SNAPS 2023

S S N N A A P P S S

the aftermath

UNDERGRADUATE

SOCIETY

S N A P S S N A P S S N A P S

A Poetry Chapbook

From the Undergraduate English Society

Editor-in-Chief

Destiny Hopkins

Publication Manager

Jules Lee

Copy Editor

Eleanor Poole

Graphic Design

Destiny Hopkins

Members

Adam Taimish

Alyssa Thulmann

Asha Saha

Hanna Shore

Jahan Cader

Muskaan Dadlani

Rachael Langdon

R h l T h

Letter from the Editor Letter from the Editor

Dear reader,

With my presidency coming to an end, I am beyond excited to finish the year by commemorating the sixth volume of SNAPS! Bringing this publication back last semester was a full circle moment for me, and we wanted to continue revitalizing this publication by introducing a theme.

We picked the theme, “The Aftermath,” for its subjectivity: you can go one thousand directions and speak on the good, the bad, the past, and the future. As a graduating student this year, as well as leaving The Coterie, what has happened and what comes next because of it has been everpresent in my mind. The writers in this volume have used beautiful imagery, spoke through prose, and reflected on love, loss, and memory to imbue us with the consequences and rewards in life. Please be warned that there are some poems with potentially triggering material.

With that, I want to thank my amazing team for assisting me in putting the sixth volume together; I can’t wait to see what they do next year. I also want to thank the writing community at Western University for embracing SNAPS with us, and all of the poets for their trust to publish these works. I hope you enjoy the sixth volume of SNAPS. Happy reading!

Destiny Hopkins Editor-in-Chief

Abigail Scott

Ameena Abid

Jonas Bahn

Jiya Bajaj

Katherine Walker

nine hundred and ninety-nine deaths

By Adam Bento

Overdosing

By Claudia Kindrachuk

Alive and Beyond

By Siddharth Maheshwari

Amphibious Daughter

By Isabelle Siebert

Twining Tendrils

By Kiersten Fay

DO NOT LOOK BACK DO NOT LOOK BACK DO NOT LOOK BACK

By Abigail Scott

First Place Winner of the SNAPS Poetry Contest

DO NOT LOOK BACK screams God but I look back anyways because Orpheus and Lot’s wife and Psyche and I all share the same disease.

They are standing behind me, funhouse copies stretching back into mirrored eternity, and as one we turn.

The scholars, deep in their leather armchairs, huff about romance and tragedy, but they do not realise the fundamental truth.

(they are often the same thing.)

You cannot love without also breaking yourself a little: without sacrificing something else. The scales must balance. The score must be settled. But Justice is easily bored, and so sometimes she lifts her blindfold and fixes the game.

After all, fairness is a lie we tell ourselves to make the horror palatable, to make it lie down and growl at us from the shadows instead of stalking out into the light in all its gory reality. Thudding heart, constricted breath, rabbitting pulse these can be symptoms of many things. Seeing what cards you ’ ve been dealt does not make you sure of what the dealer holds.

This creeping rot I feel? This sickness crawling up through my belly and twisting around my esophagus? It is not love, though one could make that mistake easily enough. No.

It is doubt.

That most subtle neurotoxin, that vicious, sweet-tongued seductress; mankind’s shared hamartia. The sense that you have been played. That everything you have yearned for, struggled for, bled for, is nothing more than a stage play. That this is a comedy and you are the fool standing alone at the end, surrounded by the cackling masses

here to enjoy your failure.

So I choose. And, petrified here at the crisis point a tall, glittering monument to my own weakness

I can see that I chose wrong

Ambiguous Blessings Ambiguous Blessings Ambiguous Blessings

By Ameena Abid Second Place Winner of the SNAPS Poetry Contest

There are some blessings that can only be realised ( see: understood, observed, appreciated) in retrospect.

Certain scenes can only make sense once the movie is over.

The sermon can only be written once the shock becomes heartache, and the heartache can be dulled.

