Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine Volume 48

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Illumination Surrounded by the smell of inks, parchments, and pigments, hunched-over individuals used to copy and illustrate various texts by hand. The evolution of paper-making and the printing press made the art of manuscript illumination obsolete. When creating this edition of Sanskrit with my staff, I was usually surrounded by the smell of old office supplies, mass-produced paper, copy toner, and fast food. Instead of a haze of candle or torchlight, fluorescent bulbs and the harsh blue light of computer screens illuminated our hunched-over bodies. Taking inspiration from images of old texts and illuminated books, I hope this diverse compilation of art and literature will act as a continuous reminder of what creative minds can achieve when they come together.

History, meet Present-day.

Sarah Kinney, Editor-in-Chief

Table of Contents 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 48

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About Five Feet Tall Breeze Ella A Runner's Observations the notebooks Frame of Reference #1 3D Printed Selfies Elizabeth Outside the AIDs Clinic Air Drainage Deviate Corridor Georgie American Air The Captain 2Straws Boy Blue Haystacks Façade Breakthrough, Civil Rights Activist Kris Long and Art Journalist Hannah Rochester Barnhardt Beach Tower Mother Persephone Frame of Reference #2 Halloween, San Francisco The Mantis Walking with my Hammerfish Merrie Lineage The Gift of Perseus Digress Mug Shot Chickens The Difficult Matter of Gehenna A Flower Twice Exposed

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Lowell Fleming Elena Belova Caroline Kerrigan Alessio Zanelli Mark Belair Madison Dunaway Hannah Barnhardt Susanna Parkhill Patricia McMillen Elena Belova Hannah Barnhardt Madison Dunaway Rachel Liptak Patricia McMillen Caroline Kerrigan Aba Hutchison Aba Hutchison Donna Pucciani Hannah Barnhardt Madison Westfall Joshua Greene Marc Swan Caroline Kerrigan Madison Dunaway Patricia McMillen Lowell Fleming Myrthe Biesheuvel Sam Workman Laurinda Lind Wulf Losee Sarah Mitchell Sarah Kinney Lowell Fleming Mao Xiang Curtis Kularski

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 88 89 90

A Flower Twice Exposed II Whyme The Studied Symmetry of Hollow Bones When We Were the Apple of Each Others Eye Alternate Self-Portrait The Hush Evening Tea Staring Across the Field In the Shade The Summer I was Two What's Inside Reveal 399 Potentially Utilizable Celestial Tree Stud Muffin Jav Majesty Negro Girl Negro Girl Part 2 Reflection Doesn't Let Go Blue Sock Rock Bottom Firecracker.

Be Happy and Never Forget Lost Identity Children Gone Hard Brush 8bit Selfie (Spike) Lambs Ears and Skull Barbeque Devil Confronting Conformity The Dregs Minor Embellishments Bernini's Saints The Fates Appendix

Curtis Kularski Sarah Kinney E.P. Fisher Francesca Brenner Carley Moore Mark Belair Caroline Kerrigan Curtis Kularski Donna Pucciani Lowell Fleming Sarah Kinney Sapun Ngoensritong Thomasson Burgess Madison Dunaway Meagan Sussman Mayte Martinez Thomasson Burgess Kristine Slade Kristine Slade Aba Hutchison Elena Belova Hannah Barnhardt Sarah Kinney Kristine Slade Doris Ferleger John Trammel Donald L. Parker Kristine Slade Hannah Barnhardt Mollie McGalliard Claire Scott Bradley Tucker Hannah Barnhardt Claire Scott Donna Pucciani Caroline Kerrigan

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About Five Feet Tall I worked at a gas station.

The one where gas was twelve cents cheaper.

One day the door chime rang and a hen walked in, with curlers in her comb and rouge on her wattle.

She side-eyed me straight and clucked for a lotto ticket.

She paid in teeth and scratched out the silver.

Before she left disappointed, she told me how much she hated Easter.

“It’s nonsense,” she said.

“You don’t dye an egg.

You’re born as one.”

- Lowell Fleming

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Breeze Elena Belova watercolor

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Ella

Caroline Kerrigan digital painting 6

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A Runner’s Observations Magpies always go in twos, as one inspects the grass the other keeps a lookout, nothing has them split for long.

Hedgehogs rather slink alone, they cross the pavement way too either late or early, ending up astray or squashed.

Wood frogs hop around in swarms, they little care if any’s left behind or taken, all that matters is the whole.

People never give a damn, if many, some, a few or quite the proper number, each presumes to be the one.

- Alessio Zanelli

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the notebooks my mother kept a log / in cheap / pocket notebooks / of the weekend jaunts / from small town connecticut to new york city / she made with my father / when they were a young couple with two young children who / for these special occasions / they appropriately left home on their sunday night return / she would consult the scrawled list of things they did / and expound for my sister and me / on how those tv game shows had such surprisingly small sets / on how that hawaii kai restaurant was so fiery and large / and early 1960s new york / would rise before our innocent / provincial eyes / in all its neon lit / profligate / sexy / sophistication / our breadwinning father / on the living room sidelines / still in his suit and knotted tie / rocking on his heels and beaming after our mother’s death / my sister and i came upon those swollen / curling notebooks / of sketchy memory prompts that / while in her own hand / sat sadly flat on the page / for they lacked the detail and color and gesture / her bubbly amplifications brought to them yet she’d saved them / along with playbills to broadway shows they attended / mostly forgotten flops with discounted tickets / since those trips / while giddily exciting / were taken pricewise so the value of the notebooks / was strictly sentimental / and of course we kept them / but with a nagging feeling of falsity / for with our mother gone / they were no longer useful as memory prompts / while to the descendants who won’t have known her / the notebooks’ impersonality / will fail to warm them to her once vivacious reality / a discomforting truth we chose to deny / by treating the notebooks as telling treasures / evading another of the telling losses / ever handed down - Mark Belair

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Frame of Reference #1 Madison Dunaway wood, handmade paper, acrylic

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3D Printed Selfies Hannah Barnhardt plastic filament sculpture

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Elizabeth She breathes in sharp, flighty breaths, Too quickly for me to light my candle And compare her movements to the flame.

It’s not easy to amuse her or surprise her mind, But when she smiles, oh god, I remember why there are gaps between leaves: So that the peculiar pattern of light can play in that way.

- Susanna Parkhill

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Outside the AIDS Clinic Death slouches in the waiting room, skimming People magazine ,

toying with a lock of hair, clicking long black fingernails

on the plastic armrests of her chair.

An electronic waterfall

drips on fake geraniums.

Death bites a cuticle, listens to Creedence, spits skin

tags on yellow-waxed linoleum.

Immortal in their grainy smiles, benefactors on the wall gaze at Death through sightless eyes.

Even she can’t stare them down:

puny victory for puny Man. At last the bearded medic nods.

A pale nurse with icy hands disconnects the morphine drip.

Snare drums mask the patient’s sigh.

Death stretches stiff limbs and slowly stands.

-for Phillip M. (1950-1990) - Patricia McMillen

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Air

Elena Belova watercolor

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Drainage

Hannah Barnhardt digital photography

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Deviate Corridor Madison Dunaway cardboard installation

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Georgie Rachel Liptak

t’s finally got cold, and that means that he’ll be in fine form. He likes the cold, though why he’s never said; but a fresh day makes him light, like a bird to fly. Other times he’s slow, looking all his days and years, heavy in bones that still must work hard. Cold takes the weight out of him, smooths over the wrinkles, straightens his back and brightens his walk.

Easier to dig graves feeling good like that.

In the middle of the graveyard is a pump that likely was new when he was a boy. The water comes up from deep underground, and it’s cool even on the hottest days. It’s meant for watering flowers

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and plants on the grounds. Sometimes the boys drink from it when they’re working and the sun is hard and they’ve not brought enough water. One will cup his hands under the spout and the other will work the pump. The first gush is always to clean the hands; the

kind to him, spirit and flesh. The rain of two nights ago has sunk in and the earth is breathing soft through the grass. A fine consistency for cutting into, for digging six feet down over his own head. The boys will be along soon with the machine, but he’ll begin this grave

second is to wipe the face; and then, ablutions properly performed, the third is to drink. They take turns, pumping and drinking. But he never drinks.

Of course he wouldn’t. He knows all about the bodies that fill the earth whence that water comes. He’s buried generations of families, knowing their sins, remembering their names for them. Remembering what the earth was like the day they were interred: crisped over with frost, or wet and thick and clinging, or baked firm in drought. How could he drink that water, knowing that it’s now the blood of friends?

Wouldn’t be right. The boys laugh and say the dead won’t mind, but they can’t be sure of that. He’s known them, and some of his dead would begrudge every stray leaf that lit upon their tombs. It is that close to cannibalism, and he wouldn’t do it, no, not if he were perishing of thirst and alone besides.

There’s a single cloud in the sky that’s hurrying across after the rest of its kind. He doesn’t do such fool things as name days perfect, for each day’s perfect after its time and the Lord’s purpose; but this day is

himself, the way he began the first of his graves, with a shovel firm in hand.

He knows this earth from his born days. It is the earth he learned to walk on, not over a dozen miles away, outside the house where he was born. In younger times he worked at the farm. They play polo there now, and build fancy houses, but he used to milk cows and tend chickens there. He used to tote a wooden basket and pick apples that gleamed in the autumn sun, fruit that filled the cool air with scent near thick enough to bottle.

