Tis representative collection of writing by Notre Dame students is published through the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English. Each year, a new editorial board consisting of graduate students solicits and selects manuscripts, and oversees the production of the journal in order to encourage creativity and recognize student writing of notable quality.
Graduate Editor: Maggie Wu
Editors: Cecilia Belej, Brianna Brandon, Elena Christopher, Sofa de Lira, Marguerite C.J. Marley, Alaina Motes, Naomi Munoz, Laurel O'Brien, Clara Taub Design: Clara Taub
Cover Artwork: Shayanta Chowdhury
John Huebl named Re:Visions in 1986. Re:Visions, New Series began in 2002.
Tis is Re:Visions, New Series 23.
Copyright 2026 by Re:Visions
Theme: Recognition
Artwork: Cecilia Frazee
Dear Readers and Contributors,
Tank you for opening Re:Cognition, the 23rd edition of Notre Dame’s literary magazine. Tis year, we received numerous submissions from students across the tri-campus community with diverse classes, disciplines, and aesthetics. Our editors reviewed all submissions anonymously, with attention to thematic resonance and quality. Te result is a collection of work that confronts reality, identity, and memory in all its kaleidoscopic multitudes.
To us, recognition comes from careful, loving attention to the people and the world around us. Perhaps it is a fool's errand, but we wager that looking at something, then looking again, and really trying to see it, will lead to some sort of epiphany. It is like we see the world in a new light, and in turn, ourselves. We'll call this moment of discovery recognition.
But recognition is more than a brief fash in time. It is also a process of revision, a slow accumulation of knowledge that occurs each time we look. We hope this journal helps you practice this intentional way of looking. Read it, read it again, and perhaps you will learn something new.
Sincerely,
Re:Visions Editors
Highway Tambourine 91
Emma Betz
Photo: Barry Sly-Delgado
Stalemate
Carlos A. Basurto
I remember the spark; the wilting, dying fowers.
Blue, red, black - all clamored, glamoured, in gold.
In the grand complexities and theories and social treaties and décors and allures, that you cannot to terms come with
such a world does not play by the same rules such a world does not face the same fools such a world does not exist.
Yet.
Maybe someday it will all turn clear. As the ( ? ) that moan of a god’s grand plan, a vision we don’t see, so we believe must there be.
Maybe.
Doubt; their plea.
It takes a certain warmth, one absent from this land. Only when you hide away, run and escape do you get to play pretend
Artwork: Shayanta Chowdhury
Fake Plastic Trees
Emma Betz
What is a hospital room
Tat’s sterile and moving yet still I always found it agonizing
How surgeons cut out organs
And put them in tin cans
Breath stripped I etherize
Standing by the broken door
A suctioned eye
A heart pulse out
Pulse into a tin can
Te red veins arteries clotted lies
And love And soul
Pour into latex gloves
Abruptly
More civil than a bird, but more grotesque
You’re standing on
Tin red line
And i am not a web of scorn
Although
Te perfusionist can’t die
When we’re etherizing – lucid
Te operator's dual agency
To kill
Or patch a baby bird
In wounded battle
Fake Plastic Trees
And rubber hearts of plastic people
Sometimes I feel like a sardine at a pet store
She used to do surgery that woman in the song that’s why she’s a lego piece
Te kind that people step on
Like us
Tactile
Microscopic Blistering and broken
All of this to say, I love you.
Artwork: Shayanta Chowhury
Bifurcation
Ty Saedal
Reality A:
I arrive early the room still cooling chairs unclaimed
Reality B: I arrive exactly on time the room alread warm names settled into seats you look up and smile you look past and nod we talk about small things weather, weekends we talk about necessary things deadlines, plans the cofee steams between us the cofee cools beside us
I mention the thought that almost didn’t form
I keep the thought neatly folded away you lean in just slightly you lean back just enough later means promise later means never this version remembers this version forgets
Molly Libby Garnett
Since you’ve been gone, I can do whatever I want. I quit my job and moved to Galway. Every day, I play guitar on the main street and sing Irish songs in a half-hidden American accent until I earn enough to make Molly happy. Molly is seventy-three. She lets me sleep on her couch if I cook her dinner and play her a tune for dessert. At 5—or 5:05 if I need one more song, one of my own this time—I scoop the euros from my case and go to the Lidl for the cheapest groceries I can fnd.
Molly does not remember well, so I’ve only had to learn three recipes. Every time I repeat the cycle, she says how lovely this or that is, and how come I’ve never made it before? Afer dinner, I set her up in front of the TV and go to the Crane for the trad session. I sit and watch the musicians and the whole world amplifes. It turns back on. My ears pop like when an airplane is taking of and everything gets louder all of a sudden.
On Sundays, I play the open mic at Roísin Dubh across the river, because that’s where the gay girls are. Or, at least, where they’re supposed to be. I sing a song with the word “she” to let them know I’m up for grabs and then stand in the crowd nodding along to the next act. If anyone does come up to me, I buy her a drink, sweat through my shirt waiting at the bar, remember you, pretend to get a phone call, I’m sorry, I’ll be right back, run outside, and hyperventilate for a few minutes until my heart stops trying to punch its way out of my chest. Ten I walk all the way
home, with my hat on so I look like a man. In Ireland, if I’m wearing a hat, nearly everyone thinks I’m a man. When I play in a hat, I earn double the money.
Te frst time I got home to Molly’s afer midnight, I strained every muscle in my body to keep silent as I turned the lock and closed the door behind me. I tiptoed and winced at every creak of the old wood foors. I climbed straight into bed with the taste of alcohol still in my mouth and the sticky sweat still on my neck from when a girl had put her hand on it and pulled me in close to whisper something in my ear. I couldn’t make out a single word of what she said over the music, so I nodded and laughed, hoping it’d been a joke. She looked at me very confused and walked away, so I guess I’d been wrong. And that was probably for the best. I would’ve called her your name.
A few late nights later, I was eating cereal in the kitchen when I dropped the bowl and it shattered everywhere. Tat got the neighbor’s dog barking, which got the dog thrown in the yard, and the door slammed. And despite it all, not a single falter in Molly’s rhythmic wheezing snoring. So, as it turns out, Molly is fairly deaf when she wants to be. And now I don’t try to be quiet anymore. I watch her DVDs and write songs about you until my eyes get too heavy to hold open.
I had always thought that the older a person was, the earlier they woke up. When I’d stay with my grandmother, she would wake up with the sun. She would feel it rise on her skin while she drank her cofee on the balcony. I’d wake up to hot breakfast on the counter. Te kitchen would smell like cinnamon.
“I don’t know how long I have lef, and I don’t want to waste a minute of it,” she’d say, and I’d try to match her smile by squinting my sleepy eyes.
Tat’s not how things work here. I cook the breakfast while Molly sleeps in. She takes her eggs diferently every day—depending on the “mood of the morning”—but poached is her favorite. She shufes out of her bedroom in her slippers and her old silk pajamas with buttons up the front, lit cigarette in hand. She grins down at the plate like a tyrant god and impales the white pillow with her trident fork. Te golden yolk erupts down the face of her toast.
2
When Molly speaks, her sentences never end where I think they will. Mostly, she talks about horses. I know nothing about horses. She tells me always of Connemara, of summers with her grandmother, and of riding Seamus, so beautiful that Seamus, stately, really, a true gentleman, white as milk. I ask her questions about her life, her work, her marriage—surely she’d been married? But always she answers the same.
“A diferent world, a diferent world.”
“I’m done in an hour, I’ll take you.”
“Will she be up?” I asked, but the bartender just laughed.
Te next day I was moving my things—my old backpack from a week on the Pacifc Crest Trail and my guitar case—into Molly’s. I have been sitting in the toogood-tobe-true of it all ever since.
“Why do you let me stay here?” I ask her.
“I like company,” she says.
“But why choose me?”
“Because you were there,” she tells me, and I search her face for a hint of a smile. On Shop Street, I play covers. I used to listen to the Cranberries and dream of moving to Ireland. Now, by the end of the day, I’ve sung Linger so many times that if I never sing it again it will still be too soon. But Molly only wants to hear songs that I’ve written. She doesn’t know their names, she doesn’t want to. It only matters how they make her feel.
