The Kudzu Review: Issue No. 71

Fall 2023

The Kudzu Review red cloud with title

7711 e e u u s s s II

The Kudzu Review

A Special Thank You To Our Donors!

Kathy Sciabbarrasi

John Sciabbarrasi

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Issue No. 71

From Our Editor Dear Reader, The Kudzu Review has worked tirelessly this fall to develop the magazine before you now. This issue is the product of countless hours spent fine tuning each piece and the belief shared by editors and assistants alike that there is power in seeing yourself reflected in what you consume.

Since 1988, our mission has been to provide a safe space for undergraduate students everywhere. Whether it be through poetry, fiction, nonfiction, or visual art, we aim to help the work of undergraduates find a home among a literary collective who knows that students have important things to say.

Our writers and artists come from all walks of life. Within these pages, you will find tales of road trips gone wrong and odes to parking garages and the fly on a wall. You will find poems that speak of forbidden cult love and the simple beauty in a handful of pansies. You will find art that inspires and intrigues, in mediums ranging from comic strips to collage.

Whatever the work may be, all of our pieces are infused with a tender vulnerability and consideration for the intricacies of the human condition. Thank you to each contributor for your willingness to share your work with the world.

Thank you to each section editor and editorial assistant that helped make this issue possible. Your hard work and passion for literature and art are what motivates others to share their stories. Thank you to our faculty advisor, Olivia Sokolowski, for your unwavering devotion in helping The Kudzu Review constantly improve and become the best version of itself. Thank you to Ray, our managing editor, who makes sure that everything runs smoothly. And finally, thank you, reader, for choosing to share your time with us.

We live today in a world where expressing yourself is not always an inherent right. Now more than ever, it is necessary that The Kudzu Review celebrates the work of students and serves as a reminder that we are better when we uplift voices instead of silencing them. Your stories matter.

We hope you enjoy Issue 71.

Havilah Sciabbarrasi Editor-in-Chief

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6

Early Mourning Hours

Isa Hoofnagle

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unleaded 3.49

Alejandro Luna

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Chiaroscuro Atlas

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İsmayıllı

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Grams Tells Me Her Last Bubbe-Meise

Taylor Tieder

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Melting Stump

Audrey Femia

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cookiecutter

noor sattar

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Munchies

Tessa Germani

30

Vocal Tide

Reian Beltran

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Pag-Amping

Reian Beltran

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Writer's Enclave

Gaby LDC

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Birdfeed

Gaby LDC

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Narcissus Online

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The Playground with the Big Yellow Slide

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Abstraction

Raven "Mosspit" Watkins

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Internal

Raven "Mosspit" Watkins

Sean Faletti Rubén Darío Uribe

Maria Mullis

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David McMullen

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Skull

Miyah Lebofsky

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The Feminine

Miyah Lebofsky

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Black Swan

Miyah Lebofsky

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Tragedy/Comedy

Miyah Lebofsky

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Temple of Hera

Delaney Brown

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Dead Flowers

Megan Raams

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Racing

Riley Galpin

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pansies

McKenna Oakley

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Ice Toes

Audrey Femia

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Some Beach Scene

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Libertação

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Someone Who Knew

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Fly

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On Edward Hopper's Summer Interior Red Bull & Whiskey

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Uncomfortable

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Secret Lovers at the Heaven's Gate Ranch

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Dance of the Seasons

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Mia Rampersad Elena Malchevskaya Ellie Amos Ghislaine Marie Sydney Wills Megan Raams Madison Wright Jonathan "JD" Dent Audrey Jones & Catherine Lamey

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Early Mourning Hours

fiction

By Isa Hoofnagle It takes somewhere around twenty hours to get from Houston to Norfolk, Virginia. You cut through a couple of states, six or so if I remember it right. Louisiana, then Mississippi and the Carolinas, or whatever. It’s a drive like cutting the country’s leg off, ignoring the meandering lines of Florida, and plowing ahead.

Jude insists that we can make it in nineteen if we try hard enough. Eighteen if we really push it. He’s probably not in the right state of mind to be driving, white-knuckling the wheel, chewing his lip hard enough to bleed. Maya wants to call him on it. I can see it in the furious tapping of her fingernails against the window paneling, but I guess even she won’t try to take it from him today. Some fights just aren’t worth having.

By plane, the trip isn’t half as long. We spent all morning holed up in the library, scouring the internet for flights to Virginia with empty seats on every monitor that was free. We came up empty, though. Three spots is a lot to ask of a plane that’s leaving today, and we figured if we were going to go, we were going together.

We’re about two hours in. Nothing’s cramping quite yet, but it’s already on the horizon if the distant poke of a crick at my shoulder is anything to go by.

The first bit of the drive was a lot of useless crying, the silent kind. Those round and slow types of tears that make you feel heavy, like a cat dropped in a river. It was the radio sputtering out Top Forty hits between static coughs. It was Jude staring daggers at the lines on the road and Maya chewing through her nails. It was me trying very hard not to think about the elephant not in the room.

There are supposed to be four of us. That’s why this whole car ride is so agonizing. For years it’s been four, spilling over into yearbook pages and diary entries and football games and school

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plays and dance recitals. The seat beside me is so empty it’s full.

It wasn’t always four. Maya and Jude are two of my favorite people in the whole world, but they came last. Before them, before anyone, there was Dakota. *** I met Dakota Newman when I was seven years old, throwing sticks at the wall behind Little Creek Elementary School. Long before we left Norfolk for college, before Dakota stayed behind. I was pretending to be a ninja, I think, and the sticks were meant to be the throwing stars. I would plant my foot, pivot, and launch the stick at the brick, trying to hit a scratchy plus sign between an L and a K carved into the wall, killing time until my dad drove up and honked at me to get in.

I was halfway through a step when Dakota came bounding around the corner behind me, gripping the straps of his backpack and rocking on his heels. He asked me what I was doing. He had no front teeth. I remember thinking we were too old to be missing teeth like that. I told him I was a ninja with all the conviction a seven-year-old could have, and I showed him.

He looked at me like I had two heads and said, “Those aren’t knives, you know? They’re really just sticks. But you’ve got a good arm.” Then he flashed a toothless grin. It’s always struck me how good he is at being honest and kind at the same time.

After that, he just sort of stuck around, and somewhere along the way, his name started being said next to mine, until it was strange for either of us to stand on our own. And when we turned ten, we reared our wild heads and tore into a fifth-grade classroom, bumping into Maya and Jude, and everything clicked right into place and stayed there.

But time is a relentless and ticking bastard, and sickness is, too. So now we’re hauling ass to Virginia to say goodbye, or something like it. Because Dakota’s body doesn’t know how to live anymore. ***

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Maya throws her head back against her headrest. “I’m bored,” she groans. The world that passes outside the window is a blur of gray road and blue sky. She’s picking at a bag of carrots sitting in her lap, holding one between two of her fingers like a cigarette.

“You better get used to it,” Jude mutters, flicking on the turn signal. “You’re gonna be bored for a while.”

“What happened to nineteen hours?” I lean forward and swipe a carrot from Maya’s bag.

Jude scowls. “That’s still a while.”

“And yet you insist on driving the whole way.” Maya tries to elbow him, but he dodges with a practiced ease.

“I can manage. It’s safer than letting him behind the wheel.”

He throws a thumb in my direction. Maya chuckles around a mouthful of carrots.

“Very funny.” I frown. “How many hours do we have left?”

“GPS says eighteen,” says Jude, and Maya groans again.

“That’s so long.” She reaches back to swat at me with her hand.

“We should make a playlist.” She swats me another time. “To make sure he doesn’t pass out behind the wheel.”

I shrug at her but stretch over her shoulder to see while we compile music. We decide that exciting stuff is the way to go, things we know the words to. Nothing too sad or sappy. She turns the brightness down on her phone screen, blinking hard. The bags under her eyes are ashy thumbprints; she looks dead tired. I probably look the same.

My mind wanders as we swipe through YouTube. I glance at my hand, covered in pen ink—notes I took on the phone with Dakota this morning, like a very brief to-do list. The call plays in my head like a movie whenever I can’t manage to think about something else.

