Pornstar Martini Volume II

Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?

Dear Reader,

There are few things that could have prepared me for the pure joy Pornstar Martini has brought over the past few months. Since creating this magazine, I’ve been in absolute awe of how our writers, artists, and creators become so free, so courageous in their ability to express their deepest selves, which was exactly my vision for this little literary project. To all the wonderful editors and contributors with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working—thank you, thank you, thank you. Your excitement and dedication to this community makes it a truly special place to be.

Our Editorial Team had such a blast creating our first publication so we couldn’t wait to get started on the next. Volume I was a testament to camp, to exuberant pleasure and sapphic bliss. I wanted it to feel like disco fever on the page. In planning for Volume II, I began to explore the idea that to this beauty exists equal pain. I wanted to dig deeper and ultimately ask “what happens when the party’s over?” Poison was initially a vehicle to explore influence, malevolence, and desire. It’s an emotional thread tied to winter, but it also reflects on the world around us.

At Pornstar Martini, we hold the immense privilege of being able to observe, to have the time, space, and resources to make sense of our circumstances. A creative place that aims to keep all safe is no longer one in the absence of advocacy and mutual action. I would like to take the opportunity to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza. If you can, please donate, protest, call your representatives, and stay vocal to push for liberation. As we develop what this magazine is, we will be providing more resources and action-items for social justice in our community.

There is a lot of poison in this world. Ancient lore tells us that to use poison is to play with power; to create and destroy and alter. Now, I like to think that we can harness and reclaim as well.

In these pages you’ll find lovers and liars, wounds and scars, strength and treachery. Each poison brings its own symptoms, and I encourage you to feel them all. But in the end, there’s hope, an antidote, and even a little venom. In short, these pieces are a love letter to our will to survive. I hope you find as much healing in reading Volume II as I did in creating it.

With Literary Love,

Harriet Taylor Editor In Chief

Poison 1:

Atropa belladonna

Kill time: Within hours.

Symptoms:

Dilated pupils, loss of balance, headaches, slurred speech, hallucinations, delirium, and convulsions.

Most famous use:

It is said that Roman Empress Livia Drusilla used Atropa belladonna to murder her husband, Emperor Augustus, in AD 29.

Words by Holly B. McCauley

you’ve always felt more like persephone than venus so the third time you catch the eyes of the girl sat across from you on the train you taste pomegranates and your best friend’s citrus scented shampoo and herbal cigarettes outside of a bar with five dollar margs and jesus christ do you wish you lived at the same stop as her if only to spend the next few moments in an elevator to street level baptized in her perfume because twenty two years has taught you that sin is more innocent than the christians led you to believe and they were wrong about a lot of things but maybe they were right that humans were made in god’s image and you’ve never known if that’s a good thing so you spend your commute thinking about reincarnation and purgatory and if the priest who dipped you in holy water at three months old really will save you in the end or if heaven’s gate was right and suicide was our last chance at rapture even though the thought of their matching nikes under funeral shrouds makes you sick but through it all you wait for spring to return you to the land of the living because damn if the pomegranate seeds stuck in your teeth weren’t laced just like when your roommate got drugged at a bar and the paramedics didn’t believe you when you told them through terrified tears that no you didn’t see anyone drop something in her drink but you can tell when someone has been roofied for christ’s sake and you wonder if women can still be diagnosed with hysteria but maybe not or it would be in your file already so you hold your phone to have something to do with your hands but it ran out of battery a couple of hours ago so you stare at the ground and count how many days are left until the equinox until you run out of fingers and the train comes to a halt as the girl looks up again and when she walks to the door at a stop that isn’t yours she reminds you just a little of diana’s bowstring pulled taut and dripping ichor, like she knows how to kill god and make it look accidental.

Inside the Walls

Words by Réka Nyitrai

Sugar is a substitute for love.

In days long gone, people would gather around the fireplace. Now we all sit before the TV, eating bagged popcorn and cursing.

A man once advised me to learn to forgive; it’s the only way to move forward, he said. He was sitting naked on a couch, grinding his teeth.

If only I could break away. If only I could invent an after to disguise my corpse.

If only I could be a tree, a bee, a chair, a cat… Anything other than a sister, wife, or mother.

The seed of the man who just climbed from the cross—it is immured in me.

Nightingales sing inside the walls

It’s been a week since you slipped deadly nightshade into my tea. Charisma of a cult leader, Style of a salesman.

Flashbacks and withdrawals from a night I loved. Intoxicated kisses in my kitchen, Sordid copulation in my bedroom.

In the morning light, you looked even better. Resting my script on your shoulder, I read while you slept. Absinthe-like peace.

Before I left, I wrote you a note and kissed your cheek, actions I never do in these situations.

I hope you kept the note, I hope you felt the kiss.

Over the week, I savored slow drips of the nightshade. Our witty rapport, haughty humor, intellectual intercourse, but then you turned off the tap.

I scratch my skin, fiending for more of your ambrosia, but I will never let you see me sweat.

We both get compliments at the bar as we move around each other with not-so-secretive surveilling eyes.

When the forces that be finally push us together there’s almost relief, but we don’t go home together, and something in my bones tells me we both slept alone.

I cried as I craved.

Addicted to your deadly nightshade, and it’s killing me so.

13

deadly nightshade

Words by Emma Neu

Poison 2:

Cyanide

kill time:

Within minutes.

Symptoms:

Nausea, confusion, loss of consciousness, difficulty breathing, seizures, and cardiac arrest.