He is not a sentimental man, and he does not see any mysticism in the path from tending things into life to tucking them into death. Those times were not better than these. Work is still hard; the earth is the same. The earth is pure. If he were a grander man in thought and pride he would claim it, call it his, the earth that he has husbanded. He does not.

And he need not: others do for him.

Today it smells sweet—not the familiar odor of decay and overabundance of flowers, but faintly appetizing. It breaks readily for him, opening at the

“How could he drink that water, knowing that it’s now the blood of friends?”

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edge of the shovel, resisting only a little. Will the earth miss him when he dies? The boys will take up his work, but they have been away and come back, or they were born elsewhere and came to this earth by chance. They were not born to it. They will do the work, carry out the

The leaves are shaking peaceably in their boughs.

Soon they’ll start to change, some looking green all at once and paling to sickly yellow, others fading in majesty, rushing through to flame orange, scarlet.

When the boys bring out the machine he’ll go to the

ways he taught them; but will the earth pay any mind to the machine instead of the shovel? Will the dead feel the loss of him?

They’re dead, the boys would say, they don’t care. The ground can’t tell the difference.

When he dies he will be buried in the far corner, near the oak tree, which bears no fruit. The boys have promised to dig his grave by hand, letting the machine rest in its shed.

They have promised that no one else will be buried there before him. They’ve even joked that they’ll let him dig the grave himself, if he wants. The promises come out offhandedly: Nobody is going to want to be buried there. (The far corner beneath the oak is on a rise, overlooking the whole graveyard. One of the boys, who’d studied, once called it the king’s throne; from there a man could see everything he’d made and conquered.) And they say: The machine needs a break every once in a while. Digging never hurt a guy. He did not ask for their words, but they promised all the same.

His thanks was silence. A nod.

(He’ll outlive us all, anyway.)

shed, replace his shovel, and check over the rakes. By mid-November a pile will have grown, the size of which will tempt neighborhood child and adult alike. When he’s sure all the leaves have come down, he’ll light it, and they will take it in turns to watch over the pyre. The smoke, the crackling, the curling scent of the leaves turning in on themselves is a signal, proof that winter is really on its way. He is careful not to light the signal before its time.

The boys approach. One is driving the machine; the other is sitting in its claw, legs tucked up. They stop at the foot of the small hole he’s begun and clamber out. The driver offers him coffee from a small thermos, and he drinks it, although the boy likes it far too sweet.

It’s chilly, huh, they say.

He shrugs. They already know that the chill will never bother him. They think that nothing would make him happier than to die in winter—old people are always dying in winter. But instead of freezing because his heater was broken, or because he couldn’t afford to run it, he’d die having left it off on purpose.

“They’re dead, the boys would say, they don’t care. The ground can’t tell the difference.”

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He’s part polar bear, one says.

Part penguin.

They watch him walk to the shed with a contemplative slowness. He wears a faded red-checked flannel shirt and rough dungarees, dirty boots and a

let the world listen to their stereos. The cool sedates them today; windows are up and music contained. The world is quieting down, bundling up, nestling in for the winter to come. It’s fine, fine.

The almanac calls for snow this winter, more than

baseball cap. The boys know that he will not put on a jacket until snow falls. They know too that he thinks they are weaker and softer than he—they like sugar in their coffee, they drink from the pump when they are thirsty, they talk while they work, they are even now wearing light jackets. Yet they know that he does not hold these things against them. They were not born to cool days and this earth. They use the machine because it is easier and faster than the shovels. They drink the water because they do not know the dead through which it runs. The boy who studied tries to talk about philosophy and belief and superstition, but he pays no mind to the talk. When the boys talk too much and get distracted from the work, he reminds them that graves don’t dig themselves. They grin, or roll their eyes, but they work. They like him, for all his quiet and old-fashionedness. They try not to think about the day they’ll have to dig his grave.

The rakes in the shed are in fine condition. He had no reason to suspect otherwise, though it never hurts to check. He hums a little, surveying bags of fertilizer and grass seed, the post-holer in one corner, the coiled hoses. The bushes along the street side want trimming.

He selects a pair of shears and ambles to the entrance.

The traffic is going to drown out his humming.

Normally the cars rushing by bother him, especially in the summer, when they roll their windows down and

in years, knee-deep. Pretty as a picture, no doubt it’ll be, here in the graveyard more than anywhere else.

The first good snow in this graveyard stays pristine for longer than at any park or playground. No children come to sled down the rise or make snowmen. Snow collects in the scrolled iron of the arch over the gate.

Traffic is slower, quieter. If only no one died in winter, he could enjoy it. But the machine is a necessity in winter. He will try to wait until the ground softens in the spring thaw, to make it easier for the boys.

They finish the grave, put away the machine, set up the tent overhead. Tomorrow is the service for a woman who lived almost fifty years there in the town.

A friend. He knows that she would not mind if he drank her, what was left of her, and so he will not, out of respect. He locks the shed as the boys walk to the pump.

Maybe it’s what’s keeping us young, hey? they laugh.

They wash themselves, not yet ready to return to the dust that they are, and drink. Not for the first time he longs for the water. Finished, they flick drops off their hands, lick them off their lips, and depart, calling good night. As the boys drive off, home to their wives and children, he locks the gate. Across the street is his house, where he will open a window, lie down in his bed, and wait.

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American Air Headed for sunset, girls in camouflage play hearts across the aisle, their steel-toed boots identical to those of the young men seated beside them watching Bruce Willis and Mos Def on laptops. How new they look, the boys almost more fragile than the girls, all grateful as a steward passes out pretzels and 7-Ups—and all so clean, as though grooming won wars. At SFO we amble past displays marked “Natural History”: bleached swordfish, shark-tooth knives, fugu floating in formaldehyde.

I feign interest while trying not to think how much I pay these kids to kill for me, these sons and daughters eager to come home traumatized, crippled, their scrubbed faces gone.

- Patricia McMillen

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The Captain Caroline Kerrigan coffee, watercolor, ink

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2 straws

Aba Hutchison pen and colored pencil 22

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Boy Blue

Aba Hutchison pen and colored pencil 2017

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Haystacks for Lori

She was only eight when she discovered Monet at the Art Institute of Chicago.

she’d turn to view it from afar, so different from the random dabs that captured her warm nearness

With palpable glee, she’d run to the dozen haystacks, wanting to touch the close clouds of paint, the golden threads of straw daubed at dawn, noon, sunset and all hours in between.

with the myopic miracle of the present moment. And then

The adults feared she’d set off an alarm, her small hot face peering into French fields, perhaps looking for the proverbial needle. But hers was the search for the haystack itself, and as she scampered back into the center of the room,

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the distance, the wonder of a bundle of hay, whole and entire, gathered somehow into her own blue retinal awe, along with the sense of regret at backing off, far from thick pigment and dense light that cradled her a moment before.

Now, only the reflected imagery of gold against the purpled skies.

- Donna Pucciani

Façade

Hannah Barnhardt photograph

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Breakthrough,

Civil Rights Activist Kris Long and Art Journalist Hannah Rochester Barnhardt Madison Westfall canson paper, graphite, white charcoal

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Beach Tower Joshua Greene digital photograph

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Mother She clutches a pillow in both hands— not frantically, deliberately, eyes tight, mouth half open, fingers clenched.

It’s not a scene out of CSI. It’s a nursing home in Houston.

Light dances over the windowsill, a Yorkie yips in the corner then jumps on the bed, confused, waiting for words of comfort in morning light, but there are no sounds, just stillness.

In the aftermath— a few birds trill, cars come alive along the highway.

- Marc Swan

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Persephone Caroline Kerrigan digital drawing

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Frame of Reference #2 Madison Dunaway wood, handmade paper, acrylic

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Halloween, San Francisco Between the modern art museum and the MexicanIndonesian-Thai-Turkish-Vietnamese luncheonette where for a second day I eat greasy pork kabobs and bland noodles, a man on the sidewalk slumps over a cardboard sign that yesterday read “Famished” and today says “Ravenous.”

Moving closer I see he’s not asleep but reading Us , the topmost on a stack behind his sign. It’s tricky here, sorting what’s real from what isn’t. Mickey Mouse walks by, blood gushing from a head wound. A pale geisha hangs off a cable car. Zombie brides play speed chess on Market Street, ogled by stoned gold prospectors, Vietnam vets with flags duct-taped to stolen grocery carts. Today the Pentagon’s put everyone on high alert, not saying what that means. Nervous shop owners shut their metal gates early.

A man wrapped in a tattered blanket stops sorting through garbage cans to flutter it at a pair of Asian teens, shouts “Boo!” then returns to humming “Born to be Wild.”

Real, not real; no matter. It’s how he feels.

- Patricia McMillen

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The Mantis We drove from the store with a passenger.

An indignant living twig

I hope to send him on a college-ruled carpet ride, to be a tyrant for greener fields than our garage.

clinging to our windshield.

No more harmful than a kitten It pondered and prayed for the claws to crush me as I scooped him to salvation, eyes never leaving mine.

We landed home in the garage and Michael and Peter scattered to the light for a florescent evening.

But my attentions turned to the praying stowaway on the sedan roof.

