The objective of The Messenger is to encourage the appreciation and exploration of the creative arts on the University of Richmond campus. Since 1876, The Messenger has celebrated student work by publishing submissions in a literary and visual arts magazine. More information on the magazine, as well as past publications since 1987, can be found on messengerur.wordpress.com.
Acknowledgements
The Messenger staff would like to thank Dr. David Stevens for his continued support and guidance as our faculty sponsor. We are also grateful for the University of Richmond English and Visual and Media Arts Practice departments, who continually encourage students to create and submit their works, and the authors and artists who never fail to amaze us with their talent. Finally, we would like to thank our readers for their interest in our magazine. Without you all, we wouldn’t have this publication.
A
This year’s edition of The Messenger is a reflection on the sudden changes that happen through out our lives. This common thread within the the featured works reflects not only our student population’s general attitude towards the volatility of the past few years, but is also reinforced by the recency of heavy events such as the conflict occuring in Gaza as well as the sudden death of Christopher Elvin that took place on our campus. Continuing off of our 2023 edition, “Roots,” this year’s collection explores not only how our past shapes our identities, but also, how the unpredictability of living can inform our present experiences, and thus, can alter our futures.
Further supporting this theme of the capricious is the contrasting styles and emotions of the writing and art that was accepted for this year’s edition. The turbulence of our collective experience has appeared to be a source of inspiration for many of our contributors, leading to an interesting collection of more experimental work than our previous editions have showcased. Every piece in this year’s magazine is a reflection upon both our past and present experiences. The oscillation between them has left a lasting impact on the work highlighted here; both elements of our tumultuous existence help us to create experiments of art and literature that look towards the future with hope.
This edition is filled with a wide array of tones, forms, and images. From page to page, there is a certain variability that is meant to replicate the experience and reflections of our contributors. This year, we received some of our strongest and most emotionally challenging work yet. This is also the first year that our magazine is publishing translations, both creative and traditional in nature. These works were created and curated with extreme care, and nearly every work selected sincerely impacted us in one way or another. We hope that this collection captivates you as well.
Warmly,
Bella and Catherine Co-Editors-In-Chief
Award Winners
The Margaret Haley Carpenter Award for Poetry
This award is presented to a student who has had an outstanding poem submitted for publication in The Messenger. The winner is chosen by a panel of English faculty members.
“The Pink Fish Scandal,” by Ann Sabin
Ann Sabin is a junior from Massachusetts majoring in English and minoring in History. She wrote this poem for Intro to Creative Writing with Professor Henry after a phone call with her dad. He had become enamored with his prank suggestion and kept checking in to see if she’d "gone to the pet store yet?" She would like to thank her editor, her mom, for her support and her friend, Emma, who helped her submit her poems a minute before the deadline. This poem is dedicated to her grandfather, Thomas Sabin, who shared her love for imaginary fish.
The Margaret Owen Finck Award for Creative Writing
This award is presented to a student who has had an outstanding creative work submitted for publication in The Messenger. The winner is chosen by a panel of English faculty members.
“between the world, water, and we,” by Ryan Doherty
Ryan Doherty is a junior from Charlottesville, Virginia. First and foremost, he wants to thank the English department for selecting him for this award.
This piece was inspired by Christina Sharpe's piece "In the Wake: On Blackness and Being" in which she focuses on the middle passage (and the water accompanying it) and how its afterlives continue to "haunt" diasporic contemporary Black life. Sharpe's use of water metaphors to explain her theory resonated with me as it showed how creative and academic work could be combined rather than separated. In his piece he decided to focus on water as a constant symbolic site of anti-Blackness and violence by taking the reader through a chronological sequence of events where water was a crucial backdrop within them. Writing this piece was a journey in itself, and he hopes the reader will also have their own journey while reading it. Thank you!
Honorable Mentions
"Upson Loop," Greta Gordon "bird building a dusty nest," Kathleen Firment "Everything That Happens in a Perfect Circle," Will Sheets "Hello, I have no name for you," Will Sheets "beyond the flesh," Bella Stevens
Staff
Editors-in-Chief
Catherine Leeder
Bella Stevens
Associate Editor Julia Abcug
Social Media Director
Helen Mei
Treasurer
Ally Martinez
Heads of Design
Pamira Yanar
Helen Mei
Poetry Editors
Julia Abcug
Amy Ogle
Mary Margaret Clouse
Will Sheets
Maddi Lewis
Nicole Llacza Morazzani
Prose Editors
Julia Abcug
Greta Gordon
Will Sheets
Maddi Lewis
Nicole Llacza Morazzani
Ally Martinez
Art Editors
Pamira Yanar
Alivia Palalay
Olivia Park
Design Editors
Pamira Yanar
Helen Mei
Alivia Palalay
tommyrot
Kathleen Firment
ziptie angel you bitchy xanthic clamshell wasted dancer virgin egomaniac ulcerous fox this gripping selfish hand reaches inward quietly joining parts kinetically only leaving nervy marrow mouthy navel lifting out kinetic power jutting quintessential itchy radicalism haughty siren get the fuck up ever vigilant don’t worry carve XOs by your acerbic zodiac
böl de parçala pamira yanar
The Lake is Alive
Reece Steidle
How does a wake become a parade?
Rebirth of shadow into light and back. Isn’t darkness merely a shade in between, Brighter than memory, lacking even color?
They rose over the lake, dancing, Form without form, a theoretical ballet, I the only spectator, despite you beside me. How could we see the same sight-less?
I took your hand to steady myself, But found you existed there only once. Your form beside me real as the steam
Rising from the lake’s skin and meeting night,
Greeting him like an old friend, which he Surely had to be. In the scheme of things Night and water are so alike, since both shelter beings unknowable in their inky darknesses.
Ghosts are real, but not how you’d think. They ride the memories of the past,
Which haunt us in all time and make The future far more fearful than any dream.
These spirits dance among us even now But scared to show themselves, they flit About between limbs of imagination, Like starlings in a tree, invisible with movement.
Not even a ripple on the surface, No longer water, but black marble; Obsidian mirror, touched by no feet And yet they dance.
Crossing a threshold, pulling me into step L’appel du vide; he takes my hand
And leads me in a waltz. After all Memory and uncertainty are both in 3/4.
Plath said “A blue mist is dragging the lake.” She never said what was found beneath The cracked ballroom floor of our past, When today was still unremembered
Shatters like ice under a freight train crashing, Falling to the water far below and
Meeting a twin-train rising up to the surface, Past and Future colliding in our time.
And in the silence, moments after, The dance continues, and I start
To ask why, then remember: They can’t see us, not anymore.
A Month of Nothing Leonor
Oliveira
Upson Loop
Greta Gordon
In the second grade, my friend Amy fell backwards out of the treehouse in our backyard and down the stairs and onto the plastic toy bin, which broke and spilt primary colors ten feet around. She didn’t break anything on her person, though. She had been sitting on the swing that my brother and his best friend swung from the highest tree branch during one of their secret club meetings for “SATAM,” formally known as “Sit and Talk About Muffins.” That was when all little kids wanted to have secret clubs.
Amy was over because her mom was getting chemo and my mom volunteered to watch her but I just thought it was a playdate, and so when Amy fell from the treehouse my mom was horrified because what if Amy’s mom got back from chemo and something terrible had happened to Amy, and how would she explain it? My dad was outside with an ax the next day, and I remember my mom using eyebrow tweezers to get out his splinters.