“Robbie.” Dakota’s voice was worn to threads, but as warm as it’s always been. Like music. It echoes in my head as if we were in a cavern. But we weren’t. I was just standing in the corridor of my dorm in Houston, and Dakota was miles away.

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Issue No. 71

“Hey.” A tear trailed down my face, but I brushed it away with the back of my hand. Speaking was a burden in a lot of ways. There was weight to it, a clock at our backs.

There was a stall before the sound of him crackled through the speaker again. “Are you okay?”

It startled a laugh out of me.

“Am I okay? Dakota, everyone says you’re dying.”

“Right.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “Stupid question.”

“No—it’s. You’re fine.” My words were soft in my mouth. “You’re fine.”

Maya gasps, dragging me out of my trance. Her thumb hovers over some twelve-year-old YouTube video with lyrics to “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

“Dakota loves this song,” she breathes, half a smile finding its way onto her lips.

I squint at her. “I love this song.” Too much of Dakota bleeds into me. Maya rolls her eyes, thumbing the dial on the radio. The volume clicks from ten to twelve to fourteen.

“He loved it first,” she says, “so I think it belongs to him.”

She hits the video. The music starts to rise from the speakers, humming along with the rolling of the wheels.

Jude glances at us from the corner of his eye. “I think it belongs to Queen.”

It’s funny, so we laugh. For a second, everything feels regular.

The empty seat to my left isn’t as shadowed as before. Maybe we’re all delirious, and the lack of sleep makes everything feel less harsh, but it’s a relief nonetheless.

Jude starts moving his fingers along with the piano absently.

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Maya bounces her arms. She lurches forward to turn up the volume until all we can hear is Freddie Mercury’s hazy voice. I start to sing along. We speed down the road like we’re made of wind, breathing our nerves into song. For that moment, I’m so sure we’re going to make it in time, that twenty hours is nothing, and I’m going to hold Dakota’s face in my hands and tell him we were all bluebirds that flew to him.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” is one of those songs that’s persistently sincere. No matter who you are, when you sing it, you mean it.

And it feels good to feel something other than dread.

Jude rolls over a rock, and the whole car jumps, sending us soaring before our seatbelts catch us. We laugh. We exhale. I pull my sleeve over my wrist, covering up the pen ink.

We keep driving. The monotony of road trips is something too often overlooked. People say it’s the journey, not the destination, but the journey is currently a store on the side of the road selling peanuts next to a massive billboard advertising fireworks in the middle of October. Ten miles later, the journey is a rest stop and a lake, then it’s a field of cows and a rainstorm. We stop for gas in every other state. The playlist we made is still on, but eventually, we grow tired of singing.

At one point, Jude’s phone beeps in the cup holder, and we all freeze, blood rushing past our ears. He checks it, and it’s a notification from the New York Times. Someone died, someone famous. But it wasn’t our someone, so we don’t mind. He turns his ringer off after that. It’s no good to get distracted on the road.

The AC goes out when we’re about halfway through Georgia, heaving a sigh then wheezing off into silence. Fall isn’t the warmest season in the world, so I figure it won’t be much of a deal, at least for now, but Jude looks at the vent like it’s wronged him. He tears his eyes away from the road and smacks it a few times with his palm. He huffs and knocks his fist against it, cursing to himself. His eyes are just left of wild, and the slits in the vent leave little white marks on the back of his fingers.

Maya reaches out to stop him but abandons 10

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the movement halfway through in favor of pointing urgently out the front window. She chokes out, “Jude.”

I follow her line of sight and land on a turtle, almost imperceptible among the lines on the road, toddling towards our car faster than any turtle reasonably should. Jude’s hands are back on the wheel in an instant. He swerves us into another lane. Behind me, our luggage sails through the air and crashes unceremoniously against a wall.

“Fuck!” I say. My heart is running laps.

“Fuck.”

Maya’s eyes are huge. “Jude…”

Jude shakes his head, rhythmically tightening and untightening his grip on the wheel. “Sorry.”

“What was that?” She says.

I stay quiet. Something about groups of four is that they’re all really just two groups of two. Dakota is mine. Jude is Maya’s. It isn’t my place.

Jude stares out the window. I can see his eyes in the rear view mirror. “I’m getting us there,” he says. “Dakota trusts me. That’s important.” He breathes roughly, like the air is sharp in his windpipe. “Whatever.”

He hits the gas and doesn’t look at either of us for twenty minutes. The AC never comes back on.

It takes me seven hours to get through one water bottle. I can’t stomach much, and God knows I don’t want to stop more than is absolutely necessary. At hour eight, we pass a half-hearted theme park called Peach World.

At hour nine, we get stuck in traffic for six 11

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miles. The sun sets, the moon rises. At hour ten, we need gas again.

A sticky sort of quiet fills the car when we pull into the station. A Shell, the first one we’ve seen. It’s right around the halfway point to Virginia. That makes it significant, in a way. This is the first time in ten hours that the three of us have been still.

Jude pulls the key out; the radio shuts off, and the rumbling of the engine fades. We sit for a moment. Maya speaks into the silence, her eyes trained on the flickering open sign on the gas station window.

“He took me to prom. Do you remember that?” She touches the ends of her hair lightly. The O in the open sign of the Shell dies out, so it looks like pen. “I asked Jake Bowden, just like half the girls in our grade did.” She winces. “I was stupid. And Jake said no, because of course he did, but I still cried. Dakota came and found me sitting at the bottom of the stairwell, with my face in my hands and my eyes all puffy and red. He didn’t even have to ask what was wrong. He just knew.”

Jude and I don’t move, letting her tell her story. She laughs a little, and I see tears pooling in the corners of her eyes. “He told me he was gonna take me instead. Just like that, he said, ‘I’m gonna take you to prom.’ He bought the corsage and the matching tie and everything. He did those awful pictures for my mom and sat through the lecture from my dad, the whole nine yards.” She looks down, rubs her eye. “I didn’t know there was anyone who would do something like that for me. He was such a good guy…”

Her voice peters off near the end.

I take a deep breath. I think of the picture of that night, sitting on my desk in Houston. I think of Dakota grabbing me by the wrist and dragging me through a flower shop a few hours before the dance, tucking a flower behind my ear to match his tie and Maya’s corsage and Jude’s socks. I think of us all falling asleep on my living room floor afterward, of Maya complaining about the 12

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blisters on her feet while the TV doused us in the light of Titanic or some other movie that was on.

“Is a good guy,” I say absently, a beat too late. “He isn’t dead yet.”

“Jesus, man.” Jude scrubs a hand over his face. Maya stares at him.

“It’s true,” I insist. I think about Dakota stepping on my toes in the school gymnasium, his face under flashing neon lights. “He’s sitting in his room. He’s waiting for us.”

On the phone, Dakota said it was enough to know that we were coming. On the phone, Dakota sounded afraid. I’ve never heard him sound afraid before.

Jude looks around, something unsure about him. He sighs.

“You don’t know that,” he says, soft but firm. “You have to be prepared—” “No, I don’t.” I shake my head. Maya starts chewing her thumbnail. “I’m not gonna grieve a man who’s still alive.”

Jude throws his hands down. “He’s not gonna make it this time. He’s not gonna beat it.”

“Don’t say that.” I think of Dakota at prom in a suit and a tie, and I think of funerals and open caskets catching flies. There’s something hot brewing in my chest.

“Jude, stop.” Maya is close to tears.

Jude looks at the two of us. He scratches his chin. “You just don’t want to hear it.”

And he’s right about that. So I push open the door, pouring out of the car. I storm towards the gas station and breeze past the pen sign. I blow into the bathroom, and the door slams shut behind

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me. I shove the lock into place. My fists are tight. I crash to the tiled floor, back against the wall. My cheeks are warm, my breathing is fast. I press my hands against my eyes.

I don’t understand how Jude can just say it like that. Like it’s something he can live with.

I’ve gone over it in my head a dozen times, the absurdity of it all, just trying to force it to make sense. One second, I was sitting with my feet on my desk, ignoring my calculus homework, and everything was fine, normal. The next, my best friend was telling me he was going to die. I don’t know how you’re supposed to reconcile something like that. I don’t know if you can.

