NOTA Spring 2023

Olivia

Hannah Polzin,

Katelyn Zastrow

Megan Miller

Claire Anderson

Haylee

Quinn Reinhard

Sarah

Emily Popp

Madison

Laura

Delia Brandel

Olivia Rathsack

Mitchell Kallenbach

Scout McKnight

Devin Valentine

Eliot

Emily

Kaden

Josh

Quinn

Dear reader,

In your hands, you hold the Spring 2023 issue of None of the Above. This book features exceptional literature, art, and music created by UW-Eau Claire students belonging to all academic disciplines. We are honored to continue NOTA’s decadeslong tradition of publishing students. We are especially thrilled to share this issue due to the number of submissions we could accept. Last semester, we accepted more work than usual. This time, due to the suddenly and shockingly low cost of paper, we accepted even more, a fact we could not be happier about. This semester’s issue is loosely based on artwork by Mark Rothko and other similar abstract artists, making this book its own work of art.

As always, many thanks are due. To NOTA’s staff, whose labor of love makes the metaphorical magazine world go round. To the Student Senate Finance Commission, for their continued financial support. To everyone who submitted to this issue, for your vulnerability and trust in sharing your work with us. To Professor BJ Hollars, Dr. Dorothy Chan, and Mykola Haleta for their encouragement and guidance as our faculty advisors.

An extra special thanks goes to BJ, since this is his last semester as NOTA’s faculty advisor after many years. Anyone who has spoken to BJ for even the briefest moment can see his enthusiasm and readiness to help his students, and we have experienced that personally on countless occasions. We cannot say how much we appreciate everything he has done for us and NOTA over the years.

Finally, reader, thank you for supporting the arts on our campus.

We hope you enjoy,

Emma Friend — Editor-in-Chief

Bethany Mennecke Art Director

I hear the clug-clugging of my psyche,

Feel the bursting of tubes in my temple; This excess mind-steam must find release.

The feelings, we find, are pumped in through the rig. But who knows from where your supply comes and goes?

Following emotive pipes leads to fear.

Love is found by gazing past the window-pains, But the reflection blocks me from looking through.

At least it lets me see who is to blame.

This head is too big; Are their hearts too small?

My brain explodes.

Wanderlust McKensey Koran

I wanted to convey the feeling of the desire to see and experience everything that this world offers, but feeling stuck in place and unable to move. Everything is at the tip of my fingers, yet I feel like I am just watching time pass by without me. In reality, the only thing holding me back is myself.

Olivia Rathsack

The Comfort of the Wall

Olivia passed over like off-brand Pop Tarts at Walmart aisle overflowing with forgotten flavors dates long past overdue utilized as a last resort

an afterthought

Olivia like faded wallpaper chipped paint and cracks in the walls hidden beneath a worn façade the water-stained daffodils being peeled back piece by piece revealing the Class-A wallflower Olivia constantly being drowned out by confident extroverts fire dwindling upon their arrival where high functioning anxiety manifests into perfectionistic habits isolating in their intensity turning conversations in her head until the topic has long since passed feeling alone in a room full of people

Succumbing to the pull of the wall the silent observer Olivia unable to break free from patterned mannerisms of a life in the shadows

burning red like the ambulance

Olivia

roaring sirens stretchers clanking

Clear Clear

resuscitating the liquid fire of a heart long subdued

Olivia passions ablaze in violent rays

taking

up space

demanding to be more than the dot of an i and the cross of a t

Olivia accepting the introverted fate claiming the wall where a faded daffodil is being restored.

Hannah Polzin, Christopher Gale, and Theron Christianson Lies

Katelyn Zastrow

The Obscurities of Life

A drizzly March morning, where the reminder that the rebirth of warmth is here. A tote bag with my favorite song lyrics, providing a conversation starter that lets my shy demeanor off the hook. A pastel-colored planner, maintaining the oddly strict level of organization I adhere to on a daily basis. Three books by my bedside: one classic, one contemporary, one poetry collection, all still unread. An 8-ounce bottle of Purell, to suppress my intense fear of illness. A cerulean stack of Post-It notes, to keep track of the small anecdotes that cross my mind. A worn, hardcover journal, gifted by my aunt, holding every story or poem that I’ve ever written. A navy blue handkerchief from my dad that kept the tears at bay whenever I was missing home.

A deck of Uno cards, bringing out a competitiveness I didn’t know I was capable of. A light blue record player, where the only vinyls I spin consist of Taylor Swift and Greta Van Fleet. A slice of cherry cheesecake, homemade, and crafted at the hands of my mom. A buffalo plaid fleece blanket, where I sleep away the stress and winter blues. A frayed, cream-colored anklet, causing me to reminisce about a Florida trip with the best of friends. Rosettes and krumkake, Norwegian treats I’m proud to have learned to make. A tiny, gold angel pin, gained after cleaning out my great-grandmother’s house upon her passing, and a memory of her goodwill. A handwritten letter answering ten “interview” questions, from my other great-grandmother. Each thoughtful response shows the love she has always held for me, love she still carries, even on days when she can’t remember who I am.

The Sunday phone call with my family, reassuring me that I’ll never be out of the loop. The typed letters and text messages my grandma sends me, wishing me well as she lets me in on all of the current family news. It is a form of gossip only a grandmother could get away with. The Kwik Trip mac and cheese my roommate picks up for me, a

small gratitude often found in a friendship spanning years. A new acquaintance, and their weekly visit during my work shift; an act that is furthering along a promising bond. The simplicity of kindness. The ease at which I see those I love, and those I’ve never met, hold a door open, flash a smile, and say a sweet word to others. It’s what keeps me going. The sunrise and the sunset, and how I find myself grateful to wake up and fall asleep to another twenty-four hour period. The blinding and slanting of rays evokes a reminder that each day is a crucial piece of the complex, fleeting, and momentary puzzle that defines life.

Drizzly March mornings; Sunday phone calls; Slices of cherry cheesecake; tote bags with song lyrics; an angel pin; a handwritten letter; a frayed anklet; a bottle of Purell; a handkerchief; old friends; new friends; the simplest acts of kindness; sunrises and sunsets. It is the tiny details, small features, and strange aspects. It is the few, thrilling minutes of exhilaration, gained by a short-lived experience. It is the scarce, all-consuming moments of sadness that will be swept away and forgotten in time. Most of all, it is the obscurities of life that make it grand, rewarding, and worth living.

Personal vs. Public Megan Miller

Claire Anderson

An Ode to Red Hair

The color of the sun as it kisses the horizon.

It is soft lips touching the surface of our home with brilliant hues.

It is not the purples and pinks of spring, but like the colors of October.

The softness of fresh dew on cut grass, or the tickle of a horse's muzzle against your cheek.

It is the simplicity that is a floating cloud, the complexity that is a red rose.

It is uniquely gorgeous in the way it shimmers and shines.

Like a diamond in the rough, pressed until it gleams.

We are not the girls in the paintings of old, nor on the covers of magazines.

We are not long tan models, with skin bronzed to perfection. Rather, we are the first snow of the year. We are the wings of a dove.

It has been a part of me, and I, a part of it.