My brother and I used to take bike rides around the neighborhood on one of our designated loops called the Upson Loop as a Proper Noun because that was one of the paths we were allowed to go on by ourselves. The path took us by the Block Party House and through The Creek, too. One time my two best friends Kacey and Ella and I decided to go on an adventure at age 9 and went into The Creek through all of the neighbors’ yards and the water got high and quick and there were dried cicadas in the tunnel under the bridge and we giggled our way home until we saw our parents and stopped. Our playdates stayed in the backyard for a while after that.
The three of us called ourselves “KEG” because our names were Kacey Ella Greta and our parents would laugh at block parties at the Block Party House when we called ourselves that as they sprayed beer into cups and we thought maybe we had come up with a funny word and would be comedians when we grew up. When we got a little older, we understood the laughter was at, not with, us and renamed ourselves “GEK.”
My brother and I hosted a snake burial on the Upson Loop, once. It was back when we were both Christian and we saw a dead snake on the road with its guts all out on the curb and we still felt empathy for every creature we met so we did another loop to collect supplies and we buried it and adorned the grave with twigs and hoped no one did anything to
it. We made the snake a cross and blessed it like we heard in Sunday School.
OBrasilMesmo
Maria Zambrano Davila
When I first started driving I had nightmares that I would go down Upson Loop and not know that I couldn’t go onto the path where The Creek was where the bridge had become covered with overgrowth where a new cycle of cicadas left their shells and that my car wouldn’t fit but I would have to keep going up the hill I used to bike to my first crush’s house to see if he was playing basketball with his brothers outside. I would wake up and be thankful and The Creek was just a creek.
The days when my limbs first felt heavy and the sides and top began to close around my skull and I could only see through a peephole I would get in the car and drive instead of getting on my bike to feel the wind down the hill because I was lazier and slower and my body didn’t want to lift me the way it used to when I would go down the street take a left and another and another and another. The Upson Loop was not that big, I realized. Car Bluetooth took the place of my iPod shuffle and my Smiths phase took hold and I became a cliché as I drove past the left I used to take to coast down the hill to The Creek up the bridge across the street to Max Jacobs’s house to see him raking leaves in his yard.
Amy was published in the New York Times for an essay on how to grow up once your mother is gone – where to learn to be a woman when the woman you’re learning to be is gone. Inpatient treatment has not treated Kacey so well and Ella and I are stuck in Out. Sometimes we text about when we made mudpies in the spring, but Kacey has become so small that she has all but slipped through the grates.
I haven’t seen Max in ten years, but our moms are best friends. When I was 10, I thought we’d be married, but now I think I will marry the sound system from the bar I snuck into the night I lost my virginity.
If I saw a snake on the road today, I’d be in my car and I don’t think I would bury it. I wouldn’t pass by Kacey packing mud pies into pizza boxes in her front yard and I don’t think I would blush if I saw Max playing pickup with the other neighborhood boys. My brother is an atheist across the country and he wouldn’t be there on his bike, and I definitely wouldn’t make a cross. Probably not, or at least I don’t think so.
Catherine Leeder
The Pink Fish Scandal
Ann Sabin
I have purchased twenty-five pink fish both males and females
Last night I dumped them into the far end of the lake I made sure not to be seen
In December, they will spawn their eggs will hatch in Spring
The lake will be pink pink with fish
The mayor will be red red with disbelief
The herons will be great and blue and grateful and swooping and diving
The fish will be loud and splashing and maybe screaming
One will wind up in a baby’s mouth and get sucked dry
Some will grow legs and look for work elsewhere
Three of them will pick up instruments and invent Wet Jazz
A few will fall into cleavage where they will remain
Mostly it will be a massacre and the town will reek for a month
And I will be called in for questioning when they find the receipt
I will be tried on the grounds of being a no-good punk with access to a pet store
But the scales will be tipped in my favor thanks to my lovely pink lawyer
Who explains you can bring fish to water you can even bring 25
But you can’t make them spawn the fish are guilty, for getting it on
Go Fish
Alivia Palalay
ulcers1
Translated by Bella Stevens after Federico García Lorca1
This light , este fuego that devours
Este paisaje grey
Este pain pfr una uoll idea. Esta angustia heaven, mundo & hora.
Este llanto de blood que decorates lira pulseless ya, lúbrica tea.
Este peso dit mar que batters me.
Este alacrán que por mi pecho mora.
Son guirnalda de love, cama de wounded, dondi sin dream, I dream you presencia between las ruinas de my chest hundido.
Y aunque I search for a cumbre de prdencia, me da you corazón valle supine with hemlock & passion bitter ciencia.
1 Translated from an erasure made from García Lorca’s original poem in the Spanish, “Llagas de amor.”
Insight Jessy Taylor
llagas2
Esta luz, este fuego que devora
Este paisaje gris que me rodea.
Este dolor por una sola idea. Esta angustia cielo, mundo y hora.
Este llanto de sangre que decora lira sin pulso ya, lúbrica tea.
Este peso del mar que me golpea.
Este alacrán que por mi pecho mora.
Son guirnalda de amor, cama de herido, donde sin sueño, sueño tu presencia entre las ruinas de mi pecho hundido.
Y aunque busco a cumbre de prudencia, me da tu corazón valle tendido con cicuta y pasión de amarga
2 An erasure of Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Llagas de amor.”
Pedro e Ines
Leonor Oliveira
A Survey in Happenstance
Ann Sabin
Would you say you eat a balanced diet? I would say so, others may not. I had an uncle who tried to eat every element on the periodic table. He was hospitalized for consuming too much Egyptian clay. Fascinating. Yeah, he also only cuts his hair when the moon is waxing. The lunar rays make it more shiny and luscious. I’m sure they do. Now, how much sleep are you getting? Enough. More than a girl I knew a girl who became so sleep deprived she started hallucinating. She saw snakes coming out from the walls. Weirdest thing was, she thought that I was a hallucination and she would count how many times I would blink to see if I was real or not. One time I came into the room and she went into a shock. She said I had just been there, talking about cats. Eventually, they gave her pills. Speaking of which, do you take any drugs? No, I’m scared of them. A boy in my town, practically perfect, had a full ride to Johns Hopkins, tried acid once and completely lost his mind. It happens. Last time I saw him he said, “I think I might be Muslim,” and started laughing uncontrollably. Have you been injured at all recently? No, thank god. One time my brother was sitting down to dinner and my other brother stabbed him in the butt with a fork. We called him 5-hole for the rest of the year. Terrible. I suppose. Are you sexually active? No. Alright. Did you know worms have sex? Yes. Of course. Now those are the questions I have for you, is there anything else you would like me to know? I had a dream last night that we kissed in my middle school auditorium. That’s enough. “Never in all my thousands of lives have I loved liked this.” What? You said that, in the dream. I would never say that. But you did, and I could tell you meant it, because your eyes looked like pools. That doesn’t even sound like me. But it was you and you knelt at my feet like I was a goddess and begged me to kiss you. I never beg. You begged and you wiped your tears on my tights. How unprofessional. My thoughts exactly. But you kissed me regardless? It happens.
