The Quarry 2023

Beanie Baby

Snowy Day to be in a myth

Golden Gate, 2023

On the Subject of Listening

Late Summer Untitled

All Eyes on Me

CONFESSION / absolution

Silhouette

Message from Home

Antwerpen-Centraal

Monterey even when Don’t You Know Orange Birds

Residuos

RICE, or PEACE and LOVE

Creation of Love no one ever taught me

Lola & Harvest

Mycelium, My City, My Roots

Jessenia Prado

Emily Page

Peggy Page

Auguste Bernick

Ava Craven

Charlotte Smith

Ann Li

Angeline Domeyer

Mary Magdalene

Xander Fuhrer

Lily Moreschi

Giulia Flores Brykowicz

Oslo Martin Risch

Micah Land

Olivia Hebblewhite

Ava Barnett

Andrew Mazariegos-Ovalle

Em Haas

Lilly Pihart

Allison Rafert

Luca Trujillo

Leila Rocha-Fisher

Ezhel Snowman

What I Learned from Watching Season 2 of HBO’s The White Lotus Staple, Staple. The Violinist

Untitled

People’s Police

Brutal Honesty

Plainly

Self-Portrait

If this is the last thing I’ll say

Elias Ravn Iversen

Eleanor Hinchcliffe

Clara Smith

Esmé Brown

Matson Bailey

Micah Land

Maani Ekka

Allison Rafert

Tove Trelstad-Larsen

Auguste Bernick

Abbey Kelley-Lanser

Fiko Insel

Greta Hallberg

Grayson Chan

David Gardner

Parker Gardner

Manaw Kyar Phyu

Kira Vega Anonymous

Abigail St. Peter

Alyssa Vue

The Quarry Staff

Executive Editor

Literary Editor

Art Editor

Interdisciplinary Editor

Layout Editor

Media Editor

Curatorial Editor

Lance Halberg

Parker Gardner

Fiko Insel

Phoebe Joy

Martha Slaven

Grace Quayle

Jessenia Prado

Beanie Baby Jessenia Prado

We walked outside and she pointed at the trees and said look can’t you see the leaves look at the leaves and with new eyes, I saw Trees for the first time and now on winter nights when the leaves have fallen I still look for the way the trees swayed with wind on that Iowa day and now my body dances from side to side, hoping the groundhog was wrong this year and that spring will come tomorrow so my new glasses will work just the same and I will be six years old again discovering something everyone else knew, and took for granted, because now when I stand in the forest I look at the trees and I hear the wind and in spring and winter and fall and summer I still sway, even without the leaves to sway with me

On the Subject of Listening

Ava Craven

I live on White Pine Road and at age 10 and my dad told me to listen. “You hear that rush? That’s the wind in the White Pines-”

“Oh wait, that’s actually just the highway,” he says, at age 40 while he crushes dried pine needles in his hand in frustration like a third grader who lost his recess privileges.

I heard a Barred Owl outside my window hooting its notorious call, “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?” or it could just be my neighbor Kathi.

My dad is disappointed that the highway sound is a source of comfort for me but, at age 20 that distant rush hour is what keeps the static in my brain from going sour “and what would you say if that highway disappeared?” he says, at age 50 while on an Adirondack looking up at the night sky like a philosopher searching for something out there to enlighten him, answer him.

Maybe the static might overcome me Maybe the static might become me

Or maybe the rush hour’s absence would bring forth April showers, May flowers, June’s warblers, July’s critters

Maybe in harmony with all my static a rhythm would emerge within me. Every bird call, every gust of wind, every wave lapping across the shore, nothing else, nothing more than a listening girl, and a (somewhat) quiet mind with an open door.