I lock eyes with strangers like me, and find harmony, for their eyes are filled with understanding and we both find peace. There’s simple hope in our hearts, we carry it day by day.

It makes us stand a little taller.

In my youth, I would wish that it would just be gone, but with my peers who understand, I begin to embrace.

So throw your sticks, and throw your stones, and even throw your words.

I am not afraid of you or all the silly names.

For you do not see me, the way I see myself.

A mess of gorgeous chaos.

There’s a fire in our hearts and a passion in our souls.

The embers keep us going and we never grow cold.

Those embers ignite sparks of beautiful reds and golds.

Like the colors of October.

Haylee Schreiber

Self Portrait

This drawing is red chalk on paper and features a self-portrait and eighteen background flowers. I have made a tradition to create a yearly self-portrait to represent my view of my life and use flowers to symbolize which year I am on. I find that flowers are a beautiful symbol of life and despite how I feel about my life in the moment, there will always be beauty in it. My self-portrait contains a red monochromatic color scheme to represent adventure and the unknown. Eighteen is seen as the start of adulthood and often the start of new unknown adventures, and I wanted to showcase this part of my life in my drawing. I am proud of how far I have come on my art journey, and I am excited to continue to showcase the beauty of life through my self-portraits.

Jack Orta

Dissolution

I told you I was leaving though I’m not sure what I meant by it. Maybe I’ll find where the bugs go when it rains or the urinal in Paris where my great uncle said he met Paul Newman even if he was lying.

The train station smells of brine and smoke and whatever’s rotting in the tide. The child poking at the carcass with a stick doesn’t understand that he’s the only expression of landlocked love this brown trout will encounter before melting back into its sea.

I decide

this isn’t my final stop.

The train tracks run through mud and shipyards and cladded apartments where there are no candles burning in the windows. No silent, dancing invitations. I run through cups of burnt coffee and mints and B-sides that I have convinced myself have purpose.

The woman next to me is asleep holding precious in her lap a honeydew though they can only get so ripe here. There will be no juice to run down her arms no sun to illuminate its sweetness but she’ll savor it all the same.

I pretend to sleep when the conductor passes through. I never bought a ticket.

This piece came about as an assignment where I was to take a painting and abstract its composition without compromising the structure of the piece and while maintaining a similar color palette. I choose Compartment C Car, 1938 by Edward Hopper, as the title of this piece Something Hopped On A Train is in reference to the base composition. I was surprised with how malleable the composition became as I continued to combine and separate different elements of the piece whether they were brushstrokes or representational aspects. Through a series of adding creating and changing how space would work in this suggested space and what was overtaking it, the original composition evolved into this.

Sarah Shedivy

Asian Eyes

White skin

Asian eyes

what I am on the inside isn’t what I look like on the outside.

I’m not white and I’m not Asian. You cannot define me based only on one description. I hate not knowing who I am.

“What are you?”

“Are you Native American?”

“Your siblings look more Asian than you.”

“You must take after your dad.”

“Wait, you’re Asian?”

“You must wonder about your real family in Korea.”

I hate not knowing who I am but I do know

I don’t understand how people can ask questions about my ethnicity with such a straight face.

my real family lives in Iowa thanks for asking. I have no room in my heart for those who gave my mom up.

And no I won’t ask her if she ever wants to visit when we can drive three hours to see Grandma and Papa.

Second out of six, they did it out of their love of God so how could I ever go against Christianity? It brought my mom off the steps of the orphanage where she was left with nothing but tears in her eyes.

I don’t even speak Korean or know their cultures, because it’s theirs, not mine. Not mine because it’s not my mother’s. Never a word spoken about it, sometimes I even forget she’s adopted in the first place.

I’m just a white kid in a half Asian body that feels too tight, like a second skin I have to wear every day even though I’ve never known who I’m supposed to be.

I hate not knowing who I am.

Emily Popp Witness

If nothing really is happening and nobody is there to see it, is time really passing at all?

Madison Magnani

The Power of Music

Jaryd Seever Exodus

Lent is the season of spiritual preparation between Ash Wednesday and Easter. This is a season of fasting, repentance and selfdenial. On Ash Wednesday, Christians can choose to have our foreheads marked with ashes in the sign of the cross. When receiving the ashes, the pastor will often say “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The act of receiving ashes symbolizes our mortality as well as our need for ongoing repentance. The season of lent is intentional, and it allows for a deeper reflection on the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

In my artwork, you’ll notice a burning cross. This is a subtle reference to Exodus 19:18 when the lord descended on Mount Sinai in the form of fire. Instead of a mountain on fire, you’ll notice a black cross which looks like the ashes we receive on our foreheads.

Laura Carew

What is First Love?

and

Little Women crumbl i n g from years of neglect, never opened by the hands that hold it, yellowed pages pleading for attention, to be fingered by curious hands?

if not

o

t

a

g

s t a c c a t o, c r es c e n d o and d e c r e s c e n d o, weathered hands on piano keys as small fingers wait their turn to play a new melody, student learning from teacher?

e

if not l

if not head in lap or head on chest, a body too big to rest where it used to, where arms and legs, fingers and toes, eyes like hers were made, a tiny life designed in miraculous fashion?

forgotten?

if not Japanese Cherry Blossom perfume, a pink shimmer on skin that reimagines home, where the bathroom is purple and a drawer for playing in sits empty and

leave this plane before seeing his face take shape in grandchildren that would forever know him only in memory?

if not chestnuts roasting on an open fire , melody passed from a father destined to

two,

if not a light blue, 2002 minivan with leather seats that watched infants in car seats become dancers and athletes, sending one,

to become adults in eighteen short years?

if not hair so brown it looks black, shining with a curtain of gray hair that came from years of mischief commanded by three little heads that shared the same desire to push buttons and raise hell for just a little longer, please?

three of them

if not goodnight texts and

call me when you need me and nothing you say or do will ever make me love you less and I will protect you with my life’s blood and you are my life’s greatest achievement?

my darling momma, what is first love if no t you?

Delia Brandel

I love you

The Fossilization of the Box

The claustrophobia starts within me surrounding mind body soul suffocating thoughts of escape and relief without hesitation. The box I have forced myself into is little more than a cave placed hundreds of miles below the surface tucked away from humanity from anything alive–stalactite jutting from every surface waiting to puncture stones cold to the touch icy air seeping through every inch of exposed skin.

Shallow breaths and villainous thoughts ricochet off the jagged rocks piercing my mind inch by treacherous inch until I am reduced to bones nothing more than an unknown fossil. Dirt filling every open crevice ready to be excavated to live the rest of my days in open air, but the troglobites invade–pulling the particles holding me up farther and farther down until all I know is the blackness of the underbelly of the cave. The folds of the box being super glued into place–forever sealing my fossils away.

Mitchell Kallenbach

A Deer

A deer doesn’t have the tact to keep itself upright

This deer I must shoot

This deer is a dangerous predator

A coward for how he hides

A fool for how he runs

He is here to take my life

I am here to save it

This deer has a decision

Though not the way he sees it

He must cower and kill me

I aim the rifle

I shoot

I’m hit

Scout McKnight

Latent Anger

Devin Valentine

Shared Connections

If You are Reading This, Call the Number Written on the Back. I Think My Boyfriend Is Trying to Kill Me.

