Dear Reader, We proudly present to you the Fall 2020 issue of NOTA (None of the Above), the only award-winning student literary and fine art publication of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. We are honored to continue NOTA’s tradition of artistic excellence. NOTA’s mission is to showcase art, literature, and music created by UW-Eau Claire students. Our publications represent dedicated collaboration and creative inspiration from students across disciplines. Through our events and biannual publications, NOTA fosters a supportive atmosphere and creative community. We encourage students to express themselves, and we find time and time again that we are all stronger, more inspired, and better able to carry on when we hear from each other. We are proud to be a voice for students, and we are honored to share some of those inspiring voices with you, dear reader. This semester’s issue comes at the end of a year of great turmoil, transition, loss, and resilience. The year at large has been a catalyst for change, casting a spotlight on injustices, hardships, and trials. It has shown us humanity’s best and its worst. We’ve been forced to stay apart while challenged to come together in new ways. Students were given the option of responding to the events of 2020 in their submissions, and a significant number of them did so. The issue’s design also had these events in mind, harnessing a perspective of disorganization and chaos unified under one publication. Our hope is that this issue of NOTA can act as a witness to these times. As always, we are grateful for the continued support of the Student Senate Finance Commission and Student Senate, as well as our faculty advisors, whose steadfast support keeps us afloat. We are, most importantly, indebted to the countless students who volunteer their time to serve on our selection committees, the hundreds of students who submit their work, and the thousands of readers who engage with our publication each year. Without your dedication, NOTA would not exist. Thank you, reader, for your devotion to the arts.
nota
contents 1 3 5
Anna Wendorff
7Caroline 8 Hehir 12
16
Chase Karolewski
20
Cole Weitzel Matousek 25 21Cy 22
27
Georgina Osodo Jessica Kemstra 29 30 33
s
40
34
Julia Kaeding
Kaden Ofstad Kala Rehberger 43 45 50 Karla Lara 54 55
62
Maya Ledvina
t r
Madi Johnson 58 60
contents
lit
2Kaitlin 32Rikala 34 6
4
Casper Crump
Emma Steiler
14
9Madison 10Porter 31
Lindsey Paquette
Jacob23 Lee Knuth 18 44
26
Scarlett Roderich
15
Anna Wendorff
24
Rowan Evans
s
Forst52 28Ben46
42
41
Julia Kaeding
Katherine Langfield
59
56
Robert Darling
Katie Johnson
64
Emily Wallace
68
Will Wall
36 61
Brooke Erickson
c i s u 70
Simon Paul Arneberg
Disease
1
Ringlets around Lake Rooney in your Carolina blue Pontiac Sunfire, you swear the pile of snow blocking our view of the road is a young Mount Everest biding its time before swallowing us up, I ask you if you ever think about when we used to munch our potholed canvas sneakers through ash encrusted snowbanks to the West Lawn Cemetery, gravestones illuminated by blue and white solar lights that lived in the grass to soak up the Sun, we would welcome ourselves into the wilting, seemingly uninhibited Chevrolet 3100 considering the withered interior and WD-40 poisoned seats to be overwhelmingly hospitable, listening to Nirvana’s Incesticide I would smoke my Camel 99s while you pinched your lips around tin cans of purloined PBR that your dad bought in counts of six for $5.79 at the Phillips 66, talking our way to three o’clock in the morning until the cartilage in our voice boxes got tired of doing the wave and our laughs liberated themselves with the hiss of dying space heaters, only when our marijuana-drenched breath became polar ice caps did we find an excuse to take the lollipop-stained, cotton-soft blanket out of the black duffel bag and subjugate it to the gravel only then did we tense our muscles against the unfriendly cacophony of wind and taunt the dead with our youth, Grandpa John’s headstone staring longingly at the saccharine fourteen-year-olds who thought they could outsmart the sunrise. Your laughter comes to a boil as we build a memorial of our adolescent selves, a shrine to our own asininity you turn down a choppy gravel road and kiss me with coffee-stained lips as we build our catalogue of decadent depravity, our sanctuary certain, concealed by Carolina blue.
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Für Di Jungen
3
Casper Crump Rebirth
Born by the will of my mother, I lay In the arms of the world that I most love, Free from sin. Free from distrust. But one day As I roam the garden, there comes a dove It lands fast, leaves as quickly as it came But stops to whisper in my childish ear, “For what you will become, I am ashamed.� The bird will never again come back here. The years that follow are a blur, a whirl Of midnight fights and Sunday morning screams. I scramble to adulthood, and the girl From my past is now the man from my dreams. I am up to my chest in the river, Baptized in the joy of Sun and Earth. It was a girl my mother delivered, But becoming a man gave me self-worth.
