Penumbra Spring 2024

Penumbra 2024

Volume 34

The Art & Literary Journal of Stanislaus State

penumbra (pi-num ‘bre): n. 1. A partial shadow, as in an eclipse, between regions of complete shadow and complete illumination. 2. The partly darkened fringe around a sunspot. 3. An outlying, surrounding region; periphery; fringe. [Lat. paene, almost – Lat. umbra, shadow]

All About Penumbra

Since 1991, Penumbra has proudly published poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and visual art by contributors from the Stanislaus region, throughout the U.S., and abroad. Our staff is composed entirely of students: they make all editorial decisions, including which submissions are accepted and how the journal is designed.

Because new students staff the journal every year, Penumbra constantly evolves. Each year, we receive hundreds of art and literary submissions, and through an anonymous voting process, we decide which works to accept. Students are responsible for all editing and design choices, creating the finished journal by the end of the semester.

Every Spring, English 4019: Editing Literary Magazines is open to students with junior or higher academic standing. Students from all majors are welcome: the course offers professional training in areas including art, business, and communications. Annually, we launch the new issue with readings on the CSU Stanislaus campus near the end of the spring term.

Thank you to those who contributed to Penumbra 2024. Your talent makes the journal what it is. Please continue sending us your work: submissions will open for Penumbra 2025 later this November.

Penumbra Staff

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Tony Perrello

Editors-in-Chief

Schuyler Becker

Allison Westlund

Reviews Editor

Catherine Azevedo

Editing & Design Staff

Veronica Aguilar

Kevin Alkhas

Martina Bekasha

Paul Bonfiglio

Noah Castellanos

Alexiea Chalender

Aja Guzman

Sarah Hernandez

Lauren Krone

Ryan Landon

Marcio Maragol

Estrella Ramos

Richard Rubio

Kristina Solomita

Kayla Sabella Weaver

Mary Worthington

Marcos Zaragoza

Content Warning

In the following pages you will encounter art: the creative efforts of poets, fiction writers, and graphic artists. Art, like life, can be beautiful, sad, amusing, breathtaking, inspiring but also dangerous, tragic, offensive, upsetting, violent, and ugly: such is the human condition. As in any smorgasbord, the feast of words and images before you contains fare of many flavors. Some may go down easily; some may be an acquired taste. We invite you to choose and consume your own delights, and leave the rest for others.

Reach for the Stars

By Crystal Lopez

Medium: Digital Art

By Karen Grace Soans

all the skins we wear because mother said it was cold out and the world would eat little girls who revealed freshly grown shoulders all our insecurities woven into cashmere to keep us warm when the boogeyman comes for his monthly payout in twisted blood and ruined eggs all the smiles we eat to sit at the table hide half nibbled bread in secret coat pockets you can’t hurt me when I wear father’s trousers. all the hidden layers when one grows weary drink them like cake at night by the cold fridge light just you and God and mother’s guilt that turns the sugar to dust and your hips to just the right lust trust me when you birth daughters of your own you’ll understand that cinderella chopped toes to marry a prince and all I want is for you to be happy.

loop caught in a loop

Daucus Carota

By Ari Koontz

Deep in the soil - scrape away the loam - carefully, carefully, you will find its root. Threaing and pale, but the scent is unmistakable, and you can’t help but think of rabbits. This is the wild carrot, not just a cousin of that lunchbox crunch but its only living parent, the origin point of soup. Cradle it in your hands; feel the weight, the persistence. If you passed this tuber between your lips, you’d delight in its sweetness, so long as you wait out the bitter.

There’s a white cylinder on the edge of my desk that I can’t quite look away from. In the morning I will untangle myself from bedsheets and pull myself up standing to prime the pump with one - two - three presses of the palm, rinse away the excess before extracing the first dose. The label tells me to apply to the shoulders, then thoroughly wash the hands, and let dry before covering completely.

There may be a need for caution. Wild carrots do have many lookalikes, several of which are toxic. Hemlock, for example: that famous enemy of Socrates, who was sentenced to death by poisoning and given an infusion of dark green leaves for the charge of debasing his nation’s youth. Corruption of minds by politics answered with corruption of body by nature, his vessel turned cold and rigid. But daucus carota is unconcerned with impiety, passes no harm or judgment on man—at most it may sour a stomach.

It’s impossible to know what the changes will be once I begin to empty this bottle. The hair might sprout quickly or take its languid time, the voice may drop an octave or barely a handful of notes. The gaps in my brain might be filled and they might gape even wider. When I tell a friend that I am contemplating this, she says, But that stuff is like poison

So you just have to look closely. Observe the stem, fine-haired and solid; trace the feather-edged pinnate leaves that cup the falling sunlight; count the dozens of kissing umbels and their hundreds of minuscule flowers. Most often they are white, sometimes faintly blushing pink, with a distinctive cluster of deep red at the very center where Queen Anne once pricked her finger.

There’s still a dot, but not a bruise, hiding in the crook of my elbow. My blood long ejected from some lab’s spinning centrifuge where they captured the necessary numbers, gone but not gone, pulsing through me. I will return in three months to get pricked again to detemine if it is working, which in their words means doing no harm. In the matter of positive changes, they say, it’s only my heart that can trace them.

It is a field / of the wild carrot taking / the field by force; the grass / does not raise above it. William Carlos Williams, 1938: it proliferates. It persists. Some gardeners consider it a weed and a nuisance, but it’s a useful companion plant to many; when nestled among blueberries, it beckons butterflies, and lettuce can lean on it for shade. You can imagine the insect making a home in its hat or the bird’s nest festooned with white blossoms.

Phrases I resent: living as one’s authentic self, feeling comfortable in one’s own skin, so brave / inspiring / strong you are to finally live your truth. Phrases I think and whisper to myself: journey over destination, no beginning / middle / end, there are seventy-six homones that make up the human body and this is only one.

But back down to the root again: where all blooms must begin. Remember that smell, that taste, that heft. Remember this beating heart. You could take it home and boil it or shave it thin over greens or pickle it young before it has the chance to grow tough and fibrous, or you could cup it in potting soil and tuck it into your garden beds to see if it will keep away the wasps, or you could carefully with index fingers brush away the clots of dirt and turn it in your hands one - two - three times before nestling it back into the earth and kissing its tiny red center and leaving it to stretch toward the sun.

I still cannot say for certain why I have chosen this or what exactly is coming. Only that when I think of the months and years ahead, when I imagine myself growing wild, then woody, then inevitably going to seed, I feel it as a deep inflorescence.

There was more to the dream than this

By Sara Collie

There is always something to say. Like, I should’ve been there with you but I was here. Or everybody seems to be struggling with something right now. Or simply, I’m so scared of confrontation.

I know it’s true because I have to hold it, indigestible as it is. I don’t want to blow up. It is slow, slow going marching on into oblivion. I can’t just sit here and focus feeling all the sorrow, the fear, the confusion, letting it be. Asking for help would change things –the stakes are almost too high.

Nobody is coming.

This is my legacy, this is what I’ve got: flowers, birds, light, drizzle, words. There will be more of that.

Right now, here in this moment –really in it – I feel okay losing myself in a process.

By Surjevon Dhillon

Dreams sprout,

As the first sight of green makes its way out. Out, and up, Into the light,

Where a fresh breath of air passes along And brings with it the nurturing lullaby of a mother Who left behind a life forgotten

To make a new life for her half of a seed. A seed sowed and reaped, Under the moonlight conceived, And brought up as the sun rises, Giving life to the earth and the seas. And what of those dreams

That fought to see the light of day

But blossomed at night and withered away.

As each petal dropped, Making its way.

So, as they say: A life comes full circle, Complete.

Aufhaben

By Marc Janssen

AUFHABEN

After Tympan by Jaques

Derrida

This Rorschach test of writing, A pen curling across white

Trailing a blue varicose vein.

Or is it the white’s audacity to frame the ink into a meaningful shape

The chance jumble of stick-figures that resemble a word

Or simply a bare rack, a gaudy gilt arrow, And when it is done, what does that bony finger point to anyway.

I’m not writing anymore,

Only sketching the lines that look like words.

By Mónica Martínez Escobar

Medium: Photography

Butterflies

By Rose Gubele

Once, my best friend saw me catch a white butterfly, delicate wings between my fingers. She gasped, said I killed it my fingers soiled its wings.

Pained, I let go, and the beautiful creature disappeared into the innocent blue. Later, I found a dead butterfly, Curled onto itself, its wings dirty I knew it was the one I had touched.

We called them silver dollars they shimmered when sunlight caught their wings. Shining signs of spring, too pure for me to touch

That night, I curled into a ball shaping crumpled sheets into a chrysalis, dampened by tears. I knew I was disappearing. I still felt your fingers on my skin.

What Exists Unseen

By Jeffrey Gianelli

I seek out the places that maybe no one’s seen before

Kayaking through a small opening in the reeds along the Cape Fear river becoming lost inside a secret labyrinth of canals lined by the tall grasses, like sliding through the veins of a goddess

Or hiking past the “do not enter” sign where the trail fades away a meadow full of wildflowers spreads out beyond the next boulder, a crystalline lake that no one swims in offering itself in the distance the offspring of three others just past the next ridge where no one’s footprint mars the ground

All remains just as it was meant to be or was it meant to be trampled, dammed, paved, used up to the very last drop? This we do know: nothing intervenes

I imagine that somewhere there’s a cave and inside that cave is a not-yet mined vein of gemstones and the stones are cornflower blue, sun yellow, blood red.

Somewhere untouched, unseen, unspoken, never even thought of inaccessible by human or goat or bird even the snakes haven’t found it yet it’s waiting there for me, for you

Do not forget to stop and scan the crags on the mountain top as you pass by

Seasons

By Cami Rumble

The world spins on its axis too quietly, Time tiptoes on padded feet across my life— Soft and sad and spooling toward its eventual summer.

Broken things grow like corn stalks

All in a row, march ever onward keeping pace With me as I pass. They thunder along on stilts.

It should be enough that the sudden everyday Wraps me in its shawl of leaves and long evenings, Whispers when shouting would do.

