Phoenix Magazine, Spring 2023

Phoenix Literary Arts Magazine Spring 2023 Issue 66

Contents

Poetry

Prose

Art

01 ......................................................................... Road Kill Matthew Stanley

22 ....................................................................... Insomnia Anna Trevathan

09 ......................................... a gesture of surrender Kyle Cottier

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03 ......................................................... Artifact (2021) Daniel Dassow

10 .................... and in the distance the passing of a great black caribou Kyle Cottier

17 .......................................................................... Untitled Hannah Sorenson

04 ................................ Choking On My Own Tears Harmony Fine

Beanie Baby, Baby Bear SK Yi

05 .............................................. There is a Life for Us Arabelle Sarver

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06 ....................................................... Michelle the Cat Daniel Dassow 12 07 ................................... How to describe a lemon Anna Trevathan 22 ........................ What it is to watch everything everywhere all at once as as a daughter of an immigrant Anna Trevathan 23 ............................................................................... Being Matthew Blessington 24 ............................................... Waxing and Waning Maxwell Tsetsakis

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......................................................... Her Everything M. Edmonds

................................................................. Film Still 02 Deborah Allion

.................................................................. Bon Voyage Dana Kim

19 .................................... She Never Had a Chance Eliza Frensley

A Prolific Burden Eliza Fresney

Untitled Hannah Sorenson

................................................................. F*ck Bill Lee M. Edmonds

20 ................................................................................ Wash Arcadia Moncrief

13 .......................................................... Three Steeples John Caleb Lee Houston 14

............................................................................ Pilgrim Gino Castellanos

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.......................................................... Dark Spikiness!

Max Melnic The Hunter Dana Kim

Road Kill

The dim rustling of cars lulls her like waves or paint scraped off canvas/ Mom’s body lies soft on a black interstate, burgundy heat of summer. Her arms are twisted in some unholy way. Glass dazzles around her/ she’s always been a star. There are no trees to cover Florida sun. Hot concrete sears torn skin.

Years gone by, now she sings in the daytime in her green room/ to stained glass windows.

going to have to plan a vigil on the football field. I’ve been out of that misery/ four years now/ still the image comes/ Tuesday saw an old truck parked on Eisenhower’s interstate 75 and a gray-haired baseball-capped man on his knees pounding apink cross into clay.

We don’t know it but we’re all in mourning.

isn’t necessarily safe either. I shouldn’t worry because it’s not in my hands. I resent my phone. The ringing/ not ringing/ it happens/ it doesn’t/ all at the same time. The worst day of your life will start with a phone call.

//

//

American Individuality is this great illusion that you don’t need nothin’ from nobody. While a tenth of your paycheck is absorbed into the nearest gas station. Our gas is the cheapest in the world but we still can’t afford it. But I didn’t take the bus here. Whenever you are wondering why: just figure out who gets paid.

The sole energy source required to keep the largest economy even appear functional can only be maintained by unfathomable violence and exploitation. And it’s killing us too. So now we have to make a choice.

Luke went hypoglycemic last week at the gym. He felt off-kilter on his way to the car, so he took a seat. Thank god he didn’t drive.

I’m at Kroger and then there was a phone call and a voice that wasn’t Luke’s saying he’d turned green couldn’t answer questions.

And in my imagination, there’s a metal box eviscerated by lateral force, and a bloody spider webwindshield. My brother’s body on the stretcher. A woman covers her kids’ eyes so they can’t see. But today it wasn’t him. Today.

Raccoon eyes/ cones and rods lost in the headlights. Resignation. Gabe stared into them. The racoon’s small leg bones crushed/ can’t drag his way out. I don’t know if we can be put out of misery. Does a raccoon on Neyland Drive know Dukkha? Can he understand the consequences… Who’s culpable? We clearfell forests/ carve up/ paint yellow lines/ don’t tell the locals/ now we have to make a choice.

What’ll it be? Is there divine intervention for boys in black Hondas? Who will sing the nocturn?