Late Summer

Charlotte Smith

Goddamn it! I’m sick of sorrow and wallowing and my boring old pain. I’m sicker than sick, oh, I know–somewhere in a river back in time, I am there, laughing, laughing, dozing off in Adelaide’s toaster-shaped red car, and we’re driving out to the Umpqua, four friends. I am there; it’s Addy and Jolie’s favorite place in the world, and they’re showing it to us. A name that’s called to me from the milk cartons like some lost child. Most people look younger or sweeter when they sleep, but Thomas, napping next to me in the back seat, just looks the same. I never trusted a man like I trust him, I’ve told him that, and then some; it’s written down somewhere, in an honest-to-God love letter. I’m bragging now–we swim right when we get there, barely turning around to change into swimsuits, giggling. We dive off the rocks; our heads plunging into cold water. Thomas says that every time he jumps in a river, it feels like the first time, the feeling in the body is just that strong. The state that I’m in, even the little periwinkles amaze me, scuttling over toes, blue rocks, fish ladders. I have never seen more moss, more lichen, more fern–I say it’s like a dinosaur movie, Jo says the forest is haunted, is looking at us. True, I’ve never seen more decay, or more growth, all displayed on the rocks. We are, of course, reeling with loss right now, even more reeling with the joy that exists despite it. The world after our friend died, it still forces delight. That’s what we talk about sitting above the water in wet swimsuits, using pot smoke to ward off the bugs. That and the way Jo throws slugs across the garden; it’s the ride of the slug’s life and they don’t know why. Sometimes we feel like that, other times we fall asleep on top of our sleeping bags, and the tent smells like unwashed, alive youth, and we roar like bears at each other, taunting the fate that hasn’t gotten us yet. And the joy cuts through it all, making no apology. Love is here, and it is overwhelming, and it will not stay, but will spin and change in infinity, knocked into smoothness like a stone at the bottom of a swimming hole.

Angeline Domeyer

CONFESSION / absolution

Mary Magdalene

spit and mouthwash swirl down the drain

I wipe my mouth cleaning off my lipstick checking the mirror, I look myself in the eyes

I rub my neck feeling for dark marks

I’m ready

I don’t look sinful right now at least I think

I turn and meet my family with a smile I am their Madonna

eldest daughter, meek, sickly sweet we beg for God’s forgiveness every Sunday absolving our weekly sins

I kneel in church pews and my mouth sings about their God

O love of God, how rich and pure! pure like me pure like them

I don’t think my mom knows I’m a sinner at least not yet her purity ring has been on my finger tightly fit since I was eleven I am their little angel

I got a letter from my church last night

Cheryl sent me an Applebee’s gift card begging me to visit we miss you, she said God misses you

don’t let the world steal away your kind soul sorry, Cheryl, but

I think my soul is already blackened

blackened like the rich stain of my cinnamon lipstick on his mouth

like the cherry purple marks of his lust on my breast

like the night coming through his window

I arch my back and say

I do want this, I do want you

he kisses me again and says okay

I am a whore I have broken their commandment

God’s, my parents’— my purity ring has been converted to jewelry taking up space on my finger that once belonged to God

it now belongs to me

in all honesty I’ve never been Madonna for ages I’ve craved the sinful stains of sex I kneel in his room and my mouth makes him praise me he runs his hands through my hair this is a transcendent kind of worship I disappointed God years ago so why make Him happy now?

instead we make each other happy pleasure and passion and perfect soul-poison velvety touches and soft sighs of delight tracing my finger over his spine breathing him in the salty smell of skin on skin on skin on skin

I revel in being human

this time, mouthwash swirls the drain in his bathroom sink

I look myself in the mirror am I ready? do I want this?

I go back to his bed the answer is yes, yes, yes he asks why are you so excited

I whisper

I have never been Madonna

I have always been the whore and for that I forgive myself

Silhouette Xander Fuhrer

I see a subtle figure gently poised

Inside the twilight azur of my youth

Unknown to my desires or my thoughts

Yet woven into every distant dream

And passing scarlet reverie; She weeps like bow to string and hand to key

In strange unfocused flux of rain-blurred glass, and In moments,

Caught between the folded lines of this short life

A light shines through

The raindrops and the glass still there, But brilliant and astounding in the warmth of their dilution

And in that distant beam through murky glass she is made real

A shape as yet unformed within

My long dark formless shape;

In radiance she dances, painted in A blinking harmony, A poetry of images on

Analogue animate cel, Her dark geometries recast in negative upon me—

And what’s a negative?

