FLASH Literary Magazine: The Blake School 2017

FLASH 2017

FLASH Spring 2017 The Blake School Literary and Visual Arts Magazine Minneapolis, MN To see last years archive, please visit: flashlamagazine.weebly.com

Flash Staff Editors-In-Chief C.C. Lucas Katerina Papanikolopoulos Maya Chadda Ruby McCallum Contributing Editors Arden Shannon Bea Buckly Emma Owens Emma Swenson Hanna Filby Jade Sund Kate Jolly Lauren Cameron Lexie Dietz Sidney Liu William Lyman Yeukai Zimbwa Faculty Advisor Elizabeth Flinsch Cover Image by Kate Jolly

Table of Contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Author

Title

Ruby McCallum Sneha Sinha Esha Aggarwal Ellie Oxford Ryan Whitney Belem Gomez Vega Gabby Bean Ava Christie Sophia Consentino Samantha Pohlen Phoebe Fechtmeyer Hussein Barakat Libby Rickemean Jack Owens Caroline Cameron Thomas Washington Ruby McCallum

Lady Yellow and The Bell Tower Untitled Untitled Untitled Untitled Undone But Darling it Was Only 70% Off! The Nest Raindrops Pain Behind Rain Sunflower Home Tree of Libby Jobs Something More My Face Figure Study #3

Table of Contents 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Author

Title

Ashley Allen KK Haug Emma Burke Chriss Gill Parker Haselhorst Emma Burke Joe Mairs Rachel Sigel Lucy Graham Gabby Monahan Emma Swenson Emma Swenson Emma Swenson Justin Gainsley Katerina Papanikolop.

Katerina Papanikolop.

Anonymous Chloe Countryman Maya Chadda Maya Chadda Annika Gutzke Gavin Best Annabel Chase Annika Gutzke

Untitled Untitled Searching for Snow Caps Second Church of Minora Untitled Untitled Africa Lost in The Box Golden Gate Bridge Sprinkles of Summer Glass Blooming Out of Darkness Cold Branches Auschwitz The Landscape of Females The Renegade of Culture A New Blue Louise Locker Room Talk Watched Birth of Science Untitled Boston Time Stood Still

Author 42 43 44 45 49 51 52 53 54 55 59 60 61 64 66 67

Jackson Hubler Audrey Lothenback Cheryl Minde Kate Jolly Ben Lee Katerina Papanikolop.

Katerina Papanikolop.

Yeukai Zimbwa William Lyman Katerina Papanikolop.

William Lyman Yeukai Zimbwa William Lyman Katerina Papanikolop.

Anonymous Katerina Papanikolop.

Title Hands Tied Night Tree Headlights Vintage Seplophobia: Fear of Decaying Matter Little Heron The Marshmallow This Windy City The Hologram The Spanish Painter Theophobia- Fear of God Untitled The Void.

Kate Chopin Extension Spectral The Nervous System

ART

Lady Yellow and the Bell Tower Ruby McCallum

1

Untitled Sneha Sinha

2

Untitled

Untitled

Esha Aggarwal

Elie Oxford

3

4

Untitled

Undone

Ryan Whitney

Belem Gomez Vega

5

6

But darling it was only 70% off!

The Nest

Gabby Bean

Ava Christie

7

8

Raindrops Sophia Consentino

9

Pain Behind Rain Samantha Pohlen

10

Sunflower

Phoebe Fechtmeyer

11

Home

Huss Barakat

12

Tree of Libby Libby Rickeman

13

Jobs Jack Owens

14

Something More Caroline Cameron

15

My Face Thomas Washington

16

Figure Study #3

Untitled

Ruby McCallum

Ashley Allen

17

18

Untitled KK Haug

19

Searching for snowcaps Emma Burke

20

Second Church of minora Chris Gill

21

Untitled Parker Haselhorst

22

Untitled Emma Burke

23

Africa

Joe Mairs

24

Lost in the Box Rachel Sigel

25

Golden Gate Bridge

Lucy Graham

26

Sprinkles of Summer Gabby Monahan

27

Glass

Emma Swenson

28

Cold Branches

Blooming Out of Darkness Emma Swenson

29

Emma Swenson

30

Auschwitz Justin Gainsley

31

The Landscape of Females

Katerina Papanikolopoulos

32

The Renegade of Culture

Katerina Papanikolopoulos

33

A New Blue Anonymous

34

Louise Chloe Countryman

35

Locker Room Talk Maya Chadda

36

Watched Maya Chadda

37

Birth of Science Annika Gutzke

38

Untitled Gavin Best

39

Boston Annabel Chase

40

Time Stood Still Annika Gutzke

41

Hands Tied Jackson Hubler

42

Night Tree Audrey Lothenbach

43

Headlights Cheryl Minde

44

Vintage Kate Jolly

45

46

“ I remember this road: the way voices can make a body feel so foreign “

LITERATURE

Yeukai Zimbwa

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48

Seplophobia: Fear of Decaying Matter Ben Lee Here lies the biologist tangled in a thin soup of brittle wood and kidneys.