//

// // I dreamt of my tiny blue car wrapping around a tree/ more than once. Instant death/ transition. [the ways men choose to die] Someone was going to have to find me. Someone was

Raise your hand if a little drive sent you to the hospital. Where were you going? Raise your hand if not. Knock/on/wood. Dad’s never been in a wreck. He drives to the grocery store, to the gym, to an anniversary dinner. His car 01

Matthew Stanley

02

Artifact (2021)

Choking on my own tears

‘I never realized how much I needed strangers’ we all say now, like New Yorkers baking American flags, looking out across water to where the sky fell — ridiculous, earnest, horribly lonely — strung out in loop after loop on the nightly news.

There is no comparable feeling to that of my own throat choking itself.

The misery imprisoned there demands to be dissolved.

But I can’t risk giving the same permission to the rest of my body.

We don’t rely on the kindness of strangers.

We cannot have them near us. What we need is mindless, numbing chatter like a battery. We need their strawberry swirls and Cheesecake Factories, their à la cartes and excruciating pains – they’re security guards – Black and white – in a college library.

I dig my nails into the palms of my hands until my knuckles turn white.

The muscles in my arms tense and tighten just enough to not be noticed by any outside witnesses.

The pain acts as a diversion allowing me to momentarily forget everything else.

We need one tall and one short. We need them talking like it’s 1999, or what we imagine of it. We need to get the words down before they slip like water between hands set far apart from one other, trying desperately to connect.

Daniel Dassow

I bite my tongue to feel a distracting amount of physical discomfort.

I struggle to withhold the tears that sit on the edges of my eyelids.

I do everything I can to prevent them from meeting the rest of my face.

How aggravating it is fighting the force of something so miniscule yet so effectual.

03

Harmony Fine

04

Michelle the cat

there is a life for us

In your absence, Michelle sits politely on my chest. The two of us are left in bed.

She looks down at me, stares, then licks my face. I wish you were here to see it.

I wish for late mornings with the magic of night, when our dusty, stripey girl runs to me fast, like her tigress ancestors — our little huntress, who eats chicken in the kitchen from a small white plate.

there is a place where the warm darkness of your hand folds softly over mine hesitating as our tired feet brush the planks of our deck and we can linger here for a while

Are we a mother and father, wearing rings in the golden light of an apartment at the silent center of the world?

Michelle, to be sure, has the run

there is a season when sweet mountain rain weeps onto us until my hair is damp and yours is thicket of wool and it all makes you smile and your laugh is as untamed as ever

of the place. She zooms at midnight in disheveled hurricane circles,

there is a moment in which the rattle of your tired car can longer swallow the richness of your voice as you choke out the notes of an old song and i can wonder if you are singing about me

but the noise is a small price for the gift she brings in the stillness of night, her dilated eyes guiding her through the dark to our bed, where

there is a world where the fires we build are never smoldered when conversations begin to dance around the idea of us and you ache for me until we both are soothed

she climbs in between us, sits on my chest and moves to yours, tucks her tiny feet under her like a loaf of oven-warm bread.

there is a life for us where we stretch into the autumn unbound by the duties we never asked to bear and we can carry it in a dream

With a stretch, she pulls the center of the world to us with a sleepy gravity, and we rest, three chests rising in time through the length of the blessed night.

Arabella Sarver

05

Daniel Dassow

06

How to describe a lemon?

Baby, you are a 1987 Yellow Toyota Supra, The mustard yellow fading to an ugly brown, Your doors are sealed shut from the last fenderbender, that’s what I get for buying used.

I remember our first night together, The stretching of the old leather.

You may’ve been used but for that night, Damn, you felt brand new.

Do you remember our first test drive, Checking up- under the hood, Adjusting the seat for viewing pleasure, I miss my feet resting on the fogged windows.

You made me feel new.

After that, you became the “lemon”.

How the fuck can you not use the gearshift. Just shift down one, over...

How can you not find thefixed...small...circular...