In film it’s half the process, the inner nature that the chemicals produce, And with another of its kind it changes, positive, The outer nature past the inner glass

Two darknesses within to make a brightness there without;

So what am I, then,

When I reach out and I feel her in the keys here, as I type, what am

I When I feel her in the mind up past my fingers?

In the body—

And I can’t see

It’s blinding to look past the glass at what I know lies there;

It is a terror

...but I’ve long loved fear

And sadness

And the dark

I’d say it’s since I lost him but it isn’t; it’s been since birth, This comfort in macabre

In the richness of the night’s enshrouding

A stage broad as the world for catharsis’ Lethe rush

Because the tragic is much like the comic

Finding pleasure in opposites and paradoxes— in my opposite, my paradox

—and then how to her am I, but Another shadow, another negative, A way out to the world?

How much longer will it be

‘Till that glass curtain falls away— A nd by my hand or hers?

Will it be something vacant, Another revelation-addict’s door to More of the mundane?

Or will it be what even now I dream

The truth I waltz at midnight with, Too close-held to let out

And how am I to him?

A panacea? He knows there is no panacea But an Answer

Yes, an Answer

That separateness in language

Grows exhausting, like an obligated lie

What’s in a name?

She whispers, for the dozen thousandth time

Everything and nothing

What’s a name but flesh?

A pretty obfuscation of the truth, No gateway to reverie,

But synecdoche for all the eyes outside

Repeated and reborn and re-abandoned

Silhouette, negative, glass, panacea

The truth inside the lie has made it sick: the seams have ‘come needles

< Illbearings >

How long? How long until I break the glass myself?

Until I pull the curtain back?

For how I’ve felt the stretches of sublime when our palms meet

And I am her And she is me

And the question mark that follows every voyage past perception

Vanishes

—and no one talks about the euphoria

The everything and nothingness of that, Of being whole.

The silhouette is beautiful, pure, distilled

But its symmetry is forced

An abridgement’s lilt of truth: It is pulled back, My eyes burn, and the cold of that Long dark moves through my bones, And the blue rain past the glass has no Warm amber lighthouse touch, But I am real.

Message from Home Lily

Moreschi

Antwerpen-Centraal

Giulia Flores Brykowicz

Monterey

Oslo Martin Risch

even when

Micah Land

a guy on tinder asks if i’m religious i say it’s sorta complicated, but yes. are you? he says no, but he’s hella spiritual tells me to ask about his mystical ayahuasca experience. i don’t.

there is more to my experience of the divine than spinning botanical vibrations.

i don’t tell him about the only time i have ever felt the absence of G-d: one summer night when i took two edibles body gone heavy and heart spiking paranoid, i felt the universe come to a nameless end in the span of five minutes.

Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?

keening into a void, profound loneliness all-consuming, i fell from heights, seeking sanctuary in time. seeking holy ground, divinity revealed barefoot in the dirt, seeking divine presence in the silent ordinary.

i don’t tell him how i know everything to be of G-d, how religiosity is rhythm and rhythm fills the spaces of seeming silence, how even a silent G-d still speaks.

Don’t You Know

Olivia Hebblewhite

You’re so afraid of getting there because you’re prepared for the attack. But, look, you owe No One any lack of success.

No One will be more alone if you carve time for your goals. Yes, No One thinks this makes you a less kind soul.

When No One asked me once for weakness, I crafted all I could. We hung it together on No One’s wall, stood back, and agreed through No One’s expertise, we had prevented all future pain borne of jealousies.

