TESSERAE
2024 Volume 19
TESSERAE
Volume 19, 2024
Rowland Hall
843 South Lincoln Street Salt Lake City, Utah 84103
Tesserae are tiny stones or pieces of glass cut to the desired shapes to use in mosaics. With the shimmer of reflected light, tesserae work together to create a sense of the hieratic, a Byzantine method of representation that gives the effect of the supernatural, dissolving matter and leaving the light of the spirit. The mosaics in the church of St. Mark’s in Venice use tesserae to form an interior space that is otherworldly.
Cover art: Autumn Musante
Table of Contents - Writing
I.
Erika Prasthofer — “To Live Graphite and Curlicue”
Nadia Scharfstein — “Frozen Women”
Bronwen Andrus — “My Bass Smokes Tobacco”
Kendra Larson — “The Woman on the Fence”
Isabel Himoff — “Saint Valentine’s Demise”
II.
Gabriella Miranda — “Amnesia Set to the Tone of Water”
Sophie Lieskovan — “The Year of the Metal Dragon”
Aoife Canning — “Stories of Tomorrow”
Sophie Baker — “Culaccino”
III.
Aoife Canning — “Passing Smirk”
Mina Granger — “Beneath the Rain and Fog”
Chloe Vezina — “Spell of the Night”
Erika Prasthofer — “Ghazal: Tufts”
Kendra Larson — “The Great Horned Owl”
Mina Granger — “As Darkness Surrounds”
Kendra Larson — “Here with Lungs”
Isabel Himoff — “Winter Mornings”
IV.
Erika Prasthofer — “Montagne, Narzisse, Heather”
Elle Prasthofer — “Collapse”
Grey Obermark — “Loathe Savior”
Sofia Drakou — “The Crow”
Grey Obermark — “In the Face of My Jealousy”
Elle Prasthofer — “Blindly Bleeding”
Gabriella Miranda — “Footprint Covers Foot”
Ezra Storz” — “Somnambulist’s Memoir”
V.
Imran Ibrahima — “Ice Caps”
Chloe Vezina — “Ghost Dog”
Hans Baker — “Finding Peace”
Nadia Scharfstein — “Flesh Telephone”
VI. Interviews
Sadie Hoagland
Brenda
I.
Maddi Stufflebeam — “Crimson”
Regan Hodson — “Bust”
Regan Hodson — “Shore”
Claire Wang — “Profile”
Brock Paradise — “Skeleton”
Omar Alsolaiman — “Peacock”
Omar Alsolaiman — “Cave”
Sophie Zheng — “Conductor”
Zakrie Smith — “Cage”
II.
Nadia Scharfstein — “Earth in My Eyes”
Nadia Scharfstein — “Indecision”
Ming Lee — “Dragon”
Omar Alsolaiman — “Stone Building”
Grey Mayetani — “Cosmic”
Grey Mayetani — “Bike”
Omar Alsolaiman — “Seville”
Omar Alsolaiman — “Granada from the Alhambra”
Zakrie Smith — “Coffee Mark”
Regan Hodson — “Flower Print”
Sophia Hijjawi — “Taika Waititi”
Chloe Vezina — “Depp”
Lucy Dahl — “Aqowf”
Zion Wirthlin-Ngugi — “Gaze”
Sarah Carlebach — “Room
Maddi Stufflebeam — “Features”
III.
Sophie Zheng — “Undersea”
Claire Wang — “Expecting”
Sarah Carlebach — “Flowers”
Bea Wall — “Overlook”
Zakrie Smith — “Moon by Water”
Maddi Stufflebeam — “Memories”
Omar Alsolaiman — “Garden”
Halle Baughman — “Oysters”
Ming Lee — “Forest”
Sophie Zheng — “Salt Lake”
Sophie Zheng — “Grapes”
Sophie Zheng — “Pond”
Regan Hodson — “Trees”
Claire Wang — “Guitar”
IV.
Maddi Stufflebeam — “Fantasy”
Sarah Carlebach — “Bonneville Shoreline Trail”
Halle Baughman — “Goddess”
Halle Baughman — “Wine”
Maddi Stufflebeam — “Wings”
Maddi Stufflebeam — “Otherworldly”
Claire Wang — “Portrait Study”
Claire Wang — “Pelicans”
Ming Lee — “Masks”
Regan Hodson — “Red Tree”
Halle Baughman — “Abstract”
Sofia Drakou — “Wonderland”
Sarah Carlebach — “Chairs”
V.
Maddi Stufflebeam — “Emotes”
Sofia Drakou — “Blue Boy”
Claire Wang — “Boat”
Zakrie Smith — “Bouquet”
Zakrie Smith — “Lips”
Claire Wang — “Child”
Sophie Zheng — “Traffic”
Nadia Scharfstein — “Selfie in Cadiz”
Nadia Scharfstein — “Messy”
Nadia Scharfstein — “Blankie”
VI.
Beginning in 2022, the Tesserae website offers the magazine contents in a digital format. To visit the website, scan this page or navigate to rowlandhall.org/tesserae
Time
Maddi Stufflebeam Mixed Media
“What is so frightening about writing? Perhaps it’s the horrible knowledge that the resultant product will never arrive with quite the melodious voice you hear in the acoustic cavity of your mind.”
-Brenda Miller I.
To Live Graphite and Curlicue
Erika PrasthoferEach new word jerks the conscience: there are words we’ll never hear. And so you spend life living words. You tangle your eyes between copper coverback, as you sift through chalk granules crushed. You pause your eyelids’ upward strain while you stick a finger between margins, across canvas handwoven with violet twine, to unnumb the single words embroidered in the crevice, tapered, even perilous. You stretch the wrist between the viscous web
of heraldry, and silky clumps and curves of slender lions, polygons, wings and birds, stretch and stick.
You swallow even acidic, over-garnished ones, parsley, coriander kick; you want to get a taste of words you just might use but that too many will never ovalize with gums, lips, and jaw, exhale with vapor, graphite, ink. Now, common word, who chose the word for love?
Would it be dangerous to refuse that love is still unworn, word enough to embody its weight— or its lack thereof?
Would it be dangerous to say that my love
does not manifest language bearer’s love, consequently unraveling the puissant cellos—wood, string, bow constructions— of language? And so why, in your search for words, do you still search for sounds matched with curlicues, sounds—they lie that you can make yourself with nothing but strands of graphite wedged between your calluses?
Rowland HallFrozen Women
Nadia Scharfsteinafter paintings by Delacroix, Vermeer, and Millais
She asks to be more than a frozen mime: stomp on the men she is standing on, pull her dress up and let her tired arm down.
After posing, does she go home and weep, change her name, hide herself among the People and fight as Éponine did?
Or this time, she wraps her head in scarf, to enfold the dull glints of gold, the metallic pearl swaying from her lobe, and she looks back:
unseen eyebrows wondering why she is here and not jumping freely in a river, grasping the surface to hold up her skirt.
She wishes she were breathing like she didn’t know, like the roses were unpicked and still in her palm, and she could stand without the ground,
her hair wouldn’t be wrong and her dress heavy, voice falling from flowers like freckles and men splash glacier water to freeze her.
My Bass Smokes Tobacco
Bronwen AndrusOne day, I’ll play the bass, and I think my bass will be a smoker—twelve packs a day just to prove a point. The basslines burn and embed themselves in my skin; my body is their ashtray and their favorite cigarette. The scars they leave are semi-permanent tattoos. Someday they’ll be submerged under new layers of old, wrinkled, skin after I start listening to blues. My bass smokes the old stuff like Capstan or Pall Mall. Its frets are tobacco stained and so are its strings. My bass guitar smokes tobacco; it smells like every smoke shop or a parisian cafe. It sits outside. Smoke flutters in the air. It tells me stories of its past, what it’s like to be secondhand. I often find that I relate. I know what it’s like to be second, and I know how it feels when I breathe in secondhand smoke, how it smells, the greasy burnt wood. I think I picked up the bass to share the limelight. I listened when it told me the same. I saved the bass, and the bass saved me from myself, half dead but still breathing; out of cigarette ashes rose a star, not born, but alive nonetheless. I found my bass on the side of the road, I was walking on the edge. I picked it up and took it home, laid it down on a table. It asked me to do just one thing, buy me a pack of cigarettes. I’ll pay you back, I swear. So I did, 10 pack of Marlboro 72’s Red. The box lasted 4 hours, and now my house smells like spiced wood on fire. For now, my skin is soft, and so are my hands. My talent is just an idea and my dreams are still dreams.
The Woman on the Fence
Kendra LarsonThere was a weird wanting to her hands, Fingers wrapped around the rough chainlink, The swelling of the fence to balance her weight And the stretch of her neck beneath the sun.
Fingers wrapping around rough chainlink. She is becoming a contrast, Stretching like her neck beneath sun, Dirt creeping onto her shoes.
She is becoming a contrast, Her body a perfect study of lines. As dirt creeps onto her shoes. She sinks into the sun.
Her body is a study of perfect lines, Drawn by an odd pencil, Sinking into the sun, Yellowed even in black and white film.
Drawn by an odd pencil, Her shirt ruffles with her hair, the wall Yellowing in the black and white film. Sweat begins to make her slip.
Her shirt ruffles with the wall, her hair Falling free from her ponytail. Sweat had made it slip. Her fingers nearly pulled from her hands.
Falling free from her ponytail, The swelling fence no longer balancing her weight, Her finger nearly pulled from The weird wanting of her hands.
Saint Valentine’s Demise
Isabel HimoffSaint Valentine’s demise, steel swung low across the twisted spine of love, not yet dead like the cross-worked frame of grapes picked by the crows.
The gloss of blood and matte skin diluted in a river or preserved like hibiscus tea, too tart or too sweet.
An Arizona desert with pink sands and clouds of raspberry creme, too special to share with a stranger.
All the roses I’ve received have left scars, cuts flushed with lemon juice.
John Lennon sang for love, knew love, but died by jealousy. Bullets caught in the throat like soundless screams - swallowed.
Swallows mate for life I’ve heard, dipping throughout citrus skies and Strawberry Fields where Lennon lies.
Death can draw more love than life, so Cupid’s bow remains empty, pulled into a lonesome frown.
“This is time glutted on by writers and artists starving for it, who are deeply committed to the magnificent thing they will make for us during this time, the thing that will remain.”
-Sadie HoaglandAmnesia Set to the Tone of Water
Gabriella MirandaThere is something to be said of hands vacant of a body, Lips devoid of language, The divorce of head and heel.
Our functions are liminal, but this does not mean infinite. Think of yourself,
Denim-lined and grief-stricken, The loss of your idea germinating beneath an eyelid, obvious as a forehead.
There is something to be said of letting night lapse, Holding the sunrise at arm’s length, A decadent rind of orange you see your smile in.
Remember not to collect your time In a wicker basket.
Even if yours isn’t fluid,
Anywhere you take it, It will melt.
It’s why water runs from its own memory,
Why the desert is always caught in the limbo of the country it belongs to; Everything is threaded by the kinetic. To breathe is to move.
There is something to be said of silence, But where do you think volumes get their name? Sound would fill pages even without ink.
Forgive the eardrum for rupturing, Marry head and heel in walking tandem, Command the use of lips with language,
Forget your heart, those hands are the beating pulse of your body.
The Year of the Metal Dragon
Sophie Hu-LieskovanEpigraph
Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go. – Jamie Anderson
Chapter One: The Ancestors That Abandoned Us
I was born on October 21, 1940, in the year of the metal dragon. In years to come, my mother would remind me how fitting this was. “Metal dragons, my son,” she would say, “are born with incomparable endurance and tenacity. When you are old, you will be wealthy and happy, but life has plagued you with childhood struggles. You must overcome them.”
I know now that she was right, but at the time, I would only bow my head to acknowledge her and continue my studies. I should have taken more time to appreciate her wisdom. She was a wise woman, my mother.
