hey, neighbor - issue one

Spring 2025 - issue one hey, neighbor! is a zine is celebrating the art, photos, writings, and ramblings, of Northeast Seattle.

All material herein is owned by its respective creators. hey, neighbor! is a passion project kickstarted by fellow NE Seattle neighbor, Kailee Haong Ellis. Interested in helping out with future editions? Feeling extremely generous and want to pitch in funding to print more copies? Just want to say hey?

Reach out: heyneighborzine@gmail.com.

Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

hey, neighbor! is a zine celebrating the art, photos, writings, and ramblings, of northeast seattle

letter from the editor Hey, neighbors.

There are artists everywhere in this neighborhood. I see it on flyers, in the local businesses, at the library—everywhere.

My idea was to create a space to merge two things: a shared love for art and writing, and a deep admiration for the community of Northeast Seattle.

To the submitters for issue one: thank you. Starting something from scratch is scary. Thinking I would have zero submissions and a failed project was even scarier. But it wasn’t a failure. I got to read and revel in your musings. To trust someone with your art is a wonderful thing.

Thank you.

To the readers & residents of Northeast Seattle: Look at how cool your neighbors are! Art is everywhere when you look.

I hope you enjoy issue one of hey, neighbor! as much as I do. I hope to keep this zine going, providing the space for people to share what they want to or need to with their neighbors. I hope we all continue to make art, consume art, and treat each other with kindness.

Until next time, neighbors, Kailee

Contents an empty beach emergency rainbow electrostatic cat’s cradle temp life sonnet of the woods to give and receive

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meet your neighbors

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an empty beach Stargazer Berglund

I wake again on this empty beach. You lay beside me, still and silent. I stand, brush the sand from my naked body, and leave you.

I wake again on this empty beach. I have changed countless times from this point. You never have; you never will. I stand, brush the sand from my naked body, and leave you.

I wake again on this empty beach. I hate you, you know? Though I know it has never been your fault, I hate you. I wake by your side, watch as the tide returns to take you, and you never do. I know it happened in the night. The ocean whispered the breath from your lungs with poisoned words and I lived. I stand, brush the sand from my naked body, and leave you.

I wake again on this empty beach. Perhaps I didn’t live. Perhaps waking beside your selfsame body for more days than there are grains of sand below us is the price I pay for bringing you here. For sleeping as your life was stolen. I would rather a burning hell than the beautiful greens and golds the coming sunrise brings. I’ve grieved, I grieve, I will grieve, yet I never see tomorrow. Time moves ever forward despite the cage it keeps me in. I have done things I would not tell you to feel something new. I have become a woman I am not proud of and I have become a new woman still. That woman is behind me, in front of me, beside me, as is the woman before her who first woke on this cold and empty beach and panicked at your stillness. I stand, brush the sand from my naked body, and leave you.

I wake again on this empty beach. I have grown angry with you before. Tired and resentful of your peaceful face, of how you escaped this and I did not. I have curled my hands into brutal fists and broken them on your perfect body, found sharpened stones and flayed you seeking answers. I find only heartbreak. I stand, brush the blood from my naked body, and leave you.

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I wake again on this empty beach. I watch the tide trace lines in the sand beside us. I watch the sun rise over the water. I stay by your side as the day again becomes night, and the first man stumbles over your body. When I am here he makes a call. When I am not, he leaves you. On these nights I do not stand, I simply let sleep find me.

I wake again on this empty beach. I stand, brush the sand from my naked body, and leave you. What happens when I leave does not matter, will never matter, has never mattered.

I wake again on this empty beach. I stand, brush the sand from my naked body, and leave you.

I wake again on this empty beach. I stand, brush the sand from my naked body, and leave you.

I wake again on this empty beach. I stand, brush the sand from my naked body, and leave you.