Its viper head held microphone eyes. And predator suspicions cradling its thumbnail thoughts, Twitching and sliding its sight to find every movement.

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And when the low roar of jet engines climbed over us This dragon to beetle, ant and worm turned to the sound with me.

- Lowell Fleming

Walking with my Hammerfish Myrthe Biesheuvel ink on paper

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Merrie

Sam Workman oil on canvas

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Lineage Louise lives in the middle of me between the first and the last, which is a found name because too many Swedes of the other sort lived in that one village. But Louise now, she starts as an artist in Ontario, and comes to life in wildflowers more than a century old.

The next time, Louise becomes a cousin gone gray now but full of ghosts with their games.

Fast-forward to two seers, one sage,

one sad. Louise when she gets to me is such a game girl, so carefully inept but secretly she really likes speed and bleeds all over the canvas of her silence and from the outside no one would ever guess that Louise inside has painted herself out of her corner.

- Laurinda Lind

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The Gift of Perseus for Linda

Stars are spinning away into the river night while boulders clatter in the gorge below us.

Mountains are being worn down to nubs while the sparks rise from our fire.

Granite is collapsing into cobbles rolling into sand, into dust.

Atoms are falling from the forge.

Gods and their hammers will disturb our sleep tonight.

We followed the moving shadows up the trails.

All afternoon, gargoyle faces in the cliffs observed our ascent.

But the night hides us from their gaze.

High in the Sierras, we are closer to the stars.

We are closer to the hot drops of blood that are falling from the sword of Perseus.

A light rain of burning iron is flitting across the sky.

Streaks are gone before we’re sure we’ve seen them.

The gas pockets in the wood burst and whistle.

Our voices are lost in the gathering emptiness.

We are dozing off before the coals.

Suddenly a meteor boulder shatters, flares.

It fades in the west, leaving us alone with the stars and the enfolded darkness of a world in space.

- Wulf Losee

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Digress Sarah Mitchell watercolor

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Mug Shot Sarah Kinney oil on canvas

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Chickens Wasteland dirt soft under dinosaur feet In that arena of rusty hexagons Proud musty Chanticleer L ooms.

Gold, scarlet, and emerald with urine eyes His treasure is taken for breakfast.

- Lowell Fleming

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The Difficult Matter of Gehenna Mao Xiang

n Friday evening, Arthur Katsis—a man full of years, full of himself, and suddenly wary of lingering too long on the light ice of life—requested a pound of cure, a dose beyond, the lasting send-off of a last therapeutic excess. It had been a long ordeal. His nurse, furtively celebrating with one of his leftover fentanyl patches, smiled wanly at his corpse as she phoned his granddaughter to inform her of the death.

Once Arthur’s last lungful had emptied, that which was not his body continued its limacine crawl to infinity—outside of, and so out of, time. And once his physical

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sense had shed, the manifold substances that had long offered pleasure to his brain no longer held effect.

Nothing cleared away or absorbed his excesses, for there was no longer anything to distract him from the reality of himself. Arthur’s beyond was nothing

can’t do a thing about it other than push away my hand.

When she sponge-bathes me, I—” “Mr. Katsis,” the attorney said nervously, prompting Arthur with a ballpoint pen and several stapled sheets of black-and-white copy. “I just need your signatures.”

other than memory on loop, frozen and unalterable, lived again and again—yet with invariable hope for different results. Without potential for life, only memory remains, and Arthur had condemned himself to memory, and to the memories of the wide circumference who knew him.

And yet, while the conscience on auto-condemn was intense sorrow, it was sorrow without metanoia, for the dead can perform no good works; the best they can ever do is cease doing bad.

What could soothe the enormity of such a state? Or, failing succor, what might at least induce a merciful amnesia? To die frozen in guilt and shame makes any diminishment of that condition impossible. Such was the scourge of love, an eternal memory of debts and trespasses against love—and, most maddening of all, still no definitive answer on the presence of God. “I can shit in my pants,” Arthur had wheezed at his attorney the Monday prior, “and the nurse cleans it up. I’ll request more morphine and pills, and she has to give it to me. I can reach up and grab her ass, and she

“It’s like being a baby again,” Arthur said, “but with a working memory and a libido!” His nostrils dilated, better exhibiting the abundance of hair inside his nasal passages. “Ah, if only I could keep up this state forever. Fuck, if I could only keep up this image and likeness...”

“Mr. Kat—” “I’m narrating to you exactly what it’s like to die!

Don’t you understand?”

“Mis—” With the reactive twitch of a healthy man doing abdominal crunches, Arthur, despite the bloat of gut protruding from his rawboned frame, sat bolt upright from his orthopedic emperor-size bed. “You’re fired!” he rasped, snarling to reveal a tooth-free upper gum. “And don’t even think about coming to my funeral,” he bellowed after her. “Bitch.”

“Such was the scourge of love, an eternal memory of debts and trespasses against love—and, most maddening of all, still no definitive answer on the presence of God.”

From the Monday after JFK’s assassination to the Saturday before September 11th, Arthur Katsis had worked as a content developer for the board game industry. His windfall, a truly substantial one, came from a game called Trust Busters. Rather than amass wealth (as in most such games), its goal was to impose

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multiple interlocking patterns of governmental regulation upon the board’s businesses, while ensuring they still functioned efficiently until they became publicly owned. It was a game with no losers, at least in the conventional sense. (And while the game was never released to the public, the sale of its creative rights had put Arthur’s grandchildren through some highly ranked East Coast universities.) In life, Arthur had excelled in crafting complex games of dumb luck, with the critical exceptions of marriage and parenthood; husbanding, for him, was solely an economic duty. This endowed him with an extremity of freedom, along with the net worth necessary to reify his desire to be otherwise (or, in some instances, to remain exactly the same). The meeting points of the carefree and the careless consistently and without hesitation had marked his life. The Indian summer that approached Arthur’s retirement aggrandized this imbalance all the more, and retirement itself became an invisible gavage pumping his body with the weighty grains of excessive living. Now at his earthly end, Arthur was rich but spent, with a salved gray moustache and a friar’s haircut—the latter a begrudging concession to a baldness minoxidil and finasteride couldn’t adequately treat and that multiple hair transplants were unable to fully cover. Most things considered, however, dying

had become astoundingly fun for him.

He wished he’d done it before, in fact. And he wished he could do it again, and keep doing it, for it seemed nothing but the small mirabilia of sustained endorphins and moral immunity. ...Little Crystal. You were both five, but she was so small for her age, bowl-cut chestnut hair just over waxy jug ears, rotting baby teeth and skin freckled henna . What she wore was (most likely) her older brother’s old clothes—usually blue jeans and flannel shirts, even in the springtime warmth. Her family was poor even by the standards of yours. She’d claimed nothing could make her cry, that she’d never shed tears, so your response was to strike her, closefisted, intermediate phalanges rapping her tiny head, then denying it later to witnesses on the playground, school officials, and everyone else, until an adult...

“Most things considered, however, dying had become astoundingly fun for him.”

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On Tuesday morning, Father Demetriou, the longtime protopresbyter of the city’s St. Lazarus Greek Orthodox Church, visited Arthur to offer to him the Holy Mysteries. His intent did not last long.

“Arthur,” the old priest sighed, “we don’t bless suicides. You know that. You should.” He frowned and pressed himself deeper into the plush armchair at the foot of Arthur’s bed. “Puts me in mind of how years ago I had to explain to one very sad mother why we don’t

bless abortions, either.” He quietly beheld his lapsed communicant. “Regardless—even though we’re always unworthy, we still have to prepare ourselves to receive the Body and Blood of our Lord. When exactly was the last time you received Communion?”

grease to his moustache, then raked the inside of his lower lip over the slimy bristles. It was fairly impossible to determine where his moustache ended and, in turn, where his nostril hair began.

The priest bowed his head and, breathing through

“Ah, couple Paschas ago, I think.” Arthur nonchalantly fingered a hairy nostril. Even within the shortest periods of contact, his presence tended to induce in his acquaintances the sensation of grapefruit juice on a toothpasted palate.

Father Demetriou asked, through an appropriately sour face, “When was your last Confession?”

“I confess,” said Arthur, his voice made kazoolike by his index finger, “that I have no idea. It’s hard to remember anything anymore. How can I confess to things I don’t remember doing?” Satisfied, he extracted the digit from his nose and wiped its tip on the lava red silken comforter that covered him from the chest down. Then he very obviously fixed his visage upon the Rubenesque rear end of his nurse, who had bent over to arrest some rogue sparks shot from the rubicund hickory embers in the bedroom’s massive stone hearth.

Though heavy in scent, the coals generated no sensible heat.

Disapproval registered in the voice of the priest, who asked Arthur if he remembered Christ’s words about the commission of adultery in one’s heart.

Arthur reached for a tube of pomade on the bureau by the bed. “Well, Pateras, there’ve been many, many times I’ve thought in my heart about going to church. Shouldn’t that same principle apply?” Without the aid of a mirror, Arthur applied a smidgen of the

his mouth, communicated a good quarter-minute of verbal silence. Finally, he said, “I’m not going to give you Unction, either.”

“Why not?”