For did you know No One is a landscaper of your dreams?

If you could just tear up your turf, uproot self-trust, buy some bonsai shears, a big bucket of time with a bottomed hole...

No One is waiting to plow your projects into the ground.

A charge-free service in implosion, save the compensation in No One’s chance to remold and remold and remold you.

But one last thing. Keep this quiet. No One doesn’t see its merit.

Don’t let No One support you. Remember, it’s true: No One will not love you as much as you love you.

Orange Birds Ava Barnett

Andrew Mazariegos-Ovalle

RICE, or PEACE and LOVE

Em Haas

My mom came home late. She came home with my aunt and my dad, and they all walked in together, my aunt hovering close by and my dad keeping my mom upright as she wobbled to the couch and fought to keep her eyes open. Most of the lights were oit now because the scar is still there: four jagged, lightened pieces of skin she hates.

I might have run to her, my little legs carrying me as fast as I could across the carpet to a mom I barely recognized. I might have walked because of how scary it was to see her that way. I don’t really remember anymore. But I clearly remember my mom, her head tipped back on our old, moss-green couch, her arm in a sling, her hair tied back in a lazy ponytail. I could see her eyes then, too, and she had kept them open just to look at me.

When you Google, ‘what to do for wrist pain,’ the first thing that comes up is an article from Penn Medicine. It says to rest the wrist, apply an ice pack, take ibuprofen and-or tylenol, and suggests talking to a doctor about wearing a brace. Usually, this is shortened with the acronym RICE, or rest, ice, compression, and elevation, but recently PEACE and LOVE have become suggested abbreviations. PEACE stands for protection, elevation, avoidance of anti-inflammatories, compression, and education on the doctor’s end. LOVE comes after PEACE, standing for loading – or building tolerance – optimism, vascularisation, and exercise. Doing these things, along with time and patience, should better the condition of a patient with a soft tissue injury, but after four years of PEACE, I have yet to feel LOVE.

“So, what brings you in today?”

“My wrist has been hurting a lot,” I oversimplify. I can’t do schoolwork the way that it’s assigned because it starts to hurt so bad that I can’t finish it. I can’t do part of my job without a flare up. I don’t know what to do anymore. This is the truthful answer, but I tend to cry at the doctor — the notes from one of my recent appointments describes me as interactive and appropriate, but tearful — and I didn’t want to cry in front of him. I wanted answers, and I wanted to feel better, and the answer I was too shy to give him was this: There is never a day without pain. Sometimes, when I bend my wrist, there’s such a sharp pain that comes so quickly I gasp out loud and have to hold onto it, like it might feel better if I do that. There are days when the pain is so bad and lasts so long I have to skip class to lie in bed and ice it, even though I know it won’t do anything. There is, to my knowledge, no way to make it stop.

“Okay.” He sits on his rolling chair, then pushes himself in front of me. “Where does it hurt?”

“My ulna,” I tell him. Four months before, in my high school biology class, we had

had to memorize over sixty bones in the human body. When we had learned about the bones in the wrist, I’d committed the ones that had been hurting me the most to memory. “But also here, in the carpals.”

“So, everywhere,” the doctor summarizes. That makes me smile. “Yeah, basically.”

He makes sure I can twist and bend my wrists and asks if there’s any pain. I say no, so he moves on to taking my hands in his and pressing. That doesn’t hurt, either. He makes me squeeze both of his pointer and middle fingers as tight as I can. But he’s asking the wrong questions and looking in the wrong places. When he starts feeling the rest of my arm, I want to stop him and say, What are you doing? I told you my wrist is hurting. Look closer. Listen to me. But his face lights up and it’s too late to say any of that.

“Your muscles are really tense,” he explains, “and you really don’t have any grip strength. So I’m going to send you to physical therapy so you can work on building your strength up again, okay?”

He tells me to stop wearing a brace, because wearing one will only make me weaker, and he tells me that what I have is adolescent and will go away by the time I turn twenty-five.