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emergency rainbow Photo & caption by Jena Whitesman

Get this - I’m driving home from work a few months ago chugging along down the iconic Lake City Way when I see the most stunning rainbow above the otherwise mundane usual sightings on this strip, so I snap a photo. I reach my little home in Wedgwood and see my roommates’ cars are there so I run in and scream “Emergency rainbow, everybody get up, EMERGENCY rainbow!!!” And we scurry outside into the middle of our street to take it all in together, a glorious rainbow and a brilliant pink sunset. It had been a tough few months, which made this moment all the sweeter.

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electrostatic Tait Chandler

When Laurentide’s lobe crawled across this isthmus, she left a landscape languid in her Vashon wake.

Her 3000 foot thick bulk scoured bedrock to silt.

She worked erratically, marooning moraines, dropping drumlins, bouncing boulders North to South, 17,000 years distant.

Neighborhoods hills rise in her absence: Capital, Phinney, Beacon, Delridge built on glacial shrapnel.

Laurentide left fervent furrows becoming lakes, rain-filled kettles not quite boiled off: Green, Sammamish, Union, Washington; homes and highways coiled around them.

We drained them, hemmed swampy edges, severing arborescent flow.

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Ravenna, Carkeek, Thorton, Yesler: stranded ravines upon this striated suburban canvas.

When Denny’s boat landed, the shore electrostatically rebounded to meet his leather-clad foot.

This shore, kept still by timeless millennia of Duwamish, was altered irrevocably by seven generations of whiteness.

This land beneath my feet is still rising to meet justice, to meet the sky.

As I climb 85th street NE I am crushed under a mile of ice and history.

25.01.15

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cat’s cradle Photo by Tally Ellis; Caption by Kailee Haong Ellis

In late spring, early summer, we spend evening weeknights traipsing the neighborhood, coaxing cats out from bushes, offering our hands in friendship, counting bunnies — six, seven, eight — losing count.

We zig-zag, chit-chat, end up at our spot, the spot to catch a fading glimpse of the sunset. Blue hour. Fade to dark. Head back home.

Garden yard, trampoline, Top Pot, rainbow.

Tree full of wishes, dreams of a better world, bold tags swishing.

Roots busting through the sidewalk, another cat follows us nearly all the way home.

Lime green door, lock clicks, shuffle, shuffle, home.

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temp life Elise Caldwell

My first temp job was at the Adobe office in Fremont, working for the giant real estate management company Cushman and Wakefield. The commute was awesome: I was living in my apodment on Capitol Hill at the time, and the bike ride down the hill to SLU and around the lake to the Burkey-Gils was great. I’d make it a loop on the way home, taking the Burke to the University Bridge to go up the Long Hill back home.

The job was laughable. I can’t recall a day in which I didn’t have at least two hours of free time to surf the Internet at my sweet adjustable sit-stand desk, and typically it was more like three or four hours of free time. I really did offer to help out and do just about anything, but the only project they could find for me was a few days’ worth of cleaning. There was a giant shelf of unlimited snacks, my favorites being the Smartfood cheese-y popcorn, Skittles, and mini dark chocolate bars. The empty bags and wrappers became small mountains on my desk every day. My responsibilities consisted of hanging out waiting for the doorbell at the loading zone to ring, opening two doors for the UPS/FedEx/ Amazon person, escorting them to the “cage” and counting packages, and signing their tablet. Then I’d scan and check in the boxes using an old iPod scanner that worked correctly about 70% of the time. I’d sort the items by the recipient’s floor and desk number, and when all of the couriers had arrived, I’d strategically load the boxes onto my little black cart and go wheel it outside, down the street, and navigate the floors and illogical desk number system of the Adobe offices to drop things off. I’d also sell postage and prepare packages for employees who had outgoing things.

To be clear, the items I was delivering were mostly just personal shopping items. I was hired on before the “Christmas rush” so things were slightly more busy when

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I first started. Slightly.

