Susie Magazine • Issue 3 • C Y C L E

SUSIE Issue 3 • C Y C L E

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SUSIE

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E D I TO R ’ S L E T T E R When the Susie team sits down to toss back theme ideas, we usually find ourselves landing on fairly broad, grand words that hit particular political marks or cultural happenings surrounding us and our everyday lives. Our themes for Issues 1 and 2, Power and Build, felt sharp yet malleable, perhaps uplifting. There was something about the word ‘cycle’, however, that drew us in to reflect upon feelings of despair, discomfort, a powerlessness to the eventide of nature.

Our call for submissions quadrulpled for Issue 3. And while we jumped around with hearts in our eyes as the content numbers ticked up and up, we also felt an innate amount of pressure weighing down on us.

How could we accurately represent the theme cycle in its fullest? How can we round out all of the incredible stories that came to us from around the world? How do we lay down stories of survival, plotted in the chaos of these cycles that bind us?

We are all so singular on this journey of life.

Our history is not linear. What has kept bad habits circulating throughout our lifetime is up to us to destroy. We can choose to combat uneven, corrosive sequences with strengths that are sometimes waving at our surfaces, or sometimes pushed so far deep that it takes years of digging to pull out again.

Bench

SHELBI SCHROEDER

NORMA JEAN ORTEGA

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Bloody Belle

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ALEXIS LANZA

something is starting to settle over my head a wet rag fever dreams sharp thoughts and I can’t remember the things I think aloud to you at night there is a blunt in my mouth I am living in your skin

Cooperstown is ice around dried reeds the wind blows my ribs straight drip marks down the walls of my bathroom there is something wrong with my heart 12

your fridge is a very friendly place​, I say to you in the kitchen this is before my head begins to melt but I didn’t ask for it a list written on a pizza box for a weekend that didn’t come true anxiety breathes with its own lungs

all week we have been smiling into each other’s faces

the heart is something you heave today was swallowing a rock every hour but we have had such glorious days in the snow a winter has never felt like this your eyes in the kitchen when there’s snow outside more than 26 red- winged blackbirds come to visit what circle am I walking myself around in?

I remember my head in your lap at Pine Lake that was not the first time the sun had me flat on my back knowing you is a deep breath

regarding alarms: sometimes when they ring for long enough, one stops hearing them it’s when they’re no longer tugging at my follicles it’s the fever you hide in the yard let me down into your rabbit hole but never let me forget that it’s yours when you said _________, all the knives in my body froze and turned inward

the ladybugs at your house are asking me to save them

in March I ask what happened to my fire scars? in April I know

your driveway has felt like coming home since the first day

in April I learn your love is a gun in the closet

I think your toothbrush is suspicious of my suspicions

in May you make me leave and change the locks

the lime green tree has been lime green this entire time

in May I return to you in the green glass of Tuesday

descartes

M A D I S O N M OO R E 13

HANNA WELLISH

Maps Of The Harvest (Tumult)

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ALEIGHA K. SPINKS

Curation #3

I’m digging my way back into myself and it’s exactly as it sounds: bloody and depleting; as if I haven’t already known the true definition of tired. .

Everything is circular. Everything tastes chartreuse.

But starting a book never gets me off quite like finishing one. And I keep reminding myself that not all days are bad. There are some nights I’m able to sleep 5 hours.

And there are some days I’m able-minded enough to slither out of my front door. Those are the days I value most. .

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The craving for more constantly drives me. There is a feeling in the pit of my stomach which extends itself to the surface of my flesh and it grows and grows until it becomes all consuming. There is this booming voice that lives at the base of my skull that continuously reminds me that I am not living to my full potential. When she booms loud enough that she is undeniable, I purge all things that no longer serve me, including people.

Especially people. Until there is room for more.

There is no sanity here.

There is no sanctity here. .

What’s worse? Addiction to substance or addiction to pain?

They’re both equally bad for my teeth. .

I used to paint pictures with my body and dance entire ballets with my mind.

Both served me quite well.

Then you came along.

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I’ve been known to suck bones dry and pump out toxic words. You’ve been known to change the cosmos. I wonder how well we’d disagree. .

I am worth so much more than the time I’ve wasted on you. Yet, here I am again wasting precious breath.

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Are you sure you want to hang out? Because every time I’m around you, without fail, I become far less interesting and I don’t know why. That’s never happened to me before.

Do you fancy dark magic? .

I realize now that my biggest downfall is my innate ability to hold on to hope. I squeeze it. I pull at it. I scratch it. Even when unwarranted. .

Because she is my idea of any and every ultimate.

What type of woman actively tries to love less?

And I don’t know if I’m any good.

Me. I think I am that type.

Typecast. . .