Tissues of white descend upon a wall plastered with brains next to scribbled chalk on dust.

Stay, but don’t look at her too closely now, for every cell has run away; deeper you will not find her duplications, her malignancies.

that you don’t know how to differentiate between the gravity of an artery and a vein. But, understand that you might never be able to explain why her heart has stopped beating, and why her liver continues to blush. Please don’t leave a set of tired thighs and shoulders, bracing a shatterproof corpse in chaos.

Touch your palm to her shoulder and peel away films of her buttery blouse. Hear the beat of a pulse without blood, and sift through ossified organs, like the cockroaches that guard her pedestal. You hold her saintly lung in your right hand, while balancing a gall between your feet. You inhale the cavity of violet mysteries, and feel the ecstasy of warm atoms rising from frosted insincerities.

And you wonder just how to stare at someone who has no eyes. Take hold of a yawning drawer of tools like it’s a gift you never wanted, and begin to piece her back together.

Fold her shaven ribs beneath her breast and watch as she appears to stand taller. She is a motley puzzle with missing scraps strewn among her glass gore.

You reach across an atrium to a chemist with grayly torched test tubes, resentful towards the smiling botanist.

As you thread shriveled capillaries you start to realize

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50

Little Heron

The Marshmallow

Katerina Papanikolopoulos

Katerina Papanikolopoulos

Little Heron In my palm, your wings cannot extend, they merely go limp: broken, the entrails show.

Little Heron In my breasts of maple, you become stuck Disfigured; ampally bruised.

Little Heron, I press one firm elbow of pine against the soft curvature of your back, And smell your scent come unto mine, A sore, sweaty scent of melting bones dried blood.

And the pungent spice of crinkling needles Burning, burning, fuming-My sweater of elm piling against your beak, The soft fibers wasting away into the atmosphere of feathers and cashmere that all too well, once thought highly of your aching cries.

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I forgot to tell you of the Muslim woman who came without acknowledged entry into the wood-laden fixtures of this place, this school.

She was tyrannically simple, burdened, in need of articulation But I acquired a mouth and she spoke the words I had not yet dared to answer.

“What is the diversity like here?”

Heaven knows, I’m not American. Nor Greek, nor Cypriot, nor fleetingly European, but simple too.

A mixture, a confiscated, hybrid of trial.

But she persisted: “What is the diversity like here?”

I shifted to hospitality,

“Would you like a s’more?”

Oh hell, I knew better. I had an inclination to stop the movement of the child’s arm, but I hesitated.

Gelatin, jelly: not what I was thinking.

Child spat out in sacrilegious heartache, oh god, it happened.

I cracked, head up, internally arched and ran like a preacher after his sins (an internal affair, to be true, I but gaped opened my eyes and stuttered). No Muslim can eat Gelatin and leave an unmarked soul.

The act of giving failed me like a lost kitten, plagued of some words to hook unto--mouth dry, foreign.

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The Hologram

this windy city

William Lyman

Yeukai Zimbwa

i remember this room: the cracked paint sidewalk walls holding the scent of a birthplace that could’ve been mine, the round womb chandeliers & the yearn to retie cut chords

They said he was crazy.

They mocked the way he moved through the air, Endlessly surrendering himself to nothing.

A pixelated reality, An idea.

He was in love with a hologram.

i remember this road: the way voices can make a body feel so foreign, the way /the man/ baptizes himself priest, so he can make his gentrification holy, the way we will always be soldiers trudging along to the beat of his breath

On crisp Thursday afternoons he would take to the streets, Holding on to the faint projection of a life created in the vitiated reality.

One that made each mind believe it was special, That is was destined for something other than spent dreams and empty epiphanies.

Leading the blind down dark hallways into dark places.

Enveloping a soul with love for a thought that holds no hope of coming to fruition.

i remember this bridge: red-rimmed and rusted i remember this wind, and the way feathers tend to become such lonely beings

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They said he was crazy.