Unspoken words pass by osmosis through my skin, A sweet understanding floating in the pool of my heart Carried buoyant through the fresh rain of spring.

<<Volverán a brotar las ciruelas>>

- Originalmente escrito en español por Jesús Ramón Villalba Gastélum

Volverán a brotar las ciruelas; me lo dijo la tierra algún día.

Para saberlo, no ocupo escuela: Se siente en el alma alegría.

Pero cuando de nuevo nazcan, ¿Dónde es que tú estarás?

¿Estarás donde otros plascan?

Un día tu vida será tuya, verás.

Cuando sepa que han nacido, será para mi una euforia.

Sin maleta ni pistola, habré ido.

¡Un milagro! Un árbol de la escoria!

E iremos todos a verlos, Y veremos los bulbos, lilas negros Y cuando caigan,a esos dulces moretes, comerlos.

The Plums will Bloom Again

By Jesús Ramón Villalba Gastélum

“The plums will bloom again”

- Originally in Spanish, by Jesús Ramón Villalba Gastélum

The plums will bloom again

The earth has told me so.

The books don’t say as much, Instead, joy falls like snow.

But when they are reborn, where is it that you’ll be?

Is it where others want?

Your life will be your own!

And when I learn they’ve bloomed, my heart will burst with joy!

I’d go without my gun,

To see trees grown from scorn!

We’ll all go there to see those blackened purple bulbs. We’ll pick those bruises up, and then we’ll eat them all.

Home Is Wherever I am With You

By Liliana Figueroa-Larios

Medium: Assemblage

Ours is a solid house: sturdy walls, roof tiles overlapping like fingers, a foundation that doesn’t shake like ground pushing itself apart.

The road is smooth and glassy, no potholes to ripple at our feet as we chase the newborn sun. We sit at the windows and watch the prairie stretch out its hand over the curving earth, new comfort to mimic each season: earthy green couches in summer, eggshell recliners in winter. When storms come, they ride in on chariots, carrying God’s voice in their clouds. When they leave behind sunlight

caressing dewy meadows, you ask if we can afford to keep this forever. I smile, run my fingers through your hair: Yes, my dear. We can afford it now.

The American Dream

By Matthew Andrews

Anxiety 201

By Bart Edelman

Might as well put my disorder

To some type of good use.

Aced Anxiety 101 last semester. It was pretty much a breeze

With everything I’ve been through. Believe me, I know distress, Both backwards and forwards, So I’m a natural at it; Why not earn the credits?

I’m thinking of changing my major From Animal Husbandry to Psychology. After all, why not cash in On each dilemma I face.

Take Saturday night, for instance. My date walked me to the drive-in But left before the movie began. Or my parents making me choose sides In the never-ending bickering match, Referred to as their marriage— An institution I won’t enter, No matter how desperate I get. Perhaps, grad school is in my future, And counseling those more troubled Than I may appear to be. Now if I can just skate through 201, Prior to enrolling in Anxiety 301 next term, I’ll cross another conflict off my list.

By Schuyler Becker

Someone get the detergent–They are folding in on themselves like laundry;

Reds bleeding into white, Dye and teardrops intermix;

Just put her in the wash and hope for the best; Who’s to say what’s resin and what’s pain;

Fabric a testament to time in perpetuity; It won’t take much for these hands to collapse;

What’s a scratch outside a gallery of wounds, with stitches and seams to match;

They’re still spinning–But don’t break the glass in case of emergency.

Shadow Being

By Suzy Eynon

The first time it happens, she thinks she sees a man in her bedroom. She knows it’s a man even though he’s made of darkness. Some call this night man The Hat Man but her shadow doesn’t wear a hat. In the half-dream, she recognizes his presence. She hears herself wail. This is embarrassing but those whose homes she’s slept in know. She warns, sometimes I have night terrors. She worries the neighbors will hear her scream and call the cops. A guy she slept with once told her You hit me last night, in your sleep. The dinosaurs on the posters tacked to his bedroom wall loomed tall and menacing in the night, their arcing necks curling out and over the bed. The tips online say to never try to wake someone who is having a night terror, because they may injure themselves or someone else, like the guy from work who keeps a pet sugar glider and her empty shampoo bottles, but she didn’t know this then.

The terrors worsen when she lives alone. One night, she wakes up on all fours in her bed. Like an animal. Another, she wakes up across the room from her bed, standing next to her dresser, where she rests one arm across the night-cooled wood as if posing for a portrait. She realizes what has happened and returns to bed to pass the hours until daylight. In another apartment, when she first moves to Seattle from the desert and doesn’t notice the black mold as it creeps from the pipe in the back of the bedroom closet, she sleeps in the living room on an inflatable mattress to escape the damp. The complex is a converted motel, the rows of front doors identical. Someone tries her front doorknob as she sleeps feet away on the floor. Maybe they are drunk and the key doesn’t fit. She startles at the noise and emits a phlegmy cry so disturbed, the person at the door says It’s an accident! I’m sorry!

Living back at her parents’ home after a break-up, her mom greets her in the morning: I heard you last night. She had knocked over a CD tower, the plastic cascading across the room in a wave as she slept surrounded by the boxes and evidence of a failed life she’d tried to start.

Her brother has them too, the terrors. He dreams that he has died and can see his body from above. He says they’ve changed since he had a child. She wants to tell her brother they will get better, but they just take different forms. Now she sees tendrils of a spider web, a spider dangling an inch from her face. She sees a photo negative view of the wall shifting in the night, the picture frames unchanged over the years, their existence and location etched into her mind in squares and rectangles, even in the dark. Even with her eyes closed.

By Sheila Medina

Medium: Intaglio Print

The Hat

By Beth Sherman

My mother’s bedroom closet has built-in shelves and a full-length mirror. In the right lighting it looks bigger than the rundown studio apartment my oldest daughter has in Bedford Stuyvesant, which I got her father to pay for. I had it written into the divorce settlement. Pay the rent on Becca’s overpriced Brooklyn apartment, even though at that point she was still living at home and hadn’t started looking yet. She and her sister call it Granny’s Closet, like it’s the name of a store. Half the clothes still have price tags. I don’t go inside because I can’t bear to see how much the stuff costs. The girls have taken jeans, shoes, boots, jackets, gloves, handbags, and sweaters from it. My mother wraps the stuff up and puts it in shopping bags from boutiques on Madison Avenue. If you passed us on the street, you’d think we went shopping for real.

*

When I was a child, we lived in a big apartment on East End Avenue, overlooking the river. Every afternoon the babysitter took me to the park and sat on a bench, while I went on the slides and swings in the playground. My mother never came. I once asked her what she did all day since she didn’t have to work. She patted my arm and told me being a mother was work enough. I made sure my kids had a different childhood: Girl Scouts, play dates, ice skating lessons. I was Class mom every year, baked mini muffins, went to all the band concerts and field hockey games. I showed up. I kept them safe. But in the end, it didn’t matter. They have the same relationship with me as I have with her.

*

While they ransack the closet, I lie in a chaise lounge in a corner of the bedroom and look in the mirror. It’s not that I’m vain. It’s just that an entire wall in my mother’s bedroom is mirrored and it’s hard not to stare at yourself while you’re in there. The mirror makes me look fat. I’m not fat fat. But I have hips, unlike the three of them.

*

One day in the park, I got bored and wandered away from the playground. There was snow on the ground. Cold enough for me to see my breath and I tried to catch it in my hands before it disappeared. Ice crackled under my feet, slick and shiny. My breath misted the air. Even the pigeons looked unhappy.

*

I think my mother enjoys pretending she’s the mother and I’m the . . . what? Not another daughter. A guest, maybe. Someone who’s a friend of someone else you’ve actually invited, so you have to be polite to them, nothing more.

*

The East River was adjacent to the park. When I left the playground, I walked along the boardwalk and waved to all the people on the different boats – tugboats, ferries, barges, the Circle Line packed with tourists waving back to me. There were sandboxes on the boardwalk, too, but I wasn’t allowed to play in them because sometimes needles were

buried there. Eventually, I headed away from the river and came to a square in the park lined on either side with towering piles of rocks. A man was sitting on a bench in front of the rocks. He asked me if I’d ever climbed to the top and when I said yes, he told me to show him how it was done. *

My mother pulls out a bin filled with hats. Cloche hats, wool hats, straw hats, hats with veils, hoods. The girls try them on, taking Selfies and posting them to Instagram. Big sale at Granny’s Closet! Come on down!

Here, Mom, says Becca. Try this.

She tosses me a black beret that looks just like a hat I had as a kid. It mashes my bangs down.

Not flattering, my mother comments.

The girls look at me and yell take it off. This instant!

They’re giggling and modeling hats for my mother, taking more pictures. Everyone laughing and getting along. Like a family in a Hyundai commercial. *

I was wearing a beret that day in the park. I remember touching it as I showed the man I knew just where to put my hands and feet, how proud I felt of this accomplishment. When we got to the top, the trees hid us from view. He sat behind me and talked about his family. He had a little girl about my age who also liked to play in the park. After a while he unzipped my jacket and ran his hands up and down my chest, on top of my sweater. His fingers felt like angry caterpillars. It didn’t occur to me to run away. He had stopped talking by then and the trees made lovely shadows on the snow. A bird cried out and it felt like we were the only ones who heard it, that there were just the two of us left on earth.

Snowflakes and a Friend

By Casey Giffen

Grief is a flurry of snowflakes, no two alike, yet falling with icy incessancy,

until daylight flees for fear of exposure to inability, unable to assuage

the essence-piercing freeze of humanity. Cold-life envelopes mind, might, and motion.

Darkness dawns to smear snowflake after snowflake over panes to the soul, but the breath from a friend facing us in our flurry melts away tears

frozen upon lifeless lids, and like heat emanating from a wood-burning stove

into our iced-over souls, compassion warms us from the biting blizzard of grief.