4
Prō Patriā Mōrī
We skate on a backyard pond, frozen over. She’s twirling like Venus, I’m not so graceful and l fall, I fall in love with her, but I don’t pull her down with me, I fall in love with her cold air-blushed nose and pale skin that glows like the snow, this winter. We strip our wet clothes, she turns her back to me, unclasping her bra and I watch her freckled shoulder blades. Wind chimes dance drunkenly in the arms of the wild, wintry winds as I lay restlessly in her bed, unable to silence the clock in my chest that’s letting time just slip away from it, wait till the sun slides in and leave soon after. Won’t stay long enough for her to catch on. I won’t ever tell her, ‘cause not even my parents say that to each other anymore.
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Caroline Hehir Shattered Beauty
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Caroline Hehir
A Twist on Function
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Madison Porter Undone.
Catastrophe! It’s the end of my days, an irreversible fate, I can feel myself slipping away. So sallow are my cheeks, so drenched is my skin, so twisted is my spine as I curl in a knot around my stomach, a cave whose walls have been forced into siege by a brigade of bats gone rabid. I’m not long for this place; it’s just cruel to take me so slowly. The knife on the counter gleams under remnants of last night’s rotten supper. I heard a rumor that cuts from silver are smooth. My flesh would be grapefruit sliced to perfection just before breakfast. In the sink, I could drown, commiserating with my new found love of tile, a comforting hard surface, an iced casket for my fading corpse. I release a spectacular moan, despaired. I contemplate the merits of death by lack of air. As my howl resounds through the house all the way to the kitchen I hear my mother’s voice, perhaps my last and final flash before the end. “Next time, don’t forget to fully cook the chicken.”
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Madison Porter And The Birds Won’t Stop
No one told me the world would forget humanity while humans still stood on the earth. No one told my teachers they’d have to work while parents died and children cried and students of tomorrow stopped learning “hi.” No one told the turkeys the coming of Spring wasn’t a call to flee. But I, in the ever-growing silence of a stationary nation, like the migration of wayward robins racking miles on wings of habits and needs, like the push of roots into soil from forget-me-nots blooming in the late hours of Spring’s kiss, am always but hushed. For there is a road, everywhere in the world, that is empty of rage and CO2. There is a line, everywhere in the world, filled unlike the stomachs of those who wait. There is a leader, everywhere in the world, balking at the knees of the people’s pleas. But I, like the chickadee’s song in morning amidst the rusting factories, like the moon half-way through another phase around a world remembering it is blue and green, like the oak another life circle through a water cycle, am tired but waking. As for the calls inside the houses, forging bonds without faces, as for the black keys and fake silver screens that push ‘to-do’ on to ‘too late,’ as for the thing called time, it is failing because every day is a blend of the next; we create a coffin waiting to host but the birds won’t stop.
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Caroline Hehir
a POP of New York
bones quake beneath your skin luggage bleeding blue as you stretch too thin, but never thin enough. the hour has gone twice each tick feeding an empty pit the wasps in your throat rot in your ear Eat the cup on the counter heavier than you remember tips down trembling fingers water running over marble. spooking the rabbit in your ribs pit upending on uneven feet skidding across hardwood your knees upon tile hair back, the hive alive.
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The fiery apple filled your eye with brushstrokes of examinations as I lay dying bare before the eyes of witnesses in a blazing bowl with no solace depiction of lined lips & raven hair that sterile void to which my being was subjected abundant wash of painted skin, unholy My taut stomach was your shrine to old idealized fantasies My nipples in rosy hues were proof of sick manifestation My thickly drawn eyebrows were not the numerous twisted follies of man You did not bother to examine how or why I existed in that garden Instead you blatantly took form for sole function in an act of utter cerebral dismissal You pandered to the most stained denominator with every colorful stroke pushed on my soul.
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Chase Karolewski
Duluth Rose Garden
Jacob Lee Knuth
The white boy walks and walks and walks. Soft, sweet and silent remain the reception, whiteness reckoned. Behind a dumpster, her ankle scraping a busted dustpan, it never made the trash; can the white boy walk? Walks and walks. Just a corner Turner. No change to inflection, the public portrays the best reflection, a supreme infection, whiteness destined. AR shot, piping hot smoked intestines, breathless pedestrian, skateboard dropped on the concrete— a testament. The white boy walks and walks right by the cops, strapped like Chewbacca or a Girl Scout. Rittenhouse, smitten house, shit in mouth hurled out as the president talks defending murder cops and vigilante cocks. Unprecedented gawks and jaw-drops, heartbeats skip or slow and stop for the white boy walks and walks and walks and whiteness stalks, Arbery drops.
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An afterthought to take a jog or run for your life while the white boy walks. And the white boy walks and walks and walks. They might as well raise the roof for Dylann or he’ll have it his way with a Whopper and blow the sucker off the top of a Baptist chapel holding D1 offers from both ends of Tobacco Road down Abbey with your Beatles hair frizzing from the electric chair, look at you, despicable glare, walking where the sun shines fair.