But deep down, Hopelessly unfurled within himself, I think he knew.

He knew the hallways were void of light.

He knew of the emptiness.

He knew of the conformity everyone had thought to be a hologram.

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The Spanish Painter Katerina Papanikolopoulos The Spanish painter had dark, cracked hands that were not dull from age, but rather sculpted. His mouth was as slick as the curve of a bronze handle, tapered at the edges. Tormented but subtle, his eyes caught the light just before the nurse pulled the curtain. He had the very complexion of a man gone mad, yet it is quite common for men of his industry to have gone through the mill of life only to pursue the restlessness within it. As a father, he was known for abandonment. As a son, he was known for his disagreeable manner. As a child, he was pardoned for his entry into America as a lone visitor, the son of a silversmith who had sent him to work. Within his pocket, he kept a tiny silver statue of a man on a dolphin--a gifted remnant of his father. He had but himself, and that for a painter, suffices only to a singular series of compositions: self portraiture. With no prodigee, none to record and continue his mastery, Rícardo had created over 200 self-portraits, some of clay, some of tin, wax, earth, and sky-blue artifice. In every composition, he could see himself laughing. Within his portraits, there were collarbones missing, arms adrift in white poppies, knees that seemed buckled under heavy bed sheets. Yet, in all of these ruminations of the moment, Rícardo had found himself a hypocrite to his studies. He never drew his scars, the red dots that marked a plain, radiant poppy, the fabric tag under the sheets that very well showed they were not egyptian cotton, but rather plastic. He lived in proximity to his imagination: everything a mortal disguise made to seem immaculate.

“There is a thread, see, that ties the men to their wishes, the women to their ashes. This is what the sculptor deals with, the stunning array of pulp that comes from a dry plate of clay to become a statue. Here is the earth I had promised to save. But there is no saving in art, there are only digressions from the known. Re-cycling, to be exact”.

(Rícardo Heilnér)

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These are the words that mark the introduction of his autobiography, “Rícardo Heilnér: A Statue of Transition”. In July 1999, Winona Pirelli, an art critic, had conducted a series of interviews with Mr. Heilnér before his death. A woman that had never touched clay in her life was astounded to see the working hands of a dying man. Here is what Ms. Pirelli has come to know of an artist gone by: “Mr. Heilnér, I am Ms. Pirelli. Is it possible to share a few moments with you?”

“Hello, Winona. Call me Rícardo, it will make both you and I feel younger,” he said pulsing, clutching his knee, staring at her purple iris pin that seemed ancient.

“Yes, no worries, Rícardo.” She could not roll her r’s. Rícardo profusely liked the American charm. “I have collected clippings of your work from certain publications.” Fumbling through her journals, a museum guide fell to floor. She hastily threw it on the table: “Can you please speak of your sculpture La Perla?”

“You know kid, everyone seems to rapture in that sculpture. You can almost feel the bareness of it, the pulsations of its heart. I did not know if I wanted to burn that sculpture, or if I wanted to hang it over my child’s crib. It was a fearless...one moment.. Ms.Perilla, can you please bring me some water?”

WP: “ Of course, sir” WP: I remember he spoke like any woman would want to be spoken to. Rhythmically, timely, alertly.

Even in his dying breath, the artist showed life through his adoration of his art. He took a great gulp, and when I knew he was done, I progressed, only inching towards the true question that lay on my lips.

“Rícardo” she paused. “The cigarette butt... your assistant… I suppose... placed it on the armoire… I mean… I haven’t heard you to be a smoker.”

“Really what you think? There are fools, and then there are splendid fools. A dying man has no use

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for his lungs, I smoke out of pity, not amusement.”

“I see sir, but truly, there is such a suffocating cloud in here. Back to “La Perla,” how can you still be so haughty in your work at such an old age? Do you remember the body, as if it were young?”

“You don’t forget the body Winona. It is not possible. You may forget your mother and father, your language, your mind, but the body is always there. A one, cylindrical, curved out shape that we carry with us. That is why in my ceramics I can hold the very bottle, and know it is like I am holding a duck, a woman, clay. When I paint, I begin to forget the form and focus on the surface: the skin. The most tortured part of the body--constantly aching for something. When I was little, my mother… she used to take me down to Fuerteventura and bathe me in the sea coves that were home to little anemones, little starfish. There was one kind of shell, that if you placed it on your skin she told me, I would begin to be like a pearl. I never believed her exactly, but I did find it, the shell, and she was awfully correct, eventually. It was an ugly, rather dull hell of a shell but its insides were radiant. “La Perla” is of a woman upright, looking out towards the horizon, with a broken hand. She is polished with this shell, see here?” He held up one of those shells with a rough epidermis, the type that curves twice in your arms because it hurts to hold it. She’s quite the ‘looker’ don’t you think? Really, she is so… perfumed.”