Some notable interactions: one of the employees, a higher-up manager probably in his 50s, asked me out to dinner. Two other employees, both women, gave me cookies on the regular. One employee gave me a $20 (which probably gave me a $10 tip) for dealing with his package mailing shenanigans with my own personal credit card when he had forgotten his on the mailing deadline. That was for sure against the rules, but I was okay with it. Another employee, a developer, looked quite familiar, and when we finally talked, we realized we’d hung out a few times when we were both students at UW connecting over punk music. Boy, how our lives had diverged...

On the whole, the Adobe people were super friendly and understanding. I remember being so confused when one person’s name tag on their desk had “Shantanu Narayen” taped over his actual name. The employee, laughing, said “Oh you must be joking, you know who that is, right?” Embarrassed, I said I did not. “It’s our CEO!” Ooooh, right...

There was the one guy who, if he caught you in the break area, would talk your ear off about his meditation retreats and the latest books on nutrition he was reading. There was the lawyers’ office/intellectual property rights group, almost purely consisting of women, who always stopped to chat with me when I brought their mail.

Then, of course, the coworkers. The Big Boss, who was hardly around, was a loud, interrupting, annoying lady who hardly listened and had a super forced, obnoxious laugh. Exhausting. Arthur was one of my favorites, an older, divorced guy who was the clearly-loving guardian of his disabled brother who lived with him. He loved telling the story of his brother cleaning up the yard one day. “Boy, there was a lot of dog poop this time, Art!” when in reality Arthur had just aerated the lawn. He was often not at his desk, he was actually doing real work, unlike the rest of us. He frequently came to work with a hangover, and there was one incident where he was in a room that had a kind of vent to the outside, and someone apparently overheard him talking about “a woman’s body” and HR became involved. Arthur loved it when I swore and his favorite sayings were “for

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fuck’s sake” and “I don’t give a rat’s ass. “ He had a hard time remembering my name so he nicknamed me “Snacks” and this is still the best nickname I’ve ever been given.

Then there were Les and Rob... Les was a big guy, loud voice, and full of opinions.

I tried to see the best in him, as he had two kids and a wife and spoke very fondly of them. He was really proud of his kids and it seemed like he spent a good amount of time with them, but it was off-putting how often he mentioned how he was raising them to be responsible and hard-working adults. Having lots of downtime, he would read the news and start conversations with the room of us (none of us very interested) about Trump, the corporations, the insurance companies, in short, the Man. With a voice that increasingly grew louder and louder, he would go on high volume tirades about how the little guy was always getting screwed and all that. My favorite (untrue) conspiracy theory that he brought to light was that Bill Gates was founding a project to breed mosquitoes in Africa that would make women there sterile. “Isn’t that fucked up? He’s trying to prevent African babies from being born...you have to admit that’s fucked up.”

The best part was when I inquired about his sources or pointed out something illogical in what he would say, he would completely change his tune and suddenly he was agreeing with what I said. “Oh yeah, that’s what I meant” without blinking an eye. It was incredible.

Rob had his seriously loud rant time too (when he and Les got going together, I usually left the room) and not infrequently, an abrupt and disembodied “MOTHER FUCKING BULLSHIT!” would come from behind the cubicle divider, apparently as he looked at the headlines. But he also showed a little bit of curiosity about what I was doing when I took a day off here or there to go skiing. He read a good amount too, so we had some conversations about some books we’d read. He and his wife were separated but it seemed that seeing each other once every couple of weeks was the way things were working out for them.

He had two kids, and it was clear that his daughter, with a husband and three children, were definitely the working poor. He was often giving them money and he said more than once how sad and disappointing it was to him that he was born into a working poor household and that despite his best efforts, the cycle had not been broken and now his daughter and her family were living hand-to-

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mouth. Rob and I once went on a walk on the Interurban and it was interesting to hear (as he was talking about 95% of our walk) the story of his mother basically abandoning him to her sister when he was a toddler, his diagnosis of dissociative personality disorder, and his lifelong struggle with having clammy/ sweaty hands “and every issue and situation of underconfidence that you can imagine that comes along with that, from trying to meet girls to shaking another man’s hand.”