The odds are stacked and not in my direction.

I grasp desperately to the little things that are said to me. “I’ve dated women.” “I couldn’t get you out of my head.” “Who are you? I love it.” These sentences may suffice merely as passing conversation. But, I think they serve as a way to pry me open and keep the air flowing. I know I’m hard to crack. But then things like “You have the most beautiful eyes” really catch me and snag. Suddenly I’m boneless. I’m without frame.

I’m a pile of flesh and nerve endings on the floor.

Suddenly I’m just a puddle of feeling.

Why listen? Why stay?

Because I yearn to know what it’s like to be wanted by someone I equally want.

What’s it like to be kissed by Hedylogos?

I did it. I put myself out there. Little by little; inch by inch. That’s how I’m going to win you over. I’m going to let you see me. All of me I’ve told myself (daily) for the past couple of months that self-love is what I need right now;; that I need to be my own primary partner. That I need to make myself swoon.

How can I find room to love me when I’m so full of you? Unhealthy.

These are unhealthy thoughts.

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.

Imagine a world in which I could purchase a backbone as easily as I could purchase a gun...

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2:32am Re-reading ‘Bluets’ by Maggie Nelson.

Weeping over someone I’ve never had.

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B R I T T N E Y C AT H E Y - A DA M S

breath

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H A N N A WA S H B U R N Phantom Limb

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permission ALYSSA HARDY

I am worthy I am worthy of love and respect I am worthy of being treated like a human being I am worthy of taking up space I am allowed to be proud of my accomplishments I am allowed to feel how I feel I am allowed to take care of myself I am allowed to say no I don’t have to give I don’t have to give up myself for someone else I don’t have to give up the things I like, just to make someone else happy I can take too Or I can just be I can be quiet I can be loud I can dance I can be still I can laugh I can scream I can take a deep breath I can be I am allowed to be I am allowed to be me

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FA B I E N N E E L I E

The Nothing Nothings Quite Like You.

H A N N A H R A E TAG G A R T

breath/notbreath

When you show the skies your silver belly they will call it surrender but I want you to call it sunshine. i want you weightless and with steady hands. the world is full of pills and powdered mirrors and you never stop spinningwe could count: eight more rounds of chemo eight rotations of the moon. you slide back and forth between breath/notbreath. an empty bench on the edge of a forest. a snow globe of not snow but yellow flower petals.

JESS WHITE

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bleach

30 NAILAH “BILLIE” FULLER

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AMINA HENRY

Lessons On Beauty

My

Jamaican mother is beautiful. We’re all weeds, whereas she, with her red lipstick and manicured nails and her fuck you, fuck everybody, I’m here to stay attitude was the fiercest dandelion I’ve ever seen. And my grandmother - she was pretty, too, in her gentle way.

Neither the Jamaican beauty of my mother or my grandmother translate well in photographs.

The women in my family are as round as bubbles. I am a bubble, like them. Bubbles are only fun in person; pictures of bubbles are just that, pictures.

I don’t speak Patois, even though it was spoken to me my whole life. My lips won’t make the beautiful bubble sounds.

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My grandmother tried to teach me how to be Jamaica beautiful, but I am an American, more American than Jamaican. I learned about beauty in the American way. As a child, I felt that being beautiful was some sort of action I could take. It was something in between look at me and I don’t give a fuck and catch me, I’m falling. Something in between long hair and short hair. It was deprivation. It was, I don’t need food, it means nothing to me, give me a cigarette and a coffee and a glass of wine and vodka if you have it. It was European. It was white. It was cold, like a winter in the English countryside. Though I always preferred the summer, the heat seeping into my skin.

Little girls shouldn’t listen in on grown people’s conversations. How could you let her get so fat? How could you? My father blamed my mother, but I felt the accusation. I kept eating peanut butter and cheese and potato chips.

I look like him, except that I’m short and shaped like a bubble.

I decide that beauty had something to do with shame. It was the right amount of special sauce to be put in at the right time. Don’t eat that. Do. Not. Eat. That. I didn’t have the right amount.

Before I understood shame, I spent shameless summers with my grandparents in their beautiful house. I enjoyed the simplicity of those summers, of being loved. I ran around the side of the house to the back. There were roses in the yard. A clothesline, two clotheslines.

Sometimes I poked my face through the bush separating our house from the neighbor’s

house, peeking at the boy I was in love with. He hung around his yard without a shirt on and so did his brother. Sometimes I ran down the hill that served as a barrier between us and our other neighbor. This neighbor had a lot of cats, many of whom lay outside on the lawn. I hovered around cat city. Sometimes I walked to the nearby plaza. I went to the chicken place or the Chinese food place or the supermarket or the convenience store. At the convenience store I would buy chips.

