the galery spring 2025
G allery the
Volume 39, Issue 2 Spring 2025
Editors
Editors-in-Chief
Shawna Alston
Paige Foltz
Art Editor
Logan Mischke
Poetry Editors
Ash Pyle
Lauren Mullaney
Prose Editor Sydney Shoulders
Publicity Editor
Lulu Gri n
ank you so much to everyone who made this a fantastic semester, including the following, who helped assemble the magazine!
Irene Straw Elena Murphy
Cover Art
Bedroom
EmilyLarsen
seethefullworkonpage52
Contents
Ode to Afong Moy
Autopsies
Faded Self
A Helpless, Glorious Moment
Adjacent
A Walk
e Lake
Pneumatocysts
our love is a catalpa hyperbolas escaping to the jamestown ferry Giants
e Loudness of the Gaze
Goodbye september!
Two Oranges
Summer Lotus
accepting Nature Victim
love letter to concrete THE CITY OF DIS
Vital Signs
Melting Hourglasses
Atticus
Dementia: Ballad of the Breaking Mind
Where all the trees go
Interior of Andrew’s Hall my eyes are cursed
Insight at the Moment the Heart Stopped american pastoral
As the Miller told his Tale Paperboy’s Morning Route.
Swordmaking
A Free Verse Sonnet for a Man Who Must Perish
You’ll be sorry when I’m dead What time do the doors lock on Wednesdays?
Fenrir
Email from a Stranger from Tashirojima
Sweet Tooths and Cigarettes
Crim Dell Triptych
Pierrot the Clown Watches his New Favorite Show Sea of Belonging
College Creek
mulberry anniversary e Zig Zag Fence Harvested garden of eden
Bedroom
104A with you
Contributors’ Notes
Editors’ Note
Crystal Wang
Sasha Rinkevich
Rob Hochstetter
Dativa Eyembe
Lauren Mullaney
Neil Dongre
Alexandra Hill
Julia Peavey
Eden Leavey
Elizabeth Walker
Mia Kilburn
Shane Lea
Catherine Storke
Srinidhi Lakshminarayanan
Isabella Tian
Elise Howe
Elise Engelen
Lydia Wang
JP Heil
Damien Kanner-Bitetti
Elena Murphy
Matira Schwab
Andrew McKee
Julia Peavey
Emily Larsen
Elise Howe
Nora Yoon
Leila Cottin-Rack
Sydney Tamsett
Neil Dongre
Nora Yoon
Shawna Alston
Sydney Tamsett
Eden Leavey
Arden Pentlicki
Charlie Ciccoretti
Lucy Loudon
Annika Griggs
André Adams
Lauren Mullaney
Emmett Weiss
Lydia Wang
Mia Kilburn
Ash Pyle
Kendall Pade
Emily Larsen
Foltz
Ode to Afong Moy
I rst issue an apology formal, heartfelt, angered for all they did and all we failed to remember
I issue an apology for you, for myself, for the unseen women like you, paraded with the mermaids and the narwhals
I imagine you want to be remembered, or not, regardless, not like this, amidst their vases, oriental rugs, orchid ower in porcelain, Afong Moy, e Chinese Lady
I do wonder about your mother and your father did you have sisters, did you remember at the end of it all?
Do you remember the sweet smell of your mother’s hair, the gravel of your father’s voice, scratching how meimei, jiejie would stick to your hip
Remember Guăngzhōu? e way words laid at on your tongue, low in your throat I remember Fúzhōu. It cuts o abruptly in the middle of phrases
When I rst touched down on the golden mountain, I screamed I screamed so loud, but you were probably quiet stepping o the boat
I didn’t adjust, did you?
Food used to be warm — sān cài yī tāng I lived in the country so the air was green not so much here, more steel grey
Did you taste the air much? Or did the staleness of their glass box linger on your clothes, out of style and bright enough to hurt?
I don’t know what happened to you in the end. You died I know that for certain, you lived and then you died.
I’m sorry that is all I know there is more… there is always more.
— Crystal Wang
Autopsies
e dust settles and the ink speckles my hand like stars. I rip the wound open and examine it, again and again and again and again
I’ll look, touch, get up close.
I’ll perform autopsies, re ections, revisions.
Documentation gives solace; diagnosis gives closure.
Now I am left with the evidence. it is up to me to make something of it — to make myself of it to nd myself in the pieces.
I’ll kick up the dust, let the ink run —
because each autopsy brings closer the speckled constellations — the wound resolutions.