Before I was born, my baba and gege left to Dongbei to find fortune in the city. My father was unaware my mother was pregnant. Maybe he would have stayed if he had known. But he didn’t, so he left, without a second glance back toward his wife and three useless daughters, tears trickling down their plump young cheeks. My gege looked back at us in sorrow, but he too was disillusioned by the fortunes of the city, and he soon turned his back on his sisters, disappearing by my father’s side.
My mother had a difficult life alone in Shandong. Soon after my father left, her womb swelled, and she became aware of me. Somehow, she knew I was a boy, and she named me within her womb, calling me by my full name before I ever emerged. “Jizheng,” she would say, alone in the kitchen peeling greens with a rusty knife. “You will come into this world and struggle, but someday, you will be more wealthy than your family, and you will protect your sisters.”
When I was three years old, my sanjie and I became sick with cholera. My mother put us in our bed and wrapped us in the few blankets she could find, setting a rusty metal pail next to our bed for our vomit. Sanjie and I wrapped our arms around each other and trembled with fatigue, leaning over each other to vomit into the metal pail. With each vomiting spell, we grew weaker. My mother instructed my older sisters to move into the kitchen, and they slept on the floor with blankets, frightened. She spooned rice and pickled vegetables into our mouths and wiped our cheeks when we subsequently vomited into the pail.
My mother went to the medicine store in the village with the few coins she could spare and begged the medicine man for the cheapest medicine she could afford. He was a kind man and offered her the medicine for much too cheap a price. She came home and spooned the traditional herbs into our mouths, forcing it into our throats and pinching our noses. For some
miraculous reason, I kept it down. Sanjie was not so lucky. She vomited even harder, and my mother had to empty the pail for the third time that day.
That night, sanjie and I lay in bed, watching the night dawn and the moon light emerge through the slits of our house. I was mentally tracing the wooden slats of the roof when sanjie squeezed my hand underneath the blankets.
“Didi,” she whispered hoarsely. I turned with difficulty to face her, tugging the thin blanket towards me.
“What is it, jiejie?”
Her sunken eyes were clear for the first time since we had been infected with cholera, and I could see the moonlight reflecting in them in the darkness. “I’m afraid, didi.”
“Don’t be afraid—”
“I think mama thinks I’m going to die.”
I didn’t know how to comfort her when I knew she was right. “Jiejie…”
“I want to grow older,” she begged. “I don’t want to die. Don’t let me die.” A lonely tear trickled down her cheek. “Didi, don’t let me die.”
“I won’t,” I lied. Even as a threeyear-old child, I was aware that she was slipping from us. Sanjie let out a deep, trembling breath. “Okay,” she said childishly.
I trembled as I closed my eyes. Dear ancestors, if you can hear my plea, I thought, don’t take her from me.
The stars were beginning to wink out when I woke up in the middle of the night, the song of crickets chirping outside, and realized she was stiff. I shook her, but she didn’t stir. I called to her. Nothing. With a start, I realized she was
With a pang of fear, I pulled my arm out from under her and called out to my mother. She came in, and I think she knew before I called her, because she came into the room and held her arms out to me without a glance at her youngest daughter. Her eyes were stricken.
I slept with Mama that night, and when morning came, she wrapped her youngest daughter in a clean blanket, forbade my older sisters and I from following her to the field, and then took her daughter out in the morning dew. It was a dewy, warm, comforting sort of morning, and I hid by the door, watching my mother as she tenderly laid her daughter on the grass beside her and then dug into the dirt with her bare hands.
She stayed out there for an entire morning and then called out to us, wiping dirt and tears resolutely from her cheeks. My youngest sister lay in the cold dirt as my mother murmured a couple prayers, and then my sisters and I began to throw the dirt into the grave. My erjie began to sniffle, the realization slowly dawning on her. I clasped the cold, wet dirt in my hands and threw it into my sister’s grave, watching the clumps hit the thin blanket she was wrapped in. It was such a thin blanket that I could see the fragile figure of my sister through it. I wiped my cheek, dirt smearing across my skin.
My sisters left the grave first, heads bowed in mourning, clutching each other’s sleeves. I watched them disappear behind the buildings of our village and then turned to the mound of dirt that was my sister.
“Xia ci jian,” I whispered. I’ll see you next time. My mother turned to me in sur-
prise. I knelt on my knees and bowed with my forehead on the dirt and then got up, wiping my face with my sleeve, and left.
There. She was gone.
It was a long time before I ever trusted my ancestors to reenter my life again.
Chapter Two: My Mother Begs My Sisters Forgiveness
Those were difficult times for my family, after Sanjie’s death. We didn’t speak of it— nobody forbade it—but in fear of upsetting my mother, I refrained from asking again about my youngest jie jie. I believe my sisters felt the same. They never spoke of her, except on grave sweeping days, when we would gather in front of her grave and murmur prayers, and light incense. Then my mother would leave her grave, and we wouldn’t return until the next year.
I was young during these days and didn’t understand the pain and grief that gripped my mother. Sometimes, I awoke to the unsettling sound of her sobs, lasting far into the night. One time, I turned to my sister’s beds and saw their open eyes glinting in the darkness.
When I was halfway to five years old, my mother sat my sisters and I down at the table for a talk. It was a dry September evening, and the draft that swept through our house held a promising bite of winter. Dajie and erjie were eleven and nine respectively, and had begun working at the seamstress after school. I sat on the floor and moved my blocks around halfheartedly, dreary about the cold, and hungry.
“My daughters,” my mother began, “there’s no easy way for me to tell you
this, so I will say it quickly. Your father has not come back. He may be dead—”
At this erjie let out a small whimper, and dajie wrapped her arms around her.
“—or he may be alive, but I have no means of communication with him. He has not come back,” she repeated, “and I fear we will soon run out of money.”
She strode to the flour shelf and reached into one of the clay jars, pulling out a small wad of paper yuan bills. “This is the last of my dowry, which I had saved for moments of crises, and which I have had to pull from often to get by these past five years.”
My mother gently placed the wad of bills back into the clay jar and replaced the lid. My sisters looked at one another, unsure of where this was going.
“Mama,” dajie began. “What—what do you mean to say?”
My mother crossed the floor to my sisters and knelt before them, head bowed. She gently placed a hand on dajie’s dark hair, tucking a wisp behind her ear and gazing in her and erjie’s eyes in turn. “I have come to you, baobei’s, for my forgiveness. I must request something of you that I had never thought I would ever have to ask.”
She closed her eyes in pain and then opened them again. “We will soon run out of money. I fear for our family. You—my daughters—you are women, you will never have the abilities, the opportunities your young brother will have, as much as it pains me to say this.”
My sisters glanced at each other, knowing this was true.
“My job at the vegetable market is not enough anymore. My dowry will run out. We need a second—and third—stream
of steady income in this home if we are to survive.”
“Even with the extra streams of income, I will not be able to afford three sets of tuition and books. Your di di will have opportunities you two will not have. I must ask you to leave school and work for the seamstress full time. I must ask you to sacrifice your education, and allow your younger brother your opportunities.”
Dajie immediately rose and pressed her brow to my mother’s. “I understand, my mother. I will do as you ask.” A tear slid down my mother’s cheek.
My erjie placed a small paw on our mother’s shoulder. “Me too.”
My mother wept.
Chapter Three: My Tears Bled Into the Ground
It was a warm, aromatic evening when the Japanese army came. I had been sitting on the ground with some wooden blocks, listening to the clatter of pots in the kitchen as mama brewed some herbal medicine for my eldest sister, who had caught a cold.
“Jizheng,” mama called from the kitchen. “Look down the road and see if your sisters are almost home.”
I pulled myself to my feet, scattering some blocks. “Jiejie,” I called. Suddenly, my sisters ran in.
“Mama,” dajie shouted, her dark hair falling out of her braid and streaming wildly around her shoulders.
Mama appeared from the kitchen and grabbed her shoulders. “What is it?”
“We need to run. Now. They’re coming.”
I was only four years old at the time, and while the urgency in their voices
unsettled me, I was unaware of the true danger of the situation. The second world war had only been a dim backdrop in my life until then, and while I had heard the anxious, hushed words of my mother and my sisters while I slept, I had dismissed the war. Now, it was here. Now, it threatened me.
My mother ran for the kitchen. Later, I would realize she had planned for this—she and dajie—and they swept around our small home, taking some jars of food, some blankets, and other necessary supplies. Erjie sank to the floor and held me, her dark hair cascading around my shoulders.
“Get up,” my mother ordered erjie, thrusting a basket into her hand. “Now!” The note of panic in her voice was unmistakable.
Erjie pulled her arms off my shoulders, and I cringed as her warmth seeped away.
Dajie swept her arms out to me, and I clung to her arms as she spun to my mother and erjie. “Let’s go.”
As dajie went to leave, I clung to the door frame. “Jiejie, no.”
She jerked my arms from the door frame, but I reached out to her and pointed to the mantel. Dajie’s eyes softened, and she spun around as I grabbed mama’s pictures.
“You’re a good son, Jizheng,” she murmured as she ran for the door.
Outside, we weaved through our neighbors—all fleeing as we were—and ran for the mountains. I could hear shouts all around me, and somewhere, a baby was crying, its shrill cries piercing into the crowds. Dajie’s arms tightened around me as mama and erjie ran ahead of us, push-
Rowland Hall
ing past abandoned hawker stands and darting around houses.
As we left the village, I heard the first shots fire, and a horse whinnied behind us. My mama turned to look at me, and the wild fear in her eyes was unmistakable.
Her face haunts me to this day. They are coming, her face told me, they are coming, they are coming, they are coming.
We did not stop running when the village was behind us, although we had disappeared into the trees. It was only when the dim echo of shots behind us had melted into the chirping of birds that my mother stopped. “We rest,” she said and then collapsed.
Erjie rummaged through the baskets and pulled out a flask.
I sat on the forest floor and watched as my sisters tended to mama. Around us, the warm hues of shedding gingko trees fanned into the sky, leaving warm trails of sunlight that penetrated in thin lines onto the forest floor. A hume’s leaf warbler chirped on a branch near us, its soft cry a stark contrast to the shrill fear we had left behind.
I clenched my hand and was startled to realize I was still holding mama’s pictures, their sharp frames digging into my palm.
My tears bled into the ground.
Dajie set me roughly on the ground and ran to her. “Water, she needs water.”
Stories of Tomorrow
Aoife Canning
Years from now, a child will ask their parents
To share with them stories of yesterday
And that child’s parents will say “No, but I can tomorrow night before you lay to sleep”
And that child might whine, but they won’t push further
And will instead spend their day anticipating the stories to be shared tomorrow night
Until the child remembers to forget and they go to bed
Tomorrow
night without the promised stories
And this cycle will cycle through
Until that child does not remember to forget and tomorrow night that child will catch their parents and those parents will sigh and wipe their glasses and lay on the bed and begin to tell their child
Stories of yesterday
Except they don’t– not truly They tell their child
Of the grand trees, leaves blessed by golden light
They mention the mallards and how each fall
They would take their hollow bones and fly to the southern sands
They go on about strawberries and peach trees and how they would go down to the grocery store
With their own parents to buy the fruits that couldn’t be grown
In their own backyard– like mangos, But also to ride the cart
Down the aisles
Past the brightly colored boxes of cereal and granola
They leave out how the sky wilted till ash fell with the snow
They leave out how the air became freckled with dust
They leave out how you could look and look and look some more and the only ray of hope
That could be found was hidden within the glare of the sun
Though, even that was covered by billowing clouds somewhere down the crooked pavement road
Sleep will come at some point tomorrow night
And claim them each, One by one
Until they are affixed To a dream.
Culaccino
Sophie Baker
Ionce lived in the in-between, darting between worlds, silent, untraceable, yet utterly free. Look at me now, bogged down by these chains, wracked with hopelessness, so plagued by desperation that I’m willing to grovel at my oppressors’ feet. Who have I become? How can I claim to be a human being when I have lost the defining traits of being human? I can no longer have my own thoughts, no less act on them. No longer dream of better, no less make the world so. You ask me: how did I get to this place? Close your eyes and imagine: a girl no older than four, blissfully skipping through life, trying on new personas at the flip of a hat, seeking the thing that makes her whole, gives her meaning. One day, she encounters doorways into other worlds, worlds which construct passageways of the mind and heart, where a lost soul can disappear for a while. And, for a time, books were all she needed. And then, as the saying goes, “life happened.”