By Sheila Medina

Medium: Relief Print

sisterhood

By Manasvini Rai

brewed unhurriedly like lentil soup for loved ones, sisterhood survives vanity and mealtime spats over the last mouthful,

sisters outgrow in weathered suburban homes doting cradle songs, then hemlines annually, yoked fast by kinship, riding piggyback on obliging grownups for play, not knowing trust from lust at the age of five,

even as troubled teens, those twin sisters (born a dozen drowsy breaths apart) remained allies for all seasons, gaining signs of juvenescence here and there, fit for foul fancy perfect prey to vile ophidians creeping noiselessly about, what does it take to stupefy a sporting sparrow?

sister of my heart! how did you become a creature of coerced ritual? grinning wordlessly like a Cheshire cat –unconscious, inaudible, stricken by wounding,

sister-perfect still, for all practical purposes, beneath the deceptive sway of adolescent pigtails, braided in repugnant fuchsia, lilting back and forth, like girlhood on the move.

Thanatophobia

By Lucy Rumble

That’s what my therapist calls it: the fear of Death. Than-at-o-pho-bi-a – I try to taste it, rolling its sounds over my tongue. But it feels wrong: too subtle, too rhythmic a word to capture the true sensation of the thing it claims to describe. I’m not scared to die, as painful or unwitting as that may be, but I’m terrified of being gone. Of non-life, non-existence, non-everything-I’ve- known-before. The idea that some day soon, I’ll be better acquainted with oblivion than I ever was with planet Earth. And the worst part: I won’t be there to see it happen.

I once tried to convince myself of God. I thought if I believed in something greater, benevolent or malicious, heaven or hell, some paternal entity to care for me after my brief stint with mortality, I might feel some sense of peace. I even tried to fake it: I went to church and searched for meaning. And I found community, a people who would love me as their own, but who could sniff out a fraud like a bloodhound. I still pray for it sometimes, that I might believe, but the inconsistencies in their stories take root in my head and I can’t see past their lies.

My therapist suggested journaling. “The secret to a happy life,” she said, “Is fulfillment. Write down the things that make you happy, and the things that you want, and forge them into goals for life.” So, it seems all I’ve got to do is figure out what I am and what I want then I’ll be just dandy. No biggie.

But my thoughts are stuck. Whizzing round in a loop and I can’t slow them down. I watch from afar as my hand scratches lines of remorse into the pages of a pale blue notebook, regurgitating the rhetoric of CBT for how to rid oneself of anxious thoughts with each swipe. The ink blots with my heavy touch and bleeds down the page, dripping onto my checkered gown. I checked myself in this time, signed up to the ad for an experiment about curing brains and making mental illnesses a thing of the past. I’m wired up, listening to the white noise of my brain etching its waves onto a screen as I scribble down confused thoughts about what I need to be happy.

The following year, nothing has changed. The miracle pill sold out and did nothing at all save turn a few poor sods’ piss pale blue. I’ve made myself eggs for breakfast, and I’m playing pretend at marching crumbling soldier sticks across my marbled plate and plunging them headfirst into their hot and gooey doom, wondering how they do it with such ease. Maybe they believe in Me. Maybe they’re just doing what they’re told. Wouldn’t we all, for the promise of eternal life? I try not to think about eternity and The Big Unknown for too long or I’ll start to panic, and my chest will hurt and then I’ll panic more because I’ll think I’m going to explode. For some peace, I imagine you sat in my egg cup, legs dangling over its sides before you topple back with a smile and a salute into that yellow pool of doom. Why would you do it? I’m thinking in circles, and the cruelty of

Death stares back at me from my used butter knife.

Now we’re flashing forward: my smile lines are set and it’s time for Parenthood 101. A girl stands in front of me with wide eyes and a draping teddy bear, her words forming black spiders over my eyes as she asks about Death. What can I say?

That I’m terrified of Her? That after years of seeking help and fulfillment, nothing has made me happy enough to override the sense of dread that one day everything about me and everyone else will be forgotten by you and them. That sometimes, when I’m feeling philosophical, I think about when Nietzsche said that ‘Death is close enough at hand so we do not need to be afraid at life’ and I wonder if I’ve even lived enough without my fears of Death to know my thoughts on life. That sometimes I end up under the bathroom sink at 2 am clutching onto the familiar pang of panic in my chest, trying desperately to regain my wasted years as I crawl away from Her clasping hands and just cry and cry into my boyfriend’s arms, seeking comfort from a man who is just as scared as I am.

I blunder and pause, finally hearing myself say: ‘Death is a lady in black. She’s beautiful and kind, and she’ll give you a better home than you’ll ever know here on earth.’ I fashion Death into a comfort I’ll never know.

To my surprise, the girl with wide eyes and a teddy bear asks: ‘Is Death like you, then, mum?’

‘Yes,’ I say, dressed like Her in my façade; to ease the transition. “I suppose She is.” I smile at last, tasting peace.

requiem for a border-city girl

By Lucia Angileri

I’m talking to myself again. I have one foot in the future. Do you think I’ll make it? College applications are annoying. My outfit looked nice yesterday. I wish you saw. I washed my sheets today, finally. My heart is so heavy, it’s turning over inside of me. I keep drinking coffee like it has the answers. I miss being touched. I feel nothing. I feel everything. I need new shoes. I need a car. I haven’t slept well in months.

My bed has become a cemetery of wishes I had to bury, yet you have rendered me bed-ridden, for every night, I sleep with the absence of you breathing down my left side and every morning, I wake up choking on ashes. The desire I have for you is burning a fence around my room.

What Have I Become

By Bryce Mathew

Medium: Watercolor and Pen

Pity Party

By Patricia Walker

In the first weeks after her heart operation, Mattie began to feel old. Age descended on her like a wet blanket, pressing her to the ground, smothering her so that she had no energy, lost her balance all the time, found herself limping for no good reason. Stretching to reach the second shelf left her breathless. A trip to the grocery store required a nap afterwards.

Even though they’d said the operation was a success, she began to think seriously about death. For the first time in her life, it felt like something that might actually happen to her. Until then, it had seemed merely theoretical, a thing that only happened to other people, people much older than seventy-four.

Of course, after a week or two, her family and friends, even Betsy, quit calling to see how she was doing, or asking if there was anything she needed. They seemed to have forgotten what she’d been through. It was so typical. As usual, she was on her own. Sometimes she wondered how long it would take somebody to find her if she did drop dead on the kitchen floor. Probably weeks!

And her hip kept bothering her, so she went to see the doctor. Osteoarthritis he said, holding up the x-ray. No wonder. With your fair skin and blue eyes, your petite frame. She’d never heard of such a thing, and she couldn’t help feeling a little picked on. First the operation, and now this. After all, her size and skin color weren’t something she’d had any control over, not like smoking or drinking. She’d exercised for decades, done free weights, taken calcium, all those things you were supposed to do for strong, healthy bones. What the Hell? And all the doctor could say was, just keep moving. Clearly, his hip never hurt.

She began to notice how many people limped. Not just old people, but young people too. She didn’t want to look like that. She wanted to stride along, the way she always had, bold and self-assured. Not to be messed with. She wanted to be one of those women about whom other people said, “Can you believe she’s in her seventies?”

In a little while, she began to resent the way she felt. It unsettled her. But she started cleaning out anyway. Best to get things in order, just in case. She wore out a shredder getting rid of all the paid bills she’d been stuffing in shoe boxes for years. She made lists of her charitable contributions and contacts for family members. She cleaned out a dozen spices that had been crammed in the back of the kitchen cabinet for who knew how long. Years. Maybe decades. What in the world did you do with Cream of Tartar anyway?

And there were all those household items she never used anymore – the heavy stand mixer she could barely lift, the extra set of nested bowls, even the tube pan she’d always used for her mother’s pound cake. She hadn’t made one of those in years. Besides, there was nobody there to eat it.

The local thrift store took it all with a smile. Somebody would use those things and be glad for them. Somebody who still had a life ahead of them, she thought as she drove away.

Now that she’d gotten rid of all the superfluous stuff, she turned to what was left. She taped notes to the backs of pictures and to the bottoms of furniture, saying where they’d come from, and who should have them when she was gone. That way, she thought, the disposing of them would be easy. No muss, no fuss. And when it was all complete, they would have disposed of her too, just a handful of ashes in a little paper container like a Chinese takeout box. It would be as if she had never existed, never set foot on the path of life. And, if they did remember her, at least they’d say, “She was so organized.”

Then, one day, out of the clear blue sky, Betsy called. “Hey Mattie. Want to go to lunch?”

She looked at the pile of old utility bills she’d found on the floor of her closet that morning. She’d thought she was done with all that, but now she’d have to shred, shred, shred all day. How could she take time out for lunch?

Still, she was tempted. She hadn’t been out of the house for ages. A change of scenery would be nice. Then she glanced at her nails. The polish was badly chipped, probably from all that shredding. And her hair looked awful. She hadn’t washed it in four days. She sighed. She just wasn’t in any shape to go to lunch.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m in the middle of all this cleaning out.”

“Oh, come on,” Betsy said. “It’s Wednesday, bread pudding day at Simple Pleasures. You know you love it, and they only have it once a week.”

Ah, she thought, letting a water bill slip from her fingers and float to the floor, bread pudding. That did sound good.

Monochromatic Ascension

By Kristina Solomita

Medium: White Conte on Black Paper

our gossamer wings have long been broken;

we have taken up residence in the motel at the edge of the universe

[or maybe it’s just Kansas]

we watch the greenish lights buzzing in the hallway

the redundant rhythm of housekeeping’s vacuum & the broken ice maker that still tries

[it’s all so familiar–but so terrifying]

time passes strangely at the edge of the universe

how long have we spent discussing whether torn wings can be mended with gold?

