21
SINK HOLLOW
From the Editor
Dear Reader,
Perhaps more than ever, it seems that we have found ourselves in a season of questions— the sort of questions that, abstract in their refusal, dissolve in the palm and slip like grease and water through the fingers before they are formed. They congeal too far from us, too dear to us, to be picked up again whole.
Our selected artists and poets are certainly asking such questions.
Cadence Zaccardi’s artworks ask about and by means of carefully dissected bodies and their biological relations with the uncaring structures that surround them—Sahar Choudhury’s material-bound “Victual,” which exposes the mundane and worldly as transcending yet effectively untranscendable, feels like a natural companion, and S.J. Sampaloc’s deceptively simple amalgam of flora and fauna defies the seasons, those eternal entities once beyond human reach but now stained by the perverse pus of Man.
In queries of time and family, Emily Jensen undermines the supposed regularity and comfort of daily objects and places of memory—so too does poet Annie Bonnett, in a poem that relates humans to objects and back again, their forms subsumed by function, distanced from their humanity with questionable consent. In the work of artist Amanda Coburn, the wonder and disillusion of technology and “advancement” contradistincts itself with Madison Ditzler’s inquiry into more earthly analogues. Harper Miller plumbs historical scenes to investigate vestigial evidence in modern realities, as Anna Lisa sees her personal histories juxtaposed neatly against mountains and streams of hardship.
But deep in the sufferings of these pieces, there seems yet to be the scratching sound of rapidly growing weeds: the human spirit denying its own death with soiled tones that somehow resist their absorption in shock and their reduction in complacence.
Please join us in our unyielding search for answers unattainable—descend with us into Sink Hollow.
May your gods bless you and keep you, Zack Baker
Implode Cadence Zaccardi
A Night Out
Emily Jensen
Fashion
Selen Frantz
verb (1):
Needles between stratified fingers, under and over and under and over, slipping wrapping, pulling.
A flash of steel–the softest bullet.
Braiding the colorful roots of linearity into a multiplied dimension and the embrace of their polyester, pilled limbs.
noun (2):
Something to be held; to be labored for; to be soft against the dry air and the clink of metal against metal against a body.
The thin layer of paint over a carbon machine. feeling its rhythm in your every fiber.
Annual Melt S.J. Sampaloc
Bears sprout from thawed dens with orchids and oleanders growing from their backs.
Trees croon in green radiance; their tongues glow in vicious splendor
Birds swarm northward, all their beaks are lined with fangs.
Snow carcasses litter the forest floor; dirt relishes this opportunity.
Spring gorges itself on the blood of Winter.
Garden
Emily Jensen
my oak tree wrings its mother-hands
Madison Ditzler
the oak tree outside my window stretches its ravined limbs in a yawn. waking for me its sun-speckled leaves brush the glass pane, playful, a child clasping its hands around a lightning bug hope hands, full of me the faint glow left of my soul i’ve scattered as thoughtful as an indifferent father. a little in every lover, a crumb for the mouse i wouldn’t evict,a scrap flung like litter from a speeding car it danced, weightless before its highway fate the oak saves a piece, knowing i will fray— a grandmother’s favorite quilt lost to time —holds my hope in spite of knowledge crackling like my skin
in the blue winter morning from my porch i greet the uncurtained dawn with a hum i stole from the light— gave it away freely as the oak’s devotion and for it, i live holding envy in its earth kinship, how the oak belongs. want is amber a sparkling, pulling thing if only i had its roots if only i knew my name
Attention Economy Amanda Coburn
Self Portrait as Mountainside Erosion
Anna Lisa
He loves every fatal slip intoxicating edges carved from glacial shoulder grind. If he knew better he would never have touched me in the first place. When the snow thaws, rivulets carve another canyon. Switchbacks shifting the landscape, mapping my descent in vulnerable boulders and rainfall. I will bury him, fill his lungs with riverbed sediment, crush him in a landslide where he thought he had footing. He cannot hold what is always slipping away.
Flocking
Anna Lisa
After Lisa Fay Coutley
1.
I chase geese after midnight, their long necks limp. If I cup my hand I could call to them, winged V to my mouth, mistake me for a lover or a child. I will lower my guns, never once fired, never once killed, any death not my wish, my voice still lingering in the chill, by sunrise I go north.
2.
To a home without mother or father. I turn twenty two, and celebrate with broken sobriety. My half-brothers hunt all the geese I’d given my last name to. I bury life insurance checks in the backyard and mark the graves with bottles. Finally firing a shot into the Earth, so I can say I knew she was bleeding.