I drop coin after coin onto the dull metallic countertop, relishing the gritty feeling of the coins in my palm and the satisfaction of the clink of metal against metal as I complete a transaction. This is one of the rare occasions where I have enough spare change to devote to my entertainment. If I could have any friends, they would think me to be maniacal for spending it on a book, but I don’t have any—friends, that is—and, for a while now, I have found that to be quite freeing.
I shudder, feeling my being untethering from this world, and hasten to finish the process. The more time I spend in public,
interacting with others, the less time this untethering takes. And I have already exceeded my quota for interaction in a given day: I had recently been to the laundromat, where I happened upon this treasure trove of coins.
If you haven’t figured it out already, I am not of this world. Let me explain. I possess a rare condition where, upon birth, my soul never tethered to a body. I floated around in the Between for a while, but quickly discovered that I was fading, and fast. Now, I had discovered these doorways that I had been too afraid to go through, but given my condition, I realized that I had nothing better to do. I picked the nearest door, crossed the threshold, and leapt. I remained in that world for a while, an ethereal presence with a body that seemed solid, but only upon first glance. Eventually, I faded entirely and found myself back in the Between. Once again, I crossed another threshold and leapt, and found myself in yet another dimension. I have spent the last few years shifting between dimension after dimension. I am the weary traveler you happen upon on the street, the beggar that you guiltily scurry past, the child that you see rummaging through the dumpster in your alley for scraps. I have learned the rules, if you will, to this wayward lifestyle, where to go to find spare change (laundromats and vending machines, obviously), how to blend in (clothes off of mannequins), how to avoid the authorities (that I cannot divulge). But I have also learned the limits. I cannot have friends, cannot have possessions (hence the coins), cannot carry things with me from one world to the next (except books). That also
means that I do not participate in your petty drama and do not have responsibilities, so I have come to terms with my current situation.
I shudder once more. I must be going; my time is nearly up. I pull one last coin out of my pocket and slide the pile across the counter to the cashier. He frowns, a puzzled expression etched into his face. What a strange image I must be to him, a brown haired girl, a little under six feet, decked out in the recent trending clothing items, sliding a towering pile of coins across the counter, her violet eyes piercing his brown ones.
I hastily leave the store, vanishing into the labyrinthine city streets until I reach my destination, a quaint park, no more than ten-square feet, that is tucked between two towering buildings in the city center. A weeping willow dominates the space, its branches swaying in the gentle breeze, floating delicately toward the ground. This is my portal, a commonality that exists in all of the places I’ve traveled to, where the film between worlds is weakest.
I brush aside a handful of the branches, entering the tree’s cocoon-like overhang. A backpack, bursting at the seams, rests under a healthy coating of leaves, all that remains of the past eighteen years of my life: a sack of books.
Nestled against the robust trunk, backpack tucked between my knees, I flip to a random page in the book I just bought and begin to read. After a few sentences, my eyes start to feel heavy; after a few paragraphs, they flutter open and closed, open and closed as I fight to stay awake, and, after a few pages, I am gone. When I come to, the world is dark. The only light that I can see emanates from the edges of a doorway ten feet to my left. Strange. I never wake so close to a doorway.
I settle onto the floor, intending to
rest in the Between for a while before being whisked into a new life, when suddenly, I feel this magnetic pull toward the doorway. A voice accompanies it, taunting me. “No, you don’t want to lie down. Come here… There you go. Rise, no time to stretch those battered limbs, come, come. No, no, no, no, don’t turn away. This is the door for you. This is your destiny. Yes, turn the handle. Open the door, open the door. Now jump.”
I am under the willow once more. There is a pit in my stomach, a strange feeling that I cannot seem to shake. Where am I? The branches shift slightly in the breeze, revealing a sliver of the street beyond. No, it can’t be.
I shoot upward, shrugging my backpack off my shoulders and carelessly throwing leaves over it in a half-hearted attempt to obscure it. I rush out into the street, directly into oncoming traffic. Horns blare as cars part like the sea around me, but I hardly care. I spin around and around as horns honk and cars swerve and I am more lost in the world than I have ever been. Somehow, someway, I am in the same world that I was just minutes ago.
I go to the laundromat first, shoving open the door before stumbling through the aisles, in search of a hint of silver, of copper, of gold. There, a glint of copper, peeking out from a receptacle inlaid in a dryer. Grabbing the coins, I rush to the machine that had contained the treasure trove yesterday. Empty. So at the very least I’m not stuck repeating the same day in an endless cycle, a Groundhog day I promise my life’s not that mundane.
I head to the bookstore next, trusting that this is merely a one off, that I will easily enter a new world as soon as I find another book. I am not sure why my immediate instinct is to return to the Between when I have been given the chance to stay in this world.
Perhaps it’s the same reason any of you cling so desperately to your routines — is it not far easier to stick to what we know?
I push through the solid wooden door, wincing as the bells chime ahead. I’ve found that the lifestyle I lead works best if I remain as inconspicuous as possible. Bells such as these do little to facilitate that. The boy at the counter glances up, brown eyes peering out from a curtain of equally brown curly hair. There is a glimmer of recognition in his eyes before he ducks his head and continues ringing up a customer.
I falter momentarily. Bear in mind that this is likely the first time I’ve been even remotely recognized in my life. I’m not sure I like the feeling. Awkwardly, I mimic him, ducking my head and proceeding into the bookstore. I peruse the stacks, hand extended outward as my fingers skim the spines.
You might find this strange, but this is how I choose every world to enter, an instinct based solely on touch. I’ve come to realize that every book emits a certain aura that is easily palpable to the trained mind.
There! I happen upon a book whose spine seems to jut out from the rest. Sliding it from the shelf, I glance at the title. “Groundhog Day,” it reads. In my hurry to leave this world, I think nothing of it.
I pay, sliding the coins across the countertop once more, the boy all the while giving me the most curious of expressions. I ignore him, grab the book, and rush back to the tree. Once there, I sit down, open the book, and begin to read. My eyes drift shut, and I am back in the Between.
I look to my left. Once again, there is a door, far too close for comfort.
“Come…” I hear. “I have what you’re looking for…Don’t be shy…Come…” I am dragged through the door. I know with-
out opening my eyes. I am in the same world once more.
This phenomenon continues to happen, over and over and over again, until the details blend together, and I may as well be living the same day over and over and over again. I go to the laundromat, where I collect my coins. It’s quite strange that I am beginning to think of them as mine, as something that I deserve, when just a week prior I would have been delighted at the prospect of even a single coin.
I then head to the bookstore, where the boy peers at me with a puzzled expression etched onto his face. I return to the tree, enter the Between, and am dragged through the door. It’s the same door everyday, that much I’ve deduced.
Until one day, as I’m sliding my coins across the countertop, the boy breaks character, he talks, an impromptu sentence outside of his prescribed lines. I feel like I should be given a warning before someone does this, perhaps a day in advance:
“You know if you bring the book back the next day, I can let you borrow it for free.”
I pause, my own surprise mirrored on his face. I don’t suppose he expected to say anything at all.
I shake my head incessantly. “No, no, that won’t do. I’m not supposed to come back.”
He shrugs, evidently confused. “Ok, well then, that’ll be $8.99.”
I slide the coins across the counter.
“See you tomorrow,” he calls.
I glare at him as I shut the door. He does see me tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. As much as it kills me to give him the satisfaction, this universe seems to be particularly cruel. I cannot find another bookstore. And I’ve tried. It seems that now that I’m stuck in this world, I can stay for as
Rowland Hall
long as I like at any given time. That’s not as consoling as it sounds. I’ve spent much of it searching the streets in a futile attempt to avoid the smug look directed my way when I enter the bookstore. (Perhaps that should be capitalized. The Bookstore. Better.)
As I’m leaving the laundromat on one such day, I carelessly shove open the door with one shoulder, ducking over to count the coins in my palm. 50 cents, 75, 80, 90, BANG. I am flung backward as someone, a man, collides with me. The coins in my hand fly into the air, falling to the ground in a twinkling shower of clinks and clanks.
“Oh, I’m so so sorry,” the Man atones, crouching down to begin scooping up the coins.
“No, no, I should have been paying more attention,” I rebut, kneeling beside him.
A few seconds pass as we collect the rest of the coins, that awkward period between two strangers that is often best forgotten. Without warning, he grabs my wrist, pushing my fingers open like a budding flower in spring and places the coins back on my palm. I would think nothing of it, except he doesn’t let go of my wrist. His grip in fact tightens, claw clenching, as his nails bite into my skin. Jet black eyes peer into mine, pupils dilating, seeming to want to pull me in and drag me under a tsunami whose origin I can’t seem to place.
“You know what,” I say, my voice cutting through the tension.
“Why don’t you keep the coins?” I push them back in his direction, prying my wrist free of his grasp and sprint down the street.
My feet take me back to the Bookstore on their own volition. I promise I had nothing to do with it. The door opens. Perhaps I opened it. I’d like to think not.
I peruse the stacks, settling on a book with a glaringly golden hue.
“Any chance I could take you up on that offer now?” I ask the boy at the counter.
“Finally lost the golden touch?” He looks down at the book I’ve chosen. “Oh, the irony.”
“You know what, I don’t need this right now,” I say, turning to go.
“Hey,” he says, reaching over the counter and grabbing my wrist. I flinch. He drops his arm. “I was just joking. Take the book.”
“Thanks,” I say, picking it up and grasping it protectively against my stomach. “See you tomorrow.”
The nightmare continues. I begin to develop a strange hypersensitivity to my surroundings. I avoid the laundromat. My world narrows to the Bookstore and the Park and the Street that connects the two. Sometimes my hypersensitive mind notices things: a receipt jammed into my jacket pocket, a phone number scrawled on the back side, an address tucked into the pages of a book I’ve selected, a set of keys left out on a stoop. I feel as if I’m constantly being watched, the permanent sting of a set of eyes engraved into my back.
Matty thinks I’m insane. That’s the cashier at the Bookstore. I’ve started spending more time there, seeing as I have nothing else to do. He tolerates it, he claims, so long as I help him work. I’m beginning to think he more than tolerates it. I know that I’ve started to think of it as less of a recourse.
I’ll give you a snapshot into our conversations. He speaks in references, whether they be literary,or some other aspect of pop culture. He has a tattoo on his stomach that says “Love me, please?” that is only visible when his shirt rides up. Here goes:
Matty: I assure you, that old man needs
help. He’s a regular — comes in here every week looking for a book.
Me: I know I’ll go. I’m just… waiting.
Matty: Waiting for what, an invitation from the pope?
Me: I’d rather be a human piñata for the starting line up of every team in major league baseball than talk to someone right now.
Matty: Does that include me?
Me: Sure.
Matty: Fine. Be like that.
He goes to help the customer. I fiddle with a bracelet on my wrist, watching in what I hope is a covert manner until he gets back. He ignores me and begins to sing quietly under his breath. Another thing about Matty, he has a voice like liquid gold. He’s loathe to admit it.
Matty: “Fear or love, baby, don’t say the answer… actions speak louder than, louder than —” I cough.
Matty: We’re ready to talk now?
Me: Yes?
Matty: Good, because we may have just lost a regular. That man is in for a treat. He wants a book that’s “Odyssey-like” but can’t seem to find one that quote “replicates the aura of the time period.”
Me: What’d you give him?
Matty: Well, nothing. There’s a reason every odyssey is named after the most famous odyssey.
Me: You didn’t tell him that, did you?
Matty: Of course! Honestly is the best policy.
Me: You don’t actually believe that do you?
Matty: No. But that’s beside the point. The man walks out the door, glaring at Matty as he slams it in his wake. We burst into
laughter. In these moments, time seems to flit away, “gone with the wind,” as he would say.
