keep me warm!

Like mem’ry of your kiss won’t make me loved.

To walk out holding heavy keys to hearts.

His words, like cud, beset my sacred times.”

A smile fades, another grows in place.

The leaves will die and fall, but will return.

A lover born, she mourns what could have been.

She wonders, “Can I feel this way again?”

81

The Sailor Matthew Lineberry Did Jesus hate public speaking? Was he an introvert?

Did he sit in a chair next to the window, watching the sky move time with blue audacity as he questioned everything?

Did Jesus cry in bed, and did God leave him unanswered?

Did he stare at the hands reaching toward him, powerless, victim to the fear he could change nothing?

Did Jesus fall in love with the colors of the trees in distant arroyos, was he led astray by the cherubic pink in crabapple blossoms, their scent carried on the wind?

Did he laugh at jokes told over meager meals in the late, dim light, did he grimace to think of his mistakes as a child, did he ever hold his mother’s hand as they crossed the street?

Was he imbued with love, or did he find it?

82

Last Rest Victoria Nisoli

Visual Art

oil on canvas, 16” x 20’’

83

Surrender the Decomposers Emma Ressel

Photography

archival pigment print, 16” x 20”

84

Serendipity is a Spring Word Matthew Lineberry So are compassion and elegance, but not words like fortune, which are autumn words, words of plenty and imagined security.

Sure, you know spring for rhododendron’s passion but consider also: rabbitbrush, milkweed, crabapple even the overeager thistles and daisies.

Ganesha and Mary Magdalene, my environmental professor, my sister.

Moles on my skin like stones in desert sand, or precocious bikes rattling over wet concrete.

Perseverance, confidence, adoration, earnestness maybe even contentment and refuge, especially where it’s been found before and lost several times.

I don’t know how to describe the mycorrhizal relationship between us, spontaneously trading nutrients of hope and compassion but that one’s in there too.

The way we look at things differently now, pointing over our shoulders to our past selves of reserved animosity and saying, “What was that guy’s deal?” and fall into an unexpected love with smaller things.

Today the apricots and watermelons will start to swell and darken and taste sweet again and the toes of the desert, dusted with rain, will witness our gratitude and become a deeper green.

All of this unutterable language leading me by its sweaty hand, our feet swaying under a thin sheet to the far-off, rapturous thunder.

85

recent birds x e oaks

“Recent birds” Birds bring me joy The presence of which are only just starting to trickle in here and there and here and there I’ll see a pigeon struttin on all twos, oblivious, with beak in the ground, and two sparrows clutching with tiny feet ( °<°) to the gangly limbs of a naked birch and it brings me some small respite cC from the world from .

Aaa the world and wW back to the

world.

86

Warranty Voided Joseph McKee

Visual Art

digital collage, 8.1” x 5.4”

87

Myth of the Moth Simon Vetter I wonder what Clarice ate after she shot Buffalo Bill hopefully something warm perhaps, I would’ve made her a blackened cauliflower braised in sweet potato curry I think the rich, woody flavors might bring her back down to brighten a bad day I used to make my Julienne rolls of sushi with enoki mushrooms and asparagus I didn’t eat much when she left cold turkey doesn’t smell or taste as sweet as peach perfume and I haven’t had sushi since I used to make my dad black pepper pork butt he liked the way the meat fell apart into strings and fibers flesh like pieces of a puzzle dripping juices attracted to the flame like the peppered moth’s polluted wings sooted from light to dark my brother carries a hatchet cause he read this book Hatchet his plate has been empty and shines like a full moon he wouldn’t like game but still he might swing that’s why the hawkmoths fly swift and sweet

88

Trinity Downwinders Savina Romero My Great Gramo was pregnant when the bomb went off. She didn’t know to be scared. When the baby came, a girl, she cried. Only cried. Her tiny skin, soon covered in lesions. The village doctor couldn’t give them an answer just from looking. And tests were too expensive. But he said that this had been common that year. Something going around perhaps. Mysterious like the devil. So many uncounted babies burnt from the inside out. My great baby aunt (I can’t remember her name). The water they drank was rainwater.

Collected in the cistern by the roof. They didn’t know the clouds were dirty, so they praised them. They praised the rain and the angels and the saints as they buried her little body. And there they left her, wrapped in prayer and a homemade blanket. To sleep quietly in the loamy womb again. In the hillside the color of skin.