“You’ve lived as fully as a man can in this world before that final opportunity to repent. If you receive any of the Holy Mysteries at this point, without any willingness to open your heart to our Lord’s mercy, you will only condemn yourself further, to something only God knows—and it will be worse for you as you are judged, however that may be. And don’t bother calling Father Duca at the Romanian church, or that new priest out at the ROCOR mission, either. Priestshopping is as detrimental for the soul as this doctorshopping has been for your body.”

“I’ve been diagnosed as senile,” Arthur defended, “and I believe it!”

“From what I see within you, I’d say you’re fundamentally irresponsible.”

“That’s right, I’m not responsible!”

The old priest violently torqued a knot on his prayer rope.

Disdain narrowed Arthur’s eyelids. “Think back, Pateras. Think waaaay back. Think back to when you baptized my grandkids. Early ‘80s, if I remember correctly?” Arthur suddenly unleashed a series of heavy coughs, then reached for the (nearly) empty

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hospital-style handheld plastic urinal and expectorated a massive, floaty wad. “Think back to that. How much of your lovely sanctuary did my stewardship build— remind me?”

Father Demetriou practically leapt from his

perfectly by the Florida sun. Constantly humming Elvis’ latest hit through a close-lipped smile, she carefully hid her buck teeth while serving souvlaki to your family one late evening in an empty diner. Your response was to vomit the meal and leave Orthodoxy—a delayed, but enduring,

chair, but with equal agility soon composed himself.

“Arthur, I truly hate to say this, but you’re dying proof that the most egregious deployments are found in the institution of the human heart itself. Adam and Eve didn’t fall out of any lack or need, because they were already like God.” The priest’s voice built slowly, as in a homiletic delivery. “So if you’re going to be this careless about your soul, but still want some semblance of a Christian end to your life, why don’t you just convert to the Episcopal church while you still have time?” He shuffled more agedly out of the room than he earlier had into it, and left behind a final, muttered theological lament. “Spong...God help us.”

“Fuck you,” Arthur belted out, somehow amassing the pneumatic presence sufficient to belt out such expressions. Casually, he flipped on his enormous plasma television and began scanning channels.

“Fuck you, Father, and fuck the whole fucking Greek Orthodox Church, and fuck the Holy Trinity, and fuck all the Saints, and fuck the ever-virginity of the Theotokos , and fuck the Archbishop, whoever he is now.” He finally settled on a Happy Days marathon.

“And the Diaconate , fuck them too.”

result...

...That Greek waitress with no nametag was perhaps five years older than you, fifteen-ish , but only slightly taller, her mid-back bister curls and tan genes expressed

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“What’s a nine-letter word, opposite of ‘dictator?’”

Arthur asked his nurse on Wednesday afternoon, filliping his New York Times with the tip of his ballpoint pen.

The nurse, who was confecting another of Arthur’s pain cocktails, paused in mid-measurement, mentally counting letters in possible words. “’Cunctator’— never mind.” After a few seconds of scratching, Arthur looked back up and leered at her. “Dip your finger in one of my morphine vials,” he instructed her, “and let me suck on it.”

Though by now accustomed to such demands, the nurse still burnt scarlet.

“I’m not too sick to write big numbers on checks,” Arthur reminded her.

Silently, the nurse consented and Arthur’s new morphine drip proceeded off the tip of her finger. A few minutes later, she pocketed a shakily written personal check for $1,000. ...Wilma. Wasn’t that her name? We always called her ‘Biscuit’ because she ate biscuits for lunch every day at school. The rest of us had white bread for our sandwiches— bologna and ham and PB&Js . We only spoke to her to mock her; she had no friends and made poor grades. She

always smelled of unwashed clothes and sometimes of pee, and we wouldn’t let her walk along with the rest of us. So she’d silently walk by herself, head down, following the old CSX tracks to and from her family’s shack. And then two days before the end of second grade, she was struck dead by

jerky and stupid.” Hoarse laughter rattled up his throat.

Andie’s mouth slackened. “How could you know what those things actually feel like?”

Arthur clenched his fists and percussed his chest at an imaginative 7/8 pitter-patter. “Ah, you’re right.

a train on the walk home from school. Who was at fault?

Deus vult...

Hell, I don’t even know what it feels like to be a man.

I’m proud I raised such bright grandkids.” He stopped drumming and swigged a condensating bottle of mineral water. “What’s your brother doing? Why didn’t he come with you?”

“He’s been really busy lately,” Andie lied and changed the topic.

“You’ve certainly turned this into the Cadillac of hospices.”

“It’s inevitable you’re gonna die, so die feeling really, really good,” Arthur said, then loudly freed some trapped effervescence. “After you’ve done everything there is to do in life, when there’s nothing else new for you, when you’ve maximized every minimal pleasure, the only thing left to do is have fun dying. I’m a firm believer that every person alive is worthy of a fun death.” He laughed again.

Andie asked her grandfather what he thought his daughter—her mother—would say to him if she were there.

Arthur distracted himself by again eyeing the callipygian endowments of his nurse. She had bent over to pick up one of several stacks of The Economist by the bedside bureau. “Bah. Once you’re gone, you’re too

On Thursday evening, Arthur’s granddaughter, Andie, came to visit after her shift’s end at the Asian Fusion bistro where she worked as a server. She was a woman in her mid-thirties for whom a summa cum laude degree in comparative literature had conferred nothing financial other than minor debt. Despite increasingly diminished returns, she did her best to remain a good sport, if not always a cheerful player in the game of her life.

“Are you really sick?” Andie asked her grandfather, just as she had on several previous occasions. Unable to force herself to hug him, she instead gave a pat to Arthur’s bald pate. Though his scalp shone oily, the skin was hot and dry.

“Of course I am,” Arthur apprised her, pushing away her hand to reposition some nearly invisible wisps. “I’m dying. It’s just a matter of time. Feels like I have Tourette’s and Down’s at the same time, all herky-

“‘I’m dying. It’s just a matter of time.

Feels like I have Tourette’s and Down’s at the same time, all herky-jerky and stupid.’

Hoarse laughter rattled up his throat.”

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busy being dead to contemplate your non-existence.

That’s what I was trying to tell that goddamn priest the other day...”

“Grandpa, I was the one who called Father Demetriou and asked him to come talk to you. I’ve

lazing on the lawn honked loudly. “If I were healthy,” he griped, “I’d beat those goddamn geese silent with a nine-iron. All they do is shit on the clean grass. When you go, darling, just chase them off the grounds for me.”

At this constructive dismissal, Andie, her eyelids

started going back to church now.” She silenced herself, not really wanting to say more about it.

Arthur’s pore-clogged nose crinkled. The sickly savor of burnt hickory thickened the air around them.

Andie pivoted in the plush chair to face the bedroom window, whose silken curtains were drawn shut. She could sense an unwieldy run-on about to issue forth, but couldn’t be bothered trying to simplify and rearrange it. Papu, I just want you to know...we’re really thankful for how you took care of us, growing up and everything...And how you always made sure we went to good schools...and took care of our tuition and housing and made sure we were provided for...and... I want you to know that I’m going to pray for your soul every day after you’ve... passed...” It was the closest approximation of ‘I love you’ she could truthfully express to her grandfather, her anger registered with long-term pain and sensitivity, like a snarl through teeth eroded of enamel.

Arthur mumbled something wordless to acknowledge he had heard her. Some Canadian geese

welling, rose to leave. But instead of immediately returning to her car, she stood alone for several minutes in the long, poorly lit hallway by Arthur’s bedroom, lightheadedly breathing its abundance of wood polish and staring at the solemn black-and-white wall portraits of dead ancestors she had always heard stories about but toward whom she felt no real affinity; they were ghostly strangers made all the more strange by the nearness of their blood relation to her.

“I’m really sorry my grandfather is so mean to you,” Andie said to the nurse, as soon as Arthur’s bedroom door had securely shut. “He’s a bastard. Especially to women.

That’s just him.”

The nurse managed the weakest of all smiles. “It’s okay. I’m getting paid really well. I can deal with it.”

Andie forced herself to ask, “Do you really think he’s senile? To me, he’s acting the same as always, just kind of exaggerated.”

The nurse’s mouth opened and silently expressed hesitance.

Andie asked again, “Is he even sick?”

“It was the closest approximation of ‘I love you’ she could truthfully express to her grandfather, her anger registered with long-term pain and sensitivity, like a snarl through teeth eroded of enamel.”

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Her mouth still slack, the nurse finally said, “I’m sorry, but at Mr. Katsis’ request, I’m not permitted to discuss patient information.”

“Could you at least tell me who his primary—” Then she broke off, feeling her press as futile as

It’s time for your dinner.”

Arthur Katsis awoke for the last time, feeling as though he had just spent years driving nonstop in first gear along a lonely Kansas highway, only to find ahead of him now years of Nebraska instead: no god, only

throwing squares of toilet paper. “Just please notify me immediately if anything gets serious.”

The nurse nodded and assured her she would.

Religion.

The nurse removed the top of the platter off Arthur’s meal tray, where a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal steamed fresh. After one gummy bite that induced within him no gastronomic pleasure, Arthur upturned his tray and let its dinnerware fall to the floor. At this point, he wished only for the relief of effortless rest, for a slumber sufficient to situate him in happy stories that never happened. The wine and gall of another fentanyl patch made it real. Axios! Axios!