And then, just like that, he’s the one who’s gone. Upon entering the Bookstore, I find empty air where I normally see Matty’s smile. A note rests upon the wooden counter, pinned down by a foreign pen. “Follow the trail,” it reads.
“Trail,” I mutter. “What trail?”
I pick up the note, hoping to find that there’s something inscribed on the back side, instead nudging the pen to the floor. It pops apart, three pieces coming to a rest on the hardwood, the cap, the barrel, and a coil of paper, marked with the name of a shockingly familiar book.
I rush to the fiction aisle, scanning the spines for the magic words. There, toward the back. I tear the book from the shelf, grasping it by the spine to frantically shake it back and forth. Another slip of paper flutters to the ground, an address written on one side.
The keys. The ones left out to rot on the stoop. I sprint out the Bookstore, retracing my steps up the acutely familiar street. There, delicately placed atop a concrete stoop.
I’m missing something, aren’t I? I’m sure you remember. I’m assuming this is the part where an inclining of dramatic irony begins to creep into the back of your mind. Maybe you’ll flip back a page or two. I’ll allow it. I need the help.
The wind picks up. A chill seeps into my bones. I shiver, sliding my hands into my jacket pocket and wrap my hands around yet another slip of paper that rests inside. The fates seem to have answered my call.
I stand in front of a decrepit building on the outskirts of the city, peering up at the rickety paneling that frames the crumbling facade. I walk to the door, raise my fist and knock. A ring to my right. I turn to find an
incongruous metallic box drilled into the wall. It appears to be a makeshift buzzer of sorts, equipped with an equally ill-fitting keypad, microphone, and speaker. I jump back a step as a voice sounds out.
“Code required for entry.”
“What code?” I ask.
“Code required for entry,” the voice repeats.
“But I don’t have a code!”
“Code required for entry.”
I flip through the numerous papers I’ve found, landing on what I had assumed to be a phone number. Wrongfully assumed, it seems. I punch in the eleven digit code. A sustained buzz follows. The door creaks open.
I am met by a sparsely furnished room. Three plush sage chairs sit in a haphazard circle in the middle of the space, a lopsided coffee table between them. Shadows cloak the corner of the room.
“Hello?” I step forward.
Static — the subtle humming of a radiator.
“Anyone home?”
Nothing. I take another step, another, until I can brush my hand across one of the chairs. I pick up a film of dust. A pot of sunflowers, wilting and decaying, is precariously placed on the edge of the table, beside a heavy book titled “The 100 Most Painful Ways to Die.” I flip open the front cover and am met with startlingly gruesome images, arranged between bland text and sparse language. Burning, drowning, eaten alive by insects, slowly, very slowly, until you die from either dehydration, shock, or delirium, sliced in half by an electric cable, decapitated, perhaps by a guillotine. Perhaps your head will be masqueraded around on a stake.
“Hello, little girl.”
I startle, tearing my hand out from the
book. It settles, a knife carving intricate patterns along your back.
The Man steps out from the shadows, holding another body, Matty’s body, against his chest, a knife drawn across Matty’s neck. Matty murmurs incoherently, head drooping against the knife.
“Sit, sit, little girl,” he casually motions to the chair closest to me with the knife.
I sit, staring blankly ahead.
“Not to worry, not to worry, if all goes to plan, he’s far too sedated to remember any of this. If anything it will live in some obscure corner of his mind as a surreal fever dream.”
I nod instinctively.
He drags Matty toward the chair to my right, picks him up and manipulates his body like one would a mannequin until Matty is seemingly effortlessly seated upon the cushion, hand positioned casually over the arm of the chair. The Man perches on the arm of the remaining chair, knees crossed, holding court over our group of two. He smiles, a perplexing thing that creeps across his face, contorting it to be simultaneously encouraging and unsettling.
The silence drags on. The Man keeps smiling, as if to say “I could do this all day.”
“Who are you?” I blurt.
“Wouldn’t you like to know that? Later child, later.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Ah, that I can tell you,” he replies.
“See I used to be Untethered—”
“Untethered?” I interrupt.
“Not of this world? Condemned to a life between them? You and I, we’re not so different you know.”
“There’s more of us?”
“What, you can’t be so egotistical to think you were the only one, the chosen one.”
“I’ve just… I’ve never seen anyone in
the Between.”
“Well then you’ve never looked, have you?”
“What happened?”
“Love, child. Love happened.”
“I’m sorry? I don’t understand.”
“I met a man, and we fell in love and then I began Untethering. I told him about my… condition. I told him that I’d find a way to come back, whatever the cost. I promised him it would be forever. He said he would wait, that nothing could get in our way. I went to the end of the in-between world and back searching desperately for a solution.
“One day, I noticed a crease in the neverending darkness of the landscape, a jagged opening, no bigger than a pothole. Seeing no other option, I slipped through and found myself in a basement bustling with people, pulsing with life and lights that oscillated between green to blue to purple to green again.
“There was a woman seated on a throne at the front of the room. I quickly gathered that she was in charge, not just of this room, but of the entire operation. She was the Untethered, the beating soul of our kind. She decided when we stayed and when we left, where we went, everything, child, everything. To her, the untethering was a gift, to me, a burden. When I told her of my conundrum, she was devastated that I didn’t delight in the gift as much as she did, heartbroken, and she made me a deal. I could go back, be with the man I loved, but at a price. If our love were to ever break, I would be stuck in that world, in the same day in fact, forever. I would age, however, and the rest of the population would not. That was the price of my Tethering, and I willingly struck the bargain. Before I left, perhaps being far wiser than I was and taking pity on my naivety, she told me that I could free myself if and only if I found someone to
take my place. I assured her that wouldn’t be necessary and left.
“When I entered his world once more, I encountered a major issue. You see, time in the in-between world passes differently than in real life, far faster, in fact. While for me nearly a decade had passed, for him, it was mere months. The differences that these years had ravaged on my body showed. My hair, thinning and tinged with gray, stood in sharp contrast to his youthful curls. My knees creaked when I moved. Wrinkles adorned my face. I was hideous; he was beautiful. I was old; he was young. I never stood a chance.
“As prophesied, we were thrown into a loop, the same day happening over and over again as I grew older and older. At first, we spoke at least once a week, but I soon found it far better to maintain my distance, instead opting to stay here. Until, I remembered the woman’s parting words. And that’s where you come in.” He coughs. “Well, what do you say?”
“Excuse me? Where do I come in exactly?”
He laughs, a jarring sound that echoes through the space. “And here I was thinking it was obvious. Don’t you see? Matty is my love. You are taking my place. This is merely a warning.”
Now it’s my turn to laugh. “And how do you anticipate this happening? It’s not like you have any power over me.
“Oh, but I do. For a long time I couldn’t fathom hurting Matty, not even touching a hair on his head. But seeing him fall for someone else, now that is a pain you will never understand. And that type of pain changes a person.”
“So?” I challenge, hoping he doesn’t see my hands shaking against the cushion.
“I’m afraid if you don’t cooperate, this
may be Matty’s last day in this world.” My breath catches. He smiles that psychotic, foreboding smile.
“So you see the gravity of the situation.” He pats Matty’s arm. “It would be a shame to have to hurt poor Matty here, would it not?”
“A shame, but not beyond you?” “We’re past that point, my dear.” I nod vacantly.
“Look, child,” he says, the slightest trace of sympathy creeping into his voice. “There are far worse ways to spend a life.” He brightens. “Besides, when the time is right, you could always find someone to take your place. But Matty, well, he’s just an innocent bystander, wouldn’t you agree? It would truly put a damper on your conscience to bring him into this.”
“What do you want me to do?” I ask, teeth gritted.
He claps his hands. “Very good, very good. Now there are a few ground rules, I’m afraid. In order for this to work, Matty can’t love you. It would be better if he simply despised you. So I am hereby ordering you to stop any contact with him. Without any explanation, I might add. If not…” The Man points to Matty and draws a hand across his throat. “Now that that’s out of the way, Matty has places to be. You may stay here if you like. I’ll retrieve your sack from the park. I should be here for only a few more days, a week at most. Hatred is an easy emotion to come by.”
He stands up, enlivened, and bustles around the room. “This is fun, is it not?” I shake my head.
“Don’t be a grouch, dear. It does nothing for your eyes.” He hauls Matty over his shoulder and walks toward the door. “One last thing, I’ll be keeping an eye on you all and believe me I’ll know if you happen to come into any sort of contact with him, so be
a doll and follow the rules. For Matty’s sake.”
“Do I even have a choice?”
“You’re right, not really. Have a wonderful day, child.” He leaves, Matty, still unconscious, slung over his shoulder.
That all happened in the span of about 15 minutes. My life, dismantled, just like that. Since then, each day has worn on and on and on, an eternity. I haven’t seen the Man since. I haven’t seen Matty since. I hardly ever leave these four walls. Occasionally, I’ll get a note, never more, commending my restraint. His way of reminding me that he is always there, watching, waiting, watching some more. He tells me that I’m so brave, so noble, to have put someone’s life above my own in this way. I still believe I never had a choice. I have many regrets but none surpass my regret of the days I spent mourning my previous condition, my being an Untethered. Wasted time is truly one of the most sad phenomena possessed by humanity, if I even qualify as that. Now that I have nothing, I can’t help but imagine what could have been. Oh, how I yearn to disappear, to leave behind nothing more than a watermark on a table.
III.
“When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.”
-Mark Strand
Passing Smirk
Aoife Canning
“There is no must in art because art is free” - Wassily Kandinsky
A vessel of color blooms in the plumage you bear
So deceptively dark and daring, the valley of your feathers
Yet somehow, your eye shines with the glare
Of the sun hitting a copper coin just right at midday
Your lopsided grin peeks up, further and further tilting
A lilting call tickling my ears from far tomorrow
Do you know the scent of wetness
The aroma of drying, the smell of creation, of copper
What marvelty do you wonder at, what keeps your copper eyes
Trained up towards the Cuckoo bird, away from me
How long is it that I can hold your gaze with the tips
Of my fingers, before I let go and look for another more suiting
Beneath the Rain and Fog
Mina GrangerLush
green plants erupt from the forest’s rich soil. Clouds of dense green suspend from long curved branches. The sunlight is obscured and funnelled through leaves, splashing pools of golden light against undisturbed dirt. Round beads of morning dew balance on the leaves, rolling off of their vein valleys and striking the leaf below like a waterfall until it falls to stain the dirt dark brown. There are no paths in a forest as secluded as this one, making a planned day hike an eternal voyage. Here, it’s like an organic corn maze, one not human-made but the one humans base theirs on.
It has been a stormy and bleak week in Waldport, Oregon. I’m here on tour with my newly formed band, Shadows and Sun Angles. This tour is an important one since we are gaining popularity, and it could lead to our breakthrough. We were going to stay in Oregon for a day and then head up the coast into Seattle for our next concert, but our old truck is on its last legs. Instead of cancelling the shows, we had to postpone them for a week. I try to make the best of the weather, and unlike the locals, the tourist in me decides to go to the beach and see what lies under the storm. I wasn’t expecting to like the view of the choppy grey ocean against the beige, dusty sand, but it’s going to rain all week, and I don’t want to stay inside rehearsing all day. I slide on my
sandy, well-worn Converse, brace for the freezing wind, and robotically shuffle my way to the truck, hoping it has enough power to get me a few miles at the least. I collapse limply into the tan leather seat, which feels like a block of ice underneath me. Desperate to get heat, I turn the key in the battered ignition, but instead of a roar, I hear a putter of life coming from the engine. Just my luck, we’ve gone 800 miles and the truck can’t bear ten more. I turn the key over and over trying to get some read on how bad the situation is, but my truck is dead. Maybe I shouldn’t go to the beach. What if this is a sign? Though I’m intrigued by the stormy cloud that drapes Oregon with a blanket of fog, with one last hopeful shot, I turn the key, still lodged in the truck, and the diesel engine roars to life, releasing a dark fume of exhaust. A sigh of relief forces my shoulders down. I pull out of the cracked driveway and roll off the chipped sidewalk with a loud thud onto the gravel road. The loose grey pebbles underneath scramble out of the way as the black tires roll across them, imitating the sound of crunching leaves.
