CiQ V.1 i.2

CiQ images and text from our time in Creativity in Quarantine Vol. 1 Issue 2 October 9, 2020

2020

Email, Gastronomic Distraction (A) [Cover] Tamika Fields Alabama

Gastronomic Distractions (B) (C) Tamika Fields Alabama

The Third Decade

by Justin Andre Cordova

He says not to sweat it. I am trying. I am trying not to sweat it but it’s hot.

Too hot. Too hot to walk. Too hot to think. Work? too hot for it. So I don’t work at all, and it’s even too hot for this unproductiveness. I think the south is killing me, or it’s this year. The season of a pandemic rush. I’m waiting for it to end; will it get better? I am thirty. There is no telling. The south is killing me, or it’s me; I am killing me. It’s the Christians. I am sick of being surrounded by Christians. Or it’s the Christian in me that I am so sick of. If you lie with dogs you get fleas. Dad was always right about that. Dad was a dog lying all over the South. The third decade and Oliver is one year off. What was your Dad right about? I think I know where he was wrong. I’m not you. Today I feel that more. Today is your Birthday.

We went for a walk in the woods and took the populated trail. How long before a walk is a hike? This didn’t qualify what we did. The word hangs above us. The word didn’t matter. I am trying not to sweat it. Early morning on Saturday.

Kids, we wonder who would bring up kids in a time like now. The ratio seems to be one kid and one dog. The dog is the second kid. That is worth a short laugh, followed by a sad negative space. I am one of many. I don’t know if I can bring someone else into this. Oliver too. Birth Day. Someone chose or didn’t choose; here we are. It can’t be a poem anymore, for now. I need a longer sentence and more words. No, it was that I needed fewer words and no sentences. The whole experience of this life is one word we are always one-syllable behind from finishing.

Walking behind Oliver on the trail, I want to say how I feel. I am one word behind him. I don’t feel anything; I mean, I am really thinking about not feeling anything as a solution- what could that look like? Behind Oliver, I want to communicate that maybe it is all bullshit, after all, feeling any way about anything.

Selling myself up the river is getting old and predictable. I have hope as a word, not as a frequency, and this what is needed. This year I am too old to send myself up the hill with the rock. This year in eternity, Sisyphus takes a break. Oliver on the trail ahead of me. I am thirty. He is one step ahead of me. Twenty-nine, for at least now he is happy. I have nothing to say to you about this, I only feel relieved. He has one more year. Then it will be three decades and it will be about time. Maybe I have three more decades. Maybe three more years. Three more steps. The rock stops rolling. The rock levitates on its incline- round and swollen.

I am here at the house. Chorizo and kale- a lump of yogurt. I close my eyes to nap, begin to drift. What was it you said in your song Birthday Boy? You had a thought, but could not remember it. It is only a feeling now. I close my eyes to nap, begin to drift. This time I caught the thought before going under. How must I look laying here outside on the couch? My mouth is parted. My eyes are closed. When I take a nap, I wear the face I’ll wear when I die- my body knows that. I am trying it on for shape and fit. Like a box of Warby Parkers, my death mask comes in the mail. I have choices, choices that will be made for me by the days and years; the accident and nutrition of my life. But I have choices. I could end it now, how do I look today? They would see me laying there like that. I would be cremated.

Every day. Some days early most days around three or four. The earth studies its creation; here is how he will look, another child taken into sleep. It’s only a mock-up. It doesn’t stick. I wake up, I feel the mask; still, on my face. I know I wore it in the middle of a living day. That’s what is strange. There is always a hangover from it too- a hangover fading with coffee. A walk. The day is overover and over. I taste what death must feel like if one could feel it. I have died thousand of times. This is maybe what you meant in your song. You feel what it would feel like to know a feeling you could never know. You fall asleep. You wake up.

Hot. My legs are sweating on the couch, the shade is hardly ever enough to stop that. Not in this heat. It is hot. It is too hot. The third decade of my life. The worst year. I said as much, but this is a feeling too and feelings are suspect when there is a word tied to them. Maybe there is no reason for it now but no reason for it is the season and the season fell on summer. I am trying not to sweat it.

Happy Birthday.

Open Spaces Metal and rubber jump rings, rubber bands, and paper clips.

8.5 x 3.5 “ when flat The connections and patterns of our lives have been challenged, and shifted in quarantine. Is this a temporary change, an intermission? Even so, it will prove a pivotal time.

This piece is worked in two patterns, one more dense and structured. It’s intermission, the open pattern, is more fragile, yet it shifts and defines the other when the piece is installed. It’s wings can fan and spread, or curl in. Solitude can have the same effects.

E Morgan Shipps Studio Artist and Art Educator Lexington, KY

Silas Coogle.

My submission to the zine is my drawing of my grandma’s cat, Stello.

I’m going into ninth grade, and I was in James and the Giant Peach Jr. and Our Town at Leeds.

Winchester, KY

Sylvia Coogle This is my drawing of my cat Bellatrix. I am 10 years old and going into 6th grade at Baker Intermediate School. I have been in School House Rock at Leeds theatre for the arts.

Winchester, KY

Dylan Diguette and Fannie Stonestreet Winchester, KY

A Son Who Does Not Know His Mother’s Birthday

by Justin Andre Cordova

It’s in, we are in, the thick of summer: July the fourteenth. The months ahead will be topical; how many times I will mention the heat will be restricted only by how many times I sit to write. It is your birthday. I say you are still here but I don’t know what that quite means- encouragement, spiritual affirmation. I say it because Uncle Joey has sent the group text to all of us, wishing you a happy birthday. I say it because. The truth is you are dead and no one knows what dead means. The truth is, in all of your life I never once committed the day of your birth to memory; in one of our last conscious interactions, this was revealed to you. We were at the desk, checking in. You were in a wheelchair. Name of the patient: Rose Covert. Date of birth? I look down on you, frail, likely, the details are foggy. Your face is sunken into itself and your skin reminds me, reminded me at that time, that it encloses the body; and when the body is fading away skin becomes remorseful, slack, permeable. I didn’t know. I had to say to the nurse with my eyes that I didn’t know. That this was my mother, that we both know she is going to die very soon, and that I am her son who does not know his mother’s birthday. Regret, still to this day. I mention it in therapy.

But in all of your not life, the day when your not life began I remember.

Isn’t that odd? Maybe not. I remember by default. I hadn’t known you when you were born. The date was not real, without reality. The day when you died, that was real. I was here. Your life earned merit that only death can bring; a black trophy with a brass plaque engraved- You Made it to the End. No one was there to congratulate you because everyone was there wishing you were still here. No

one was there because you make it to the end alone. We are still walking. We are still designing our award. It has been three years of birthdays, and Uncle Joey reminds us, we still have much to learn about what it means to die. He reminds us, we are still here and someone who is us is not. He sends, along with a sentimental message of missing the wind blowing in your hair, an image of the wind blowing in his own hair on the beach. What he means by this, is that the wind is blowing in your hair when it blows in his. What he means is when the wind was blowing, and Aunt Kathy took the picture, he was listening to your voice in his memory. An image like this is now the closest way to approximate this: you are still with is. But we don’t know what that means.

When you were born, all four of your children were already inside of you.

When you were born Granny held you and held us, no one knowing what was to come; but something did know. Something like a map was drawn in you, would draw us out. Something like a spring was wound up and compressed, waiting to leap into your cervix. Something like a leaf was ready to float through your bloodstream; turn it all black. I say you are still here with us but do not know what that means. I remember being so close to you, you your body; where was it you had gone? I whipped the black that bubbled from inside you, you your body, from the cold part of your lips with a tissue from the nightstand. This was goodbye. Zac said, this is Momma, that is our fucking Momma. Do I believe him? I didn’t know then, I don’t know now. I whipped the bile from your lips. You should be pretty, you would like the last time we all saw you if you were pretty. You didn’t want me

to see you suffering. You didn’t want me to help clean up the vomit. A slow death.

You asked it to Joan. You asked it to Matt. You wanted me not to worry. I wanted you to look pretty; I don’t know when your birthday is but the following night was Halloween and you loved Halloween. You would like that your body would be burned on Halloween. You would prefer I wipe the bile from your lips if we were all to stand around your lifeless body crying in wonderment. Candy asses.

You raised us to be this we and we would have it no way other. Zac played Iron and Wine. We sat silently. Mother don’t worry, I’m wiping your lips.

The old man, one of the two, much older than you; he would help carry your body out on a stretcher and as he turned the corner of the living room, beneath the shelving where three generations of the living looked down on their daughter through photographs; where the white pot with the horse embossment spun and galloped through eternity, where all the trinkets you touched they touched I touched, held them and you and us and me like the eggs still in your body’s womb: the old man’s left knee goes out in a spasm. He holds on desperately to the stretcher and to you your body which nearly rolls off the side.

He regains composure, they drop the stretcher’s legs. I am laughing to myself and smiling. Humor, this was the moment of congratulations I could afford. This was the redemption before the fire. Your ashes are in my car in the drop-down sunglasses holder. I keep meaning to take them out but forget. Your body was burned, you your body. What is you the rest of it? No one really knows. I say you are still here with us to the group text. We all feel this way but no one knows why.

Something does, however. Something draws a map from point A to point B. Maps are not linear. We are still walking; the topography changes our every moment.

It is your birthday and when Uncle Joey’s hair blows it is really your hair blowing.

This is an approximation of what it means to be gone, to be still here.

Justin Andre Cordova justincordovaworks@gmail.com Nashville, TN

Katherine Smith (she/her) Material Drifter Lexington, KY

Americans like You

Triumph Yet Again

Tremendous Pride

“Small Fry� Series my letter stating my stimulus check had arrived, painted and found paper, and dried flowers Holli Schulz instagram: @hollischulz.friley, www.hollischulz.com Lexington, KY

Wood Burning Projects R. Kasilus Art Teacher at Baker Intermediate

DIY Project Becky Banks Lexington, KY

Hired Help Project Cindy Banks Winchester, KY

Song Lyrics Erin Sliney erinsliney.com Bourbon County, KY

Thank you to everyone who shared their creativity with us.

Tamika Fields Justin Andre Cordova E Morgan Shipps Silas Coogle Sylvia Coogle Dylan Diguette Fannie Stonestreet Katherine Smith Holli Schulz R. Kasilus Becky Banks Cindy Banks Erin Sliney Edited by Rebecca Campomanes Published by Leeds Center for the Arts August 2020