[is it possible to fall farther?]

the mini fridge hums in the corner as stars complete their sad arcs

we count the persistent, beautiful things in this world & our eyes fall upon the flickering motel sign

[there is something out there whose song plays through the crackling radio speaker]

– perhaps gold still runs in our veins & the hour is not as late as it seems

By Ashlee Craft

So much of everything

By Suchismita Dutta

I wonder often why do I feel so much of everything, happiness, grief, jealousy, arrogance the boundless love of motherly nurture gently cradling the baby in a warm embrace like a talisman warding off evil

I wonder often why does this jealousy grow on me like a purple serpent wrapped around my limbs making it difficult to move or blink as if I am the evil casting a black eye on the successes I could never have

I wonder often why does this anger feel so warm it bubbles and boils inside causing a fever that wouldn’t subside even after taking the strongest dose of medication as if I could burn everything around like the wildfires of California one spark and half the forest turns to ash

I wonder often why does my grief feel endless like the river Ganges in Benares only less forgiving and far less calming devoid of the bright oil lamps of worship it ebbs and flows and pains a tumor malignant enough to kill, but doesn’t

I wonder often why my love for you reaches the heights of sacrifices, compromises and passions like I could keep touching you from dawn to dusk especially on long summer days when the sun never sets

As I wonder

I feel more, the heights and depths

Oh, the joy of being able to feel so much the abundance, the lack, the losses and gains the scented happiness of lavender fields the wound from a sharp cut that throbs and pains

as I wonder as I wander

As It Should

By Jacoby Crane

As time idly ticks away,

As the last leaf will fall,

As the sun sets one final time,

As the three woes call.

As our hearts beat their last,

As the rivers run dry,

As flower petals wither and wilt,

As the willows weep and cry.

As the mountains crumble to ruin,

As the forests writhe in pain,

As water dries and all hope dies,

As life is brutally slain.

As unanswered prayers lay forsaken,

As souls are liberated free,

As our empty shells corrode and decay,

All is as it should be.

Mi Memoria se Falla Pero Siempre te Recordaré (My Memory Fails but I will Always Remember You)

By Analaura Jocol

Medium: Acrylic and Embroidery on Canvas and Fabric

Death is at the Door

By Richard Rubio

When I yell orders at my ten year old dog, she must think, “Who do you think you are? You’re just a little boy.”

But all she does is smile, a wide smile, ear to ear.

She hardly listens to our orders now, and I wonder if that’s the stubbornness of an old lady who’s been weathered by age.

I yell when she barks at our neighbors, but she persists, probably thinking, “I’ll be damned if I keep my mouth shut.”

And so I yell louder, and her pointed ears fall flat atop her head, and her curly tail shoots down.

I’m 24 years old, and she is 10. I was nearly an adult when she was born, but I bet Luna wouldn’t believe that.

I myself almost don’t. If Luna bared her canine teeth and growled at me, I would fall straight in line out of respect.

But all she does is smile. Wide smile, ear to ear.

Her best friend, and my first dog Lobo

passed away when he was 10. I don’t think she knows,

but she hasn’t seen him since. I wonder if that loss is what ages you, if that’s the way you earn people’s respect.

Luna always smiles, but she stopped for a bit.

My parents constantly remind me that death is at our door, They respond, “Si dios quiere,” to every plan I make for us.

They’ve lost so many people in the time it’s taken me to become a man. I used to feel I didn’t have a reason

to listen to their orders. I am my own man.

But now my dad reminds me that life is never certain; Now my mom cries because I smoke.

These numbers started feeling so insignificant to me. We say Luna is 70 in dog years. And I listen to my parents more as a 24 year old than I did as a 14 year old. Luna listens to me sometimes, but not always.

And sometimes I get mad at her and yell. And when I do, she doesn’t smile.

Who am I to get upset at her for choosing sovereignty, after losing her closest companion, knowing too what awaits her?

By Liliana Figueroa-Larios

Medium: Assemblage

Fun and Games

By Carlotta Valdez

Spin the dial. Put your left hand on the blue dot. Spin once more. Put your right foot on the yellow dot. Swipe your card when the clerk tells you it’s time. Swipe your card when the machine says it’s time. Turn the magnetic strip to the left. Turn it to the right. Remove your card from the reader quickly. More quickly. Quicker than that. Too long! Now leave it in until instructed otherwise. Keep it in longer. Longer. Push the OK button when you’re done. No, the other OK button. To pay for parking here, enter your license plate number. To pay for parking there, enter your stall number. Pay in advance. Pay when you leave. Oops. Sorry, I didn’t say “Simon says.” You’ll have to start over.

Green light, go. Red light, stop. Yellow light, slow down. Tap the image of a button on the touch screen. Lighter. Harder. This time, drag the button image up. Now, drag it down. Drag to the left. Now to the right.

Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of it. Just about the time we decide to switch things up again.

Bop it. Twist it. Pull it. When entering your birth date, be sure to include four digits for the year. Use only two digits for the year. Put in your phone number, separating each group of digits with hyphens. Do not use hyphens. Enter your last name first. Now put your first name first. You’ve taken too long, so, for security reasons, you will be blocked from the account.

Prove you’re human. Prove you’re who you claim to be. Speak, so we can identify your voice. Show us your thumb print. Smile for our facial recognition software. Let us take a small sample of your DNA. Do the limbo. Show us how low you can go. Break your back. Nod your head. Shake it. Give yourself whiplash. Gyrate. Contort. Do the Saint Vitus’ dance. Clap your hands. Put your heart and soul into it. Pump your fist. Pledge allegiance. Sing an anthem. Pray. Bow. Blow a kiss. Drop and give us forty. Crawl.

Justicia para las Mujeres

By Mónica Martínez Escobar

Medium: Photography

By Marcos Zaragoza

When I close my eyes, it’s hard

It’s hard to fall asleep

I see you slipping away Fighting, fighting through your pain

But I’m okay knowing you’re not hurting anymore

I remember the stuff we used to do together And I just hang on to those memories

And anytime I’m in those places without you, I just take a moment to myself and remember you Because right there, in that moment, in that memory, we’re together again

There are faces I see, and I see parts of you in them

Their eyes, the way they laugh, the stories they tell about you

That’s when I really feel like you’re still around

And even though you’re gone, I keep my memories close to me, Because that’s where we’re still together

The Final Plain

By James Mcloughlin

“They’ll be here soon.”

“You don’t know. They aren’t as accurate as they say. It’s not so easy to find a dying man in weather like this.”

The dying man lay in the snow in an opaque and swirling landscape. His lips were cracked and purple. His friend crouched beside him. Two times already the friend had urged him onward. But now it was no use. The man’s strength had failed and soon his life would be gone too. They knew this could happen when they started out across the glacier. Each had heard the stories from those who got so far and turned back, those who had lost others. There were first hand accounts and old wives’ tales, direct recollections and whispered rumours. They knew it wouldn’t be an easy journey, but hard journeys are worth it when what you are escaping is what they were escaping. It was no land for men now.

“Drink this,” said the friend, offering water.

“What’s the point?”

“Drink this, then,” said the friend, offering a hip flask. The man took it and drank and grunted, handing it back.

“That’s good stuff. I wish I’d had more of it while I could.”

“It wouldn’t have been worth it. You know how they would have reacted.”

“Yeah well fuck them. That’s what I should have said. We should never have followed their tune.”

The friend grimaced and looked out across the plain. He thought it was like living in a snow globe but then he had never seen a snow globe so bleak before. They were always happy things. Happy people in a happy place, happy in their cocoons. It wasn’t quite the same when you were living it. When the snow was melting on your lips, chapped in the wind. His heart was aching because soon he’d have to leave his friend, before they arrived for the cleanup.

“I never got to do all of the things I wanted to do,” said the dying man. He wasn’t whining or regretful when he said this; his voice was flat and expressionless, as though he were acknowledging something that didn’t concern him. “I was going to ride horses, you know. That’s something I always wanted to do, because I was scared of them but I saw how graceful they could be. So I wanted to get past the fear to the grace.”

“And you never rode a horse?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Why do you think not?” The dying man’s voice took on a bitter tone. “Because it was assessed and analysed and deemed unsafe for the human and cruel to the horse and blah blah blah. So I was never allowed to do it. I wasn’t even allowed to face my fear, because they said it was too dangerous.”

“They can be dangerous, it’s true.”

“So?”

“So you can see why they’d calculate it like that. To stop people from getting injured.”

“But why is that the overriding concern? You know what - I’ve had this conversation too many times already. I’m not having a debate about algorithms as I lay dying. Pass me that hip flask.”

The friend did pass the hip flask. He looked at his watch, an old Casio, no GPS chip. The time was 3:16 am. They had been immobile for 46 minutes and the cleanup machines would be there soon. They had heard differing reports. Sometimes it took them less than an hour. At others, when the storms were particularly bad, it took longer, more like three hours. But they always found what they needed to find and did what they were programmed to do. And that was why he needed to leave. As if sensing his friend’s thoughts, the dying man propped himself up on his elbows.

“You should go now.”

“I can wait a bit longer.”

“I don’t want you to go but you need to go.”

“I know. A bit longer.”

The friend took the dying man’s hand and squeezed it. It was purple and orange from the cold. He rubbed it between his hands to warm it up.

“I’m sorry it came to this,” said the dying man, blinking snowflakes from his eyelids.

“It’s not your fault. There was nothing else to do.”

“I know, but I’m sorry all the same.”

“In a different time, maybe we could have chosen differently. You could have ridden your horses. I could have tended my allotment. We could have drank more of this,” he said, passing the hip flask to the dying man for the final mouthful.

The dying man sank back down from his elbows, curling up now as he pressed the hip flask to his lips and felt the last trickle of warmth sting its way down to his belly. The warmth was welcome but it wasn’t enough. The storm was thickening, and he thought it would be a good time to go now.

“Before you go I want you to put an end to me.”

“What? No.”

“I don’t want to be alive when they get to me.”

“I can’t. I can’t do that. I’m sure those horror stories aren’t true anyway.”

“I don’t care about the stories. I want to die by the hand of man.”

“But you’re my friend. What kind of friend can do that? I won’t do it.”

“This is exactly what a friend would do. Mercy. Doing something they don’t want to do because it is the right thing to do.”

“Who says it’s the right thing?”

“Me. A man should have the right to decide certain things about his life. And death should be one of those things. I would do it to myself if I could.”

“I don’t know.”

The friend had stood now and paced and circled, running his hands through his snow-wet hair. He looked again across the plain and tried in vain to imagine that he saw lights there. Warmth. For a minute he indulged the fantasy of propping the dying man on his shoulder and dragging him to his salvation. But there were no lights. Only the white of the plain dimming to the black of the horizon.

“Please,” said the dying man. “Please don’t leave me to them.”