At night, my grandparents were toothless monsters. Both of them, my grandpa and my grandma, took out their teeth at bedtime; a shared indignity. The teeth sat in separate glasses, soaking in water, smiling. I was only slightly repulsed, mostly fascinated. I assumed that when I was old I would be able to look at my own teeth through a glass. Summers, at night, I lay in between them on the bed, my grandma a soft mountain, my grandpa, a windy road.

I was there the night my grandfather’s legs stopped working, laying in my usual spot in the middle of the bed. They took him to the hospital before dawn and when the sun rose, everything was the same, but different.

Hospital waiting rooms never have good magazines. If there was one lying around, a Cosmopolitan or a Marie Claire or a Vogue, I read it over and over again, learning how to be beautiful, learning about shame as the weird hospital smell made my nose tingle. Lose 10 Pounds in 10 Days. Stomach Exercises That Will Change Your Life. Healthy Snacks.

I know that I am not beautiful in the American way. I learned that in a hospital waiting room.

Is grandpa dying?

Yes. But he didn’t die, not for a few years. Three years. Definitely not five years.

Back at my grandparents’ home, the house underwent a transformation. No longer was it an American house with a separate dining room and an office off the dining room. It became a Jamaican house, repurposed, strange. The dining room became grandpa’s bedroom, filled with a hospital-sized bed, bedpans and a chair. The dining room table was thrown away. His office was converted into a bathroom. The front sitting room became my grandmother’s bedroom. I shuffled between the two bedrooms, watching wrestling with grandma on her little TV and then watching wrestling with grandpa on his bigger TV. Eventually we all moved in – me, my mother, my little brother, my uncle and his various girlfriends, my mother’s various boyfriends as well. I was 12. As I was changing, the house changed. I became rounder, stranger. My mother claimed the upstairs rooms for us. One of the bathrooms was converted into a small kitchen. Many nights I stayed up killing roaches in that kitchen. What was once my grandparents’ bedroom became a living room. There was still a deck off this bedroom, now-living room, and I still went out on it. Sometimes in the evenings I would go out on the deck and look at lightning bugs. I thought about things out there - my family of balloon women, our stick figure men, the way we all loved each other

clumsily, fiercely, shamefully, casually, irritably, constantly. Thinking about my father made my face feel tight and so I didn’t think about him. I pushed my father off the deck roof and he was gone. Poof.

In this house with the converted rooms and the rosebush still outside, the tired clotheslines, the makeshift everything, I watched grandpa die in between episodes of tv shows.

Sometimes I came home and tried to sneak past the dining bedroom so that I wouldn’t have to say hello. Sometimes I’d climb onto the bed with him and stay for a bit, hoping the sheets were dry, hoping there wouldn’t be a smell, loving him awkwardly, as much as I knew how to.

My grandpa and my mother never seemed to like each other. The circled each other like cats, glaring. He’d been hard on her in Jamaica and she never forgave him. He criticized her constantly. He frowned; he did not approve. Yet my mother moved in before my uncle after grandpa’s legs stopped working. I don’t think it was because my mother had declared bankruptcy and needed to save money. I think she wanted to be there. We were all there to witness the slow and ugly thing that was death. My grandma kept the simmering fights from turning into outright war. While grandma puttered around the house, my mother and I fought in our own way. She, defiant, me, sullen. It was not a good day when my mother’s boyfriend moved in with us upstairs.

I have other memories from my time in the house, but they are whispers now and too soft to hear clearly.

So, beauty. It may be something that you do in addition to it being something that you are.

What can I do? What should I do? Eat more protein. Exercise more. Drink more water. Drink a gallon of water a day. Will it make my father love me? Will he remember me if I do that?

My mother was with my grandpa when he died. He loved her, his fierce fuck you daughter. I know my grandpa loved her. Maybe that’s it, the special sauce. My mother always knew that she was loved, she knew. So maybe beauty isn’t an act – maybe it’s a feeling.

I don’t live in that house anymore and my family is scattered around America like bubbles.