...And then there was Ally Cat—man, oh boy. You were a year older at seventeen. The crisp blueness heavenward, the bright morning air, and the early-turned leaves all happily overwhelmed you that Sunday of September on the steps outside the narthex. Her name you pissed in cursive on the mountain lake water, up where West Virginian starts giving way to Pittsburghese and y’alls become yinzes.

The sorrel cascades of her hoyden cut, parted evenly down to her sun-flaked shoulders, and her never-ending smirk rendered your response: hissing , half-mad, hell-bent to purge any trace of that beauty from within you through any new nepenthe , from smokeless tobacco to the occult...

On Friday, when the possibility of the future had gone for good, nothing greeted Arthur but the rashes of memory. In bed, he kept to a cooked shrimp’s position as a daylong deluge of sweat left him simultaneously chilled and fevered, entropic and compressed, static in the unrest of simultaneous extremes. The fireplace continued to exhale its hickory halitosis and popped at irregular intervals.

At 6PM sharp, the nurse touched his shoulder, then withdrew her fingers as if just scalded. “Mr. Katsis?

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A Flower Twice Exposed Curtis Kularski 35mm film

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A Flower Twice Exposed II Curtis Kularski 35mm film

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Whyme Sarah Kinney oil on canvas

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The Studied Symmetry of Hollow Bones What happens to a robin when it dies?

Does it peck a hole in the back of the sky Scratching the mirror-silvering off?

No studied symmetry of hollow bones, No fallen star, no cairn in heaps of stone, Nor jointed, dactyl skeleton remains;

The loon, the cuckoo only leave behind Their melancholy echo in the pines, No date of their demise or epitaph…

No squadron veering, steered magnetic north; No delicate, winged contraption washed ashore In silhouette of fossil vertebrae…

The nightingale’s unearthly repertoire— An inconsolable burden, like a bier, A nocturne to the moon, an egg-shaped O! No fever-clutch of feathers in a ditch— No white, angelic frieze, no sacred niche, No preposterous braggadocio of crows!

Last spring a flock of starlings left no trace, No V-shape sign to mark the season’s pace, A thousand cross-staves X-ing out their eyes!

Like silent sparrows falling in a field, A broken seal, a prophesy revealed, A carcass dropped like Icarus from the sky...…

The hummingbird, the pigeon at my sill, More regal, more articulate than my quill, These unreal passing shadows on the ground.

The whip-poor-will’s last will & testament, The swan’s dispatch, the mourning dove’s lament Migrating to the other side of sound…

- E.P. Fisher

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When We Were The Apple of Each Other’s Eye Tonight at dinner, after you return plate a mound of second helpings garlic mashed potatoes, chicken and broccoli

Little hands pulling my arms around you as we sat on the floor, you in my lap rocking and rocking, a boat in a storm

and after your third large glass of milk it hits me—

until we tipped and fell

Like a wall of water hits the shore flattens duplexes, power lines rushes mile after mile in a runner’s minute thins to foam at an inner-city curb where a homeless man sleeps on the sidewalk then recedes, carrying back pieces of my liver and lung and blood swirling in a muddy froth to the bound ocean of my heart—

You’d climb on me knees and elbows tickling your rescue boat from hot lava until we slithered onto our bellies in imagined snow and built an igloo

I miss you

You’d use every pillow in the house and the village was made of shoes and socks my potted geranium the town park Zaboo the lemur, Ircus the muskrat, Mafoo the gerbil and your favorite, Bluey the Gloomy Bear

Two weeks ago you couldn’t lift your newborn head I nursed you to sleep, kissing your tiny nose last week, knees wrapped around my waist I carried you on my hip just yesterday I ran fingers through your shoulder-length hair

All now tucked away in your drawers

You running to get me pulling my hand to come see the skyscraper built out of Kleenex boxes the train parade under the dying table the potion plan that turned our sink dusty magenta

I look at your six-foot-two-inch frame as unfamiliar to you as it is to me

I imagine asking if you remember the love song I wrote and sang for you when you were small I could sing it for you again, but I don’t

My heart is trying to speak to you but I ask you to put your dishes in the sink and move the car to avoid a street-cleaning ticket - Francesca Brenner

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Alternate Self-Portrait Carley Moore screen print

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The Hush The fog revealed all

something alive, a being

the drizzly morning I first

(I could hear in the hush)

trolled the beach in Maine

longing to return, longing for the stormy sea,

alone, a boy in a rubber raincoat

longing for a resurrection for which they had—

stunned still by the haunting

the cold, drifting, obliterating fog whispered—

hush from every

no prayer.

shell, for each once held

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- Mark Belair

Evening Tea Caroline Kerrigan pen and colored pencil

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Staring Across The Field Curtis Kularski 35mm film

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In the Shade Hosta flourishes where nothing else will grow.

It loves the roots of trees with which it shares soil and rain. It survives the hunger of rabbits, the sucking greed of slugs.

No roadside wanderer, it prefers the domesticity of yards, the hidden corners of old houses that lean unfashionably into the dark.

How is it that you and I have weathered the dubious grace of age, leaving summer light to swooping robins, cabbage moths hovering in sunny lavender, squirrels with their nearly-human hands holding bits of fruit to bury for the winter?

We spend the shadowed nights imagining the unfinished business of days not yet born.

- Donna Pucciani

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The Summer I was Two Walking More like plopping hammer feet with fat heels in the backyard chasing chickens and watching cats and feeding rabbits with carrots stolen from grandma.

I learned something My face hurt because I did what I was told I told mom to shut up I just felt like she should She said say it again So I learned that language is complex.

- Lowell Fleming

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What’s Inside Sarah Kinney scratchboard

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Reveal

Sapun Ngoensritong reverse applique 60

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Thomasson Burgess acrylic on board

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Potentially Utilizable Madison Dunaway wood, succulents

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Celestial Tree Meagan Sussman digital

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Stud Muffin Jav Mayte Martinez digital

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Majesty

Thomasson Burgess acrylic on canvas

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Negro Girl Negro girl, Why do you continue to wallow in your ways?

Do you not see that your unflawed melanin has been kissed by the brightest of the sun rays?

Have you not noticed that there is a universe in your afro and it is naturally buoyant and bounces in the breeze created by the coconut-infused and wind-filled waves?

Can you feel the sensational sway of your curvaceous hips when you walk across a street after looking both ways?

How have you not realized that the angelic radiance of your white chiseled teeth can brighten even the darkest of days?

Negro girl, Who told you that your cinnamon, cappuccino, butterscotch, caramel, mocha, mulatto, expresso, dark chocolate, or nutmeg skin was uneasy to others’ eyes?

What made you believe that your sweet, coco butter enriched fragrances would attract the dirtiest of flies?

When did the empowering and tedious sound of your tongue creating impeccable words make others create such vicious lies?

Negro girl, Tell me. Oh please just tell me what they have said.

I shall put their haunting words, empty thoughts, and frightful stares along with the dead.

All for you,

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Negro girl.

The mother of all beauty; I will remind you of your captivating soul, Make sure that you know your wonderfully and fearfully sculpted existence is man’s ultimate life goal.

I will embrace your neglected yet sexually satisfying allure with the underlying cure of what it feels like to be whole.

For you, Negro girl, I will show you that you are the definition of love.

From the sun kissed melanin, buoyant fro, curvaceous hips, and radiant teeth, I will prove that your creation was idolized so dearly that only the Lord above could make something as perfect as a fitted glove.

Negro girl.

You are more than just any other girl.

You are envied. Flourishing. Aspiring.

Most importantly, you are a negro girl, and You. Are. Loved.

- Kristine Slade

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Negro Girl Part 2 Negro girl, I know that we live in a white Amerikka, but Believe and trust in me when I say that your Black skin, And black hair, And black mind, And black culture, And black beauty Will one day bring so much color to this world that your Ebony glaze will begin to invade and take over their Transparent-with-racial stereotypes and standards so quickly that they will be Blinded by your brown, Restrained by your resilience, Shackled by your soulful knowledge, And petrified by your power, Because I said it before and I’ll say it again: You Negro Girl should be proud.

To be a negro is to be strong, and to be a woman is to be intelligent.

Take note and remember that you are Envied. Brilliant. Noble. Essential.

Most importantly Negro Girl, know that you And your black Matter, And that You Are Loved.

- Kristine Slade

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Reflection Aba Hutchison pen and colored pencil

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Doesn’t Let Go Elena Belova watercolor

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Blue Sock Hannah Barnhardt watercolor and pencil

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Rock Bottom Sarah Kinney digital drawing

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Firecracker.

New York bred. Army made.

You’ve battled the wars in the streets and overseas.

Fought for freedom and your family.

Explosions of love, IED’s of despise, MRE’s of content, Guns of adrenaline.

The Army prepared you for any battle, But I guess they forgot about the battle of the firecrackers in your head.

Manufactured by the PTSD company, Claiming the slogan “Designed to go off at any time”.

Little did they know that you’ve been trained to kill the enemy.

The one your family would be mistaken for.

- Kristine Slade

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Be Happy and Never Forget Doris Ferleger

ery early in my life, perhaps even through intrauterine fluids, the double message “Be happy and never forget” flowed into me. An aiming-to-please daughter of Holocaust survivors, I tried hard to do both. “Happy talk keep talkin’ happy talk,” Poppa’s favorite song from the King and I. He would sing it if I appeared gloomy or just regular. “Memories—all alone in the moonlight,” he’d sing in the next instant, telling me how much I resembled his sisters Ruchele, Goldele, Nache, Hafche, all sent to the ovens.