It was such a small and desperate voice that the friend could argue no longer. He took a few more moments to accustom himself to the idea of what he had to do but in reality it had been decided from the moment of request. The friend knelt back down beside the dying man.

“Ok. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. This is a gift.”

“What a world it is where such a thing can be considered a gift.”

“It could always be, I think.”

“You’re right. Okay.”

“Before you do it I want to tell you that I love you. I know you already know because we have been friends for twenty years but I never said it before. I love you.”

“And I love you too.”

“Ok. Do it now. No more words.”

And the friend did it, pressing his hands down over the dying man’s mouth and looking away as the tears froze on his cheeks. When it was done he sobbed and cried out across the plain but his pain was incorporated by the wind and made anonymous. He stood and began to run. In the distance behind him flashed the red lights of the cleanup machines as they approached the dead man. In the distance ahead of him he could see nothing, but he went towards it anyway.

Return

By Jordan Hanson

Last time I flew home

The ice fishers camped in tents

On the grey white mass Of Lake Mendota.

Now, early May, boats zip across green Speckled water.

It’s a long walk to the economy lot, Suitcase bumping against my heels. I pass the limp little body Of a robin, laid out on the sidewalk, A funeral arrangement of pink and white Blossoms slightly wilted.

I close my eyes for a moment And think about the colors

That weren’t there a week ago When I left in the cool morning. They’re like a consolation:

Sure, the world’s gone to hell

And you’re lonely

And you hate your job And tomorrow is Monday

But look

We turned up the vibrance for your return. Redbuds burst into magenta next to the cement parking garage. I drive with my windows down Past blurring verdant fields or trees And try not to cry.

The countdown restarts, as it always does Until I see you again

And home doesn’t feel like the right word Without you there.

The sun sets later than it did a week ago

Over my empty bed

But the frogs rehearsed their lullaby.

The sun sets later than it did a week ago

Over my empty bed

But the frogs rehearsed their lullaby.

I fall asleep in Wisconsin, Dream of your arms around my waist, Of birds winging over the Blue Ridge Mountains

With pink and white petal feathers.

Plagas de la Vida

By Kristina Solomita

Medium: Oil Paint on Wood Panel

My Love, My Love, My Love

By Veronica Rosemary

My love does not span galaxies, But it is everything for you to be.

It does not touch outside of a universe or paint itself in the streaks of a dying star.

My love stays grounded, on this planet, on this earth, never too far.

My love does not leave you; it is a rumble beneath your steps.

It is a flash of heat, a snowflake on your cheek.

It is the weight of the sea, the rush over the shore, the grainy foam on the beach.

My love, if you listen closely, is the flutter of butterfly wings.

My love, if you listen closely, is the ferocious lava, pouring over destroyed things.

My love creates new lands for you to see.

My love rests underneath the crust of the Earth, it trembles in seismic waves, it pleads in echoey caves.

My love is the air in your lungs, seizing, twisting, rushing in a bend

To meet every inch of you, then exhaled before you are starved again.

My love is your mouthed name from my lips, the span on your shoulder blades about to be kissed.

My love is you, satiated and blissed, the first greeting in the early mornings never to be missed.

My love is the very hunger of your stomach, the bottom of the well,

My love will fill you up for all to see and tell.

It is this earth, this poison, this cure, this disease.

My love does not span galaxies, But it is everything for you to be.

Late Night, Listening to Jazz

By Diana Woodcock

with my cats – all electronic devices save the CD player switched off –one piece of the day’s bad news bleeds through from a heavily Palestinian Chicago suburb:

a 71-year-old man attacked one Muslim woman and her six-yearold boy – the woman in critical condition, the boy with twenty-six stab wounds dead. Perhaps, they’ve

said, his actions were triggered by the Israel-Hamas war playing out. I wait in the darkness with my jazz and cats. I meditate on emptiness

till I’m filled to the brim with compassion for the mother and the killer, for all displaced and grieving Palestinians, for the Israelis, for Hamas

and their captives, for the woman who cried to the reporter, I don’t need bread, all I need is to sleep in my own bed, to return to the bombed-out shell of my home

and sleep there in a tent. She cannot bear being sent to an alien land – she is far too old and bent.

Late night, listening to jazz,

the plight of the world chokes like a lump in the throat. I imagine turning into compost among river reeds, long since done raging against the light’s dying, not leaving a trace, finally finding a resting place among ruins and shards. Late night, listening to jazz and my cats purring, I wait

for the morning when I’ll write toward understanding and survival, laying aside all suicidal thoughts, finding words for my unspoken hunger.

Godspeed

By Lucia Angileri

I was never good at endings. Or goodbyes. Or good nights.

I’m great at beginnings. And middles. Man, am I good at those!

But I tend to hold on to things. Too tight, and too long.

Simply because I’m afraid If I let go, that it will shatter, And be swept up and forgotten about in our distant, dimly lit memory.

I am nostalgic for the woman I was yesterday, And this morning. Tomorrow I will miss the woman I was today.

I tear up when I run out of my favourite perfume, And sink into the sidewalk when seasonal drinks discontinue.

My clothes never seem to fit as well as they did last week, And my last poem will always be better than the one I’m writing now.

I’ll never be who I was when I met you, And I will forever yearn for who I was with you.

So, I’m not good at endings.

Let’s call this a “see you later”?

Responsabilidad (Responsibility)

By Analaura Jocol

Medium: Acrylic and Embroidery on Canvas and Fabric, along with found objects

I thought you were a metaphor, But now – I catch you, As you rise above the grass That sings through motion.

I hold your head in my hand, As you wake the summer’s day. You are a listener, no singer, Without a voice you speak In verses written by a feather On the pale side of the leaves, I can read them with my fingers,

I won’t stay long, yet we are so similar, We both have left our garden.

A wildflower on a highway’s shore

By Milena Filipps

Woman At War

By Schuyler Becker

And she wore high heels

On cotton balls

Because stilettos

Should never make a sound

And they told her

Female pain

Is female rage

But they are not the same

For where one is injury

The other is purgatory

And where one asks for forgiveness

The other demands penance;

Eyes a desert

Heart a subway track

Funnel fire in my veins

Before they rust

Heels on tempo

Against the marble

There’s blood

In the grout

Matching the perfume

Under my tongue

Bitten once by

A fool in the night;

I claw at

Invisible walls

Inside my mind

I chew up nightmares

For breakfast

I bleed into my shoes

And tell myself

I’m walking on water

I stare into a void

Until I see stars

In my periphery

Nothing is new enough;

She sees a dynasty on their vines

An absolute disgrace

Of weaponry in her face

She renames herself

The chill before the flame

Nothing but dust to tame

In the kaleidoscope

Of a curated misanthrope

She seizes the occasion

For a worse reputation (There’s red on these soles).

Butterflies Without Wings

By Abiodun Ekundayo

As if we were never friends; flowing rivers diluted into one another. As if...strangers walking past briskly, we forget we once had lovely memories.

Like we never made promises, paper planes and boats; oaths to have our names sail on every tongue. As if we were not once kids standing, foolishly, in front of a mirror; the certainty of years to come staring back at us. Once lost now found yet we pretend we were always on track.

As if we were not once beautiful butterflies without wings, slender palm trees forcefully swayed by the wind, back bent with worries— as if to break we act like life is all bed of roses.

By Oormila V. Prahlad

Medium: Gouache, Distress Inks, and Pens on a Tea Bag

eggshell

By Andrea Wagner

Backwhereyoustarted.

Again.

* Magnus Opus. Incomprehensible Muse. My nothingness comes from me. From you.

Go back to before, where the sickness didn’t spread so much through my stomach, Little girl-boy, you are nothing. You own nothing.

*

I feel sick. It’s my last year of high school and I feel so sick. My hair is long and red, and my eyebrows are waxed perfect. This smile is well practiced, and it damn well better be, with all the years and teasing of braces and retainers.

“Congratulations! You’ve worked so hard!”

“My beautiful daughter, all grown up.”

“You look so pretty!”

I don’t really remember what they said, and it doesn’t matter in the first place.

*

“Smile for the camera, baby!”

She’s seven again, looking back and frowning. This beach is never too hot, and the sunset stays perfectly still, in my mind. Years of orange and pink, every time. Smile, baby. Smile.

“Say you’re a pretty girl, honey.”

I’m a pretty girl honey. I’m an ugly boy baby. Grow my hair long and make me say your words. Click your camera. Smile. Smile big, honey. You’re holding the world in your hands.

*

When I was plucked out from the air, I wonder what mom was thinking I’d be.

Marigolds or sunflowers? Chrysanthemums or calla lilies? My peony brain unfurls with two, one-inch fists. Did you want this? Are you satisfied with your purchase? Baby fingernails look like rosebuds if you squint. And when you look at me now, I wonder.

Am I violets?

Or weeds.

*

I thought they would hurt me. Scissors were taboo until one day I said fuck it. Let’s cut it off then.

Hair is sacred. I was a mirror of promises. The future looks bright when it has long hair and shiny fingernails. It promises children, belonging, Saturday night football and mom yelling at the kids that she’ll kill herself this time, though last time was a bust. My body reflects it all beautifully, and my narcissus preens with promises:

“She has your eyes.”

“She’s so smart.”

She’s hardly an illusion. The mirror pool breaks my knuckles back and I can only sit there, grumble, sit again and smile. Yes mother, you are beautiful. Yes mother. I am you.

I cut my hair and dyed it black. We don’t talk about the mirror anymore.

* What will it feel like?

Living alone.

All my life I’ve looked after you.

Your health, your children, your happiness.

*

Going to the store is such a liberating activity. Any store. Walmart, Target, you name it. As long as they have rows of options and routes, I’m happy.

I spent a long time deciding whether I should buy a lot of things, really. It started with men’s deodorant. OldSpice, naturally. Gradually it became men’s body wash. Boxer briefs were the biggest mental hurdle, and I remember waiting for the right moment, bunching them up, hiding them poorly underneath my other cover items.

It felt criminal. Disgusting. Whatwouldmomsay?

Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to find my clothes after they’ve been washed, and that creeping feeling would sink back, seeping under my skin.

I still buy OldSpice.

I still scurry down aisles, as if I am a great thief, committing a most heinous act.

It’s just soap, isn’t it?