Dakota’s always been sick, sure. And there were times when our hearts stayed stuck in our throats for months. But he’d get through it. To me, he’s always been a pillar, a god, an unkillable thing.

But this morning, I got a text from his father, and then two texts from Maya, and then four from Jude. A cacophony of misery at 9 A.M., grieving our own grief.

And then my phone rang.

I drag my hands down my face and try not to remember it, but the ink trailing my wrist mocks me. Write a song, in looping print.

“No last wishes over the phone, man. You might kill me, too,” I had said.

But Dakota didn’t listen, and there was nothing to do but relent. “Just once. Make it a good one,” he said. “About life, not death. Too much of my life has been about death.”

A song. It grabbed me. My fingers shook around my pen. *** In our second year of middle school, Dakota bought me a guitar for my birthday. It was a shitty thing, the best a thirteenyear-old’s dog walking salary could manage in the knickknack section of Goodwill. The wood was scuffed, the strings were worn, but Dakota bought me a pack of stickers to cover up the scratches, 14

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and my dad gave me twenty bucks for new strings. I taught myself to play “Wonderwall” through a patchwork combination of learning by ear and YouTube tutorial. I spent two weeks holed up in my bedroom trying to get my fingers to stretch right.

Dakota was the first person I ever played for, and when I did, he lit up like the Fourth of July. He shoved my shoulder and said, “You should’ve told me you were good at music. I would’ve gotten you this thing last year.”

A few months after that, I managed to gather up the courage to play something at the school’s talent show. I was so hopped up on nerves that my body was squirming under the spotlight, but I managed to get through it without much of a hitch. Dakota cheered so loud I could hear him over the rest of the crowd, a whale screaming in the ocean. I came in sixth place, but it didn’t matter. I was making music.

Toward the end of my senior year of high school, Dakota held me by the shoulders as I tore into my admissions letter from Rice University. I’d been waiting on it for days, stalking the mailbox, taking all my meals by the front window. I didn’t want to open it until Dakota got to my house, so I stood there staring at it until he did, my heart pounding against my skull.

When I ripped my finger through the seal, Dakota’s yell rattled my bones. “Top five in the country for music,” he marveled, squeezing me with a surprising amount of strength for a man always on the cusp of being bedridden. “Rob.” His eyes were all stars. He shook me in place. I stared holes into the Congratulations at the top of the cardstock.

“Houston is really far away,” I said. I was full of joy and relief, sorrow and terror. “Really far.”

Dakota’s grin was too wide. “So what?”

I shook my head. “It’s like a million miles from here.” From you went without saying. I didn’t know if Jude and Maya would get in. If I would be all alone.

“Actually, it’s 1,361.” He knocked his fist against my shoulder.

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“And it doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it does. You were supposed to come with us, dude.” My throat was dry. I traced the edge of the paper with my thumb. “That was the plan.”

He shrugged like it was that simple. “Plans don’t always work out. Remember when we tried to climb that oak tree in the Hendersons’ yard?” A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

“And we spent two whole days mapping all the footholds and branches? And then Jude got halfway up and fell and broke his

arm?” He tilted his head. “That was a plan. Sometimes plans suck.”

I didn’t say anything, and Dakota must’ve seen some sort of look on my face, because he softened up, edging away from the jokiness. He ducked his head.

“Look,” he said. “Nothing changes. Whether you’re in Houston or Norfolk or on fucking Mars. I’m sick.”

“But what if things get worse?”

“They probably will. But we’ll get through it.” He leaned into me. “Always do.” *** Outside the gas station, someone’s car alarm goes off. I squeeze my eyes shut. The bathroom floor is gross, and I kick at the tile with the tip of my shoe. My mind runs faster than I can keep up with, memory upon memory, sorrow upon sorrow.

There is a long and complicated history with me and music and Dakota, so write a song feels too heavy for skin. It feels more like remember me, and that makes it almost unbearable.

I need to write something that makes everything worth it: The four months of distance, the letters and phone calls, the two weekends spent together, the rolling guilt in my gut.

Once we make it, I can play for him. It’ll be poetic and 16

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beautiful and all of that bullshit. I can sing so hard he’ll know I wish I had stayed.

I pull my phone out and text Dakota again. Another I love you, just for good measure. I shut it off before I can see if he’s messaged me back, bury it so deep in my backpack that I can ignore it for a while. I rub my nose and listen as the buzzing of the fluorescent lights wedged into the ceiling blends with the music in my head.

There’s a slam on the door. “Robbie.” It’s Maya. She pounds her fist against the wood again, like she’s trying to beat the life out of it.

“Maya,” I call back. I don’t move.

“Get your ass back in the car.”

“I don’t—" She cuts me off. “I know he was being a dick. I talked to him.

Let’s just get over it and get on the road. We don’t have time for this.”

I shake my head even though she can’t see it. I hear sevenyear-old Dakota in the back of my mind telling me that I’m not a real ninja. If I close my eyes, I can see the gap in his little teeth. “I don’t know if I can.”

Maya sounds gentle when she speaks again. “It doesn’t matter.” She pulls at the door handle. “Dakota wants us, so you’re getting back in the car. Yeah?”

I hesitate. “Yeah.” I don’t know if I mean it.

I wipe my eyes, feeling sticky all over. I pull myself to my feet and shove out of the bathroom. Maya catches me and brings me into a quick hug. Her eyes are sad, but they’re forgiving. Sympathy works wonders, I guess.

“We’ll be there.” She squeezes my 17

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shoulder.

I nod, and we head outside. I stretch my legs before crawling back into my seat. Jude watches me from the front but doesn’t say anything. I put my headphones on before he can get the chance.

It’s only ten more hours. We can manage that. We already have once.

For what feels like a million years, we drive. At some point, Maya says we should probably stop for food. I’m so sick with nerves I can barely choke down the Pop-Tart I bought at the gas station. We pass a dozen restaurants and don’t stop.

There’s nothing but trees in South Carolina, and North Carolina is no different, just oaks lining the roads like soldiers.

There’s a billboard that says I should get right with God, and another that says I should stop at the strip club at the next exit.

We drive past towns and creeks and antique shops and more trees.

Maya starts counting the number of corn fields we see. Jude hasn’t said a word for a hundred miles. Neither have I. We pass a fallen tree tangled up in telephone wires. The space is tense. The sun is rising.

Maya’s phone starts to ring.

My eyes pull away from the window, and Jude looks away from the road. The ringing captures all of our attention, a magnet at the center of the car. Maya snatches up the phone, nearly dropping it as she holds it to her ear. The contact just says Mr. Newman.

Jude’s arms are locked. My pulse races so fast that the world starts to spin.

“Yes, sir,” Maya says, distantly. She blinks. “Yes, he is…

Virginia, sir. We’re an hour away. Jude is driving.” She grips the phone, and her eyes go glassy. My heart drops out of the car, and we ride away from it.

“Okay.” Her voice is tight. “I’m so sorry... Yeah… See you soon.”

Maya lets her hand fall from her ear. She isn’t crying like she was earlier. Her face is placid and frozen.

Her eyes dart to me for a fraction of a second. She opens her mouth.

“Don’t,” I cut.

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Maya’s face twists with an awful look.

I look away then back again. The quiet is gone, and the car is full of noise.

“Robbie.”

“No. No. We’re an hour away. An hour.” I glance towards the GPS. Maya reaches for me, but I lean back. “Shut up.”

Jude peeks at me over his shoulder.

His eyes are shiny. “Robbie.” He sounds like he should, like he hasn’t spoken in hours.

“Shut up.” I cover my ears, a million places at once. I’m frozen in the corridor, with my phone in my hands and Dakota’s wavering voice telling me it’s over, and I don’t think I can bear it. I’m at prom and Dakota is grinning in the light. I’m on the bathroom floor texting Dakota I love you. I’m behind Little Creek Elementary throwing sticks at a wall.

Maya’s yelling at Jude to pull over and Jude is yelling back and the car is lurching haphazardly across the lanes toward the halfsideways speed limit sign. For a second, I think we might die, and that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, but then we’re skidding into a lopsided parallel park.

