After a good day, through the night

This book is funded by the Instructionally Related Activities Grant of California State University, Stanislaus.

California State University, Stanislaus

Penumbra Literary and Art Journal

1 University Cr.

Turlock, CA 95382

Cover design by Liliana Figueroa-Larios

Edited by Autumn Andersen, Essence Saunders, Andrea Wagner, and Jarred White

Copyright © 2023 by Luke Valmadrid

Penumbra Press, 2023.

All Rights Reserved.

Penumbra Press is an extension of Penumbra and Penumbra Online. For more information, see our website at www.penumbraonline.org

The Penumbra Press Selection Process

For the second year in a row, our team has been fortunate enough to receive a plethora of compelling, captivating, and carefully crafted works. Rather than coming to a quick and unanimous decision, we had many exciting contenders for publication. The viability and printability of these submissions cannot be understated. Yet, we could only publish two this year, a decision that spurred many spirited discussions about theme, tone, mood, structure, and imagery. This exciting process is one of the things we enjoy most about Penumbra, and we are thankful to have had such amazing content made available to us. The poets we selected are true stars of their craft and their poems have earned the respect and admiration of our staff. We are delighted to present their works in the second edition of Penumbra Press.

Luke Valmadrid’s poetry centers around themes such as nostalgia, loneliness, and gripping romance, and they come together in a heartbreakingly beautiful manner. The chapbook is full of vivid imagery that captures the experiences of reminiscing on the past, relationship struggles, and the human experience of loving another person. In the author’s words, the work can be read as “a collage of the past.” After a good day, through the night will feel like catching up with an old friend.

In addition to being thorough in our selection, we at Penumbra Press also wanted to be sure to curate a beautiful cover that would convey powerful images and emotions. After considerable time and careful consideration, we selected Liliana Figueroa-Larios, an art student at Stanislaus State, to create Valmadrid’s cover. We felt that the message of the author was highlighted by the artist’s creation. We hope you enjoy Luke Valmadrid’s

After a good day, through the night.

Notes from the Author - 7

[all the prepositions] you - 8

Apiary, aviary - 9

Horns were enough - 10

When you ask how I’m feeling, I wish - 12

Two times - 13

Illusion of choice - 14

Lacking lilac in the palate - 15

After all, our feet touched the water - 16

After the equinox - 17

Standing in the ceiling - 18

In choosing karmic debt - 19

I’m glad you know what I’m going through - 20

The reservoir as a wishing well - 21

Sixty thousand feet over - 22

Found, even in translation - 23

What is after - 24

Honesty, conditional - 25

This too shall pass - 26

Imagine moving on - 27

Winter wasn’t dry enough - 28

Notes from the Author

Content Warning: This chapbook mentions of death and passing.

Inspired Poem Acknowledgments

1.Standing in the ceiling – inspired by the poem “I found the crawlspace roomy” by RE Katz

2.Found, even in translation – inspired by the song “Through the Night” by IU

I would have lost the pictures, if I could, if they didn’t sound like you. Here again, your laugh chimes, hands clap like aural light rays blurring through closed eyes, windows to a once viscous, ever-flaring soul. I did lose the kitchen things, but the wooden spoons would’ve snapped before burning, if they stirred anything up. These days, I watch chemical changes confined to a chrysalis fighting its instincts, doing its darnedest to send a butterfly back to the ground. Atlantis did exist and Atlantis did sink. I’ve recently gotten into deep-sea photography, most of which is done in a boat on the surface, waiting for dead things to come up.

[all the prepositions] you

Apiary, aviary

We used to talk and cultivate honey at the same time, learning of light years and spacetime without going to class, running on run-ons of real love’s contrails, feeding on the nectar of commas and hyphens and whatever conjunctions could keep our ideals off the ground, as if planes, bees, and well-written sentences never had to land, as if living through several dreamy metaphors wouldn’t leave the best parts of me with you very much alive in the present time, in a little place on memory lane.

Horns were enough

Wraithlike-sheathlike black clothes and a pair of devil’s horns. Raw emotion cleaved the mist of alcohol and wasted sweat. Eyes that swallowed the costumed shadows slashed through the pandemonium and gripped me, more of a shearing force than tension; you were trying to tear me apart.

My heart sank until it was low enough for you to step on. The spring in your step masked why your step had a spring, if it was despite, or because of the extra weight from an escorting military officer, whose arm was continually discouraged by your hand.