And yet, to me, it feels like everything. *

The room that’s hosted slumber parties and DS marathons is now painted grey, and I haven’t felt this petrified since pissing myself in first grade. Who knew pen pals were such a tricky subject?

Mom had no idea I had a friend in Ann Arbor. She was an online friend, but I was convinced I’d go see her. Seventeen then, twenty-four now. I wonder if she knows how afraid I still am of leaving her. Her face when she realized what I wanted to do. You don’t have to tell me not to go now mom, I’ve got it. I won’t worry you so much. Sorry for stressing you out. Sorry.

*

Just recently I found out I might have a disorder. It’s called dermatillomania, or something like that. It’s basically when you scratch your skin without wanting to. But you keep doing it for some reason. Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.

Something is wrong with my skin but I can’t see it. I know it’s there though. Maybe if I open it up it will heal whole. I’ll heal whole again. Holes heal whole, don’t they? I’m not me anyway. If I could peel out. If I could.

Mom hands me acne spot treatment. Thank you, mom. Thanks.

*

“Why don’t you ever talk to me?”

Mom sits across in the driver’s seat. This isn’t a real conversation, but I can see it when she looks at me.

“What makes you think I don’t want to know what you like, sweetheart? What do you want?”

What do I want?

I…

I want so many things.

I want to be touched and to dance in my living room, the one that will make me happy and feel safe. I want to smile and feel unashamed. To own so many books and have read them all, once, at least. To feel smart, and important, and to have others look up to me. To protect the ones who hurt, even when it hurts.

I want too many things, mom. I could never explain it, and even when I try to, you just look at me, unseeing. Do you see me? When I look at you, can you tell? I think you’d see it if you’d just look at me. Look at me. Look. At.

“I’m tired,” I mumble, before letting out a yawn.

* Today plays out like yesterday, Yet playdates from the past dissipate in my hands. Where did she go? Was she ever there at all? She?

*

A+ Outstanding student.

Adheres to class procedures and listens to instructions. I wish I had a whole class of her. Calm. Obedient. Intelligent. Reserved. Why can’t other children be just like her? She’s so quiet. The most perfect baby in the world. Bubbly. Friendly. I’ve never had a problem with her. Compliant. Submissive. Bark, bitch. Good girl.

Aren’t you proud of me? Isn’t this what you wanted? You never told me, but I figure that there’s nothing better than the best. Right? I’m really going places? You’ll be happy when I make it, yeah? It’ll be okay then, that I don’t have a boyfriend, a husband, or children one two three. It’ll be fine, won’t it? After all, you’re just grateful I’m here.

Right.

*

Finally. I look in the mirror and smile wide. Finally, flat. Finally

She isn’t staring back. My mom. It’s finally someone else. It’s me. It’s me.

I look nothing like mom. In fact, if anything, I think I look a lot like my dad now.

I roll back my shoulders and straighten my spine. Stand tall. Smile. This is me, isn’t it?

Not a costume I’d put on to cheer at football games. Not a figurine dancing on stage. Me.

Breath gets mangled in my throat.

Life had felt so repetitive, and it still does. But I savor these small moments. Moments where I forget how it feels to resent myself. Where I can recall the little girl with long red hair fondly in my mind. She’s happy there. And sometimes, I am too.

*

In high school I couldn’t imagine a future for me.

Well. That sounds bleaker than what I mean.

It’s not that I didn’t think I could achieve great things or whatever.

I thought I was hot shit.

But I didn’t apply anywhere. Not anywhere risky, I mean.

In truth, I have nowhere to go. When I think of my future, all I see is a big, gaping hole. In front of me is the same shell I scurried out from when I was still crawling on my knees. I never left the womb. I stumble wearily, having nowhere to turn.

I have no past.

I know where my parents came from, but I don’t really know them. I hear the stories, but they’re far away. They’re leaving, away from my grasp. Is it me?

I look inwards toward the soul. Nothing. I cannot purge when there is merely vapor in my core. Void-like mass. A black hole eating. Eating everything.

I’m at a 4-way street with the road signs whited out. Beyond those streets are more curves and pathways. Any corner could be right. Maybe. Where do I go?

Which way leads me home?

And how can I know, when I’m not even sure who this is?

* When I peer inside the eggshells, Nothing stares back, No past, no set future, But she isn’t there either. This nothingness bleeds infinites And my mouth is open: Wide.

* Tellmethestory WhereIownsomethingreal. Letyesterdayrestawhile And tomorrow enter in.

In Loving Memory

By Catherine Azevedo

Medium: Colored Pencil on Paper

Fathers have a code

The way thunderheads have a code: Majestic, growing, somewhat dangerous And far far away.

Not everything is put away in the correct place They get worn down by questions that have no answers If they close the door a final time, they are wrong.

Real fathers don’t throw you in a lake to teach you how to swim. That is the work of a man, A stranger with benefits; Over the embarrassing guy who is at the lake Giving you the courage to paddle.

There is rain

There are storms, Always storms, Cracks of lightning you will never hear Flashes your eyes will never see.

You will never speak the same language as your father. Your tongues never work the same, It is a language that has a weight it is best you discover yourself.

By Marc Janssen

Hoarding

By Allison Westlund

It never occurred to me that others could not see through the perfect façade. That name brand clothes, and a “present” mother can fool everyone. That a child dying inside could go completely unnoticed by everyone. Especially by the “present” mother, who refused to see.

When I moved out to get away, my friends were shocked to learn the truth. Even though it was never the whole truth.

“I thought you grew up rich” they would say. And by no means were we poor, which made it hurt more.

Every time Hoarders came on, I would feel shame. Knowing that I was getting a glimpse of our future. As the years went on the piles of stuff got worse. Until that future was the present.

The piles of stuff grew until a path of walkways was all I knew. The bathroom could no longer make me feel clean. The kitchen became putrid and uninviting. The backyard became a junkyard.

I could have had a normal living situation. I could have had a normal childhood. I could have been a normal child. I was not a normal child.

I am not a normal adult.

And You Began to Slip Away

By Jordan Jones

Medium: Watercolor and Acrylic on Paper

Visitations

By Donna Pucciani

I like to think you’ll visit me after you die, my dear, hanging in the air like a dust mote, making the morning shine, or grumbling from your recliner at the television newscaster who can never quite get the question out.

Will you appear in one corner of the bedroom, your old plaid pajamas empty now, a floating specter of nocturnal romance?

Perhaps you will leap out and yell “surprise” though you were never one for surprises, a creature of habit. More likely you’ll be watching Jeopardy, with your sage-like mutterings.

Maybe you will be the ghost who peels the spuds in the kitchen, or loading the dishwasher when I least expect it. I will hear the clink of coffee cups, the jangle of knives and forks, and I will shiver uncontrollably, knowing that you are here and not here.

How shall I prepare for your resurrected wanderings? Do you long to be still, to be free of me, happy to abandon our lifetime of domesticity for celestial rest?

Is the beatific vision all you ever wanted, and I only a diversion, trying to do crosswords alone, as you hitchhike all the way to heaven’s gate?

By Cleo Griffith

To all of those with whom I share any part of my soul, my mind, my heart, my thoughts, how can I express my joy enough?

You are my anchors, my delights, my rainbows, a wild plain of flowers, an ocean of wonders, the universe of mystery, so much.

You’ve awakened passions of all sorts, desires and longings, and secured the answers to why I am here, just to know you is enough.

So thank you my creatures, human and others, my life is so full because you exist, may each of you find your destiny as I have: so much!

By David Agyei-Yeboah

Oswald was definitely one of the troubled ones, from his wide-eyed glare at gloom as it wrapped his torso deep to the sturdy trappings of hopelessness on his feet as he walked off the corridor on graduation day. He’d failed to make valedictorian. Just three decimal places short. He’d changed his major from Business to History, settling in to a new flurry of straight As, reminiscent of high school. But it wasn’t enough. He still didn’t make valedictorian. He had topped his classes often, been called out for excellence on countless occasions by his professors but still couldn’t manifest this one dream he’d nursed since receiving his admission letter. It took him back to junior high school when he constantly felt second best to Aminah with the locked hair that always popped bubblegum during recess. She never gave him room to even share number one. Even then, he was still praised for brilliance, still looked on with respect. And even now, he was adored by his faculty –their true unicorn, their luminous brigade.

He walked past the empty seats at sundown, past this year’s valedictorian, lanky Malcolm from the Statistics department, who was huddled around a mini table filled with confectioneries and flowers with his girlfriend and family. Oswald managed a hearty congratulations, which barely escaped his chapped lips. Then kicked pavements when he had floundered out of everyone’s sight. Graduation had ended three hours ago but a particular image had been hounding him: Malcolm, clad in mulberry, beaming as he hugged the Chancellor of the University on the podium earlier that day; the whole arena reverberating in ruptured praise for the star of the graduating class. Their new titan.

Beads of sweat broke out on his nose as he paused at a signboard: ‘Welcome to excellence. Everywhere else is a dead end’, emblazoned in saffron. Dead end. He let that phrase sit with him for a while in the silence. Then a thought suddenly leapt from his gut, like hot vomit rushing into the mouth. Maybe I know I should be happy that I still got the award for overall best student in my faculty but it still does not feel enough. A tear dropped. That the idea that we are capable of so much more haunts me. Another coursed his cheek, this one full-bodied. Call it healthy ambition marinated with envy. Call it childhood wounds unhealed. Call it angels of achievement and demons of self-loathe in close combat. Call it desire gone wrong. Call it undoing. He found an empty wooden bench nearby and buried himself into it. And sobbed. And sobbed. And sobbed. Maybe underneath all this layer of achievement people see, I’m still a broken record. A sheltered broken record. A fucking broken record! After a few minutes, he gathered himself, wiped his cheeks and rose. A frown contoured his face. Call it what it is. Bullshit!

Judgmental balloons in psychedelia

By Mayank Kejriwal

Medium: Hybrid-Digital (oil pastels on paper, followed by neon digital enhancement)

By Jane Blanchard

A poem, published as expected, may afterward remain in mind if something needs to be corrected.

The poem is again subjected to work of eye and ear combined; the fix is published as expected.