— Sasha Rinkevich
Faded Self
Rob Hochstetter Acrylic Pastel
A Helpless, Glorious Moment
Helen of Troy was in town
I saw her at a stoplight on Merrimac Trl
In those helpless, glorious seconds
I revelled in our brief and ancient romance
And I watched, devastated as the light changes and she led her thousand ships to war with my heart, still hot in her cup holder
— Dativa Eyembe
Adjacent
Lauren Mullaney
Photography
A Walk
In the end, night covers all –it is, I think, the rmest hug, the owner of the keenest eyes like lamplights all in a row
that ash upon the starry eyes not much is as light as a hug, the rmest owner of them all are these lamplights in a row
they stand like knights of old, the thin rm line against the dark which cannot touch, & cannot hug those prisoners in a solemn row –
I trace everyone’s steps the path of ancient, steady brick. My eyes are full of the soft stars. ey all die out one by one in a row
— Neil Dongre
The Lake
by Alexandra Hill
One day, in her best dress, she dove into the lake, and felt the cool water wash away the sun.
As she fell, she closed her eyes, because there is nothing much interesting about the bottom of the lake, with its green-brown murk and silty bottom. e rare sh looks like an erased drawing, if an artist pressed a pencil too hard into the paper and left a dull mark. Staring and skeletal, it quickly darts away, concerned at the sight of the strange invader.
But that day, when she blinked her eyes open for an instant, the water was blue. Not the turquoise of her polyester beach towel, opped on the reeds above. A blue so deep and out of reach, it seemed like she had swam deep into the ocean, instead of a few feet into a lake.
Afraid it was a mirage, she stared into the dark. She dared not look up, because the sun might ruin everything.
And as she stared into the blue, she saw him. e folds of blue draped over his face, shimmering. She tilted her head at him. He laughed at a soundless stream of bubbles. His hair bloomed motionlessly. His eyes were bright, but his image wavered in the water.
His imp-like smile was the only thing that didn’t seem distorted. Raising his eyebrows, he asked her to tea, the words exploding with bubbles at their corners.
In reply, she folded herself cross-legged and lifted an imaginary cup to her lips, wearing the posh expression such events had always called for in her childhood. He grinned. ey toasted and tilted the china backwards.
He dropped his teacup nowhere, since it was nothing to begin with. He reached out his hand. She shook it, surprised at how warm his palm was in the cool lake. Gently, he pulled it back into the shades of blue.
She knew she had stayed too long only when her throat pulled, and she realized she was out of air. Furiously, blindly, she reached for the surface, for the sun. Her ngers brush the air, then her face does. She gasps.
Relieved, she looks to the spot, where he should be if he followed. She nds the empty air. e at surface of the lake stops only where it hits the roots of the trees.
Desperately, she throws herself downward again, so fast that the waveless water ripples against her. She turns left and right, but the water is green-brown murk and the glimpse of motion to her left is a lonely, wide-eyed sh.
Pneumatocysts
Remember when we would stop our games — sand thumping beneath bare feet, pink and gasping and footprints chasing a mile behind us — to pop our heels into the helpless bulbs of the kelp which burst from between their branching antlers and paddles, their in nite webs and vessels. Limp and immovable, we lesioned their bodies with our violent feet to make a sound rounder than our laughter.
Remember when we would throw the perfect buoy-bubble spheres — where upon entire ecosystems could oat — and watch the sunlight turn them bottle-brown. We’d kick again, again, again, for they were rm as the calcium cysts which form in bone.
Remember when they broke open, our heels coated in placenta slime, the release of sacred salt-rot air that tastes thirty million years old, and we were the only ones to taste it. When we whispered what we’d never say inside them, my chest lled like a bubble.
Once mine slipped but didn’t break, and you told me it gets easier. e way yours always shattered, and you’d rush on, until the entire shore lay decimated by your sharpest edge.
Don’t you remember my feet catching — tangled in carcass and stained with bio lm — when the tide rolled in? Your weight on my chest immovable, and I cannot oat. Dragged to the bottom.
— Julia Peavey
our love is a catalpa hyperbola
we know this won’t work but i’d still like to try here’s why
because you braid grass into bracelets & fasten them around my wrists
because you hold bees in your throat so that i can taste honey on my tongue when you kiss me & i am sick.
because when i cleared out my sock drawer you moved in with what you claimed to be a house plant. a catalpa you said would grow until soil became our oorboards & roots the feet of our bed.
—
Eden Leavey
escaping to the jamestown ferry
let’s walk.
ankles, rouge, over the bridge and on to the ferry, away, away, away from that which could see.
streetlight, pouring down, geometric, the cavity of liquid warmth bathing in, broken in, breathing to catch light pooling, or the air down the throat into the lungs.
watch the snow drift down on the wind, like something perfect, transcendental–it lays so softly, embraces the lingering touch it kisses the quiet heat of the earth that will melt it.