3
“Play that one again,” she says, leaning her head back and inhaling. “ Te sad one.” She closes her eyes and puts her hand on her chest like she’s keeping something inside. She never looks at me, and she never asks me questions. Sometimes I write a song about her, just to see if she notices. But when I fnish singing, she just nods at me and goes to sit by the fre. When I fnd the time, which is ofen, I go to Salthill and walk the promenade. Te sea smells like salt and fsh and nothing like home. Te coast of Galway faces south, so I can stare out as long as I like, and all I will see is more Ireland. I went to the Clifs of Moher once, and I felt sick to my stomach looking back at America, 3,000 miles away. At you. At everything I lef behind. At everything I miss. At everything I don’t.
I get a little lonely when I realize that no one here knows my dog’s name, or my high school’s mascot. No one remembers when the mayor ran for president. No one has heard the sound of my old best friend’s voice. But sometimes that makes me breathe easier. Because no one has seen how badly I dressed in high school. No one’s met my
family. No one knows how many times I’ve fallen in love or gotten my heart broken. No one knows who the songs are about. No one knows who you are. No one knows anything I don’t tell them.
My alarm goes of early in the morning, and I’ve barely slept. But my eyes open easily, like fipping a light switch. I should be tired, but I’m not. Te city is waking up, the people are rubbing their eyes, the musicians are tuning their instruments, and I am a part of it all.
Photo: Barry Sly-Delgado
Postcards Ava Hyde
I am in the football stadium, eyes sifing through faces in the crowd like grains of rice, stopping at the back of your head, bowed toward a nameless other the drums, trumpets, and screams clamor in vain for my attention as bodies and bodies shif between us
I stare only at the back of your head and memories seem to scatter, shatterI look down at my body and think もうこの色は似合わない (these colors do not suit me anymore)
(I am standing naked just a few steps away)
あなたに存在することを主張している
(insisting that I exist to you)
今まで知らなかった新しい色が
(new colors I have never known)
今のあなたに似合っているようだ
(seem to suit you now)
私が決して行けない場所へ行った
(you went to places I’ll never know)
あなたの笑顔が背中に入れ墨されてい
(your smile tattooed on my back)
かつて私をそばに欲しがっていた理由さえ忘れか けているのに (even as you forget why you used to want me so close by)
今は違う言葉で話しているのに
(even as we speak in diferent languages now)
知られていることの温もりを覚えている
(I remember the warmth of being known)
私たちの間に重い水が満ちていくにつれて (as the heavy waters rise between us)
膨れ上がった、浜辺に打ち上げられたクジラのように
(like a bloated, beached whale)
私は置き去りにされた
(I am lef behind)
Artwork: Shayanta Chowdhury
Survivors: An Analysis of the Self in Wartime
Dylan Hockx
All we did was wave our arms as if they were wings, so as not to fall into the abyss that our lives had become... Hanging over the abyss bifurcates or even trifurcates you.
- Andriy Bondarenko, “Survivor’s Syndrome”
Te abyss, in this case, refers to a condition that began on the 24th of February, 2022, one defned by a paradoxically universal fragmentation of individuals. For Ukrainians, the Russian full-scale invasion brought more than just a war. Te psychological efect of what Plohky has called “the largest and deadliest military confict in Europe since the end of World War II” (Plohky xx) has forced Ukrainian writing to grapple with the experience of writing in a warzone. Te “abyss” which appears in Bondarenko’s Survivor’s Syndrome and Halas’ Te Chronicles of a Lost Soul is more than just an image for the war. Rather, the term attempts to capture the all-encompassing fracturing that snaked its way through the Ukrainian nation, its collective psyche, and its art. In the midst of war, the abyss feels neverending. Anna Halas recounts “the 64th day of February” and Nina
Zhakhozhenko’s character Tonia from Me, war and a toy grenade describes the “endless February” which she feels “we’re all in” (Zhakhozhenko 141). Even the experience of time begins to crack in a variety of works, suggesting how widely the efects of wartime fragmentation are felt in Ukraine. Yet, represented in Ukrainian wartime poetry and drama is a fragmentation of far more than time alone.
Characters:
I-BODY: emotionless, insensitive shell; refers to oneself using third-person pronouns.
I-SOUL: emotional and empathic substance; refers to oneself using frst-person pronouns.
- Anna Halas, “The Chronicles of a Lost Soul”
Te Oxford English Dictionary defnes “psychomachia”, as “Confict within the soul, or between the soul and the body; an instance of this; a literary or artistic representation of such a confict.” Halas’ protagonist—and her two speakers—vividly refect Bondarenko’s bifurcation, as well as a modern psychomachia, when soul and body become fragments of person—a representation of a self fractured by war. In the above cast description of Halas’ play alone, it is evident that war causes isolation, displacement and a destruction of the self and identity. Yet, in the aferword to his history of Te Russo-Ukrainian War, Plohky insists there are “clear indications that the Ukrainian nation will emerge from this war more united and certain of its identity than at any other points in its modern history” (Plohky 294). Te writing being produced in contemporary wartime Ukraine resolves the above tension: despite the isolating and
identity-fracturing efects of war, Ukraine will emerge unifed and truly self-assured. Te fragmentation of the self that is signifcantly represented in the works of art coming from the Ukraine war seems to almost universally afect all that share an intimate connection to the war. Yet it is this very fracturing which—in Ukrainian writing and reality—brings people together and facilitates the creation of a collective self. As art becomes refective of life and the genuine psychological experience of war, the shared experience evident in Ukrainian depictions of psychological sufering—but also the documentary form Ukrainian writers have chosen to employ—is further support of an emerging collectivity.
Grandma, how did you manage to get through this and not lose faith and humanity? I’M LOSING IT...
- Anna Halas, “The Chronicles of a Lost Soul"
Te Chronicles of a Lost Soul by Anna Halas depicts a mother represented by two characters—I–BODY and I–SOUL—who considers her own psychological struggles in response to the war, while still grappling with caring for her children and the feeing strangers she provides refuge for. As Halas’ protagonist grapples with the bifurcation of I-BODY and I-SOUL alongside the feelings of loss that war creates, I-SOUL questions her experience. She recalls her “late great–grandmother” who was “the kindest person I knew in this life”, and asks her “what should I do? How do
I protect children from war?” (Halas 158). Troughout the play, I -SOUL marvels at the persistence—or perhaps resurrection—of her great-grandmother’s humanity despite her experience of war. Te kindness towards and courageous protection of others her great-grandmother displayed by “[hiding] her small children from the bombings in freshly dug graves” (Halas 158) are features of this humanity. I–SOUL sees in the very act of caring for others, and especially her children, a kindness in her great–grandmother representative of a faith in humanity. Yet, comparing herself to her great-grandmother, she worries about the humanity that I-BODY lacks without a connection to her soul despite the fact that she is—like her great–grandmother—still caring for her children despite her own difculties through the war. I-SOUL witnesses the brokenness of I-BODY’s “tear-producing function” (Halas 159), its inability to fnd the “necessary function” to “reproduce joyful laughter” (Halas 160) alongside the protagonist’s daughter and questions how parents can “live through [the war] if they are alive?” (Halas 163). In a question that refects her desperation, as well as the protagonist’s isolation from any kind of mother fgure while grappling herself with how to mother, I-SOUL asks “Grandma, how did you manage to get through this and not lose faith and humanity?” (Halas 158). I-SOUL’s questions swell in gravity, refecting the uncertainties of war that become life-encompassing. She asks: “God, how do you allow this?”,“Will it always be like this? Will I never be able to restore the integrity of my soul? (Halas 163-164). Te psychological experience of the war has caused Halas’ protagonist to question whether her identity and humanity will survive
beyond it. She worries about whether she herself will survive this war intact, showing how Ukrainian art refects the tension between the disheartening personal efects of war and Plohky’s hopeful claim about Ukrainian identity. Her most pressing fear, in relation to her humanity, is that “I’M LOSING IT…” (Halas 158). Life in wartime renders these questions–especially the metaphysical ones–almost unanswerable, creating an uncertainty that feels like “hanging” (Bondarenko 89) over the abyss.
Where are we now, and why?
Who are you?
Who am I?