Beyond the green void of trees, there could be anything: a field of violet wildflowers poking out through long, waving grass that has never been stained with the footprints of humans, a shimmering waterfall exploding from the side of a jagged granite wall, or maybe a grey ocean, the dullness of it hidden by the overgrown green tunnel that leads there.
I decide to go to the beach near Yachats, close to Thor’s Well. Although I’m on a main road, it feels like I’m on a backroad that only I know about. There are no cars, no people, and the scenery is a brilliant, Pacific Northwest green. With the poor stereo of my truck, I put on R.E.M. The scenery is clouded in fog and is only visible when my windshield wipers remove the thin layer of mist speckling the pane of glass. I don’t know exactly where the beach is, but once I see a turnoff I’ll take it. I turn a corner a few miles later, and the trees create an opening. In their place is a parking lot with the sign “Strawberry Hill Wayside.” This spot looks like a neat place to stop, so I pull into the parking lot and turn off my truck, hoping I will be able to start it once I get back. I jump down onto the barren gravel and locate an entrance.
colourful trees fall to the ground. Stick by stick, barren trees expose the void that lives beyond—like a tunnel of death, only a bleak beach lies at the end. The golden sun turns to a foggy sphere, only visible through dead branches waving like lifeless arms, like bones clacking against one another.
Weaving through the guard rails, I find an opening that leads to a gravel trail on a steep downhill. At the bottom, tide pools overlook the dead ocean. Everything looks monotone and dreary here. I carefully slide my way down. The waves crash against the sharp rocks jutting out from the earth as if they were forcefully pulled out. The tide usually leaves behind crabs, kelp, and even harbour seals in the small pools carved into the rock. Maybe I’ll get lucky. I look out at the choppy sea and dagger rocks, no gulls in the sky, no people outside—just me and the creatures that live in the tide pools.
The glistening green leaves slowly start to fade out and disappear. The
I decide to make my way towards the beach. Scrambling and climbing over rocks, I slowly approach the sandy opening. I look into the pools of water while stumbling, and all I see out of twenty pools is one crab, dead and missing a pincher. I was expecting more—maybe too much. I step onto the last row of rocks until the drop-off to the beach. The rocks are scattered with stringy, dullgreen kelp dampened by the water that left it here, making the rocks a slick and slippery death trap. The rock I’m on is about three feet from the ground, and there isn’t a good path to take down, so I decide to jump onto the grainy sand below.
My mind envisions me jumping, but my feet don’t. Stuck on the slippery kelp, my feet slide out from under me. Flowers
I try to push myself away from the rock and onto the packed sand, but my fight or flight is broken. I hit the ground, sand exploding around me like a stone dropped in a pond. I hear a loud crack and think it must’ve been the rock or the crashing of the waves. I try to scramble back to my feet, but not a moment later, I feel a crippling wave of pain. Nauseated and burning with a fever, I try to unzip my slick black windbreaker, but my arm falls back down to my side as I flinch in an electric pain. The crack I heard, was that my arm? Is it broken?
A set plan can’t compare to jumping over fallen logs even though both paths lead to the same outcome. Trees hang their heads low, arched roofs acting as a path back. The rich and lush green foliage has folded to the ground, replaced by bald sticks and the remaining leaves which are desiccated and could fall off with a gentle fall breeze. The way back is gloomy and dark in comparison to the adventure on the way in.
My wrist fractured in two places, I am put in a splint and then an L-shaped cast reaching from my swollen, purple knuckles to my raw, scraped elbow. We have to cancel the whole tour despite my insistence on still being able to play. We rescheduled the tour, but it’s not like it’ll be the same. People probably got the impression that we aren’t serious. I knew I shouldn’t have gone to the beach the second the car didn’t start. Rain and fog made nature so mysterious that I had to see what was underneath.
Spell of the Night
Chloe VezinaThe world sleeps deeply under the glow of the luminous half-moon. Light blooms in an evening sky, every empty space filled, sprinkled with stars. Starting to rise, soon reaching its peak, peeking out behind airy clouds shrouded in darkness – the moon, a mere mirror of the sun. Its lunar brilliance advances down dark roads – deserted, reverted back to their silent state. Defiant, innate –few remain awake reminding the night that they aren’t forgotten, far too often left in the shadow of day. The moon’s radiance rains on the speckled wings of the great barn owl scouring the night sky, searching for its next meal. Concealed by the spangled, black water, the rainbow trout slides downstream. The moon’s gaze follows the flowing river and blowing wind, winding down with dust that settles in the ashen sky.
Eyes raised to the stars, left red and tired. Tied down by his thoughts knotted around his mind. Minding the silence, the insomniac lies sleepless, pressed deep into his sheets and pillow. Below the light of a silver half-moon, most of the world sleeps, but there are some, numb to the spell of the night, never asleep, always awake.
Ghazal: Tufts
Erika PrasthoferFor God, you caramelize cherry blossom: candytuft. You crystalize sin to sucrose gobs, blossom candy-tuft.
Thunder strums gut or nylon stark across the chestnut harp, and violet twine, crooked music line, swells from candytuft.
We seal the slitted, sanguine scruffs of wounded doves with lace while skies toss silken sun to our palms: autumn candy-tuft.
Evergreens and aspens hem the musty trail of goodbye, as we savor crisp, alpine mist of solemn candy-tuft.
Who was she once the auburn wire of day began to flake— when, in linen gowns, she rustled, a lonesome candytuft?
Raspberry crystals rot and shrivel at daybreak; even drought rain after hosing hour shrinks the quantum candy-tuft.
Do not dance in daylight, Erika, or its citrus-skin tile shapes, but at twilight, extract root-bottom candytuft.
The Great Horned Owl
Kendra LarsonIt’s dark now, late night or early morning.
You wouldn’t see her slipping through tree canopies.
Her eyes are newly minted pennies, the great horned owl.
We can’t hear it shifting through the leaves from last fall, but she can hear its heartbeat, its small feet scratching for food or shelter. She heard its heart rate drop last winter, almost till it didn’t beat and its blood thawed again in spring, just for her to find it once again.
You can’t see either of us, nails hovering over flesh, waiting to be unexposed. Her talons fall first, mine second, neither of us are bothered by the pools of red blood caking themselves to our nails.
It is you that would bother us, your fear of us bleeding as though we mean to attack you next. If you could see us under the trees, by the streams that you manicured into something useful, you would call it disgusting, tell us it was wrong, dangerous. So we bleed into the dark, on your cultivated wild you would never know, surrounded by dark leaves, cold streams, and the quiet flash of wings, that I watched as a great horned owl killed her prey.
As Darkness Surrounds
Mina GrangerIn the dark and light, I run, starless soil grabbing at my feet, staining my thoughts.
Rays of moon shoot through green-leafed trees, seeping beneath the inky ground.
Stumbling and falling, I cannot let the shimmering pools of light go beyond my reach.
I cannot let them drain through the soil, dripping into the dark, making suffocating pools of nightmares.
Broken branches reach up, trapping my next step and pulling me back down to the dim coal ground where I can’t go back again.
A dead, dark forest ground climbs up the living green trees, soon to consume the forest, turning the darkness upside down like an hourglass of death, slowly counting down the seconds: a forest soon to be a world of gloom, turning into a pool of oblivion, forcing your head underwater until you drown.
Here with Lungs
Kendra LarsonI sit in a window sill, trapped between the panes of glass. My lungs once large, now shrivel in salt Blown from that gleaming mirror and its dust.
I lie in the salt flats, mouth above the water, a perfect reflection Of sky and mountains, so still a pin drop could send me tumbling.
I am swept from my feet by a crashing wave, trampled under water.
My lungs fight to fill, to lift above the pacific, and lay amongst the clouds.
I rise and fall through salt water, each breath a miracle earned by thrashing arms
The window sill again traps me as dust blossoms to my eyes And my lungs are filled for good.
Winter Mornings
Isabel HimoffI used to think sunrise was painted every morning, colors made of rose petals and deep blue pines.
Clouds wispy like the paint strokes of an unseen artist. His task half-finished, an ocean in the sky.
While the first stars are long gone, the last shone weakly upon the brightening canvas, a surface with no sheen of oil but of the sun’s new rays. Those cold mornings, the sky filled with thick fog
sprinkling sugar on the pavement. Crystals sparkle and vanish in one’s hand, frosting glass with veins of ice.
The sun, a pearlescent glow from the mist of milk whose presence brings blooms of pink to my sister’s cheeks.
My mother’s concern about slipping reflects off the ice below our boots, a sheet of glass
with shattered shards glistening in the cold light. The Sun, cruel with its back turned and warmth drained.
The frosty glare of a hidden star sends shivers to my bones, winter mornings, mesmerizing as a frozen rose.
Revolution
Erika PrasthoferThe lamb lingers, laments by lavender buds in the south while roosters shriek cocorico up north, stark across the mariner’s channel or the origin soil of strawberry root.
In the south, while roosters shriek cocorico, a daughter’s palms cool: crescents on citadel. Up north, stark across the mariner’s channel, teal-quartz tides rise, whip, recede from rampart stone.
A daughter’s palms cool: crescents on citadel, translation of moon distilled by twilight while teal-quartz tides rise, whip, recede from rampart stone within which digits knead, distill dough to moon.
Translation—of moon distilled to twilight, while the cicadas croak by the cobalt-shadowed cottage, within which digits knead, distill dough to moon under candlelight, respiratory hum.
The cicadas croak by the cobalt-shadowed cottage in sync with the last shrills of human grievance under candlelight: respiratory hum foreboding fervent fists, fleshy riots, aristocratic slash.
In sync with the last shrills of human grievance or the origin soil of strawberry root, foreboding fervent fists, fleshy riots, aristocratic slash, the lamb lingers, laments by lavender buds.
IV.
“The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams.”
-Louise Glück
Montagne, Narzisse, Heather
Erika PrasthoferI steal from a mountain. Her name is plume and pine and willow, but she has no proper noun like Giverny or Tehran.
I scoop up nearly crumbled sedimentary, let it crackle as I pull together the firm, rounded keratin seams of the worn flesh webbed across my metacarpals.
I stand still to hear the breeze wisp and guzzle, wafting the rhythm from the stream to my eardrum: a glissade down my neck, scapula, and elbow, a warning that palpitates, vibrates my curled phalanges enveloping ashes of stone.
I slant my palm abruptly to swallow, spritz the grains between my frigid, mountain-berry-soaked lips, not to render this rock my own, but to exchange what was my leathered frame of thievery for particles and peat.
I hobble to the gurgling, aqueous source of my action, lifting a stiff, rock-ashen body to its toes upon the water’s adjacent, grassy beam, and an arcing, flexible figure spun from pinnate leaflet twine and Colorado columbine sautés right beside me.
With distance, she is a human outline, a girl but not a daughter waning in debt, deceit of what is hers, of possession of character, so my rigid neck cranes towards her water liberty, weightless, as she strides more elegantly beside me.
I decide then to forget this mountain’s vitality by standards of self-sacrifice through disintegration.
I dedicate already fragmenting knees to my desire to claim her trailing mahogany braid and ductile, rippling joints.
Her name is Pine and Willow and Plume in the bronze-fringed feathers, leaves, and mocha sprigs that prick her braid: crown of bristle and root, earthy mountain reign.
Her name is Erika, eternal ruler, but as I reach forward to grab her wrist, I feel nothing but moistness chafe, resentment crinkle: my own carpal bones ready to crumple with the slightest displacement.
What is a ruler who may never rule herself? Erika governs in a whisper as I reach deeper to grab for her, bending over water in Prussian blue pigment shadow, observing the mouthing of this question posed in sync with my trepidation.
Perhaps somewhere near Szczecin after Stettin, on a mountain called plume, pine, and willow, a flower called erika carnea grew, firm heather hovering above a stream, above a reflection more slender and wavering, beside remnants of cervical bone, shriveled sediment entangled in calcium chipped.