The worst part about that visit, in hindsight, was that I believed him. But I had finally been given an answer, so I held it tight and didn’t let it go.

I look at the records from this doctor’s appointment two years later, at my desk in college. It’s a thick stack of papers, five copies of the same thing shoved into a white manilla envelope. I remember the answer I was given, but I see them with more experienced eyes now. Patient reports, ‘It’s going alright and feeling OK.’ ‘Patient rates the pain at a 9 out of 10.’ ‘Functional limitations: lifting, reaching, and activities of daily living.’

I cry every single time I look at those papers, because what seventeen year old can’t lift their backpack without their wrist hurting? What seventeen year old can’t hold a book in their hand for longer than a few minutes without having to set it down? What seventeen year old was never given the results they were promised?

My mom calls me the morning of my doctor’s appointment. I’m home alone, save for my dog, who trails at my heels up until I go still to answer her. “Hi.”

“Hi,” she says. “I want you to listen to me.”

Her tone is gentle, but I want you to listen to me is never said happily. I swallow and nod. “Okay.”

I hear her shift in her desk chair. “I want you to be... you today, but I also want you to be a little bit more...”

“Assertive,” I finish for her. “Bold.”

“Exactly. This has been bothering you for years. You need to tell them about it.” She pauses. “You need to tell them how much you’re hurting, Em. Because you’re hurting a lot.”

For a second, I hardly know how to respond. She, of all people, knows what it’s like to hurt so much and for so long. She’s had the same kind of wrist pain longer than I’ve been alive and has taught me every trick she’s ever learned, because in the two years since my last appointment, the pain has gotten worse and spread to both of my wrists. I see myself doing the same things she does to try and take care of her aching joints –icing where it hurts, always keeping Tylenol on me, rubbing my wrists and arms and hands when my muscles feel tense. She texts me every other day asking me how I’m doing with three question marks, eager to hear that maybe I’m feeling better, and I think I break her heart every time I tell her how much my wrists hurt, just like hers.

“I know,” I finally say, and then the line goes quiet for a few seconds. I stare at the brown-beige carpet of our living room and sniff back the rest of my tears. She lets me in a few seconds of silence.

“I wish I could be there with you,” she says.

“I know. But I’ll call you afterwards to tell you how it goes.”

“Okay,” she says, “let me know what they say. And if you need anything, I’ll be with my phone. I’ll answer.” It’s a promise.

“I will,” I say, “Love you.”

“I love you, too.”

I hang up. I leave.

I’m not the one who ends up calling – my mom calls again when I’m at the doctor. I’ve chosen an orthopedic this time with the hopes that specialized work will get me specialized answers. A nurse has just looked through my chart, at the answers I was last given, and the doctor will be coming soon. I scroll through Twitter in the meantime, and halfway through reading something or other, she calls. I answer on the second ring.

I update her on everything that’s happened – which mainly includes the suggestion of a cortisone shot – and she comforts me through it, until the doctor comes in. My mom stays on the line as she talks, half-focusing on work and me while I explain my situation through tears. The orthopedic does a couple of tests that mostly check for carpal tunnel, then looks at my chart again before turning in her chair, to me. I’m so excited over the possibility of any kind of answer I could cry.

“Here’s what I want you to do,” the orthopedic says.

I’m holding my mom in one hand, and my heart is in my throat. Whatever she says, I’ll do.

“I want you to take Tylenol, a thousand milligrams, three times a day. I want you to ice your wrist, to use Voltaren, and to see our hand therapist later today.” She lists out four different times, and I choose the second one. She asks if I can do these things, and I say yes. She leaves to go print out my papers, and it’s me and my mom again. My mom starts. “So.”