Steering wheel. Of course.

What else would I be talking about?

Anna Trevathan

07

08

Kyle Cottier A GESTURE OF SURRENDER

Kyle Cottier AND IN THE DISTANCE THE PASSING OF A GREAT BLACK CARIBOU

SK Yi BEANIE BABY, BABY BEAR

Dana Kim BON VOYAGE

Eliza Frensley A PROLIFIC BURDEN

M. Edmonds F*CK BILL LEE

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John Caleb Lee Houston Three Steeples

Gino Castellanos Pilgrim

14

Max Melnic DARK SPIKINESS!

M. Edmonds HER EVERYTHING

Dana Kim THE HUNTER

16

Hannah Sorensen UNTITLED

Deborah Allion FILM STILL 02

18

Hannah Sorensen UNTITLED

Arcadia Moncrief WASH

Eliza Frensley SHE NEVER HAD A CHANCE

20

21

What it is to watch everything everywhere all at once as a daughter of an immigrant

Anna Trevathan

A multi-cultural, multiverse exists, and I do not wonder if there are gigantic green gargoyles on congress or if tyrannical tarantulas terrorize the senate floor.

I instead wonder if there’s one where my mother got to stay in Mexico, and if she got to raise my brother, I wonder if he turned to breast feeding instead of beer guzzling?

In this universe, I imagine a version of her with her nursing degree, a nationally recognized nurse who trains with dazzling doctors and is paid the money she deserves.

I hope she is somewhere wearing one of those long white dresses, eating tortas and tortillas and tacos, I hope she drinks cafecitos and chews on chancla and chisme.

What does she look like when the world treats her with kindness?

Does she stay her beautiful hundred pound, double-zero, four foot eleven self?

I hope her hair is still long, that it didn’t fall out from the dollar tree shampoo/ stress combination, I hope she braids her beautiful black hair in violet vanities Does she have nightmares about cleaning the toilets we clean together here? Would she choose a life where we struggle to put food on the table?

I wonder if there is a version of her that came here legally, one that thinks a coyote is just an animal and wouldn’t know where the human-sized hole in a desert fence is.

In this universe, I hope she had a good Catholic daughter with her black hair and skin that matches hers, I hope that she got the name my father couldn’t pronounce.

I pray that in another universe my mother is loving her daughter the way she could never love me in this one.

22

Being

Waxing and Waning

My hate and my love Both two sides of the same coin That seems out of hand A coin I can’t flip Buried deep in my pockets Too far for my reach I try anyway Forlorn hope to have control My will nullified The best I can do Keep eye contact with the world It embraces me Rejection happens Accept one—accept both Everything cycles Much like the ocean It gives as much as it takes The shores don’t complain Can I process this I know nothing is certain Consequences happen Balance keeps order The absurd heals my anguish Yet I can’t escape The world moves with me It also moves without me A quite dreadful thought Walls surrounding me An urge to tear them away Marooned with free choice I still carry on Because how am I special Anyone can choose

being of my understanding starts at the lip of my skull sucking on my spine like a gentle centipede holding the whole of my flesh from the liver to the bladder to the two lungs too my bones bend the flesh and the flesh bends the bones tasting, hearing with a pulse underneath and up above in between crannies cracks and seams and the cyclical rhythm is as primal as music i love that bloody red line i have a couple on my skin myself blue ones too, running and sprinting racing, chasing, every last breath

Maxwell Tsetsakis

Matthew Blessington

But I made my own choice 24

Insomnia

Anna Trevathan

A Short Story

When Samual awoke the clock blinked 2:43 am. The pearly moon illuminated a monochromatic glow over the nineteen year olds apartment bedroom. Chinese take-out decorated his desk. Dirty laundry paved a path of where he had stripped earlier that day. Sam’s body ached to fall back asleep. The cool breeze of the overhead fan only sent him further into the embrace of the silky sheets.

He stretched his legs out long and bare feet poked out of the bottom of the bed. His blue eyes shut oh-so-tight. He listened for the melody of the fan to do its trick... but he felt it.