— Elizabeth Walker
Giants
Mia Kilburn
Gouache on Toned Tan Paper
The Loudness of the Gaze
Shane Lea Photography
Goodbye september!
Goodbye september! and to the dust in every corner. Before i knew the fnal wisp of us had dropped away, silent, i was still missing you. Low light on a distant hill. A star dies somewhere we cannot see. This might make it better: death is a syllable. Like wind, like dusk, like go! and i’m glad i did not know. The memory folds in on itself, and i’m glad i did not know.
— Catherine Storke
Two Oranges
by Srinidhi Lakshminarayanan
ere lay two oranges, freshly squeezed, freckled by seeded lth that only boasted the nature by which they were brought up. ose hot Nevada summers steadily ripened the fruit, but even the heat, blistering and unfeeling as it was, held no match to the suckled, pink tongue as it xed its way around citrus, a delight only hindered by the devious, childlike rope of pulp. So, fresh from the market they lay, in the knitted bag of a lady Professor, doused in the speci c stench of that fourth glass of wine—the descent from normative to uncouth, the descent from a woman to a wo(man) inebriated. e son sips from the fridge at night, the father from his ask at his desk.
It was to be said that this was the marking of something new. is was all part of her new routine, the market, and what a good routine it was shaping out to be! First she would grade three papers, and then ask her supervisor what on earth she could be doing wrong. She thought herself to be a decent educator; there were certainly at least three women, typically those who dressed like they were missing a tie, who hung onto her lips when she spoke, even if her colleagues joked that they’d rather climb into them.
It’s always the little fuckin’ lesbians who sit up front, Professor Moutgil had once spat. She smiled remembering how angry he seemed when he said it, like it was some great injustice to him.
With their knee high socks and skirts that don’t match the hair. Oh, don’t get me started on the fuckin’ hair.
Anyway, it was strange to her, the mismatch between the eye movement of the class and the papers that were handed to her. Some were beautiful in their youth and ineptness, so tangentially intellectual she supposed they could act as a great study on how vitality and passion leered its way through even the most rudimentary prose. A rogue sentence could be called many things, many awful things, but not uninspired. e students were not uninspired, but they were inspired by the wrong things. After she graded a few papers, she’d hastily stu them in her sling bag and by habit, make sure all the grades were facing downward, with the most obscene ones folded. It was a service, she thought! en she would bring out the wine, and its redness recalled a sedimentary type of serenity; stoic, yet so clearly borne of air, and it felt like that when she drank it. Sure, it was expensive, but it was the type of expense she carefully allotted for when her assistant did her budget, and it was classi ed in the reds—necessity!
By the time she gulped down her fourth, her throat nearly brought her back to her third, and she took that as a signal to get behind her wheel and head to the market. is is where she’d pick up these oranges, and manage a smile underneath a straw hat to the father of a student of hers, maybe it was that Billy, pimpled-Michaelwho-loves-Sharene, it was a boy who shared the name of a 70s jazzman, she knew that for sure! And then she’d slur that she loves the weather here and the Father would ask, not arrogantly but with this distinct reluctance, the type men save for their wives, Well, what’s di erent about the weather at this market than by the college? And she’d say, the people. e people are di erent. e people here are more earthborne, they look like they’ve stuck their ngers in dirt for fun, like that dirt has traced itself in them as a parting gift. I doubt many of my students have ever planted a seed. Orange? She extended her arm out to the Father, and he put his head down and blushed like he’d been propositioned, mumbled that he really better get going, it's late and his wife is waiting for him and all, but he eyed the orange a bit longer than he should have, because even men can not resist citrus!
Marker on Paper
accepting Nature
a bird perches on a tombstone singing to graves in warbled tones.
a preacher addresses slumbering mountains with cries of faith and salvation.
stairs ascend up and up and up and end at a cloud that whisks away.
i seek the in nite but Time confronts me.
giving in is not giving up; it is accepting Nature.
— Elise Howe
Victim
e righteousness of the sun as it rises rings hollow. It shines but it shines wrong. Vines turn to rust on that playground. Fire burns tempests into the asphalt. My brain melts under the years and I can’t say I miss it because then I’ll miss it more. Just a victim of the passage of time. Motor cars and shattered stars with tire tracks on my arms. It all becomes fruitless in forgetful eyes. Void of concern for the yearn that I feel. Pine for the years I can’t call mine anymore. Wash away temper and tears to reveal bones. Clothes that don’t t with a soul that feels too big. Never noticed my hands were growing larger until I saw that art project. Time stands like a suspect, guilty and arrogant. A delinquent in my perfect world, lling my cup with regret.