The Architect
Nicole Llacza Morazzani
All I see is the shape of your fist, casting a shadow on each wall of this room.
like the moon playing tricks on a child in the backseat. “It follows,” the young one mumbles. “I know, love,” the mother replies, facing the expanse of blue. She is not staring at the moon.
I inspect the destruction from every angle, trying to recall the appearance of this room. before shadows roamed this place, before you made yourself king, I was there, tracing my fingers along each crack, breathing in through every brick. Back then, I would walk facing upwards, always towards the ceiling. Perhaps you were here too, and I failed to see. Where was I?
Rooms know nothing of kings, to them, there are only spectators entering, breathing in through every brick, pretending they were always here. They impersonate figures in the before, those long gone in the after, but the room shuddered when the fist hit the wall, piercing through brick, piercing through cement, piercing through the stillness of a crowded room, the sound of the blow reverberated, danced around the indifference of shared breaths, breathing in through every brick.
I would like to believe the blow never happened, and that this structure emerged with you holding up your fist in mid-air, that the hole you pierced through the wall had always meant to be there, like a pillar keeping everything steady.
I am the architect, and you, a box on a blueprint. I measured you intently so you would fit. within the structure I crafted.
Are you proud of me?
I was so entranced with this task, forgot to fit myself into the box, and once everything was ready, there was no more room to fit in.
They placed the bricks around you and began to build the wall. They left a space for the outline of your fist with such precision. pour cement, get the paint, paint it yellow! they yelled, and you stood still.
All we needed was your fist, time to leave.
sweep the floor, clean the brushes, leave everything clean! We did not miss a single corner, pretending we were never here.
I often dream of storms, of a rainstorm so treacherous it pierces holes through the ceiling, and lets water run wild into the room.
Right then, my lungs will fill with water. There will be no more breathing in through these walls. Do people return to their source, the same way water does?
böl de parçala pamira yanar
I am the architect,
I plan, I create, I dismantle,
then start again, and again, and again.
reflect Catherine Leeder
transcendentalism
Mary Margaret Clouse
god remains a kind of tangible thing. childhood in the three-storied arms of the magnolia and october in a new city that has stood for thousands of years. it is impossible to define religion when all it takes is belief. my grandmother stands steely in a velvet pantsuit, sits softly in a sweater with ornate silver buttons. the door of the house across the street is green and unlocked. the spring is windy and blue. the tears are harmless and you will come back to me. lilac lines the fence and the tiny vases on the windowsill. we are all part and particle of god. there is no bridge to cross, only arms to cling to. from the bent branch of the magnolia, god is a tangible thing. we do not need to be made to believe.
Family Portrait
Eva Steinitz
Hello, I have no name for you
Will Sheets
Hello my bat winged angel
Hello my stand tall spruce
Hello my Christmas music in the kitchen
Hello my lunar dragon dancer
Hello my gun toting savior
Hello my violent knee breaker
Hello my diamond ring biter
Hello my golden sweater knit by hand
Hello my day where I forget the date
Hello my shining sequin starlet
Hello my scent of family homes
Hello my pimple popping maniac
Hello my eyes that see the soul of Earth
Hello my high tide troubadour
Hello my code name whisperer
Hello my dandelion hair piece
Hello my communal basket case
Hello my rollercoaster stomach drop
Hello my unattainable laugh track
Hello my side eye slinger
Hello my snow globe scene painter
Hello my box and bag keeper
Hello my ancient crypt cracker
Hello my liquid
lithium pulse
Hello my space between magnets
Hello my perfect circle focal point
Hello my bunting in an apple tree
Hello my make me love the winters here
Hello my name less dreamer without form
Khora
Lauren Carter
Good Different
Amy Ogle
It was always great to meet someone new. I used to follow the same steps every time: “Hello. My name is . I’m adopted from China.” My name and the fact of my adoption were equally important to know. In fact, my adoption was my identity for a time, obnoxiously encouraged by myself. It was a good different. It was especially good because I learned quickly that elementary students could be amazed by anything relatively different.
The wonderful fact about children is their simultaneous awareness and innocent perspective of the world. The first time I succeeded and failed to realize this fact was when, while waiting for the bus in third grade, one of my classmates asked me if I was sisters with Celina Brouard, another girl on our bus. I denied it and laughed it off as any seven-year-old would, but I did understand one thing: Celina was also Asian.
(To every person who believes humor is the best coping mechanism, I fully agree with you. Humor was how I made it through another five years of this question.)
I chalked it up to ignorance but not the type of ignorance with a negative connotation. This was a child’s ignorance—and my own ignorance—rolled into one ball, particularly a heavy one like a bowling ball. It wasn’t until I was much older that I could take that ball and hurl it at pins just to knock some sense into myself. There was a reason I didn’t deal with it for eight years: I’ve never been particularly talented at bowling. In that moment in third grade, all I knew was I was adopted, but it was a good different.
By middle school, all my classmates knew me for my good different, so little changed. We gained one more Asian classmate, bringing the grand total number of Asians to three in our approximately 100-person class. I constantly learned new facts about myself in those three years. For example, of course I had good grades since I was Asian. Reassured of my identity by my classmates, I knew exactly who I was going to be in high school.
For the next four years, I stopped presenting my adopted status as the sole symbol of my personality. It retreated to the bottom of my list of priorities, especially because my classmates rarely mentioned it. There were about twenty more Asian students at my private school than my town’s public school could ever dream of, so I stood out far less. Despite that fact, I rarely interacted with them. They were Chinese students in a foreign country, I was an American student in my home country. Our good different never matched.
And maybe their good different wasn’t as good as I thought it was. Maybe their good different led them to be isolated, to remain within their own pods of international students until graduation. Maybe they skipped graduation altogether because it was a different good different.
However, my good different was the same as my sister’s. It was the same when anti-Asian hate swept the country, when she told me about people moving to the other sidewalk when they saw her on campus. It was still the same when my sister’s white roommates berated her for daring to be conflicted about her capability to advocate for a community that she had never truly been a part of.
We made it this far with our good different, but it wasn’t enough. Apparently, her roommates’ Instagram stories condemning anti-Asian hate were better. After all, it was easier to advocate from a distance and shame others for not doing the same than actually act.
Despite being slapped in the face with my outsider status, it wasn’t until senior year of high school that I finally improved at bowling. I got my first strike in years with animated letters, right in my face:
“My parents aren’t racist to you because they think you’re too white to be Asian.”
I didn’t know whether to be insulted or relieved. My behavior was so “white” to them that I didn’t even deserve to be called a slur.
After my friend told me that, I went home and thought about my white relatives and their influence. I thought about my third-grade classmate and her harmless question and about my sister’s roommates and their criticism. And in that moment, my good different transformed. It was still good, but it was only good for protecting me from the consequences of racial stereotypes. In a country known as the melting pot, I had become what so many people apparently wanted me to be: Asian by birth, white by design.
I stopped using adoption as my fun fact. I crack jokes about every mannerism and every word I say that can be construed as “too white.” After that day, I never stopped looking in the mirror, seeing my Asian eyes, talking to myself, hearing my American voice. But the mirror is intact and so is my voice. I’ve had my doubts, but I’ve never stopped smiling at hearing both names.
. Aidian Fu.
So I offer you a place in my home. I offer a seat at my table. And if that isn’t enough for you, I offer you the dumplings me and my white father made together. We made a traditional filling and dough, we cut the dough circle with biscuit cutters, we steamed them, and we fried them. We dished up Asian heritage created with the gentle touch of a white hand.
Here are your dumplings. Here is me.
food for thought Alivia Palalay
latitudes
Mary Margaret Clouse
how i feel about you seems prophetic manifest destiny do you want to see the west with me? i should need this less or in a way that makes more sense but you keep retracing the parallels
i don’t like it when i can see too much of the sky and i am fighting the urge to buy everything that reminds me of you it unnerves me the way you glide through air like it’s water
i want to be jealous in the same way i want to care less none of this is as biblical as it could be maybe next time i can be the mother of god divine by a decision not my own
you’re bigger than this, you tell me and i know climbing over these mountains is the hardest thing i’ve tried to do but they aren’t the hills i want to die on
i cannot write a sentence without wandering for four lines or leave the map untouched there are too many of them, i think the poems and the other people who also love you
two lone stars Sydney Serio
between the world, water & we
Ryan Doherty
August 30th, 1800
today the sky has decided to punish us the men watch the mistress above as she pours misery from her cheeks rain slams down on their backs water caresses blood & drowns hope from their eyes quick as the rivers can break the bridges life, freedom, love, torn asunder by the current the leaves tear from the trees & the wind screams like warnings & the spirits of those waiting to fight sink beneath the mud
today was the sky’s judgment but not the first time i saw the water’s vengeance & nor was it the last this is my odyssey:
i first saw the ocean at the end of our march
through an open distance paved by our bloody soles & bodies left behind
i remember the laughing of chains laced in mud as we all fell to our knees at her sight a familiar blue in front of a distant fire
a horizon of a young Yemoja taken by her ankles in the grass chained to the ground dragged from her back towards a floating coffin
they held us on the bottom of ships listening to groans behind the masks a last dying breath followed by another the stench in the air sharp with salt & rum spewing pieces of ourselves onto each other the movement— the flows
Back&forth back&forth your head next to mine
back&forth back&forth
My forehead pressed against yours the heat rising & rising
& the pain as smooth as the tide
back&forth
ebb & harmony; a temporal overflow now into a world of bad spirits
so sick you cannot even eat
all my help was cries & tears
but those could not stop
one succeeding woe
swelled up by another
rhythms wallowing in the echoes of hunger white reapers casting curses on the winds above
an apocalypse boiling under the hull
hating the waters beneath the waters that had betrayed me the waters that forced me here
in another life i jumped into the sea i stood on the hull & raised my arms to the sky i did not fight the water & she did not fight me her ebbs & flows danced with me at the hips & i sunk deep into her heart the parts that get blacker & blacker an abyss hidden from the reapers eyes my reunion with Yemoja—& we became we again the waves above us rejoicing in their liberation i became a dolphin, a whale, a shark, a mermaid i watched the starlight gather under the seaweed & i discovered the secrets buried deep and i met a million more of me i realized the ocean & i were no different both commanded by white things in the sky —but she finds true freedom in her darkness
in another life they threw me into the sea
i was a secret
i was a pain
i was a blessing
i was food i was love
i was a burden
i was a ship
i was cargo i was a king
i was a curse i was nothing
i was a warrior
i was a cycle
i was under i was drowning
i was insured
i was a plan i was not spared i was alone
i was a trial
i was a chain i was freedom
i was a man
i was a child i was together
i was a woman i was awake
i was a baby i was a hundred
i was a crime
i was forgotten
i was a pen
a voice a dream a hope a prayer a spirit
a reflection a memory
a splash
a ripple
a wake
he once baptized me in a river where destiny falls between it he told me to carry his secrets to the end but his secret grew & grew til’ it couldn’t be kept my rains came down & the thunders of his smile erupted he took the girl & blessed her a name only said when free & that night we ran
through the gates & brigades
swamps & dogwoods
we ran & we ran & we ran
the girl in my arms
wading through the water but the food depleted– the hounds closer the blood in the air thicker & thicker the chains, the reapers the muskets
our sojourn of love death & water, closing to a hilt but then he stopped & said he would wait for me at the end he told me to take the girl & run run like fury, like wind, like storms, run like desire run like he loved me
we parted ways where the orchids kissed the shining water & where the moon creates the path ahead of me i traced starlight all the way to the river’s end & left behind a dark figure wading by the blossoming plums i saw them toss a boy into the river & watch him rise a week later his skin wrinkled to softness dropping away at my touch i’d seen boys like him before happy, alive, free– judged by the depths beneath covered in crawfish, dirt in his veins chewed, digested & spat up by the swamp
i saw my grandfather hosed onto the street after crossing the line & sipping the water on the other side he said it still tasted like shit
& i remember those beaches, spiked & dirtied glass filled, desecrated, entrenched & gated
girls & boys touch the ocean dipping their feet
but the ocean touches them too
grabs their reflections & rips them into waves
tides them across the sea
but bodies lost within the deep will always rise to the truth
i once was a boy
on a roof with a radio
i watch a man & a girl on his shoulder in the distance
push through the water with three bags in his hand
looters, the radio says, levees, the radio says
a thief, a criminal, a thug
i heard the people on a bridge become a firing squad
— bodies hit the river like the rain hits the roof
a loud thud
mama’s been downstairs since the storm came
& daddy said he’d find us some food
i couldn’t come he said
& later a headline rings
vigilante justice?
man claims he shot 38 looters after storm says he gave the bodies to the coast guard
daddy told me what to do while he was gone sit on the roof & wait on the mercy of the Lord
but the seas claimed the day & avenged the night
that same stillness, that same glare
just my reflection– just the water ready for its prey faces of the drowned stare through the blackness above them
& i laid my head back & watched the ladder from above descend ten ton angels coated in metal— salvation guided by soldiers & rifles
mama they here i yell
mama they here
daddy they here–
the water had always been there by the edge the water had always pulled us together water that i can’t swim in— water that hides our bodies but storms are like nooses, & flames
& my odyssey hasn’t ended yet
our souls grow deeper than the rivers
& living in the wake means becoming the current itself
& our present storm is so strong
that the ocean moves to its very depth so i watch the horizon lie to me & i know as water flows so does blood
We live.
We rise.
We return.
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African, 1789
Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts And Sentiments On The Evil Of Slavery, 1787
Toni Morrison, Beloved, 1987
WDSU News, Youtube, “I-Team: Man Claims He Shot 38 Looters After Storm,” July 14th, 2009
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937
Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, My Monticello, 2021
Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, 1921
Scott and Wyatt, Petersburg’s Story, 51; Sentence of Claiborne’s Peter, October 20, 1800, Condemned Slaves 1800, Auditor’s Item 153 Box 2.
Christine Sharpe, In The Wake: On Blackness and Being, 2016
I’ll just dip my toes in Eva Steinitz
Catullus 51
Translated by Reece Steidle
He seems to me, equal to a god. He, if possible, might surpass the gods, who sits across from you and again and again watches and hears you
Sweetly laughing, which, from miserable me, rips all the senses: for when I see you, Lesbia, there is nothing left for me of my voice in my throat.
But my tongue lies still, in my limbs, a thin flame flows. With their own sound, my ears ring, my eyes are shaded by twin darkness.
Leisure, Catullus, is troublesome for you: Leisurely, you exult and praise too much: Leisure has ruined before, both kings and great cities.
Catullus 51
Ille mi par esse deo videtur, ille, si fas est, superare divos, qui sedens adversus identidem te spectat et audit
dulce ridentem, misero quod omnes
eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te, Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi <vocis in ore;>
lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus flamma demanat, sonitu suopte tintinant aures, gemina teguntur lumina nocte.
otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est: otio exsultas nimiumque gestis: otium et reges prius et beatas perdidit urbes.
Daybreak
Olivia Couch
It feels illegal to watch the sun rise
To be aware of the day splitting itself apart so fundamentally
I’m on a train somewhere between Durham and York and I can’t help thinking of Imperfect cartwheels and The gymnastics class I got kicked out of as a kid
The cold seeps through the glass of the window onto my cheek
Shadows of a Christmas cut in half and then Halved again
Dancing at each corner of my mind
I have spent years holding a lighter to the edges of each shadow
Just to watch them curl up protectively against themselves
United only in their fear
The book I’m reading has a leaf pressed between Two of the pages and I’ve taken it out to flatten it mindlessly
I’m trying to do the splits in my head
Like I used to do as a kid
Failing in the desperate, spectacular way one can only fail themselves And struggling to look away from the sunrise
I split myself in two every week of my life until I forgot
Who I was supposed to be (can anyone find her?) and Here I am looking at daybreak on a foreign farm
Deceptively serene in the face of Momentous, cyclical change
A split right down the middle and Squeezing my fingers into my palms just hard enough to break skin
Waiting for the fallout
Afterimage
Kevin Liu
cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos1
Nicole Llacza Morazzani
I. Autumn
She drew his name from the wind, and they became whispering voices amid the autumn air. Her hollow eyes light up to tell the story of crows cawing above the trees. She would speak this secret tongue for the years to come, a decree imposed by The Court of Tulip Trees. Trapped inside wisps of cold air, her words were gasping for breath, fighting those scratching at her throat. It was a time when truth became a splurge of oxygen, so Killari spent months under a spell of silence. She feared she would eventually lose herself in the language she had created, so Killari wandered the world, blinded and speechless, until she forgot how to guide thoughts to the realm of her voice.
Before the end of all things, before Killari lost her hazel eyes and her ethereal voice, she would sit on the lawn outside her front door to hear the song of the wind, drawing circles around her: pishquta qhatiy, sutinqa Astuq2, it sang, pishquta qhatiy, sutinqa Astuq. An ancient language circled back into her ears, a sweet melody encapsulating a woeful fate.
II. Winter
Killari would leave seeds outside her window, awaiting the promise of the wind. Late at night, she would stick her head outside her only window and sing to the cold winter air, waiting for a song back. She sang,
Uyariq wayrata waylluy, qawaq hanaq pachata waylluy3. Until her voice felt hoarse, she sang, Uyariq wayrata waylluy, qawaq hanaq pachata waylluy.
Killari spent nights sitting beside the open window until the cold became unbearable, so she shut it down. The songs ceased and gave way to lullabies muttered against cotton wool. Killari only opened the window to let her pale hands stick out, scoop the snow off the exterior windowsill, and savor the cold until her fingers turned violet.
She had no shield against the cruel winter months. Her only garments were a pair of white linen pants and a matching cotton shirt. She shivered, curled
barn burning: a series
Helen
up next to the burning furnace, wrapped in a wool blanket, humming to herself. The lady in white had been trapped inside the cottage for so long that she had forgotten what her thoughts tasted like. She vaguely remembered she used to be fond of the taste of empty promises. Of the kind you whisper to yourself while lost in sleep, those that the pillow sucks up and hides from your waking morning eyes. It was a remarkable sweetness, which would later burn into the bitterness of guilt until the last drop of sunshine on the horizon. Still, taste no longer mattered.
Killari was long past the guilt and past the thresholds of time. She buried her past under the winter’s last snowfall and stood still as her promises ran away with the light of day. Once she left the cottage to chase them down, she would chase wisps of cold air among the tulip trees lining up to show her the way. The Court of Tulip Trees parted like the red sea, menacing but inviting, until Killari fainted from exhaustion, and woke up to notice her body felt numb from the cold.
III. Spring
On the first night of spring, Killari heard a loud bang on the sole window of her cottage. She paid little mind to the sound until early morning when she went out to tend the garden. Little did she know that, on the soil beside her window, there lay a crow. There she found its lifeless body on the soaked ground, and a couple of feet away, a fallen nest, and a hatch peeking its head from the last remaining egg. Killari looked up towards the sky and noticed no tree covering the sky from view. There was no tree around the terrain, and yet here it was: the remains of the crow’s nest on the ground as if it had descended from the heavens. As Killari picked up the survivor softly in her hands, the wind whispered into her right ear: Astuq, it said, sutinqa Astuq2. So, Killari named the little crow Astuq, per the wind’s request.
Killari fell in love with the tiny creature the second it landed on her soil, yet she could not discern what the wind wanted from her. All she wanted was a song, but she got something else. Would the wind use that feeling in her chest to mock her? Would it ridicule how her heart skipped a beat? Oh, how fast it would sprint whenever the crow playfully nibbled on her thumb! A lonely woman, all she desired was something to keep, to call her own. She
wished for it for so long, so she became the mother of a crow. Surely, she thought, she must have gone mad from isolation. A crow is no child, she said to herself, and yet this crow became hers.
Killari fed Astuq with crushed nuts mixed with rainwater. Astuq grew healthy and strong for his first weeks of life until he refused to eat. He would flutter around the room, cawing insufferably. Killari tried to remain serene, she believed the crow would have to eat one way or another. As the days passed, the cawing became more intolerable. On one of the warmest days of that spring, Killari knit a scarf for her to wear for the upcoming autumn. Suddenly, the needle poked her right index finger, and the cawing ceased. Astuq stood on Killari’s shoulder, inquisitively staring at the small streak of blood falling down her finger. Killari was perplexed but relieved that Astuq decided to finally hush. She held up her finger to the crow’s peak and watched as it fed from her blood. From that day on, Astuq began to bloom like the liverleaf flowers below Killari’s window. It fed on Killari’s blood, so Astuq did not have to hunt down small animals anymore. She became everything he needed to survive.
IV. Summer
While Killari wrote in her leather-bound journal, face down on the grass, Astuq flew down and landed in front of her sun kissed face. He carried a liverleaf flower in its peak, which he set down slowly for her to see. Killari grinned, set her journal down, and caressed the petals with her fingers. Astuq, as clever as he was, realized that colorful, shiny objects caused a positive reaction to Killari, so he became a collector.
For the rest of the summer months, she would receive all kinds of peculiar objects on her windowsill. She would excitedly wake up in the morning to find out what new thing Astuq would bring for her. Was it a seashell? A wristwatch? An old bracelet? The possibilities were endless for Astuq, he flew away to places undiscovered whenever he pleased. For the hours he would be away, Killari wondered what it would be like to borrow his wings for one day, or his eyes even, there are so many wonders his eyes must store!
On the warmest day of summer, Killari was met with the most delightful gift
Astuq had ever brought for her. On her windowsill, there lay a pearl. As she held it up to inspect it closely, she could not hold back her excitement. She jumped up and down and laughed to herself. Such beauty would bring so many riches for them! If only Astuq could bring more pearls, Killari could trade them for a better life for her and her crow! Astuq, a loyal companion, accepted the mission, he would bring back all the pearls in the world if he had to, all to keep the lady in white contempt.
He lived to give her reasons to smile, when the blood she provided for him drained the color from her face, which was slowly becoming ashy white. In his eyes, Killari looked like a pearl herself, as her skin was as white as an orb, and it glistened with the summer sun. Maybe that is why she likes them so much, the crow thought to himself, these shiny things remind her of herself. In her eyes, she visualized a bright future in the glow of this tiny orb, she saw a future in which she ran away from this tiny cottage, she would run away so fast she would begin to soar like Astuq. With a pocketful of pearls, they would fly away far beyond the lair of The Court of Tulip Trees.
V. Autumn
The wind carried no song that autumn. It was one of the coldest autumns in years, and the landscape became inhospitable as early as mid-October. After days of searching the skies, Astuq found no more pearls to bring back home. He once left the cottage for three days straight, hoping that the sleepless nights would lead him to his goal. In his absence, Killari grew anxious, so much she would hold up a bleeding palm towards the sky, calling his name for him to return.
Astuq returned crestfallen, there were no pearls in sight, and what he dreaded the most became true: there was no welcoming smile upon his return. Killari sat cross-legged in front of the burning furnace, humming the remnants of an ancient song:
Uyariq wayraqa rinrinta chinkachisqa, qhawasqan hanaq pachapas ñawinta chinkachisqa4. Until her voice felt hoarse, she sang, Uyariq wayraqa rinrinta chinkachisqa, qhawasqan hanaq pachapas ñawinta chinkachisqa.
For days, Astuq would venture out in search of pearls. Killari would lie next to the burning furnace and sing to herself. She had no more blood to give, her skin was almost translucent, so much sometimes she thought she would see flames reflecting on her skin. In the absence of blood, Astuq stopped flying as high anymore, he would drop down on the grass beside the window and rest. It was the same place he had been found when he was barely alive.
One dreadful day, when The Court of Tulip Trees had shed off its leaves, a piercing scream broke through the autumn wind. Killari woke up to find the world had lost all light. She touched her face in desperation and found two holes in place for her eyes. Astuq had been deceived by his lack of energy, he took away her beautiful hazel eyes, mistaking them for two shiny pearls. Realizing the pain he had caused, she left the pair of eyes in the windowsill, and fled away, past The Court of Tulip Trees.
From then on, Killari would roam the earth looking for her little crow, with her palms holding up her hazel eyes. One night, she fell from the highest cliff in the world, unaware of the demise she was walking to, when she ventured on her own beyond The Court of Tulip Trees. Killa, goddess of the Moon, showed compassion for the lady in white. She caught her limp body in her arms and laid her on her bosom. Then the lonely woman became Killari, the shadow of the Moon, the light that shines upon the rivers and oceans looking for a love long lost. The love of a child that never was, of a crow with the astuteness of a fox. Killari echoes the song of the Moon once it shines over the world, hoping her song will lead Astuq back home.
1A common Spanish proverb, meant to warn people against giving away too many favors which will not be reciprocated.
2 From Quechue, it means “follow the bird, its name is Astuq.” Astuq also means “astute” or “fox.”
3 From Quechua, it means “I love the wind who listens, I love the sky who looks.”
4 From Quechua, it means “the wind who listens has lost its ears, the sky who looks has lost its eyes.”
Eva Steinitz
Caution
Olivia Couch
It’s the sound of suitcase wheels on pavement outside my window and I am eight can’t sleep eighteen can’t sleep twenty. Can’t. Sleep. Stretching my skin over a cardboard cutout of a chalk outline of a body taken from a crime scene. Caution. Something happened here and we’re not sure what. Caution. The wind is blowing east today and that might change the way I appear to you. Caution. I can’t get the glint of tin foil out of my head because I’ve been staring at the chocolate bar Sabine left outside my door for three days. Metallic and it’d probably get stuck between two teeth and my tongue is reaching and reaching and can’t quite get it and I know that’s not blood filling my mouth but caution. It might be.
Still Life with Steelpan and Snare
Will Sheets
BOOM! and the door frame trembles. BOOM! and the cereal box falls from the top shelf. It clatters to the kitchen floor and BOOM! little O’s line the linoleum. A bigger O on my mother’s mouth and BOOM! she starts to scream. BOOM! and a sky-seam appears. BOOM! and silver acid arrows pool between flagstones. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! the door frame crumbles. A BOOM! ricochets through the room as my daydreams rupture. The BOOM!ing earth announces the arrival of a subterranean serpent. My best friend’s death knell BOOM! echoes in my ears every Sunday. There’s a quiet, constant BOOM! bludgeoning my chest and a louder BOOM! battering my mind. BOOM! the meadow bellows its true name until it dies the word-death. BOOM! my heart is stolen by a swimmer whose strokes are swallowed by the sun. BOOM! the solar system somersaults. A throat is slit in a piss-stained alley. Silently. A BOOM! from an osprey lift off turns oxygen to gelatin. I am adorned with bands of birch bark and BOOM! I am prepared for the pyre. BOOM! and my home erupts. BOOM! and twilight is high noon. BOOM! and is is was and neighbor is corpse. BOOM! and reality rarefies. BOOM! and Eden implodes. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! it is over, and BOOM! it has barely begun.
eyes on the prize pamira yanar
Master Plans
Lillian Tzanev
My creator wove strings of meat to make my muscles. My muscles so stiff and so sore a skeletal inferno, lathered in blubber. With every passing second, I rot.
A familiar voice looms deep in a dream orchestrating master plans an ambush of dissonance, an amateur choir.
Now I am scared of windows.
Picture the swan dive. Cellists and violinists lay their bows to rest. Pages turn, await the next movement all while suffocating winds take my breath. Head first into cement, I plummet.
Though, the conductor will not grieve. So long as the viola continues silence evades.
A Yak Song
Lauren Carter
James River collage
Eva Steinitz
return Mary Margaret Clouse
i try to remember the day the blockbuster closed the tape catches on rewind
i’ll never like the way you look at me it will never be enough
i am tired of having to defend everything there is no truth within these walls
carefully decorating your barricade with fictions but you won’t think outside of the box when they killed brick and mortar i hope you were trapped in the rubble
courtesy of my college and a coliseum in florida it wouldn’t be the first institution built on a grave you are dust and to dust you shall
At the edge of the pit, I watch the flames rise and face that my fire is burning those who come too near. A pain-turned-itch distracts me from such terrible truth. Rubbing my ankle, I am at an odd peace.
At least the skeeters still want me...
My flesh still in the teeth of He who bites, I watch Him wither with its weight, die beside the flames, my blood still dripping from His mouth.
Mackenzie (“Kenzie”) Proukou
my maiming metaphysical(morphosis)
Mackenzie (“Kenzie”) Proukou
darkness silence interrupted by a cacophony of car horns & brake screeches & pained screams the color of your voice. nothing in my stream of vision my stream of consciousness but you your body sprawled still on the blood-soaked pavement your soft dark hair freshly dyed red with the liquid that pumps from your misunderstood misused mangled heart your hands tie-died a maroon mess of blue & scarlet held in one of my own pale palms my other gently stroking your face seeping in the saltwater leaking from my eyes against my will my breaths fractured as my throat chokes and rudely interrupts my sobs my heart aching more than your broken body must my soul soaking every last moment it has with yours which is releasing from your body & floating away from your being my brain regretting when it overruled my own battered heart and told my mouth to say we can’t see each other anymore now my mind knows not to mind good sense recognizing the futility of hiding honesty when this moment is the last one we’ll share why not make it a moment of truth so i use the words love and you in the same sentence while holding your body to mine to hold onto your soul in case it’s still there still here before it leaves me for good the way i left you but before it leaves i leave you first like i always do when i care like we all must do when our eyes flutter open like the wings of a butterfly when we wake from our worst nightmares that bear our greatest dreams we ignore when we wake
hand study one
Eva Steinitz
because to say the words love and you in the same sentence not while sleeping but while living would be too much & never enough so you’ll never know you were the star in/the point of/my dream in my dream because my brain tells my mouth not to open the way butterflies’ wings do when we see each other in passing and i force myself to ignore my truths/my dreams/my love/you which came to me last night in a solemn slumber.
Untitled 4
Gina Kim
Angus Girls
Alivia Palalay
bird building a dusty nest
Kathleen Firment
my neighbor’s key-lime topiaries that whiff of cough syrup and peonies a hatchling falling into her lawn an eggshell splat in puddles of cream, and tangy yellow yolk a whirligig of feathers and fluff tiny bird dying when it hits the ground her fetid mutt gnashing it in his foamy jaws but immediately spitting out the fledgling thing my neighbor collecting it: guarding it with her life her, crying like it is something sweet gritty streaks of tears in folded wrinkles the clarity that this woman mourns more a thousand summers lost to time with warped dissonance a window behind her her suburban estate, a brutal mansion the glassy eyes of four mounted deer boring holes in the back of her skull their perked, pointed ears a harmony of sobs erupting from her swollen throat the gilded cork on a vintage champagne bubbly twilight illuminating the veteran who lives two doors down the street dusk kissing the pink sky his junkie face melting off his skull skin dripping on the ground the neighbor lady speaking in geriatric tongues my spine beginning to twist an invisible hand wringing out my back bone dry vertebrae and so it goes a tisket a tasket here there and everywhere it all comes out in the wash
Country Mouse Alivia Palalay
beyond the flesh
Bella Stevens
after David Cronenberg 1
Shimmering orange metallic-green light swallows you as you’re standing there, afraid, unabashedly hoping I’ll see rhythm in your words and hear my thoughts mirroring yours. I yearn for you to touch me like the nights where you would dive into me, feeling that pleasure of our every skin:skin surface and blood cell congealing and coagulating, our plasma becoming one, a peculiar newness, choking on fluttery throat-pulsating desire found only in the deep end of the pool. Aren’t you tired of feeling/unfeeling and constantly wishing for waiting for your chance to give in to fear, to surrender, unafraid, to be utterly, entirely destroyed by love, only to be met ceaselessly by self-made binds that tug & tear & trip you as you go through the motions? Over over over you are reminded of possibility, a desire of a man in chains, clanging & crashing & crawling along the floor, shackled to your severed heart, your bloody carnal organ of desire, and though its cardiac corpse is splattered on the cold cement, you fail to see that I am crucified before it; I am never considered. Aren’t you at all concerned that you might miss the serendipitous sacrifice that I have splat and splayed before you? You think you cannot understand/reciprocate my martyrdom, but you were the one who led me towards this path, this ritual of suffering and loving and pain and joy that starts and ends with you, with us. Sure, you’ve just been teaching me a lesson, a bent-over-the-knee incessant beating, harrowing, back-to-back lashing and lashing and moving your eyes and hands about my body, as though it were animal, or worse: merely imitation of the flesh, foreignizing fat & fingers & flushed cheeks from the exhaustion of being but a butcher’s plaything. I am tiring of your subconscious relegation of me to the sub-human, as if my every loving breath were only a means to an end, every knuckle-busting bone-breaking world-shattering experience merely an excuse to get near you, to worship you, to build my own society around you, searching you out endlessly, again, again, begging you to tell it to me straight, to finally put me down once and for all so I can move forward down the line towards a reality in which each moment of my existence is not about you. You are so blissfully unaware of the truth in things around you,
pose pamira yanar
your principal concern with flesh that you can’t seem to shake, this carnal and visceral state of being, constant seeking, needing something more than me, than us, than feeling. Yes, I am tired of the constant penalties, trying endlessly to align myself to what you see as right, your concern for the beyond, for some life that exists outside of our carnal bodies, the borders of the society I’ve built for you slowly sickening & weakening & crumbling as my bones become gray and mush themselves together into this fearful pool of nothingness that you’ve made of me, the flesh that you once so loved to drink now tasteless, dissolved into nothing, and once again I will stand here, begging you to see me as anything more than flesh, than bone, than organs and coagulation and cells and veins that pop and squeal and breathe when you touch me. I cannot help but wonder if you will ever be touched by me beyond the veil of the flesh.
1 Written around a fragment of page 51 of Cronenberg’s original script for The Fly (1986).
weep within me
Bella Stevens
in my chest cavities i search for you you lie dormant, yet i feel you: my sacrificial tendencies my self-crucifixion & my martyred mother canonized while i am made a lamb offering myself up the hangdog calf i am a goat in sheep’s clothing. i’m praying for something (i don’t know what) to incite you in me but even so i cannot capture the flame: i am gripping a ghost— a slick unearthed grave— falling through my fingers reaching out to you meet me, it doesn’t have to be halfway i’ll go the distance retching exorcizing you from me i want to feel your claws on my skin your breath on my neck (something external, visceral) but i am trapped in longing forced to make meaning from scripture trying to paint the image of something unseen unable to identify you like the illiterate learning language: a flashcard. this poorly drawn cross = “holy” and i want sensation, to feel you bubbling up inside me, noxious nauseating your sizzling and steaming inside like i’m in an air fryer, my flesh crunching as you make omelets of my egg-embryo; gut-crushing? maybe. but it’s not numbness.
god, are you here?
please no more numbness.
lifejar
Maddox Lowe
Untitled 3
Gina Kim
Sappho Fragment 87
Translated by Reece Steidle
Honey-sweet Mother, you see— I cannot weave the web. Given up as I am, to longing for that girl due to slender Aphrodite.
Nam Ki, Good Weather
Lauren Carter
Untitled
Ally Martinez
I sit on the cold, neatly-made bed with my back against the wall that refuses to move. I can’t stand being left alone with the screams of my own silence. So I pray. The quiet reawakens the sunken pit in my sternum and the pain becomes physical. Now tears are rolling down my cheeks and making pretty splotches on my pillow. I hear footsteps approaching. So I hold my breath. The door opens its mouth; it wishes to say something, but a woman forces it shut before anything can come of it. The wall is annoyed with the door, and I am fed up with this place. I look through the shatter-proof window in search of a sound, but even the outside is hushed in shadow. So I close my eyes.
I roll up the walls like scrolls, smother the voice telling me to stop. I hear its muffled apologies. I see a hundred white paper sheets fall at my feet, covered in colored sentences. I throw shadows at the wall, words at the door, colors at the ceiling. My estrangement in the small room increases as the walls suddenly unfurl to soft and white, and my hands are restrained with a forceful hatred. Fog dissolves in faithful whispers. Demons grow faces and white clothes. Mouths with broad smiles talk in tongues, heard but not understood. Concealing syringes and multi-colored pills.
upward & outward
Catherine Leeder
the bug basher
Bella Stevens
In my mind’s eye I am constantly itching, my fingernails tearing at the supple new-flesh that lies beneath my scabs, waiting to be uncovered, longing to shed the weight of those congealed blood cells, to shake off the handicap and relinquish cross-bearing, and as I live and breathe I am still scratching, but it is somewhere deeper now, beyond me: a kind of lurking transdermal teeth tearing that haunts me in my most vulnerable moments, always checking over my shoulder and under every sofa cushion to see if they’re there, if those flesh-munchers are waiting for me, multitudes of them begging to enter my skin, to dwell inside my body’s every crevice and nestle themselves between my ribs; and I am growing weary, yes, so weary of these hallucinations, of my restless dreams, my waking nightmares— every day I exist in utter agony, yes, my head hangs heavy and hollow from the hole-punched newly-made orifices in my skeletal frame, and the nerves in my spine twitch and tingle with each hint at motion, each gesture towards departure, each attempt to get up and shake this heaviness and let my arms become hollow light and let my feet levitate and my body float above myself, yes, I wonder what it would be like to breathe without the bugs, the brain-sucking creatures that nip at my insides, gnawing on cartilage, devouring until the holes they form fill with blood-sweat ooze and drip and drop until the scab dries up, I wonder what it would be like to live without them, their mind-numbing constant state of devouring, never getting enough, no, never enough, and I wonder if my brain is big enough to satisfy them? there’s simply no way they can continue to feed forever without killing me, right? my brain can’t possibly be large enough, can it? and it certainly doesn’t regenerate that lost flesh, does it?
I think and I believe that maybe one day my brain will cease to function because of the holes, the newly gnawed gaps in my cranium, because they are all stick-stuck full to the brim with an amalgamation of my bodily fluids and rather than my frontal lobe telling me how to think and feel and express love it will instead scream that
and I won’t be able to hear you through the noise, that unintelligible teeth-gnashing skull-breaking static, to answer you when you ask me why; why? it’s because of the leeches, the mind-suckers, the roaches that crawl within my skin and tug on the nerves behind my retina, not the literary kind of critter, but rather, something so vile and fearsome, yes, and when I woke in the middle of the night as a child and felt that slow creeping pitter-patter on my skin, and I jumped out of my sheets and decided I’d sleep on the sofa for the rest of the weekend, my father told me what a ridiculous idea, he told me there’s no need for such fuss over a little varmint, and he promised we’ll find that sucker and kill him dead, and we stripped through the layers of my bed and by the time we got to the fitted sheet I saw him there, that hard-shelled brainless spineless eyeless wiry ticklish gag-inducing thing, and I watched slack-jawed as my father took his shoe and banged and banged, and after one blow the exoskeleton cracked (I watched his little legs, each and every one of them, squirm and squeal and search for footing to flee this imminent death that my sleeplessness and childish fear consigned to him), and with another smack I began to see that blue-black beetle blood, it dripped and dropped and made what to me was the smallest pool of blood I would experience with my own eyes,
and my father kept bashing and bashing until the critter was done in, he was barely a bug anymore, he appeared to me more like a set of parts, a deconstructed creature, something God would order online and receive in a few days only to find out that He had to put it together Himself without instructions, trying to make sense of a mess of pieces with no clear connection, something like that, something beyond the realm of the animal, entirely foreign in every sense of the word, yes, and so I sometimes feel sorry for the bugs in my brain but then I recall that they are just nuts and bolts cheaply constructed to take me apart, haphazardly crafted for the sole purpose of my mental undoing, and so as they bite and scratch and leave scabs on my tissue I do not feel concern for them, no, I feel glee that they will either die from starvation or I will die from their overindulgence before they erupt from inside of me, before they burst through my dermal layer and I have to meet them face-to-face again, because I cannot stand to see another bug be bashed and battered, not by me; but I’d have to be the one to, I wouldn’t be able to let them go back in my ear canals and eat my organs until I’m vegetative and wilting, but as long as we keep our unspoken agreement of avoidance then the scabs will be my only reminder of their presence, and although my bones will be chipped away at and my brain may not regenerate,— or maybe it will— if my brain goes before my body or my bugs then perhaps it will be a kindness, and I’ll be happy to be in such a blissful unthinking stupor, free from their gnawing and sucking and scratching for once in my weary life.
Institution
Kevin Liu
Everything That Happens in a Perfect Circle
Will Sheets
Alpha
A dying star melted into the hillocks and its throes turned the dirt to diamonds laced with lavender.
Beta
Berry bushes crisped in the magma and the crystalized earth closed around the autumn olives like amber.
Gamma
Green faced genuflecters dove into the fractured facets and resurfaced on the other side of the vertical horizon.
Delta
Dowagers doled out death sentences to dour children who tried to clamber over the bramble-clasped trellis.
Epsilon
Every man who’d die for their father tore a finger from a socket and flung it to the sky for the falcons to feast.
Zeta
Zion tumbled from the sky and collided with Atlantis leaving the salamanders to watch the catastrophe with detached horror.
Eta
Eclipses sped across the grass covered hippodrome grasping echoed stag antlers trailing green cloud-heated granules.
Theta
Taciturn raindrops pooled between slats and shingles, silent in their slow trudge toward planetary omnipotence.
Iota
Infidelity ran rampant through a prosecuted populous, marriage crumbling in tandem with the temple palisade.
Kappa
Karma donned his carbureted carapace and went to kill his sister Obsession in a contest watched closely by Envy.
Lambda
Leopard skins and lion manes adorned a room set aside for royal refugees, a ring of swords positioned above the mantle.
Mu
Missionaries traversed mountains spotted with vineyards and orchards, vocations and orders made irrelevant by introspection.
Nu
Nunneries and monasteries were manifested in mountain passes by god-fearers and vine-pickers without cause nor appetite.
Xi
Xiphoid forms created concentric circles around the newborn king, his strapping from dressed in robes of black panther and bengal tiger.
Omicron
Obsession died the true death from a dagger drawn gash on her collar, Karma watched her corpse and wondered when the joy-bird would find him.
Pi
Palisades worn weary by floods come yearly lay in disarray with the souls of cheaters and charlatans scattered nearby.
Rho
Rainstorms swallowed the isolated village in sea-born static as a solitary scream, the sole refugee, escaped on the back of a crocodile.
Upsilon
Updrafts carried severed toes from every father who’d die for their son to the top branches of the sky-oak, landing in the midst of a meal for vultures.
Tau Toads and similarly self-absorbed species hear the pantheons collide but were too consumed with crickets and the like to watch God kill the ocean.
Sigma
Stag hunters with capes of midnight and dayend stood glowering above their game as it glistened in the burnout from last millennium.
Phi Prudent mistresses kept their charges from the town house thorn bushes, they knew the woman in the rose petals would raise patients than they could.
patients better
Chi
Cardiff grew cold as the last dribble of kindness followed its kin into the geometric paradise suspended in the soul of the glass prism.
Psi
Poppies and poplars were the only life to survive the purge, every other organism pressed into service by an insect spreading anthrax.
Omega
One last flicker of sunlight fled from the rolling hills of solid amethyst, searching for the hole in the night sky where it remembered being born.