Equivocating, niceties, and then—

are you okay

This second time, you held my hand firmly. desperately.

cradling bones more than anything, as if you could see the future and knew. coruscant glass eyes. a syrup voice suddenly water. the voice you used when you held my hand the first time.

please talk to me please come outside my tacit pride.

I watched you walk into the kitchen light which exposed your horns as synthetic. There was no devil, no demon, not even a villain. Just a person, who looks a lot like my best friend, who grips the side of their shirt when they blame themself.

When

that you felt invited inside, that I could call a strawberry moon that draws scended sand over the line, that you could know that jumping in with two feet is jumping in with ten toes, that I only know peonies from rosettes from roses from mistakes that I’ve made, mistakes I blamed for specters and déjà vu echoes until asking nostalgia if it got off on glorification or crossed fingers.

you ask how I’m feeling, I wish

Two times

Once, we held forgotten hands like two snakes in the winter in the back of a burrow, thumbs unopposed to reassuring strokes or lengthy soliloquies, or promises of someday, “ .”

The other time you grabbed mine so I wouldn’t step into nonexistent oncoming traffic, and I heard brass rings and dvořák romance on almost broken strings, and I saw two eyes on their knees pleading with a pedestal that just couldn’t be me. I hugged you under that streetlamp, looked down, and saw one shadow.

Illusion of choice

I fragment midflight, as the heights upon which we withered pass: a mountain, a minute, the speed making light of a red-eyed flight and the lovesickness contracted from rising to an occluded occasion. The peaks in the window form a jagged mirror, exposing my kaleidoscopic feelings for their splatter painting origins in clumsy rotation, the torque just enough to separate a hypothetical heart from its idiomatic sleeve. Your ghost could still stop me from leaving, it could even land the plane— but so could we.

Lacking lilac in the palate

Inside the folds of the napkin responsible, lay earnest, beautiful moments, pearls among crumbs of diamonds, rougher than the idiom might imply, yet still infinitely edible. But the attendance at this picnic tells us living in the past is really living off. At some point, the feast will be digested or fester. Souffle scraps are not meant to be saccharine, but to be looked upon rather bitterly as the taste fades away, as the sweet tooth only sharpens.

I lost it. But the day before, you palmed the sand as it slipped through hands rebraiding the mooring ropes they held in pictures. Absent ships loomed down by the docks; we built a grainy castle from memory, from back when you were taller than me. The moats came later and sank the castles into the sea, after I realized I’d been taller for a while. Always, we chose the moments where we knew how high the tide came. That day, we chose the moments differently. That day, was the only time I told someone I loved them after the fact.

After all, our feet touched the water

After the equinox

Your words chilled the air into crisp sheets, asking me to fold the origami swans that you deserved more than anyone, with flashes of farewells folded across creases designed to look all too familiar through apple eyes looking down cider horizons like flowers blooming in the fall, a miracle not exempt from dissonant dreams trying to tell stories time would never tell, tales of two ill-fated travelers who crossed the stars themselves.

Standing in the ceiling

Our regrets still pull me out of the surf bubbling without hooks, like your echoed laugh and its full-time job as a motivational speaker without self-interest, its reckless enthusiasm swaddling even my most forgone dreams in holey blankets and hallmark cards, but even if we didn’t get well soon, I remember that one day when your sick voice tuned lower and I heard my leading tones; the resulting piece, for solo piano (for two hands, two voices), a different song than the one you sang when you asked me to walk home with you in front of our friends, which I remember when I see your name on my phone when you can’t help it every few months.

All the time we spent in the absence of confessions coalesces into a ladder to a wormhole to an apartment attic, one I can only visit when wondering if we still think the same things, in the same order, all while preparing to forget we ever did.

In choosing karmic debt

My curled hands splinter the outside of long-rotted dendral intentions, still uncalloused in every meaning, bleeding with needless profusion while loud voices with distant faces call for compromise. Their rationale rains softly, choosing a slow rust over a quick acid burn

when neither is helpful. Breaking bread alone leads to dry mouth, the way viewing a single constellation cannot constitute stargazing. The person I love knew more about the black hole at the center of it all than suburban deer and rabbits know all planted objects to be food. And so can you blame me if I’m feeling a little bit unhinged, if I cannot watch long movies, if I can’t sleep until the sun burns the stars out of the sky?

