REMINISCING

FROM THE BRUSH ARTS AND LITERARY JOURNAL
ISSUE III
Foreward & Dedication
REMINISCING

, earlier this semester, Geraldine en, the front office manager of NLV Honors College passed away. dine, also known as “Gerrie,” was ed by not only the From the h editorial team but also by one in the Honors College munity
From the Brush team decided to ate this year ’ s issue to Gerrie to k her for all the support and love has given us these past few years. the cover and the following page n art installation From the Brush nized Each piece of origami was d by Honors College community bers in remembrance of Gerrie.
Iron Horse
Rylee Carley
Oregon State University
This photo depicts a rustic horse statue above the Columbia River in George, Washington, one of many statues in the public art installation "Grandfather Cuts Loose the Ponies "

Brooklyn Mumford
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
I asked for a word to describe our friendship I put it on my wrist and you put it on yours We are connected through lines of plastic and if we were beads I’d hope to be on the same bracelet as you until the string breaks and we explode into a million pieces
my phone is ringing i decline
he saw me smiling
Isabella ShenoudaUniversity of Nevada, Las Vegas
how am i supposed to just walk away from this meeting we are discussing a serious topic it is heavy in here
i can’t just leave everyone is blowing up my phone where are you? why aren’t you answering your phone? he is getting mad
i can barely read the messages my reading interrupted by back-to-back calls and influxes of texts each replacing the next not even one gets the chance to be understood
which do i answer first?
i decide to answer none at all i turn off notifications do not disturb
hoping the quiet of the constant vibrations will give me space to think
i am overwhelmed overwhelmed by the conversation no longer taking my focus
overwhelmed by the angry faces and voices i can already picture angry at me for not giving my devoted attention to them and them only
overwhelmed i try to ignore it try to speed up the meeting let them know i have to go
but the only thing that speeds up is my racing heart
they keep talking it gets heavier
i consider running away hiding before i’m seen
there is too much it is too heavy
i am atlas holding everything above my head as the rest of me screams for reprieve pretending to be okay as i hold my ground as i hold their sky
and wait to be found
i soon see the shape of him walking up the stairs where my meeting is i warn my team that he is on his way i pretend that things are normal i try to continue our conversation where we left off instead, i am blank my mouth hangs open as i try to remember how to function it is not heavy anymore it is empty
i try to be normal but no
i retract
i am a child again no, not again always
my role as an adult is taken no, i am not a child again i am not an adult i never was i never will be
he comes to my place of work to look for me
my team finally notices as he continues walking up the steps
that’s sweet he is looking for you mine would just drive away
that’s sweet you think that but no, he is not looking
he is watching staring controlling he’s 19 feet away no 19 years looking down on me as i sit up in my crib
i can’t remember where we were i awkwardly laugh offer nonsense to discuss he slowly retreats down the stairs i am free no he sits down he is waiting
we begin walking back to the office he stands up sees where we are headed opens the door pretending to be a stranger maybe he is back in the office we tie up loose ends see you tomorrow i walk out head looking down finally a relief from holding it up
i get to the car but the anger is not there only remaining is a mild frustration
we get home everything is normal why wasn’t he mad i ask her later she says he saw me smiling
Tree
Moonis Ghani
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
"Tree" represents six months worth of consistency Every day I was on campus from March to August of 2023, I took a picture of this one specific tree Initially, I was struck by the beauty of a springtime tree, so I took a picture of it without too much thought Later, I conceptualized a one hundred image collage of the tree. I committed to taking the same picture within the same framing every time...Having this project where I was able to map the changes within a natural part of the world let me simultaneously enjoy what has become MY tree on campus, while also being able to examine how interesting it is to be able to look at something in one hundred different ways.