This version is to be collected, till other goings-over find another thing to be corrected.

The latest edit, re-inspected, fits in the book, quite well-designed, which is soon published as expected.

The book is then itself dissected by readers more or less inclined to notice something uncorrected.

That poem has not been perfected. Why not move on, leave it behind, once-, twice-, thrice-published as expected? Perhaps the thing could be corrected.

The Happy Girlfriend’s Guide to Cleaning the Apartment

By Meghan Proulx

Let’s begin by putting on our rubber gloves and, more importantly, our smiles. Any girlfriend can keep her apartment clean, but a happy girlfriend makes her home sparkle. Now pick up the rugs. Fold them neatly into isosceles triangles so they don’t form unsightly lumps. Remember, a loved rug gives the feet a hug.

Next, run the vacuum over the floors, making straight lines all the way to the kitchen. Stay here a while and wipe down all the appliances. Do take care to scoop out all the blackened crumbs from the bottom of the oven. As I always say, your boyfriend will be love’n a scrubbed stove and oven. Repeat this whimsical rhyme of mine to yourself as you scrub. Feel free to laugh at the playful turn of words. Laughing is always recommended while cleaning because when you laugh, you are less likely to be grimacing. Grimacing causes fine lines and wrinkles.

Use your lotioned and gloved hands to delicately empty the vacuum’s dust cavity. It will be full of dirty little treasures. You will find so much of your hair in the dust cavity that it is alarming. Go ahead and rush to the bathroom mirror, quickly now, just to check for bald spots.

Yes, it appears that most of your hair is still on your head. You certainly aren’t balding. Or are you? A little in the back perhaps. Look away darling, just wear a cap when you go out. But since you’re already here in the bathroom, you might as well clean the sink. It’s coated in toothpaste, little beard hairs, and what appears to be black freckles of mascara. This will not do. Time to tighten those rubber gloves!

The sink can be a contentious arena in even the most harmonious of relationships. But especially in yours because, well, like the rest of your apartment, it is too tiny. My word! I have never in all my illustrious years seen a young couple spend so many hours in a confined space. It’s like watching two mice chase their tails in a matchbox all day. You live here, you work here, you do pilates in the living room while he uses the recumbent bike in the bedroom. He gets a larger portion of the apartment for his own personal use because, of course, he makes much more money than you do. He pays most of the rent while you work part-time and cobble together a DIY MFA from writing lectures on the internet.

How very admirable that you think you will be a writer one day. In the meantime though, you are still poor and insignificant so you might as well do most of the cleaning around the house. It’s only fair. But it is also completely natural for you to start feeling unrestrained negative emotions toward your boyfriend as you stare into the sticky, black hole of the sink basin. Because, well, you both use the sink don’t you? And yet he never cleans it, not even once. Not even when you went out of town for a few weeks that one time. You came back and the sink was so filthy there was a sort of moss growing on it. But, exhale. Give your boyfriend a break. There are no bad intentions; he simply doesn’t notice that his little beardies are all over the sink, stuck to the mirror, and clogging up the drain.

Just breathe and smile, scrub and laugh. Because remember, a clean sink turns a sneer into a wink.

But if you’re finding it challenging to giggle the rage away, I understand. You believe that deep down he actually does notice the hairs. That he’s just waiting for you to wipe the sink clean and stick that foul plastic device down the drain. You know the one. It’s called “The Snake” and it was $3.99 at the hardware store. You slither it down the sink hole and then pull it up, wrenching out all the hair and clumps and foul globs that fall down the drain or possibly bubble up from hell.

Try this tip: Just walk up to your boyfriend and kindly ask him for help. You’ll say, “Hey, can you please be more careful when you shave? Your beard hairs get all over the sink and into my tub of face lotion. Then, when I put my moisturizer on in the morning, I look in the mirror and find that I, like you, have a patchy little beard on my face.”

This is a decent start but he will be insulted since you suggested he has a patchy little beard. Go ahead and apologize for that. Your apology will leave him confused but acquiesced. He will be curious. He will scratch his face and say, “Actually, I think it’s your hair that’s clogging the drain.”

Your hair? Why you hadn’t thought of that. It’s true that lately you’ve been shedding like a Maine Coon. It’s also true that your hair is much longer and curlier than his and so thick that you can floss with it. Fight the urge to tell him you’ve been brushing your hair over the garbage bin in the kitchen for some time now. Be honest, you only did that once. Concede defeat and see what happens.

You’ll say, “More of my hair may be going down the drain but your small hairs clump together to form a dense net inside the drain that my hairs can’t penetrate.”

Ok. That’s not exactly how plumbing works but ultimately he will agree to shave in the bathtub from now on and you will stop brushing your hair over the sink which is strange anyways.

Now that you’ve finished cleaning the apartment, don’t forget to unfold the rugs and lay them gently down upon the floor like angel’s wings. Remember, a rugged floor is never a bore.

Now that your home is sparkling and your significant other is compliant and hairless, I think it’s time that you stop cleaning. Even if you see a spot that you missed, just leave it. It’s time to take yourself on a diverting stroll. You earned it. Take off your rubber gloves and get outside. Look at a flower, consider the birds, find shapes in the clouds and know that you are the only one who sees them. Reduce your worries and be care-free. Think of a story and write it down in the Notes app on your phone. Yes, there you go! You’ve come up with a very clever idea. Even I like it and you know very well that I am rarely pleased.

After 30 minutes of enlightened strolling, return to your immaculate apartment as

a changed woman. You will find that after that small confrontation with your boyfriend, followed by a brisk walk, you now have wisdom and perspective. A fog has suddenly been lifted from your eyes. Perhaps that fog was caused by the noxious vapors in the heavy chemicals you used to clean the oven. But no matter, this fresh air has helped you realize that cleaning makes you happy. Yes, very happy indeed. Doesn’t it add so much meaning to your insignificant life? And don’t you think it feels good to be of service to your boyfriend? Go check on him, why don’t you. Oh my, it appears that something is very wrong. Your boyfriend is malfunctioning. He’s in the bathtub and not only did he cleanly shave his beard hairs, but he sloughed off his head hairs and even the curly ones on his legs. His arms are bare too and, I’m terrified to say, his eyebrows are now nonexistent. Touch him. He feels like a jelly bean. Well this is not the result I was hoping for. And how about you? How are you doing? Oh no, don’t do that. You’re taking the razor from him, you’re stepping into the bathtub. No, stop that, go back to listening to me. Wasn’t it nice? Wasn’t it simple when all we did was clean, clean, clean, write a little, clean, dote on boyfriend, clean? No? Not your favorite, you say? Perhaps that walk wasn’t as good for you as I thought it was. No more walking for you. You’ve returned to this pit of squalor with a bit too much perspective. Well that’s fine, it’s not too late. Come back to me, I’m here, resting dogeared on your bedside table. Open me. Read me. Let me guide you. Very good, you’ve picked me up. That’s better. Oh no. You’re filling the tub. Oh disgusting, it’s full of all his flimsy little hairs. He’s getting out now. That’s better. Ok let’s all go back to normal. Let’s use this bathtub full of hot water and scrub the tub. No, don’t do that. Don’t tear out my pages and throw them into the water. It is so very hot! No, not my spine, not my precious spine!

By Oormila V. Prahlad

Hidden smiles

Medium: Gouache, Distress Inks, and Pens on a Tea Bag

By Troy Nethercott

This is about a painter—the portrait of an artist who never painted a portrait in his life. He was eighteen when he came to America, traveling in steerage on a Hamburg-America line ship, with $25 in his pocket and the address of a cousin in Little Odessa. His cousin helped him find a room in a boarding house near Washington Square. It was full of Russians, Greeks, Armenians and Poles, immigrants trying to build new lives in America.

He made his way as a dockhand, a carpenter, a house painter. Painting was the job he liked most since he’d been to art school back home. He liked having a paint brush in his hand. When he could afford it, he began taking art classes again. He went to the Artists League where he met Franz Kline and Motherwell, and joined the abstract expressionist movement.

Today, the painter is ninety-two. He has dementia. It plays tricks with his mind. At night, he travels through time, dreaming about the ships they used to unload, and the nights with his friends at the Cedar bar or George’s, drinking and arguing passionately about art. He loses track of what’s dream and what’s real. Is he really back in his cold-water flat on 10th Street, or is he in his compound upstate seventy years later.

At daybreak, he notices the ghostly light seeping around the curtains. He sits up in bed. It hurts to sit up. Six months ago, he broke his hip and it hasn’t fully healed. Walking hurts. He needs to pee. Somehow, he always needs to pee.

His dementia has gotten worse since the operation; he needs a full-time caretaker. His granddaughter, Elena, takes care of him. He calls out to her and she helps him into thebathroom, the old painter unsteady on his feet. He leans on her. She gets him into position then steps out. He manages to pull down his sweat pants and his diaper. He pees for a long time.

“You OK, gramps? Is your diaper wet?” Elena says from the door.

“No, daughter, I’m fine,” he says.

All women are daughter now. She’s used to it.

In the kitchen—he sits at the table, she makes coffee. He’s entranced by the golden light flooding filling the room. To the painter, light is magical. He’s spent his whole life trying to understand the alchemy of light, trying to fix it on canvas with paint. Someday, I’ll get it right, he thinks. Someday.

They sit silently over coffee. After a while, Elena places two boxes of cereal on the table. “Which one do you want today?”

The old man looks at the boxes: Cheerios, Special K. He looks back at her, his face blank. She pours Cheerios into a bowl. Pours the milk. Sets a spoon beside the bowl. The old man looks at the bowl and the spoon. Some days he remembers how to feed himself, other days he does not. Elena moves to the chair beside him and feeds him, one spoonful at a time. Some days he’s like a baby, she thinks. She’s thought about that before—how

dementia slowly turns a grown man back into a child who can’t take care of himself. A baby in diapers fed by his mother, now an old man in diapers fed by his granddaughter. That’s the circle of life, all right, she thinks. When he’s done eating, she wipes milk from his chin and brushes his hair.

“Good job, gramps,” she says.

Mid-morning—she wheels him into the studio and opens the curtains to let in the light. Elena watches him pick up a brush and sit in front of the painting he’s worked on for weeks.