We can ( I can) only make sense of the loss once the wind that blew open the door to our perfectly arranged room has stopped howling.

Is the air still enough ( yet) for meaning to be made.

Certain ambiguous blessings only make themselves known once we ’ ve swept up the dust of our former lives, once we ’ ve rearranged our rooms, changed our walls from beige to blue and put the books back on the shelf knowing it could all come down again.

I glue the pieces of a tiny ceramic house back together again and place it on a different shelf. I begin to forget how my place looked before—

—before the wind hit before the books fell before the little house was tossed to the floor.

I let myself build in the Land of After.

And I let the Land of After deliver me an understanding that did not appear at the scene of the crime.

I let myself believe that there are in fact lessons to be had, ambiguous blessings that will fade in

like polaroid pictures but in years rather than minutes.

I let myself make sense of blurred images. I believe these flash cuts fit into a larger storyboard.

I let myself believe these jagged little rocks are in fact gems that will be worn down and made to shine in time.

I let myself believe these ambiguous blessings are in fact blessings that will become less ambiguous with time.

And even now I can see that what I felt at 22

I was not ready for at 18.

And I understand that there are certain lessons that could not have been understood had I never had my heart broken

—had I never had the tiny house tossed to the floor.

There is an empathy

I gained that I did not fully possess in the Land of Before.

I thought my room was safe from the forces of chaos that tend to sweep up others.

I thought with enough planning and care, I could prevent the wind from blowing the door open.

I understood sorrow but I did not understand loss, not until the tiny house fell. And though I am tempted to trade it all back for a little more time in the Land of Before,

I know that sometimes what we want is unwillingly forfeited for what we need. And that in time we learn to love those ambiguous blessings that were needed to build a home in the Land of After.

Chicken Towns Chicken Towns Chicken Towns

By Jonas Bahn Third Place Winner of the SNAPS Poetry Contest

When the people from the summer countries came, they brought us things that we had never seen in the north. They promised gifts tenfold if we used their machines to bore beneath the riverbeds for coal. So, at their behest, we abandoned our nomadic way of life and began to search underground for that shiny black gold. Gone were the troubles of herds lost to sand plague and harsh winter famines. Instead of bending yew into bows we wrote books. Instead of goat’s milk we drank wine. It was like nothing we had ever imagined.

The golden age lasted as long as the coal beds did. When they ran dry, so did the gifts of the summer people. So we did what we did best, and moved somewhere else in search of more coal. But we couldn’t pack up and move our refineries like we used to do with our tents. That was when a brilliant young engineer created the first chicken town. It strode across the steppe atop colossal, trunk-like pneumatic legs, carrying our homes and livelihoods on its broad mechanical back. It was revolutionary. Now anytime we ran out of coal we could just leave and find more.

The chicken towns required constant maintenance. Each of them gobbled up several tons of fuel a day, so we had to add more mining rigs which in turn required us to build factories to produce the parts. Of course every addition also required more manpower, which meant constructing more houses and hydroponic farms until the whole machine was stacked sky-high with teetering buildings and great bulging steel pipes. It got to the point that almost the whole population of every chicken town was dedicated to keeping the beast alive, and only the fraction that remained actually traded with the summer folk. The towns were a sight to behold. Wild horses reared and hares retreated into their burrows when they felt the earth shake beneath those great thundering feet as the lumbering behemoths made their migration.

Then one day, the summer people stopped showing up. Some said they had gone away to war, while others said they had been wiped out by a plague. One thing was certain, though there were no more gifts coming. Still, the chicken towns chugged along, tearing up the landscape to keep their legs moving. There was talk of returning to the steppe, but the truth was that no one knew how to do anything but run the chicken towns anymore. They kept their heads down and did their jobs, mining coal and chopping wood and manning the boilers until their backs were bent and their joints worn out.

Years after the summer people left, one of them returned to visit a girl he had sired a child with in my town. Everyone rushed to him with questions. Why had his people abandoned us without a word? He looked confused and told us that they had simply found a country overseas that would mine twice as much coal for half the price. Our business had concluded.