“Perfumed?”

“All ceramics, paints, and arts are perfumed. The artist is a confused liar if they tell you that their pieces alert one’s sole singular sense-- for sight is temporary. Smell, lasting smell, is eternal. The dust, the mere heart of it all, is what becomes remembered. Not the colors, nor the frame.

“Rícardo, when were you diagnosed?”

“Too long ago, Ms. Pirelli. Last April.”

“Do you remember the date?”

“My God, Winona!” He got up erratically from his love chair. Fumbling to the kitchenette, he pulled out a ceramic dish with a great April 17th, 2008 plastered upon the center, the edges of the inscribed script curling in. “Here it is! Right damn, smack in the middle of it all! I have made even my grave to be of my suiting. Ceramic plate with a blue pipette turning all the corners. Imagine that!

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A pretty grave Winona, a pretty grave!”

“ I am sorry sir, I am sorry, I didn’t mean....”

“Stop it, everyone means what they say, what they make, what they create. If it weren’t for all the drugs that plague this industry, everyone would know that this madness is artistically genetic - we are all bound to this state of hyper analysis for God’s sake, hyper creation.”

“Sir...”

“And so be it with this long-john talking mouth of yours! I am tired, awfully tired at that... and so damn fragile. You make ceramics thinking that only the pieces are fragile, but God-dammit, the artisté is already damaged - already cracked, already broken all the way through!”

End.

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Untitled

Theophobia - Fear of God

Yeukai Zimbwa

William Lyman

My eyes have bared witness to the worst bearings of human existence, yet still I have never seen a soul so irrevocable as the light that dims within the walls of your chest.

Surrounded by heaps of tissue, tumbling in on each other and tumultuating the silent weep I hear behind your words.

I hope the god you scream at is the god that wishes the best for you.

I wish a conclusion could be drawn from the remnants of your aspirations and the dreams that you would rise above those who gained from your fall.

But the sweeping force of exiled presage rejects the need to be more than you can imagine as foolishness, such as that you see in the faces of believers, and of worshippers who get on their knees only to be brought down to the same position from the cruelty of aimless affliction.

I see the bravery behind your nights of endless suffering, and your mornings of inhibited obliteration.

I know you fear nothing, because you have felt the worst.

I know you see only illusion in the face of god.

I know you have lived to lose, and have nothing left to give.

Within the pain of inadequacy lies a need for freedom.

All bleeding must subside eventually.

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To be both loud and woman is to take up too much space, is to be angry, to be bitch, is to be the one who makes the air around the men fidget, to have a voice too often.

To be both loud and black woman is to be forgotten backbone: crown mistaken for mess that sits like a welcome mat for white footprints, hips carved out for carrying colonists’ power, white man’s shadow, basket weaver, strange fruit collector & the silence after the bullet.

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The Void.

William Lyman Footsteps cladder the beaten floor Flooding my ears with the sounds of life, The sound of movement, The sound of existence.

Yet somewhere remains a void A space where I listen for life, I listen for existence, But all that exists is nothing.

A gap of silence seems to be the loudest thing, Pulling my body along with it, to the point where life buckles into a void.

My feet join the clatter as I make my way across the room.

Weaving in between people who cannot possible understand the blaring silence that beats my ears into submission, calling upon my limbs to move me to it.

Amplifying its endless crescendo.

A cloud darts in front of my eyes, Turning my vision hazy with hot air and empty lung.

I extend my arm forward into the void, feeling the tips of my fingers freeze, Enveloped in the vortex of the void just as I was.

The void pulls all in, I listen for the footsteps, I will myself to seek out the warmth,

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But all I feel is cold.

All I hear is silence.

All I see is the absence of light in front of me.

I gaze up the stone exterior of the statue, Desperately seeking the source of the void, but all I can find is the rough scrape of the marble, Ripping skin cells from fingertips and leaving the void unscathed.

The statue is of a man.

A tall one in build and short in width, towering above the humans that surround him.

I recognize his face, His stone eyes tint a certain shade of blue His mouth mimics my lips and twists into an emotionless frown.

Empty - is the only word I can find.