I shove open the car door and throw up all over the icy patch of grass under the sign, my mouth full of rot, panic, and the Pop-Tart I got from the gas station. The front door opens, and Maya is in front of me with her hands on my shoulders. A car zooms by and blows her hair all over. She’s a blur. She’s crying. She’s trying to hold my hand. The speed limit is 65, according to the crooked sign staring down at us. But 65 wasn’t fast enough.

There are no bluebirds now. No flying, no miracles. There’s just our shitty car and the sunrise before us and an hour between me and Dakota’s last breath. My whole body aches from sitting.

“We have to keep going,” Jude says from the front seat. His lip wobbles. “I’m sorry.” He runs a hand through his hair. He tries to say something else, opening and shutting his mouth. He gives up.

“I’m sorry.”

Maya squeezes my shoulder like she did at the gas station when she told me we would make it. Dakota had said it was 19

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enough to know we were coming, but he was afraid. I touch my cheek, and my fingers come back wet.

“Are you okay to drive?” Maya asks Jude, making her way to her seat, sniffling.

Jude just nods. I feel like I might throw up again, but I just want to get there. We get back on the road. It’s still trees and billboards and cornfields. Nothing’s changed. The world should be paying more attention. The grass should be burning up.

I pop off my seatbelt and slide into Dakota’s chair, the car rumbling beneath me.

The last hour is a lot like the first—crying, miserable, long. Jude calls his mom. Maya watches the road. I don’t move, hardly even breathe. I try to pretend it’s twelve hours ago, when we were still singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Dakota was alive.

I thought the call with Dakota would be the hardest thing I’d ever endure, but I was wrong.

Eventually, we drive by a sign that reads WELCOME TO NORFOLK VIRGINIA in slanted, bold lettering.

Jude straightens suddenly. His whole body has been shaking for thirty minutes. “I told you.” He points to the GPS. “Nineteen hours.”

I follow his finger and stare at the thing. It shouldn’t be possible, really, but the number is blinking at us. I guess that’s just how it goes. Twenty becomes nineteen. Four becomes three.

Dakota’s house is ten minutes away. We drive on.

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Issue No. 71

poetry

unleaded 3.49

By Alejandro Luna TW: implied transphobia and misogyny, use of the q-slur i wait for costco gas in my car for about an hour more than planned i get to the pump and it won’t scan my newly acquired membership card. suddenly an old man behind me speaks, stepping off a truck as white as his skin, says “you have to put your debit card in” and i can tell he’s judging my physique: these stupid young girls wearing bulky button ups and mannish hair can’t even get gas; they’re so unaware he’s condescending, and he’s staring and in his eyes i twist– i transform into a caricature of myself, i just know to him i’m simply another queer, slow in the head and disturbing the norm. but i don’t get upset, instead i explain it fails to scan my card again and again. the man turns and glares, and it is then i give up and leave; all wrath’s in vain. my time, my money, my gas all gone. i dare all philosophers, every monk, to find meaning in this massive flunk or to blow up every costco. begone!

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The Kudzu Review

Chiaroscuro Atlas

poetry

By Sean Faletti TW: mention of death I’ve no Time to be an Artist when weight presses hard upon my shoulders, heavy like my feet on dark grapes that seep blood wine — I sip shadows, stepping upon spiders that slide on the gold waterspout-sunrise that I would paint if I had the Time to be an Artist. Time is a god, and I live before light. Time is Money. I carry it, creep barefoot for liquor, smokes, guns, or any weapon that could kill the few hours I have. When dead, I snatch my shiny spade up and bury until a void rises like black holes in tense skies that I’d have all of the Time in the world to imagine if I had Money to be an Artist. I’m no Artist, black-hole soul. My brown skin speaks of dirt and mother. My silence sings of dirt and father — with rich soil, I’d have the Time to call home on the weekends, to fill my void with love, my heart with thick syrup straight from a warm, milky tree — if only I had the Time to shrug this weight off of my weak shoulders, broad by design and not by effort, nor ambition — Time to be an Artist, not think of all the people to talk to and hands to shake and warm bread to bake and break. I break my back, but not to be an Artist.

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Images Courtesy of Canva

Issue No. 71

İsmayıllı

By Rubén Darío Uribe

visual art

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The Kudzu Review

Grams Tells Me Her Last Bubbe-Meise poetry

By Taylor Tieder TW: death, abusive relationship With seven spadefuls of earth sitting on the Star of David, her pitiful pimiento-centered, olive eyes sob beneath the thin wood. She’s coughin’ in her casket, clouded with Newport cigarette smoke and her last Bloody Mary breath, thinking I shouldn’t have relied on rebirth, upon meeting her wishful Death.

As I say so-long, she eulogizes her short-lived life and croaks: When you’re 13 in 1954, you believe to wait for love is to waste your life away, so I selected the first fish who had googly eyes, clammy hands, claimed “I’ve got a heart!” and anchored myself to an anti-heroic anchovy.

We agreed to for better, for worse five years later, yet Richard only made me poorer; My daughter-in-law became my best friend, gossiping about my grandchildren was my grandest hobby, and my dentures deemed Denny’s a delicacy. However, splicing our slices of spiral challah sufficed, for all of long eternity.

When Dick serenaded the secretary with “What’s New Pussycat?” I detonated their Sexbomb: signed my DNR, not divorce papers, because I thought he’ll change little by little, even though hell never has. You’ll be endlessly damned, like me, if you pine for a perfect family.

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My last vacation was in Bermuda, four decades ago with our three children.

Every day since, I dreamed of him treading into the Triangle and I tell the sea to seal the Tomcat in Jones’s locker.

But that ship has slipped away with a flailing sail, shot its hardened matzah-balls and capsized The Matriarchy.

Shabbat was shabby as a domesticated Tabby.

Each weekend I wet-coughed Windex fumes as I bleached the bathrooms. Meanwhile, the lazy man in the La-Z-Boy combed the morning paper, shifted and scorned when he saw my stiff tendons unwind on the deck’s sectional. He shouted “Sheket, Sheila!” when I shared spiels through the telephone.

So I’d cancel the calls, go back to schlepping the Swiffer & dust buster past the Dirty Devil.

That schmuck still shoved me from the tainted sheets. To sustain shalom, I slept on the swept tile next to the schnauzers, beside the love seat in a stained, schvitzed schmatte, like a burnt latke that turned gray in the middle.

Prepared to Pass Over, she shrugs in her cloak-like shroud. A cocktail of fizzy Coca-Cola capillaries and gooey, fiery tears seeped, oozed down into the sod.

She sang “Untrue Unfaithful” to the sizzling soil, booed the bugs for not feasting on her blackened lungs fast enough. She sank a mere six feet, into the void of God, and I wised up.

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Images Courtesy of Canva, Raw Pixel, and PNGEgg

The Kudzu Review

Melting Stump

By Audrey Femia

visual art

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Issue No. 71

cookiecutter By noor sattar

visual art

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The Kudzu Review

non-fiction

Munchies

By Tessa Germani TW: drug use Oh, to be high and hungry.

It is an inevitable predicament. One cannot deny the temptation of un-sober indulgence, a taste for something truly magical created only by a spectacle of drug-induced revelations.

I sit in a milky daze—thinking aimlessly and shamelessly of conspiracy and cluelessness, in moments of misfortune and mental fragmentation and, suddenly…craving. I’m hungry. There is a moment to ponder the thought. It is a delicate decision. Do I go for something light and snacky or something nutritious and filling? Something hot and savory or something sickly and sweet? Something that will take thirty minutes to prepare or thirty seconds? Something that could fulfill the normal calorie intake of a meal or something that exceeds it?

It is a rudimentary process. No matter how hard I try, the numbers on the label catch my eye, and for a moment I regress.

Adolescent memories of mirror reflections and counting up to one thousand. Sometimes lower, sometimes higher. My hunger stills in fear, afraid of my hands and how they grab what they want.

Until I remember that what I’m hungry for is not to be judged by government manufacturing and teenage girls online. Or by myself. Those numbers mean nothing when my stomach shakes in anticipation. It lets out a low moan, waiting for anything. It is not my hands that lead, but my heart. It would be unkind to leave a frail body starving.

I think about the fridge. Brita. Two-day-old leftovers. Eggs.

Okay, never mind the fridge. The pantry has endless possibilities.