Please help.

I don’t know who will see this or if you will find it in time, but I need you to help me. My boyfriend is going crazy. This isn’t just a one-time thing, it started, like, several months ago. This is a live transcript of my voice, so I hope I’m not going too fast, but I need you to help me.

I’m a freshman this year and I scheduled a class with his help because we’re in the same major. But he’s gotten a little distant lately. It’s different from when we met in my senior year of high school. He had this, like, otherworldly quality to him, you know? Like something special. Okay I know everyone says stuff like that but I’m not just saying things, I mean, like, I mean this stuff. It wasn’t just the dimples and the way his hands hung out of his pockets, but the way he’d always make a joke every time he messed up. He always knew he was kind of awkward. That was what I liked, though. He seemed, like, like a human I guess, like he just was himself. Maybe he wasn’t trying so constantly to be like the perfect person. I know I tend to struggle with that.

But we went through the same orientation group even, it was kind of like an impossible coincidence. We went to a party, and he kissed me after we got stoned, is that the right word? I think I mean drunk. Anyways, we’re in this world politics class and I can’t get over how hot he is in class. When the professor calls on him saying “Evan,” he says back “speaking,” and then he always makes his answer sound more complicated than it needs to be. Sometimes I’ve wondered whether he has been trying to filibuster a political science class if that is even possible.

But he’s been off since he went on… like this field trip and he—I think he said it was for a psych class? Anyways he stopped drinking, which I thought was weird, but he just said he was turning over a new leaf. I mean at least he didn’t chastise me for doing it. I mean I’m eighteen after all, but it’s a bit different when he’s never at the parties now. We were still together at that point, but it was weird because it was like he flipped from an extrovert to an introvert. I don’t mind introverts but the switch was like the second odd thing after the drinking thing.

Then he got this new job. He said he worked out in a supply lot or something. I mean I didn’t get a clear idea of what he was doing, but he tried to explain a little bit. The problem was that he never mentioned what it was he was doing. He said, “loading

trucks,” and I said, “what trucks?” and he said “trucks” and I thought that wasn’t very helpful. But he would leave at, like, four in the afternoon and he wouldn’t get back until early in the morning. I only knew because sometimes we’d sleep together, we were close enough for that, though I suppose it is possible that he was moving a bit too fast, I’m not an expert on relationships exactly.

Anyways, he was always out late. He got more distant. He would never drink. I didn’t really think anything of it at first. Okay, that’s not true. I thought it was suspicious as all get out. But my friends were the ones that called attention to it the most because Kayla used to say “you should follow him to work sometime, see what he does.” I told her, “oh he’s probably just stressed out trying to make money. If he doesn’t want to talk about work, that’s his thing. He never said he was chock full of money anyway.” And I mean he wasn’t. I had that right at least.

But then he started skipping classes. At first, I was worried he got hooked on drugs or something, but then I asked him if he was ok, and he gave me his usual flashy smile. “Right as rain.” What a weird freaking thing to say. He never acts like that. I just couldn’t understand what the hell was up with him. I found out that Evan was getting an A in the class. That was strange because he wasn’t always there. And I guess he wasn’t always gone, but when he was, he didn’t talk to me as much, and I spotted him on his phone more often than not.

I paid him a visit to his dorm once.

He often came over to my apartment in the past and we’d have long conversations about school, friends, classes, music, movies: the normal stuff. But I was never sure whether he was interested. He always seemed to deliver though, until now I had thought he actually cared about those moments. But when I visited his dorm, it was oddly different. His room, which was usually on the cute side of a little messy, was completely and utterly ordered. It was neat and tidy, organized, and efficient. He never seemed so formal in his life. I don’t know why he was so tactful suddenly, but I also went looking in his drawers while he left to hit the vending machine and I found a knife in his drawer. Now that might have been nothing, but it was a kitchen knife, which I thought was really weird, and also, he’s not really a hunter or anything like that, but he used to have a pet lizard which was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t plan on asking where it went. At the time, I supposed it just died.

Now I know what you might be thinking. “He’s cheating on you.” That’s exactly what I thought, but I was hesitant to talk to him about it. Of course, I didn’t want him to hate me for thinking that way. I’m starting to wonder why I was the idiot who didn’t press him about previous relationships. He’d only said they hadn’t ended well for him. That’s what I get for dating a guy named Evander Vile. But I eventually confronted him, and he said, “I’m not cheating on you, don’t worry, I’m just moving forward.” What does that mean? I eventually texted him, because it felt like we hardly talked as much as we used to. We didn’t even text as much. I told him that he needed to shape up or come clean about what exactly was up because something was definitely wrong with him. He said not to worry. I said I’d break up with him if he didn’t tell me. He said, “fine, but you know I’m always here for you.” Which felt really weird given that he was not always there for me. I eventually did dump him over a text, which I admit was not the best decision looking back, but I didn’t know how else to reach him.

Then one night my friends and I were playing Exploding Kittens when I saw him looking in through the kitchen window. It was ten-thirty, and it was Thursday. He works on Thursdays. But that wasn’t the weirdest part. When I pointed him out, he left and I went outside to catch up. But he was just gone. Like he was stalking me. I made it a point to talk about it at first with him, but when I looked for him throughout the next day, I couldn’t find him anywhere. I have had trouble finding him since then. Until the day he almost hit me as he barreled through the Phillips Parking Lot. I never knew if he was trying to kill me or not, but he would’ve killed me if I hadn’t leapt out of the way.

Three days later, he disappeared. He hasn’t been at work, and he wasn’t in his classes. No one has seen him. He left behind no note, and I don’t have his parents’ contact information. Then an anonymous person on every one of my social media accounts started spamming me with messages detailing the possible ways that they could kill me. Now I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I know it’s him who is doing this. I know it. If you know where he is, or if you have seen him, please let me know or call the police. If you have seen him, I need to know where he is. I need to know. Go to the fifth floor of McIntyre. I’ll leave something there for you. Better yet, if you find Evander, send him there for me.

Emily Popp

Nightlight

For children, nightlights are the things in the dark that lead us to safety. For adults, nightlights take us to others.

Kaden Ofstad beats me

I am my eyes.

They’ve dried through tears, through electric screens, through cold winds stream.

They’ve reddened. Fragile skin, hyperpigmentation— eczema. Eucerin, Vaseline. Salvation.

They’ve fluttered at snow.

Watched the world go, and go and go… Through wonder and anguish, they’ve seen it all.

My eyes are children.

They’ve seen my legs grow, hair grow, Changes. Growth. From child to now.

Yet my eyes haven’t grown…

They’ve just been there.

They roll with me, crinkle and cringe. They widen in amazement, fear of life and people I meet.

Their eyes…

Their eyes haven’t grown, They’ve seen the world go by— two eyes— they contain a life. Blink.

A life still there. I’m still here. I’ve met many eyes.

Pretty, kind, hostile, contemptuous fragile, loving.

Blue, my favorite.

I close mine, and imagine, all those eyes and lives, People and their eyes, people and their lives.