“Everything I’ve been doing already.” I’m dizzy with disappointment. Almost twenty years old and I’m still being told the same things I was when I was seventeen and sixteen and and fifteen. I’m being asked if I can do them when it’s what I’ve been doing all along. Before I know it, I’m crying again. I’m on the verge of sobbing all by myself, and my mom apologizes, saying again how much she wishes she could just take the pain away from me, how much she wishes she were there. Selfishly, in hindsight, I’m glad she wasn’t, because I was ashamed enough crying alone.

The hand therapist is older – maybe in her 60s or 70s – with short, gray-white hair, and she almost reminds me of one of my Greek professors with the way she carries herself. She’s efficient and confident, and does more tests on both of my wrists in fifteen minutes than any doctor has done i four years. I tell her so, and she tells me that it took her a long time to remember all of these little tests because they all check for issues in the carpals. “I still forget some sometimes,” she says as she presses into the middle of my wrists, somewhere close or in between my capitate and hamate. She determines that whatever I have is causing instability in my joints, and that’s what’s causing the pain. She puts a sheet of plastic in a hot-water bath, and when it’s softened, she molds it to the shape of my arm, saying to wear it 24/7. She says that the stabilization encouraged by the brace will help with the pain. She says to come see her in a few weeks. I want to trust her, because she’s been more extensive than anyone else, and try to push away my doubts.

But now, four weeks have passed and there’s been no difference, but I wear it anyway – I’m wearing it anyway – and I don’t know what’s supposed to come next.

Creation of Love

Lilly Pihart

no one ever taught me

Allison Rafert

how to properly spit watermelon seeds. I have no memories of sitting in plastic lawn chairs on my grandpa’s porch to send seeds flying into the suburban lawn they don’t slide off my lip in home videos and clumsily tumble down my chin before I learn technique from grandpa’s mouth full of german beer

I never celebrated a successful launch with a nice one or pat on the back— and not just because I am the least favorite grandchild

it’s petty and it’s small and it probably wouldn’t have been a formative moment, it doesn’t put me at some great disadvantage or in a poorly conditioned state, but it didn’t happen and I wish it did because now I have to teach myself how to spit watermelon seeds, and there is saliva all over my kitchen floor

Luca Trujillo

Lola

Mycelium, My City, My Roots

Leila Rocha Fisher

We are Mycelium, an intricate network of thread-like roots sharing knowledge, resources, and stories across thousands of acres. This ancient, uniquely interconnected, strong yet fragile system runs all along the world, forming the bedrock of communities and filling in the cracks of our cities.

Lovepoem Elias Ravn

Iversen

If your touch is shorthand for love,

Then spell it out for me

In terms I understand

Like sweet soda, or new music

Because I am learning this language with you

One day at a time

The vocabulary of love is not learnt

But remembered

I spend most of my days remembering

In my room

Where the window is closed

And the green bed is unmade

Just so I can remember you

That much longer

Propagation Baby

Eleanor Hinchcliffe

The greenhouse heat

Is heavy like velvet

Curtains parting for me

As I bend to the crumpled

Flower, severed at the

Neck, bruised tissue

Paper petals bleeding

On the gravel floor

I cradle it into

My kitchen where it floats

In a glass bowl

On the counter, an unfurling Flame, a beating waterLily heart

For Her Clara Smith

That little girl stalks me. She won’t leave. She isn’t angry, doesn’t shout or even frown at me. She just sits in the corner of my mind. Knees drawn up to her chest, encircled in her arms. Her head tilts to the side, watching what I do, hearing what I think.

Me before I’m sick. Her hair is blonde- it hasn’t fallen out yet or grown back a frizzy brown. The bones don’t yet jut awkwardly out of her frame. She’s still got those blue blue eyes- they haven’t faded to a duller gray- green. She’s not sick just yet.

I think about her loves. Sunshine, impatiens flowers, the river birch out the window. She smiled with all her teeth, cried while eyes were on her, and giggled without blushing. She gifted flowers to the neighbors, and complimented without thought. She questioned often without revising for convenience. Sickness is not smiles. So she traded her sunlight for fluorescents, grew tolerance instead of flowers, and watched snowstorms from hospital windows when she used to watch the riverbirch sway from her own.