Yes—a true array of options that will not hesitate to satisfy the empty feeling. My eyes trail over Cheez-Its and blue boxes of Kraft macaroni. I go for the red box, digging my hand into the dusty lusciousness of extra cheesy crackers, and as I snack, I think. Soft,

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Issue No. 71

Images Courtesy of Bleepbloop.design

gooey shells are a comfort food, but a rather timely task in such a moment of need. Hunger is an impatient child, sitting in the backseat of my dad’s car on Easter morning—staring out the window, silently seething in rampant hatred at every restaurant with a wait time over an hour for brunch—tears brimming at the thought of fluffy egg whites and syrup-drenched pancakes gone uneaten. A feeling so insistent it bubbled over in boiling heat. I am rather patient as an adult, but the younger me stares idly from behind my hip into the pantry as well, already canceling out what would take too long.

I move onto the next shelf. Oreos. Yeah, I’ll eat an Oreo. Or two. Everybody eats. Call this the appetizer to the main course. My body gleams in acknowledgement. But it is only satisfied until I remember in my mindless haze that I need to eat something else.

I can’t just eat Cheez-Its and Oreos, as much as my heart admires a snackish meal. My eyes trickle down to the floor to see a plastic wrapped container holding individually packaged dry noodles: ramen. Tangy, sweet chili. I hear symphonies of excitement in my ears. I think back to the fridge and Easter. Of course I’m putting an egg in it. It’s what elevates the flavor toward godly dimensions. It combines protein with carbohydrates to create a melody of steamy mindfulness, and it only takes four minutes in the microwave. And what aromas that lift from such a delicacy—a warmth so delectable it whispers to my tastebuds with siren-like precision, enticing them toward a state of watery longing. The egg sits atop the bed of noodles like a blanket, stark white and crispy brown at the edges, fried over-easy to perfection. The yoke oozes out in full glory, mildly potent with rich thickness, smothering the noodles. It is an art, and it is delicious. I think not of space or time as I sit with my warm, noodley goodness. And at first bite, I’m in love. My heart breathes in crisp collections of joy and exhales in satisfaction.

Oh, to be high and happy.

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The Kudzu Review

Vocal Tide

By Reian Beltran

visual art Images Courtesy of Diego Solas and Riko Laguilles

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Issue No. 71

Pag-amping

By Reian Beltran

visual art

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The Kudzu Review

Writer’s Enclave

By Gaby LDC

visual art Images Courtesy of Canva

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Issue No. 71

Birdfeed

By Gaby LDC

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visual art

The Kudzu Review

Narcissus Online

By Maria Mullis kiss me with your lips on the screen I see my own reflection staring back, front camera, flash on, no filter poetry or a thousand, all showing my glowing face, my perfect pores seared directly into yours, keep scrolling, feed me plump, scarlet hearts that slide easy down my throat and get stuck between my teeth when I sell you my smile and a cream to cure your worries and your putrid imperfections, Darling, keep scrolling until there’s nothing left but a 20% off discount, use my name at checkout don’t research the companies, you can trust me Babe, my screen time is larger than my shaft size drown with me, you don’t want to miss this, myself posing in places you dream of sipping on your paper straw while I fly a private jet, thank you for two million my Dearest Friends, like and share, there’s no one but you and me in this world, turn on notifications I’ll be here, and if your screen shatters look at me in the shards.

Images Courtesy of Diego Solas and Sketchify

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Issue No. 71

The Playground with the Big Yellow Slide

poetry

By David McMullan Time did not belong to me — Instead my sneakers with Lights in the heels trampled up perforated metal steps On the playground while coach-pitched baseballs Pinged off aluminum bats in another part of the park And the crisp scent of fresh mulch rose up from beneath Chopped wood The smell of summer afternoon and The smell of Christmas morning.

The creaks of the swings were my metronome while I Laughed at the squeak my skin made going down the slide Before going back up again — using my hand to pivot Around the bright yellow pillars Two steps at a time Until a call from granny interrupted the adventures I was narrating for the roly-poly bugs in the mulch The day was over Maybe for the last time.

At the sun-bleached vending machine Grandad gave me a quarter from his collection A special one with Florida on the back So I could get a bottle of lemon-lime Gatorade Somehow still cool after hours under the sun.

After mama helped me get the plastic cap loose And I had enjoyed my first sips She talked about how the drink used to come in glass bottles And all I could imagine was the bright green fluid Exploding in a shatter of glass on the asphalt Before trickling into the orange clay To be claimed forever — Just as I was starting to enjoy it.

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The Kudzu Review

Abstraction

By Raven “Mosspit” Watkins

visual art 36

Issue No. 71

Internal

By Raven “Mosspit” Watkins

visual art

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The Kudzu Review

Skull

By Miyah Lebofsky

visual art

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Images Courtesy of Raw Pixel and PNGEgg

Issue No. 71

The Feminine

By Miyah Lebofsky

visual art

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The Kudzu Review

Black Swan

By Miyah Lebofsky

visual art Images Courtesy of Raw Pixel and PNGEgg

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Issue No. 71

Tragedy/Comedy

By Miyah Lebofsky

visual art

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The Kudzu Review

Temple of Hera

By Delaney Brown

non-fiction

i. Love A girl is six years old when she chooses to walk out to the kitchen. The walls in the hallway are a cream-coated terrain of unidentifiable braille, and the girl glides her first two fingers across the popcorn. She smiles. It’s a toothy smile. She lifts the crest of her hand to make the two fingers walk on the wall. Her parents had built this partition, not as a load-bearing wall, but as a divider, to abolish the direct view to the children’s room from the kitchen, where their adult friends would often frequent.

The house was always filled with laughter and light when others were around, but they didn’t need to be looking into the young girl’s room, much less her baby sister’s. Within the nook of the girl’s opposing arm rests a red and brown sock monkey named Kreggles. Kreggles has long, spindly limbs, white capped hands and feet, a beanie fixed with a firework of red thread at the tip, and a crimson smile the shape of an orange peel. The girl carries him with her as she prances down the strip of carpeted hallway and into the kitchen, where she glances up towards the sink, right as her mother shouts obscenities and throws a soap-soaked sponge at her husband’s chest. The girl’s father shouts back one word: something that, to the girl, sounds a lot like ditch. The girl is six years old when she sees this act, which she labels as love. ii. Lust A girl is eleven when she dresses for gym class. It is the third day of her first year of middle school, and the girl tugs at her cobalt blue shorts, which rest at the crook of her hips and trail down to just below the crease of her behind.

The uniform seems slightly raunchy for a charter academy, but there is a mirror in the locker room, and the girl likes the way the shorts make her look. Grown up. Her Under Armour sneakers squish and squeal on the urethane floor, while the 42

Issue No. 71

sound of bouncing basketballs echoes through the venue. She stands in line in front of a boy she barely knows, brighteyed and smiling. The girl adjusts her ponytail. Gym Teacher rambles on about traveling and double-tied shoelaces, while the girl glances up to scan the banners that drape from the checkerboard ceiling. She feels a brush against her shorts, riding on a phantom wind, but then it’s gone. Until it’s back, not as a brush, but as the palm of a hand, cupping the shape of her ass. The hand squeezes. She spins; the boy’s smile is laced with poison. When his friends laugh, the girl realizes two things at once. One, she will always and forever be a girl in a world molded for boys. That will never change. And two, that world built for boys is made out of clay; clay that, unbeknownst to them, is only found at the base of the temple of Hera, at the intersection of womanhood and power.

Let them think they hold the key; let them think they run the show.

The girl turns her head forward and arches her back. iii. Sensuality A girl is dressed as a swan, with the eyes of a succubus. It is Halloween, and her friend is hosting a party. She is eyeing the boy from across the room whose eyes have been locked on her skirt since her arrival. He is dressed as a white knight. Fitting. The girl takes a sip of her drink and crosses her arms to accentuate her collarbones. Suddenly the boy is behind her, and she’s acting like she’s not surprised when he invites her upstairs. He heard her talking about Star Wars and wants to show her a book on the archives from Episodes III through VI. The girl sits at the table next to him as he flips absentmindedly through the pages. His eyes aren’t following the words; he’s simply staring in the middle of the crease. The boy swallows. His leg shakes.