89

Border Crossing Savina Romero

Visual Art

acrylic on canvas, 30” x 40”

90

Say Goodbye, Catullus, Sophia M. Eagle You can’t go back.

You can kick and scream but you can’t go back.

Say goodbye, Catullus, to the shores of Asia Minor.

Think of the chapel where you prayed for good health.

What a joke that turned out to be. .

Who will remember how Grandma bought us comics at the bookstore, when the sun poured yellow lemonade in through the windows, that filled our throats and drowned us with being?

Say goodbye and don’t come back here.

These are my shores. Say goodbye.

Think of South Dakota and think of the grass.

Do you remember the cold?

Think of the roots you pulled, think of how they looked like your veins because they were your veins and you were nothing but the prairie and the sky. Say goodbye.

Think of your sisters. Who will remember them, before they changed and forgot what they were, so small you could fit them into your aorta where you would love them violently and sing them to sleep, say goodbye, Catullus, say goodbye.

Who will feed the chickens through summer?

Who will think of a painting with disgust only to realize it is the only painting they can remember?

Say goodbye, say goodbye, you are getting older and you are changing and you are forgetting what it meant to be alive.

91

Eagle

Poetry

You can kick and you can scream, but you Can’t Go Back.

Someday you’ll forget why you ever wanted to return.

Say goodbye, Catullus, to the shores of Asia Minor.

92

Contributors

Sarah Bauman

Movement: study1 61 Sarah Bauman is a Houston born photographer now getting her bachelor’s of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico. Her main focus is on photography.

Graham Brant

Fortunate Perverted Hippie

26

Graham Brant is a student, artist, and excommunicated Zen monk from Albuquerque, New Mexico.

He specializes in small-scale metal sculpture but pays his bills by picking up balls at a golf course. He spends most of his time regretting his actions and admiring his cat, Nina.

Simone Athena Campbell Maps Across Skin

“He spends most of his time regretting his actions...”

51

Simone Campbell—soon to be UNM alumna—is a current undergraduate student of psychology and philosophy. She’s grateful to be touching lives in and out of the classroom as Outreach Coordinator at Agora Crisis Center and looks forward to doing the same with her art. New to the professional literary world but no stranger to the euphories and sorrows of creative writing, she’s thrilled to make her debut in Conceptions Southwest.

Flannery Cowan

A Fine October Night

60

Flannery Cowan graduated from the University of New Mexico in 2022 with her bachelor’s in interdisciplinary arts with an emphasis in graphic design; Flannery had the pleasure of spending her university career working on a Pacemaker award-winning publication, serving as Scribendi’s digital editor for award-winner Vol. 36. She now spends her day kerning text and tweaking pixels out in nature as a graphic designer and photographer.

Anya Deezhi Lacy Undulation

81

Anya Deezhi Lacy is an undergraduate student at the University of New Mexico. She hopes to continue with her art in the ways of painting and sculpting.

Sophia M. Eagle

Say Goodbye, Catullus,

91

Sophia Eagle is Hunkpati Dakota and Serbian, currently attending University of New Mexico as a third-year student. She is majoring in English, and would like to be a successful poet in the future.

Addison Fulton All of the Rabbit

18

Addison believes all of life can be sorted into the following categories: the beautiful, the grotesque, and the mundane. In her work, she seeks to create art that exists in the intersection of all three. She has previously been published with the Homer Humanities and in Scribendi.

Tyler Fife

I Live So I Love 36 Leopoldo 62 Tyler Fife is a Mexican-American son, brother, writer, and curator. Using writing as a means to explore the world around him, he specializes in prose and nonfiction. His main inspirations stem from his gender-identity, family, and life experiences.

Kadra Guillermo

Leaving the Hospital Bed 34 Kadra is a sophomore at The University of New Mexico majoring in English and Philosophy. When she is not writing poetry, she is pursuing her many other creative interests including playing the piano, crocheting, and painting. She has been involved in the publishing process but has long dreamed of being the one whose work is published.

Julian Holman Ode to Oregon

39

Julian Holman is an undergraduate student majoring in Geography at UNM. Born and raised in the Willamette Valley in the Pacific Northwest, they came to New Mexico to continue their exploration of place, nature, and divinity in art and in academia.