I’m still a little sick.

I may never escape this gray. She hears this- and I cannot bear to look at her face. So I crawl another inch

towards the sunlight. I ask my questions. I marvel at rainbows and romanticize the rain. I giggle when butterflies land on my fingertips. For her.

I fill my calendar and to-do list, to see the smile on her face at fulfillment. I sing beautiful melodies and descants- play music that moves with the depth and range of the ocean. She is kept alive by the music. In this way she haunts me gently. This is for her. for her.

Split ends

Esmé Brown

ego

Matson Bailey

stone heart

Micah Land

i ate the other half of the nectarine i gave you after lunch you ate half left it toothmark streaked juice dripping down your fingers

nectarine just overripe, perfect like a second comedown tonguing the pit for the last bit of flesh

i don’t want to kiss you most of the time, anyways but it’s not like that really matters

this is just making out with more steps. i hold your sticky hand my teeth trace the trails yours left

i tear flesh from pit forget the difference between taste of lip and nectarine collect my thoughts. suck the juice from my hands. try to forget your taste in my mouth.

Skeletons. Maani Ekka

Mama didn’t have to tell me there were skeletons in her closet. I saw them.

I saw them in the flash of the white scarf that hangs all the way in the back. Never touched. Never worn, never spoken about. There’s a shadow over her eyes every time she gets a glimpse of it. Like she’s staring death in the face.

I saw them in a photo buried in a drawer in the way bottom, among the good jewelry she hides and the sandalwood powder sachet she keeps in there. It’s a woman and a baby. Her and her mother, I think.

I asked about it once. I never did again- the silence I received from her for the remainder of the week was enough to terrify me.

You can glimpse the skeletons when she steps on the scales and breathes a sigh of relief with every pound she gains.

Mama won’t let me into the blue bin- the one filled with pictures. Does she know I’ve been through them?

There’s only a handful of them, but they’re there. A man with a funny goatee and mustache. Two boys and a girl, and then another girl. Occasionally another boy. A family.

Mama never talks ‘bout them. I have a great aunt, and cousins. That’s my family. We don’t talk about nothing before. My great Aunt’s getting real old, and she’s old enough

and pale enough for me to know that Mama isn’t actually related. We talk about her cousin and Aunt in New York- when I was younger I thought that they might be the key, but they’re not either.

I asked my cousin - my great aunt’s granddaughter- about them once. She showed me a few pictures of her, Mama and a boy- one of her brothers. All my cousin could tell me was that he lived with my great aunt and mama for a bit, and then, he moved back. And she knew nothing more.

I know mama has skeletons because she gets this look in her eye when people talk about traveling. Like she’s lost.

One of mama’s coworkers once told me that mama was the best-traveled teacher in the district. I told her that she must be joking since she only goes three places- work, home, and my great aunt’s. And then the teacher pointed out all the pictures in the room– her geography classroom.

It turns out Mama took all of them. All of them, from the faded images of icy lakes to the still-bright portraits of tropics and sunkissed crowds of lives far removed from this small town I’ve never called anything but home.

I tried looking a few times. At the library, through newspaper articles and census records. But there’s nothing. Not a trace of her. It’s like she just appeared out of nowhere. Filling in some gap that didn’t exist. Blending into the backdrop without blemish or foreign tinge.

I brought someone home one day, and Mama was more guarded than usual. That night, she told me very quietly not to trust anyone whose skeletons I didn’t know by each and every bone. I turned and looked at her quizzically, opening and closing my mouth like a goldfish. I had so many questions, but no words.

I barely knew Mama’s skeletons- let alone their bones. Did I trust her?

I knew her. The person who put me to bed every night. Who read by the fire and baked and played soft piano music. The person who peeked into my room at all hours of the night to watch me sleep. The person who brewed tea and watched me bike up and down the street from the kitchen window. That was the person I knew.