— Elise Engelen
love letter to concrete
bitter sister of marble cold and coarse never crafted, ever engineered
clouds of grit and glass coat greener pastures in a corridor of cables and contracts
coming back home feels like a guessing game what trees have been cut? what grey slabs have replaced them?
how much of home has turned to stone— warehouses of wires and walls without windows
data as pedagogy and cultivating computations words don’t count here
they say you are the future well, then i must be the clock stuck and watching you
bleeding microchips and code for the sake of humanity for the sake of an alley of concrete
— Lydia Wang
THE CITY OF DIS
I.
Before the sun, blackened pillars frame an open-air temple. Pass through the town center without civic speech or divine incantation.
II.
Songs do not come. Among the scattered daisies waxen forms erode; suspended death enchants each naive pilgrim.
III.
Could sparrows sing in this place? Breeze warps the marigolds, red weeds, green grass. Walls open to the sky, wrecked in storms of progress.
IV.
Frozen, here Apollo lives on atop a dais. His worship awaits. Are his the plaster forms, the bunched yellow owers? All bow, half-buried, reaching up.
V.
Catastrophe billows up, blots out the graver second death: columns crumble still, and no soul can chant Cocytus. Stone lives breaking yet.
— JP Heil
Vital Signs
e body in the morgue is more familiar than your own.
e eyes— now shut— that shone so bright on their rst day of school.
e legs— now limp— that pumped so hard on their rst bike ride.
e dimpled cheeks— now hollow— that could not tell a lie.
And the nose— your own and your mother’s— that crinkles alike when you laugh.
But you have not laughed for a long time.
Surely something must have gone wrong inside that head.
ose lips have said things unforgivable.
ose hands, you cannot forgive what they have done.
No, you tell the coroner.
I don’t know who this is.
— Damien Kanner-Bitetti
Melting Hourglasses
Time is like so much water, uid and hard to grasp. It is cold and always moves forward, destroying obstacles in its path.
Honey is a lest apt simile since time never moves as slow, but blood is a close second because of how easily it ows.
Time is like so much blood, draining life from my body as it moves forward without regard for the living or dead.
I stand at the precipice of some ne cli , wondering how my time continues to drip. Softly, softly, down it falls, winding, looping, carrying on.
Blood is limited and water is nite, so too will my time eventually run out. Beeping, beeping, asystole and an alarm clock. I’ll lose it all in the oncoming drought.
— Elena Murphy
Atticus Matira Schwab India Ink & Alcohol-Based
Dementia: Ballad of the Breaking Mind
“Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, And naked shall I return thither: e Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
And blessed be the cross Perched not upon the vacant casket, But in the arms of one who still may clasp it, As if a bulwark against the very loss.
Yet we mourn a death regardless, e death of the still-living, Who breathes yet; speaks yet; Meets your eyes with her own yet Is stripped of all perception.
e Lord giveth our governance, But lose the yesterdays and morrow, Lose yourself--not to sorrow, Not to pain nor mind astray, But the drag and ebb of numb decay.
To the unseen, viperous sting, Of memories that persist in other minds an the one they belonged.
In death delayed the loss prolonged, And all the anguish lucidity can bring. So meet every bated breath, moan and sigh And watch, disarmed, the long goodbye.
-Job 1:21
— Andrew McKee
Where all the trees go
In the dream, there’s a boy; we carry planks of rotted wood together.
ey are long and cumbersome and he is frustrated, as we hoist them over this, over that, above the mud-bled garden.
When they clash against a tree, he curses at the wood that drops to earth. Into the worm-rich soil,
I begin to dig. ere are plastic gures here, peering through the grime:
a cottage, a bookshelf, a bucket t for dolls. eir eggshell paints vex the garden, pierce its clay-clot womb.
e deeper I go the more there are, catching on frantic ngers, faster, fastened. I will never get to them all,
for the mud parts like sand and sticks like blood. e boy does not
dig. He chops at the tree, that same clash-bruised spot, with his plastic axe.
He hacks again, again, plastic-to-wood, but it never falls, this tree. He falls instead,
cushioned by his temples to memory built of dirt, built of leaves. He tends to them daily
so they are soft to the touch. He looks up at me now, scooping the earth,
how the mud in my ngers is too smooth to hold its shape, how it just turns to liquid and buries me,
buries my ngers, buries all my plastic worlds again. When he sees the temples in my mind,
his splintered hands cup with sympathy. He pulls me down into the mud. We are dense and fallowed. We speak of people
as we lie together, beside his planks of rotted wood. We breathe in the orchard and its graveyard.