Nell Johnson

Mary, Untier of Knots Dolphin Girls 66

57

Nell Johnson (Capricorn Rising, Pisces Mercury) works for her hometown public library. She served on the staff of Conceptions Southwest for two years and believes it is pure desert magic.

Lark Landon

Bleeding Through

73

Lark Landon is a soon-to-be UNM graduate with a degree in English. Having grown up as a queer person without a stable support system, he seeks to offer that support to others through his writing.

Morgan Leanor Tracy

Four Minus One 17 Morgan Leanor’s writing leans heavily into the exploration of mental illness, trauma, domesticity and disability. She loves to write in all genres and is fully immersed in her study of creative writing as a double major in English and Psychology.

Matthew Lineberry

The Sailor 82 Serendipity is a Spring Word

85

Matthew Lineberry is an English major undergraduate at UNM who works in outdoor education and conservation in the summer. Previously only published in Red Rocks Community College’s literary magazine Obscura, he hopes to continue writing professionally.

Roxanne Marquez

If you don’t let me die here, I may never be reborn

72

Roxanne Marquez is an artist and ecologist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Their work in science and art revolves around the relationships organisms hold in ecological and cultural contexts, exploring how we can create more healing narratives around the connections that humans have with plants, fungi, and other animals. Their main interests are in drawing, bio-art, restoration ecology, and microbial ecology.

Joseph McKee

Warranty Voided

87

Joseph McKee (they/them) is a graphic designer and digital artist based in Albuquerque, NM. Interested in design, collage, and typography, Joseph explores queer symbolism, digital compositions, and the manipulation of body in digital spaces throughout their work.

Austin Nguyen

Stairway to Heaven

42

Austin Nguyen is an artist coming out of Michigan. He came to UNM to pursue a degree in biology.

Austin Nguyen’s has been featured in galleries and art books such as the 2023 edition of Scribendi.

Victoria Nisoli Last Rest

83

Victoria Nisoli is a third-year student studying chemistry, but who likes the occasional creative pursuit. She explores themes of family and nostalgia in her work.

Jill Nuckles

Perception of Time

54

Jill Nuckles is a first-year MFA student in the Confluence MFA program at the University of New Mexico. These reflections are from her first experience with the high desert of Abiquiu with Tewa artist and food activist Roxanne Swentzell.

x e oaks

demon comic “possibility”; tribute to linda barry’s ‘100 demons’ surfacelevel 41 meditation in it 58 pelf sortrait 59 recent birds 86

14

x e oaks is a nongender mark-maker/ illustrator rooted in albuquerque, new mexico, a home sown on stolen land. x e likes graphite. x e thinks often about how unfortunate it is that graphite does not have a mouth with which to give kisses.

Nat Olmo

Whale Fall 65 Nat loves to think about water structures. Nat feeds its boogers to its dog, who eats them ravenously, even cries for them sometimes. Nat wonders if it is a bad idea to do that. Nat is an MFA student in Experimental Art and Technology at UNM.

Zoe Ostby

All My Sisters 22 Zoe Ostby is a prolific artist who demonstrates her skill in almost any category: photography, painting, drawing, digital art, creative writing, and more. Her main inspiration comes from the conglomerate of what makes all of us—our fears, insecurities, dreams, desires, the unknown, chaos and harmony.

Kendra Padilla

Heliophile 05 Kendra Padilla is a contemporary artist engaged in multimedia, jewelry, and sculpture. As a New Mexican native born in Albuquerque, Kendra has always been surrounded with southwestern arts and culture. She is studying Biochemistry and Art Studio at the University of New Mexico.

Nino Ricca Lucci

Body Swatch I 52 Body Swatch II 53 Nino Ricca Lucci is an “...and subsequently stitching interdisciplinary artist studying at the University of New ourselves back together...”

Mexico. Working primarily at the intersection of painting and textile arts, he explores how medicalized experiences shape understandings of the self and embodiment among transgender, disabled, and chronically ill subjects. He is interested in how western medicine tradition privileges an anatomical view that compartmentalizes and treats bodies as asocial objects. His work seeks to connect with viewers through shared experiences of living in tension with this process of objectification, and subsequently stitching ourselves back together through periods of convalescence.