- Iryna Tsilyk, “New Perfume”
Ukrainian poets also describe the isolation, psychomachia, bifurcation and uncertainty of living through war, refecting the paradoxical universality of the fracturing experience of “hanging over the abyss” (Bondarenko 89). From questions of motherhood to uncertainties about the self, these poets join I-SOUL, likewise suspended above the abyss of uncertainty. In Halyna Kruk’s poem “mama”, the mother shares I-SOUL’s struggles with motherhood, and the difculty of being responsible for children during times of war. Kruk writes, “somebody’s standing between you and death” (Kruk 1). Kruk’s speaker reveals how the ultimate responsibility of a mother—like I-BODY who “takes care of three children” (Halas 157)—beyond catering to physical and emotional needs, is becoming a literal barrier between life and death. Like I–BODY, who does not always meet her
children’s needs for food (Halas 157) or attention (Halas 160-161) and I–SOUL who questions her ability to “live through” the war as a parent, Kruk’s speaker is unsure “how much longer [the mother’s] heart can stand it” (Kruk 1-2). Te bulk of Kruk’s poem focuses on the mother living out her responsibility by begging for her son’s life, developing a comparison between her adolescent son and an unripe strawberry. She begs, “God, don’t put him on the edge, / don’t deploy your grad rockets over him, God… / i have yet to envision this war!” (Kruk 13-16). Tough the mother cannot even picture the war she is living through with any certainty, and the speaker of the poem is uncertain of her survival, she begs only for her son’s life. Like I-SOUL, her responsibilities are performed separately from refection of her own survival.
Irina Tsilyk also discusses the psychological and isolating efects of war in “New Perfume.” She writes, “I smell like this today… / you don’t know me like this yet… / What do you smell like today?” (Tsilyk 4-10). Refecting on the experience of lovers living through the fragmentation and separation of war, Tsilyk’s speaker—like I-SOUL—asks a string of questions that grow increasingly existential. She worries about her identity and the identity of her lover, suggesting in the question “how will I recognize you later?” that war can attack identity to the point it is unrecognizable. And even when, at the end of the poem, the lovers engage in union and reunion through touch, they are still “together and apart / together and apart / together and apart” (Tsilyk 24-26); bifurcated. Ukrainian writers struggle with how to answer the questions that wartime causes them
to ask, and what life might look like without those answers. there is a string that binds us all together that string between us is a safety fuse
- Yurii Izdryk, “Make Love”
But I-SOUL’s fnal question, which ends Halas’ play: “my grandmother ofen laughed, so maybe I can too?” is a ringing inquisition of hope. I-SOUL’s fnal refection, as well as the experiences of Halas’ protagonist, display how in the fragmentation of wartime, connection to others becomes a primary need. Troughout “ Te Chronicles” I-SOUL yearns for this connection, while I-BODY attempts to provide it to others. I-SOUL refects, “All of us, like blind moles, will crawl on the earth in search of a warm human soul, whom we can hug and feel alive” (Halas 159), yet the act of hugging her daughter is described in the detached voice of I-BODY, lacking any features of life or humanity. In the protagonist’s fnal speech, I-SOUL begins to discover a possible answer to her earlier questions. Halas writes, “I am connected to this world with one thread. Sometimes it thins and almost breaks of, sometimes, on the contrary, it becomes so rough and strong that it makes me believe that this planet still has a chance to be saved. Tis thread is complete strangers who reach out to you and pull you out of the abyss” (Halas 164-165). Now seeing her great-grandmother as a beacon of possibility, not a shameful comparison, I-SOUL realizes, “Someday, I will tell my grandchildren about the war, as my great-grandmother told me. I
will write about those stories that were told to me in the evenings by complete strangers, who turned out to be so close” (Halas 165). I-SOUL hopes to regain her self and her humanity, like her great grandmother. But the “safety fuse” (Izdryk 12-13) to do so is the stories of strangers. In recognizing the universal thread that connects these strangers despite—and through—their sufering, I-SOUL has traced a path back towards the union of body and soul and the possibility to “laugh[ing]” and “hug[ging] the children” (Halas 160) with humanity. I-SOUL has identifed the paradox of wartime and also the hope for survival; the fact that in breaking society apart and fracturing individual selves, the war has resulted in a thread of experience sufering, but also survival—a thread which has created a national, collective response. Te collectivity is evident in the similarities between diferent refections of sufering, but also in the collective response to that sufering.
I-SOUL fnds a glimpse of escape, a tightrope spanning the abyss, in the collective thread of the Ukrainian experience; Ukrainian poets fnd this thread too—collectively. In the poem “Make Love”, Yurii Izdryk highlights the collective responsibility of Ukrainian’s, writing “to protect one another is all this occasion demands” (Izdryk 3). Te speaker argues that despite the fracturing efects of war, there is “a certain and fery passion” (Izdryk 10), a kind of love, that “binds us all together” (Izdryk 13). In her poem, “resin”, Kruk refects her consciousness of this collectivity with the image of a body. She writes, “we’ll heal like wounds, we’ll grow back / like leg and arm stumps, like an eye’s / empty socket” (Kruk 4-6). Each individual becomes a
part of a whole, and each experience of these individuals is not brushed away, but rather augmented by this collective. Despite the healing of the national body, “we’ll call the dead. each name” (Kruk 7). Te importance of individual experiences is not brushed away by collectivity as even the identities of the dead are listed by name. Te thread which spans the abyss is one that ties each individual to others. Collectivity is not an erasure of any individual’s experience—even afer death, but rather a chance for a “lost soul” to feel whole and human again.
The fnal import of the psychoanalytic and historical analysis of trauma is to suggest that the inherent departure, within trauma, from the moment of its frst occurrence, is also a means of passing out of the isolation imposed by the event: that the history of a trauma, in its inherent belatedness, can only take place through the listening of another.
- Cathy Caruth, Chapter 21, “Trauma and Experience”
Connection becomes a primary need during the fragmentation of wartime, and the changing form of Ukrainian writing refects how the writers and their subjects search for the “thread” of connection. Te experience of war and the fragmentation it brings has resulted in the need for a new language to talk to others, extending the thread and recognizing collectivity. As life fractures, so do the genres of poetry and drama, alongside their traditional conventions.
Luke Harding writes, “‘ Te aestheticising of war experience is seen as suspect and morally problematic,’ Rosochinsky explained. ‘ Tere is resistance to the idea that war poetry should be beautiful.’ Instead, the new forms of Ukrainian poetry stressed the importance of truth” (Te Guardian). Charlotte Higgins echoes, “Ukrainian writers ofen tell me that now is not the time for literary experimentation, but rather for directness and documentary” (Ibid.). Ostap Slyvynsky, Irina Tsilyk and Anna Halas all discussed a similar difculty with poetry. Slyvynsky highlights the length of time he went without writing a poem, Tsilyk turned away from poetry towards documentary flm with her production of Te Earth is Blue as an Orange, and Halas described “ Te Chronicles” as merely her efort to tell “the truth” and authentically document her experience, rather than achieve any kind of artistic fame or prowess (Class interviews). Te art and the artist of wartime both come to refect the universal experience of life within the war.
Te shif towards documentation refects a desire to record one part of the collective experience of war, revealing how author and subject alike attempt to “[pass] out of the isolation” of trauma “through the listening of another” (Caruth 197). Boris Humenyuk describes how, afer the war started “poetry went to the grave” (Humenyuk 2). He refects the collective dissatisfaction with the poetic forms’ ability to efectively describe war, writing “Poetry didn’t want to talk to anyone / What is there to talk about / Death?” (Humenyuk 15). In “We wrote poems”, Marjana Savka opens, “We wrote poems / about love and war… / in the days before we had war”, but closes by asking “What
changed, my sister? / … Te metaphor — died” (Savka 1-22). In the rejection of the metaphor and traditional forms of art, Ukrainian writers seem to be rejecting the artifce, individuality and ambiguous nature of poetry in favor of a direct, sharper, and more collective form. Rather than searching to interpret one’s own experience through metaphor or beauty, these writers attempt to document their own experience and the experience of others in war, authentically creating and adding to a collective and poetic history of the war. In “War Generation”, Vasyl Makhno promotes this collective turn away from individualism. He writes, “today you must forget that you are a poet / you must come here and stand—there’s room in the ranks” (Makhno 10-12). He places the individual role of the poet in direct opposition to the collectivity present within the ranks of the Ukrainian resistance. Even Halas’ I-SOUL, outside the context of writing poetry, admits her frustration with metaphors that occur in her life, writing “the colour white annoyed me” (Halas 161) when she sees it throughout her city. Her annoyance is not with the color white itself, but with its metaphorical and symbolic import, writing, “ Te world should be mourning every day, and not put on white coats or walk in white boots on the dusty roads, while in Mariupol, there is no undamaged spot lef on the torn body of the city” (Halas 161). Similarly, I-BODY can no longer write “about” others, “only record” or document “what it sees around” (Halas 164). During war, as Humenyuk writes, “there isn’t place for poetry” (Humenyuk 84) in the traditional, individual or metaphorical sense, but there is room for poetic documentation. It is in this documentation, in re-
cording the stories “told to me in the evenings by complete strangers” (Halas 165), that the “thread” connects Ukrainians to the shared humanity of those around them. Even the popularity of contemporary poetry readings and plays in Ukraine (Te Guardian) can act like a “collective catharsis” (Halas 163); a way to share one’s documentation of their own trauma and pass out of isolation (Caruth 197). Te experience of feeling bifurcated by the war, but regaining wholeness through documenting one’s existence in the collective Ukraine, sews itself universally through speaker of poem, to poet, character of play to playwright and through all afected by the war.