The sensation used to unnerve him. It would force him to turn on a TV show or a lamp while putting in the work to simply fall back under.

Now it was part of the night.

Inky eyes peered through the glass. Samual peered back. Through the forest that grew outside the window, eyes were all he could ever make out. The eyes blinked. He blinked.

The boy laughed. He flipped sides, finding the cold side of an abandoned pillow to cradle. He felt it. Samual did not fall back asleep until the clock showed 6:58 am.

The next night bright blue eyes opened at exactly 3:04 am. He felt it. An abandoned Mcdonald’s napkin lay on top of a pile of textbooks. Samuals’ comforter was no longer

on the bed. The sleepy-eyed boy raised his head, black hair pointed in all directions. The chill nipped at his bare chest as he crawled to the foot of the bed in search of his comforter.

He felt it. In the shadowy room, he did not have to glance at the window to know what he would find, but he did regardless. He gave the eyes a sardonic wave before rescuing the blanket off the carpet onto the rightful place of his bed with him. That night he finally slept at 5:23 am.

The following night he awoke at 1:47 am.

He felt it. That night he stared at the eyes for a good while. He followed its blinking. He based his breathing on it. He fell asleep at 4:32 am.

The next night he woke up at 4:15 am. He felt it. He immediately turned on his lamp.

The eyes were absent in the light. Samuel fell asleep with the light still on at 8:09 am.

Awake at 3:26 am. That night his muscles refused to move. He felt it. He could not turn to see it. His heartbeat rattled too quickly beneath his ribs. His body was hot. Trapped beneath a blanket with no weight, Sam could only inspect the texture of his popcorn ceiling.

Nights like these pissed him off and he never would have admitted that they scared him.

Wikipedia told him sleep paralysis could be caused by a lack of sleep but all he tried to 25

do was sleep. He slept at 7:58 am. Sam could have cried.

The next night Samual never laid down to sleep. He used the excuse of a ten-page bio paper to keep him away from the sheets. The room was littered with canned iced coffees.

The nineteen-year-old shoved his hair back roughly and jammed his glasses further up the bridge of his boney nose. His body was always tired. The maroon halos decorating his eyes had made a permanent home there and he began to resent his bed in the way one might resent an unrequited love. He kept the blinds closed that night. He felt it. Sam never fell asleep that night.

On the seventh night, Samual took sleeping pills. A lot of them. He laughed at the palm full before downing them with a cup of day-old Sprite. He swayed like a drunk over to his bed.

His head had never hit his pillow harder. He had never arrived at his dreams so quickly... He was awake by 1:27 am. Insanity. Isn’t that the process of doing the same thing over and over again and waiting for different results? Yeah…

Sam was feeling insane.

Sam shot up, drowsy and irate. Inky eyes blinked at him through the window pane.

Sam rubbed his eyelids harshly. Inky eyes

blinked. He threw the blankets back and the inhospitable cold bum rushed him. The boy shoved his feet into one of the many castastray pairs of dirty socks and sneakers. He ripped a hoodie off the back of his chair and stormed through the apartment. Samual’s roommate Thomas never even looked away from the glowing TV while the boy marched through their living room and straight towards the front door.

Cicadas announced his entrance to the outside. Only a second was taken to shoot his arms and head through the hoodie. Quick, angry feet carried him to the treeline outside his window.

Now he paused. Now he took in the fact that he stood outside in his boxers on a frigid, spring night. He was staring into the trees to find... something... anything? He might’ve been dreaming. He might’ve been hunting a hallucination. He might’ve taken too many pills. Regardless, he wanted something to confront. “...Fuck it.” The whisper curled up in a curl of vapor before Sam plowed forward.

The brambles desperately attempted to hold the boy back and the deeper he pushed, 26

the more spotted the moon’s illumination became. He stumbled, grunted, and fell only to rise and catch a shimmering glimpse. A grin stretched tight over his jaw. Inky eyes blinked.