Tesserae
Rowland Hall
Collapse
Elle PrasthoferI hate, but I’d love to think there was something that could’ve been done, that a force, perhaps myself, would have stopped the inexorable, stopped the fury enveloping each aurous fawn log, breathing plumes as if in a marathon. The aspens peered from their pruned eyes, quaking as I do, as the glass blackened, then was reduced to scattered shards, reduced to windowless portals, gaping into my hollow soul, and into the soot-filled heavens, who, for all their trial, evaded us.
I saw parallel fates, met both by blinding heat, a Persepolis of my memories not ruined to time or greed, but by my own hand in yours.
I periodically reminisce when it sweeps me again, from the second story, the lilting ground I’m told to regret standing on. If he had known the grief would come before the wails, would he have resigned or remained simply as a useless spark never deterred by snow?
Loathe Savior
Grey Obermark
Her head is tilted back as if to look up at God, the green bottle a spyglass for her to find Him. The mirror at her back is a reminder of what could have been, what could be; a woman, her head craning up, from this angle with no vice in her hand, no Bloody Mary to swear to or at. The room in the reflection is dark enough to imagine something beyond it: bottles of water instead of wine, no pipes to crack open, warp her cabinets and whatever lives inside. Windows with blinds that at three in the afternoon are not yet drawn closed—they were never opened in the first place—or if so closed for reasons other than the piercing of the light on her memories of the night before and the flood of red that came with it. But here, before the searing eye of God, she is pathetic and drowns herself in wine bubbles and dies this night as all other nights, in her porcelain bathtub, no body to find, but glass, certainly.
A green cage of bitter blood that bleeds into the roof of her mouth will twist her words tomorrow into barbed wire, her prayers into curses. A girl drinks alone in her dreams and cradles herself in the dark and does not weep for mirrors or promises of God because she knows Him. She sees Him this night at the bottom of her bottle and tells Him if He has a plan then speak up.
The Crow
Sofia DrakouI remember a time before a map was torn, before we left, before I was alone except for the crow that followed through the shadows but never home.
Lies are nothing but words.
The crow has grown hoarse from crying out, suffering through its bondage. Its words fabricate a cage with metal bars intertwined so closely like poison to delicate black wings.
The crow gnaws away at its flesh, feathers astray in tufts at the bottom. A pair of once-black wings lie atop a bloodstain that taints the metal floor, wings so battered like fragments of a broken mirror, so battered and maroon stained. The cold drives the metal knots tighter, now ebony feathers seem to carry so much weight, a feeble bird lying crippled.
Frail silence is louder than the pain inflicted by an unspoken deed. I run, yet regret catches up to me. The crow broke itself to ruins, but
the blood is on my hands. Sometimes
I just wish I could tear another map and you could be right next to me. But I was alone before we left, so I’ll tear at my own wings instead, and I’ll use a black-feathered quill to etch scarlet words onto the wall, and they’ll read nothing really matters. In the aftermath, an empty cage and empty eyes, words are nothing but empty lies.
In the Face of My Jealousy
Grey ObermarkAnd she’s everything; red, spilling across a ballroom floor, sap sticking to wooden floorboards, smile wide and white, teeth curved and dull, and I, as always, am the knife. She can’t hurt people like you can, but she can make them stay. I know that, I know that.
Oxygen on the moon, flightless bird in the spring, every miracle you could think of and rotting wood. Admiration is jealousy for people who don’t hate themselves. Her love cups the faces of the condemned, her fingers soft and eyes aching.
My love is barbed wire and electric fences. Please come in. Sorry it hurts you. No matter where you are, you won’t be happy with me. No matter what I do, I can’t be gentle. Here, jealousy again gets the best of me, and Lucifer looks up at God, and God has better things to do than look back.
I overstate my importance: a sinner in an alleyway looks up at God, and God looks away, looks over millions of others just like the sinner, smiles and loves them all because She is better.
The sinner is discontent with this and selfish. Neither of these things change.
The ballroom is empty and stained red. Good things stay—the sinner goes.
Blindly Bleeding
Elle PrasthoferYou’ve been watching me each time I weep. You console with pitiful stares, your delicate words slicing through the noise of the bag that shrouds my head, but to no avail.
Tiptoeing over all the reasons we both are here I hack and I grasp, in and at my mask so that you, too, can escape the little I can see of this cage as it was meant to be crocheted of sorrow and crimson iron; now rusted. Although we are together confined, I am betrayed by your inability to bleed, to let me breathe, for you always had the key and no bag that hinders you to see. The veil has lifted only to inquire that you only watched, a furtive smile growing on your lips as parasites do, to cause harm to me, and now I am the one from whom pity seeps, every pore aching, because now I understand you, taking as you please for you are faithful Peter, and I, anguished, remain in Gethsemane.
Footprint Covers Foot
Gabriella Miranda
Somewhere there’s a leak.
I can smell its fragrance like a dance, palms outstretched for a midnight-flavored flame; Kerosene is the sign of a god.
When you find this god, watch as you wait for it to drink a daughter dry. Maybe yours, almost always not. When she is left astringent to the touch, she’ll think of it as a freedom
And you won’t know to correct her. She’ll know to ask the sky to take on a body, urgent with skin and foliage of feeling. I am that daughter but so are you, holding an hourglass by its middle,
sifting time in two halves and wandering between eyelet holes that mark a month, a year cased in paper before the edges roll eyelash black at the lick of a flame.
If you had to choose, you’d say this god first takes its bite from the wrist, nursing the pulse like an emergency but embarrassed by its alkaline taste; the mouth knows when its contents are stolen.
The left lung could be next, but it goes quickly, a lozenge that cloaks the throat in fever. Any pain that follows travels like watercolor before it dulls in the living room of a stomach.
Daughters know what to call this. We learn to find it in our valentine faces,
beneath your railways of shoulder blade that contract as conversation, Sewn in sun-kissed muscle warm with touch, a slate of open-ended wants.
I’m not a daughter to you, but I’ll still learn how to live in this arid strait that separates your love from your indifference, even if it is unnavigable, a virgin desert asking for footprints.
A Somnambulist’s Memoir
Ezra Storz
“An entomologist,” Zin repeated, exasperated but still trying to maintain a smile. It made him angry that his landlord was so uninterested in his well-being. But then again, why should he be? He probably had lots of other meetings scheduled for today. Maybe his landlord was too preoccupied with plans for his daughter’s birthday tonight or with the fact that he didn’t know if he was going to have time to eat dinner to pay attention to what his tenant was saying to him.
“This new job not paying you well?” The man at the desk looked down at his hands.
“I’m afraid not.” Zin wondered whether or not he would be physically capable of shaving one of his own eyebrows off.
“Fine,” he said, fiddling with his pen as he leaned back in his chair. “Five more days. But if you don’t have it by then, you’re out before 10 o’clock.”
“Right,.” Zin replied, and at that point, it was obvious that his landlord was a chameleon disguised as a businessman.
Zin walked towards the elevator, leaving his absentminded landlord with a salute-wave. Stupid, he thought, closing his eyes and gritting his teeth. He opened them and let the sticky stains on the golden walls of the elevator enter his gaze. He had to talk at the university today; he was going to take a shower, buy a coffee from the vending machine in the hallway, and
then ride his bike there. He’d gone over the route a million times in his head, yet he still got lost more than he ought to.
First he would pass the ramen place with its cracked TV and large tip jar that always seemed to empty before reaching the smudged permanent marker. Zin was fairly certain that without the TV goal and the tip jar to spur donations, the store would be closed. He always wondered why it worked at all, though. A one dollar bill takes up the same amount of space as one hundred. Today, the tip jar was full— not of money, but of liquid color, the same color as the stain Zin had once tried to wash from his T-shirt. The cold tap water from the sink didn’t remove the stain; instead, it split up and browned the color, forming smaller stains throughout the shirt.
Next, he would turn onto 45th street and witness the sheer blinding glory of the Jackie Miller Grocery Emporium, which was home to every processed and packaged food that had ever seen the light of day. Zin’s mother and her mother and her mother had each taken him to the store on multiple occasions as a youth, yet all three experiences were unique. When his mother took him, it was the average kitchen-stocking shopping routine—salmon, kale, oranges, blueberries, tortilla chips, oats, potatoes—he would always try to sneak bags of his favorite ravioli into the cart when his mother wasn’t looking. Once, Zin was piecing together a puzzle at
his cherrywood living room table, dehydrated, trying his hardest to keep his mind from slipping away. In an attempt to clear his head, he stood up and eyed the golden bag of potatoes his mother had placed near the stove. Suddenly, he seized a raw tuber from the hole in the wire mesh bag and took a small bite of it. It did nothing to improve his addled state; it only made him wonder whether his mother would notice. She did not.
Then there was his grandmother, who rarely bought or ate anything at all. She was also not the type of woman who let wrappers and packages and boxes or even cans stop her from knowing what a product tasted like. Zin always suspected that more of her calories came directly from the Jackie Miller shelves than from her own dinner table. Zin’s great-grandmother, when she could still walk, spent great lengths of time deciding which product had the better calorie-to-price ratio and, unlike her daughter, she spoke only in brusque whispers to the corner-dwelling reptiles at the store. Great-Grandma’s friends always giggled in their corner, and he always forgot to say hi to them before he and Great-Grandma took the elevator back to the parking lot. He might have liked his great-grandmother better if she hadn’t spent so long deciding which product to choose or whom to spend her days with.
When he turned left at the intersection, he would see the Italian place that served the mac and cheese that tasted like warm glue and the pasta primavera that reminded him of his father’s hedge-trimming shears. He used to order Neapolitan ice cream for dessert, and his sister would
order vanilla, which he disliked, as it brought back nauseating memories of the ice cream-oatmeal-pancake breakfast his mother made for him when he was sick one morning. It tasted of chameleon food, of crickets. Neapolitan was much better, as you could get three different flavors of ice cream without having to order multiple scoops, something Zin believed would make the waiters think him gluttonous. Yes, that way he never got sick of eating just one brightly colored flavor. Once, he dreamt of eating from a grand harlequin ice cream scoop in a metallic, boat-shaped bowl with four-hundred and twelve flavors of ice cream, swaying back and forth atop the invisible sea. Each of his fingers was a little sampling spoon, and he had to lick all of the ice cream out of them because if he tried to wash his hands after eating, he knew the concavity of the spoons would redirect the faucet’s singular stream of water into a powerful spraying fan, making a mess of the kitchen.
“Why did you even eat the ice cream?” Zin’s sister asked—mockingly or pleasantly, he couldn’t be sure—upon hearing about this dream, to which he said nothing, as he didn’t really have an answer.
There was a shape on the road in front of his bike, a traffic cone, perhaps, or a construction worker’s lurid yellow vest. No, that couldn’t be it. The bright color seemed to be coming from somewhere out of his field of view, as if it never really existed at all. It hovered on the edge of his vision. He felt as if he had just pressed really hard on his eyes, trying to catch phantasmagoric patterns on the insides of his eyelids, except his eyelids were the
Abstract
Halle Baughman
Acrylic
ceiling, and the patterns were never there. He had a feeling of disconnection from reality, from time. A repeating sensation of jolting awake afflicted him, though the rotten-sweet taste of unconsciousness still plagued the roof of his mouth. What time is it? His mind asked him over and over again. He had to do…a thing. He had to go attend a lecture at his university today, so he began to pack his suitcase. Why are you packing your suitcase just to go to school? His mind asked him. He stopped, and his mind reeled as he looked at his ID. The letters didn’t make sense. Dr. Cohen, they read. Was that him?
The uncomfortably warm ringing of tinnitus drew his attention to the terrarium next to his humid wooden bedsheet. Why are you here? What’s in the cage? Nothing, he thought, though he could never be sure. His mother stood before him, clutching a strange mass of green—no, blue. He turned his head and saw his father, holding his garden shears in one hand, and Zin’s severed arm in the other. He rushed to give him a hug, but by the time he had sat up, his sister was already in his embrace. You have somewhere to be, you know. I know, he told his mind, wondering where and what “his mind” actually was.