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Snap Crackle’s Child

Independence Day’s Child

At the kitchen table, over roasted chicken, Rice Krispies’ snap crackle and pop—happy talk, terrifying talk, numbing talk. Never sure at what meal they’d turn up in conversation—aunts, grandparents, cousins—128

4th of July fireworks: laughing mothers and fathers set out lawn chairs, blankets, picnic baskets, bottles of beer. My family sits on the dropped down rear door of our station wagon. Safely watching bombs bursting.

murdered relatives to be exact, but who’s counting, except my brother who took to researching the handwritten roll call entries from Auschwitz, Majdanek, Bergen-Belsen—rounding up all pages that contained the name Ferleger, Furleger, Forlager, spelled differently in different camps—

Warsaw burning.

Favorite dessert at our house: bread, butter, salt.

Camp’s Child Summer camp.

Never went. Any place with the word camp in it—

Never a Child I wanted so much to be happy so my parents could be happy: the collective unconscious coda of trauma’s children. I didn’t get that it wasn’t my job to make my parents happy.

“I didn’t get that it wasn’t my job to make my parents happy.”

Easy Trigger’s Child If I “never forgot,” how could I “be happy”? If I “be’ed” happy” I would surely, even if momentarily, be forgetting the tragic fates of both my parents’ families.

Each day, something that would appear neutral to the average onlooker triggered Momma’s traumas: my new clogs made Momma say, Ach. Terrible shoes.

Though she couldn’t say why. Until the next day when she realized: oy, death-march shoes.

Reparation’s Child

For Momma, happiness could be defined as the opposite of terror: safety. Safe children equaled happy children.

Safe children would also be fair reparation for my parents’ years of terror. We suffered so you shouldn’t suffer, Momma would say. Suffering included everything from getting bumped, bruised, confused, congested, constipated, cold, hot, sweaty, hungry, angry, tired, a failed test, to just having a plain old bad day. Oy, God forbid. Ptew. Ptew.

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War Zone’s Child To insure happy children, Momma created a “No Suffering Zone.” If it were up to her, the zone would have stretched across the continent. But since it wasn’t, she kept us home a lot. When I hear friends talk begrudgingly about their parents who said, Go out and play and don’t come back till dinnertime—I grow jealous.

Basement’s Child

that hung-over beds were immediately removed from their places, leaving visible the hooks and the darker squares, where once the pictures hung.

If the Holocaust could happen, then anything can happen. Pictures can jump off walls and land on a child’s head.

Bad Table’s Child As a child, when I did get hurt

“If the August thunderstorm. Momma miraculously bypassing my mother’s would get that look, then take watchful eyes and hands, she Holocaust could the orange-handled scissors would hit the object that hurt from my hand and down to me, saying, “Bad table,” while happen, then anything the basement we went. I rubbing my good little head. longed to cut the blue and Or she’d pull at her cheeks can happen. Pictures can with red construction paper into all her fingers, saying, I paper dolls with arms that should have expected, predicted, jump off walls and land on joined together the way Poppa protected. had shown me. But lightning a child’s head.” could strike at any moment, and the holder of scissors would be toast!

To prepare for our stays in the basement Poppa had upholstered appliques of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck on long benches that held our toys.

But a bunker by any other name is still a bunker.

Wallflower’s Child The “No Suffering Zone” extended outside the home as well. When we stayed at those cheap motels, the tacky pictures of flowers—knock offs of Van Gogh—

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Dobcha’s Grandchild

“Scybki,” “Mondra” (“Quick,” “Smart”) like Dobcha, Poppa’s mother, a bren, a fireball.

And I looked like his six swarthy sisters. So Poppa saw me through a thick film of grief and longing.

Sometimes though, he took me to dance on the yellow kitchen linoleum. And I became Poppa’s “Be happy.”

Bones’ Child When Poppa and I sat on folding aluminum chairs, and talked about the “Old Country,” I felt it was my “Old

Country” too. We set up those chairs with the flimsy, mesh, crisscrossed slats on our small cement patio— the kind of chairs that kept the impression of you long after you stood up. That patio inspired Poppa’s shtetl memories; his Momma who made doll furniture from chicken bones, and pies from scratch meant only for the restaurant guests; run next door to borrow schnapps for the customer who ordered it. “The restaurant” was really the family kitchen. Two rooms housed eight people and the family business. Poppa wanted me to become a judge like Deborah, aka Dobcha, prophetess and judge of the Old Testament.

Bulletproof Child Poppa’s regular Holocaust nightmares—stabbing chest pains that doubled him over as he watched war coverage, insistence on watching no matter how his body reacted—scared me. Angered me. I’d close the latticed sliding doors of the walnut TV cabinet, but he could still see through the slats and sheer curtain. So, I’d put my body in front of the TV screen of “Never Forget.”

Starvation’s Child Upon leaving any restaurant, Poppa takes the remaining rolls from the basket and places them in his pant pocket, though there was plenty of fresh rye at home. Taking that last roll or rolls was his way of surely outwitting death. To the waiters, he’d joke, My wife never feeds me.

Legacy’s Child In the spring of ninth grade, a valedictorian speech contest was announced. The winner would read his or her speech at graduation. The topic assigned was, Those who forget the past are doomed to relive it. I had walked the halls of this topic my whole life and was able to easily write of it and win the contest. In my white pique sleeveless dress, adorned with an orange polka dot tie, with sweat running down the plastic sweat protectors that Momma had sewn into to the armholes, I stood at the podium, body shaking, but voice calm and clear. My parents sat proudly in the fourth row of the tan auditorium, with be-happy-andnever-forget-tears in their eyes.

Breaking the Silence’s Child At my 35th high school reunion, I discovered that at least five other classmates were offspring of Holocaust survivors. No one spoke about it in those years, but now, in our fifties, the survivors’ kids were finding each other in the ballroom of the Sheraton Hotel, where we spoke of the challenges of a shared legacy, made merry, danced the twist.

Epilogue: “Being happy” and “Never forgetting.” It is like looking at the new moon. Though I see only a sliver in the foreground, if I look with soft eyes, in the background I can see the whole round face of the moon, lighting my way.

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Lost Identity John Trammel wax

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Children Gone One day the children left.

The nursery is empty now Except for odds and ends forgotten The door swung open remains so.

A dollhouse in foreclosure A train derailed The crossing gate down Hint of the past Comings and goings.

Out there A man said “nigger” Another “kike” Another apart watched Laughed at both.

One day the children Came back to the nursery Looked around At each other Spit and left again.

- Donald L. Parker

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Hard Brush Partially through a leisurely post Sunday meridian Of coming in from a sanctified church gathering To acquire school clothes, analyze fifth grade notes, And embark on a moment of family tithes to each other, I make accessible the back of the drawer to find The paint worn away with each smack on the neck or stroke, Caked with ancient grease and stray hairs, hard brush.

The handle still functioning, I reminisce on the limbs that mastered its skill In smoothing out behavioral issues and wry hairs.

I recall my grandmother’s pale hands and mother’s powerful wrists.

Me sitting between their legs, wrestling for freedom as the bristles invade my negro naps.

The restlessness of my behind as I am overly eager to get up And revisit the position the following week, Portrayed to me the clause behind beauty being painful.

- Kristine Slade

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8bit Selfie (spike) Hannah Barnhardt urethane plastic sculpture

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Lambs Ears and Skull Mollie McGalliard digital

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Barbeque Devil Those dreaded dinners on Thursday nights overcooked meatloaf, dry & desperate the devil leering from a bottle of BBQ sauce

my face flushed I slept with the lights on, not just my

pointed tail, sharp beard, menacing horns but it was his pitchfork his three-pronged pitchfork poking & pushing sinners into the pit of hell flames licking their feet

Superman nightlight, I slept with the ceiling light on, the bedside lamp on, the bathroom light on, a flashlight by my side the windows closed even in July my room sweltering over ninety degrees each night I vowed to never steal or lie or tattle but the gum was always there the next day along with impossible math problems

that terrified me each time I stole gum from Saul’s corner store each time I said I had brushed my teeth or finished my homework each time I told on my sister so she would have to stand in the corner while I made faces at her back the image of Barbeque Satan flashed through my head his pitchfork poised craving, coveting, convincing my hackles rose what the hell are hackles? my tongue tangled

ridiculous lists of presidents to memorize & a sister who called me a mealy-mouthed monkey today I eat meatloaf with catsup my sister & I chatter on & on for hours I no longer steal gum & barely lie but I still sleep with the windows shut & I still sleep with the lights on alright - Claire Scott

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Confronting Conformity Bradley Tucker bronze

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The Dregs

Hannah Barnhardt urethane plastic sculpture

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Minor Embellishments Can memories be embellished, elaborated painted pink, doused in fantasy, dipped in inspiration can we put down the yardstick of true/not true valid/not valid, happened/never happened and simply change what didn’t work what caused pain, precluded possibilities adding a few i’s, crossing out a few t’s substituting a word or two or perhaps an entire chapter does it matter? as for me, I’m nostalgic for moments in others’ lives for a past not exactly mine a Fulbright to London to study Monetary Economics (I who can barely add and panics on planes) a trek up Kilimanjaro, reaching the summit as the sun glints off blue-white glaciers

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(totally nauseous at high altitudes) a famous chef at a five- star restaurant people traveling for miles to taste my minced moose with marmalade, my ten- layer coconut cake laced with absinthe and apple sauce (I eat only take out Chinese and frozen pizza) moments stitched together to form a life never lived a life so perfect, so satisfying even though not exactly mine not exactly does it matter?