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Cole Weitzel
Piece of Pieces
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Cy Matousek
Untitled 1
Cy Matousek
Untitled 2
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Jacob Lee Knuth
Milk soaks country fields like it’s good for their bones. Mass graves filled with the cities’ unclaimed like seeds sown to be reaped as tomorrow’s tales of the sandbox. “Corona, corona, corona, COVID!”
The circling boy taps the head of one sitting, an unlucky fellow, sent to chase the Trump around the circle to continue the cycle until they all fall down.
“Washed away, washed away the rest are paid washed away, washed away the mess it made washed away, a greater day!”
Peeking past finger-bent blinds, a park’s vacant jungle gym poses like a statue as a dog walker swings the slack on a leash and I blow smoke. This could be a while.
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I’m a top-down diagram, petals withered & curled up together, hemmed with pinky-promise threads. Sinister is bland, bored tasting, coerced into retreating roots, worlds licking up rusty & sniveling sour coated begonias desiccated with tiny dripping venom, leaking long paths down my veins. Dictator doesn’t require useless titling, pockmarked & drooping words, disgorged, fictitious, misused language and stitching patchless holes with weeks-old chrysanthemums, but I’m sensing enriched doubt petering & potent master-minded institutions besieging collared towns to assuage orange-lipped egos. Signs of history loops pivoting between short-term crowns & long-term corruption spearheaded by presumptuous bastards with titan arum towering over each policy, strayed, frayed rope lynched collars and snatching up lives, plucking & harvesting segregating onyx odyssey magnolia delineations I have grown accustomed to. Don’t spare a torch to fractured pieces. Together, senseless diagrams are without shimming planes for bracing my bloody, cauterized feet. Weeds live among weeds, or do unethics grow in pretty little places?
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Cy Matousek
Untitled 3
my therapist was made by eMachines she told me “Faulkner sat on that couch” I said “so what” she said “so I can’t help you with the incest or the rent”
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Georgina Osodo Untitled
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Ben Forst 10/8/20
track the body; your smothered jaws and bated breathing, the missing tongues you will wave in indignation. each ragged tow of breath amongst the ebb and flow of oxygen that brushes and moves through the flesh, taking note of each tired and tangled cell—each pungent red sky that paints itself into the muscles, scanning constellations. they will find nothing but a pair of eyes, hanging soft above cloth divisions carrying your smothered jaws from room to room— bated breath still yet to bloom.
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Jessica Kemstra
7 feet, 12 toes
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Jessica Kemstra
Drink Umbrella
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Madison Porter The Box
Beyond the melting on the mosaic table, of red ice cream running pink on to the cement porch, creating drops of sweet that pool into oceans of wasted treats, there sits a cat in green grass genetics reminding her to eat while she— I can’t remember what grass tastes like, I had known hadn’t I? I was once a child— looks upon a square van. While I am busy throwing nature at nature, the cat lies in wait for him to leave, before she can proceed to prey on the light of mid-day, stalking from shade. We are both unsure of the mailman.
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Puddles isolate themselves in my vertebrae. My back has been hollowed out, a candle with a lopsided wick, a burnt-out flame. I don’t know how to tell if I meant what I said about the drain hiding in the center of my chest. Newspaper clippings of trauma lay idly on the table. Coffee tinged edges. What do you do? Applauded for a plot you cannot follow. Insurmountable, the blue and yellow tube. Bitter. Disintegrating with saliva.
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Jessica Kemstra
Marie An
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Peach wine bubbles sizzle off the tip of my tongue. Reminded of my alcoholsoaked cerebellum when I teeter off the ten-dollar couch. Three sheets to the wind is what my decaying mother would have called it. Lungs become the exhaust of the crippled Crown Vic, fumes aren’t mitigated by canoeing Zig-Zags. Swallow me up whole with nicotine infused saliva, forget the tendrils of blue vapors. Wrap me up in the scent of sensitive skin laundry detergent, lavender skies. Create crescentic forms in tired bed sheets, our legs can intertwine. We’re as free as highway litter, clogging up ditches post-winter.
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Lust, appetence, avidity, fervor met with the liquidation sale of your limbs.