He sat up and looked for his…he didn’t know what he was looking for. He lay back down, plumping up his pillow. Letting the uncharacteristically humid, quiet chirp of crickets absorb him once more, he succumbed to the sleep-tendrils without brushing his teeth or even gluing his arm back on with the half-eaten bowl of mac and cheese that lay on his bedside table.
V.
“It is the broken heart that makes us human in the end.”
-Melanie Rae Thon
Tesserae
Ice Caps
Imran IbrahimaAt the same time Saeed and Nadia were leaving the island of Mykonos, a boy, with his eyes shut tightly, fell out of a portal’s blackness into a frigid Norwegian landscape. The moment he hit the snow, he thought to himself one word: cold. The snow burned. His teeth chattered, his body shivered, his breathing sped up, and he became aware of his knees in the snow, his head facing the ground, the iciness scalding his neck, his legs, and his hands, which were planted in the snow, keeping him from being absorbed into the powder. He wore a T-shirt and shorts, gray sandals, and white socks, all of which offered little protection from the snow soaking through. His black, curly hair collected falling needles of snow. They pierced the boy, sapping his energy with every touch to his skin. He opened his eyes. He stared down at the snow, expecting to see white, but it was glowing orange. Before he knew it, he was looking up at the sky, blazing colors of sunset tearing it into a dance of cloud and fire, casting a masterpiece onto the brilliant snow, and the sight of this wonder warmed him, at least on the inside, granting him just enough energy to struggle to his feet, the snow crunching but remaining steadfast. His feet burned. His hands burned. His face burned, yet he found the energy to see the small home some fifty feet before him. He limped to it, slow and determined, and when he reached it, he wanted to knock, but he had no idea who
was inside or what he would do if no one answered. He knocked anyway, and he slipped out of consciousness, falling to his knees, then onto his side, hitting the snow once more, the skin of his unconscious self reflecting the scarlet glow from the departing sun.
He was embraced by warmth as he awoke. He saw a small fire that emitted a glow that allowed him to see his surroundings, just barely. He was on a bed, or maybe a couch, wrapped with a heavy blanket, and he wanted to stay in that blanket for another minute, or another two minutes, or forever—the inside slightly humid from his damp clothing—but the sound of an axe splitting a log roused him from his thoughts, and he shook his head. He pulled the blanket off and looked to his side and saw someone watching him. Out of the corner of his eye, the boy saw a window. Outside, he saw the source of the noise: a woman, bundled in clothes, splitting a log into pieces a few feet wide at most.
The boy heard someone say something in an almost squeaky voice, and turned his attention to the small figure watching him: just a kid, he thought, no more than four, with big, curious eyes and tiny hands, hands that reached out and touched the boy’s face silently. The boy, with a clouded mind from having just woken up, didn’t know what to make of it. He was never good with children,
and he had already given up on ever being able to connect with them, but something about this child’s gentle gaze was infectious, and so the boy patted her head— gently—and the girl looked up at him with wide, moon eyes and the boy couldn’t help but smile. He reluctantly pulled off the warm blanket, sat up, and his feet touched the soft carpet laid meticulously
in front of the bed. He knew he would have died if it wasn’t for whoever had saved him, so he grabbed the puffy jacket on the chair next to him, slipped on his sandals, and he went outside. The child watched and followed him. Despite his certainty that there would be a language barrier, the boy stepped out into the cold and waved to the woman outside.
Ghost Dog
Chloe VezinaWhere you once were, I now stand alone, one moment, not enough. The fleeting dawn takes you as the light fades in your eyes.
Silky black fur turned grey with age. Like stone, my heart sinks seeing your pawprints on the lawn — Our first hello, both of us new to this world, our last goodbye — a lifetime in between, your windblown fur after every walk, your wide, gaping yawns as you stretched into the morning, your quiet sigh as you drifted into sleep. Life overthrown by time. We spent yours running, running on fields doused in sunlight or snow. I try
to fill the space you left behind. Your lone, lonely ghost drifting beside me. Suffering, drawn out for selfishness, day after day, I question why you stayed for me. Last days of skin and bone, and sunken eyes. Brown pools tell me to move on, yet they haunt me still. I want to justify the wasted time, not spent together wasting time. I come home, and only silence greets me at the door, your life, gone. I feel as empty as your bed and bowl, my life, now just as forsaken. I should have known nothing lasts forever. While the world spins on — I wait, ‘till we meet again under the sunset sky.
I wait ‘till we meet again under the sunset sky. Nothing lasts forever, the world spins on — life, now just as forsaken. I should have known I would feel as empty as your bed and bowl. My world fell silent when you left me. Forever gone is the wasted time, not spent together wasting time. I come home, and my thoughts haunt me still. I want to justify your sunken eyes, brown pools tell me to move on. You stayed for me. Last days of skin and bone, out of selflessness. Day after day, I question why I can’t move past your lonely ghost. Suffering drawn into the space you left behind, the lone fields doused in sunlight and snow. We tried escaping time, we spent yours running. Your head, on the tile floor, as you take your last breath. Life was overthrown as you stretched into the morning, your quiet sighs, your tousled fur, your gaping yawns, a lifetime in between. All of the windblown days, lying on the grass, in the yard, our last goodbye. My heart sinks seeing your pawprints on the lawn — Silky black fur turned grey with age, like stone.
Life takes you away as the light fades in your eyes. One moment, not enough. The fleeting dawn — where you once were. I now stand alone.
Finding Peace
Hans Baker
Like a nightmare come to life, I am awoken.
Instead of the tall sleek skyline of the city, I am engulfed in the forever of mountains. Instead of the sounds of people, I am entranced by the songs of the birds. Instead of the forever-changing ambience of city noise, and well dressed citymen, absolute Stillness. Absolute silence. Never-ending boredom. What once was the stench of a rat, Is now filled with the aroma of freshly cut grass. Silence, with the occasional whisper of the wind, As though trying to talk to me., It says, run. Run, Run home,
To the city,
Escape this everlasting plains of which you now reaside. Find it, Find what you have been looking for, Find comfort, Find home.
Rowland Hall
Tesserae
Rowland Hall
Flesh Telephone
Nadia ScharfsteinI can only hold a body for so long. They weigh more than I’m worth and my nails aren’t thick enough to clutch them and their skin is slick and malleable.
So they drop every inch of my shuffle, and I fall on them in fatigue, resting my ear on their neck as if I were hearing their heart’s final voicemail, thumping coded goodbyes.
I never did enjoy rowing down their currentless veins, feel the static blood curdle and clot, take a chance on a dead one.
Bodies are much better asleep, warmer, serene, in their minds instead of mine. I could listen to their dreams this way, hear their jaws churning words they want to say, feelings they want to feel.
If only I didn’t lug I could listen, give their dreams my number, say, let’skeepintouch, so that when you fall asleep, I’ll call.
VI. Interviews
Interview with Sadie Hoagland
Every story is an argument about the world.
Sadie Hoagland visited Rowland Hall’s creative writing class in Spring this year to discuss the topic of fiction writing. She grew up in Holladay, Utah, and graduated from the University of Utah with a Ph.D. in fiction. Her collection includes her novel Strange Children (2021), American Grief in Four Stages (2019); a collection of short stories, along with her newest novel, Cirle of Animals (2024) to be released in August this year. Her work has been featured in The Black Herald , Mid-American Review , Women Writers, and Foreword Reviews among others. She is a fourtime Pushcart Prize nominee as well. She is an alumnus of Rowland Hall.
During this interview, Sadie Hoagland discussed her first novel Srange Children (2021), a story that surrounds the life of a group of young narrators raised in Redfield, a polygamist community. The book centers on their experiences, with some being confined to the borders of Redfield, and others exiled to the city, as senseless violence and manipulation entagles the reader into their slowly unraveling world.
How did you get the idea to write about this kind of community?
I grew up in Holladay, and there was a polygamous family that lived really close to one of my good friends. There wasn’t a big barrier between us and them—it was just a two-post fence—but it was a huge barrier because they wouldn’t speak to us, and they lived this totally different life. We were fascinated.
My grandmother was raised by her grandparents. She was orphaned in the first pandemic; the 1918 pandemic, killed both of her parents when she was three, so she was raised by her grandparents. When she would be in a shop in downtown Salt Lake with her grandmother, her grandmother would be horrified because she would see half siblings of hers because her mother had left the community. So they’d have to duck out of a shop because her half siblings from the other wives were there. There was this whole family legend about why our line of the family left, something like she was the first wife and the third wife got new curtains, but she didn’t get new curtains in her room, so she was fed up. It was fascinating to me that my family came from that sort of background as well.
In this book, basketball is banned in my fictional community. This is actually a real thing that happened with Warren Jeffs’s community. They used to have holidays, and they had school, and they had sports. Women were married off at 16, not 12. He took everything to an extreme and created a system of even more systemic abuse than was already in place. The actual real life community fractured well before Jeffs went to jail. Half of them were following someone who was more traditional.
In part of my research, I had a kid who had grown up there, and I paid him $100 to drive me around the community. He was around 17 and he hadn’t had a home for about three years. He had worked on oil rigs in North Dakota. This was a really common thing.
That is the strangest part about fiction. If it’s too out there, it won’t work. Fiction has to be believable: nonfiction doesn’t have to be believable because you have the basis that actually happened, but fiction has to be believable or based on a reality like that.
Short stories are conversations
with myself.
What aspects from real polygamous communities did you use to make Strange Children realistic fiction?
After you released Strange Children, did you receive any pushback from people here in Utah or those affiliated with the church?
There was one weird thing that happened. The book was already well in the works, and then the lawyer for the press said, “we need to look into defamation.” In this case it was for FLDS leader Warren Jeffs. Then the question was, can a convicted felon actually be defamed?
But it was an interesting question and then it kind of made me nervous. My brother is a lawyer. He does litigation for shell companies set up by the FLDS in St. George. He told me, “You got to watch out for these people.” I said, “I don’t think I need to worry: nobody reads literary fiction.” I was very aware that I’m writing from an outside perspective. I was concerned with not wanting to diminish the experiences of the real victims of this kind of abuse.
Was this book was based on only one community that actually existed, or did you take details from several different ones?
Just the one. There were several iterations of the one. Warren Jeff’s father Rulon Jeffs was probably the beginning of all of this. He was famous for his expression “Keep Sweet,” which he basically used to control women. In the FLDS culture, the prophet is the main person speaking for God and God’s will, but everyone technically has access to that will. People can have revelations and say things like that, and so sometimes that
gets complicated and it’s about like the abuse that can happen is because people feel justified.
The narrative is a container.
Can you talk about the research process and how much of it went into the development of the book?
That was hard with this book too because a lot of the research was really dark. The book I’m writing right now is about guns in America. That’s also really dark, so I have to pace myself. Because it was my first novel, I over-researched everything and not nearly half of the research made it in. The nice thing about being a fiction writer researcher is that you’re taking information so you can build a totally different world. It doesn’t have to be factually exactly correct. It’s not about something that did happen: instead, it’s something like this would happen. You have this liberty that you can’t take in non-fiction writing or in academic papers, of course.
How do you navigate creating dialogue that’s grounded in situations of grief without making it melodramatic? How do you make that dialogue sound human?
I did theater when I was here at Rowland Hall and also in college. Theater is great for dialogue but thinking about how actual conver-
sations flow. There might be two things to be careful with dialogue, the things that I see most often with college students is when they try to explain things that you wouldn’t explain in dialogue in order to get details about a character. Much of our interaction is nonverbal. If you have some of that nonverbal interaction in the dialogue but not making it too clunky, being able to say what someone’s doing, if they’re scratching at their cheek when they’re talking or they’re like tapping their foot, if they’re looking out across into some corner.
In terms of how it rises above the grief and trauma, that’s what happens in life: people keep talking; people keep moving, so those conversations still happen. The difficult things get communicated even if it takes a full story to do so, or they don’t, and that’s another ending to the story.
What was your goal when writing this book?