He wants her and she knows this. His invitation has turned hands, made its way into her domain, awaiting her approval. The girl lowers her voice to a whisper, and tells him what he wants to hear.

And when the boy wraps his hand around her neck, Images Courtesy of PNGEgg

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The Kudzu Review

and when he lifts her from her place at the table, and when the girl pushes her chest against his, she will know it was because of her that this happened. It was always going to be because of her, for this moment has been days, weeks, months, years in the making. This moment is not a moment at all, but a checkpoint, the girl realizes.

A pit stop. Confirmation of all she is becoming. The girl smiles. iv. Desire A girl is not a girl anymore, but a woman. She is sitting on the bed of a man she met as a friend, talking to him as a lover, looking at him like a doe. The man slides his hand up the curve of her frame, memorizing. Her breaths are short, silent, all too quick and unnatural. She has held the key for so long she forgot it came with a lock. The man asks a question. She cannot answer. She cannot tell him what she wants him to know, so when he draws his lips closer to her jaw, delicately, she angles her cheek. She lets him think he runs the show. She lets his hand glide up and over her, under her, into her. The girl does not feel it. She is safe inside the shell of her mind, for protection. The man asks again; the girl says yes. Did time ever move this fast before? The girl thinks this as she watches the man dart around his room, upturning piles of muscle tees, jackets, Carhartt slacks, scavenging and searching for a little square of foil.

To an artist, the tableau would’ve read ‘Primadonna and The Fool,’ the way the girl sits poised and proud, legs folded under her, hands crossed, waiting. The girl blinks, and the man is now on top of her. She tells him it hurts. He retracts. Uses two fingers to reset some buttons, push some levers, rewrite some code, all within the time it takes for her to take three breaths.

Then he is back on top, telling her to breathe through the pain, and she thinks he cares, as he rolls like thunder and shows her how it 44

Issue No. 71

feels to be desired. In this moment, taking looks a lot like giving, and lust looks a lot like love. The fan spins on high. A chill rides up through her toes. The girl becomes languid, melting through the microscopic holes in the eucalyptus sheets, and she thinks she knows what honor is supposed to feel like. She thinks she shouldn’t have to feel guilty for being hesitant, but then again, her image of love is blurred and foggy, and she forgot to eat breakfast this morning, and the man has gotten up to shower, and now she is naked and alone, and nothing makes sense. Then everything is suddenly clear. The girl dresses. She walks to her car. She calls her mother.

At three in the morning, her mother answers.

Images Courtesy of PNGEgg

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The Kudzu Review

Dead Flowers

non-fiction

By Megan Raams

TW: very subtle description of sexual violence.

You walk into your younger sister’s room and see a vase full of dead flowers on her oak and cedar dresser. You can’t help but stare at them because you remember when they were alive two years ago for her 16th birthday when everyone went out to dinner and got dressed fancier than necessary. But who cares? It was for a special occasion. Not only was it your sister’s birthday, but it was also the first time her boyfriend was meeting your family. He brought three bouquets with him that night: one for your grandmother, one for your mother, and the biggest one, with blush pink balloons tied to it, for your sister. It was a nice touch to get all the women in the family flowers, but in the back of your mind you thought he was a kiss ass, plus you were the only one without any flowers, which you were terrified would become a pattern in your life.

Seeing them again surprises you and stirs emotions you have trouble identifying. The phrase “little girls love dead flowers” laps around your mind as your sister tries to talk to you. What does it even mean? “Little girls love dead flowers.” Is it that you can’t help but think she’s naive for having them? That keeping flowers past due is a young girl’s tradition? Maybe in some ways it is, in some ways it isn’t. You think about how there are people who preserve flowers so that they can keep them nice forever, but that’s not how your sister keeps them. No, they’re stuck in spiderwebs of dust and glued to the bottom of the vase with mold, once pink roses now the brownish

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Issue No. 71

hue of old blood. Baby’s breath shriveled to match a coffee-stained tongue, eucalyptus leaves gray like your mother’s hair. And the pink ribbon tied around the glass neck has grown fur to hibernate for the eternal winter that is your sister’s room. So why does she keep them? Only one dust-hardened bouquet? Shouldn’t her room be filled with hundreds of dead flowers by now?

You begin to think her boyfriend is slacking. Does keeping these flowers send a message to him that he doesn’t have to buy another set because she still has the last ones he gave her? Why must she keep them in such a state? But then you begin to wonder why these flowers are so important to you. Maybe it’s because you never got a bouquet, and thus you never got the girlish impulse to keep it. And maybe that makes you sad. Maybe your obsession with these flowers says more about you than her because you were only given one rose, and it was thorny, and it stabbed you over and over, and you hated that rose. If you had a whole bouquet of them, you might have gone mad, and the flowers would be red not because of anthocyanins but because of your blood spilling over them. So maybe it’s not about the flowers at all; maybe it’s about the boyfriend, or maybe it’s about your sister. Maybe you’re jealous that your sister gets to live in blissful girlhood, daydreaming about him and loving him enough to keep the first flowers he ever gave her. Maybe you’re mad she gets to be soft and mushy while you wilted and hardened too soon.

And maybe you just long to be that stupidly in love, to let something die, wilt, rot, and crystallize past the stage of smell in your own space because you cherish someone that much.

Images Courtesy of PNGWing

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The Kudzu Review

Racing

By Riley Galpin

visual art

48

poetry

Issue No. 71

pansies

By McKenna Oakley i understand why they don’t have pansies at weddings, but i still want for their soil, from those cracked pots you brought me, to kiss my sneakers. i want that romantic sienna—but more, i want the petals. the velvet mauve, plush saffron, unabashed merlot, living on the quiet breath of two people too conscious of themselves. i remember, back then, smelling the love & tension of that sienna-earth under my fingernails, our fresh & blinking intimacy keeping me awake. cuddled by moonlight, i heard my name enveloped in the newly rich timbre of your voice that kept getting deeper, though i pretended not to notice. we were always worried about that—the noticing. could they see the pansies? other kids, our parents? i wish i had worried less. after all these years, it’s still not roses i want on my wedding day. i don’t like their monochrome sensuality, & i hate being pricked. i would rather be bookended by the violets & reds of those gardenia angels you brought me everyday. & i want you— you at the end of the chapel-velvet-stretch, handing me a bouquet laced with dew to replace the one i’m still holding, the one that’s dead. i guess it’s embarrassing that i’ve kept it all this time, but i need you to know that it’s the pansies i loved, not the attention they brought. yes, i loved you; & after all this time, still, i do

Images Courtesy of Raw Pixel, Pure PNG, Clean PNG, and PNGEgg

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The Kudzu Review

Ice Toes

By Audrey Femia

visual art 50

Issue No. 71

Some Beach Scene

By Mia Rampersad

Atop the dune, amber flakes line the sea. poetry Chocolate-coin-wrapper-gold weaves between ripples of leftover paint water – turbid, murky, gleaming. The shore is dim without the sun’s brilliance, though silhouettes of boys dance across the sand with milk-scented skin and salt that climbs to their ankles.

Down and up they go, pillbugs with moles that howl when they strike the ball toes first. Shrieks come from nearby, but not close: the lovers who came from the train and drank Limoncellos, tricking and caressing under the sea foam. They glide and reclaim the other with vigor and the taste of lemons and salt and the kind of desperation that only comes from infidelity. Swarthy and chiseled, the woman circles the man. One more piggyback ride, she asks. On the shore, the boys’ grandma conspires seaweed in a yellow raincoat, the Georgie-from-IT-yellow. But, the offending shade is muted by the dusky sky, and the kids don’t hear her promises of burrata and bread over the waves – so she melts into the sand near the decaying algae. Her son rejoins her grandkids, his soundless words and gestures saying: “This is how you do a perfect arc.”

Atop the dune, one can’t see the smooth skin that lines the cheeks nor the cream-colored windbreaker that’s plagued by the illusive tint of the sun.

The lovers break apart and rejoin, thrashing, and wrestling: brothers with a vendetta of pride who are sloppy with mirth. They trudge back up to the shore and shove one another. Sand flies when they collapse, stinging the skin of the girls who play with a football nearby, their arms cocked and legs sore. It’s dawn or dusk; across the pond or ten miles north.