On Eyes

Josh Holness

He was once a boy, small and frail and with skin so thin that all things cut through him. It was as though it were paper and the world the sharpest of knives when a simple nail file would have done the job just right. The world did not want just right; it wanted absolute perfection, true decimation, to tear this boy apart until he was nothing more than open skin and puddles of blood and a pile of bones.

But right now, laying on the sofa with some sitcom rerun, he was a boy eating ice cream messily. He shoved the spoonfuls as though they were his last until his mother reached down, took the tub, and scooped her own spoons. He complained, having been no more than seven, maybe eight—the days were blurring and somewhere down the line, he and his mother had both forgotten. It was only the two of them, it would always be the two of them. Until it wasn’t. But that day was not today—this day, they sat on the sofa, the wind blowing through the crack of the window in the studio apartment. It was a thin crack, but it made all the difference. The crack was not only a crack but a doorway through which every horrible icey, wretched thing could move through.

He shivered, the boy. He shivered violently while he ate another spoonful. His mother took the ice cream from him, watching as his nose turned red and his cheeks puffed out.

She said, “No more. You’re freezing.” He shook his head.

“I am not,” he croaked, settling into the cushions. His mother returned, wrapping him in a heavy fur blanket and securing him in her arms. She pulled him in close and hummed. It was this gentleness that he would always remember. The same gentleness that swaddled him so tightly and securely that he remembered the feeling later in his life not as something familiar, but as a haunting feeling that left his skin covered in goosebumps.

His mother died three weeks later, having caught a cold she could not afford to medicate. Having become riddled with infection from a dirty needle, having wrapped her son in the last bit of warmth she could spare. He would have frozen if it weren’t for their neighbors and the smell that came off of her. The smell of death and the sorrow of leaving a child in the world alone. Cold.

Quinn Reinhard

There Were Knives in the Apples

Lexi Sheridan

Hawai’i

My Mother’s Hips

In the kitchen, my beautiful mother

Shaves fat from a hefty, red steak.

– a gift from my Grandmother. She harpingly laments about her disgusted aversion with the slab–gushing watery red from the pores.

“I’ve never liked it”

– the gift she was stuck with. My father gnaws on the flesh, sucking the herbs from the skin. Telling my mother how lovely she looks. as she slices her piece and scrapes it onto my plate.

Ryan Lindert

A Wizard’s Dinner Party

“Oh good, you’re here! Come in, come in! Oh, don’t worry about your boots, you can leave them on. By the heavens those look spectacular! Are they new? Yes? Where’d you get them? I’ve been dying to get myself a new pair for ages. The ones I have are so old, nearly as old as I am! I jest of course. Dragon leather ages beautifully, but even that can get worn after a few centuries. But enough, you’ve only just arrived. How about I give you the tour? Come along.

“As you may have guessed, this is the foyer. Notice the marble and the gold? That was all sourced directly from Naxos around 3000 years ago by my great-grandfather. Amazing, right? He was quite the collector. Not that he himself collected it of course. See the gentlemen leaning on the pillar over there? Yes, the ones with the wings. That is Gabriel and Raphael. Yes, as in the angels. It’s a long story, but the angels and I go way back. Unfortunately, Michael was busy tonight, and Uriel isn’t much of a party guy, but the two of them are always down for a game of pickup basketball if you’re available. There’s a hoop out back of course, but you can explore that way later.

“Now unfortunately, for everyone’s safety, the upper floors are off limits for tonight. I had a few guests disappear somewhere between the 90th and 94th floors a couple years ago, and had to restrict the party to only the main level. Nonetheless, we have plenty of space here for everyone to enjoy. Come along now, this way.

“Here we have the library, or rather the one on the main floor. Careful! Watch your head! The books and scrolls can fly and sort themselves, but are quite temperamental if you get in their way. By my last tally, there are some one and a half million books split between my libraries. Rookie numbers, I know. But frankly, I’m not as much of a reader as my father was. I prefer people, much more interesting. Or creatures. Or plants. Essentially anything that can talk is better than a book. Except for talking books, they are the worst!

“Oh why hello Sardok, how are you doing tonight? This is Prince Sardrok, son of King Sardrok of the Appalachian Dwarven Clan. They have ruled beneath those mountains since before the Ice Age! The actual Ice Age, not the movie. Not sure which one though. Prince Sardrok here is quite the reader, and, if rumor is true, met quite the famous author a couple decades ago and may have been the inspiration behind his book, King of the Rings. What? Oh, yes, Lord of the Rings, silly me. Sardok here claims that he wasn’t, but the similarities are uncanny! Well, we must be on our way. Have a good night Sardrok!

“Right, now, our next stop is the dining room, one of my favorites! This table was gifted to me by a close friend who happened to be quite the talented carpenter before he was killed. Ah, you see the ogre over there? The one talking with the centaur? That is Worob, but he prefers William. He is a huge improv buff, and his British accent isn’t half bad either. If you’re feeling daring, try to jump in one of his impromptu scenes, they’re always so much fun! Although, if you do find time to chat with him, don’t mention Shrek, I don’t think he knows what a movie is.

“Through these doors here is the kitchen. We won’t spend much time here, as you can see all of my fine chefs are hard at work preparing tonight’s feast. It will be absolutely spectacular! 500 dishes! Can you believe it? I haven’t hosted a dinner party this spectacular since the fall of Rome! Ah, those were the days. I must admit, most of the chefs here are rather bland in personality. The only one that I truly suggest you make time for is Bartiox. He went to school with me back when we were both wee little wizards. He was a whiz with potions back in the day, pun intended of course. Nowadays he has put potion making behind him, but can mix up the best Long Island Iced Tea that you will ever have!

“And here is our final stop, or at least as far as I can take you, the sitting room. As much as I would love to stay longer, the next guest will be arriving very shortly, and if I don’t greet them at the door they may accidentally find themselves turned inside out, or spit out into a different dimension, both of which I can imagine would be of minor inconvenience. But rest assured, I leave you in good hands!

“Over there by the fireplace is Kythaela. She’s an elf from New Zealand, funnily enough, and teaches at Monash University in Australia. She’s always one for a great conversation. She is a bit of a nature nut though, so be prepared for her rants about ‘global warming’ or ‘pollution’ or whatever human nonsense she’s believing these days. Otherwise there’s Zaryn over there floating above the piano. He’s a genie! No wishes unfortunately. I’m afraid that stereotype has caused him quite the issues in the past, but he does have some truly humorous tales.

“I must now take my leave. Feel free to explore the rest of the house, but remember to stay on this floor. Have fun, drink freely, but don’t try to steal anything, I’d hate for you to die like that. Ciao!”

Megan Miller

Returning to a Home I’ve Never Been

Scout McKnight

Little Man

What is First Love?

First love is Packers games and squeeze cheese, hand warmers used for icicle toes, stuffed in boots between layers of thick wool socks from home.

First love is a card game in the dim light at a dinner table, the instructions lost in a cacophony of wait, say it again? and no, that’s not right, and fine, why don’t you explain it then?

You don’t really like first love when it’s math homework at the dinner table while young fingers plunk, plunk, at piano keys in the background, but frustration is a funny song when it’s directed at numbers and worksheets.

First love is an eighteen-egg breakfast with cheese that could feed a village, but really, it’s for five hungry mouths and come get it while it’s hot, why don’t you?