Generations have passed since the summer folk first appeared. Me and everyone I knew are dead now. Still, the chicken towns live. Without purpose, all they know how to do is feed themselves on our land and our people. They aimlessly wander across the horizon, belching smoke into the sky, silhouetted against the setting sun.

Reflections of Life Reflections of Life Reflections of Life

By Jiya Bajaj

Of beauty, love, and joyous light

Or darkness, pain, and endless night

In nature’s realm, there’s no reward

No punishment, no final word

Only consequences, pure and true

A reflection of what we choose to do.

I Imagine Our History Through Your Eyes I Imagine Our History Through Your Eyes I Imagine Our History Through Your Eyes

By Gray Brogden

How I like to think you tell our story:

“She hit me like the smell of baking chocolate chip cookies hits you when you first walk through the door. She took daffodil steps and wore piano key smiles and painted in colours I hadn’t seen before. She asked about my day. She always wanted to hear me play. And I had never been so in love with someone who still left me wanting more. ”

How you probably tell our story:

“I loved her and she left. It’s not a big deal anymore. ”

Muscle Memory Muscle Memory Muscle Memory

By Ethan Shi

These days. My body remembers you

More than my mind does

In the late hours

My hands search for you

Like the way they reach for the light switch When night arrives

In the soft glow of the TV

My head no longer has a shoulder to rest on The empty space jolts me back to reality And I feel a bit colder than I did A moment ago

Our love was habitual And my body is still lost in its routines

Holloways Holloways Holloways

By Victoria Schroeder

In 1918, the Holloways did not cheat death.

(⅓ of a global population. One of 50 to 100 million deaths. I wonder if he spat blood-tinted bile or turned blue as the water filled his lungs. I wonder

if he saw his sons before they died. I wonder if his wife held his hand.

I hope she did.)

My great grandfather, John, was not chosen to return with his widowed mother to England.

(Her father asked her to make a choice: which of your three children will you bring home?)

He lived through a depression with Sheila Dear, working the train lines. (He never went to war the way men his age did. A crucial job; don’t feel bad. But he did). John was Pop, and he died when I was three. He made people laugh.

I returned to Canada almost sixty years after the Holloways followed the trains south to the United States.

I am living through another plague in the frozen north. Am I that much older than the ancestors who made hard choices? I sit in Ontario unpacking my things, and wonder what my great-great grandmother thought as she packed.

(Did her to-be-orphaned children stare? Did they refuse to be in the same room? Did they know what she was doing, or did she wait to tell them?)

I wonder if she cried, if she thought about how things could have been different.

I know I have.

You Were So Tired You Were So Tired You Were So Tired

By Katherine Walker

The last time I heard your voice, The conversation was twenty years too short.

I said hello like I would be able to say it on my wedding day. You said hello like you only had five days left.

I told you the weather had been good here the past week. You hadn't been outside in just as long.

You told me my mom had just left to get some coffee. I knew you would be gone the next time I saw her.

You fell asleep on the phone with me. I don't think you heard me say goodbye.

nine hundred and ninety-nine deaths nine hundred and ninety-nine deaths nine hundred and ninety-nine deaths

By Adam Bento

I travelled long distances to see them

I walked endless flights of stairs

I stepped over volcanic coals

I killed Lions protecting their cubs

I cried over my nine hundred and ninety-nine deaths

Their thrones were golden and white

Their looks were stern and unwelcoming

I thought my nine hundred and ninety-nine deaths were for something

Instead Aidos greeted me with my thousandth death

Overdosing Overdosing Overdosing

By Claudia Kindrachuk

I got too high when I was with you. I remember one day, my skeleton tried to rip its way out of my flesh. You had me diving for scraps, throwing me a bone every

now and then, so I wanted to give you all of mine. When I retreated to my nondescript bed, I slept naked with the door unlocked in the hopes

you’d slip inside and I could pull your insides out. I remember when I tried to kill myself in that room I locked the door, even though I knew

my body would start to smell eventually. Whether I wanted to let you in or keep you out, it was all rot. I remember one day,

you asked if I was a Capricorn and I spent three weeks wondering what that meant. In the sex dream I woke from in a cold sweat,