I wanted to see if I could do it as my first novel. I was really interested in the characters. I’m really interested in circles of redemption. I loved these characters from the very first stories that I wrote with them, and I wanted to see where they were going and where their journey would take them. With both of these books, I like to push. How much can narrative hold? The narrative is a container. I’m always interested in pushing the boundaries of that container. We can’t solve a problem with it, but can we try to understand it further? What kinds of questions do I have
about the world or what arguments about the world that I can make within this container? Also writing is fun. I still like it after all these years.
What did it take for you to make it through completing this book?
Some of it is just perseverance like what they say for anything. It’s the most important life skill and predictor of success is the idea that even on days where I’m pretty sure the whole draft is just ready for the garbage can, I have to slow myself down on that and say, okay I gotta keep going. It’s important to know when to get some distance, and I think it gets easier. Every story or book teaches you how to write it, as weird as that sounds.
The other thing that I tell my students is that neuroscientists know for a fact that your brain is super excited during that inspiration first draft. They can see it on the brain scan. You feel, this is so this is gonna be so awesome, and then they can actually see your brain go just pitter out. That is just humanity; that is the human experience. It’s not just you and your lack of motivation and your crappy story. It is actually what it is to be human, to be super pumped about something and then think “I gotta do it. I gotta do work, and I gotta finish it.” Keeping that in mind, perseverance comes to be important.
Interview with Brenda Miller
Brenda Miller visited Rowland Hall on March 29, 2024. Miller is an author who has written many essays thus far such as A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form (2021) and Telephone (2021) in collaboration with author Julie Marie Wade along with her poetry chapbook The Daughters of Elderly Women (2020) which won the 2020 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. Miller has won six Pushcart Prizes and is currently a Professor of English at Western Washington University.
How do you find what you’re writing about?
iSpy was my latest collaboration. Starting with “iSpy with my little
eye” encourages us to pay attention to what we’re seeing in the world and also allows us to remember more. We go through our days, and so much is happening around us. There are hundreds of things that could stick in our memory, but only a couple of things do. I learned as a writer that if a thing is staying in my memory, there’s a reason for it, so I write it down and see if it goes anywhere. Half the time it doesn’t: half the time it does. It’s all just a practice of paying attention. Another way of thinking about getting started with writing is giving yourself some kind of container, or some kind of form to write in. When I first started writing for iSpy the draft of it was all one long sentence. Writing in one long sentence bypasses your censor and bypasses your intellectual mind because you have to keep writing.
How do you make your writing more interesting?
As you’re writing, you’re thinking, “What did I really see?” I’m thinking of details of the features, the shirt, right? And I might be kind of making it up, but there are little flashes of those details in my mind.
I’m always trying to bring in sensory details of the scene. Is there one detail that I can write that will bring life to the page? When you’re working with a form, you don’t want it to just be repetitive. Having images floating through the essay and echoing and coming back in different ways throughout our sections makes a segmented piece cohere a little more. What kind of effect does it have when an image needs to come back? It can become a formula or a trick that makes it overused, but formulas are there for a reason because they do work. Sometimes I switch the last paragraph and the first paragraph just to see what happens. You keep moving things around to see what happens, just keep things in flux until you have a deadline.
If you enjoy doing col- laborative work you should do it all the time, because it doesn’t have to be such a lonely act.
In the piece you read, Secret Machine, there’s an epigraph by a poet. How do you use epigraphs in your writing?
Just for help—when I’m on a writing retreat, where all I’m doing is reading and writing, that can be my practice to start my day writing; reading a few poems, and then lifting a couple of lines and putting that at the start of my own page and
writing from that. Whatever imagery, feeling, or idea is in those lines, I can go from there, responding to other writers. I find the blank page the hardest thing in the world, so anything you can do to not make that page blank is great.
How do you think writers can make personal narratives become something universally meaningful?
You move from the personal to the universal by expressing the experience as specifically as possible so your reader can take away something relevant to their own lives. Starting with something small usually leads to strong imagery, metaphors, and connections that you might not have thought of except when your hand is writing them down.
Interview with Lisa Bickmore
Utah’s Poet Laureate Lisa Bickmore came to Rowland Hall’s creative writing class in late January to talk to the students about poetry. Bickmore was born in Dover, Delaware, but she lived all over the United States and Japan throughout her childhood. She has published three books in verse: Haste , Flicker , and Ephemerist which are each widely esteemed, having won several awards including the 2014 Antivenom Prize. Her poem “Eidolon” was awarded the Ballymaloe International Poetry Award in 2015. Overall, her works have been published in several journals and reviews nationwide,
You will fail, you will write bad things, and bad things can teach you something about what’s right.
including Tar River Poetry , Sugar House Review , Hunger Mountain Review , and more. Bickmore received a B.A. and an M.A. from Brigham Young University, is Professor Emeritus of English at Salt Lake Community College, and is one of the founders of the SLCC Publication Center.
What counts as success in poetry?
I know poets for whom a book coming out is a giant, splashy thing, and people buy lots of copies and their press reprints and all of that. For lots of people, it’s not the case. In some way, you have to get your knowledge of how you’re doing in other ways. Part of the measure is just to keep going. Don’t stop; don’t stop writing. Have a capacious definition of what writing is because it’s not only typing. It’s paying attention. It’s thinking about a thing. It’s reading and keeping
track. Even buying vegetables and cooking your dinner can be writing too.
How do you balance your role as Poet Laureate with your personal creative endeavors?
It feels like my writing is a couple of notches behind on the to-do list, partly because of being the Poet Laureate, doing the work that I’m doing, and partly because I’m also an independent publisher of my work. I have a small press, and as it turns out, there’s a lot to do all the time. I have little scraps of poems that I’ve been working on. I have a ghost of an idea of what the manuscript might look like, emerging out of those scraps a handful of kind of finished poems. I take some things occasionally to my writing group, but I’m not writing.
It feels like this is a quiet gathering for me right now. It’s really easy to stay busy with all the other things that I’m doing that also feel like poetry to me. It’s not like one is poetry and one is not poetry.
One of the things about becoming Poet Laureate is that it’s a kind of giving back in a big way. For the duration of it, Paisley Rekdal (the previous Utah Poet Laureate) said that rather than thinking of it as an honor to yourself, it’s really more an act of public service. And that is how it has felt to me. It’s not that people don’t say nice things about you, and they
do. But really, it’s more about being with people as they are writing or becoming writers.
My project as Poet Laureate is to publish small chapbooks of writers around the state with the project funds that the state has set aside. I’m not the boss of poetry in Utah; I’m a person, I’m a poet, and I have this role for this time. So I’m trying to help give feedback that I think will help that is also respectful. I’m not in charge of poetry, and I’m certainly not the boss of disciplines. I’m using what I know as a poet to do that work, and it feels really good sharing the things that I know from having written all these years and had feedback and had some books published, and all of that gathers up in a way so that I can help other people.
How and why did you first get interested in poetry?
I was really little when I started loving poetry. I have a very distinct memory of a book that I got from the Weekly Reader book club, a collection of poems. My parents cleared out a lot of my childhood books so that they no longer existed in the family libraries. And so I couldn’t remember the title. All I can remember is that the cover was a little bit pink. I looked and looked and looked. And when I became more of a writer, I found it. I can remember the poems really well. I remember reading them as a child, connecting with the rhythmic sound of poetry as a child. Those poems were funny and light, but they
also had a slightly ecstatic quality like, isn’t the world amazing! As I got older, I had teachers who taught the kinds of poetic forms that they teach you when you’re young. And then I was really lucky to have high school teachers who liked poetry, so I read a lot of poetry in high school. And I know that when I got to university, that I was better prepared to write about and think about poetry than a lot of my very well-prepared fellow students because of that. I started writing more poems in high school and I had a, believe it or not, Mormon Sunday School teacher who could see that I was an outsider in my Mormon Sunday School cohort. Believe it or not, she asked me if I had read Gerard Manley Hopkins. I remember reading Frost and Dickinson to a certain extent, T. S. Eliot, Stevens and Williams. I had those resources to draw on.
By the time I left high school, I had determined, without knowing how this actually happens, that I would become a published poet. That was really important to me as I identified what I wanted for my future. So I kept writing poetry, and I
don’t know how good it was. I certainly got rejected a few times and wasn’t prepared to be rejected. I didn’t know how to handle it. That took a piece out of me, and I learned another life skill as a writer: how to have people tell you no and not let it become a dagger in your heart.
Do you ever feel like you’re too vulnerable in any of your poems? Or are there any poems that you write that you don’t publish because you feel like they’re too raw or close to you?
There are poems that you write because you need to write them, and they may not end up being a poem that is for everyone else. It may be something that you wrote to get you from one place to another place, that you’re a different person from having written that poem. What I want to do is recognize that poem and honor it for what I got out of writing it, what it revealed to me as I wrote it. What gets us started in poetry is often the sense that the genre allows us to feel in words and allows us access to our feelings. I would never disrespect that as a motive. It’s important to recognize all the other things that poetry can do, so the feeling becomes woven into an artifact that has all sorts of things going on. [Poetry] is not a shot of naked feeling but the feeling embodied in a piece of art you’ve made. You never want to lose the thing that makes you want to come to the page. You want to add up your understanding of your own art so that
you have a lot of things to draw on as you move through what brought you there in the first place.
Have you ever written a poem that has a secret message in it? Or an escape from what a poem is?
“Oh, I love that idea, an escape room.” There’s this Robert Frost poem, “We dance around in a ring, I suppose,/ but the secret sits in the middle and knows.” That’s lines from his poem called “The Secret Sits.” There’s this really powerful idea about poetry, that it wants to be difficult in order to hide what it’s doing from the reader. The thing about poetry now is that I want the reader to be with me when the poem happens to them and to feel invited by the poem to participate in the meaning-making. But it also does seem to be true that there are plenty of poems that you don’t want to say, that have a powerful urge to hide a thing or to not say it outright.
What topics and themes do you usually find yourself gravitating towards, both when reading other people’s poetry and writing your own?
The last handful of poems that I’ve written have been about illness and death. Because those are the things that are on my mind right now. Faith is another topic, but my poems aren’t usually directly about that. When you are creating your piece of writing, you situate the speaker in a specific place and time with bodily feelings, that allows the
reader to apprehend what you’re doing and feeling. It’s not like anybody has ever been a master of it either. You can look at your home and say, I need to put my body in a place. Trying to start from there, start from where I am and what I’m feeling in my body as I am feeling it or experiencing it is a really powerful motivator for me.
The world is big enough for different kinds of poets, and the world is big enough for more poems.
How many poems are there that you don’t like as much, compared to poems that you really love?
I write many, many, many more poems than the amount I end up feeling is good. Then there are poems that I write where I’m like, “This is a good poem, even though it hasn’t found its place yet.” I’ve written many poems that were vehicles to get me from one place to another, vehicles to help me learn something. That’s the other thing—you can’t be afraid of failing, you just cannot. I mean, I say that I’m not afraid of failing, which I am, but you have to talk yourself down from that because you will fail, you will write bad things, and bad things can teach you something about what’s right.
Tesserae Staff
Co-Editors-in-Chief
Gabriella Miranda
Nadia Scharfstein
Assistant Editors
Erika Prasthofer
Kendra Larson
Interview Editors
Chloe Vezina
Mina Granger
Grey Obermark
Hayden Thompson
Sofia Drakou
Editorial Staff
Alex Alfaro
Shaler Anderson
Bronwen Andrus
Eden August
Hans Baker
Lila Bates
Elliot Caulder
Isabel Himoff
Meredith Maloy
Elle Prasthofer
Gavin Schmidt
Ezra Storz
Submissions
We invite submissions from all students in the Rowland Hall Upper School. The editorial staff reviews submissions of art and literature, ranking each work according to aesthetic excellence. Works that receive the highest scores are included in the magazine.
Colophon
Editors have used InDesign for the layout. The cover of this book was printed on Sterline 80# dull cover with a floor dull UV coating. The body of the book was printed on sterling 80# dull text, 10% PCW. 400 books were printed.
Special thank you to mentors Joel Long and Rob Mellor for their invaluable artistic input and constant support.