Most famous use:

In 1978, all but two of 909 individuals died by cyanide poisoning in the cultish mass murder/ suicide at Jonestown.

sacrament/guilt (sestina)

Words by Laura Wencel

Dressed in white, her tears of marble, the Virgin Mary is my mother. She tells me that if I would just pray more often her life would be easier, that men wouldn’t sin looking at me or otherwise, so she gave me my first Bible when I came home wasted in 11th grade. I heard her say: Christ, Why do you give me the nails to hammer her to the cross?

but I could never stay put so I crossed through Eden with shorter hair, avoiding virgins, to kiss a girl and confess “I’m the reason why Christ hates women.” I found her in sunlight, not in prayer, in the paper cuts I got from shutting the Bible, in the salt and the sweet of committing soft sins

I have always fantasized about, still calling myself a sinner. So, I nailed her heart and chest to the cross, and signed my name there. Does it say in the Bible if sex with a woman still makes you a virgin? Her open hands pressed against mine, in prayer, bells tolling, heartbeat thickening. Is moaning Jesus, fuckblasphemy if we are the only ones to hear? I was christened while crying, tarnished baby birthed by a sinning mother who spent her life on her knees, praying that when death finally came, the crossroads would be gentle. How do you measure up to the Virgin Mother, who always enjoyed sex and never had it? Does a Bible

on the nightstand absolve you of climbing the walls of Babel naked? What does it say that I look for Christ in every man? Tall, dark-hearted, handsome long-haired virgin but knows what he’s doing (if it isn’t sinful I have to make it worthwhile). My body, stretched across the red sea so others can cross over me and still they pray

that I don’t drown and remain. They clasp their hands in prayer but cross their fingers behind the covers of the Bible, hiding dreams of life divorced from ash and a death on the cross, drunk on red wine, stuffing fat bellies with bone-white Eucharist, pointing at Judas’ soiled feet. At least I’m honest in my sinning, I’ve accepted the metal taste in my mouth, the Virgin

hanging on the cross above, his hands nailed open in prayer as I beat my chest, Virgin Mother, over your bleeding Bible, crying for Jesus Christ and my own slithering into sin.

Confession

Words by Maya Gardner

“You know you’re not funny, right?”

You were lying on the bed, arms behind your head, legs crossed. The position of victory you always took after I sucked your dick. You had been eyeing me as I dressed, a routine. Something about me putting clothes on always made you feel powerful. I was cleaning up your mess.

I never knew how to react when you tried to start fights. I could brush it off, but you’d find a deeper wound to stick your fingers into. I could fight back, but you’d tell me I was being irrational. There was no way I was going to win this fight. So instead, I laughed.

“What?”

“You’re not funny.”

There was this inextinguishable fire behind your eyes. I had seen it the first night we met. Not the flame of a fireplace on a cold winter night but the flame of a slash burn, the flame of the stove I slammed my hand against as a kid. This unavoidable pain I was always drawn back to. I stared back, smiling, trying to figure out if I really wanted to stick my hand in.

I laughed again.

“I’m not joking.”

“Okay, well, sorry. I just don’t know how to react to something like that.”

“It’s an insult.”

“It’s a bad one.”

“Why?”

“Because we both know I’m funny. I mean, you laugh at my jokes.” You cackled at this— an inside joke I’d been left out of. “What?”

You rose from the bed, stalking over slowly before putting your hands on my hips. Face inches from mine. This was a position that I knew was intended to be romantic, that could be romantic. Intimate. Instead I slowed my breathing—fight, flight, freeze, I never knew what was more appropriate for you. If I fought, you’d fight back. If I ran, you’d catch me. So I froze, hoping my stillness would make you lose interest. Instead, you pressed your face closer.

“Tell me a joke,” you smiled—in some world this was seductive.

“No,” I smiled back. Smiles pose less questions than frowns.

“Tell me a joke.”

“I can’t just come up w—” My protest was interrupted as you let go, falling back, cackling.

Your laughter grew as you stared at me, louder and louder before your face fell flat, silence cloaking the room. The fire was gone, replaced instead with something darker. Not a muscle in your face moved as you pressed towards me again.

“That’s why I laugh at your jokes,” you hissed. You giggled, stopping abruptly once more, an encore performance. “It’s a pity laugh, love. You gotta get better at spotting them, or someone’ll take advantage of you.”

Your face went from cool to warm as you held my chin, “I can help you learn those things, huh?” I smiled up at you. At least you could help me.

You pushed my chin away and threw on your robe, walking out of the room, “What do you want to make for breakfast?”

At least you could help me.

I don’t know what it was that attracted me to you. You weren’t attractive in any conventional sense but had this effervescent charm that drew people to you like flies. Your face could mold

into any shape. You knew how to time every look, every mouth movement to melt people—especially girls—in your hands. It wasn’t until months in that I realized your faces were never quite right.

Your eyes couldn’t sell it. They remained cold, reptilian, no matter what emotion you were portraying.

That wasn’t completely true. Some nights you would have these fits—usually when I would suggest you had hurt me in some type of way. You’d look at me, guilty, bereft, then break down, collapse— crying and hiding your face. Your eyes portrayed a type of panic I had only ever seen in animals being slaughtered. Inevitably, I’d comfort you.

The first time you hit me I held you for an hour as you cried. I coaxed you through it, told you you had done nothing wrong.

Sometimes I wish I had hit you back instead.

These episodes ended as abruptly as they came on. You’d cry, explain how hard you’re trying, how you’d rather kill yourself than hurt me. All the while your hands would creep to my thigh. Once I apologized for bringing it up in the first place, you’d snap your head up, showing a tear had never fallen, and glide your hands up higher.

