L I T E R A RY M AG A Z I N E
Marilyn, Betsey Yu 14
YA Q UE E S T Á S L I S TA / N OW T H AT YOU A R E R E A DY FRIDA JAUREGUI
ya que estás lista, ya que ni te queda un estrago de ningún dia o año, puedo levantarme del suelo y verdaderamente observar; la introspección me envuelve y las dos sabemos que no es desventaja. en la cocina, me sentaba en la mesa, la que le sacaste cicatrices con el cuchillo de mantequilla. ya, debería haberte dicho, ya para de limpiar. ud estaba parada en los dos pies junto al comal con los huesos intactos (nunca usas/te las caderas para bailar). no sé si alguna vez me daré cuenta de que todo fue más más más mejor hecho por tí: el tallo de la flor rompida, más y más, todo lo que me pasó por el esófago, más y más, la manera en que camino a través del umbral. now that you are ready, and that you are left without the traces of any day or year, i can lift myself from the floor and truly observe. introspection engulfs me and we both know that this is not a drawback. in the kitchen, i would sit at the table, the one that you scarred up with a butterknife. enough, i should have told you, enough with the cleaning. you were on both feet at the comal, your bones intact (you never use/d your hips to dance). i don’t know if i’ll ever realize that everything was done más más más better by you: the torn stem of the flower, más y más, everything that passed through my esophagus, más y más, the way that i walk over the threshold.
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17t h PA RA LL E L J O N AT H A N T R U O N G
In my dream, my mother is a colonizer and my father colonized. With her she brings a catechism, a few Latin syllables, the 17th parallel, and an M-60 — and we all know which one fires the loudest shot. It is funny, how a man can be malleable but the glottals and the diphthongs never flatten out, how if you cut him into cross sections you’d see red all the same. In our Volkswagen my father is still throwing up entire villages, which is to say that he is coughing up ash and nothing more. He is scared of the smoke clouding his periphery: look forward or go blind. So we look forward and see uniformed bodies that we cannot help but drive over. It’s the Socialists, they’ll say, always trying to burn everything down. My father salutes, not so much colonized as evacuated, mouthing: we gotta get outta this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do. My mother, clutching her stomach, holds an embryo that hasn’t yet chosen which pole to hold on to: North or South, East or West.
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Maya, Trenyce Tong 145
20/20/20 - The Special Vision Steampunk Festival Twenty events in twenty days to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Creative Writing Conservatory at OCSA, honoring conservatory founders James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers, the Godfathers of Steampunk
Art by Salem Haight
H E LIO S L I Z Z Y H AT C H
We learned how to inhabit the warmth of a place is what my mother tells me when I ask, as a child, why half the world is empty of people. I’ve heard that the other half is where monsters live—giant untameable beasts and a cold that leeches all the heat from things. The sun is a gift from above, she reiterates. Where the sun goes, we follow, our planet a heliotropism machine. I read online that the most common fear is a fear of the dark. It’s one of those evolutionary bugs: the antithesis of exposure therapy. In school we spend a week learning about the rarity of REM and object permanence: how our eyes move east in our skulls like sunflowers and how a thing can lose itself in itself. A girl raises her hand and says she can’t sleep unless the windows are open, too afraid that she’ll blink herself out of existence; says she remembers dreaming once. In comparison we only have a half day learning about the other side of the world. Our teacher tells me what my mother cannot about rotation and permeation, how everything we have is nothing more than a statistical miracle. My mother tells me that that kind of thinking is what gets people sent to the other side after they die. I don’t tell her about my fixation on closing my eyes as tight as I can until the whole world turns to grey matter. In the city where I live, the buildings make the earth feel like its own ball of light: mechanical instead of chemical. The skyscrapers yearning upwards like competing plants with solar panel petals. But sometimes, when the sun is low enough and the surrounding buildings tall enough, it almost looks like we’re on the other side: everything cast momentarily in shadow. 173