It’s those old comedies that Mom doesn’t really like but you can’t go a year without watching them because it doesn’t feel like a trip back home without did you eat paint chips as a kid, Tommy? and so you’re telling me there’s a chance!

First love is Dinty Moore stew by the fire, mosquito bites forming on pink sun-kissed skin despite plenty of sunscreen lathered on in daylight.

First love is a trip up north to a house made with love that holds memories of a family of eight that grew to twenty-one in years that flew by.

First love is learning to drive in an elementary school parking lot, tense instructions inspiring tight grips on the steering wheel despite exuding confidence.

First love is a father’s blue eyes crinkling with a smile and an I’m proud of you, kid, and you’re more capable than you know. A father’s love can’t quite be replicated.

Macey Majewski

On Orange

I’ve been thinking about the color orange. I noticed the vibrancy of it more intensely around me, at a higher frequency. Various algorithms crossing different platforms lead me down roads circling the themes of love and how they intertwine with oranges. Through the simple imagery of peeling an orange to split with loved ones, various writers have captured the quiet emotional intimacy of sharing food as an act of love. It’s been echoed as well in the ideas of remembering how people like their orange juice, or in the ways people describe their favorite color. I’ve always had a fascination for these metaphors that layer and appear to fall apart when applied with nuance. These ideas lingered for weeks before I knew I had to create something that helped communicate the enormity of this metaphor and what it meant to me. I had hoped to share it with you.

Emily Rutzinski

Like a Panting Dog

I bite my cheek whenever I remember you. I’ve pavloved myself into tasting blood whenever I think of you, and thoughts of you run viciously, intentionally through and within every daily interaction to the point that water tastes metallic bread is soaked before it touches my tongue. You can fill my lungs and hold me till I choke and you’re not even in the same room.

Knowing you have command over me is as close as I will let you get because whenever I taste my blood at least I know I am strong enough to draw it, and even if it is my own, it is something I can never let you control because while my thoughts run rampant to your every move, I know to you I am simply dried blood from a scraped knee you don’t remember getting and you can scratch away unscathed.

Jack Orta

Blank Face

Mara Bernstein

Cancer

You taught me walking and you made me laugh you were my best friend, without you I feel halved. We watched TV lying on your old little sofa We danced together, one of the best memories so far.

I remember how you always were so prying when we unwrapped our Christmas presents you stood there carefully eyeing what we got and if we liked it.

When we were in the court drawing with chalk on the concrete you came across portraying an Easter Bunny making our drawings complete.

Some days when the weather allowed it, you sat on your bench in our yard when we came back from school as if you were our guard who ensures that we get home safe.

The hats you wore The handkerchiefs you used are still in those closets in memory of you, unused.

In one of our last moments together your hand caressed my cheek you said we're best friends, you were a fighter but already so weak. I felt that our time ends but I kept this in my heart as an unforgettable memory before life ripped us apart.

Opa

Opa

Skulls of Life

Haylee Schrieber

Liam

On the fourth day the teacher walks up the drive, the next suitor in a parade of empty condolences. Her face tells the same pain as the rest; the lilies she hands your mother rest over the lack of words she can’t find. Before she leaves, she gestures down the road: the bluffs beyond the cul-de-sac used to be a buffalo run, she says, prior to the era of the human effect, and for a second

you feel the paleolithic winds on your back, see the tumbling precipice before you, smell the holy bison carcass in the virgin prairie grass. No cabins, no surburbs, no cul-de-sacs will lay upon this grave for another epoch. The killing is in the name of hunger, the barest gesture of survival, death in the natural order, violence begetting the dawn of civilization.

You watch out the window as the teacher rolls past the ditch, past the horizon, and turn back to the still house, and somewhere in the chasming quiet all the buffalo fall, fall, fall.

McKensey Koran

Too Much of a Good Thing

This piece is meant to reflect on over-indulgence and how even the best of things should be taken with moderation, lest it take over your life. Even the things we love and enjoy most can become too much for us to handle, no matter how tame or controllable it may seem. Moderation is key.

Eliot Gannon

The Domestic Missile Crisis

Mr. Johnson was a hunter.

He was deeply Christian at heart and believed in his Second Amendment rights to be protected, and to him, that meant owning a hunting rifle and a Sig Sauer M-17 handgun. He decided to go down to the shooting range. He’d done this many times before, so he supposed he could displease his wife for a little longer. Especially when he had nothing better to do before Sunday when he would pray to Jesus for forgiveness as he skipped church to watch the Packers game.

He decided that he was a cool guy. After all, he owned a gun. He was like that guy from Die Hard. He wanted it to be hard for him to die, so he figured he would probably shoot the other guy before they had a chance to send him to the feet of his Heavenly Father. He often gave himself little lectures, promising that he would not fall upon the feet of God and bear the indignity of a pat on the back and a harsh judgment: “Maybe next time aim a little lower.” No, he wouldn’t go down so easily. And he was, as he might say “mighty proud” of his ability to intimidate little children and make the Festival cashier take an uncomfortable step back, but he had never met his match until the day he met Mr. Bronson.

Mr. Bronson was a gun fanatic. He collected all sorts of pistols in his time. But the only pistol he didn’t have was a military-grade Sig Sauer. So when he stepped onto the shooting range and glanced over at Mr. Johnson holding his shiny metal zinger, the man found himself in a maddening kind of awe, something some might call love, for that shiny piece of metal. It was like a nice new belt buckle from Scheels. Shiny and flashy, it caught his attention and made him fixate on it.

As he stepped up to the adjacent target, priming to fire, as all good shooters do at the same time for double levels of deafening deliberation, he smiled and waved over to Mr. Johnson. “That’s a nice-looking thing you got there,” said Mr. Bronson. “It’s a real zinger.”

“A zinger?” Mr. Johnson had never heard the term used in that way.

“Yeah, it’s a really nice gun you got. You have a lot of them?” Bronson asked.

Mr. Johnson frowned. He had been thinking about the bag of potato chips he was planning to buy, so he was caught off guard by this odd man in a quirky black suit and sunglasses, matching his words with the flash of a quick toothy smile that would have been cooler if he didn’t have gum in his mouth.

Mr. Johnson noticed that his Packers jersey was longer than the hem of his jacket. Well, shoot. He looked back up at the weird guy. Did this dude think he was some kind of big shot? What was he doing with sunglasses on? It was February and they were indoors. Mr. Johnson sized up the other fella.

Not wanting to sound like he didn’t know guns, which he obviously did, he decided to tell a little white lie and ask Jesus for forgiveness later. “Course I do. I got plenty.”

“You got them with you?”

“No I don’t have them with me,” said Mr. Johnson. “Then how do I know you’ve got them?”

“Oh I’ve got them,” said Mr. Johnson. “I got loads of pistols. I got pistols all up in there.”

“I think that’s a little load of rabbit pebbles,” said Mr. Bronson.

“Oh yeah?” said Mr. Johnson. “I’m a man of God, you think I’d lie to you?”

They drove to their respective houses which were coincidentally in the same area. Mr. Bronson, who was quite new to town, happened to move into the house next door. Mr. Johnson gave him a snide look of curt satisfaction as he pulled into his own driveway first and made sure to lock his car with his clicker as loudly as possible, sending a musical fart in Bronson’s direction.