— Julia Peavey
Interior of Andrew’s Hall Oil on Wood Paint
Emily Larsen
my eyes are cursed
by: biology and genes and evolution and mutations
when gravity draws my eyelids down (a force unresistable and uncanny)
Lights become comets.
many say Lights are like the stars that pepper the sky. but no, no.
when my body is tired and my eyes give up Lights have trailing tails,
Each on its own plane of existence But all moving with me.
It is a beautiful thing, To see Light slant. And solely mine.
— Elise Howe
Insight at the Moment the Heart Stopped
And the mist rises o the ocean, too.
Above is heaven, where no one smiles or waits for you. at pale and unfed blue unblinks; eyes with resolve like bone Exhale into the blood and chill your heart as would a hand on stone.
ings turn in their way, split with light, and death is just another turn. No more resistance. Frigid light says there is nothing left to earn.
— Nora Yoon
american pastoral
these emptied rivers of gold – these burnt lands littered with lumber and soot.
I manifest this destiny: roots grow over my body again.
— Lelia Cottin-Rack
As the Miller told his Tale
Sydney Tamsett
Polaroid Instant Film
Paperboy’s Morning Route.
I am very tired, but still so full of love –love for the things that ache like owers in the rain –curled-up bits of paper bending with the leaves
e old man I see leaves; he is also tired –he holds his newspaper like it is his great love –a shield against the rain and all the things that ache
I stand amidst that ache a orded by the leaves that fall soft with the rain that are also tired –seeking out all our love written on newspapers –
ere is wrapping paper made to cover the ache of a heart – of some love like a gift for the leaves who, like me, are tired of falling drops of rain –
I have never seen rain such like tears, like paper boats in rivers, tired –of the things that ache the trees are shedding leaves like it is their great love –
I’ve not been in a love that rivals the way rain loves the Earth & its leaves of grass – its soft paper hollows and ats ache when they too are tired –
I do not love words in papers which rains hate like a deep ache. A thing like that – it leaves me tired.
— Neil Dongre
Swordmaking
When the singer of love goes down And the body exhales into sleep, e great work of dreaming, the changing of time, resumes. e tears forget themselves, e chest forgets heaving, the mind forgets its frame.
On high the mountain sunlight falls On nothing that someone observes, falling With the grace of things still too unknown. In the sculpture waits the heart’s saying, In the night the forest starts, Making itself from itself again and falling us apart. Love’s mouth says death and blazens pain. No dead are waiting in the dark.
— Nora Yoon
A Free Verse Sonnet for a Man Who Must Perish
If there ever was a love as devastating as this—a lover as wretched and evil and golden as you, there wouldn’t be enough saliva to wash the heart clean. ere would be enough blood, however, to keep it pumping—to keep the desire and hatred and bad luck coursing through that bulb in your chest. If there ever was a lover like you, countries would fall. Men would die. If there ever was another love like this one, my mother would have to keep my baby sister locked away. She is a naive young girl, she would not survive a lover like you. It is still a mystery how I survived a lover like you. For now, I only pray there are no more lovers like you. Because if there were, the world must end.
— Shawna Alston
What time do the doors lock on Wednesdays?
I’d like to think that one day
Eucalyptus gum & rolling chairs, Staring into each other’s eyes
While cheap tunes echo Our dirty thoughts, Will become a memory.
Emotional rodeos are a dangerous place
For a young girl to drink at Until her stomach sits in her throat & her tongue swells around The semblance of being Choked by a lasso.
Mountain Dew reminds me of diamond rings & the key lime walls keep contracting
A magnetic force of attraction
Until I remember we are just Visiting smaller rooms each time.
Arab men remind me of leather seats in new cars & I can see a smaller you, canines-deep In a lemon slice. I’m sorry for leaving My jacket on the foor of your car (I’m not.) I left it there on purpose
& now I’m left wondering What’s the egg, and who’s
The chicken.
— Eden Leavey
Fenrir
by Arden Pentlicki
Odin came again yesterday, the ravens at his back. He was, as he always is, one step closer than the day before. It is the only time I am glad I cannot pry my jaws closed, as throbbing-sore as they are. I want his ugly eye to see all of it—the teeth that will splinter his bones, the drool that will loosen his esh. Like Tyr, whose delicious hand still crawls somewhere in my belly. I know our battle approaches, though time does not pass here; the sky never brightens, the stone never softens, the frost never warms or melts. Still, I feel it coming. I am eager to taste him and then die.
But Odin has not come today. Something older than sight or scent tells me who is here in his place—some bone-knowledge, like hunger.
My tail wags.