This is the same way we had started.

I found you on a dating app after strings of talking stages. I’d ended an almost two year relationship abruptly, and jumped ship into the arms of strangers. You looked nothing like your photos. Though they weren’t what captured me in the first place. What had done it for me was your voice. Low, gravely, you spoke as if you were commanding a dog. I wanted to be that dog.

I wanted to sleep at the foot of your bed. I wanted to be left out in the cold when I did something wrong. I wanted someone who would tell me when I was bad, who would train me to be good.

On the first date you started by making it clear you wouldn’t be paying for me. Followed by a comment about my breasts. You grabbed my hips and guided me through the LA night. We walked for hours, talking.

“You’d be prettier if you lost a little weight.”

Now I’d slap anyone who said this, but back then I drank your words like I was parched, savoring them. You were telling me how to fix myself. How to fix all the malfunctioning parts of me that I never understood.

“You think so?”

“Yeah, with a thinner face. Maybe you should be vegan.”

This was the first of your changes, my diet. You touched my ass in the market stalls and glared down at me.

“Let’s find somewhere more private.”

You led me to a park where I sat on a concrete wall; you stood in front of me, looking me up and down. I was wearing fishnets and a corset—things you would later note as why you knew I was easy.

“I could tell right away you wanted me to fuck you.”

You slid your hand up my skirt in the dark of the playground. I felt there were three ways this could go. I could say no, ultimately ending the date and our relationship. I could say no, and not be heard. Or I could say yes, and be the girl you had fantasized about.

Each time you got my clothes off was a personal victory. You’d bet against yourself on how long it would be before you could turn a no to a yes.

“I didn’t think you’d cave in that time,” you’d chime in on nights when I had more fight left in me.

You were obsessed with winning, beating others at every cost.

Once we were official you showed me off daily—carrying me around on your arm, introducing me as your girlfriend to every man we met. In your eyes, you had won—you had tamed me, domesticated me. You knew we didn’t make sense, and you loved to see the shock in your friends eyes when you told them every detail of what you would have me do. The lows I would stoop to for an ounce of your affection—some recognition that I was real, that I existed.

When your hand hit my face I was incarnate—I could feel.

Words by Aahana Chowdhuri

you can’t take a vampire away from her garlic fries

so as i’m enjoying god(s)/(esses) most wonderful culinary concoction, you’re all up there like whoa, why isn’t she dying? did you think shoving garlic down my gullet would kill me? baby, there’s syncretism nowadays. i’m a multifaceted creature. there’s a myriad of ways to kill and not kill me. like how you can drown me in chick-fil-a sauce that serves me little pangs of guilt when i have it. how you cut off my head but i grow seven more, one for each time i was proven wrong. driving a stake through someone’s heart would kill anyone (but that’s so contrived, no?) silver is fair game too—i’m told gold looks better on brown girls anyways. and as i scarf another tray down, you look at me through those camel lashes, like you don’t believe me. you don’t trust what i say—how i indulge in that which kills me. i assure you,

there are lesser known ways to meet my end.

like wasting one and a half years on you. it’s a slow death, sure, and i didn’t realize i was crumbling to dust ‘til i left. you’d be surprised at how much you lacked reflection: when you’d chastise me for my fangs, though they keep me alive. when you’d see guys as competition, but girls as a bonus. you thought i’d bring you novelties straight to your chest, holy water out of a squirt gun. a vampire of convenience, only entering when invited, to ward off your loneliness like i was bearing a cross. and yeah, you didn’t need any holy ritual to break me down. no pope nor filial guilt, no ray of sunlight; just your obstinance and your victim complex. so if you want to kill me, you really don’t have to do much. you have no lifeblood left for me to take anyways, so i’ll do you a favor and choke on a french fry.

Poison 3:

Polonium - 210

kill time:

Days to months.

Symptoms:

Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, headaches, hair loss, lymphopenia, bone marrow damage, and organ damage.

Most famous use:

Former Russian Federal Security Service officer and political defector Alexander Litvinenko was murdered when Polonium - 210 was sprinkled into his teapot at London's Millennium Hotel in 2006.

SELF-MADE MAN

A ntidote

SELF-MADEMAN

SELF-MADEMAN

Words by Cal Geib

SELF-MADE MAN SELF-MADE

SELF-MADE

“...a wild testosterone poisoned young man.” -James Cameron

“I always think of [testosterone] as a toxin you have to slowly work out of your systems.” -James Cameron

Art by Vanessa Veyfo

SELF-MADEMAN

SELF-MADEMAN

SELF-MADEMAN

SELF-MADE MAN

Vial, sterile syringe, rubbing alcohol, cotton pad. Each item neatly laid out on the bathroom counter. I lift the bottom of my T-shirt and clamp the hem between my teeth, exposing my bare stomach where wisps of light brown hair are just beginning to grow: my injection site. Alcohol goes on the cotton, which goes onto my skin. There’s a tiny hard lump forming there again. I’ll have to switch sites next time. Needle goes into the syringe, piercing the rubber and devouring the clear liquid inside. It’s as hungry as I am, gasping for the next hit like a man dying of thirst. Needle pierces skin and a pinprick of pain blooms there. I clench my teeth in my spit-damp shirt. It always hurts. But the cool of the liquid soothes the pain, soothes all pain. I press down on the syringe and empty it into me, sending the drug, the “toxin,” the “poison” running through my veins. I blink, and the world comes into focus again. Drop the syringe and needle into the sink where they fall with a satisfying “clink” against the porcelain. I can breathe again. I imagine it running through my veins, stealing fat from my hips and thighs and adding it to the padding around my ribs, kickstarting muscle growth, and speeding up my heart, pumping warm blood through me faster and faster, heating up my internal temperature by a few degrees. I grin at my reflection and scratch at my chin, phantom hair that hasn’t grown in yet tickling my fingers. I flex like some TikTok gym bro and watch the muscles in the reflection of my arms, then stick out my tongue and laugh at myself. Week after week after week I run through this ritual. One injection of T—every week, for the rest of my life.