Allie was the first person I’d met when I began the job and the one who’d trained me. She was quintessentially “basic” due to her hobbies but in the very best way possible. Genuinely generous, kind-hearted, and sweet, she was also always very made up, fashionable, and her weekends consisted of cocktails with friends, TV show binge-watching with her husband and dogs, making cookies, and going shopping (at least until OMFG COVID-19 struck). She was excellent in customer service, she always followed through on her word, she thanked me at the end of many of my days of work, and generally was a positive and upbeat personality. I was so, so grateful that she was basically my direct supervisor (and that the big boss, my on-paper supervisor, was actually hardly present). Toward the end of my time, she got into “plant-based eating” which was apparently the in-vogue way to describe vegetarianism and hearing about her cooking exploits was entertaining.

Then there was Heather. Heather came on, not as a temp but as a permanent employee, about three weeks after I started. When I first became aware that another person was coming aboard, I was shocked: how could we have yet another person around to work when we already had so little to accomplish?

Heather had this weird slight Texan accent from her year or two stationed in San Antonio, but her most distinguishing feature was her ability to monologue in twenty-minute increments, without any listener (or witness or passer-by) making any sound or giving the slightest indication they were interested at all.

Some would say she had “diarrhea of the mouth” and it wore on me very quickly.

She wasn’t a bad person, she was just so completely clueless, and had absolutely no interest or curiosity about other people or life through their lens. Luckily she never seemed to take it personally when you’d just nod once and walk away from her. I thought she was around 22 or 23 and later found out she was 28. Yikes.

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The most fun people around were the janitors. An interesting mix of older people, there was the couple from Bosnia, a woman from Ethiopia, another woman from Hungary, and then a plain ol’ white dude who mostly kept to himself. The other four would take breaks together near where I worked, and they’d watch funny YouTube videos together, laugh uproariously while making fun of each other’s English grammar and accents, and buy each other cake and pizza on special occasions, like when one of them had her citizenship ceremony after living in the US for something like 25 years. I learned about this delicioussounding Bosnian “pita” which is a kind of rolled up phyllo pastry savory pie, and how the Ethopian’s woman’s dream was to work for another 10 years so that she could retire like a queen back in her home country on the US dollars she’d saved.

In March, with OMFG COVID-19, I was sent home with a computer and told to work from there. Hmmm... how does someone whose primary responsibilities lie in shipping and receiving physical packages and mail work from home? Answer: they don’t! And so for roughly two months, I got a paid mostly-vacation, which required roughly three hours of work per week, but the kicker for me was that I had to stay within cell phone service “just in case.”

In the end, I got laid off along with the rest of the Adobe temps. I wonder how many people go in to work at the Adobe office now. What happened with the remodeling and construction? Rob told me his daughter’s husband (their sole income) got laid off from his restaurant job. What happened to Arthur’s brother’s daily volunteer job at St. Vincent de Paul? I think that Allie and the rest were able to keep their jobs. What about the janitors? What about those six pallets of Skittles that were set to expire in October of 2020? I will probably never know.

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sonnet of the woods Elayne Crain

A forest bath requires many tall trees, and feet that wade slowly through leaf-strewn path... a yearning need to sink in past your knees through dappled sun shining like warm bubble bath.

Let fingers dip into thick mossy plush; here in this safe space, fear shadow no more.

Surrounded with magic, healing and hush, feel weighty worries fall to forest floor.

Look up and breathe in the freshest of air, listen to songbirds that babble nearby...

Then, closing your eyes, let down your wild hair so it flows around you, weightless as sky.

When chaos reigns or you feel out of place, let nature immerse you within its embrace.

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to give and receive Tait Chandler

On 20th avenue NE there bend giants skyward, yet rooted in routine commutes by bike.

A passing century of rainy days; a fleeting moment of awe going uphill.