Captured
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Brooke Erickson Essential Work
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You go to work. Everyone was ordered to stay home after the virus hit, but not you. Of course not. You, with your nine-dollars-an-hour pay: you are essential. You are valuable. In the commercials, it goes like this: a wide shot of the outside of a grocery store. A voice-over. The company has hired the best, most soothing voice actor for the role. He, or she, says, “These are trying times.” The camera cuts to a worker, dutifully stocking produce. They are responsible, silent, wearing a mask and gloves, their work uniform pressed and neat. If it were possible to see behind the mask, they would be smiling. You can tell. The music swells when they place an apple in the display. “Take the time to thank essential workers,” the voice-over says, and isn’t that nice? Don’t you deserve to be thanked? Inside the store, where the camera isn’t looking, things are different. Everyone looks rumpled, slightly askew. The uniform shirt never stays tucked in like it’s supposed to, and the reusable masks distributed last week are either too big or too small. There is something in your coworker’s eyes. Something manic and afraid. You know because you see it too, when you go to the bathroom and wash your hands for thirty seconds, just in case. The little stand for the Lysol wipes has run out again. Three people have told you this, but you don’t have time to fix it. One mentioned it casually, and you thanked them for it. Two said it sideways and with a polite sort of nastiness. You go to refill the Lysol wipes. They weren’t empty. The wipes were just stuck inside, the same way that Kleenexes sometimes disconnect from each other and leave you fishing around inside the box. You ask your boss if you can leave the lid of the dispenser open, because this is the fourth time that this has happened during your four-hour shift. They say you can’t, because if you do someone will come and take every single Lysol wipe. You leave the lid closed. Half an hour later, someone complains. “You’re out of Lysol wipes.” Customers complain about a lot of things. You’re in the middle of a transaction, and someone yells sir at you from six feet away. You are not a sir, but you are so used to this that you turn anyways. They ask you if there’s any toilet paper in the back. Later, that same customer comes through your register. They are buying thirty pounds of meat. “I have a second freezer,” they whisper-yell, as
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if sharing this innocent fact has drawn you into a deadly conspiracy. When they use the pin-pad, they press the buttons through the Lysol wipe they have poorly wrapped around their index finger. Another customer comes through your register, and knocks on the sneeze guard. They make a joke of some sort. You can’t hear it; the sneezeguard muffles everything. You fake a laugh and nod as though the joke was funny. You must always pretend the joke was funny. You and your coworkers stand in a circle and laugh. It is forty-five minutes to close, and you have nothing to do. Someone says, “You’re all too close! We’re all supposed to stand six feet apart, remember?” Everyone laughs and stretches their arms wide. Someone funnier than you runs to the opposite end of the long line of registers and yells, “Am I far enough away yet?” Everyone laughs harder. Your laughter has a bittersweet edge to it, put there by the small, lonely thing inside you that grasps at this companionship and does not want to let go.
A customer complains about that, too.
You are cleaning your register. The sharp, acrid, medical smell of the sanitizer makes you cough. Behind you, someone glares. You cough again; you will have a headache soon. The sanitizer is new, like the plexiglass sneeze-guards and the foot-shaped stickers on the floor and the little bag of homemade masks stashed behind the guest services counter. All of these things are newer than they should be. The store is always one step behind; the sneeze-guards were installed a week after a bigger grocery store from a different chain did it first. It is nearly a month into the crisis, and they put the wide-spaced foot-shaped stickers on the floors last Tuesday. The masks are homemade. One of the customer service reps came to work with a Ziplock bag stuffed full of them, and said they were hand-sewn by her mother. The sanitizing spray did not show up until three days after that first Friday, when the panic hit. A customer comes through your register. When you hand them their receipt, they linger a short second, as though they are about to say something profound. “Thank you for working,” they say, with the same sort of gravity that one uses to quote Shakespeare. You look around at your coworkers, their frazzled, faded edges. You think about the stickers on the floor and the empty spray bottle beneath
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your register. You think about your tuition, your coworkers’ rent, the vital money the company hands out so sparsely. You think about the neverending rush that first Friday, and the whispers about the tripled number of customers and increased profit. You think about the way the CEO of the company said, “Thank you” in his company-wide video about COVID-19.
“It’s no problem,” you say, and the lonely thing inside you aches.
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Kaeden Ofstad Solace
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Katherine Langfield panic running through carson park
the day before my university shut down, I spent the afternoon running through carson park. running among the pine trees seemed natural, as if on the other side of the ice-covered lake, the world had reverted to normalcy, and as long as I stayed running, I’d never know the difference. now the river’s flooding and I don’t walk to campus anymore. these days I run at a frenzied pace, trying to drone out the fever pitch that I feel constantly reverberating from the news cycle to my skull. all I wanted was to watch the chippewa at spring flood on the way to my morning lecture, but now I am untethered under this end of winter sky. now I am watching the world break apart, like the ice floes on halfmoon lake.
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Kala Rehberger Green Pitcher
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Jacob Lee Knuth
They say, do what you love and you won’t work a day in your life and they say, be careful turning what you love into a daily grind you may grow to hate it and be left with nothing but you could still follow the golden rule (or so they say) treat those as you wish to be treated just don’t expect them to wish to be treated like you and always stand up for yourself but make sure you look out for others too and don’t stoop down to someone else’s level though you’re no better than anybody anyway; everybody’s equal so people suck as people and people have the capacity to change except people are set in their ways so just accept who you are but be better every day well I’ll be, aren’t we? You think you made it all the way to the point where you know exactly where you’re headed but looking back you know damn well you don’t have a single clue and you can’t believe it as soon as you make the same mistake you are yet again wondering what in the
Hell
must have occurred to you if you are right back to where you once were –
is this how Dali’s clocks melted?