MAN

They call testosterone a poison. A toxin. A drug that alters body chemistry and transforms men like me, the ones unfortunately assigned to be female at birth, into mutants, worth even less than their pets. But I know better. My body has been filled with poison from the moment I was born, a slow acting poison that took twelve years to show its side effects: abnormal growths and fat deposits, regular bleeding combined with cramping in the lower abdomen, fatigue, depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts. I am full of poison, and T is my antidote.

SELF-MADEMAN SELF

enrichment time (in my enclosure)

Words by Harriet Taylor

Welcome to my enclosure.

I know it’s grim here. But before you ask about the stench of my three week old fur pile; the fact that I never clean myself in my water pool; before you claim I’m poisoning myself in this dump, please read the sign and hear me out.

I’ve been getting fewer visitors lately. Let me show you what it’s like:

Most days, I don’t get up until 2pm. I’m serious. The morning is for fucking parakeets and their corporate chicks. Even if I wake in the early hours to their screeching, I usually scratch my belly and go back to sleep or wait for the guilt to force me out of bed. I long for cheese, crackers, and Diet Coke (the keepers tell me I must optimize my body), although it takes me hours to muster enough energy to eat. By the time I take my disappointing meal, I usually have a few visitors just like you, watching my every stillness.

“Raccoon!” you exclaim like a town crier announcing the death of a prince no one knew the name of. Most of you watch me with pity in your eyes, brows upturned in sorrow but not action. Some of you find me amusing, ask why I’m here, mutter comments about my sad life. And what about it? I have ears and a middle finger, you know. None of you ever stay for more than a few minutes. You’ll forget me by the end of the day. Let’s be honest: nobody who comes to this zoo is here for me. I’m just next to the burger place with the Kool Aid. Most of you ignore me completely and ask “so, where’s the white tigress?”

I don’t have it in me to get much done. I got bored of my toys years ago, lost my friends over the years to bigger, brighter zoos. Whenever the vet comes around for a checkup, I hide behind rocks in dread of the news of an illness I already know I have and cannot seem to cure. Every few appointments, “Mediterranean diet” and “better exercise program” are thrown around as motivation. I scoff. We all know by now that my routine is beyond salvation.

And so I lie, taking in the entertainment of the day, watching the flamingos, the deer, the foxes (what kind of pretty are you?), the “oohs”, the “aahs,” the upgrades they get because the visitors like their spectacles best. I watch as keepers make darling faces at the animals who marry, breed, are given a new enclosure with their 2.5 pups and a lovely conservatory for them to bask in the glory of zoonotic suburbia. My breeding program was halted ages ago. I suppose I’m not worth preserving for future generations. On general accounts, my life has become defined by a lack of purpose, a complete paralysis that consumes my mind.

But every once in a while, visitor, things get exciting. The keepers get a new grant of patience, say “why not give it to this poor bastard?” and take me out for a special activity they like to call “enrichment time.” And every time they do, I try to escape.

“Enrichment time” usually means the keepers pay me attention, give me special nutrition, give me a new toy to keep me busy. They put me on a rope and I’ll think yeah, why not? I’ll swing on the line, piss on an unsuspecting child for the bant. I’ll leave Plato’s cave, which defeats the point because I’m aware I’m in it. I’ll visit the sun, then dig a hole and bury my head in the earth (fake ostrich meditation practice). The keepers let me have a few drinks and smoke a leaf they confusingly call “grass.” Then I’ll sneak out to the Dumpster Club to look for other ladycoon-kissers while they repaint the sign in front of my enclosure: 24, femme, nervous, adopt me? And when I get rejected I drink a little more and dance a little harder or take something stronger and pretend to be a different creature for a while so suddenly I’m a cat or a badger or a worm or a grizzly until OOOOOWEEEEOOOO im a fucking tuna bitch where’s the krill hang on how do i get out of here why am i flying oh shit—

It hits, like a portly insect on a windshield: I’m just a fucking raccoon. The fun is over. The despair returns. I’m caught and carried home.

It has been two years since I got put in captivity, since I lost my true habitat like many other raccoons. We have nowhere to go but to perform, to seek. So we venture deeper into unfamiliar territories, into cities and houses and arms that will at least be warm for a night, knowing we must leave before dawn and face the sunrise alone. We chase joy in dangerous places even if it comes crashing down because sooner or later we’ll be run over like our friends. Condemned to the cold because raccoons are everywhere, yet wanted nowhere. Nothing stops the unshakeable sadness that hangs over me, lives in my body like the rat poison used to exterminate us. The existential dread and the exhaustion of trying to survive. This is the source of what humans tell me is my depression. I hope you understand, visitor, that my enclosure is all I have left. I return to it time and time again because even though it’s a shithole and I’m trapped, it’s safe for now.

You want to know what I really do in my enclosure. To the zookeeper’s eye, perhaps I am rotting; in hibernation, brumation. Yeah, I may mistake the antidote for fresh sex on the beach or a shiny object and believe for a few hours that I’m free. But in my enclosure is where I heal, where I really enrich my soul.