“You know we don’t have to go to the shooting range,” said Mr. Bronson. “You can just show me right here.”

Mr. Johnson nodded. He entered his house crossing himself, then cursed himself because that was a Catholic thing and he was not a Catholic, then he felt guilty because he had used a swear word. As a result, he felt like a Catholic because he was guilty. He exited the back entrance and hoofed it to the nearest gun shop where he tried his best to find another Sig Sauer pistol. To his delight, they had an entire penthouse in stock. He bought one for super cheap, avoided a background check so that he could scoot over to his house, walk inside the back entrance, and out the front to show it to Mr. Bronson, who had waited outside yawning for about two hours.

“Well I’ll be fubbernucked,” said Mr. Bronson. “That’s the gun.”

Mr. Bronson, not wanting to be one-upped, decided to compile his personal stockpile. He had a colt pistol, seven magnums, an AR-15, ten Glocks, five Berettas, a Smith and Wesson, and an archaic sniper rifle.

“What do you think of these beauties?” he asked the next day.

Mr. Johnson couldn’t lie; it was against the ten commandments. “Well I have to say, that’s mighty fine.” He realized at that moment that he felt insecure with this man holding so many guns in front of him.

“Bet you can’t top my stock,” said Mr. Johnson.

“Oh don’t you pull that trick where you ran several blocks over to the gun store,” said Mr. Bronson. “That’s the oldest trick in the book pal.”

Mr. Johnson reddened. “Give me five days,” he said.

“Ready and waiting,” Mr. Bronson said with a grin.

Mr. Johnson came back six days later. He had decided to expand his cognitive definition of guns. He brought rifles of all sizes and shapes, and he knew at this point that he had the bigger arsenal. This Mr. Bronson guy could go back to chewing his 5 Gum or whatever the heck he did on Super Bowl Sunday. Well, Mr. Bronson didn’t go to church, that was for sure.

Across the street, Mr. Bronson saw Mr. Johnson approach. In his arms was a bundle of rifles. “Well cockatoo-tie,” Bronson said. And after those fateful words, he swore that he would make certain that Mr. Johnson could never be a bigger threat to anyone than he was. The next day he came home, mounted turrets in his lawn, and held a bazooka over his shoulder, as well as a belt of grenades around his waist like several belt buckles.

“Ha!” he shouted. “You just bought a bunch of rifles. I’m the OG gangster here,” said Mr. Bronson. “I bet you saw those things online. Well I’ve been surfing the internet since you were wrapped in your sanctified pull-ups. I’ve played hundreds of video games and studied millions of different Fortnite and Vallorant techniques. Yeah, they called me a gamer, but the cool kids liked my sunglasses, and instead of Bronson, they called me Bro-son, ‘cuz I was a bro and a son, two things unique about me. The mister part came after I was broke and alone for a while and thought I needed it to give me self-validation.”

Mr. Johnson nodded. “Sounds like you were very lazy for a gun owner.”

“Yeah,” said Mr. Bronson. “But I figured if Call of Duty could do it, so could I, so I started modifying Nerf guns, and eventually I stepped up to real guns. Had a few accidents in my time. Mainly the time I told my clients that they were buying a Nerf gun so that I could sell an Uzi for less money but greater sentimental value.”

Mr. Johnson nodded again. “I have respect for you, but respectfully, I am better than you.”

The next day, Mr. Johnson arrived home in a tank. He popped the hood and said, “Cowabunga.”

“Oh you wanna go?” asked Mr. Bronson. The next day he installed a barricade and integrated an arsenal of surface-to-air-missiles into his garage door.

“Yeah, I wanna go,” said Mr. Johnson. He held up two AR-15s. “I’ve got the power of God on my side.” The next day he successfully developed a nuclear warhead and planted it at the base of his driveway, angled just right, so it would hit Mr. Bronson’s house.

“Fine,” said Mr. Bronson. He cleared the neighborhood and flattened the landscape to make room for a military base where he installed three nuclear warheads and an open runway for his airplanes. Then the two men aimed their guns and missiles and weapons at one another and sat there, staring each other dead in the eyes for centuries.

Hannah Polzin

Corporate Satan

Danish Translation Theory

I'm thinking of the man in the ditch as the kids in the bike cab silently muse, their mother guiding them over a bump with something in danish: "obs, obs, obs." it contributes to an essay i want to write, about how they're all at peace, how they're not.

(the back tires fishtail; i'm alerted to the road ahead.)

> how early do you think about mourning? you brush the sleeves of your coat alongside the metal railing just to feel if it's there; and the boxcar restaurant we visit in the evening post-wake is shrouded in a fermenting haze.

the old man taking my order raises his eyebrow ― bushy hairs inquiring across languages and afterwards i walk to Scherfig's turtle, finding the dead grass and grannåle parents have instructed their children to leave for him, but i'm only aware of the dead man underneath my feet, the flodheste, the danish adults who plan their running route through cemeteries.

in freezing winds along the canal i wish for something more to hold onto other than danish characters i'll soon leave behind. i wait and listen for bones to loosen ― to alert me to the road ahead: yet i'm stuck on the lives rendered immobile by direct translation and the nine hour flight that separates here from there.

Delia Brandel

To fall in love with a girl

Your hand is covering my mouth

Your parents are asleep and I can't stop the laughter

From pushing itself out of my lips

And tumbling into the air around us

I'm sweating, it's summertime the window is open and the night is slick with humidity

My bug bites itch and my sunburn itches and my heart itches for you

Your hair is longer than mine, less frizzy and softer

I love running my hands through it as you talk to our friends

Braiding pieces as you answer for both of us

I like people knowing how close we can be

How close I can get to you

How comfortable our intimacy is “You know how women are, sisterhood, best friends, girl code and all that”

Not quite.

My body clings to yours and I love you in the way i’ve been taught to love a man and yet nothing has ever felt more right than when I can feel your heart beating near mine

It’s hard to breathe and I wonder if this is the reason social suicide is worth it for open loving and I wonder how anyone could ever think this feeling was wrong because if the horrible, angry men from my small hometown could feel the way I do about a woman I think they’d understand that choosing not to love her would be worse than any life I lead because of it

Kaden Ofstad

L'uomo Queer Vitruviaro

This zine highlights both the beautiful aspects and the hardships that exist in LGBTQ+ culture. I felt that there are too many issues in this community that aren't discussed or even acknowledged, most of which are hateful. They are swept under the rug just so our nation can call itself perfect and loving.

Phoebe Harmon

Petals

In a frenzied madness, a provoked woman pulls the petals–from a lily in a clay pot.

She finds herself, watering the flower without petals–only out of pity for pulling them off.

Never neglecting to nurture, for the potential the petals may regrow–lest she finds one more beautiful. Until then she tucks to bed, And dreams of daffodils–

Pretty to pluck, but not to preen.