- Claire Scott

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Bernini’s Saints Perched above the columns of St. Peter’s their marbled sanctity observes the squawking gulls circling for food and finding none. One hundred forty sculpted bodies ten feet tall, including haloes, appear as dashboard plastic.

They’ve held their props for centuries: books, chalices, instruments of martyrdom, a quill pen frozen in stone and gospel truth.

Pilgrims below, desiring a small share of their holiness, recall Nero’s Circus, where tortured souls left behind their lion-rent bodies, the smoke of their cries disappearing over the dome.

New martyrdoms prevail. The homeless curl under blankets in the outer coves, the slow death of men with purple stumps for legs on Tiber’s bridges.

Do saints know it’s the Year of Mercy?

Unmoved in the grand piazza of human misery, they survey the pilgrimage of tourists who elbow each other through the Holy Door convinced that saints and porticos preserved on cell phones will save their souls.

- Donna Pucciani 88

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The Fates Caroline Kerrigan digital painting

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Appendix

Staff Biographies Sarah Kinney

SK

Editor-in-Chief + Design

Sarah Kinney is a senior at UNC Charlotte working towards her BFA in Illustration. She likes hugging her two kittens, laughing at her own jokes, sleeping, and drawing faces. After graduation, she hopes to get a job in some sort of illustrative work, whether it will be concept art, magazine illustration, sequential art, or portraiture.

Tierra Holmes Associate Editor

Tierra Holmes is a junior studying Art History and History at UNCC. When she isn’t chained to her computer working on research projects, she enjoys marathoning Korean dramas and spending money she doesn’t have. After graduation, she hopes to curate a museum or gallery and possibly guest-star on Mysteries at the Museum.

TH

AH

SB

MY

BM

M

M

NC

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Branden Mabe

Melissa Martin

Branden Mabe is a freshman at UNC Charlotte pursuing a B.S. in Biology. In addition to his love for the sciences, Branden considers himself a photography aficionado who takes shots of the Milky Way, the occasional cat, and interesting human beings. When he’s not doing the next research paper or capturing a captivating photo, you can find him in his room reading Harry Potter or playing Spicy Uno with friends.

Melissa Martin is a freshman at UNCC pursuing a degree in psychology. She has unhealthy addictions to Cosmic Brownies and Teen Wolf, but doesn’t let these loves take away from the time she dedicates to friends, family, and, of course, writing!

Promotions

Michaela Yount Design

Michaela Yount is a junior at UNCC studying some sort of art. When she isn’t busy procrastinating or being indecisive, she enjoys running, jamming out to classic rock, and photographing things. In the future she hopes to start a YouTube channel, work for a magazine, and do lots of traveling.

Alex Hunt Intern/Content

Alex Hunt is a senior English major with a concentration in Creative Writing. Her specialized talents include putting on workout clothes and not working out, sleeping during the day, losing bobby pins, and procrastinating grad school applications.

She also thinks being a published author one day would be pretty cool.

Sierra Beeler Content

Sierra Beeler is a sophomore English major at UNC Charlotte. An aspiring screenwriter, she hopes to one day entertain the masses with a book series turned television show she hopes will “put J.K Rowling to shame.” When not working on one of her many uncompleted projects, Sierra enjoys watching Hulu and crying over fictional characters.

Content

Nancy Carroll Content

Nancy Carroll is a junior at UNCC double majoring in English and Political Science. When she is off campus you can find her speculating Star Wars fan theories or hanging out with her cats. If she ever graduates, Nancy would like to join a publishing house and see the world.

Samantha Lee

Content (Fall semester)

Samantha Lee is a freshman at UNC Charlotte studying International Studies and Spanish. She hopes to join the Peace Corps upon graduation, spending her time in Costa Rica teaching English.

Beyond that she aspires to write and travel as much as possible throughout her life.

Volunteers Yesika Sorto Andino is a freshman at

UNC Charlotte studying Political Science and International Studies. An aspiring United Nations diplomat, she hopes to one-day end world hunger and grant world peace. While she is not contemplating the complexities of life, she is watching the West Wing while eating chocolate.

Elissa Miller is a freshman at UNC Charlotte studying Communications and Political Science.

She is passionate about all things colorguard and musical theater, especially Hamilton. She is also the proud older sister to her four younger siblings.

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Contributors Art Hannah Barnhardt graduated from UNC fabricated elements coupled with handmade mixed Charlotte with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Digital Media. Working as an interdisciplinary artist, she combines mediums that include sculpture, performance, photography, video, reportage sketching, illustration, animation, painting, and digital fabrication to create a multiplicitious body of work with a cohesive tone. This tone explores themes of humor, horror, feminism, queer theory and figurative art, possibility, variation, and flux.

media techniques, she actualizes the dichotomy inherent in her recent work.

Elena Belova came to the US 4 years ago from

Currently a student in the Art program at UNCC, Joshua Greene has recently been turning the hobbies of miniature making and photography into the bulk of his work. Self-taught in both regards, Joshua strives to create miniatures and photograph them to appear to be as realistic as possible. Working mainly in a 1:12 scale, he uses a variety of media and materials to create these miniatures.

Russia to study architecture. She fell in love with watercolor painting at the age of 12.

Aba Hutchison is a Computer Science student at

where she completed a year of intense classical drawing at the Wacker’s Academy in Amsterdam.

Half a year ago she was offered the great opportunity to relocate to Charlotte and study Arts at UNCC. Myrthe has a deep love for illustrative art. Her illustrations are often inspired by animals and legends, tempered with humor and surrealism.

UNCC who is fascinated by both technical and visual creativity. She began with acrylic landscapes on canvas, but has now developed a passion for drawing portraits of unique figures in her own style, mainly with the mediums of pen and colored pencil. She has sold commissions, prints, and graphic-tees across the globe, and enjoys seeing her business elevate.

Website: www.akhprints.bigcartel.com Instagram: @ akh.prints

Thomasson Burgess is currently a senior at UNC

Caroline Kerrigan is a Super Senior studying

Charlotte studying Art Education. In balancing school work, an internship at Levine Children’s Hospital, and volunteering, she enjoys painting in her spare time.

Illustration at UNC Charlotte. Born in Canada, but raised in Charlotte with many siblings; she is inspired by beauty, happily ever afters, kindness, and sunshine. Ideas that are based in reality, but grow wild with magic, is what draws her to the fragile world of fairy tales and fantasy.

Myrthe Biesheuvel was born in the Netherlands

Madison Dunaway’s work is conceptually driven and manifests itself through three-dimensional mediums which engage viewers physically and mentally. She primarily creates forms and largescale installations intended to transform the space and viewer’s perspective. Through the use of digitally

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Curtis Kularski is a dual master’s student in Sociology and Ethics & Applied Philosophy. Outside of academics Curtis pursues artistic interests such as film, photography, drawing and ceramics. He is

inspired by simple techniques and designs, which is part of his attraction to the black and white film medium.

Graphic novels and comic books are life. If it has a solid black line somewhere and there’s some jolliness or muscle , then it’s probably Mayte Martinez’s work.

Mollie McGalliard is an illustrator from the Fine Arts department here at UNC Charlotte. She enjoys creating images that describe a story, and many of her works take inspiration from her great interest in the sci-fi and fantasy genres.

Sarah Mitchell is a marketer and designer based out of Charlotte, NC currently finishing bachelors’ degrees in Marketing, Fine Art and German from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is a 2D artist working primarily in graphic design, working digitally as well as by hand, using traditional methods of drawing and painting.

Carley Moore is a senior at UNC Charlotte and will be graduating in the Spring of 2017 with a BA in Art and minor degrees in Art History and Computer Science. Carley’s concentration is in Print Media and she will be pursuing a MFA degree in Printmaking post-graduation.

Sapun Ngoensritong is a senior with a concentration in Painting at UNC Charlotte. She moved from Bangkok, Thailand to North Carolina in 2012. She also has a passion for fibers work. In her recent body of work, she has incorporated textile materials and techniques into her paintings.

Maegan Sussman is a current UNCC student born in Plattsburgh, New York, and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is currently undecided and applying to the art major for the 2017-2018 school year.

John Trammel is a senior at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The piece Lost Identity is made of wax and is life-sized. The work is about people’s lives being ever changing.

Bradley Tucker is a native born and educated North Carolinian who produces two and threedimensional conceptual art objects and experiences.

He received his BFA in sculpture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2012 and has since been a full-time working artist. The expression and views that are sustained from popular culture are used poetically with Tucker’s political agendas.

Madison Westfall is an aspiring senior at UNCC with a focus in art. Many of her pieces, such as the one pictured, tend to reflect deep emotion translated onto a medium such as Canson paper. Reflective among the general consensus of modern day society, particularly in Charlotte, the world in which we live has shaped Madison’s unique style to which few can encapsulate. Always determined to capture the intensity of human emotion, Madison has been striving to push the boundaries of self and others.