I know you are here, Mother, I bark.
ere is silence, and then a reply. “Hello, wolf-child.” he calls to me, his voice landing on the air like snow. I cannot tell where he stands—his gure echoes across the ice, narrow eyes lingering on my chains. I cannot help it. I beg.
Let me come home with you, my Father, my Mother.
Name me yours. I am your wolf-child. Do not abandon me to this place. I bleed.
I ache.
I am alive with your blood, stone-hardened and red- eshed as sh.
Name me yours.
I watch the little black eyes widen. He appears in the snow before me, just a few lengths away, hovering with his pale hands behind his back. I shiver at the memory of their thin ngers on my fur. “Why do you want my name, child? I never did want my own father’s. I promise, you do not wish to be any child of mine. My name will forsake you.”
It already has, I growl. He falters, and I revise my tone to a low rumble. Little gods can be so sensitive to words. Hasn’t it?
“It has!” he cries out. I watch him closely. “ ey took you all from me before I could sing one lullaby. Remember your sister! ey locked her in their crypts with only the dead and a limping, bloodied hound. Remember your snakebrother, ung into the sea to drown in the only belly saltier than my own. Even Sleipnir: they say he is motherless, but I felt his stallion-kicks in my womb, eight limbs of thundering hooves…” Instinctive, Father’s hands drift to his abdomen. He catches himself and hides them again behind his thin back. “Him, too, they call a gray beast and tie to a chariot, a slave.”
And me, Father?
“You, they kept. ey petted you in their favors so they could chain you without struggle later.”
Why, Mother?
“ eir hate is easily earned. is you must understand.” He gestures to my sore feet, and I growl and shift, my bonds tightening at the pressure. “I am father and mother to you horde—you are the fruit of my womb, and the child of a monster can only be…”
I see rage- re in his eyes. It o ers to melt my cold island cage, and I want to stoke it.
For this, they cut your wolf-child’s pretty throat with iron and blame the wound on nature. For this I su er. Chain me without struggle? Well, I gave them struggle. I struggled hard, remember, when they bound me with the silk fetter to the screaming stone, anchored me between wide cli s—great battering cli s!—and pried my mouth open into this drooling scream.
I, too, am a hound, limping and bloodied and I, too, am your child, Mother.
On the air, then, I catch the low-bellied musk of him, and again I begin to drool. Come close to me again. You would see I am not wolf any more than you are. Bring yourself nearer. Bring your hands here to my open jaws. I should like to taste the scent of your skin. I will not bite.
Come closer,
I am no monster.
Bring your hands nearer. I will not bite.
He is silent for a long, long while. Even the wind holds its breath. At last, he replies. “Fine, child. You are mine, then. Have my name, Loki’s child.” He turns his face from me like the tide. “I cannot trust you any more than myself.”
I watch him leave, stretching as far as the fetter allows to follow his shadow into the all-swallowing horizon. Take me home, Mother, I want to ask, or stay with me, or come closer. I say nothing. I do not blink until he is gone. e wind returns, mocking me with its howls through the cracked ord. Time does not pass in this broken place. But I am a god’s child; as Odin is wisdom, as Loki is mischief, I am patience. I will wait.
Odin will come again tomorrow, one step closer to me on the ice-melt. Come closer, I will say again. Come, All-Father. Come see the truth you made when you named me monster. Come, and I will not bite.
Not yet.
Email from a Stranger from Tashirojima
(Based on a True Story)
She was careless with boyfriends and crockery kits and she never took care of her hair when it rained— on the bike she was awless. She took crazy zags always looking past tennis skirts shaking her head while clipping panhandlers’ owers for free.
In her email she said on the day she rst fell she awoke in kaleidoscope shadows and silk— she remembered she pinned her cellphone to her face not the fall from her seat or the handlebars’ snap by a hospital window embroidered with leaves.
For the rst time she hated the light of the sun seen atop the magnolia, dozing outside in a peony, tennis-court fences ablaze with its color, no longer with hers. She forgot she had never intended to telephone them she remembered the turn of the century when unenamored with Mommy her father walked out in the catkins and shermens’ nets with his tie and his cleats and her velveteen panda. She reached for her helmet and brushed past the bicyclist’s hips in her head but alone in her cot she had already lost her umbrella, her hairclip, the sight of her nose and on Cat Island in the blue night of sleep on the 13th of April, she dreamed she was me.
— Charlie Ciccoretti
Sweet Tooths and Cigarettes
“You got the candy cigarettes too?”