I thought I was right I thought that it was righteous

you looked different but I knew it was you. In my waking life, just your touch on my thigh made us both scream in terror, and an indirect kiss from smoking my cigarette made you spray-paint vomit all over your bed. I’m still afraid of the perfume you said

was hot, but I can’t bring myself to buy something else. I’m still digging my nails into you. I guess I could blame the smoke, or the pills, or the one line I did to impress you at that stupid party, but

all the drugs don’t add up to what I became. The gasoline was always there you just dropped the match. And I’ll burn forever

because of you. I guess what I’m trying to say is, you broke my heart because you were the one person I thought I was safe from. You found

a key I’d long since stopped looking for and opened all my worst doors. I think it was on purpose. I’ll never know for sure, but sometimes I think if I saw you on the street, I’d grab you and shake you and yell, I was overdosing and you could tell.

Alive and Beyond Alive and Beyond Alive and Beyond

By Siddharth Maheshwari

They must be alive

Say howling winds and ion storms

Terraforming oddities, Glowing in colours I can touch

Is it life that makes worlds beautiful?

Or beauty that makes life?

Moving, twirling, circling

What but breath, gives that quality

Water borne of sand

Vegetation from destruction

What if not tenacity of the soul

Can surmount such odds?

Eternal burn to gaseous churn

Drawing cosmic breaths

Of push and pull

Faith, in life after

When empiricism is the diametrical opposite Decadence in acceleration

We can be saved by spontaneity

And the apathy of meaning

Like everything outside the micro

We really are just grains of sand

Flitting around on the beach of life

Amphibious Daughter Amphibious Daughter Amphibious Daughter

By Isabelle Siebert

Welcome to wasteland: water-logged, wretched, humidity so heavy you could wring water from the air, and we have to, since what’s left in the lakes is something darker than sludge, something deeper too.

Some days, I believe we could stand on what’s left, we could become a miracle of Biblical proportions. I am one often, when I walk where the water used to be: forging ankle-deep in mud and decay, searching through the skeletal remains of fish or freighters, held afloat in mud 229 metres deep, clinging to the idea that there is something here worth saving.

Once, when I was a child, I saw a mudflat and under the sunlight I thought it looked like heaven. Many places do until you have to live there. Now, I miss the water: when the world seemed endless, glittering, when there was somewhere to wash the mud off, the possibility to be purified.

These days, I want to walk out from the shore until I find the heart of Lake Huron and I want to stand there until I sink down to the centre of the earth. I’ll fall beneath the fossilised remains and the polluted galaxies still suspended in the dead, dark mud.

I will become a remnant and all of these thoughts will be nothing more than the silt coating the inside of my skull.

Twining Tendrils Twining Tendrils Twining Tendrils

By Kiersten Fay

Life begins to curl into itself. The tyrant gate in the garden begins to yield to the garden it invaded, and I struggle against its rusting chains, against the metal that wasn’t meant to be there, and it starts to look more and more like you.

Who knows? Maybe my pounding heart is the reason I am so well guarded; my garden locked shut. I am feeling everything too much.

I am grasping for anything, at roots pulled too early from their pot, a dry, dark, devastating shrivel of its more youthful self, and petals, once a vibrant crimson, now crumbling shells of themselves

which you pretended were still alive despite your hands crushing their heads.

And I know this place, where the Earth begins to reclaim the ground that’s seen better days and worse. There are no more intruders as I give this place, a shielded emptiness, a new identity.

Then, as I try to ignore the collapsing shadows by the gate, the morning mourns, but I clap my hands together like a child again.

The remnants of the burning, corroding iron are buried by the freshening buds and clumps of green which defy the shade and the weight of frozen soil and I no longer have to see you in my garden but

I have never been good at letting things go.

©Cover photo: Beth Purdy