Megan Miller

Turning a Blind Eye (The Swing, Fragonard)

Sarah Shedivy

A Happy Poem

A friend once said they only write poems when they’re sad. I laughed and agreed until I realized it’s true, so I’m going to prove her wrong. I’ll write about school and how I love to learn and how thankful I am that I can afford college, but not about how terrified I was when my sisters’ high school got an active shooter call, crying in class because if something happened, I’m two hours too far away. That’s not happy, but what about nature and how pretty the trees look in the fall or the wooden forts built in the woods behind my house every summer, but I can’t talk about the ones burning across the globe or the ones being cut down to compensate for our growing population who don’t believe climate change is real. How about I write about being a woman and how amazing it is that I get to bring life into this world and the love I have for my body—Roe v. Wade

has been overturned. Wait, what? No, that can’t be right, how did this happen? At least Minnesota kept their doors open but what about all my friends in Wisconsin who don’t have the same rights I do? Well, let me try writing about America. I’ll use metaphors to show off the pride I have in my country, except I have no pride in the country that doesn’t care about my sisters because guns have more rights than them, or the trees that were paved into roads, or about having the right to my own body. I want to write a happy poem, but how can I when all the muses are dead?

Delia Brandel

I built you a home in my heart

Thomas DeLapp

Let There Be Light

Most of my Tuesdays are not spent hallucinating alone at 7 pm. But sometimes fate grabs you by the shoulders and pushes you to do things you normally wouldn’t. I am in college, after all. So anyways, there I was, hallucinating.

Ambient music began to fall into my ears and an ethereal white light rippled across my face, ghostly in the darkness. The light flickered faster and faster, and I plummeted down a spiral of rainbow fractals, flashing colors, and spinning spheres.

Still dazed afterward, I sloppily recorded my deep thoughts in a nearby notebook: “I saw three main sections of the symphony, ecstatic roses and flower petals zooming in to envelop me in dusty pink. I saw a lion and a rat.” No, I don’t know what that means either.

The best part about this Tuesday night trip — and you might not believe this — no drugs were involved. I was completely sober.

Earlier that afternoon, I had come across an app claiming to guide users into a state somewhere between meditation, hypnosis, and hallucination — simply from the flickering of your phone flashlight. Obviously, I was skeptical. But when offered “altered consciousness” and “subconscious exploration,” who wouldn’t at least download a free app and give it a try?

It’s called Lumenate, and it’s created by a Bristol start-up “on a mission to make impactful subconscious exploration more accessible than ever before.” During the app’s testing phase less than three years ago, Rosamund Pike — of Gone Girl fame — tried Lumenate, loved it, and became Creative Director of the company. If Amy Dunne herself (terrifying, but oh so smart) endorsed the trippy light app, I had to try it too.

Maybe this was the secret to infinite creative potential. No longer would I need to procrastinate, searching for ideas for stories to write, and no more scouring the squishy curves of my brain for inspiration, nay nay nay. Inspiration was to come from my divine subconscious. Galaxy-Brain Thomas would reign supreme.

The app popped open and welcomed me. First, it read sternly, don’t use this app if you have epilepsy or are prone to seizures. I’m good. After several more pages of warnings and waivers, I was delivered to my first session: “Discover Lumenate.”

As instructed by the gentle British voice in my noise-canceling headphones, I-turned the lights off and closed my eyes. Not dark enough, I decided, throwing a blanket over my head for good measure. Finally, I flipped my phone so that the flashlight was facing me. The soft, nice voice guided me on phone placement and started me on breathing exercises. In through the nose, out through the mouth. I must’ve looked so dumb.

“You are now ready to experience the light...” the voice said, ominously.-----“We encourage you to relax into it and go with the flow. Observe the thoughts and

feelings as they emerge but try to avoid forcing the direction. The visual elements you are about to experience are unique to your mind, so explore any themes, colors, shapes, or other imagery, softly questioning what they may signify.”

Then everything pretty much exploded. My eyelids twitched, resisting the brightness against them but soon settled. I fell into a black hole. The session was 10-minutes long, but it could’ve been anywhere from 30 seconds to an hour, as far as I could tell. The music was curated to match the flashing of the light; ebbing, flowing, rising and falling, swelling with brightness, and dimming with the dark. The soundtrack would ring joyfully, and I’d be enveloped in a curtain of white, feeling real sadness when the darker shadows began to creep back in. Finally, the music slowed, and the light became dimmer and dimmer until both were utterly still.

“Welcome to Lumenate,” the voice said confidently, as though I was being ushered into something wonderful and secret. I felt a little like jelly.

I also felt insane — why in the world did the flashy light app actually work? Was this all just placebo, or had I just seen the fabric of the universe?

As it turns out, it’s science. Probably. I excitedly asked a friend studying neuroscience to read over the app’s “The Science” tab and try it out for herself. Megan came back from her session, looked at me with what was probably fear, and said “well, it’s not not legit.” Good enough for me.

As far as I understand it, Lumenate modernizes sensory entrainment: when a stimulus like a flashing light causes our neurons to fire. Humans have been doing this forever — since someone first started seeing things when they stared at the sun for too long. In the 20th century, we began figuring out how to use this effect.

Stroboscopic hallucinations, caused by a flashing light, are most effective at the alpha rhythm — when the flickering is between 8 and 12 hz. Our brain’s occipital lobe produces alpha brain waves: they’re what neurologist Hans Berger found when he first invented the EEG. By using an alpha wave strobe, the occipital lobe and the thalamus are put out of sync. As both are involved with producing our brain’s visuals, things get weird.

Stroboscopic manipulation finally made its way out of the dusty corners of science labs in 1958, when Beat writers William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin convinced a friend, mathematician Ian Somerville, to help make a device for stroboscopic hallucinations on command. Thus, the dreammachine was created. Essentially a lightbulb surrounded by spinning shutters, the Beats quickly incorporated the dreammachine into their Beat activities — psychedelics and poetry and whatnot. The dreammachine flickered its way into the groovy, psychedelic culture of the 60s. Even Allen Ginsberg was a user — and although I was chided by a friend that “just because the Beatniks are great artists doesn’t mean they’re good role models,” there’s just something tantalizing about a flashing light. The moths have known this for years.

Specular Jack Orta

In the time since I got the app a few months ago, I’ve done 59 sessions — nearly thirteen hours of me being a doofus and flashing an iPhone light at myself. On the advice of a member of the Lumenate subreddit (I do serious research here), I cut a translucent green ping-pong ball in half, squeezed the halves under my eyebrows, and kept my eyes open for a 15-minute “Intense Exploration” session. I’ve probably never looked more deranged. The pupil-less ping pong eyes bulged out of my face like a horrifying humanMuppet hybrid, my face strobed in and out of darkness, and I held a staring contest with the void.

I feel just a little bit crazy for even trying the app, let alone indulging in it for thirteen hours. Maybe it’s because of its association with psychedelics, even though I’m not doing them. There’s something taboo about hallucination, even in the service of meditation. It feels wrong, inappropriate, like I’m accessing something I shouldn’t be. Some part of me that is better remaining hidden. That’s likely the subconscious of it all, although so far, I haven’t seen a ton that’s very contraband. Just lions and rats. I haven’t yet been divinely inspired by my subconscious during a session. No creative revelations, epiphanies, or visions of god have occurred. It’s a bit of a bummer. How convenient would it be to generate new ideas at the click of a button?