Emma Ressel

Smoky Sweet 67 Surrender the Decomposers 84 Emma Ressel is a visual artist from Bar Harbor, Maine who uses photography and collage to make images about decay, consuming, and the intermingling of beauty and the grotesque. Ressel is an MFA candidate in Photography at the University of New Mexico where she also teaches in the Photography department. Ressel’s first book Olives in the street was published in 2017, her work is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and she is currently a 2023-2024 Emerging Artist Member at Strata Gallery in Santa Fe.

Savina Romero

Los Carniceros 01 Land Memory: Oropajita and Martha Listening to Oldies on a Car Hood in Hondo, Nuevo México, just 2 decades after Trinity Bomb (72 miles away) and UFO crash (43 miles away) 24 Trinity Downwinders 89 Border Crossing 90 Savina Romero is a Chicana writer and painter born and raised in Albuquerque New Mexico. She is currently studying creative writing and studio art at the University of New Mexico. Much of her work is made through a cultural/historical lens as a Hispana, Chicana, Mexican-American as she often draws from the rich lexicon of symbols, stories, and traditions of her ancestors.

Zara Roy

Two or three lovers

23

Zara Roy is a UNM alumnus. She loves lamotrigine and other people’s boy drama. Feel free to share your own with her.

“She loves lamotrigine and other people’s boy drama.”

John Scott

Viewing Party 02 The Neighbor’s Backyard

71

John Scott is a recent graduate from the University of New Mexico. He has spent his time since mostly studying the physiognomy of cows.

Andrew Sowers

Crop Circles 06 Dust 43 Andrew Sowers is a writer and poet from Albuquerque, New Mexico. He enjoys walking, playing soccer, making lists of things he intends to read or watch, ducks, film photography, learning new things about people he thought he knew well, and listening to people tell stories. His artistic interests often concern dilemmas of memory, questions of time, and giving attention to little moments. His essay, “Gathering Up; Holding On,” won the Scribendi Staff Choice Award in 2023. His work has also appeared in the Blue Mesa Review Blog, and in Conceptions Southwest.

Tanya Tyler

December 7th

44

Tanya Tyler (she/her) is an undergraduate UNM student, double majoring in English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is Diné and originally from Tséłałnáozt’i’í, New Mexico on the Navajo Nation. After graduation in May 2024, she is planning on pursuing an MFA degree in Creative Writing.

Simon Vetter

Myth of the Moth

88

Simon Vetter is an undergraduate student studying English and Film at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point. He is participating in National Student Exchange at the University of New Mexico and hopes to study poetry in graduate school.

Special Thanks Susanne Anderson-Riedel Stephen Benz Dr. Leslie Donovan Megan Jacobs Anita Obermeier ASUNM President Krystah Pacheco Daven Quelle Walden Shank President Garnett Stokes Peyton Williams UNM Publications Board: Amaris Ketcham, Chair Lisa Chavez, Vice Chair Seyi Adekoya Jaelyn deMaria Soroi Jones Jacqueline Martin Aaron Martinez Mikayla Otero Josiah Ward Fellow Publications: Blue Mesa Review The Daily Lobo Limina: UNM Nonfiction Review Scribendi Student Publication Family: Madison Hogans; Communications Editor, Scribendi Marcela Johnson; Editor in Chief, Limina: UNM Nonfiction Review Raychel Kool; Managing Editor, Scribendi Maddie Pukite; Editor in Chief, The Daily Lobo Reyes Reynaga; Digital Editor, Scribendi UNM Alumni Association Starline Printing Company UNM Art Department UNM English Department

Anna Abeyta, Editor in Chief Addison Key, Digital Editor

Kelsa Mendoza, Managing Editor

Thomas James Crowe Sofia Doke Jesús Eduardo Sánchez Flores

Raychel Kool Alhana Lewis Will Martinez

Isabella Zamarchi

2023 - 2024

Staff

Crossword Find the title of the prose piece using the quotes below Down: 1. “A wall-eyed man with sixty-four teeth slept all day, eyes open...”

2. “Eyes oozing white decay” 7. “...my eyes always drifted in the direction of that rug”

Across: 3. “Tom’s eyes seemed to deepen as he nodded slowly.”

4. “...shielding my eyes from being blinded by the morning sunlight.”

5. “She watches it, looking for some recognition in its eyes.”

6. “I want to make my body perfect in my own eyes.”

8. “...you know, the second your eyes met hers, that you are a better man...”

9. “The eyes are the oven of the face.”