Empty like the silence in my ears, like the frost that I feel enveloping my fingers and spreading down my wrist, Climbing towards my torso as the blank stare on his face is to my heart.

The frost bites down onto my chest, spreading rapidly downwards towards my legs As the silence creeps into my brain and down my neck to meet the frost.

I try to move, Endlessly stuck in the cold that eats away at me.

Taking with it a piece of my soul with every cell it devours and turns solid.

My mind is screaming through the silence,

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Kate Chopin Extension Yet still remains barely perceptible amongst the void spreading through my body, blocking out my movement, Blocking out my existence.

My fingers outstretched, hopelessly reaching for the statue in front of me, Not knowing that I had become it.

Abandoned to face the stares, To bear the pain of knowing that I will never be in control.

To know that all I am is a spectacle, unlike the others that flood the room, Inhuman.

Left to be gawked at and prodded as if I was a void of my own.

Frozen in time, without thought, Without sound, Without motion.

What remains is nothing, And the screaming inside my head, I am still here.

I am still human.

Replaced by silence, Stolen by the void.

Until the footsteps stop and I am left lifeless, a void created in my place.

Katerina Papanikolopoulos

“When the doctors came they said she dies of heart disease-of joy that kills”.

Brently Mallard saw his feverish wife in a peculiar state of consciousness: her once pale pink lips now shone purple, dead, beat, and awfully tired. Brently felt the shiver in his body- the aching arch his spine made when he knew what was to come. He hovered to the staircase, each limb both protecting and shunning his sudden need to flee. One to love and suffer in the face of guilt, he felt the plastic card within his posterior pocket call out to his wife’s spirit. Within the hard frame of a calling card, the robust grin of a woman, arms floating in a sea of flora, now beckoned him more than his old wife’s pout. He clutched the photograph, swiftly liberating it onto the floor. Her name was Nadia. A Eastern European import, she held the love-things that caved and coffered Mallard’s heart into a thing that could be wept for. Besides, Ms.Mallard could, and never would, look Brently in the eyes.

She had a rumored impulse to never feel love for traveling men, men whose only source of exaltation was in the absence of structure. Mallard touched the curves, the edges that Nadia had once clipped from her card so that it may be no bother in the pocket, a slim, thick, source of comfort for a man who always cut his fingers on sharp edges. Brently had decided that to miss someone, was no more than waiting for the day to end.

“You know, Sir, that her great grief must have been your savior, and her destroyer” said the doctor. Brently at once propped his cane near the staircase “And yes, it may be so, but I have no more grit than any of you!”

He collapsed onto the staircase, unable to weep for his wife without thinking of the great, expansive days he had roamed with Nadia, uncensored and unwritten. Just yet, he saw that glimmer that industrialists see when the building they have constructed starts to shine for the first mo-

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Spectral

Anonymous ment in the glitter of the sun. A rapturous moment it was, when Brently Mallard finally acknowledged that he had never truly a woman such as his wife, a woman whose eyes were liars and breast were more flat than any piper’s screeching song. Brently composed himself, grabbed the card that lay upon the floor, awaiting him, and dialed the sequence of numbers that could confront,comfort, and abolish him from his misery. He pulsated his legs, his arms extended, his mouth arched the way men do before they speak words they know well not to.

“Nadia, I have a penance in my pants and a wife in the dead sheets of day. Ring me a cab?�

End.

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Pages torn from the holy book Traveling to the floor with clouds of dust Settling against the oak The room was dark Shadows danced across the faded walls Like the ghost of the life lived here The room was framed with images Pictures smudged with their fingerprints This room was all someone had These images their memories The bible, overtaken with cobwebs, their lifeline The shadows, their television The dust, their food The air, their wine The four walls were their entire world A rosary hangs from the wilting chest Twisting and turning ever so slightly Somebody lived here

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The Nervous System

Katerina Papanikolopolous I see your wretched nails that cling to my flesh like an inorganic hingea pivot to be exact.

There within your ecosystem you may have strung my hair into braids that would not flatten from wear, but straighten the curls I have been bestowed with.

Your lips would call out to me lullabies, a songstress you would be If you knew how to cradle like a mother, a nun, a saint: But your arms have needles The petals of your flowers, fallen.

Your eyes no longer watch me as they used to: How they would follow my movements, catch me in a harness of understanding Your knees have buckled Your tongue no longer sings the hymns I knew to be of my own beating, My own making. I am lopsided, tangled A mere poaching of the conscious.

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