Writers, the angsty bunch that we are, love to wax about ideas, to pontificate on deadlines, and demand perfection from our cute little keyboards. Our *inspiration*, we say, comes from the heavens, or lovers, or desperation, or alcohol — or the subconscious, opened up by a flashing light. But why do we actually write? Is it only to see triumphant specters emerge from our brains and sink victoriously into paper? I hope not.

Maybe sometimes writing needs to suck. An easy solution for inspiration is boring. Maybe we need to be stuck in ruts of creativity, frustrated by the poem, story, essay, or research paper that just refuses to wiggle out. I think we spend so much time trying to push stories out of our bodies that we forget about our bodies themselves.

I used the app for thirteen hours, not because of fantastical visions or deep connections to my past life (see the Lumenate Facebook group where members earnestly discuss using the light to access their Spirit Bodies), but because it’s an opportunity to just shut up and be quiet for a bit. To not think.

In the beginning, I jokingly said that maybe I’d find my true self through the ‘flashy light app.’ The mystery to why I am the way I am. Revelations from childhood that would bypass any need for therapy. Enlightenment. Total Zen. The ultimate muse.

Infinite productivity.

None of that was there. Deadlines are still scary. I haven’t transformed into a Beatnik; poetry doesn’t spill forth from my brain like a river. There’s nothing in the light that I didn’t already know.

Cy Matousek

Boys Night Out

In this mock-editorial shoot, the overly dramatic and creative style of high fashion photography is contrasted ironically with the theme of creative burnout.

Delia Brandel

Autumn in the Midwest

A Study in Alpine Meteorology

“Did you see it snowed last night on Indian Peaks?”

It is summer and the sun sticks like tree sap you just can’t sweat away: acrid, unshakeable. Children languish on the grass, crimson arms bearing the witness of late July’s desolations. But you—

oh white-bannered towers, rising cloud-realm, what other winters have you known? do the eyes of untold wilderness circle your stony peaks? Will you step down and join our wildflower world, or does the breath of summer die at your feral and incorrigible feet?

As August spreads its final phoenix wings we find refuge in valley fields and watch you shrug off the trappings of the aspens, distant, indifferent.

“Huh, I guess it did.”

There is much to be said for continuing through periods of rapid change while being haunted by past versions of oneself, as well as memories made; however, there is more that goes unsaid. This series follows a ghostly figure reflecting on the world around them, constantly lingering everywhere until viewers finding them once more in almost the same place they started. Being haunted is not always a terrible thing, there is the golden nostalgia to be cherished in the smallest of moments, wether by being reminded of specific memories by the world around, or simply pondering as a moment of the past calls out to ones mind. This lingering, yearning feeling that follows and is carried in this figure, is balanced by the movement portrayed in these different scenes through travel and the passage of time. This repetition pushes the idea that life always carries on, in our own time.

Wesley Hazelberg

the pa inting. the pa thetic call for help. the pa lease be my friend

i’m sorry this thing is boring

i know it isn’t any art collector’s first choice a bluish-gray blob is pa robably all they can see. but i pa romise that isn’t all that is there.

if you look closer, then you can feel the depth. i swear it is fun, and interesting, so pa lease. but nobody looks closer.

pa erhaps my pa inting is just that ugly. so. so. so. ug ly.

Music

Zach Kerckhove

Zach Kerckhove doesn’t mind his computer science studies, but music is his true passion, and he has no doubt that it will pan out for him. “I wanna make it big, I wanna be a superstar in Hollywood ... and I don’t have any doubt that it will [happen].”

To ensure this is the case, he has dedicated himself to music, saying that it is “pretty much-all [he does] all day,” and is considering several paths to get his music into the world, including sending demos to labels and the recently-popular DIY internet route.

But along with big ambitions, Kerckhove have fears for what fame and notoriety could bring: a lack of musical freedom, meddling labels, and his music no longer having the same quality. For these reasons, Kerckhove enjoys how doing every part of the creation process himself allows for ultimate artistic freedom. Despite his fears, it’s clear as he speaks that his passion for music outweighs his trepidations.

Another place his passion shows is for his musical idols. When asked who influences him,-he had a handy list of five ready to go: Paul McCartney, Kurt Cobain, Kanye West (“not recently, though,” he quips), Eminem, and Dr. Dre. His admiration for some of these artists dates back years, when he listened to Nirvana and classic rock in the car with his parents and his sister listened to Eminem. He also finds inspiration in the passion of others, and they don’t need to be musicians.

When inspiration strikes, Kerckhove often begins a song with just one element, such as the base line or drums, and builds a song from there. He doesn’t like to pin his music down to any one style, saying that in one album, there could be any number of genres.

At the time of writing, Zach Kerckhove is still working on polishing his own music. When-it is ready, it can be found online under his name.

Eliot Gannon

A creative writer with short stories also featured in this issue, Eliot Gannon finds inspiration for music in his writing. “A lot of the time, melodies attach themselves to these emotions I feel … to a story in my head.” For him, a song often starts with wondering what the main theme would be for one of his characters.

In fact, that is how the song he submitted to NOTA came to be. A professor prompted him to make a song inspired by a short story, and the rest is history.

Gannon has loved music for as long as he can remember, struggling to come up with a firm answer for the question of his first memory of loving music. He remarks that his parents were the kind of people who played classical music for him as a kid. In elementary and middle school, Gannon learned piano and violin respectively. He remembers creating melodies in his head as far back as elementary school, even getting in trouble with teachers for humming in class due to how much he thought about music.

Eventually, he found free online music creation platforms like Flat and Soundtrap. With a plethora of free instruments and a welcoming user interface, Gannon could experiment with composing and turn the melodies in his head into a finished product.

Among his musical influences, a wide variety of artists and genres make the list. The classical music of his childhood, yes, but contemporary stars as well like Coldplay and Imagine Dragons. He admired the latter for their musical variety over the years. He also inspired by smaller blues artists for their off-the-cuff musical qualities, which he attempts to incorporate into his own work.

Eliot Gannon’s music can be found on YouTube under the name Witness.

Meet the Team

Alexia Folkman

Somerset Seymer

Kristiana Engel

Bethany Mennecke

Oliva Stehr

Graphic Designer

Graphic Designer

Graphic Designer

Art Director

Graphic Designer

Claire Bradley

Mckenzie Minter

Alex Scheppke

Maisie Beagan

Beth Stein

Dr. Dorothy Chan

Emma Friend

Mykola Haleta

Poetry Editor Prose Editor

Finance Manager Poetry Assistant

Prose Assistant Co-Advisor

Editor in Chief Art Advisor

funding

University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Student Senate & Finance Commission

printed with

UW-Eau Claire Printing Services address

NOTA

Centennial Hall 4102

University of Wisconsin Eau-Claire Eau Claire, WI 54702-4004 submissions and contact

NOTA@uwec.edu

donate

https://connect.uwec.edu/donate?fid=O%2bs0%2fSg5rm0%3d&fdesc=R6mwgYCg8%2 fma%2btI5cb6ScjVGXL9hpT95bAslAz2vUEQ%3d

social media

Facebook @uwecNOTA

Instagram @uwecnota

TikTok @uwecnota

Literary Selection Committee

Declan Melchoir

Katelyn Zastrow

Eliot Gannon

John Straub