Regardless of who one was in the past, it became entirely irrelevant. Now we are soulmates.
- Anna Halas, “The Chronicles of a Lost Soul”
Te evolution of Ukrainian writing refects a collective and admirable response to the difculties of war, as well as the poetic authenticity present in the documentation of survival. Each response to wartime experience is a documentation of survival within—but also despite—the immense pressures of war. Despite the guilt that Halas’ protagonist professes for becoming fragmented by the war into an emotionless body and detached soul, her actions are beyond admirable. She takes care of three children, runs a house for individuals feeing the war, and recognizes and acts upon the importance of documenting the events she experiences. She has survived for so long that her survival has become near-mechanical, and yet she feels “guilty” (Halas 161) for
being a survivor. In grappling with the abyss of all that is unknown in wartime, Ukrainian artists suggest that the hopeful thread of survival can only be found within each other. Te only way to pass out of the singularity and loneliness of being a survivor is by documenting and sharing one’s story. “Someday”, Halas writes, “I will tell my grandchildren about the war, as my great-grandmother told me” (Halas 165). Together, though the Ukrainian people still face immense struggle, their experience is defned no longer by the isolation of survivor’s syndrome. Rather, through resilience and solidarity—through the collective—they become survivors. Ukraine will “emerge from this war more united and certain of its identity” (Plokhy 294), as each lost soul—through the documentation and sharing of wartime experiences—is tied to and made whole by a nation of “complete strangers” (Halas 165) who become “soulmates” (Halas 160) and “pull you out” (Halas 165) from the abyss.
Photo: Barry Sly-Delgado
Cathy Caruth, “Chapter 10: Trauma and Experience,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
Harding, Luke. “‘It’s a Golden Age’: Poetry Flourishes in Ukraine – but at a Terrible Price.” Te Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 29 Dec. 2023,
Higgins, Charlotte. “For Ukrainians, Poetry Isn’t a Luxury, It’s a Necessity during War.” Te Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 9 Dec. 2022, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/09/for-ukrainians-poetry-isnt-a-luxury-i ts-a-necessity-during-war.
Kaminsky, Ilya, and Carolyn Forché. In the Hour of War: Poetry from Ukraine. Arrowsmith Press, 2023.
Kruk, Halyna, et al. A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails: Poems. Arrowsmith Press, 2023.
Maksymchuk, Oksana, and Max Rosochinsky. Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine. Academic Studies Press, 2022.
Plokhy, Serhii. The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History. W.W. Norton & Company, 2024.
Theatre, Poetry and Performance Arts in a Time of War: Ukrainian Drama Reader.
Tsilyk, Iryna, The Earth Is Blue as an Orange. Albatros Communicos/ Moonmakers, 2020.
Poems:
“ Te Chronicles of a Lost Soul,” Anna Halas, The Ukrainian Drama Reader
“Not a poem in forty days,” Boris Humenyuk, Words for War
“Make Love,” Yurii Izdryk, In the Hour of War
“Mama,” Halyna Kruk, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails
“Resin,” Halyna Kruk, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails
“War Generation,” Vasil Makhno, Words for War
“We wrote poems,” Marjana Savka, Words for War
“New Perfume,” Irina Tsilyk, The Earth is Blue as an Orange
“Me, war and a toy grenade,” Nina Zakhozhenko, The Ukrainian Drama Reader
Composition after Karel Appel Aaliyan Geschwind
Today and yesterday I am foating in yellow-gold space. Born too soon, or too late, or unborn. One week and four days. Six weeks early. A Dangerous slip and curve and touch like the circling fsh of a coasting Pisces.
I’m all big-eyed and blue. Something formless. Abstract. Subtract this cloud of gray-black dust and despair from the depths of my chest. Make me tiger-striped and wispy and blue like the sun, not unknown.
Te most unremarkable gray-blue ever seen; water in the dark.
2 fsh swirling in oil she poured on her own head: one is hope, one is oil.
Fragments of who I once
was.
Carlos A. Basurto
Hidden cover, harrowing sight tender lover under gravekeeping night.
Have you met what one’s whim decrees? Have I transfxed into what You seek?
Te lights cradle time taking the maim. Claiming away
Blinking at the TV misunderstanding what we greet –
all to the sound
of the melody
of the Click CLIck CLICK
oh, how they sway
oh, walk the talk
but can I?
How could you?
Once the rug sweeps, bear your feet, break your teeth.
Wonder melts into thunder, as your thoughts are yours no longer.
A h,
How p r i s t i n e
Te baby chuckles, unseen.
Photo: Shayanta Chowdhury
Pretty Visitors
Francesca Bartolacci
Rambling, bumbling, stumbling on a slant. Your words have such purpose—unfortunate we’ll never understand. Oh, Alex, under your layers of mystery life is but a riddle you never cared to understand. Each line of music, dissected till the walls turn white and your hands go numb
Canopy 19
Organs are the echoes of churches—trashed that you did. Religion was tossed, the glass pane smashed, replaced with foundering drum lines. How does a snake pit have a shadow?
At one time it was a circus—a mirage of sounds blending like a bad high. Ringing guitar chords and ill-ft bike spokes that scrape along the concrete. Te rhythm switched between a lazy day and a whirlwind—never quite sure where one piece ends or begins. Do you wave your arms at your mother? Does she wave back?
Photo: Barry Sly-Delgado
Blind man’s bluf
Tian Han
Trodding in the pebbled clif face
My lesson for reason, par amour then of lithifcation, pressure and slate rocks and shells that crumble dislodging from ever canyons
As a silence broken by a tremor and a violence devolved to thought: so it is maybe – sometimes - always.
How Do I Recognize Myself?
A confused entry from an international student Sofa Baquerizo Coello
Tere are days I look at my refection and can’t quite tell who is looking back.
Not because she is unfamiliar, but because she is plural. Layered. A composite of places, accents, and versions of myself that refuse to align into a single silhouette.
Recognition is supposed to be immediate, a swif revelation, a clarity.
But what if clarity is the one thing migration dissolves? What if self-recognition is not a fash of insight but a long, stubborn negotiation with everything I have been and everything I am trying to be?
When I lef home, I imagined I was stepping into a new country.
I didn’t understand I was also stepping into a new self.
No one tells you how easily identity slips when language changes. How your voice bends around new vowels. How you study the mouths of strangers, imitating sounds like a child learning to speak for the second time. How sometimes a word disappears, not in English, not in Spanish, but in that untranslatable gap between both.
How do I recognize myself when my own tongue betrays me?
It is an odd, disorienting thing to live in a place where no one knows the architecture of your past. Te streets that shaped you, the food that comforted you, the jokes that built your frst sense of belonging. People see only the surface: the name on the roster, the accent they can’t quite place, the skin that doesn’t match theirs, the performance of competence you perfect out of necessity.
Tey don’t see the part of you that is improvising every second.
Recognition, in this context, becomes a rare event, a small miracle.
An epiphany not of seeing the world clearly, but of seeing yourself clearly despite the world’s blur. Sometimes it happens in ordinary moments.
On the bus, when the city looks almost familiar. At the grocery store, when your hands choose ingredients without hesitating.
During a conversation where you don’t translate in your head.
In the sof quiet of your apartment, when you realize the space has started to smell like you.
Other times, recognition is painful. Walking through an airport and realizing neither passport answers the question Where are you from? Returning home
and fnding that home has shifed in your absence.
Hearing your mother’s voice on the phone and feeling both comforted and exiled at once.
How do I recognize myself when every place claims a different version of me?
I used to think identity was something fxed, like a singular truth I could point to.
Now I understand it is more like a tide. It recedes, returns, shape-shifs, carries debris from distant shores.
Maybe this is the recognition the editors speak of. Te clarity that comes not from choosing one self over another but from seeing all of them illuminated at once.
Te self that belongs to the country I lef.
Te self that is improvising a belonging here.
Te self that exists in translation.
Te self that survives every moment of doubt.
Te self that wakes up each morning and tries again.
Maybe I recognize myself most honestly in the in-between, the liminal border where the old and new selves overlap. Where I am no longer who I was, but not yet who I’m be coming. Where the split in my identity is not a crack but an opening.
And maybe the epiphany is this:
Te self I am trying to recognize is not lost. She is simply changing.
She is expanding to hold more than one world. She is learning to see herself with the same sofness she ofers others.
She is becoming someone her former selves could not yet imagine. Recognition, then, becomes a practice.
A gentle returning.
A patient looking.
A willingness to meet yourself where you are, even when where you are feels foreign. So here is my quiet revelation: I recognize myself not by how unchanged I remain, but by how much I continue to grow, how much I continue to endure, how much I continue to become even, and especially, in the places where I once felt unrecognizable.
Photo: Barry Sly-Delgado
Portugal
Libby Garnett
In Lisbon, all the buildings are like Easter— rows of pink and yellow and baby blue, once rubble, then risen up. I don’t know why I’m stuck there still.
I was waiting at the airport, with your name sharpied on a sign. You walked of the plane in a shirt I’d never seen, and you smiled.
And I haven’t lef Portugal since.
At the fea market, we bought shitty rings with a “quanto custa issa” and an “obrigado.” You took yours of when it turned your fnger green, but I’m still wearing mine.
I’m still at Rua Silva Carvalho in the white room with the two twin beds, (We only used one), I’m still standing on the balcony listening to the street,
I’m still smiling at your smile,
I’m still locking the door with that skeleton key, I’m still putting my hands on your skeleton.
It was so warm in Portugal, so sunny. Te sky was so blue, the bedsheets were so white,
the foor was so sof, the hills were so tall, the days were so long, the air smelled like cinnamon.
I’m still there on the water, watching the sunset with the sailboats and the tower.
I’m still watching you become a silhouette.
Now everything is quiet and covered in snow. Now, your silhouette is stuck to every sunset and every skyline. Now, you jut out of every horizon.
Te Iberian Peninsula is really more like an island. It wears the ocean like a blanket draped around its shoulders.
When we sat on the clifs in the gold light, listening to the waves crash, our feet were hanging of the edge of an entire continent. It should have made me feel small, but I felt so very big there with you, watching the sun sink into the ocean like a movie you should only see in theatres.
Photo: Shayanta Chowdhury
505
Francesca Bartolacci
Barry Sly-Delgado
Do memories sink into certain fabrics? Once a smell, the next day a fash of red.
Trapped in a 4 by 4, waiting for the click of a lock. Te sound never comes. Te room key was lost.
Scrubbed away day afer day—erasing the tears, the fghts, the embraces and all that prompted it.
Te sun ficked through the curtains, the rays struck the walls. Te paint peeled—the white sheet crisp as an autumn breeze.
Favourite Worst Nightmare—a high turned low, corrupted, plagued.
Te sun rose day afer day as decorations twisted and turned. Te paint faded. Your silhouette is stained in my mind walking across the room, opening the door. Day afer day, week afer week, month afer month, year afer year, the room number tattooed in my heart.
Photo:
my brother will become a priest
Genevieve Le Leux
He doesn’t know that when he lef For seminary, I tore to shreds his bedroom, Took a green-blue pocket knife, Used soap and water every time, Until I found a diferent drawer, In which he lef a box of spare Gillettes. Tose became my friends.
He doesn’t know that when he lef For seminary, my mother cried To me for grandchildren, I assured her I’d provide so many From the pustle-covered womb I prayed would heal by thirty. Now, at twenty, I can’t be sure.
He doesn’t know about the reign Of quiet in our house, the words Our family couldn’t say aloud, Because then God would hear them. Tis silence is the heavenly grief I hold Inside my tabernacle rib cage.
He doesn’t know my thoughts About the Martha and Mary of it all, Tat sometimes I fear his white collar
Damns me as the ever-lesser, reticent And yet, resentful. I am not just abandoned, But also the one not chosen by God.
He doesn’t know that when he lef For seminary, I kept counting patches Of unbroken fesh, small hosts, to be engraved. I bear them now across my ever-forgiving body, And it’s not because he lef for seminary. I think it’s because I couldn’t.
Photo: Barry Sly-Delgado
submarine pressure
Tian Han
Among a montage of masks on one of my digital feeds: Te animal who hunts does not ask the question as the hunter who lusts does not bide his time - so I will rather be born human, in all its ugliness, transience and sufering that entails. A human who sufers cannot sink. If I were to plummet, as I sever the umbilicalfrom navel to esophagus, you’d imagine my form would crumple to the core, then, at challenger deep you would ask me if I recall what once was as if I live in the penultimate stage of the Finale’s. What need is there for a mirror if the fnal face shares the same pale gaze? Yet I continue to stare as if I forget my own collage - of glass eyes, moles and wrinkles. I could not touch the strands of pellucid hair in the sharded glass so I must shatter the acrylic as a gesture of my savage love. It belongs to a time of another lost o’clock.
On the edge
Ryan Fitchpatrick
Tey told us to stay young while we could, to savor the scraps of childhood lef. We laughed on the playground— soaring on swings, shooting down slides— all at the fragile age of fourteen.
Yet when we came in from recess, from cold air into a heat that felt sufocating, we sat silent in our seats for theology. We were told we’d be confrmed in spring— adults in the eyes of the Church.
But how can I be young and old at once? How can I be wise and still have room to make mistakes?
Tey called it a choice, but lef no space for us to truly choose.
I sat in the pew that day, both young and old at once— on the verge of adulthood, clinging to the edge of adolescence.
I knew then, deep in my bones, that Church would not be my forever home. And as the bishop anointed me with oil, an ache spread through my soul. I wanted to stand up, to say no— but we were children dressed as adults, recess replaced with ritual, the church remade as our new playground.
So I bit my tongue and bided my time.
One day I knew I’d cross that edge into the unknown— fully an adult, fnally with choice, on the verge of something better.
Barry Sly-Delgado
Unmedicated II
Lily Brustkern
Unmedicated, I go to New York, breaths resounding coldly in my barren, broken chest.
I would have stayed just for the fickers. But you’re a drinker and I’m the guilty 3am whiskey –
I, clamoring to be consumed, you, glassy-eyed and distant with memories of bar bathroom blood.
(Did you know I’m proud of you for calling it a night?)
Because you weren’t really sick it was worse than that, and yet you didn’t laugh when I apologized for my broken-ness although you must have known I broke what you never even had.
We were almost, cuasi, not quite anything, but hard to dismiss and I would have kept at it because all I need is an altar and I would slit my wrists on its cold back if my blood could keep you warm.
I can’t forget – you patently unashamed and I feeling almost human –the crevices of my mind still sparkle with your gem-charged exhales, but these secret thrills must be starved until they do not make me warm.
So I trek down sunlight-glutted pavements, past sidewalk apples weeping grayish tears, through smoke, piss steam, and hot-dog fumes,
and wonder if the waves of time will kiss our memories into oblivion, or if the shards of my heart that caught in your gold-fecked eyes will stay.
Sun Poisoning
Madison Denchfeld
When I was shipwrecked, Te only thing that brought me hope Was the efect of the tides on bleached white sand.
Beached and stranded, I remembered the taste of a Sunday, Te hedonism and champagne residue stuck to my lips. When I kissed the sweet Earth, it reminded me of sponge cake.
As UV rays penetrated porcelain skin, I had lots of time for introspection, And how I missed the joy of taking things for granted!
By the time the coast guard came, I was running a one hundred and two degree fever And felt that the world was on fre.
I remember the taste of the Tylenol pill I let sit in my mouth for too long.
I remember the acid burns the tear streaks lef down my face
As salt water washed of sunblock, As Mother Nature taught me how cruel the warmth can be.
The Only Ones Who Get It
Maura McMahon
In the bathroom there’s a sunset in the mirror, With batteries banging against the back door And people barge in, but they’re your best friends who amend
Te dents detailing your forehead
Messages of admiration meshed with Mutations of opinions of ownership
Roommates reach the rancor of rationed relationships And scoop the sludge of secrets.
Tat semi-solid slurry sanitizes presentations And proposes personifcations of a good day in Te way you grin, lif your chin
High and mighty, ignoring the fighty nature of your Instincts.
Interlock and hold down shop for Your deepest darkest dissection of self
Help with your own reconstruction to function
For the fightiest fairweathered friend you can summon
Gut punch, gut lunch, gut sense nonsense
White fence frailty with a focus on freedom from Feelings too big to see without reverse binocular vision And virtues kept in my pocket as I peddle my service for purchase
So I’ll sell them my Maura kit But it’s free of charge and Tey’re the only ones who get it.
Artwork: Shayanta Chowhury
“...in the sea where a great ship would be waiting for me with its lights on...”
Francesca Bartolacci
Someone’s arms fold as they wait for me. On the porch, At night Mother waits.
Te foorboards creak over the rocking chairs cycling tracks. Over and over smacking ground—violently, angrily, hastily. Where was I?
Te bugs burned with the porch lights, Wandering toward death in the zapper—so naive Her frail hands rubbed at her side tracing the rips in her battered jeans, her thumbs sliding over the hems of the pockets
Every nerve on end, every bad thought in hand. Counting on her fngers the ways of could’ve died — I was a child to be cradled, in her mind still 9 inches, 6 pounds
Te sweat beads on her forehead. Te heat, yes, but the worry, Worse.
Dad fast asleep on the couch—his snores, the only rival to the deafening paranoia
Her eyes red lines like rail lines, the lids tipping close only to be forced open
Where had I gone?
Bliss was my only thought, not of mother, not of her worry, not of her concern guilt would be a later thought, crippling with age
I grabbed another drink — only smart enough not to grab the keys they were tucked far in my pocket
Te rumbling of gravel wouldn’t be heard til the morning
My phone lost — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, MISSED CALLS
CURFUE IS AT 12. WHERE ARE YOU?
COME HOME.
WAIT TIL YOU FATHER GETS A HOLD OF YOU.
empty threats of paternal discipline
it’s emotionless, coming from a place of expectation Was my phone dead? Why didn’t I answer? Why didn’t I care?
Te fre had died, the roaring fames now embers fghting to glow.
the smell of smoke lingered, braided into the scent of the pines.
every animal fought to keep mother awake, the cicadas, the birds, the wolves.
Together they waited til the moon tipped above the log cabin.
Te chair rocked to a stop as the gravel sounded between the worn tires of the truck the lake was a pulse-quickening thought — the water stayed warm til late September
Rejection was a bitch, it kicked til concussed, hit til your lip was a bloody mess
I didn’t want to move, I didn’t want to go home, I didn’t want to be with anyone but the stars — they were a constant
Silence was my friend, but she was my mother, her silence was my silence
Photo: Barry Sly-Delgado
It’s Grandma, not Abuela
Hannah Gatewood
Te A’s, the B’s, the C’s, not Si’s. It’s “Chuh,” not “Shh,” the belittling of me. Margaret, not Margarita. Most certainly not Padilla, the erasure of my history.
Potatoes on tortillas, a poor man’s food. 15 dollar “K-See-Dee-Ya’s,” a status I can only aspire to.
Last night’s comedy show was my purple Goodwill tag. Tonight’s Emmy goes to the girl with a thrifed bag, iconic isn’t a word ft for my class.
My food, music, culture, is a shame, inherently wrong. Tat is until a gringo exclaims, brown lip liner, gold hoops, sandals, are trending on Tiktok to a Bad Bunny song.
If You Should Wake Before You Die Haynes
Melchior
Wait a moment.
Trow of the covers, let the light back in.
Step out onto the cold tile foor. It will sting a little, but it will be beautiful too. It means there’s still time.
Notice how the light showers through the dappled leaves of oak trees, how the sky glints of the sequin scales of mullet, so bright they could be mistaken for angels. In the right light, even the storm drains look sacred.
Consider how each flament of yarn forms a tributary towards purpose, and from the margins of a stranger’s laugh it’s not so hard to love the world afer all.
Tink of how pigs can’t see the sky unless they fall on their backs, and a fsh might spend its whole life searching for the ocean.
If, by some miracle, you should wake before you die and get the chance to rise again tomorrow, do not fall back asleep,
sifing for Heaven through dreams.
It’s here. It’s already here.
Photo: Barry Sly-Delgado
Bedtime Feelings
Josy Pitaro
One of my dreams is about virgins
Tall and slender
Knees poke out from legs
Like it’s an accident
Prideful
Unaware
Holding cups of hot cofee
Black, untouched
Straps fall from shoulders by accident
Slipping down arms
Slender, as though
Incapable of permanence
Handprints lef on my chest when they crawl
From my mind
I don’t feel them when they crawl
From my mind
Socks with frills
Above little laced footgarments
Where little toes step
Bending and curling
As virgin toes do
Footprints unlef
I dream that they wake in rooms
Of cotton
Floors cool and refective
Feet trod toward the sink
Clean faces are washed
Doused and dried
At this part, I fip over, hogging
Te covers
Te boy in my bed is Aware
He dreams of virgins, too
Little fngertips lick
His mind
Tickling the knob in his throat
Te place where I lie
Damp
Disheveled
She sits
At the edge
Bony legs hang
Stances
Leaning
Sturdy walls
Curve into tall ceilings
Embroidered
Tey will be here tomorrow
Evening, once more
Baby Blue Sonnet
Jack Kaczmarek
I tell myself it’s all over now. & then I dream of myself in full form. I am alone in the woods a kitchen knife releasing from my hand diving into the bark of the tree. I become a pale-skinned shadow & the prison I will die in. Sometimes revenge is best self—
I’m served cold like a child to his grieving parents. I’m sorry I’m still grieving the body of my parent ossifed in the summer sun.
I was angry with God. I’m still angry— I’m with myself believing I’m with him too.
Carousel Confession
Ryan Fitchpatrick
We sit in the mahogany pews, silent in the early morning aughts. It’s cold outside but blazing within as we wait to confess our deepest sins.
At eight, you aren’t yet fully conscious. We sit before the priest and name our crimes— calling your brother something mean, gossiping about the girls in class— childhood slip-ups treated like moral failures.
At fourteen, I went to confession for the last time. When Father asked if I had “anything else,” I lied.
Maybe I am a masochist bred by religion, Catholic guilt etched into the spine. But even then, I could not bear to have the truest part of my soul dissected by a man who had lived a shell of a life, a man who knew nothing of the battles I’d already fought.
Afer that day, I decided my sins were between me and the Lord alone. Intermediary be damned. I say my Hail Marys,
wish well upon my enemies— isn’t that enough? When will it ever be enough?
When can we recognize that the cycle starting at eight— sin, confess, repeat— is just a ritual to soothe the conscience without changing who we are?
How many times have you walked into the confessional with the same sins in your pocket, walked out with a rosary in hand? I may be damned, but at least I had the courage to step of the carousel that never stops spinning
Photo: Shayanta Chowdhury
Romeo from Juliet's Hospital Room Haynes
Melchior
In psychology they call it the simulation heuristic:
Te illusion that one thing done diferently Might have changed everything, How an alternate ending easily imagined Hurts even worse –
Te mocking masquerade of choice
An omnipresent overseer of sleepless nights.
In quantum mechanics, the Many-Worlds Interpretation
Ofers the comforting idea that somewhere, Perhaps only a star or two away, Tere lives a version of us
Tat is dancing in a dafodil kitchen, four settling like forgiveness into the creases of your smile.
But the truth is, I don’t think there exists a world In which we have any ending but this one. Already, the stage is being reset, Actors shufing backwards
To tell the tragedy one more time.
Te cards of fate futter back into the dealer’s hand: An illusory shufe, jokers laughing
As they fall back into their preordained places. Te wheels of time turn counterclockwise, And everything moves in retrospect.
Outside your window, tangles of stars Become unbound, and focks Of nightingales drif by, Unmaking themselves.
Bad news surrender back into Te mouths of nurses, and moths resurrect Temselves over and over to dive Into the fuorescent lights of the waiting room.
In the chill of antiseptic air, Your rumpled sheets smooth themselves Back into bleach-stifened anonymity. Mab reverses in her gnat-pulled chariot, Whispering fantasies of remission.
In my dreams your hands are birds, Larks of light alighting on my palm, Already swallowing back their song, Already being set free.
Nocturne for a ruptured heart
Carlos A. Basurto
Te spirits I’ve glimpsed from inside the night sky of the stellar ribcage were the sharpest claws.
Tey seemed about to bleed then Collapsed into a scar.
Te stars handed out contentious breaths for the shaken. \\\\\ Wounded victims bent over hung archangels of a forlorn gazeland.
In a frightful embrace, a messenger mixed slights with hands melting its waning warning against the fesh.
Te lunar sight refected back a whimper struggling with lumine.
Te wisps with wallows of waves promised a possibility of vanishing hyperboles for what few by.
In pent-up whispers mindless creatures seemed to provide as if performing autopsies on premonitions before they were ever to be.
My childish violence, my bitten knuckles, my swelling feet –all my things that live on the starless voids of mine –appeasement, the spirits are about to bleed.
And one day, I am going to grow wings. But now they’ve collapsed.
Artwork: Shayanta Chowdhury
Dinner
Party
Josy Pitaro
My mother never travels without a mirror
Saying it 10 times fast, she
Spills
Red jelly frosting pills
From freshly plucked brows
Talking to myself I am convinced
Alcohol is fne in social settings
Men do better in social settings
Men in capri pants who worship the statues
Of women
Who cannot use their arms
A dining room table encaged By chairs
Tonight, they will serve
Fear of cellulite with
A side of broken Mirror
Shattered Glass
Skin stretches beneath the tablecloth
Ripping, slicing purpleness
Life is more bearable with a touch of lip gloss
My silver radio plays children’s pop
Hits
Muting the sounds, the
Retching
Lighting
Coughing
Snorting
Singing
Spiking
Tey tell me it is raining
Better grab my slicker
Stretching
Clumps of skin reach toward wetness
Fixing matted hair
Unbrushed in the wind tunnel
Photo: Shayanta Chowdhury
Bacterial Transformation
Madison Denchfeld
Te recombinant DNA molecule formed by in vitro ligation can be introduced into a common laboratory microorganism such as E. coli by the process of transformation. Transformation is a naturally occurring phenomenon observed in a variety of bacteria (man could get used to anything), by which naked DNA is taken up by a living cell (and he got used to it). In the naturally occurring transforming systems, the bacterial cells are at a stage of growth called competence. In this infnite history of our repeated mistakes...
Te E. coli that we are using in this experiment do not possess a natural mechanism for transformation .... we do not possess a natural mechanism for isolation... However, competence can be artifcially induced by exposing cells to calcium chloride (CaCl2) prior to the addition of DNA. We buy our competent cells from a company versus making them ourselves. ...we do not possess a natural competency for loneliness... Our circular recombinant plasmids will be taken up by the cells and will be maintained as extra-chromosomal pieces of DNA. Te plasmid will be replicated and transferred to new cells as the cells divide.
...we are lowly recombinants circling in perpetuity!
Te transformed cells are selected for by plating them on media containing ampicillin.
We are transformed! Penicillin and its derivative ampicillin inhibit a step in bacterial cell wall synthesis. Tus, E. coli that have been exposed to ampicillin develop weak cell walls and eventually lyse and die. We are dying! Te plasmid vector used in the cloning encodes the beta-lactamase gene (also called the ampicillin resistance gene), which inactivates ampicillin and other beta-lactams. We are repetition! Dividing and multiplying over and over again. Tus cells that do contain the plasmid will survive, while cells that were not transformed with the plasmid will die. Tis is an example of positive selection, where you can directly identify the desired cells. This is an example of natural selection, of the iron fst of nature hammering down on the slab of stone we were carved upon. Tis is the frst selection process in this experiment - separating cells with a plasmid from cells without a plasmid. This is our evolution, from monkey to man to dog.
In the ligation reaction, the plasmid could either reclose on itself (recircularized plasmid) or it could ligate the PCR product into the plasmid and then reclose (recombinant plasmid). Does the ant ever wonder how it came to be? Or is it just the man? In order to identify cells that contain recombinant versus recircularized plasmids, we will have to miniprep plasmids from the cells and analyze them on a DNA gel. Survival by chance, for all or for nothing. We are a testament to the glory of creation, a case study of cognitive dissonance. We were fsh, then men, then dead.
Citation: Whaley, M. (2024). Bacterial Transformation. Lecture.
Casual Oddities
Lily Brustkern
I wish I kept the words inside my palms and spoke the way I touched, as sofly as the breeze but the shadow of your wordlessness inhales the marrow from the roots of “thanks” and “please.”
Minutes pass through my pruned fngers like river pebbles, rounded smooth by tardy kindness painted bright by that time under the cross when I couldn’t stop laughing. All I wanted was
to grow in disobedience. To let my anger sing bright and deep and nurse my thorns into perfect, unafected points, easy enough to slip between your ribs.
For not the last time I will wonder whether you waited for my exhale, whether we needed guard-rails or solemnities. for who are we but casual oddities?
God Bless America Jack
Kaczmarek
you lay across my chest, silky cheek breathing like wind-tossed milkweed, the corner of your placid smile fowing at each turn of your words, your words that tell me I am so brave
for enduring this open chest I have borne all these years.
you say I am so brave for freezing my organs, for letting them shine in the fuorescent lights of convenience stores and cofee shops, bearing my innards like an opossum corpse ripped open from the swarms of of road truck tires and sharp treads of vulture beaks laying, rotting in the slush of fresh melted snow in the gray sun of midwinter.
your words sew a golden thread through the halves of my cadaver, each inhale an entrance, each exit an exhale of frostbitten air from my petrifed lungs
you breathe you speak you listen
to the pattern of my footsteps crackling through downed limbs and frozen leaves to the crumbling barrier of oak trees between my snowy oasis and the screech of my bones cracking under the fuming exhaust of a jacked-up truck so brave, so brave, so brave
for scampering from beneath the heap of my pack whose warmth sufocated fear of the dying sun, whose warmth you emulate with your words, each one falling and rising in the stare my broken eyes cast on the ceiling.
can you hear me?
you ask yet I do not respond, entranced by the specters crawling above.
the body of a fawn, holed and bloody caught in the crossfre of Poacher and Conservation Ofcer, spread at the feet of her parents in a forgotten funeral the Nation’s rose soggy from the faithful tears of the buck
who clings to his country’s name.
the icy paw of a cub who froze next to his brothers and sisters
in their den as his mother foraged for berries in the banks of a barren river, plowed at the indiference of the Legislator who sealed Father Bear’s life in an oil contract, whose pen ran dry at the promise of nourishment for the other.
the legless veteran propped on the curb outside the convenience store, begging for loose change, tattered like the coat of the lost wolf whose bloody tracks I followed to the downed cedar log where his legs laid limp and his nose reached for my hand and his eyes pleaded mercy
yet I aimed my loaded gun and fred into his skull mercy still frozen in his eyes like the paw of the cub in mine.
so brave, so brave, so brave
for crushing the dead opossum for spitting on the fawn’s rose for starving the family of cubs for widowing their mother for condemning their father for discarding the limbless veteran for executing the harmless wolf. so brave, so brave, so brave your words echo through our bedroom where the walls are a shield where the warmth runs full where I wish the specters could fnally rest. so brave, so brave, so brave you sing the anthem of our forgotten country.
Resurrection
Josy Pitaro
It’s February, and I was never baptised
It’s cold and grey and I sweat through my polyester
I rock side to side on the plastic seat
Along narrow flaments
Te Catholic Study Bible weighs a thousand pounds
Jesus foats, weightless
Unaware of even the angels beneath Him
Te gravitational scafolding between them
I wonder what that’s like, to defy I would like to do that, I think
Te football player coughs
Someone remarks that all is dark, Jesus glows
Te transmission of light through stained glass windows
I yawn, and it makes me cry
Tears rolling, journeying
Into the world of perfect
How is He so sure?
Te bad haircut on my lef chews his lip
He shouldn’t do that, my mother says in King James English
Perched on my lef shoulder
Te right one is just air
Te heaviest kind of air
My roommates text me and my phone illuminates
Tey want to throw a party
We will address real-world issues like Poverty and asymmetrical mouthparts
Everything will be blue, even the vodka
I was never baptised
I sit in the dark
It smells like jealousy
Like orange creamsicle nicotine I reek of emptiness
Photo: Shayanta Chowdhury
Highway Tambourine
Emma Betz
I rode last week through West Virginia
And saw a scrap of roadkill
Trough the glass pane of my Jeep
A white feathered bird and her Lace overcoat A tambourine on the highway strip Smells like blue
Te gas stove fame It scorched your wing
And when I think of broken clocks I always think of you Who used to sing through Dove lungs
When we were girls you shined like lemon water fat free sun
Mango juice you sip Beside me bathed in baby fat
And now you lick the bone teeth
Of your candy hustling lover
Soil spun for sun-girls
Soil spun for blondes like you
Friday night at Denny’s, in the dirty bourbon booth. his peanut foored apartment where the bedsprings crack like ribs You used to lay in bed for months
Te black fies
Swamp the green
Along the mug rim
Did you remember then?
Te time you told me what a soul
Was just
A particle in air
Floating numbly
Trough the street
That’s the white birds broken lung
Tat’s the roadkill tambourine
I sat by candle wax And beads
I watched Your teeth rot through your cheek
Contributors' Biographies
Aaliyah Geschwind is a sophomore at the University of Notre Dame double majoring in English and FTT (with concentrations in creative writing and flm, respectively), and minoring in European studies. She's spent her entire young adult life writing, mostly in the genre of poetry, but also in fction, screenwriting, and creative nonfction. She hopes to continue writing and learning post-grad, sharing her passions for storytelling and creativity no matter where else her life may lead her.
Ava Hyde is a senior undergraduate from Oradell, New Jersey majoring in political science with a supplementary major in Japanese. Her poetry primarily explores themes of translation, the body, and the “other,” though she is still exploring her personal style. Beyond personal experience, she draws inspiration from travel, politics, and visual art. Outside of writing, she researches political communications and mobilization, interests that inform her approach to poetry as a form of societal and institutional inquiry.
Barry Sly-Delgado is a 5th-year computer science Ph.D. candidate. His creative endeavors include flm photography and writing. His photography primarily focuses on the relationships between subjects or between the subject and the photographer, attempting to depict his idealized perspective of the subject.
Carlos A. Basurto is a senior at Notre Dame studying philosophy and computer science. He was born in the United States and raised in Mexico, but does not truly belong to either. Someday he will write fction, but poetry works best for the time being. He appreciates hopeful tragedies tainted with radically individualized freedom, and hopes it is refected in his work. He does not like to think, yet he does. When permitted to publish, he writes for the Observer in his opinion column Eudaemonic Banter.
Cecilia Frazee is a Junior studying Studio Art and Environmental Science here at Notre Dame. She's a longtime lover of all kinds of arts, and spends a lot of her free time making handmade memorabilia for her scrapbook and as gifts for her friends. Outside of crafting just for fun, her art focuses primarily on the journey of discovering one's identity, specifcally when it might seem unclear as the what that's supposed to be. She thinks that is a really important part of the college experience: uncertainty, and learning how to work with it, and this piece speaks to that.
Dylan Hockx is a senior from South Bend, IN, studying English and Political Science with a minor in Chinese. His critical essay “Survivors: An Analysis of the Self in Wartime” was heavily inspired and would not have been possible without the works of Anna Halas—especially her beautiful and moving play The Chronicles of a Lost Soul. Anna Halas recently passed away after fghting a long battle with brain cancer. This essay, though it fails to live up to her immense ability, is dedicated in memory of her and her art.
Emma Betz is a sophomore at the University of Notre Dame, double-majoring in Political Science and English. She is a staf writer for The Notre Dame Observer, a Kellogg Institute Developing Researcher, and a weekly childcare volunteer at the Center for the Homeless. She is originally from South Bend, Indiana. Her work is primarily inspired by Sylvia Plath, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Adrianne Lenker. This is her frst year contributing to Re: Visions, and she hopes to publish more work throughout her college years.
Francesca Bartolacci is a sophomore at the University of Notre Dame, living in McGlinn Hall, and originally from Easton, Pennsylvania. She is a Finance major, and minoring in Chinese and Data Science. These poems were selected from her Fall 2025 portfolio for an introductory creative writing class. They express the use of ekphrastic poetry and were infuenced by separate works of art.
Genevieve Le Leux is a sophomore majoring in Literature, Creative Writing, and Philosophy at Saint Mary’s. Other interests of hers include creating art, enjoying cofees and teas, and going for contemplative walks. You can fnd more of her work in the ND Observer and in Chimes 2025. She is so grateful for your readership and wants to thank Caroline Dutton and Josh Vo for their continuous support of her writing.
Hannah Gatewood Durán is a poet from the Class of 2028, majoring in Political Science and Spanish, with a minor in Marketing. This is her second publication with Re: Visions. In addition to Re: Visions, her previous work has been published in The Radical. Her writing often centers on feminism, society, and the tensions between identity and power. In addition to poetry, she is also working on music, where she continues to write about the afictions of life.
Haynes Melchior is a frst year student majoring in Biological Sciences and Global Afairs. She currently lives in Lewis Hall and is originally from Tampa, Florida.
Josy Pitaro is a sophomore in Breen-Phillips Hall from Westport, Connecticut. She majors in English and FTT and enjoys spending time with friends, acting, reading, and running in her free time. She's so thankful to the Re:Visions community for featuring her work!
Jack Kaczmarek is a senior from Rockville, Virginia. He studies creative writing, constitutional studies, and Italian. He writes about the rural Southern landscape, among other subjects.
Libby Garnett is a Notre Dame senior from South Bend, Indiana, majoring in English and philosophy. She spent the summer in Ireland with the Kylemore creative writing program; she is indebted both to the nation of Ireland for inspiring her and to the program for helping her create something from that inspi-ration. Although both pieces published here are about faraway places, she loves her hometown very much. She wants to ex-tend her gratitude to Prof. Dionne Bremyer and Prof. Orlando Menes for encouraging her to submit her work to Re: Visions.
Lily Brustkern is a Math and Classics major from Denver, CO (she really misses the mountains). During fall semester she went through a New-York-School poetry phase which, given that only her most straightforward poems were accepted to Re:Visions, she may want to shift out of (sorry Frank). Lily loves color (Klimt, Matisse, Van Gogh, etc.) but since she is hopeless-ly inept at all forms of visual art, she tries to create the images she wants out of words, an exercise which keeps her a healthy (ahem, necessary) distance from reality.
Madison Sailor Denchfeld is a junior majoring in Biological Sciences and English. She spends her time preparing for the MCAT and writing poetry, sometimes simultaneously. She feels most like a poet when she studies biology, and most like a biologist when she writes poetry.
Maura McMahon is a sophomore living in Farley Hall from Minneapolis, Minnesota majoring in FTT and English. She is so excited to share her work with Re:Visions and is even more ecstatic to read the work of her peers in this year's issue. Go Irish!
Shayanta Chowdhury is a 5th year Chemistry PhD candidate from Bangladesh. For his research, he focuses monochromatic beams of light on nanoscopic specks of gold covered with wiggly molecules and studies the changes in the light scattered by said wiggly molecules. For fun, he occasionally focuses polychromatic beams of light onto flms of silver salt crystals, which can then be dunked in chemical baths and scanned to reveal images from his memories. He is currently trying to fnd a way to make a living doing both for the rest of his life.
Sofa Baquerizo Coello is a member of the Class of 2027 studying English and Marketing. Born between languages and cultures, her writing explores immigration, displacement, and the quiet negotiations of identity that happen in translation. She is interested in how language both bridges and deepens distance between people, places, and versions of the self. Sofa writes to make sense of belonging, loss, and the emotional landscapes we carry with us, even when we think we’ve left them behind.
Tian Han is a semester exchange student majoring in Genetics from the University of Western Australia. He continues to use the poetry skills learnt during the Fall semester back home and hopes to keep developing them.
Ty Saedal is a sophomore studying Finance at the University of Notre Dame. Although he is from New Canaan, Connecticut, he has moved ten times throughout his life, making “where are you from?” a difcult question to answer. Growing up in constant transition sparked his interest in how quickly life can change, which ultimately led him to explore poetry. Through his writing, he explores movement, impermanence, and the small moments that shape identity.