“Oh yeah, I got addicted to these cigarettes!”
e boy sat on a bench with his friends, twirling the white stick in his ngers beside him a gray hand covered a cough with the swirling smoke of time from the sweet rosy lips and drool-covered ngers to those that are chapped and calloused and purple
For one a chalky candy to forget the homework he has and to run with his friends through the mud and the evening sun to only come home when the street lamps illuminate the cracked driveways and sidewalks
For the other a smoky haze to escape the voice of the father he can no longer speak to and to hide away in his own heartbroken hotbox where he can y high away from his problems but ignores the fact he’s in a soot-covered birdcage with the key dangling from his ngers for a saccharine sugar-stick hit is not what he is looking for not a decent taste but a descent an escape
To the boy an o hand joke
To the boy the man is ancient
from only a few years before.
To the man a daily occurrence
To the man the boy is himself
— Lucy Loudon
Crim Dell Triptych
Burial at Sea
ere is no horizon between black sky and black pond silent landscape breached by aming paper boat holding hamster corpse.
Rescue
Sun squats comfortably on ruddy arch framing dimpled pool girl in socks and rubber slides knee deep in aquaphobic paralysis hair stuck to temples she looks down at matching fearful eyes and down jeweled ngers cradle crippled duck.
Magnet Fishing
Breathy August fog obscures the shoreline and twelve woody trunks some straight some topped with green mullets one holds a shing rod knees planted against heavy catch a two-wheeled contraption cramped and bloated algae-stu ed tires rusted blistered barnacle-covered handled bars who rode their bike into the dell?
— Annika Griggs
his New Favorite Show
Pierrot the Clown Watches
Andre Adams
Paint Pen on Bristol Board
Sea
of Belonging
Lauren Mullaney Photography
College Creek
Water ows with sediment
Foundations of sand
Boulders into pebbles
All dotting the land is current cuts through stone, but somehow I stand
If I lift up my feet, and open my hands
I’d oat down the river
No intentions to hold
I’ve given up on trying
But im happy to hope
— Emmett Weiss
mulberry anniversary
i grew up playing under mulberries did my part picking fruit from branches stained my shoes and hands purple as i reached for the ripest fruit
do you remember that summer years ago when i taught you to do the same we went out marching with our baskets and we baked a pie from the spoils
it wasn’t the best or the worst but the leftovers barely lasted a day and the laughter was worth the stains and mosquito bites (at least, i’d thought you’d thought so too)
the mulberries dyed our skin but you have scrubbed your hands much harder than i and when i was still sitting at the table you’d already washed your plate
you told me yourself that i’m not your favorite and i know mulberry isn’t anyone’s either i wished you would still give them a try (if you could even care to reach)
last summer, we gathered our baskets again but the mulberries had dropped from branches already we returned empty handed and sunburned and i’m still stuck at an empty table
i wonder if they’re sour to you now or if you’ve even eaten them since (i wonder if i’m the only one that’s still picking mulberries)
— Lydia Wang
Zig Zag Fence
Mia Kilburn
Goauche on White Paper
Harvested
I asked for mandarin, just a gently peeled piece or two, ripened to orange by the blue sky and a butter y tongue.
You told me I was sel sh and refused to take me to dinner, so we sat so far away, looking at the same bloody moon while moths died on the porch.
ey burned in a winter chill, too close to the light the same as we were too far — I stayed up for angel numbers, you went to bed at 3. Sticky knives sat on the counter by morning.
You handed me grapefruit, carved into putrid pieces, ripened to red by clouded expressions and moths long since deceased. — Ash Pyle
garden of eden
the dishwasher is not run and the sink is full of co ee cups, some with lipstick stains.
there’s moss covering the oor, an inchworm on the yellow lamp
the bedroom window has beams of honey-butter light ltering in through the shades.
a smattering of daisies grow from the rug under a desk
wedding owers have been preserved, pressed into a co ee table book
a single peony, blushing with life grows among the dry petals
the tap has been left on, amid the silence there is the persistent rush of the falling water.
the toothbrush is entwined with curling vines, forever rooted.
under the stairs, there’s a faded armchair, left by some dead relative.
forget-me-nots grow from where the echo still reclines.
the back door is left ajar, muddy boot prints still trailing inside.
a blueberry bush sits by the phone, waiting for someone.
alive on dead, withered on bud, rose on thorn: frozen between, the garden holds its breath
— Kendall Pade
Emily Larsen Bedroom Watercolor
104A with you
alarm from the other room, gunk in my eyes, smoke in my teeth no time for night routines at the weighted blanket windowsill sunset lamp blues clean your bowl, close the blinds get some sleep love pu y eyes too, shall pass
lattes in the AM calico dust bunnies watch us from the corners what are you wearing today?
the laundry door is o its hinges again the other dryer ball is around here somewhere i hope we never nd it
— Paige Foltz
Contributors’
Alexandra Hill (‘28) can be found adventuring/getting lost, watching romcoms, and wearing blue light glasses so she looks smarter (don’t tell anyone!).