I Am Salma
Salma HussainUniversity of Nevada, Las Vegas
I am Salma
The arabic word for peace
The opposite of what people think of when they hear it
They feel fear
They think terrorist
But it means peace
I am salma
My last name is the great grandson of the prophet muhammad
My name holds great stories and history
I am Salma
The daughter of my father
Who lived through the terror of the war of independence in Bangladesh
He watched the people fight for their language, they're religion, and they're culture
He felt the oppression that lingered after the rule of the british and felt it again under Pakistan control
I carry that trauma
I am Salma
A brown woman in america
I am Salma
I live across the world from my family and their culture
I've slowly forgotten the language
The one that I first learned.
I am Salma.
There is Nothing of Import Here
Leonard Brattoli
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
I.
Clearly, you did not read, heed, or possibly acknowledge the title Otherwise, you would not be reading these words If you had followed my opening advice, you would not be going on this literary liaison You would not stand before the promise of learning the truth behind why people write. Had you listened, you would not be taking part in a maddened experimentation of the American literary legacy and future landscape. For the title of this very piece is a warning. For there is nothing of import here.
That is what you should acknowledge about the piece of writing placed before you. At a customary glance, you would assume this writing as genuine. However, it is not, or at least not in the traditional sense. In our post-industrialist, preposterously progressive modern world, most new writing truly exists as an intangible smattering of code, meant only to be interpreted by the artificial brain located within the silicon confines of a computer casing This machine mind turns computer language into human language, in a way acting as a translator for our very selves. Technology was wrought from humanity, yet the minutiae of what occurs in a computer is lost to most people. It is a miracle that turns intangible data into tangible content: a ritual that people access through the combined marvels of the digital screen, a right-handed mouse, and the simple monotonous exercise of digit fingers That is how folks such as yourself engage with writing in our bold and brave new world.
Though it is entirely possible that you are reading this on a piece of genuine, corporation-crafted paper. For this to have happened, a selection of persons other than yourself (but still referred to as “ you ” by others) would have gone through the various tasks needed to conjure this paper The papermill, its workers, shipping companies, transporters, storefronts, and salespersons work in an asynchronous harmony towards the deliverance of the physical paper. This is how our modern world of tomorrow made-today works. That is how it should be. Though God forbid if the piece of writing before you ever make it to physical print. Out of the menagerie of scribed voices, me getting onto the page would be unrealistic I would have gotten too big for that
Now wait a minute.
Who is I, however?
Well, I am “I”. And that would make you “ you. ”
It is best that you keep this partition of pronouns in mind There is a definitive difference between you and I, one that cannot be crossed You (yes, I am referring to you, my dear reader) are the very specific individual that you are at this moment in time. When you reread this paper, regardless of time, you will be the very specific individual that you are at that moment. A copy within the original, in a sense. Your life, up until and after this point, has been one large series of revisions made to the same person. A collection of memories, adjectives, experiences, titles, names, and claims A living character in the greatest piece of prose that can never be truly dedicated to text: life.
You are many things strung together to make one thing. You are the student picked out in a packed classroom by a particular teacher. An employee rewarded with the gift card riches of a mechanical, on-time capitalist society. A child unaware of the extent of parental squabbles A student senselessly making sense of a world simultaneously just in and just out of reach. A boss leading with broken promises and precarious comforts. A leader selfprescribed with a great purpose to give to the common folk An artistic sellout A slur of vile belief and social acceptance. A no one that exists for a someone. A someone watching over no one. If you ask who you are, then I would propose that you are somewhere in this enumeration Or maybe you have escaped me. You are the most immaculate tangle of memories and meanings that could have been born into humanity. An alphabet of things limited merely by my own, specially derived
imagination. A person that I can perceive but is still forever out of my reach. You are my greatest obstacle and goal at the same time, you magnificent member of my audience You have put me in a difficult position. I have to connect with you, yet I can never know you. You are both there and not. You can be anyone. You can be everyone.
Yet if that is you, then what am I?
I am I. I am the written word itself. I am that which has been left on these pages, and on many other pages by other ambitious souls seeking to preserve a piece of themselves. I am the main character, ensemble cast, and narrator all wrapped into one. I am a message for tomorrow’s travelers. For those who know the person that brought me into existence For those who will never know who he really was. I am forward thinking in my approach, hopeful that the words I am composed from ring proudly into the vast emptiness of the unknowable tomorrow A human voice captured in black and white. And most importantly, I am a cacophony of dreams. Dreams unrealized. Unfinalized. Unfulfilled.
Despite this, I will never be the person that I originated from. You’ll look to the start of this essay to see a name. The one behind that name is responsible for this paper. This bold statement. Yet, in truth, none of him is here That is how all pieces of writing work Greats like Whitman, Miller, Steinbeck, and Plath are long revered even as the reading populace’s tastes change over the years. Their recorded words, often the only remaining piece of their deeply personal existence, echo to this day. Like a holy sermon or ancient proverb.
But the writing, despite its reverence throughout the ceaseless procession of time, will never be equal to
the one that penned it. There is a reason people hold great works above great writers. For not even the most skilled penman can replicate their complete essence onto the page Yes, you can remember a person. You can find information about the greats with incredible ease. But is that really knowing them? Once a person is dedicated to death and history, that is it You may argue that they live on through memory, but like a broken promise, the effect of that ideology is a farce. For each text made during a person ’ s life is only a sliver of who they were at that moment. Such as me. My writer merely means for me to be a garland of what he thought and believed in at the moment of my creation. He is equally likely to adore or denounce me. But once I am let loose on the world, I begin to speak for him. I am a testimony to an image he wishes to share Upon my liberation into publication, he forfeits control. His readers can dissect, analyze, and even reclaim me. Call me a portrait of his ideals as both a writer and a person. Yet I can never truly be him I can never record the parts of him that he rejects. Never can I know where he goes after me. If I was meant to be the recreation of himself, I will always be unrealized. Unfinalized. Unfulfilled.
That divide between me and my creator is why there is nothing of import here. You read this in hopes of gaining some insight into the name branded on these pages You want to see if I attest to some sense of progress or future potential But is that what I am really meant for? Why must I carry the weight of his person? His identity and soul? I exist for one point in time: the point of my production. I am cast out as soon as I am done My writer is then able to change and evolve. I start to no longer recognize him. I can no longer represent him.
You see the divide, don’t you?
Writing is a deeply human experience, but it will always be what separates you and me. People try and try again to impose their own human nature onto writing Yet the books and essays and poems and prose that mankind has produced can only ever be so much. They can only ever become a realization of the choices made in their individual embryonic state The written word is now its one entity I am my own being One that can be morphed by your interpretations, your presupposed ideas, your individual inherent beliefs. You choose how you see me, but you cannot be me. We can never be one and the same
You are a living human. I am the dead written word.
You are free to change. I cannot.
You are alive. I have never lived.
You can make yourself into something. I have nothing of import
Timeless Dance
Wesley Harden
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
While in Prague I came across one of their biggest attractions, the Astronomical clock which was built in 1410 CE While adventuring across the city early in the morning I noticed a street performer dancing in front of this historical monument. After agreeing to take a picture, this is symbolic to show how the historic delicacy of Prague remains in the modern era.