Not many people know about the raccoon I used to be. I guess they never bothered to put the information on my sign, but I’ll tell you a secret, visitor, if you wait just a moment. I dream of going back to the deciduous forests I once was from; to carpets of oak and birch, to sweet sap and seasons that make change feel magical. I don’t want to be here forever.

In my enclosure I recover, lie in wait for the day I have someone like you to douse the fire, restore the trees, smile at my presence, leave a tin of cat food out for me at night. I have a little warmth left in my heart and not quite enough venom; a little hope that you will stay long enough so that one day, I will have felt enough love to become immune to the poison that keeps me here.

Art by Vanessa Veyfo

poem in which im the bad guy

Words by BEE LB

i’ll admit i’m toxic but i want to be britney spears toxic i mean i want to be worth it. when i say i want i mean i’m desperate. when i say worth it i mean desired. if i’m the villain my body is the weapon. i do laps around the heroes beat them backwards and blindfolded. my battles make bowen and burke both look pathetic, i mean i beat death-defying odds.

when i say i’m the villain i mean you love to hate me and i’ll talk you into loving me. to beat the villain nine times out of ten you just have to skip the monologue

but to beat the hero all you have to do is let them talk while you scheme. i scheme best in the background, i mean i think best when i don’t have to

talk, i mean all my dialogue is planned, everything i need to say i can say better with my body.

i’m saying uma thurman got her lipstick from me & sigourney weaver got her nail polish from me desire is the best form of control there is when you want to bend someone til they break.

i don’t like a clean break, i like fracture, splinter, bone shards clouding the wound. when they say time heals all wounds we all roll our eyes but i’m saying i want to worsen your wounds each time. i want irreparable damage, to be the last thing you think about at the end of every day.

Saskatoon Starlight

Words by Caleb Blumenshine

There is a man standing beside a road in the middle of nowhere. A vehicle speeds away from him, and the man listens to the receding hum of the engine’s rumble. It is the only sound in this place, save for the low whistle of stinging wind skirting atop the vast dunes of driven snow. He feels the fleeting, artificial warmth of the exhaust cloud dissipate as it is whisked away by the bitter gusts. He savors the heat and the accompanying stench of spent gasoline. Deep down he understands that this will be the last warmth he will ever know.

The man looks around, his eyes failing to keep pace with the movement as his head swims. His cheeks are rosy from drink. In front of him stretches miles of ice-slicked asphalt. The road’s coalescence with the distant sky is denoted by a miniscule set of shimmering pale lights on the edge of the sleeping world. The man turns around and sees a scene that is identical in its bleakness and vastness, but with no light to speak of. Embrittled branches of long-dead sagebrush reach upward through the surface of the drifts like the gnarled blackened hands of Ninth Circle penitents seeking a reprieve that would never come. The night sky drapes itself over the landscape, the yawning blackness of the firmament permeated only by the faint pinpricks of pale blue starlight that bring with them no warmth. Even though the man has lived in this area for his entire life, he finds it difficult to imagine that Saskatoon has ever been anything besides what it is now. The cold has paused the world in place, stripping it of the fundamental motive force that once animated it and turning it into a grayscale limbo. The man is not supposed to be here. Nothing is supposed to be here in this Place Between, the man knows.

The man turns back to gaze upon the twinkling lights of the distant city and mutters a curse under his breath. There is no one to hear it—not even the man. His words are blasted away by the howling winds searing his exposed flesh with the bitter cold. He is wearing only a thin shirt and jeans. The men who took his jacket, gloves, and hat wore uniforms. He thumbs the red mark left on his wrist by recently removed handcuffs.

The man begins walking towards the distant city, his stride labored by the ankle-deep powder. He walks on the shoulder of the road for no other reason than rote intuition. There are no cars; few would risk the vast stretches of empty highway in the dead of the Canadian winter. To break down in such a place would spell certain death. For the man, there is only him, the distant city, and the cold.

The cold is all-consuming. The man’s face contorts and his eyes form creased slits to block the stinging shards of ice pelting him. He fumbles with the hem of his frost-encrusted pant leg. Some of the deep snow that he trudges through pours into his boots and sears an inflamed ring around his ankle from the biting cold where it presses against his skin. Even with the false warmth of alcohol in his limbs, the cold is unbearable. He quickens his pace.

Plates of ice shatter into pieces and skitter away atop the hardened surface of the undisturbed snow before him as he plows forth. His breath heaves in time with each hastened step and his lungs rattle from the acerbic frozen air. Above the roaring cacophony of the wind the man can faintly hear the blood pounding in his ears. They burn from the intense cold. He pulls his hands from his pockets and clasps them over his ears. It does little to ease the pain, and soon his fingers feel as though their very bones are being gnawed upon by the gnashing winds. His limbs ache. He looks behind him and sees that his progress is negligible. He looks forward and sees that the city is no less distant than it was when he was first abandoned in this place. Panic rises in his chest. He breaks into a run, spurred on by a merciful lapse in the gusting wind.

The man’s pounding footsteps are muffled by the deep snow. He rages against the darkness and emptiness. He runs for what feels like an eternity until his legs— sluggish from the cold siphoning away his energy—catch on a rock, and he tumbles into the snow. His hands plunge through the sharp crust, and his bare arms are buried up to the elbow. A shriek of agony and frenzied defiance pierces the static silence. The frost shreds his nerve endings and the man feels the last bit of blood shrink away from his extremities.