The old man seems to come back to life in his studio. After a few minutes, she can see a spark in his eyes again. Watching this small miracle never ceases to move her.

“Daughter, where are my paints? All my colors are gone! Except for this fucking yellow here...” he says. “What was I thinking? God-damned cadmium yellow,” he says, hurling the tube across the room.

“Right here like always,” she says, patiently wheeling over the cart full of acrylics arranged by color, his brushes standing in jars; palette knives, pencils, all the tools of his trade.

The painter settles in, squeezing knobs of color onto his palette.

Elena looks at the canvas—the swirling shapes might be sails or maybe clouds, slashed by ribbons of amber and gold. There’s something ethereal about this one, a sense of light coming through the clouds, she thinks. His earlier work had been dense and dark and brooding, a riot of shapes emerging from darkness. The new work is brighter, stripped down to essentials. It’s warmer, she thinks. More human, somehow.

He has a handful of paintings in the museums. Sixty years earlier, critics had placed him in the vanguard of post-war abstract painters. Then came pop, minimalism, conceptual art, land art, performance art. Many avant garde movements have come and gone since the heyday of abstract painting. “Joan Mitchell was the best of us,” he often says. “But no one took women seriously back then.”

Over time, he fell out of fashion. Now, he was now considered a minor contributor to Abstract Expressionism, a footnote in art history, compared to more famous colleagues like Pollack, Rothko, or de Kooning. Most of the art world thought he was already dead.

In the studio, he would be lost in his work for hours. Forgotten or not, he was still driven to make things, even at ninety-two.

Elena returns to the studio mid-day, bringing her grandfather a sandwich for lunch. He never wants to eat. She often has to force him to drink an Ensure when he won’t eat solid food. He’s rail thin. “I’m just a bag of bones,” he often jokes.

Elena looks at the painting again—he’s introduced some blue between the yellow shapes. Maybe sky peeking through clouds? Or is it water? she wonders. Whatever it’s meant to be—and perhaps it’s pure abstraction—the blue makes the yellow more radiant.

The golden shapes pop off the canvas now. She sees that with each pass, it gets better. It’s thrilling for her to watch her grandfather work, to see a painting come to life, to evolve. He really is a master, she thinks.

Elena is a painter, too. After RISD, she lived in Brooklyn a few years. Her last shit-heel boyfriend cheated on her with another woman, the shit-heel before that had dumped her for another man. She was taking a break from shit-heels.

None of the galleries liked the paintings she was making and she was broke. She’d been happy to retreat to her grandfather’s compound near Hudson. At first, she resented taking care of him...washing him, feeding him, changing his diapers. It was too much. But in time, she grew to care more deeply about the old man. She realized that caring for him gave her a sense of purpose. It was the first unselfish act of her life. It was the first unselfish act of her life.

Now, late in the afternoon, the painter takes a final look at his painting.

“I’ll need a fresh canvas tomorrow, daughter,” he says.

“Is it done?”

Is any artwork ever done? he wonders. You let it go when you can’t make it any better.

“As done as it will ever be,” he says.

“What shall we call it?”

He’s stopped giving them titles and numbers them instead. Numbers are neutral, he says.

You look at the painting as just a pure image.

“What number was the last one?” he says.

“Seventy-six.”

“Untitled #77 it is, I guess.”

“I think it’s quite beautiful,” she says.

“Thank you, Elena.”

It’s the first time he’s called her by her name in six months. Elena was sure he’d forgotten it. She’d gotten used to his generic “daughter,” of being lumped in with everyone else. But, at least for this moment, he sees her for who she is—Elana, his grand-daughter. After he passed away, five weeks later, she would think back to that moment in the studio when he remembered her name... she’d treasure it for the rest of her life.

In the studio, the light is fading, the day drawing in. Soon it would be dark.

“I think I’ll rest for a spell,” he says.

He puts his brush down. Elena helps him onto the sofa. The old man settles in, staring out into the studio. He doesn’t look the pictures, he looks at the fading light, another long night will close around him soon. Elena sees the light in his eyes going

out—the real person hidden away again, buried over by the disease that is slowly eating him alive, slowly making him disappear. Someday the light will go out forever, and he’ll be gone. And then what will I do with my life? she wonders.

Army Sleep Technique

By Sara Collie

Even in open warfare soldiers drift soundly asleep once they master this technique, the video declares.

I am scrolling on my phone again, looking for answers.

Two minutes is all it takes! No more sleepless nights!

Despite my doubts, I follow orders, 4 a.m. having long since lost its charms.

Arms at your sides, the voice instructs, now, release the tension in your muscles one by one, starting at your temples.

I barely manage to soften my jaw before my body starts fighting back, doubling down in an old familiar protest.

I try to picture a gentle light sweeping through my limbs like the one on the screen. I, too, would like to learn how to glow on the inside, but it’s no good.

Another offering from the algorithm imposes itself on my inner eye, it has been playing there on repeat for weeks.

The computer simulation shows an animated asteroid colliding with the earth: the moment of impact the unstoppable aftermath the shockwaves of red hot lava rising up spilling out over everything sending us all to oblivion in a matter of minutes every single time.

As I watch the waves ripple out I cannot deny that I feel drowsier. I cannot deny the weight of my own body

pulling me down into the mattress, deep into sleep.

In the last few moments I am ablaze and then gone. A good little soldier, another battle won.

By Marcos Zaragoza

Medium: Digital Art Guardian

By Pacella Chukwuma Eke

The day my father hunted down your language from my tongue, there was a splash of blackness in our fairytale. History says the bomb that turned our ancestral home to dust was a parcel sent by your clan. It was there his grandmother became part martyr, part food, for monsters birthed by the war. He fears the past isn’t behind us, that his nightmares are a progression of my generation clipped by your own; I have always known the accuracy of tribal bonding to be as thin as a princess in a pumpkin ball. People begin to carry pot-holed hearts, carved by the concept of vengeance, and their offsprings bear the curses of their parents’ distrust. In another world, where countrymen aren’t so nostalgic about hate, our love doesn’t flicker. When we collide, what is there to fancy in the world’s gaze, or perhaps the language written on the tone of our tongues?

All this is to say we can shapeshift to sky lords— creatures envied by constellations, lovers embracing the sun in diversity. We can faith our lives on the other’s palm, unafraid of the crisis our pedigree has harboured for centuries. And when we fall, our bodies become mass enough to bridge an inherited emptiness. To fill up this hollow, with wings wider than a regenerating colony of weed, between us.

And after the fall, there would be no need for maps to draw our borders, our homes. For in the beginning was love, not boundaries— bodies dancing to the stillness of the wind. The collection of purity before the cracks.

Should the darkness that stole our ancestors come back to make a hollow out of us, we wouldn’t have empty spaces to grant it passage for another wreckage. This forbidden love is how we bridge what is left of our humanity.

Mirror Images

By Andrea Wagner

I’ve spent so long in front of this cheap, white-bordered mirror that leans against the bedroom wall.

It’s not productive.

I’m not gaining anything when I stare at the spots across my face and scrape the skin that collects in heaps on cheeks and squish the fat that is but isn’t there—doesn’t have to be there—might not be one day, but I’m not sure.

Why does it matter, right?

I wish I knew what I look like, what others see; Bones and tissue vibrate underneath paper-thin skin and I worry so, so much. What is it that stares back, looking through me?

The image only blinks, and I’m alone.

Voyeuristic eyes can look, but they can’t exist within these blue-green, spider veins that appear in certain lights.

I’m alone, with my thoughts and with my mirror, and no one can ever climb their way inside.

“There were no signs” By Will Roberds-King

I would pretend it didn’t exist. To acknowledge it made others uncomfortable. I pushed it back down. Poured icy guilt over the boiling mass. Pushed it all down harder and harder until it was as dense as osmium.

Suppressed until the fibers of my spirit snapped. Frayed threads snagged and knotted as I fell apart. That roiling black tar bubbled out of my mouth. Left a burning hole in my lungs.

Cancerous bile comes out and spills onto the page. After the ink dries I fold, stuff, stamp it. Send it to you, return-to-sender.

Staff Favorites

Art

Plagas de la Vida

Kristina Solomita

Poetry

The Plums will Bloom Again

Jesús Ramón Villalba Gastélum

Fiction

Shadow Being Suzy Eynon

Nonfiction

Daucus Carota

Ari Koontz

Hybrid eggshell

Andrea Wagner

Acknowledgments

Launching a Penumbra edition is a team effort, and it would not have been possible without the help of many people.

Our gratitude first goes to the Department of English for being the foundation from which Penumbra has grown. Thank you to Dr. John Wittman, the department chair, for his invaluable guidance and support of the journal and Dr. Tony Perrello, our faculty advisor, for promoting innovation and a strong work ethic that allowed us to bring the journal to life.

This publication would not have been possible without the hard work, guidance, and artistic vision of Schuyler Becker and Allison Westlund, Penumbra’s co-editors-in-chief. We would also like to thank our senior editors Autumn Andersen, Brittany Landon, Essence Saunders, and Andrea Wagner for their advice and contributions. A special thanks to Catherine Azevedo, our Reviews Editor, for continual support throughout the creation of this journal. Lastly, we extend our gratitude to our team managers and graduate students who dedicated themselves to providing invaluable assistance and hard work: Kevin Alkhas, Martina Bekasha, Paul Bonfiglio, Lauren Krone, Marcio Maragol, Richard Rubio, and Mary Worthington.

We are also grateful to Stan Prints, Kory Twaddle, and the rest of the University Art Gallery team for their exemplary work and support.

Finally, we extend our heartfelt appreciation to Dean of Humanities Dr. James Tuedio, Provost Dr. Richard Ogle, Interim President Dr. Susan E. Borrego, and those not mentioned for their continuous support throughout this process: thank you for helping make Penumbra possible.

Cover Art: “Reach for the Stars” by Crystal Lopez All rights revert to the contributors. Penumbra is indexed in the Humanities International Index. Content © 2024

Penumbra Department of English California State University, Stanislaus One University Circle Turlock, CA 95382

Penumbra@csustan.edu Peumbraonline.com