Time can’t be beat after all it just keeps passing
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as you lose it you peel both thighs free from the sunbaked cognac leather in a Glasshouse on the Autobahn to Bauhaus of course you’ve smelled rain you just never know what rain will smell like.
Kala Rehberger The Witch
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Ben Forst Ode to the Abstract
I. Crawling through the age and decay of antique busts and rotten books I found a painting abstract broken and unform(ed) It has no name and no owner so we’ve become pen pals with each other telepathic communications running through the dark merlot underbelly of a formless shape like radio wires, ja/gg/ed and o ut o f sy nc as with no subject to speak about we s w i m through words anyway. and in our constant babbling, incessant and silent I ask: what form it will take today? Snagged. lines move about and I can see a jar pregnant with rose or, no. a face with one orchid eye, blossoming, billowing like wine, the [m{e}]ss with which it framed itself the cra/ck/s in the deep mahogany skin? How such patterns not controlled (un)[tame](ed) by the grounds that hold them found their way into my wavelength? I’ve noticed how the trees do the same, bark squEEzed out like a rag by the wind the leaves in a smattering of auburn, amber and crimson; sea of the husks that were once their bodies. Branches dancing in macabre tangoes their limbs contort and snarl asking the sky for forgiveness; priests in dark chant cry for the leaves that abandon and decant.
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perhaps it’s that sky which pokes out of the trees, in br/oke/n abstract shapes, forming blue paper its edges burnt on the edges of the twigs contorting its figure in broken soliloquies of thick air the bursts of white in your face— my pen pal what has your face become? Those same branches broke out and reached for nothing bent backwards and forwards in praying mantis dances searching for violent disagreements for those wondering why their arms were not in the same positions? Symmetrical. II. They call the summary of an academic journal the abstract. To me, it was because it was an abstract notion to find meaning in the summary when the writing Fa/lls upon the page mere sec·onds later. This poem could abstract. in adj. forms I could speak ab’strakt, some magic incantation All this just to define myself in 1. Not having a concrete existence. I would space out the words Make them slow; bathed in the white vak yoo( )m where the ink does not run. e
Or I could run them at you, the words coming faster and faster with no end, until the dam breaks, and the floodwaters rise in my mind, the raging flow in the middle of the calm and I’m found 47
underneath the bridge where once blue sat on the walls of the street’s hidden crevice, and cr/a/cks formed and dis`conn`ect, ri pp li ng across the black cement like the notches in my s p i n e [POP]ping like that late night treat, from sitting dormant too long. It’s my personal Jackson Pollock underneath the vacancy of street as I pass below the stars, s pe /ck l /ed, thrown across the canvas. They stand in time with oblivion {nothing} owed and nothing guessed. I find myself at the church, Stained glass murals b n i g e d n and brea\king the faces of the b l v d, contorting what is hard and full of sharp hate into the warm soft face you must look to find. e ee
Until once again I’m back with my pen pal our communications dry; my mind bled. we swim once again in the familiar /rek/
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Kala Rehberger The Girl and the Goose
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Ben Forst Scenes of Two Lovers (or) Nocturnes of Two Insomniacs
I. Listless Daydreamer Everything is so tiring, days stretched paper thin. My eyes wander, and rescind as I sleep in afternoons. Eyes not discerning— the sky mimicking morning with dusk overtones in nighttime shades of violet framed by geometric form. Thoughts of sleep, I am immune to their crying tones; my heart wrapped in your wiring the beat held in your hand— trapped. The incandescent walls of my heart retract as we sit with our darkness in soft, drowsy sheets your arms wrapped around— unformed. “What on Earth am I here for?” I ask the walls— white shifting, vast regardlessness As the sun breaks in limbo, I sink into night, holding onto your racked limbs.
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II. Resolute Sleepwalker Watching T.V. I drifted to planes between here while you made coffee, listless. Yes—I could’ve stayed all year your arms break the night, dark sunlight shining on your face. In casual daydreams, I might hold it and lace cold fingers through your white hair turned so by the chemicals I place with tender care long ago, so tactical. Work through it, tender and slow swimming in your arms I grab hold of voidless flight, dreaming of time before we were preoccupied with the business of lost nights.
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Karla Lara Pointillism
Karla Lara Frida
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With the moths he flocks to the streetlamp’s witchy glow, Swaying in rhythm with numb drunk feet to The lamp’s monotonous buzz and The guitar’s fractured chords clanking And reverberating off fissures of concrete, Bounding off rebar, Clambering against dented fenders, And the strings scratched like scabbed-over veins. That’s it. Pools of vomit on the faded pavement, Weeping down his shirt, Mixed with the blood from falling face first, Oozing from him like talent, burnt off like smog, Chords so incoherent they evaporate, Cover the moon with fog; Even the stars can’t see through it. It’s a pilgrimage somewhere.