The man whips around to look at the cause of his fall and sees that it was not a rock but the frozen cadaver of a buck buried beneath the ice, the ten points of its massive antlers exposed above the snow’s pale surface. The carcass is bloodied and broken yet is curled into an inexplicable rendition of peaceful sleep. The man hopes that the beast’s life was ended swiftly by a car, but he is unsure. The man kneels in the snow and looks over the infinite expanse of road in front of and behind him and wishes that he could be so lucky.

He struggles to his feet and renews his efforts, noticeably slower. He cannot get his hands back into his pockets, the tendons frost-locked into clenched fists and the flesh swelling from cell death. His feet no longer bother him, having turned into pallid rubber facsimiles in his boots. The snow packed into them has long since stopped melting. Tears suspend themselves at the crux of his almond eyes like small diamonds wreathing the polished jasper of the man’s irises. The puny reflection of the distant city remains firmly in the center of his pupils. Ice crystals flake his redbrown skin, dusting his high cheekbones in white. His once proud aquiline nose is swollen and splotched with patches of the angry red of incipient necrosis. The wind has plastered his long black locks against the back of his shirt and pasted over them with crusted ice.

His lucidity falters and the pain enveloping his body fades to a numbing warmth. The panic subsides in time with his dimming mind. Thoughts flicker sporadically through it as he attempts to piece together his fate. He walks and thinks about why he is here. He was amongst peers so recently that the moon hung in the same place in the sky that it does now, the man notes. He curses himself for drinking as much as he had. Maybe then the uniformed men would not have whisked him away to this place. The man shakes away the thought, an imperceptible jitter of his slackjawed visage. He knows that if it weren’t him out here tonight, it would have been some other Ojibwa. He knows he is not the first to be taken on a tour out under the Saskatoon starlight. He seethes at the knowledge that he will not be the last. The incandescence of his anger rises at the thought of the two uniformed men driving into the distant city, cocooned in the warmth of their patrol cruiser. The man recalls the impish cackle of the taller one and the perfectly white, straight teeth of the shorter one’s smile reflected in the cruiser’s rear view mirror from the man’s position in the back seat. The man stops, the indignation at the humiliation of his fate halting his momentum.

He wonders if they will ever find his body when the snow finally thaws in the spring.

He wonders if they will even look. He does not know.

He wonders if the coroners will care enough to bother matching a name to his corpse. He does not know.

He wonders if there are other shuffling ghosts like him out in this place tonight. He knows.

He wonders how his grandmother, his nokomis, will care for his boys, his gwewizaynsug, without him. He does not know.

The man slumps to the frozen ground, shredding his kneecaps on the icy gravel of the highway’s shoulder. He does not feel the blood instantly thicken into scarlet slush in the fresh wounds. He weeps for his family, for his people, for himself.

They all have known much cruelty for the mistake of their birth as Ojibwa. The man understands his only real mistake was thinking that he would never be taken for a starlight tour, for thinking that such events were merely myth, for underestimating the inhumanity of the uniformed men.

A wave of dreamy drowsiness falls over the man, washing away his rage. He takes one last look around him for any sign of a vehicle on the road. There are none. Maybe he can just rest here for a while until a car comes, the man thinks to himself. He slowly lies down in the soft snow under the twinkling starlight and curls into a rendition of peaceful sleep. He wonders if things could be different, if he and his family and his people did not have to live under such a cruel regime. He knows they do not have to. He knows things could change. He smiles.

An RCMP highway patrol car picks its way through the thick snow covering the westbound highway five towards Saskatoon. Wary of the slick asphalt and with little in the way of urgency, the uniformed man in the driver’s seat slowly cruises towards the distant city. His headlights catch the figure of a man slumped in the snow drifts on the side of the highway. A work acquaintance in Saskatoon spoke to him about this one tonight. The uniformed man grimaces. He wonders if things could change. He does not know. He drives past the man in the snow and towards the distant city.

Venom Poison 4:

"If you bite it and you die it's poison, but if it bites you and you die, that's venom."

-Dr. Ronald Jenner, venom evolution expert at the Natural History Museum, London.

Poison vs. Venom:

Poisonous creatures merely secrete their toxins to be absorbed or ingested, whereas venomous creatures inject their toxins through specialized body-parts. They are uniquely adapted for both protection and predation.

kill time: Minutes to days.

Most venomous animals:

Inland taipan, box jellyfish, Sydney funnel web spider, cone snail, stonefish.

Human uses:

Certain types of snake venom are used in drug discovery and developing medicinal healing treatments.

Words by Jazmin Polido

In the first quarter of 2023, I went through a particularly rough breakup. All of the usual stipulations: codependency, manipulation, resentment. Initially I felt great—I swear I could physically feel the stress leaving my body. But shortly thereafter, the true danger of the poison set in: the long lasting doubts and loss of a sense of self.

As always, I looked to music for support. Music has everything heartbreak medicine needs. Music is inherently repetitive and structured; the chorus comes back, the drums and melodies loop, and the instruments that leave will almost inevitably come back in again. Ultimately, the song can be replayed over and over and the audio file is fundamentally the same. What adds a layer of depth, however, is that the listener can return to the song’s lyrics at different points in their life with new perspectives and interpretations. I find myself projecting my own issues on what the artists are saying. The band Trousdale writes, “What could I say to you to bring you back home again?” At the beginning of my heartbreak, I heard that and felt so seen. Now, I listen to that lyric and feel the depth of how important it is not to say something just to bring someone back and to admit to yourself how you are feeling in order to move on.