So you’ve also seen the person you love pass you by on the crosswalk at midnight and then stop when you stopped; you recall that you both cried, that you both smelled terrible, but you crushed into each other because the weight of the world wasn’t anyone’s fault, something you both realized right away, but felt guilty for, and then, in that moment, you both promised to never forget what was real, and then a few weeks later you neuroticized a text asking you to come over as a slight comparing you to their friends and everything fell apart even as you both remembered every single, perfect, beautiful thing, and you still think about it and how you can’t know if they do and you’re happy meeting new people every day, until you get home and realize you only care about a single person who no longer exists.

I’m glad you know what I’m going through

The reservoir as a wishing well

I can assure you, crushed hopes do not die. They sink to the bottom of a great memory lake, festering until the bottom roils during storms, and the lake becomes the kind of pond that people think they made, the kind fit for trashing because nothing beautiful ever lived there anyway. My regret skip easily across the surface, but my hopes lovingly laden with your dreams, sink with little splash. Even though small moments flicker like fireworks, streetlamp confessions, jumping into puddles, they fade while apologizing as our most earnest wishes fall deeper down where hues fall to shades, and shades fall to diary entries that remind me that we knew all too well what could have been.

Sixty thousand feet over

Whenever I fall out of the sky, I smile, knowing I’m coming home. A crash landing into a crash pad of memories where you cry, laugh, and hold me like you know where it’s all headed. Like lovers alive, we put each other first to the point our feet tangle, diving like rain drops through gossamer, with great ease, knowing that the sun will come some time. When I wake up, I think of all the places and foods and grocery stores that we never went to together. But in the ether, we don’t do any of that. We always go for a walk that starts at the arch where I tried to sneak up on you that one day in the fall, and our footprints leave rainbow patterns, and gradually and suddenly we’re pacing above the clouds, moving up instead of moving on, joining the horizon instead of surging towards it. There, we are already where we want to be.

Found, even in translation

My unsung ballads, now IU elegies, echo through the night, so that I am truly just like words scribbled on sand I’ve never seen, meaningless without the lingering waves, or the melody that aired happily, sillily together, a soulmate soliloquy shrouded so deeply in a steeped heart, weight born from sunder, soaked in time, spread across flaking paper with inked dates that cannot age with me.

What is after

Bonds die, only for the promises to thrive. Direction-locked dreams rise off-course, skewing toward an outdated version of you and your predilections. How unfair it is to burden a living thing with dead wishes.

Honesty, conditional

If those photos exist, then it’s nighttime and the shade blurs the colors and faces. If the details are lost, then I’m forced to rely on memories, where we bled red threads, where demons apologized and became angels again, where we knew better, and still chose anyway. If it wasn’t diamonds or vodka that fell from your eyes, maybe I would be a person who tosses and turns even with all the answers.

This too shall pass

When the concrete shimmers on a cool day, I slow just a little. Your mirage responds to thirst just a little slower, tendrils of memories reaching out from a time when I knew good days from bad ones, when good old days passed their knowledge through the generations. Your face flickers mid-laugh at a joke I hadn’t finished telling; no need for explanation. You knew I loved you. Those moments pass, like this one, like you did, like we always meant to. I no longer stop to watch slow deaths, and you are no longer dying one.

Imagine moving on

I hide our memories in the sun, disguised in fiery threat from plain sight. Reality comes often, sweating in shades, powerless in the blazing face of a natural fantasy. I spin the rays around your smile, chameleons around another chameleon, blending by being, breaking my heart by staying— yet after terrible days, it’s holding onto things that could have been that holds me together, even though they bring me close to someone who I can only call by name in the dark, alone.

Winter wasn’t dry enough

Arid air on cracked skin, cracked despite hydrous effort, etchin lines into red cheeks on a vanquished face feigning warmth, sinking behind serrate bones that couldn’t help cutting.

and then suddenly, there you were

Breeze-filled diaphragm, chrysalises danced, wings traced, inscribing laughter, forcing lungs to expel roughly, cheeks rose, blood donated water, cliffs into riversides, lips curved into love-flushed deltas, joyfully shaping laughter into the syllables of your name.

Luke enjoys biking, qualitative research, IU’s prolific body of work, and playing video games with faraway friends. Is also an MS1 at UCSD. Hopes to make some music soon. One time.

Author Acknowledgements

Thank you to...

The Aurora Journal, for the surrealism poetry workshops that taught me ways to share things missing from my stories. My former writing teachers: Larry Edgerton, Carol Hudson, Rain Wilson, and Meghan O’Gieblyn. Those who read my writing at some point and made me feel supported: Maddie, Connor, Isaac, Tiffany, Natalie, and Sam.