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A saxophone howls with the wind, Freezing the strings, they sever and snap. He wasn’t always this drunk, But he is now. The streetlamp burns him, Sears his fucking sin to his skin with shame and regret. He abandons it like his guitar at a pawnshop for fifty bucks to score heroin. He slinks to the hallowed shadow between the streetlamps, Light to shadow, Light to shadow, Light to shadow. It haunts him just like his habit; Fingers that used to be precise, composing Raging infernos and maelstroms of lightning, Twisting down blind alleyways and dive bars, Always glowing, Burning bright with blinding twinkling stars That shoot through the heavens like comets Leaving behind trails of frigid glaciers for us to gape at, Now are fat and knobby grotesques, Little arthritis ridden stumps that Appear like the would-be chords as Apparitions and paranoid visions of A shrouded devil, mocking him for Losing his soul. I said it was a pilgrimage. He’s stumbled to a crossroads but There are no more deals to be made, He’s lost it all already. He stands in the middle, Eyes clamped shut, Fingers clenched in fists. The dirt turns to mud and he sinks Down, Down, Down, Gone.
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Madi Johnson
Untitled
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Katie Johnson Falling Rain
If you force it enough you won’t be able to let it go Like a janky head that sprays water in your face every time you turn on the shower And you say to yourself again and again this is fine I like—no I crave I fetishize the way the boiling blast blurts from the poorly-wrapped duct tape holes like it’s my punishment for neglecting to buy a new one
And though you force yourself to the store once a week Where hundreds of options reflect off the cheap fluorescent lighting Directly into your eyes You have never once stopped to look, let alone buy a new one
Maybe you’ll ponder some more as you fall asleep tonight Or maybe it will be how you spend the last moments of your consciousness Inquiring of Death: Does chrome really match with charcoal gray? Do rain shower heads actually feel like falling rain?
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Madi Johnson
Untitled
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who self-destruct. i get so jealous of people e in it, dismantling there’s something so fre h a hammer wit every piece of your life d of caring for tire so i’m . and a bloody fist turing her sitting in a pile the me in the future, pic the mess of it. of rubble and crying for ething. i want i just want to break som ant and throw to take something import gasoline, nk dri to it in the river. i want whole. tch ma a w allo sw just once, and baby; er, eth tog i’m so tired of holding it lode and lose exp and rt apa i want to let myself fly k through it all, nuke myself and pic uld, wo i . ces pie e ctiv the radioa ss the big red button if i wasn’t a coward. i’d pre it. but god, i’m so scared of and blow my life to shit, gile fra s thi g win blo t, the losing, the being los to help me float. boat to hell with nothing it all apart. i think i’d drown, if i tore slip under the water i think i’d die, let myself pieces of my body the t. and breathe in the sal magnets aligned are volatile and hateful; ved together, sho to dif ferent poles and se. i’ll keep going, clo m the p but for you i’ll kee that big red button for now. might as well. to something er when its sitting nex t looks a hell of a lot bright i don’t want to break.
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Maya Ledvina Spoiled the Bunch
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At eight years old, I was president of the ‘Save the Worms’ club. Granted, the club consisted of me and my three other siblings who only joined because I offered to give them all of my lime-flavored Tootsie Rolls from my Fourth of July candy stash. This club was dedicated to parading out in the rain and saving all the worms inching their way to death on the street. The worms didn’t know; they were blind and unable to sense that they were squirming themselves onto their black pavement deathbed. If it was pouring, I’d scamper outside with my bare feet pattering on the pavement and peel all of the naked, rosy worms off of their paths to doom and plop them right back next to my mom’s yellow tulips and bleeding heart bushes. The dirt was so smooth you could stick your hand straight in and it would reach all the way to your elbow. After a good day’s work, there would be ten, even fifteen worms squirming around like moving brain matter next to my mom’s flowers. I was saving their lives. Sometimes, I would get a casualty, a worm that was run over by a blue Mini Cooper that was driving forty miles per hour in our neighborhood, but I did what I could. Worm saving advanced to mouse rescues, nest recovery, and neighborhood cat feeding. I would never feel guilty about being too late for an animal. I only ever felt guilty one time, when I was the method of mass destruction. I didn’t even mean to be. *** The summer night was cool, and the thick humid air carried the scent of soggy watermelon, unearthed worms, and rain on heated cement. Our neighbor, Don, called our house and told my dad that there was something “really cool” at his house. My dad and I walked the two blocks over. We took the long way around the pond. When we arrived, he showed us a massive brown mound of what I thought was evidence that Don’s dog had had a rough day, but then it started squirming. As I stepped closer, I saw at least fifty black salamanders huddled in the corner of Don’s cobblestone firepit. Their skin was so thin that I could see it wrinkle every time they moved, like their bodies were covered in a silk cloth. They reminded me of posh old ladies draped in their satin night gowns. Don bellowed in a voice that sounded like Kermit the Frog on depressants. “Yeah, I really wanted to have a fire this weekend, but these
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little guys won’t move.” I inched closer to the writhing pile and felt a crunch under my grass stained tennis shoes. I assumed it was one of the crinkled potato chips I’d seen scattered around Don’s yard, no doubt left over from his barbeque the day before. I wiped my shoe on the grass and kept inching my way forward. The salamanders were black as onyx, except for their backs which were dimpled in rusted brown dots. I continued wading through the grass, closer to the fire pit when there was another crunch. I looked down and saw a wrinkled head of a sun-dried salamander. Its eyes either plopped out of his dry skull or were hijacked by a family of ants. Its mouth was withered open in a silent scream, like my Nana whenever she lost her dentures. The rest of its body was crinkled up with four limbs grasping at the sky. “What happened to them?” I screeched. Don nodded and said in his lethargic voice, “I think they need more moisture or somethin’.” My eight-year-old ‘Save the Worms’ self was still alive and kicking in my eleven-year-old body. I scooped a fistful of salamanders and began running them to the pond’s edge. A thick wall of cattails and those wild daisies that smell like my brother’s wet socks were crowding the outskirts of the water. I couldn’t even get close to the soggy dirt around the pond. Instead of gently setting them in the water, like I would’ve preferred, I had to do the second-best thing an eleven-year-old could think of. I launched those salamanders above the towering cattails and thistly flowers like a pro Olympic discus thrower. I flung them into their new sanctuary and waited to hear the splash, so I knew they wouldn’t join their dehydrated raisin friends. Before I let them go, I whispered a goodbye quiet enough so the wind could mask it and my dad and Don wouldn’t hear. I wished them a happy life in their new haven. With each trip, I would look up to see the silhouettes of Don and my dad welded together by the orange porch light. Both of them chuckled at me as I fumbled with the helpless creatures, my bleeding heart nearly tumbled off my sleeve. It didn’t bother me that I was the only one that cared. I tried to work quickly, before any more lives were drained by the sun. I made hasty
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trips back and forth from the fire pit to my designated launch pad. With every armful, the crusty dead salamanders would tumble off the top of the mound and join their friends in the accidental graveyard marked with potato chip tombstones. On my last trip, I wasn’t able to scoop them all up at once, so I had to pick up the survivors individually. I plucked them out of the fire pit and plopped them into my slimy, salamander urine-soaked hands. I accidentally picked up one crusty salamander which made my stomach queasy, like when you bite down on a smooth food and hear a crunch that wasn’t supposed to be there. As soon as I collected the rest of the survivors, I strolled up to the wall of thistle and cattail reeds and tossed them up into the air where they joined the stars for a moment before splashing into the pond. “Whew,” I sighed. “No more crispy salamanders.” “Yeah,” Don’s Kermit voice broke through the silence. “I don’t think those were aquatic salamanders. I’m pretty sure they live underground or under rock.” Upon further research, I found out that they were not aquatic, and they did not have gills. I had just launched fifty salamanders to their watery afterlife. At least they didn’t die crispy.
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Will Wall Jacob Lee Knuth, 26, performing under the pseudonym Will Wall, is not just the typical bright-eyed Eau Claire hopeful, but a layered individual. He is dedicated to his craft and full of thought. The name Will Wall is a riff on the name William Wallace, the titular character and real-life historical figure featured in the 1995 film Braveheart, but more importantly, the name alludes to how he will be the symbolic image of a concrete wall covered in his own lyrical graffiti. A painter uses colors on a canvas, carefully blending hues together. In a song like “Wasted,” Will Wall paints poetry with the fluidity of a stream, moving through beats and bass like glistening morning water over ageless gray stones. Unsurprisingly, Will Wall is a Creative Writing major and an Interdisciplinary Linguistics minor, using his accrued knowledge to the best of his ability. Originally from Sheboygen, the story of Will Wall is that of many musicians and music lovers who are introduced to music as adolescents, then acquire an addiction at the first downbeat. He became enthralled with hip-hop and rap in middle school with the likes of Lil’ Wayne, Eminem, and Kendrick Lamar. Exposed early in life to Iron Maiden and AC/DC by his father, Will Wall grew up to appreciate these early influences and incorporate them to have greater sonic variety to tap into, as seen in the song “Now Know.” Later, bands like Coldplay opened his eyes to the expressive nature of music, the influence of which can be heard on the first half of “Stain” before divulging into a chaos-filled XXXTENTACION beat and harmony. Once he arrived in Eau Claire, Will Wall kept dabbling in and eventually released his own music. Wall also writes poetry under his real name, Jacob Lee Knuth. When asked what his favorite aspect of his music is, Wall says it’s “that feeling of creating and just leaving it all behind you.” Through expressing his musical desires, Wall hopes listeners will find something deep and personal to connect to. Of the songs from APPRECILOVE, Wall explained his favorite song is entitled “Sonder,” which Wall says, “goes all over the place and not— there are slight changes throughout that are a metaphor for structure.” One of Wall’s goals is to infuse a sense of poetry into his lyrics that he feels some traditional rap lacks.