Road to Dawson Harper Milller
Tallow Light Harper Miller
Rotting Further Cadence Zaccardi
Victual Sahar Choudhury
It’s too late — I have seen you when you thought yourself unwatched hunched, plastic fork plunging into limp greens, tines broken off in your red mouth, spat out like fishbones, never slowing down, head ducked like feeding left you exposed. I’m on to you, the hunger you hide. Passed some pulp driving to work, white-black
coat still lovely, blood bright against the asphalt. Sliced up strawberries in chia pudding. Blinked and pictured you crouched over the kill. Funny language, isn’t it, that permits kill
to sum the still-cooling life in that little body, say You are what I have done to you.
ode to a doorstop
Annie Bonnett
the lowly doorstop in his buttoned wool coat, white-gloved, beckons with wide arms.
we tower over his close-cropped curls, forget to look down dragging gray sludge, green salt. he greets turned backs, wet shoes.
dwarfed by cockroaches and mice. tonight, his mother will adjust his collar, rebuild his valor. this little Atlas, his small chivalry.
Waiting in Time
Emily Jensen
Contributor Bios
Annie Bonnett is an undergraduate student at Purdue University studying literature, creative writing, and history. She loves local bookstores and has a fraught yet loving history with the color pink. She has been published in The Bell Tower.
Sahar Choudhury is a Bangladeshi-American poet and undergraduate student at George Mason University. Sahar is the winner of the LCPL Poetry Contest, the NEHS Flash Fiction Challenge (twice), and the Dandelion Press Micro-Fiction Contest. It would appear they are a bit of a contest fiend.
Amanda Coburn is a TRIO McNair Scholar working towards her Honors Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Art with minors in art history and history from Idaho State University. She uses critical theory and intersectional feminism to create artworks that study the effects of power.
Madison Ditzler is a poet from Missouri Southern State University with a B.S. in Professional Writing, B.S. in Literary Studies, and Creative Writing Certificate. Since Fall ‘23, she has served as an editor for MSSU’s Literary Magazine, bordertown. Her work crafts a body shown to endure, haunted by thirst. When Madison isn’t writing, she’s reading by the water or singing at concerts with friends.
Selen Frantz is an urban planner from Detroit and is currently the William T. Battrick Poetry Fellow at Oberlin College. Her work has appeared in Lucky Jefferson, BarBar, Meniscus, Belt Magazine, Heimat Review and elsewhere.
Emily Jensen is an undergraduate student at Northern State University, SD. She is majoring in Studio Art with an emphasis in Interdisciplinary Studies, allowing her to highlight her newfound explorations of time and how it interacts with human experiences.
Anna Lisa is currently pursuing a BFA in creative writing at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Sink Hollow Literary Magazine, Prairie Margins, and Glass Mountain Magazine. Her writing explores grief through the lens of the midwestern landscape.
Harper Miller is an undergraduate student specializing in animation and interactive design at East Carolina University. He enjoys exploring historical settings and museums which inspire the subject matter within his works.
S.J. Sampaloc is an undergraduate studying creative writing and technical communications at Eastern Washington University. He is queer, writer of color who enjoys sweet treats and new tattoos.
Cadence ‘Cadie’ Zaccardi is currently an undergraduate student at ECU, working towards a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with an intended double emphasis in painting and illustration. She is currently based in Greenville, North Carolina, U.S. She mainly paints and draws, painting with acrylic and sometimes digitally, using procreate. Her art typically depicts humanoid forms or feminine subjects placed against fluorescent colors and anatomical imagery. Her current conceptual focus is on self-perception, specifically in the context of femininity and the female experience. She leans into the distortion and horror that self-perception can cause and how it affects how one sees the world around them.
Staff Editor-in-Chief
Zack Baker
Managing Editor
Chloe Scheve
Poetry Genre Co-Editors
Indigo Aves
Brook Haight
Poetry Readers
Brady Parsons
Gabby Stone
Janna Nitchman
Kat Fletcher
Samantha Hopkins
Sonora Lee
Kamryn Corbett
Emmalynn Erard
Nonfiction Genre Editor
Ella Unguren
Nonfiction Readers
Dhanai Anthimidou-Friel
Woodrow Walters
Cody Powell
Eliza Oscarson
Kayleigh Kearsley
Malorie Ellefson
Sadie Olsen
Tessa Weyand
Yasamin Osqueezadeh
Fiction Genre Co-Editors
Bee Pickering
Brooklyn Hibshman
Fiction Readers
Abby Huber
Ara Jensen
Baden Chipping
Elizabeth Lindeman
Ellie Carlson
Jake Casper
Jess Lindhardt
John Hall
Mia Nielsen
Mikkel Ohene-Opare
Aimee Hamblin
Design Managing Editor
Amelie Haymond
Faculty Advisors
Ashley Wells
Charles Waugh
Robb Kunz
Russ Beck
Veiled Cadence Zaccardi