I didn’t know her skeletons. The little girl in the picture. The young man who held my cousin and broke her trust. I didn’t know the person who liked to travel, who could fathom adventure beyond her routine.

I knew her. I loved her. But perhaps trust is something that only dwells in bones too far buried in the dust of closets past. Perhaps the difference between knowing and trusting is the difference between the skeletons of a body, and the flesh it lays to rest. Acetone Allison

Rafert

Arizona

Tove Trelstad-Larsen

Can you spell out this strangeness, concoct a mixture to adequately imitate this burnt landscape, these strange hills, that look like they hide giants, that pulled the trees over their shoulders like a blanket, and curled up, snoring softly, not knowing the eons passing.

I can’t do long division well, or breathe out wind, but hope I can see something true and resist the temptation to, refine it, or curl it into something new. Let the roughness shine through and say, yes. Breathe in the craggy mountains and cough out rocks and dust and shrunken trees onto a page.

Fading

Abbey Kelley-Lanser

I am fading in and out of light and shadow

Drifting sideways, fleeting as the snow

My emotions chain me to my sorrow

Shifting from lamppost to lamppost’s glow

An orb of ghostly white to catch an orb of crystal

Sphere to sphere my troubled planets fly

Beneath no moon I can’t perceive which pistol

Pierced my side and shot me from the sky

It’s funny how I never knew where I was blowing

Winter winds blur boundaries of flight

Confusing stars and flakes when nights are snowing

In and out of shadows dim with light

Ezhel Snowman Fiko Insel

What I Learned From Watching Season 2 of HBO’s The White Lotus

Greta Hallberg

Embrace a life

Of gelato, shopping sprees, and vespa rides on the Sicilian coast (Plus infidelity, molly, and murder).

Yell with gusto on the phone

When the airline misplaces your luggage And sends it back to New York, The fucking geniuses.

Cry openly and often–

It doesn’t really matter what about. Shed sexy tears at the bar. By the pool if possible.

Bitch about your quarter life crisis

In front of strangers. Now it’s their problem, too.

Hire a medium to read your cards, Then throw a fit when She gets all negative About your cheating husband.

Dump the nice boy

With the big brown doe eyes

So you can fool around With the ugly-hot himbo.

Loathe your rich asshole friends

Just enough to fuel your superiority complex

(But not enough to totally rule out The possibility of passionate hate sex).

Show up to the residence

Of your long-lost Sicilian relatives Without warning (Or a working knowledge Of the Italian language).

Wear silver to Madame Butterfly. Accept a coveted role As the tragic heroine Of your own Italian opera.

If you have to discover a dead body

In the Ionian Sea, Be sure to wear your hottest one piece.

Untitled Parker Gardner

Blood lathers skin, picture pink

As aches wax poetic

The shadow of my symphony asks

For a delirious honey

Raw and repulsive in the light of day.

People’s Police

Manaw Kyar Phyu

Brutal Honesty

Kira Vega

Plainly Anonymous

I’ve never been good at introductions. The day I binged, I called her from a truckstop, unable to speak. The dashboard and passenger dip dizzy with sprinkles, plastic, smeared receipts. “I can’t breathe,” I gasped. There are always tickets to places you never wanted to go. All that energy now mine. Caloric virus, I the host. Oh, small child, pregnant with shame. So many things we take for granted. Lungs. Bugs. Bats. Bellies. Beauty. Later, beads of floral vomit splashed my forehead as they hit the eggshell bowl. Marked.

You are mine. Fine.

You try so hard, but you can’t hold yourself down enough. One of us was bound to control the other. One of us was bound to admit this cycle is a kind of contained conclusion, at least a necessary self-definition, at most this body’s waterlogged home.

Cherish our moments Or cast them away, my love Is yours forever

If this is the last thing I’ll say

Alyssa Vue