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Currently, Wall’s main focus is preparing for graduation and filling out applications for graduate school. However, he hopes to get back to recording a new EP or LP sometime in 2021 when time permits. In the meantime, all of his music is available on SoundCloud, and he is open to booking for streaming concerts. Wall also has many other singles and projects uploaded aside from his latest EP to check out. One of his biggest influences, XXXTENTACION, is honored on the cover EP X with songs like “Infinity (888)’’ and “I spoke to the devil in miami, he Said everything would be fine.” When asked what advice he’d give to young musicians, Wall shared from his own experience: “just go with what you feel like going with. Emulations are great, but carve out your own voice.” For inquiries, contact Wall at: 94sight@gmail.com To listen to on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/wherewithwill 69
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Simon Paul Arneberg Originally from Chippewa Falls and now based in Eau Claire with a guitar he got as a graduation present, Simon Arneberg has released the first two of his three planned EPs this year: Rooted, which consists of five songs, and Branching Out, consisting of six. Both are grounded firmly in a melancholy folk tradition that will be familiar to listeners old and young alike. Many songs carry a weight similar to that of artists like Andrea von Kampen, but with much more ease and a grounding in soft expressive vocals. The Eau Claire influence of early Bon Iver is not lost on the tracks, which feature vocals and finger-style guitar. However, Arneberg uses his midrange voice with a soft, bellowing sound that allows his music flexibility, expressiveness, and a unique sound. Arneberg wrote the titular song off of Branching Out entitled “This Place” during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on an experience many shared in spring of 2020: having to back up one’s dorm room with a heavy heart and an unsure mind, a mind and heart only a guitar and somber melodies can repair, or at the very least relieve. Other somewhat on-the-nose song titles will delight many with their themes of 2020 life, including “Standing Still” and “Another Summer Day,” reflecting the year’s at-home nature, as well as the efforts to break from monotony that many have enacted. That same monotony was one of the forces that inspired Arneberg. A goal of Arneberg’s is to have lyrics that can connect to audiences’ thoughts, experiences, and feelings, so that they know they are not alone in their very human lives. His personal philosophy is to make something he would want to listen to himself, not to stroke his ego, but so that he can be proud of his work and look forward to constantly improving it. Another noteworthy element is that Arneberg is a long-time piano player, which can be heard on the texturing in the song “Breathe” with vocals similar to that of Ben Folds at his most pensive, but with flourishing, soft piano that one only acquires with age, experience, and thoughtfulness. For inquiries to Simon Paul Arneberg, contact him at: arnebesp2531@uwec.edu To listen to on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/76RcZz6arHNuv3v1zhYL7K
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Editors’ Notes While we’ve always been fortunate to have innovative works filling the pages of our publication, the lead-up to this issue required a different sort of creativity. This semester, we’ve had to rethink our very understanding of NOTA. To keep our community safe, we adapted everything to an online format. Submission committees and voting nights left Centennial and Haas for screens, open reads departed the cozy ambience of The Cabin and local coffee shops for the blue-lit glow of Zoom, and we’ve (temporarily) bid adieu to the thrill of flipping paper pages. But we’re still here, chugging along, still humbled and blown away each day by the caliber of original work we get to share with you all. One thing the pandemic can’t touch, it seems, is the remarkable, tear-tugging, laugh-inducing, goosebumps-drawing creativity of UW-Eau Claire students. Our team of artists developed a design representative of the disorganization and chaotic nature of the current year. This design stems not only from the events of this year but is also closely related to the suggested theme of the issue: how we create and survive amid the chaos of 2020. Our color palette is vibrant and varied, occasionally clashing or visually straining. We have added hints of personalized handwriting to enhance the idea of individuality and uniqueness, and you may notice that our team’s section doesn’t contain photos of us, but more so the spaces that have become us as we have transitioned to life in our homes. In summary, our design is the balance of chaos and order as we grab hold of our new “normal.” We would like to thank our contributors, whose work has invigorated our organization and made this issue possible. We also want to extend our thanks to the Student Senate Finance Commission, and to Jordan Plehal, whose work keeps NOTA running smoothly. Our sincere gratitude also goes to our faculty advisor, B.J. Hollars, whose dedication to and support of NOTA is unwavering, even in the midst of a global pandemic. NOTA wouldn’t be what it is without his championing and guidance. Finally, reader, we are thankful for your support. We couldn’t continue without you! Sincerely,
Angela Hugunin, Editor-in-Chief
Meg Adlington, Art Director
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