Too large to be here.

The root-cracked sidewalks they occupy strain and trip feet; the very air above them arcing electric, their boughs contorting around loose telephone wires.

They shed life endlessly feeding cold concrete, bleeding, pretending to be soil, blown into bags, raked and hauled by rumbling trucks nowhere.

A cycle detached.

They cause necks to crane painfully towards fractal infinity.

Sometimes letting eyes skip, sucking screens unawares.

Many happily house nightly murders, wrens, and shelter children beneath boughs

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becoming grandparents on shaded wooden benches.

Becoming umbrellas in the once constant canopy, formed and forgotten.

These towers of light and stars feel the gap of their fallen brethren.

A shooting few deemed good enough for our heaving lungs; for our worried minds.

Speaking and thinking first about writing even these out of pages.

I wish these beings of slow accretion could rise up and march on City Hall descending Ravenna’s ravine fording Lake Union.

These scrapers of the sky could show us their inherent right to grow where seeds fall and to die when the wind blows from the east.

24.12.19

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meet your neighbors Jen Aster Jen Aster lives in Wedgwood and loves to draw, write and read graphic stories. Instagram: jenaster_comics Etsy: jenastercomics

Stargazer Berglund My name is Star, I am 24, autistic, and incorrigibly a girl! I’ve spent all of the best years of my life living in northeast Seattle, and my best pieces of poetry live here too. I believe anything that makes you feel is art, a belief I crafted through years of thinking my writing wasn’t good enough to be called poetry.

Elise Caldwell Alisse has lived in Wedgwood for the last four years and loves it, particularly all the big trees! She feels most at peace in the alpine and enjoys human beings and all their quirks.

Jena Whitesman Hi y’all, I’m Jena and I’ve lived in Wedgwood for about a year and a half in a cozy green cottage with two wonderful roommates and a cat named, Fig. Catch me hanging out at Cafe Javasti eating a Fall Hash Burrito and sipping coffee. I’m a late twenty something finding my way, enjoying the ride (most of the time), and taking in the beauty of the PNW. Hope to connect with you all soon. Go Wedgwood : )

Tally Ellis Tally Ellis is pediatric social worker, wannabe florist, aspiring knitter, and avid supporter of all of her wife’s creative endeavors (like this one).

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Tait Chandler My name is Tait Chandler and I am currently based in NE Seattle in the Roosevelt Neighborhood, having recently moved from Fairbanks, Alaska. I am a homemaker and father to a precious infant. I grew up on a sheep farm in Hazelton, British Columbia, just off the Cassiar Highway. I have a B.A. in Environmental Studies with a Minor in City & Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Poetry has been on my tongue since childhood. My father and grandfather come from the Australian Bush Poet tradition. In college, I wrote and performed spoken word at many local venues with the UNC Chapel Hill Wordsmiths. My work has been published in the Alaska Alpine Club’s Descent Magazine, and was selected to be featured in the recent Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition’s What’s At Stake art show. I am working on my first self-published chapbook, writing at Revolutions Cafe with the SUAW Green Lake writers group. I want to use poetry as a vehicle for simultaneously tethering us to the earth beneath our souls and launching our minds into the stars above our hearts.

Kailee Haong Ellis Kailee Haong Ellis is a queer writer and editor. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University. Her work has been published in Split Lip, Moss, The Inlander, Spokane Coeur d’Alene Living Magazine, Lilac City Fairy Tales, and elsewhere. She writes & resides at the crosshairs of Ravenna-Wedgwood-View Ridge-Bryant with her wife and cat.

Elayne Crain Elayne Crain is a proud writer of (mostly) childish things. Her debut book, There’s Something Odd About the Babysitter (illustrated by John Ledda), will be published in June 2025 by Macmillan Kids. When Elayne is not reading or writing, she loves walks in the woods with her sons and partner, photography and karaoke. Learn more at elaynecrain. com.

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hey, neighbor! issue one spring 2025