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Music gives me something to hang onto. It’s a point of reference for my emotions as the instrumentals and lyrics tug on heartstrings in a specific way to elicit cathartic or healing sensations. Taylor Swift’s “Hits Different” reminded me that I wasn’t alone in my own “catastrophic blues” because she described how I was feeling so well. If so, she must have felt something similar and managed to push on. In this way, music helps me to process my feelings, identify the right strings to pull to stitch myself back together, and make sense of what I’ve lost along with what I’ve gained.

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2023 wasn’t the first time I was experiencing long-term effects of grief, so I had some old playlists to go to, including “Fuck an Ex” and “sad :(”. I ended up creating two playlists, “No Self Sabotage” and “Picking It Up,” in the hopes of making a playlist that would help me to go through all of the stages of grief so that when I was sad, I could come through to acceptance quickly. (Cause no one has time for that, or at least not enough time to let an ex ruin their whole day.) I decided to go through all of my playlists and highlight my top songs that helped me through it.

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Jazmin Polido

Part 1: Spiraling while Delulu

Warning Signs

Ellie Williams

What Could I Say

Trousdale

Explain You

JP Saxe

Hits Different

Taylor Swift

Sunshine Baby

The Japanese House

ceilings

Lizzy McAlpine

this is me trying

Taylor Swift

Part 2: Haunted

Can’t Go Back, Baby

Troye Sivan

Haunted

The Band CAMINO

Undertone

Julia Michaels

leave my mind

Ben Platt

Part 3: Tired

Blindsided

Kelsea Ballerini

Don’t Hate Me

Lola Young

Fear of Being Alone

Lennon Stella

making the bed

Olivia Rodrigo

Happy Anymore

Trousdale

happiness

Taylor Swift

Part 4: Anyways...

Shirt

SZA

HAZARDS MICHELLE

Sally Remi Wolf

Ex for a Reason

Summer Walker

Part 5: Ascended

Conceited SZA

dry eyes

Nightly

Clean

Taylor Swift

Good Days

SZA

Selected Lyrics

1. Warning Signs

Ellie Williams

“There’s no other quite this divine. / How could I find someone new?”

– The lines reminded me of what I used to justify staying in the relationship I was in. It validated me to hear that other people had those thoughts so I could then work past them.

2. What Could I Say

Trousdale

“If we talk, / Will you listen”

– My fave lyric because it’s so desperate and bare bones. The whole song hints to a long time of trying to make things work that leads into desperation.

3. Sunshine Baby

The Japanese House

“I don’t know what’s right anymore / I don’t wanna fight anymore”

– This entire song is a dichotomy. The happy music with the sad and lost lyrics. Who fights with their Sunshine Baby? But the instrumentals helped me reach a state of calm when I’ve never felt so stressed!

4. this is me trying

Taylor Swift

“And it’s hard to be at a party / When I feel like an open wound.”

– It’s good to remind yourself that you are trying! Life is hard sometimes. I remember just thinking, this is tough but hey, “at least I’m trying.”

5. Haunted The Band Camino

“It is what it is / And it’s just what it will be”

– Accepting that sometimes your past will haunt you and healing isn’t linear!

6. leave my mind

Ben Platt

“Do what I can to survive / Do what I can to cut ties”

– Ben takes baby steps to remove himself from this feeling but the whole hook laments over the way his exes took everything and couldn’t have just left his mind. Fun hook!

7. Don’t Hate Me

Lola Young

“Don’t hate me, but you’re not / what I thought you was”

– I had a huge fear of what others thought of me! However, it is worse to hate yourself for staying trapped in something that doesn’t serve you whether it’s work, a relationship or a past self.

8. Happy Anymore Trousdale

“You make me miss who I was before.”

– Due of a lot of people-pleasing, I experienced a huge loss of self. I had to relearn who I was, which made me miss who I was before I stopped prioritizing myself!

9. Shirt

SZA

“Feeling lost, but I like it / Comfort in my sins, and all about me / All I got right now / Feel the taste of resentment / Simmer in my skin”

– SZA illustrates the crazy switch in perspective from being lost to achieving radical acceptance of the transitional moments. She even accepts deeper, more shameful feelings of resentment and pushes forward.

10. Sally

Remi Wolf

“I don’t wanna waste another night.”

– Adore this song because it’s definitely a love letter to Sally, but I listen to it like it’s a declaration of freedom. It feels like the release of tension that comes when you end things that are a waste of your time! Also love “wyd” by Remi; she says, “I don’t need your validation / I’ve got me and medication!”

11. Ex For a Reason

Summer Walker

“That bitch your ex for a reason though.”

– I also kind of flipped the meaning of this song. Let Summer Walker speak to you about what you left behind; there was a reason that was left behind. Let. It. Go.

12. dry eyes

Nightly

“You can keep the shit that I left at your place / I moved on to a better headspace”

– I love that this song kind of compares an old relationship to a new one, highlighting the benefits of a happy relationship! The beat is fun! We did it y’all! We have moved past heartbreak!

13. Good Days SZA

“All the while, I’ll await my armored fate with a smile / Still wanna try, still believe in / good days, always”

– This song got me through two breakups and a pandemic. It is my go-to song that hits every note that you want. Good way to close things out!

It’s weird to think I knew I would get here, to acceptance, while making these playlists. Really, I’m beyond acceptance; I have a reinvigorated sense of self and a new person to love in my life. Perhaps grief really is love persisting. It’s just a universal love, for ourselves and those around us. It’s the hope that one day our love will be returned to us in a way that’s sustainable instead of poisonous.