The Freezing Moons Fiery Wrath
Daniel AlizadehUniversity of Nevada, Las Vegas
My body is freezing
My Ego has been set ablaze
The pain has broken the mold of happiness I once had
The hunger is everlasting
My life has become meaningless
She cloaked my world in an eternal darkness
Nothing can help save me from the Armageddon ahead
And my home is so far away but I must withstand the end times
For a blaze in the northern sky will light my path and take me to my home
So that I may return the favor of being given the gift of Abyssal hate
By she who has decayed for eons
Wilting away in her hedonistic garden
The Freezing Moons Fiery Wrath will be no more
And I will truly awake
the moment that started it all again
Isabella ShenoudaUniversity of Nevada, Las Vegas
it was 1am i was trying to return to sleep after a brief period of waking i had just shut my eyes when i felt a deep sudden aching in my heart my beating, pounding, feeling heart
my eyes jolted open and my brain started screaming he’s not okay he’s not okay and i knew, after tonight, i wouldn’t be either
i had a feeling that you were not home not safe and warm in your bed
i had a feeling you were going to see him
i open your location to comfort myself if you were home, you were safe and if you were, i would be too
but if you were on the roads, it meant you were with him
there’s no way you would see him right?
no way you would be with him after the day we just spent together i really thought something changed
i know that’s crazy and selfish of me but i can’t deny what i felt and i’m sorry that you don’t feel it too all of these precautions all of these defenses to curb my paranoia just to see your contact slowly make its way towards me
but you ’ ve never been further
i watched your contact enter my neighborhood but instead of coming to me you turned the other way
i watched as your car stopped at his place i watched as you left as you made all the turns to return to your house
i imagined you entering your home taking off your shoes as you went to your room i imagined you feeling safe and warm but knew i would not feel it too
it’s been an hour my heart is still aching and i’m shaking my neck is tensing, pulsing and i know it will hurt for days
the hot tears that once flooded my face eventually turned cold and are now slowly trickling down the tracks they have made as if they were always there and are there to stay
i’m drowning in a puddle of my own despair and i wish i could throw up my insides until everything spills out until i am empty until i can feel no more because nothing hurts more than this
why would God, if he exists, burden me with falling in love with someone who could never love me in return? someone incapable of feeling as much as i do
how is it fair that i know where you are and who you ’ re going to see while im in my sleep
i can’t even rest in peace
how is it fair that i can feel so strongly for you and feel your betrayal from miles away when it never even crossed your mind that you were betraying me
because how could you be? you did nothing wrong.
my friend jokes that i’m psychic but the longer this goes on, i think i’m just psycho
i’ve been told multiple times before in various different ways that you will never love me the way i love you
yet still, i hold out hope as my delusion grows and i used to want to hate loving you but i just hate myself for loving you and i hate everyone that you love because how fair is it that the person that you are with of all the people in the world lives down the street from me
Im Deutschland
Wesley Harden
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
While on a trip to Berlin I was able to take a tour of the Reichstag. On a placard on the roof it discussed the plurality of maintaining transparency within the federal government. After WWII this transparency was a precedent as the building was rebuilt. This picture was taken on the roof of the Reichstag to symbolize the sun setting on Germany’s history and showing the dichotomy of contemporary German culture and their tainted history

marion: she just like me fr
Isabella ShenoudaUniversity of Nevada, Las Vegas
marion
a schoolteacher in love with a gay man what a travesty to love someone so deeply just for them to stab you in the back in the heart wipe the knife clean and move on like you never mattered to them because you never did at least not like that and marion in her delusion in her hope and wishful thinking
continued on, with the wounds still bleeding still fresh
as she told herself it wasn’t what it looked like it just couldn’t be
it made her a worse person and led her to do the unthinkable
something i couldn’t have imagined doing back then but now it doesn’t seem so crazy
i don’t want to end up like her but even still, i feel i already am
the hateful thoughts have already started and i hate someone i used to admire wishing he would just go away would just disappear wish he never met you
because no matter how much i try and i tell myself the truth i can’t bring myself to believe it
i lie to myself instead and trick myself into thinking you could love me and like marion
i would do anything for you
i would press your shirts and make your floured cod turn a blind eye all for your love
i would do all of this and more no questions asked no hesitation all the while i knew you were out with another man
but times have changed and tom might’ve needed marion for the disguise for his own safety
but you would never need me you can be free and while i’m happy about that
the evilest part of me deep deep down
wishes you were trapped with me
Meet and Give
Hannah CrowellUniversity of Nevada, Las Vegas
We meet again in a dream: the world falling apart. Your hair dyed blond, us staring out a hotel window at the sprawling blue sea
What happens next? A dream within as we are reduced to spectators. And the seabirds fall slow like ashes, sooty as the edges of your burnt hair
I feel your eyes fall on me, your gaze empty–when I forgot how to take care of our world, you fled with wings, and I held you in memory, encasing your heart in honey.
I feel your eyes on me, but I don’t meet your gaze. I could never meet you halfway, this ebbing of the tide, push and pull. I was drowning within, and you watched, waiting as I failed to wait for you.
So I hold you in memory and gaze at the world, at seabirds with burning wings, at fire spreading on endless waves, and its heat beating restless on our turned backs
What I never calculated was time:
I feel the loss of it, the sand slipping away–
I know that when I let you go, you’ll depart with your half-earned, fully won smile
Why does one try in this world?
Rapture
Daniel Alizadeh
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
When you get off the train with nothing, And end up getting back on the train with nothing, Why try at all?
Is it for the Mountains? The Grasslands? The Beaches? Is it for laughter? For “fun”? Is it for friends, family, and loved ones? When the walls come tumbling down, And you enter darkness with only yourself, What makes you take a chance and try again?
And if you do not, why? It may seem ridiculous, But when you can only control so much, That can go away in mere moments, Tell me, what’s the point?
35 mm Film Collage
Seth MaokhamphiouUniversity of Nevada, Las Vegas
This is a collection of photos taken on my 35mm point-and-shoot film camera. Every photograph captures a singular moment in time spent with the people that mean the most to me, my friends. Although the technology of cameras has moved far past the need for film cameras, the aura of photos taken on film simply cannot be replicated by digital cameras. The process of physically unloading a cartridge of film, taking it to a local film processing facility, and waiting 3 days to get negatives back is tedious, but definitely worth the hassle. It is a small price to pay for memories that will last a lifetime

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