Sam Workman is a painting and art history double major at UNCC. Working primarily in oil, she is fond of portrait painting, and is inspired by insects and other natural curiosities.

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Contributors Literature Francesca Brenner has studied with Jim Krusoe while the machinations of humans usually occupy and Jack Grapes and attended writing workshops with Mark Doty, Ellen Bass, Dorianne Laux, and Joe Millar. For over twenty-five years, she has been an active member of a monthly journal group created by poet Holly Prado. She can be heard during many of the readings given by the LA Poets and Writer’s Collective, of which she is a member.

the background. He spends far too much time sitting in gardens or on park benches looking at bugs.

Laurinda Lind writes everything down in

Dr. Doris Ferleger, winner of multiple creative

shorthand, which, topically, people say looks like Sanskrit (or Arabic), but it’s a great way to write poems while appearing to be taking notes in meetings (also, to disguise gift lists) . Other bad habits include guitar and genealogy.

writing prizes, is the author of Big Silences in a Year of Rain (Main Street Rag), When You Become Snow (Finishing Line), As the Moon Has Breath (Main Street Rag), and Leavened ( Mayapple Press). Her work has been published in numerous literary journals. She holds an MFA in Poetry and a Ph.D. in Psychology and maintains a mindfulness-based psychotherapy practice in Wyncote, PA.

It should come as no surprise that Rachel Liptak is a cemetery aficionado. A recent sojourn in the Northeast afforded her the opportunity to visit a number of graveyards, ranging from early colonial burying grounds outside Boston to sprawling Green-Wood in Brooklyn; Connecticut provided the inspiration for her story.

E.P. Fisher taught high school English in Uganda The two cats that allow Wulf Losee to live with as a Peace Corps volunteer and worked for 30 years as a play therapist and adventure-based counselor with special needs children. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Literature and a doctorate in Psychology.

His work has been published in three books and over 100 small college journals and magazines. He is a Pushcart nominee; winner of New York Poetry Forum competitions, and executive board member of Hudson River Poets.

Lowell Fleming is an English major and Film Studies minor at UNCC. A self-described fiction writer turned poet, Lowell has a tendency to explore the inner lives of insects and animals in his writing,

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them are also his severest critics. Writing poetry detracts from play time, petting time, and from feeding them treats—and they regularly show their contempt for his muse by walking nimble-footed across his keyboard.

Patricia McMillen is an Illinois writer, musician and lawyer. Her poetry awards and honors include an Illinois Arts Council fellowship and a Pushcart Prize nomination (both 2002). McMillen holds a BA (Human Studies, 1973) from Brown University and an MA (English, 2005) from the University of Illinois at Circle. She is in the process of turning her first poetry chapbook Knife Lake Anthology

(Puddinghouse Publications 2006) into a one-act opera.

Donald Parker is an Executive Leadership

of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry . This collection is primarily about aging, loss and death.

Coach residing in Connecticut. He received a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Rhodes College, a Diploma in Ecumenical Studies from the University of Geneva, Switzerland , and graduated from Sewanee: The University of the South’s MFA program. Donald attended the From Silence to Poem workshop at Gotham Writers Workshop and Poetry Writing at the New School. He enjoys reading, traveling, and participating in church activities.

As a quirky-yet-bold sophomore English and Communications major at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Kristine Slade has always loved writing, especially poetry. Whenever she is not writing, you can see her crashing cymbals in her university’s drumline, stomping and shouting with her cheerleading team, or calling cadences in her Army ROTC Program.

in English at UNC Charlotte. She enjoys science fiction, fitness, and art, and would like to work in journalism or the film industry after graduation. On campus, she can be spotted sweating and walking aggressively, carrying a watermelon purse.

music and travel, not necessarily in that order.

Marc Swan lives in Portland, Maine. He recently Susanna Parkhill is a junior pursuing a B.A. left the regular work-a-day to focus on writing,

Donna Pucciani’s work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and German. She has won awards from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, Poetry on the Lake, and the Illinois Arts Council, among others, and has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize. Her sixth and most recent collection of poems is A Light Dusting of Breath (Purple Flag Press, Chicago, 2015).

Claire Scott is an award-winning

poet who has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize.

Her first book of Poetry, Waiting to be Called, was published by IFSF Press in 2015. She is the co-author

Mao Xiang lives in North Carolina and enjoys 1) digging deep to disinter gone-away truths, 2) logically clarifying thoughts, 3) delivering non-social justice, and 4) working toward epistemic immunity.

Alessio Zanelli, Italian, has long adopted English as his literary language, and his work has appeared widely in magazines from 13 countries including, in the USA: California Quarterly, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Italian Americana, The Lyric, Poesia, Poetica Magazine, Potomac Review, Santa Clara Review, The Worcester Review and World Literature Today. His fourth collection, Over Misty Plains, was published in 2012 by Indigo Dreams.

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Literature Jury Christopher Davis is a professor of creative writing (poetry) at UNC Charlotte, where he has taught since 1989. He is the author of three published collections of poetry, The Tyrant of the Past and the Slave of the Future, The Patriot, and A History of the Only War, and has completed a fourth collection, Oath. His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies.

Bryn Chancellor’s novel, Sycamore, will be published by Harper in May 2017; her story collection When Are You Coming Home? (Univ. of Nebraska, 2015) won the 2014 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Other honors include the Poets & Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award and fellowships from Alabama and Arizona arts councils. A graduate of Vanderbilt University’s MFA program, she is an assistant professor at UNC Charlotte.

Peter Blair has published three books of poetry: Last Heat, The Divine Salt, and most recently, Farang from Autumn House Press. His work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Poetry East and elsewhere. He teaches in the UWRT Program at UNC Charlotte.

Art Jury John Hairston Jr. is a visual artist/illustrator hailing from Charlotte, North Carolina. The native Charlottean is best known for seamlessly blending social commentary with elements of Kitsch, funk and pop culture references. A self-proclaimed workaholic, Hairston's work can be seen throughout the east coast and abroad in murals, galleries and private collections. See more of his work @ www.allcitystudios.com

Kristin Rothrock is a lecturer in Foundations at UNC Charlotte. She teaches drawing and design classes as well as Book Arts and Papermaking. Rothrock studied printmaking in undergrad at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY. She received her MFA in Graphic Arts while at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Andrew Leventis is an oil painter who references imagery from film and television in his work.

He earned a BFA in Painting from the American Academy of Art in Chicago and an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London. His work has been featured in Norway at Kunstgalleriet, and in London at Matt Roberts Arts and The Griffin Gallery.

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Thank You Contributors: Thank you for choosing us to showcase your amazing work. Without you, this book would not be possible.

Wayne Maikranz: Thank you for all of the work you put in to support us, and the helpful advice you have given us along the way.

Danny Huffman: Thank you for your patience in answering our constant stream of questions and for always having such a positive attitude.

Megan Smith: Thank you for always having your door open and offering us your design expertise.

Kelly Merges: Thank you for your help with circulation and for encouraging us to showcase Sanskrit to the world.

Art and Literature Jury: Thank you for dedicating your time to helping us pick the very best work to feature in Sanskrit.

Laurie Cuddy: Thank you for being a wonderful Business Manager and an important part of Student Niner Media.

Graphic Impressions: Thank you for taking our idea and turning it into a reality. Without your team, there would be no printed version of the magazine.

Jeff Allio: Thank you for being patient with us while we worked out all the kinks for this year’s issue. Your dedication to Sanskrit is much appreciated.

Student Union Art Gallery: Thank you for coordinating with us to display this year’s artwork and for creating an amazing exhibit.

Janitors of the Student Union: Thank you for always keeping the office clean and pristine.

Students of UNC Charlotte, SAFC, and Readers: Thank you for all of your support and interest in our work. We hope you enjoyed this issue!

Family, Friends, and Loved Ones: Thank you for being there to support our hard work and encouraging us to follow our passions. We love you!

To all of our incredible and dedicated staff members and volunteers, thank you! We have all worked very hard to put forth another beautifully made publication of Sanskrit. We have come a long way from our initial literature read-throughs and our calls for submissions. We should all be proud.

Congratulations on an awesome job well done!

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Colophon Copyright 2017 Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine and the Student Media Board of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form electronic, mechanic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the permission of the copy holder.

Graphic Impressions, Charlotte, NC 3,000 copies for Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine were printed on 100# Endurance Book with 100# Linen Cover. This magazine contains 100 pages, with a trim size of 8x10 inches.

Typography Almendra, Almendra Italic, Almendra Display, Almendra SC Italic, Simonetta, Simonetta Italic.

Appropriated iMac Computers Adobe Creative Cloud 2015 Microsoft Office Bojangles’ iced tea Wendy’s chicken nuggets Wacom IntuosPro tablet

Credits Cover Design: Sarah Kinney Page Illustration: Sarah Kinney Layout: Sarah Kinney and Michaela Yount.

Copy Edit: Tierra Holmes, Sierra Beeler, Melissa Martin, Alex Hunt, Nancy Carroll, Elissa Miller, Yesika Sorto-Ardino.

Submission guidelines: Please visit sanskritmagazine.com to view past issues, access submission forms, and view general requirements.

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