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The Kudzu Review Review The Kudzu

Libertação

By Elena Malchevskaya

visual art

Photo Cortusy of Marcu Loachi

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Issue IssueNo. No.71 71

Someone Who Knew

non-fiction

By Ellie Amos The music notes etched into the metalwork of the parking deck walls look down on the city. The notes were once hardly noticed at all. In pedestrians’ eyes far below, they were just part of the shapeless barriers that lined the winding roads and sidewalks. The music notes watched but were not watched in return. The order of the world was just as it should be.

That’s what set apart the ones who knew—the handful of kids who kept their eyes open saw what everyone else failed to. At seventeen, I was taken to the upper level of the parking deck by someone who knew. We climbed over a waist-high concrete wall, dropped down to a covered balcony carved into the side. The wall before us was cut open in a large rectangle, with only a low rail to keep us from falling overboard into the city street.

I was now someone who knew.

Months prior, I had been advised by someone else who knew.

He told me to keep quiet about these beautiful, hidden places that lurked beneath the surface of what most eyes are drawn to.

“The more people that know,” he said, “the more will come to these places, and then nothing will be special anymore.”

I didn’t believe those words. The caution felt shortsighted and narrow-minded. After all, if I had been shown these wonders, why could I not show others? In the subsequent year, I took many to the balcony above the city. Close friends. Romantic interests.

People who just wanted to see something different, something unique.

We skated, attempting ollies on the smooth concrete. We drew on the railing with my oversized Sharpie. We even drew on the concrete pillars, next to someone else’s graffiti. We sang. We danced. I laughed in the light of sunsets that poured through the music notes etched into the metalwork. I kissed people and held their hands. They told me secrets. Rain poured down onto the city streets.

This year, I felt like the parking deck was my very own. I 53 53

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could bring people as I wished, and squeeze all of life’s joys into that secret area above the bustling world. It was safe to exist there. Safe to laugh and dance, safe to be young. There are not many places anymore where such a thing is safe, undefiled.

But beneath my thirst for life, anger boiled, rising to the surface to destroy it all. I had lost the ones that had shown me everything in the beginning. When they left, they gave me a new fear: that I was just a doll they had brought along for the ride.

Discarded on the side of the road while their adventures were taken elsewhere.

In bringing others to the balcony, in stepping into the role of someone who knew, I wanted to prove my own agency.

Adventure was ripe for the taking. My taking. But I overstepped my opportunity. I challenged myself to see how many different people I could bring here. How many words could I get people to write on those columns, those rails? Everyone I brought wrote something new next to the older, dustier words. I learned what people kept in their hearts. I learned what they valued, what they found beautiful. Some drew pictures, too. Some wrote multiple phrases in multiple places. Soon, the bare spaces I’d originally discovered had been covered all over.

I wanted to find this development admirable. But when I brought my best friend to the balcony, I found… garbage.

It was strewn all over the balcony floor. Plastic bottles, cigarettes, cups and straws, old food, packaging, everything you could expect from an upturned trashcan on the side of the street.

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People had learned about the balcony, and they hadn’t respected their discovery.

That was the unspoken rule, of course, kept by the ones who knew: Respect the hidden beauty. Learn from it, feel its power, but never defile it. Never treat it as less than it is.

My best friend and I cleaned up the mess left by those who had found out, but my soul felt heavier. I could not erase the plethora of new markings—both Sharpie and spray paint—strewn along the walls and across the floor. They were broken and disgusting, tearing apart the magic that had once existed here. Curse words.

Taunts. Insults. Profane drawings. These markings were not art.

From then on, more and more people came to the balcony.

They took pictures there, using it as a symbol for their own youthful rebellion: Look at us! We are different from the rest! See? Do you see what we have discovered? Fear our rebellion!

Groups came to smoke or drink. Then, more graffiti covered the columns. Graffiti wars broke out—who could outdo the rest?

Everyone who went to the balcony hated the others.

I never blamed myself fully; none of the ones I saw there later were my friends. They had found out in other ways. But I had to wonder if in any way, on some small scale, I had contributed to the demise of one of the safest places on Earth. One of the last strongholds for those who see beyond the masses. If my anger had taken any part in this destruction, then I couldn’t forgive my immaturity. I should have listened, all that time ago, to the person who told me to keep these places quiet. He was right, in the end.

It’s been three years, and I’ve never returned to my oncebeloved parking deck. I can’t bring myself to face it anymore.

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Fly non-fiction

By Ghislaine Marie

I am sitting in the tenth row of a crowded lecture hall, jammed between the same strangers I sit beside every other day. They like to take up space, insouciantly occupying both armrests next to me. I pretend not to mind. I keep my hands busy, instead feverishly typing away while my professor rambles on about Plato’s Republic. As he roams around behind his desk, he keeps his gaze assuredly transfixed on the floor, making only the occasional glance at his silent audience.

The hall is filled with his near incessant droning, his continual cadence interrupted only by the occasional cough or sneeze or creak from half-a-century-old hinges as his restless spectators shift in their shabby, stadium-style chairs cramped tightly together. I make it a point to sit still.

As I watch my professor wear a trench into the stained linoleum beneath his peripatetic feet, I notice a faint speck inching along the wall behind his head. A fly noiselessly clambers up and around the projector screen, as imperceptibly unexceptional as a speck of dust. And yet I notice it, from the tenth row up, thirty feet away. And as I watch its mindless meanderings, I wonder if anyone else has noticed it too. I wonder how it got into this stifling lecture hall, and if it will ever find its way out.

Or if it will be noticed, only to be swatted against the wall it so desperately clings to. I wonder why it is so firmly fastened to the wall in the first place. Maybe it knows that once it takes flight, it will not be able to avoid the crowd’s notice any longer, the murmur of its humming wings just loud enough to be perceived, just incommodious enough to be silenced by hitting hands that send it freefalling out of flight. Perhaps it forgot it has wings for a reason.

Overhead, the buzzing fluorescents flicker briefly as my 56

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professor asks the crowd of spectators to share their thoughts.

It seems as if the collective audience has hitherto been devoid of any—and yet, a hand is raised in the front row. A young man shares an insight, which prompts another to share his comment, and another to share his question, and another and another and another. My hand does not raise. But my heart rate does. I have an insight. A comment, a question, a thought worth voicing, but no voice to do so with. Instead of even attempting to eke out any semblance of a contribution to the conversation, I watch it pass in front of me. I listen until I forget my original thought, only for it to be replaced by another and another and another; all of which I silently swallow without sharing. My professor moves on to the next slide and resumes his pacing. His voice again fills the hall in a blanketing silence. All I can hear is my pulse. All I can watch is the fly on the wall. I’m sure it looks like I am paying attention.

Eventually, the treading and lecturing ends. My peers stop pretending to listen and start packing up and piling out of the bleak lecture hall, now swarming with the buzz of conversations and shuffling feet and screeching hinges and slamming lecterns swinging shut. I placidly put my things away and reticently rise from my seat, carefully catching it to not add to the discordant din. As I walk down the steps towards the door, apologetically shrinking between jostling bodies and bags, I glance back at the fly, and I wonder if it has noticed me too.

A day later, I drive through a national forest down a hardpack clay road I have never driven down before. I am taking the long way back to the bustle of campus after stumbling upon a peaceful state park—wandering in search of silence has become my innocent pleasure. Tomorrow is the first day of fall, and the beginnings of autumn’s chilled breezes sweep through my open windows and cracked sunroof. They are open only because a fly is fitfully flitting against my windshield, but I am not complaining.