Andre Adams is an Art History major (‘26) and artist largely working in printmaking, and drawing mediums. His art can be described generally as New Oceanic Art, or simply, New Oceanism. Taking from his Polynesian/ Black ancestry, Andre mixes these histories to generate a new mode of Oceanic expression.
Annika Griggs is a senior double majoring in Biology and English. After graduation, she hopes to document her Appalachian Trail journey through poetry.
Dativa Eyembe is looking for the world between these pages, listening for signs of love.
Damien Kanner-Bitetti is a senior majoring in English. He hopes that his poetry will help him get a job, or at least lessen the weight of being.
Eden Leavey (’24) is an English major in the Joint Degree Programme with the University of St Andrews. She seeks to tell stories through creative writing, journalism, theatre and dance.
Elena Murphy is an English major in their junior year who is deeply fascinated by the written word and every form it comes in. ey are always working on something creative, whether short or long, nding inspiration in the fantastical as well as the everyday.
Elise Howe is a freshman double majoring in Public Policy and Mathematics. She adores reading and is grateful for the opportunity to throw her own words to the wind.
Julia Peavey (‘28) is a neuroscience major who attempts to write about memory.
I’m Kendall Pade and I’m so excited to be published in the gallery this semester! I started writing poetry last semester when I took the creative writing class and I’m so happy I did.
Notes
Lauren Mullaney is a senior who will miss trying to come up with something clever to say here—almost as much as she’ll miss everyone who lives adjacent to her.
Lelia Cottin-Rack is a freshman intending to major in Art History. Her interests include art, walking in the woods, cooking, reading, opposing fascism, and co ee.
Lucy Loudon (‘26) is a Biology major and Creative Writing minor on the pre-veterinary track from Columbus, OH. Her interest in writing originally stems from her parents who have always encouraged her vast, though sometimes odd, imagination. She likes to write about vulnerable moments of the human experience while often using imagery from both nostalgia and the natural world.
Mia Kilburn is a Freshman who is interested in majoring in Studio Art and Physics. She loves painting en plein air and is particularly interested in light.
Neil Dongre is a sophomore at William & Mary and is proud to be in this semester’s issue of the Gallery. He picked up a strong interest in writing last semester; he hopes you have enjoyed reading his work as much as he has enjoyed writing it
Nora Yoon is rereading poems from Anne Carson’s Decreation and muttering angrily about how good it is.
Paige Foltz will miss this.
Sasha Rinkevich is a sophomore at William and Mary studying English and Philosophy. Writing is one of her favorite things in the world, though she also loves baking, working as a orist, and riding horses. After college, she hopes to go to law school and become an attorney and published writer!
Shane Lea (they/them) is a class of ’25 graduate of Anthropology and a selfdesigned major of Gender and Sexuality in Antiquity. When they are not in the eld or in the lab, they nd joy in the stills of life’s chaos.
Shawna Alston will carry Gallery with her for all time coming.
Sydney Tamsett (‘27) wishes caf had the chicken tortilla soup more often.
Editors’ Note
Hello friend,
It’s with immense gratitude and over owing a ection that we present our second and nal edition of e Gallery as Co-Editors-in-Chief. is was quite the revelatory year, as we’ve been a part of this wonderful sta since the second semester of our rst year, and we’ve learned more than expected about what it means to make art and share it with strangers. We’ve had the invaluable opportunity to nurture these public sharing spaces alongside so many other talented writers and artists. We can’t quite put to words how exciting and empowering it felt to watch our members learn themselves as creatives, but we’re sure this issue will bring to light the commitment and talent of your fellow peers.
is semester’s issue was a di cult one to put together because we got so many wonderful submissions. We had to make some of the toughest decisions in quite a limited amount of time. It’s our hope that you can feel the careful curation in each page—we did not make these decisions lightly. Each poem, short story, photo, drawing, and painting was handpicked and evaluated with a deep respect and unwavering compassion.
ank you, again, for reading and submitting.
—
Shawna Alston and Paige Foltz Co-Editors-in-Chief, e Gallery
Colophon
e Gallery Volume 39 Issue 2 was produced by the student sta at the College of William & Mary and published by Carter Printing Co. in Richmond, Virginia. Submissions are accepted anonymously through a sta vote. e magazine was designed using Adobe Indesign CC and Adobe Photoshop CC. e magazine’s 54, 6x9 pages are set in Garamond. e titles of all the pieces are Derivia. e text on the covers is set in Trattatello.
Check out The Gallery online
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