KCSB-FM Zine (2022)

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

dear reader,

LETTER FROM EDITOR, ZINE COMM CREDITS

2022, like every year before it and every year to come, was a year of metamorphosis. flip through, keep this on your shelf, dust it off.

fondly, KCSB

editor in chief

Shirley Wang committee

Benjamin Behar, Marley Calderon, Caren Chua, Bella Genolio, Michelle Kim, Jonathan Lara, Amit Shefi, Meiya Sidney, Kaitlyn Smith, Marion

Suchowiecky, Audrey Taylor, Dane Taylor, Mariela

Vasquez, Raymond Vasquez

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5

by Caren Chua

By Amit Shefi

metamorphosis playlist

6

By Michelle Kim

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8

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by Marley Calderon

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11

12

13

By Maxine Lemuz

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Yuen (a computing language) 15

by Yulene Teagle

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Words by Audrey Taylor

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Layout by Claudia Qi

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by Kaitlyn Smith and Jackson Bocheff

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By Bella Genolio

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By

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Jonathan Lara

BECOMING HUMAN

BY AMAR DESHPANDE

Late at night I was born; a cockroach. My mother held my hard armored body in her hands close to her chest close to her beating heart. I did not cry. My spindly legs too small for my body scuttled in the air spelling out wild desperation What’s happened to me?

Unanswered, I was brought home. To the house with the wooden floors glowing with the light of the golden sun. To the young ivy everlasting perpetually reaching and stretching on the window sill grasping for something beyond. To what it is to be loved and held and remembered and to memories long lost behind the dense fog and masked by the setting sun. To my father gingerly placing food behind my click-clacking mandibles, wiping spills from my face and neck as I chewed with abandon shivered with joy and exhilaration. To my mother telling me how much she loves me without saying it because she doesn’t have to say it because I know it because I feel it in her touch because I see it in her eyes. I was brought, unanswered, towards experience then memory glowing red like hot coal. Here I was tasked with piecing myself together.

I began school. There I learned who I was and who I wasn’t. There I learned to define myself through those around me to put myself inside of concentric boxes smaller and smaller and smaller. There I learned difference. I learned that my body was out of place that my chest was too broad that my face was

made twisted and grotesque. There I learned what vermin meant. There I learned how to fight and how to dance and when to hate and when to love and who I am and who I am not. And there I came to the understanding the simple understanding that I must change.

What if I slept a little more and forgot about all this nonsense?

Late at night, alone, I began to pupate, shedding my armored skin slowly deliberately revealing a chrysalis glowing incandescent and pulsing a steady heartbeat. Constructing and reconstructing my humanity, formless and thoughtless I lay still as the current surged around me roaring cacophony and bringing with it vibrant images so full of life yet signifying nothing. I emerged, naked and shivering, sloshing this way and that full of blood and shakily held upright by complicated interlocking lattices of bone and sinew. I looked down at myself surveying my new body recognizing, actualizing this metamorphosis memorizing my own shapes and contours as if the difference between remembering and not remembering is in how hard I focus in how long I stare. I must not forget. Suddenly, finally and all at once I realized that I had become who I was supposed to be. I realized that this life is better lived and that humanizing myself requires humanizing others that my existence necessitates yours. I realized that to love someone is to let them in and to let them in is to let myself go to surrender to bliss and ecstasy and rapturous presence. I have learned love and survival and have become human so human but sometimes, when I look inside, past the rushing current behind the fog, I still see a cockroach, antennae waving, sad and confused.