They were larger than before. No longer were they separated by the plane of a window, now they towered over Samuel. Glassy and wet, absent of light and color, like a pool you don’t know the depth too. The eyes were the size of human skulls at least. He didn’t know which one to look at since it was impossible to look at both.

Skin. Thick, textured, and drenched in mucus. It caught the light iridescently. Fatty hind legs, sagging body, distorted proportions.

A mouth that stretched across the length of a tall man. Samual laughed. His ribs felt as though they might split.

“Oh yeah! I’m the crazy one! You are the giant fucking frog, and I AM the crazy one! Well fuck you and fuck me!” His words tore through his throat harshly before he turned to wrestle back through the woods.

The next sound was low and guttural.

Something gurgled deep from the belly of the creature and echoed through the forest.

Leaves shivered. Birds cried out in horror. Sam began to believe he was not hallucinating or dreaming. Sam wondered if he would wake up in his bed in the morning.

His next experience was complete and utter darkness. It was hot, wet, and slick. In the end, Samual finally got his rest and the creature finally ate its fill. 1:37 am.

“...You’re a frog... a giant frog.” He found the moment sickly hilarious. He wished to be back in bed. He wished to bash his head against one of the surrounding trees. The creature blinked.

“What do you want?! Hmmm?! How about we let each other get some damn rest, yeah?!”

Samual began to swing his arms frantically.

The creature blinked.

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Letter From The Editor

Letter To The Editor

Thank you for picking up this copy of the green issue, an amalgamation of the ever present artistic and literary talent at the University of Tennessee. Born in the spring, the 66th issue of the Phoenix was made with love by eleven amazing staff members, one talented designer, and eighteen gracious artists.

Another season is drawing to a close, as seasons tend to do. In this particular waning, we find ourselves reflecting more than usual on the journeys we have weathered as a team. The time has come for us to bid farewell to you, our exceptional editor-in-chief. Since you first found a home in the Phoenix’s basement office in the fall of 2019, six issues - three of them with you at the helm - have flown by faster than an end-of-semester submission deadline.

Green is envious. Keeping a student publication alive is no easy feat. Art and literature are not a priority of the university, which is expected but constantly upsetting. I cannot help feeling jealous of campus entities that will never face fear of impermanence. Our staff, contributors, and readers are proof, however, of the vitality of sharing and experiencing creativity within the UT community.

Beyond your exceptional direction as a leader and curator, it is your unshakeable attitude and willingness to tackle any task that arises - not to mention staggeringly impressive eyeliner skills - that truly set you apart. In the face of challenges, deadlines, and a certain pandemic we don’t care to mention, you remained unflappable. Thank you, Sadie, for your skill and your commitment to the creative community at UTK throughout your tenure.

Green is also hopeful. The color of growth and renewal, green represents a major change for Phoenix. This is our first issue with the Department of English, a change we hope will fulfill our needs and amplify our readership. I’m excited for the possibility of the transition. I know that as long as Phoenix remains student-run, we’re in good hands. I want to thank Student Media for giving us a home for all these years and encouraging us to find a new one when we needed it.

My past four years with Phoenix were sometimes tough and tiring but always, always worth it when a fresh batch of magazines arrived in our little office. I won’t miss the old cranky door (y’all know), but I’ll miss the folks that it let in. I wish the fall staff nothing but elation and achievement. Green is a four-leaf clover, but luck is something they won’t need.

Sadie Kimbrough, Editor in Chief

Phoenix Staff

Sadie Kimbrough ............................... Editor in Chief Maggie Meystrik ................................ Lead Designer Diana Dalton .................................................... Art Editor Maxwell Frasher ................................... Poetry Editor Case Pharr ................................................... Prose Editor Taylor McKickle ............................... Business Editor Presley Cowan .......................................... Copy Editor Madisun Richardson ........................... Social Media

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Abby-Noelle Potter Raina Watson Adin Lamb .............................................. Support Staff