Barren

F R A N K L OC K E 35

H A N N A H CO L E M O N

Sunday

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E M M A S H AC H AT Discard

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SAD

The sun falls on my face In the afternoon In autumn the love changes with the leaves Growing darker, but clinging to hope Beauty still grasps in the glow The sun doesn’t fall on my face In the night Winter brings cold and callous Clouds and chills pave my way I’ve lost you through the earth’s tilt

C AT R I O N A M O R TO N

The sun falls on my face In the morning The summer softness caressing Pinkish hews and long eves The darkness just below the horizon

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K A R I PAU L

biopolar triptych

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Donuts

J E S S I C A P E T T WAY

WENDY KVECK

Mad Woman

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Ode To A Crumbling Statue KERRI SIMMONS

Alternatively this text is aligned to the right As a nod to those in a justified plight Where the justified righteous now looks like blight Oh poor man, the justified white

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Aligned to the left’s a little too nice Tears fall like snow but harden to ice As long as they’ve got their guns and their Christ Their walls and their laws their crutch and their vice

Dog Whistle (Consort) LANCE SMITH

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B R OO K E G O L D M A N

Ethel

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E M M A L Y N S U L L I VA N

H AY L E E M I L L I K I N

IUD: Year Four

I c a n ’ t t e l l i f i t ’ s spring o r j u s t P M S

no signs of the season

no browning in the Fall

no blood.

S t i l l — s t i l l — l i f e .

Peaches ripening,

falling away from pit

roof of mouth stinging, f i n g e r s s t i c k y , l u s t .

I signed up for no possibilities

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but god do I want a reminder

that actions bear consequences

for nine long months.

IUDs

K AT R I N A M A J U K U T 57

ELIANA CARTER

Dungeness Crab

grandma cooks gumbo on the stove, big pot boiling dungeness crab swam in west coast waters Washington water bottoms delicacy on our east coast tongues

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back before we came, grandma cooked blue crab brought in to Baton Rouge, Louisiana low voltage crab crawl sassafras, okra, celery stock in this blue house, where wallpaper crawls off walls and lemon trees live outside live bright yellow lemons a small front lawn and snail bed driveway back before I came, grandpa rode his bike down this street cigar smoke on his neck now it’s hung up in the shed like an offering

I am the youngest baby on blue carpet living room floor TV antenna eyes and standing lamp dancing in my orange slice dress and flower clips hung on ends of braids that click together as I jump from chair to couch while the adults laugh chat in the kitchen they watch as grandma stirs the pot they say someday I’ll be just like her cooking my grandma’s secret ingredients and dungeness crab in a little blue house where palm trees grow we sit around the kitchen table crab crackers, pick teeth bite and broth hot on our breath little blue house our second home west coast wind chime sun peeks through white doily curtain the smell of gumbo on the stove laughter in the neighboring room

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PAU L A PA R T

Ripple Shell

V I K TO R S H A U L I YA N OVA _ Invisibility

Grow Out Every Angle of Hidden Hair

she came into the kitchen and performed this ritual one could hear the limbs overlap or was that the highway speaking over us

S AVA N N A H H A M P TO N

resist being smooth

on the corner where she lives, there are four houses and a pine tree dear, rest your commas here, it says like a sort of breathing out the excess there was nowhere to go but under those shards of light “laughter is one of the most intimate things” pulling his face under the body of the fruit, floating in bath water “we collected in the footprints of animals…is this where we’re headed?”

you look like you might weep so they hold a jar beneath your eye faucet

keep making these grandiose efforts towards emotion or eroticism am i

learning anything or just trying to feel less?

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SARA R. RADIN

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74 ELLIE LEE

Purple Cow EMILY SHIH

i’d write myself into the stars and let the moon keep me awake all night but maybe our vision doesn’t reach that far with the street lamps and strobe lights they think i’d taste of blackberries and cream but white chocolate kisses are never what they seem it’s hard to swallow, i might be something else somehow but what flavor would that be? purple cow

with chords Dm7 G7 i’d write myself into the stars

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CM7 E7 Dm7 and let the moon keep me awake all night

G7 CM7 E7 but maybe our vision doesn’t reach that far

Am Dm7 - G7 with the street lamps and strobe lights CM7 D G they think i’d taste of blackberries and cream CM7 D G7 E7 but white chocolate kisses are never what they seem CM7

D G7 E7 it’s hard to swallow, i might be something else somehow CM7 D Dsus4 but what flavor would that be? purple cow

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K R I S TA R AY broken

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Issue 3 • C Y C L E

Winter 2019 susiemagazine.tumblr.com instagram.com/susiemagazine facebook.com/susiemagazine

Cover Image: Lucy Black, The Plant and I Inside Front Cover: Gabrielle Humphrey, Flower Series Inside Back Cover: Gabrielle Humphrey, Flower Series page 24: Celeste Ortiz, Garlic Blooming page 38: Holly Lay, Diamonds page 44: Moomal Shekhawat, nothing essential changes

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Susie Magazine is a creative print publication that presents cutting-edge interdisciplinary work. We create an equal platform to highlight, empower, and amplify women, trans, and non-binary voices that are traditionally ignored in mainstream media.

Interested in contributing to our next issue?

Email us at susiemagz@gmail.com.

Copyright 2019.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission.

Printed in Brooklyn, New York by Rolling Press Inc.

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