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Despite the wind pushing it toward freedom, it remains fixated against the glass. As I watch it fretfully thump against this insurmountable impediment, I wonder if it will realize that the glass is not going to move and that it must, instead. I wonder if it realizes that the windows are down, that the sunroof is open, and that the wind is blowing. I wonder, why won’t you let yourself leave? But I figure it will find its own way out eventually, so I am patient. I turn my music off to not disturb the wildlife and to listen to its song instead. I slow to a brisk 15, despite the speed limit, to avoid kicking up dust into my car, and because neither I— nor the fly—seem to be in any hurry to leave. As the calm current caresses my skin, I note the perfumatory scents, the hardiness of Florida pines mixing delicately with wildflowers. In my rearview, melted gold fills the sky with the last sunset of the summer. A halfmoon rises to my right and climbs above the shrubs, the palms, the flowers, the pines, and into the deepening dusk. I listen to the pulsating hum of cicadas and crickets over the faint purr of my engine. My tires slightly raise the red earth, settling it just as tenderly back into place. A cardinal flies from one pine to another across the road in front of me. I hear its wings brush the breeze as its neighbors chirp out lullabies.

And then I notice the golden glow in my rearview replaced by the foreign flame of truck headlights rapidly approaching, its engine throttling in a roar to overtake me. I roll my windows up in anticipation of the dust cloud it will bring in its wake. And as it kicks up a flurry of burnt umber powder and thunders ahead, I notice the newfound silence echoing through my car. The fly no longer buzzes against my windshield. I did not notice when it left. I could leave my windows up and resume my music and rage along the road at the prescribed speed limit and leave a haze of dirt in my wake like that passing truck.

There is no reason not to. The fly has flown.

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Rolling the windows down again might only let another in. But I roll them down anyways, and I keep the music off, and I listen to the cicadas and the crickets, the bat cries and the bird chirps, the twig snaps and the leaf rustles. I leisurely turn down another dirt track, just as a black bear bounds across from the right side of the dense forest to the left. I stop my car and catch my breath. I listen to its footfalls amongst fallen pine needles and palm fronds. And I wonder, how could anyone race through this?

Eventually, I continue on, and a rabbit runs across my path as I reach the main road, with its pavement and streetlights and passing cars and people. Dusk has long since settled in the dust behind me. I am out of the woods, out of the forest’s subtly orchestral ambiance, and into the dissonance once again. I roll the windows up and close the sunroof. But I keep the music off for a minute longer and let the quiet linger with the awe. And I think of that fly, its eagerness to escape into the wonder of the wilderness beyond, desperate to join the cacophony of the forest’s symphony, for its buzzing wings to become one with the world’s wild whisperings. And it did. Either by the gentle persuasion of the wind’s current or by its own course correction, it did, in the absence of my attention. And I wonder if I, like that fly on the wall and that fly against the glass, will one day leave the confines of my own cage without noticing. If one day I too will join the ensemble of voices in lecture halls and group discussions and club meetings and community discourses. Because the windows are down, and the sunroof is open, and the winds of change are blowing. So why am I still pressed against the glass of my own life, a fly on the wall in my own mind? I wonder when I will let myself leave, and if I will even notice when I do. I wonder when I will remember that I have a voice for a reason.

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On Edward Hopper’s Summer Interior poetry

By Sydney Wills

TW: mention of abuse On Edward Hopper’s Summer Interior Or: “A nation’s art is greatest when it most reflects the character of its people.”

How the day came and took her with it, How it folded her like thinly-washed sheets Too heavy for the humidity’s savvy, tucked Into the dust of a closet packed stoutly until winter.

How it crumpled her into the floor And herself: hastily formed, Hardly corporeal, indistinguishable From the sheets mottled with icy blue hues Dripping from the pale painted warmth To pool at her feet.

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The burden – how july drips Its magmic soup on her bare body, Broth murky as a man Whips scalding absence Cracked against the sky of her Spectral summer interior.

Hopper’s women, how they sit.

Their one great happiness In slouching against the corner Of their cage, despondent Yet exposed through the bars Of light composed with pale yellows.

Strokes designed to fall, bland and repressed Delicate pearl coloring tumbling against The darkness guiding gazes hungrily Down to that coarse mass of brown: The big strip tease, gentlemen, ladies Let us pause to applaud her Sobbing into her knees.

See how she sinks, sallow To a floor that fragments cruelly at her feet.

Witness! If you would please How he dares her, doubled over To thrash against his esteemed Brush, deployed like stubborn fists Curled into the shape of love.

Push, shove, crowd in to see As she staggers, circling The room. From the time he strikes His match to the whole place Becoming ashes, she unlatches.

The rhythm of falling, Closely observed. But muffled Like marching over a carpet of roses, never heard.

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Photos Courtesty of Duragloss 1949

The Kudzu Review

Red Bull & Whiskey poetry

By Megan Raams TW: mentions of alchoholism and emotional violence Ignited within myself, my hearth blazes & sears my flesh, fashioning charcoal armor, I wear it as you drown the house & liquify the comfort.

Your fatherhood slipping from your scalp, pulling off my daughterhood with it, you burn in the most unforgivable way – tantalizing the throat & quieting all whispers of life.

Rampaging silently, I wonder if we burn the same?

I heat the altar we tread on, waiting for a banshee’s scream to shatter a sacrificial glass, the same way you did with your fist.

So, I’ll wield a redwood sword sheathed in sabbath to meet you in a Copenhagen forest, where the silver tops of my eyes illuminate your anger, moonbeam mirrors that catch the rippling quiver of a beast hidden in your bottle, & where barreled tears reveal my crocodile forced to swim in the murky early time waters of your spit.

Sunning on top the snuffed lump of your bottom lip that doesn’t speak my language, & is that why you can’t speak my name?

My horns stick in your proofed garden where consciousness goes to die, where butter lettuce catches droplets of pesticides & green beans become shriveled & weep tears of ethanol, where two demons dance on dry earth, at an elemental crossroads of obsession, where a deal is made with crossed fingers behind our backs.

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Uncomfortable

By Madison Wright

visual art

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Poetry

Secret Lovers at the Heaven's Gate Ranch

By Jonathan “JD” Dent TW: suicide, cults I’ve tried to break from you or faith But skin and spirit lay locked in sweaty tangle while the angle of our bodies sometimes align; eclipse, I spit bloody moon angel.

No past life regression or morbid ascension can cure our anti-ascetic spring.

Fifteen spacemen asphyxiate on top of sheets left stained where transfiguration-chained bodies evolve without indication.

Except the lavender blanket laid overhead squirm underneath, like forgotten mistress tease, while their comet-coated dreams entangle with absolution.

But before the final exit comes, tonight, I hover over as human.

Your saucer-shaped garter, orbit-locked by my earthly means breaking apart mid-atmosphere while the quiet compound sleeps.

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Resurrecting surroundings shriek whistling; through your teeth sound escapes like soul plugged by impious vessel lips, our gangrenous hearts interlocked sprout applesauce tears and vows.

That clasp our hands together and form a solitary cocoon under the pile and up in the stars.

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Images Courtesy of Canva

The Kudzu Review

Dance of the Seasons

Illustrated By Audrey Jones & Written By Catherine Lamey

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Fall 2023 Staff Editor-in-Chief: Havilah Sciabbarrasi Managing Editor: Pearl Ray Treasurer: Sien Bauman Faculty Advisor: Olivia Sokolowski

Fiction Head Editor: Michelle Benitez Assistant Editor: Sarah Lerner Savannah Aleksic Riley Atzert Ashley Fischer Rhubi Henderson Jillian Kaplan Cherith King Aidan Little Non-Fiction Francisca Puiatti Head Editor: Michelle Chadwell Taylor Tieder Gianna Birkeland Daniel Fairman William Faucett Cameron Glymph Zynni Hartman Kaysyn Jones Dana Liberto Bella Long Julia McMahon Savannah Monge

Poetry Head Editor: Lexi Fuertes Assistant Editor: Andrea Lopez Delaney Brown Miranda Frank Emma Gannon Isa Hoofnagle Madeline McCabe Gabriella Mola Albert Oleksy Visual Art Marlee Whelan Head Editor: Tessa Mahurin Fiona Adair William Gragg Barbara Kopec-Jewula Ava Neill Layout Victoria Pagan Head Editor: Ally McGivney Assistant Editor: Jamie Soto McKenna Oakley Alexa Ramos Burke Weisner Social Media Callie Wilkins Head Editor: Lili Verrastro Sien Bauman Sofia Canko Stephanie Dowd Mairyn Krause Katherine Lewis Kayla Miles Kaitlyn Payne Sunrya Peace-Friedman

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Images Courtesy of Canva