Graveyard of Memories

Words by Cal Geib

“I Know, I Know” by Kat Poole

Light streams through the window and bounces off the dust mites in the air, sending beams of light dancing around the room. These beams one by one reveal the dusty furniture, old canvas covered picture frames, and shelves full of toys with chipped paint and cracked features. A breeze blows through the open door, sending the wind chimes just inside the entrance singing through the room. The loud, sweet notes of the tiny silver chimes float around the ceiling and bounce merrily off of the moth-eaten drapes, while the low bass notes of the large copper tubes creep around the floor and weave among the table legs, filling the room with a haunting sound. Red and gold leaves follow the breeze inside and go dancing across the floor with a quiet whisper.

You cross the threshold and everything goes silent. This is a sacred space.

Sacred because of the memories it holds, the people who have been here, the love the toys have felt, and the time and care that was put into the paintings. In this single room are thousands of memories. Lives lived and lost. Triumphs and victories thrown together with tragedy and loss.

That chair in the corner saw the suicide of a young woman. This pen signed the marriage certificates of a hundred people. The doll with the missing eye belonged to a young girl who traveled with it all over the world, until she grew up. The owner of that red car grew up to become a Formula 1 driver. That lamp lit the room where a woman gave birth to her only child. That chipped cup broke when it was knocked off the table during a dinner party, in which a guest was gesturing during a particularly funny story. So many memories have been laid to rest here.

Are you here to leave something behind too? Is there a memory you want to forget? Perhaps you’re one of those lost souls that seem to belong to such places. Perhaps you too belong in this graveyard of memories. Or are you looking for something lost long ago? Ah, yes. That’s it. It must be valuable. Although you don’t look like someone in need of money. Your boots and coat are new, even if they aren’t the most expensive. That scarf is cashmere, and the diamond on your finger is real. So what is it that brings you here? Perhaps a lost heirloom? But what use would you have for such an item? We are part of the graveyard for a reason. No one wants us anymore. We are broken and damaged. Our memories are the only things of use. You are young and we are so very old; what could you possibly need from us?

You move further into the store, brushing your fingers through the dust on the tables as you pass. There’s no sound except the gentle tap-tap-tap of your black heeled boots as you walk the aisles. You’ve been careful, walking through the haphazard aisles here— we thank you for that. Some aren’t nearly as considerate as you. You’re now in the corner full of boxes of pictures. Pictures of people, of places long since demolished in the name of progress. Is this what you’re looking for? Old family photos? Some of these are as old as the invention of the camera. In fact, that bottom box on your left might have some of the first pictures ever taken. No one remembers those people anymore.

You’ve unbuttoned your coat and laid it carefully on a chair. The scarf comes off and is folded neatly over the coat. It’s kind of you to worry so much. Kind of you to take so much care.

Be careful with that box. It’s a little bit heavy. Don’t drop it on your toes. What are you looking for? What could possibly interest someone like you? Surely you have better places to be. But you seem to know what you’re looking for.

That box probably won’t help you, only landscapes are in there. That fourth box on your left might help. Those are the family photographs.

Dust billows into the air in clouds as you brush off the tops of the boxes. So much dust you can’t help but sneeze. I’m sorry. I’d offer you a handkerchief if I had one, but my pockets have been empty for a long time now.

You’ve set the box of family photos down and taken a seat on the floor beside it, legs tucked neatly to the side under your gray skirt. Every photo you pick up is older than the last. You handle each with so much care, it’s as if you know the value of the memories. Each photo is of a family, some with only three members and others with ten or fifteen. The parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles are long gone by now, but some of the children could still be alive. Is that what this is? Are you a great-grandchild? Have you been sent to dig up old memories for someone?

You’re holding a black and white family photo now. It’s very old. The image has faded around the edges and one corner is slightly torn. It’s a beautiful photo: Mother

sitting in an armchair and Father with one hand on her shoulder, the other on the cane he uses to stand. He was shot during the war, and his leg was never the same. In Mother’s lap is a young girl with bright green eyes and dark curly hair. She’s holding a yellow teddy bear with a purple bow around its neck. She’s called Lizzie— the bear I mean—and where she goes, the girl always follows.

But I don’t understand. This is my family photo. What are you doing with it?

There’s a tear rolling down your cheek, but you aren’t moving to brush it away. As it drops lightly on your white gloves you turn and look, as if you can see me. I wish you could. It’s very lonely here sometimes. No one to play with anymore. They’ve all gone now. I haven’t seen Lizzie in ages either. I miss her.

A second tear rolls down your face as you look at the last picture ever taken of my little family. You turn and look at me again, this time in the eyes.

A third tear falls, and you speak for the first time since walking through the door, “I’m so very sorry.”

Volume #002

Winter/Spring 2024

Contributors

Name

Aahana Chowdhuri

BEE LB

Cal Geib

Caleb Blumenshine

Emma Neu

Harriet Taylor

Holly B. McCauley

Jazmin Polido

Laura Wencel

Maya Gardner

Réka Nyitrai

Harriet Taylor

Kat Poole

Vanessa Veyfo

Lighting: Sophie Barnard

Hand model: Adrika Yousuf

Cal Geib

Harriet Taylor

With inspiration from Enrique Martinez III

Logo by Katie Liu

Harriet Taylor

Cassidy Kuhle

Isabel Kettler

Cal Geib

Rachel Roberson

Jazmin Polido

Holly B. McCauley

Pexels Rawpixel

Goldie the Toller The Literary Editing

TOTAL: 20 CARD: