Phoenix Magazine, Winter 2022

P Issue 64

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contents Gracie Somich

compulsion performance

01

estrogen

01

Pothos: Longing Growth / Growing from the Shadows

02

Annihilation / Disconnected

03–04

Self Portrait No. 2 / Antithesis to Lomography

04 / 10

Drifting

05

In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue

06

The Cherry Theory

07

Swim Space Station

07

Maxwell Frasher

I didn’t mean to say your name

08

Jackson Jalamo

Banned Blood

09

Tell Me Again, Ammy / JESUS

09 / 15

Conquest

11

Bert and Ernie

12

Hot Ramen / Bigger Than Me

13 / 14

Window / Obstruction

15

Empty Playground

17–18

Sam Liske

One Big Playground

17–27

Colleen Tongco

My Yolk is not Light

28

Carson Parham

My Father’s Apparition

29

Susan Feinberg

Magnolia Leaves

30

Things I Ask At Confession

30

maybe if you go to sleep happy, then you’ll wake up happy

31

Chevelle Benton Natalia Mahan Katie Seal Diana Dalton Taylor Kolnick Adarian Johnson Sydney Sensabaugh Jana Ghewazi

Lauren Farkas Nicole O’Connor Wyatt Hester Rae Taylor Megan Wolfkill Guido Del Rosso

Hollie Sikes Griffin Allman

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Issue 64 This is the first volume of the sixty-fourth Phoenix issue. The Winter release encapsulates the hard work, creativity, and prowess of students in the previous Fall semester of 2021. Ran for students and by students, Phoenix Literary Arts Magazine was founded in 1959 at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

In keeping with the practice of displaying the campus’s current culture and artistic dexterity, we hope you enjoy this issue.

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compulsion performance

she surrenders to repetitive motions and she looks so beautiful, spinning rollers in front of the mirror, bra hooked on the third clasp an appropriate tension for the anticipated purge

Gracie Somich

pirouetting through her room strewn in a white sheet she pops the top to a new bottle of dom perignon lipstick kiss of talcum and carmine on the neck & she sips until she is fluid and her better mind relents

01

she’s pulled open by the strings of her own compulsions and his fingers on her buttons so she yields spine arches evermore concave ‘til her head hits the floor she braces herself- a heightened tension in her root her eyes have gone mechanical contorted to fit the uniform of submission she’s bent in all the right places. she yields to these compulsive repetitions. she watches her toes hit the floor and finds her face in the reflection the half empty bottle of dom perignon is in the trash she locks her front door and her tight smile unwinds with the crack of her jaw she’s at peace again strewn in a white sheet in her room

Chevelle Benton

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02

Pothos: Longing Growth oil on canvas

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Natalia Mahan

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03

Annihilation Disconnected Katie Seal photograph

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04

Self Portrait No. 2 digital photograph

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Diana Dalton

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In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue

Adarian Johnson

05

drifting 35mm

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Taylor Kolnick

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06

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07

The Cherry Theory Sydney Sensabaugh digital drawing

Swim Space Station Jana Ghewazi mixed media on frosted mylar

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08

I didn’t mean to say your name Maxwell Frasher I didn’t mean to say your name.

It just slipped off my tongue.

And it reminded me of that thing I wanted to tell you once, but I forgot what it was.

I told myself I’d write it down, but I didn’t.

I was driving to the store to buy your sister a birthday card, and a man on the radio said, “Pray with me,” so I did.

The words were so striking and bright like sunlight like rippling water like hyacinths.

I wanted you to be able to have them, so I tried to remember the words.

I even prayed I would remember.

But I forgot them.

Then I was lying in your bed face down, and you were watching the ceiling fan cut through your own private heaven.

I was so nervous to try to tell you what the man had said because Christ imagery has a charming way of being so fragile.

I said the words wrong, and they didn’t sound pretty coming off my tongue, so I stopped trying to get it right.

Go on, you insisted.

I don’t remember the rest, I said.

You sighed and ran your fingers over the notches in my spine, and when you stopped, I knew you had fallen asleep.

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09

Tell Me Again, Ammy Lauren Farkas brown bark, red bast, white meat of the vine the bone that is not a bone but pith all sponge and cling

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tell me again how to slaughter and prepare a pig remind me how the blood draws how the muscles tease how even the hooves are used tell me again (while we hack and harvest this vine together) of the ways you learned how not to waste your life or another’s

photograph

Jackson Jalomo mixed media

Antithesis To Lomography

Diana Dalton

Banned Blood

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10

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11

Conquest aquatint copper plate

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Nicole O’Connor

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Bert and Ernie collage

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Wyatt Hester

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13

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Hot Ramen Rae Taylor mixed media on canvas

Bigger Than Me mixed media on canvas

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Rae Taylor

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JESUS Lauren Farkas

JESUS stippled in red solo cups in the chain-link fence named Rio Grande and Spanish speech curls around the collapsed cinder block frame

and the propane tank waits like an old dead cow nobody buried.

I learned Knoxville Tennessee’s middle name today (or one of them), JESUS ­— but written in red plastic on galvanized wire; materiality is a dialect.

Window / Obstruction flashe and fabric on canvas

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Megan Wolfkill

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Growing from the Shadows oil on canvas

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Natalia Mahan

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Empty Playground

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Guido Del Rosso photography

make elongated “B

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One Big Playground

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My elementary school hatred of playgrounds was unmatched. I wanted nothing to do with those titanic abominations of metal and plastic, with their primarycolored slides weaving erotically past one another like a pornographic snake display; with their scalding monkey bars suspended over dogshit-scented mulch; with their handpowered roundabouts that made it feel like my stomach was digesting itself. Indeed the playground was where other children were condemned to lower forms of stimulation. For the children who, unlike me, did not live on a farm, and did not have their own forest to play in.

I intuitively knew that the woodlands behind the farm had taken eons to perfect, and a series of lessons in my third grade science class confirmed this. As a reaction to the Scopes Monkey Trial that had taken place a few counties over, the state had this initiative where elementary school teachers were required to tell us early about the real lofty concepts: the Big Bang, the formation of the solar system, evolution and natural selection. (Ideas knocked daily by my God-fearing parents, who believed and still believe that the Earth is younger than most archaeologists theorize agriculture to be.)

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After school each day, and after I had done my chores (replace hay in the stable, de-weed the okra beds, water the petunias by the mailbox) I would take my shoes and socks off and wander into the forest, where I often imagined myself to be a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, connecting with the rest of the whole, becoming one superorganism, fully integrated and enlightened. I’m an atheist to this day but I think that’s the closest I ever got to a mystical experience. The scents of decay and rebirth, the mud lodged under my toenails, the wind breathing somnolently over the canopy—it all felt like I was doing something incredibly profound. And of course, I had conversations with the forest, which I imagined was

by

Sam Liske

And attached as I had become to the forest near my house, I was gratified to hear that everything from the stonedwelling mosses to the fragrant honeysuckles had come from a much older continuum of life, and that I belonged to that continuum. Because this meant, to my prideful third-grade mind, that I was no different from the forest I loved, that I possessed a sacred familial relationship which no playgrounddweller could ever understand.

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some massive interconnected nerve network of preserved ancestral knowledge. I frequently asked questions like:

“Why is Dad upset with Isaac?” (My brother) “What was it like at the time of the dinosaurs?”

“How can I get the ability to fly, or turn invisible?”

And when my mind churned up answers to itself, I pretended or perhaps convinced myself that the trees and ferns and fungi were giving me information I wasn’t sensitive enough to perceive on my own. Then I would return home, content for the day, feeling as though I’d accomplished as much for the family as my parents had in their own lines of work.

Oh, it was an idyllic childhood, which many hate to admit. I don’t hate admitting it, however, because it implies there was a time I could be happy, that my natural state isn’t just glum and gloom.

The beginning of the idyll’s end occurred one night when Mom and Dad called me into the living room to talk about something important.

They were on the couch, and Isaac was perched on Mom’s lap, wearing the velcro Buzz Lightyear sneakers he had been sleeping in for about a week. Although Mom was smiling at me, I felt from my forest-ordained sensitivities that I could detect a sadness she was not expressing. Dad’s arm was around Mom, his permanently mud-stained fingers combing through her hair, and he was looking blankly at me as if I’d let one of the animals loose or stepped on a garden bed.

“Sit, sit,” Mom said, patting the cushion beside her.

When I did she ran her fingers through my hair like Dad was doing to her.

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She tended to ruffle the curls of my hair, an act I always worried she might do in public.

She breathed through her nostrils, smiled again, and said: “Your father is a writer.” As if noticing the weakness of her own smile, she made a pretend gasp. “How about it?”

It sounds mundane but I could hardly believe it at the time. Dad had devoted his life to this farm primarily for subsistence, selling what surpluses we had and working occasionally as a freelance writer for local companies. He was making just enough for toiletries and gasoline and insurance, but we didn’t mind this: Dad, after all, was a storyteller, and it seemed he would one day write a novel so brilliant that we would no longer have to farm, that we would be whisked to the oasis of suburban middle-classness, blessed immediately with cable television and regular visits to the movie theater. For a moment I thought this had come true.

“Did he sell a book?” I asked Mom. They had already explained to me the nauseatingly banal and painful process of querying an agent, finding one who won’t scam you, and scoring an actual publisher—not to mention, once the book is published, actually getting the book into the hands of people willing to put aside their televisions and computers and sit still while they looked at pieces of paper. Mom stuttered for a second and looked at Dad, insinuating she wanted him to explain. Dad palmed his cheek and said nothing for a moment, like what he was about to describe was the mental equivalent of teaching Mandarine Chinese to a basic English speaker.

“Not a book, no, but I now have steady work as a technical writer.”

“What’s that?” Isaac said without looking at anyone.

Dad cleared his throat, adjusted the way he sat. “A technical writer is someone who takes big ideas and compresses them into, say, more compact messages, so others can easily read them.” He didn’t stop looking at me as he spoke, and this I interpreted as a kind of self-consciousness, as if he were worried I might start laughing at him.

“What’s that?” Isaac said without looking at anyone.

Dad cleared his throat, adjusted the way he sat. “A technical writer is someone who takes big ideas and compresses them into, say, more compact messages, so others can easily read them.” He didn’t stop looking at me as he spoke, and this I interpreted as a kind of self-consciousness, as if he were worried I might start laughing at him.

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I leaned in front of my mother to see him. “Will that help you sell a book?”

“Possibly,” he said, shrugging. He palmed his cheek again. “The thing is, the job’s in Cartersville. We’ll have to move.”

I’d never heard of this place before but Dad’s tone made it sound dangerous, murky, like there was some unscalable obstacle in our way. I vocalized this intuition: “What’s so bad about Cartersville?”

“Oh, nothing bad about it,” he said and dropped his hand. “But we’ll have to move there. Get a new home. It’ll be a great experience for you guys.”

“That sounds good to me,” said my little brother, who was still too young to psychologically plant himself anywhere.

One Big Playground

“Like poems?” I said.

“More like… instructions.”

He sounded unsure of himself, and to this day I regret not showing even a false sense of enthusiasm. The truth was, I wanted more than anything for him to sell a novel to a publisher. I wanted my classmates to talk about my dad, and the strange narratives he was peddling through the literary stream. Because the stories he told us at night, as we sat in lawn chairs around the flickering brazier and listened to the cicadas thrumming in alien rhythms—they always managed to take me places far more interesting than the farm. To shifting dunes in ancient Persia, camelmounted under the swelling deep of outer space; to the droning Arctic Ocean, black and vague; to warring colonies on the other side of the Milky Way, thousands of years into the future. Often I went to bed identifying as some new hero created by Dad: an explorer, a detective, a frightened shopper escaping an axe murderer. And because the sheer words of the man could pluck me out of reality and drop me in constructed worlds much more interesting than the one considered “real,” I was certain he would make it. He would be hailed as a gem of the southern U.S., a storyteller on par with whoever I thought was the pinnacle of storytellers at the time—I think at this point I had been particularly infatuated with the writer of Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Sam Liske

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“You mean, you can’t just drive there to work?” I said, noticing vitriol in my tone.

“Well, no,” Mom said. “It’s almost three hours away.”

I caught myself speaking without a first or second thought: “You mean Dad can’t just move there?”

Mom’s hand stopped ruffling my hair. Assuming that familiar tone of spiritual finality, she said, “The Lord has already told us to go as a family.” I said nothing and she went back to ruffling. One can never argue with the tenets of an all-powerful deity, or else He or She or It wouldn’t be so powerful.

I almost said something like, The forest wants me here, but I restrained myself, knowing all too well the way my parents talked about the tree huggers and flower power madness of their parents’ generation.

Not to mention, I wouldn’t have even known what I meant by saying it.

The rest of the summer was highly enjoyable, not only because I was too young to understand the emotional ramifications of uprooting and going to Cartersville, but because my friends at school expressed great dismay at the news (some even cried!) and vowed to fill every empty day with meaningful activities. At higher frequencies than ever before, I was invited to neighborhood pools, to hikes in the Smoky Mountains, to low-country boils where I ate shrimp and crawfish and seasoned potatoes until I vomited all of it back in the grass. It was all so warm and gratifying, and though I never told my parents out of fear of being spanked, I felt somewhat like Jesus of Nazareth before his crucifixion: my friends being my disciples, our conversations being the profound final dialogues of Christ.

Toward the end of the summer, on our last night on the farm, I became aware of the imminent suffering from leaving the place I’d spent one hundred percent of my life. Feelings of misery were beginning to descend, and I knew I needed to sort myself out in the forest, perhaps receive some parting gift of esoteric wisdom that I could use to weave through the perils of ambiguous Cartersville.

After Isaac had gone to bed, it was just me and my parents in the living room.

Mom was filing taxes, Dad was working on paperwork for the apartment we would soon occupy. White-noise-heavy paid programming was droning on the television: I still remember the spokesman through that electric fog, an old tan guy with freakishly white teeth talking about his store where he sells Mediterranean jewelry.

I stretched my legs and yawned loud enough to be heard through the television

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static. “I guess I’ll sleep now.”

Dad looked up from his document and removed his reading glasses. “Hey, Terence.”

“Huh?” “Have you ever eaten sushi?”

“No, sir.”

Double-clicking his pen, he said, “Tell you what. With this new job, I’ll start taking you to some nice haunts. You’ll try foods from Africa, Asia, Latin America— it’ll be great.”

“That sounds good.”

“And museums. I could take you to an aquarium, or to Noah’s Ark—” “Noah’s Ark?” I gasped.

“Well, not the real one, but a faithful recreation.” My excitement fell right into my stomach. Noticing my silence, Dad flicked his glasses back on and said, “All right, Ter. Get some good winks.”

“Yes, sir. Goodnight, Mom.” “Goodnight, little dove,” she said without looking up.

I went to the stairs, clomped my feet to feign going up them, and tiptoed slowly to the front door. I spent at least thirty seconds pressing down on the button of the door handle, letting each unit of sound leak out and disperse in its own time.

Without a stir, the door was open. I slipped through and accidentally slammed it shut; I was so jarred that I peeked through the window for minutes, waiting to see if my parents had heard the noise and were going to find and spank me. But neither of them appeared. I could still see Mom’s tapping foot in the living room, and I could hear the faint hum of the paid programming.

When the sound of my heartbeat stopped coming out of my throat, I snuck around the side of the house toward the woods. There was a detached, apathetic quality to the forest at night. I was, in fact, terrified, but I was searching for a sacred experience. And I have always intuited there is a clear intersection between what is sacred and what is terrifying.

Waterfowl in the pond nearby, cooing and splashing; frogs chirping chorally; trees shrieking as they tilted, convincing me they might fall over and crush me. I set my shoes and socks beside a fungally-digested stump and continued into the woods until I found my favorite oak tree. Old and climaxed, the tree’s gnarled branches radiated in all directions like tentacles of some petrified

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Lovecraftian monster. It was my favorite tree because of how grandfatherly it seemed; if transcendent wisdom could be found anywhere in the woods, it was among this oak’s experienced branches.

In a couple tries I climbed the trunk and got comfortable on an especially thick branch. Ear pressed against the trunk, I listened for what Dad once described as the organism moving water through itself. In that moment I came to disbelieve my father; I seriously entertained the thought that the tree was thinking, that I was the only person who recognized the fffffsssshh sound inside as the psychic mechanics of a wise but tragically misunderstood being. That recurring feeling of spiritual gratitude (megalomania?) washed over me, and I thanked God for honoring me with such finetuning, for who else possessed these gifts? The pious druids my father spoke of, the mages and wizards of his medieval tales—these were lost archetypes resurfaced in me.

I took my ear from the trunk and leaned back, legs splayed across the branch. “I am going to sit here, even if it takes the entire night,” I said aloud. “And you will tell me what I need to know before I leave for Cartersville.”

Waiting, waiting. I pressed my scalp against the trunk as if I needed the arboreal wisdom to flow directly from the bark into my skull. When my thoughts wandered off to anything other than the oak tree, I dutifully reeled them back like dogs on a leash. Looking back, it seems this was my first experience with mindfulness meditation. Soon I was in a trance, my mind having filtered out the frogs’ croaks and the leaning of the trees and the wind’s agitation of the canopy; I felt disembodied, suspended in a void, and though this was considerably more interesting than the mundane state of occupying a body, it was information from the woods that I wanted.

But nothing came. No recitations of lost spells, no memories of ancient wanderers, no sudden feelings of enlightenment or ecstasy. Not one indecipherable hieroglyph, not even a generated voice reverberating across the psychic canyons. It was all boredom and a growing sense of exhaustion. The observer behind my eyelids was receding, being pulled into that muddy bog of feelingless nothing, and even when I opened my eyes and slapped myself in the face a few times, the grayscale forest went back out of focus and I drifted away.

It was still night when I woke up. Frogs still croaked, trees still meowed.

A lone bird was warbling far off, singing into the night with no response. My vision reorganized and I was lying on the ground among mosses and wet ferns. My wrist pulsated. I wondered if I had just been teleported by the forest; that would suffice,

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By dawn, when the higher-pitched daytime birds had come out and the Sun was yawning over the horizon and spilling into my room, the pain in my wrist had become less pronounced. It seemed my mind had caught on to the fact that I would do nothing to treat the pain, and had shut off the signalling. I used one hand to load my bags into the station wagon, which luckily were few, and then we were on the road, leaving the house and hens and goats and cattle for the buyer to have.

It was my first time going beyond a thirty-mile radius of my house.

The trees and farmland dissipated and soon we were submerged in a world alien to me. Today I liken that experience to a more nightmarish version of Vaughn Williams’ Fantasia: the entrance into a fantastical world, played not with strings sections but with the sounds of breaking glass and gagging. I was appalled. We passed playgrounds, shopping malls, construction sites, shoddy seafood restaurants (“Never, ever, eat fast seafood from an inland restaurant, unless you want mercury to twist

One Big Playground

spiritually; after all, who could say they’d experienced the same?

But then I looked up and saw the big oak branch above me. Then, right there, seemed to be the message of this arboreal grandfather: your wrist hurts. The gentle heaves came, then full-on sobs, and soon I was in the middle of the woods by myself crying to an audience of trees and a single bird.

The crying died down, then reignited after I realized I couldn’t tell Mom my wrist hurt without also telling her I’d snuck out. There was an alternate procession of events where I’d done this all during the day, rather than spending the time with Smith Thomas throwing rocks at ice cream trucks and stop signs—where this had all happened during the acceptable time for going out and I could trudge home whimpering and Mom would swaddle me an ice pack and make me pasta with chanterelle mushrooms.

Adding to that misery was my inability to locate my shoes and socks; it was like the forest had swallowed them whole. Given, I didn’t look very hard, what with my wrist talking to me the whole time. I got home, wiped the mud off my feet as best I could, and got in bed, where I didn’t sleep for even a minute. Fading grasp of home and friends, ache in my wrist, the percussive snores of my parents in the room over.

Sam Liske

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your brain up like the Mad Hatter,” I vividly recall Dad saying), grey gas stations, and strip clubs (paradigm-shattering concepts to me at the time). Meanwhile the pain in my wrist was returning occasionally and without rhythm, abrasive and nauseous; I would ask Mom for the barf bag and then feel better as soon as it was in my good hand.

I felt betrayed; by whom I was unsure. We arrived at an apartment complex near the company headquarters where we were told Dad would go each day and write out instructions and directions. He pointed to the building out the window, looked at us, and bit his lower lip as if he’d presented some profound unswallowable truth. “It’ll be just like the old days, where I can walk to work.”

“Can we come visit you?” Isaac said.

“Of course you can.”

With the pain coming back to my wrist, I abandoned all dignity and morality and went into the bathroom, where I slammed the door really hard and, at last, let tears fall that had been waiting in there since yesternight. When Mom rushed in to see what had happened, I told her my wrist was throbbing, I had gotten it caught between the wall and the door, which I’d closed a little too hard. As if she’d known all along, she was in the next moment kitchenbound, collecting a little towel along the way. She returned with the ice pack and held it against my wrist, and I leaned my head against her and cried again, though I couldn’t think of the exact reason why, since my wrist was pretty much numb.

Looking through where Isaac’s and my bedroom would be, and the living room where our family would soon sit in front of the television (cable TV! promised Dad), and the kitchen where I would do the upcoming school year’s homework—I felt like I was walking through a musty museum display, something alien and separated from me by vast quantities of time and space, like the exhibit in my hometown devoted to an especially gruesome battle between Cherokees and Englishmen.

“Why don’t you and your brother go outside and look around?” Mom said. “It’s your first day, don’t be all cooped up.”

I found Isaac, who had been occupying himself with the door bumper, pulling it up in one direction and letting it pendulate in the other. “Hey, come look around with me,” I said, ice pack around my wrist. Ever eager to be stimulated, he followed me out the door and we went down the grid-iron staircase.

Airplanes far off were thumping and growing weaker in pitch as they disappeared into the sky. There were the huffy sounds of leafblowers, the clomping of car doors, the sliding

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tones of firetrucks whizzing by. It was all overwhelming for me, especially with my heavy right arm. Soon I couldn’t help but be in a pouty mood. Isaac, eager to soak it all in, led the way.

I scoped out places I could spend my time. Like it had been in my hometown, I would need a refuge from the house while Mom and Dad talked about and did things that had no bearing on my life. There were bars and clubs, and I achingly watched people go in and out of these and imagined myself as an adult able to visit them myself.

Meet the girls, listen to the music that I would one day appreciate, get to traverse the city late at night.

The forlornness of the walk culminated when we reached what my brother and I both agreed would be our hangout spot for the time-being and probably the future to come. It was a playground, rusty, one boiling silver slide flanked by a chipped rubber platform with a horn you could yell in that would transmit your voice across the playground.

“This place sucks,” I said.

My brother was already climbing up the slide, shouting yow! from the conducted heat. He reached the rubber platform, held his face up to the talking tube, and said, “Get up here now, captain. We need you and your services. And Dad said you’re not allowed to say sucks.”

“I’m not going up there,” I said, standing on the mulch, cradling my arm.

“The ship will crash if the pilot doesn’t come.”

I shifted my footing, eased onto the hot black border of the playground. “Let it crash.”

“Suit yourself,” Isaac said.

He pantomimed an airplane flying around on what he was considering the ship, which I found nonsensical, seeing as the use of a spaceship is wasted if you’re going to be flying planes on it. While he made propulsion noises with his mouth, I sat and sulked on the plastic border. And even though the pain in my wrist had mostly disappeared, I was trying to convince myself it was still there. I think it was here that my childhood ended, and I began my journey into adult life.

One Big Playground

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My Yolk is not Light performance art

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Colleen Tongco

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Don’t let me live in your memories.

White, turbid water rushes off his jaw.

Jagged twigs fall from his mouth.

Hand outstretched, his palm to my damp cheek.

Anxious chest, seizing.

He tells the tale of October on a foreign mountain, when we ran through old growth pines, my feet, dangled over his sturdy shoulders.

He whispers tenderly, the story of the dragon Smaug who slept upon his bed of gold, the story that kept me awake as a child begging for him to read one more chapter.

He pleads with me to remember, the fondness I once had for him.

On nights leaves rustle against the harsh winter winds, he arrives. Sallow and skeleton, under a pale cracked moon.

He awaits, aside the walnut bed frame. The mattress groans under the weight of his disdain.

Finger to the sage colored quilt, tracing the shape of two figures alongside one another.

Carson Parham

My Father’s Apparition

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Magnolia Leaves acrylic on canvas

Susan Feinberg

father?

father is fear contagious? father can you smell it on me like rot? a dead thing, days gone, father do your pupils dilate in the balmy heat? father does my body reflect the light? father is my body a crime? father is my body a weapon? father is my body a suicide bomb? father have you ever been in love? father will my feeble animal skeleton ever lie down in a crater where it fits? father is my crater my own? father where does the love go when it leaves? father where does the grief go when it leaves? father what is sin? father if the airplane parts are faulty and you build it anyway and they all die in the end, does it make you a killer? father what’s the difference between optimistic and reckless? father what’s the difference between sin and sinner? father what’s the distance between faith and faithless? father aren’t we all just walking each other home? father does blood still taste rich and acrid against your teeth or has salvation turned it cherry-sweet? father have you ever been in love? father where does the love go when it leaves? father are we destined to die here? father are we destined to die?

Hollie Sikes

Things I Ask at Confession

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maybe if you go to sleep happy, then you’ll wake up happy acrylic and watercolor

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Griffin Allman

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Sadie Kimbrough Editor in Chief

Letter from the Editor

The Phoenix editorial staff is made up of Art Editor, Rose Hamm; Prose Editor, Clint Liles; Poetry Editor, Aslan Gossett; and Copy Editor, Josh Strange

In weary climate and contagion, craft is awake and unpredictable. Artists and poets and writers declare what it is to be alive, and we at Phoenix have the pleasure of illuminating those human inclinations. The past three magazines I’ve worked on all sang different tunes, and so do the hundreds of archives that rest in our file cabinet. Each issue asks new questions, answers old ones, and demands a fresh set of eyes.

Issue 64, Volume 1 is no exception.

Our Lead Designer is Jaylin Witherspoon and our Social Media Coordinator is Taylor McKickle We are supported by staff members Case Pharr, Abby-Noelle Potter, and Kyle Wente A special thanks to Lynda Sleeter The Phoenix team is advised

by Director of Student Media Jerry Bush Winter Issue 64 volume I

I don’t study Art or English or Journalism, but I found education and camaraderie in the Communications building basement. I’ve gained a considerable appreciation for Tennessee creatives and a passion for preserving print media.

My first editorial semester was challenging yet gratifying, and I urge anyone and everyone to find a creative outlet at UT. To my staff that invents and accomplishes and cares so much, y’all are seriously brilliant. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Without your sincerity, Phoenix would come to a halt. To our designer, Jaylin, thank you for letting me drag you into this and sharing your vision.

Each year, our submissions amaze me. The student body curiously and unfailingly produces work that gives the Phoenix Literary Arts Magazine function. Thank you to our donors, advisors, and supporters for letting us stick around.

All the best, Sadie Kimbrough

For exclusive articles and full archives visit : www.phoenixmagazine.net

For more information about the Phoenix check out our instagram: @phoenixutk To learn more about sponsoring the Phoenix, contact: phoenix@utk.edu

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