Phoenix Magazine, Spring 2020 (Printed Fall 2020 due to COVID)

Cover Art: Community Blanket / Alexa White

It’s been a tough year. Already in 2020, we’ve seen so much death and disillusionment. We’ve seen unrest and uncertainty, immeasurable pain, suffering, and grief.

In these uncertain times… That’s all anyone can say. In these uncertain times.

Here’s something I am certain of: Art can lead the way.

Art can lead the way because art is the language of change, of culture. Art is a tool, a means of capturing hearts and changing minds. Art has the power to unite us. It can bring us closer together, especially now, in these uncertain times.

Our cover image for this summer edition is a piece called “Community Blanket”

by Alexa White. It’s fitting because that’s exactly what I want this magazine to be: a patchwork of community ideas, art and literature, representative of the best this university has to offer—representative of all.

When I look at the Phoenix, I see an organization, a group of people dedicated to unity, the promotion of equality, and providing a voice to the voiceless. I see a room of wonderful minds and artists. I also see a lack of diversity that needs to change.

To our students of color: I urge you to apply, not just at the Phoenix, but in all forms of student media and student government. Representation is key to change. By fostering acceptance and diversity in our student organizations, we can ensure that the views depicted by the university represent those of the student body as opposed to views of the state legislature. It is time that students control the conversation.

Collin Green Editor in Chief

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Madalyn Dillard

A house isn’t a home until its full.

It takes decorations, dinner parties, dog hair, divorce.

They say a body is a temple but it feels empty until filled.

It can consume the world.

A body is a burden when it gets in the way.

A home is outgrown when its paint fades, its ornaments without meaning – old junk.

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Negattive / Quy nh Nguyen

I say a body; my body, is a beached whale. A docked ship. I take more than I need. Consume more than fits - grow stuck.

My belly a soft bow – fills the bathtub to the brim. Limbs bend to fit.

ley Tennessee Queen / Ha

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Cowan

And All I Saw W as White / Jana

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Ghezawi

Shani Perera Scenic Detour /

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Bailee Wilson

Wide Open / Rachel Doub

The Beachmaster raised his rubbered neck, opening his meaty maw to charge his brother.

Together, they thrashed, groaning and gnawing, until the brother was sucked out to sea.

Then he turned his head to me.

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He was revolting: all root veggie, all rot, with his peeling skin and his dead squid teeth, stinking of sun-baked seaweed, rain-on-asphalt.

With a voice like blended rocks, he told me: I am the god of turmoil and thunder.

I asked if he liked poppies.

Crush them, he commanded, and I did.

I stomped California poppies, Sticky Monkey, Sky Lupine all to chum as I cried.

The beach shook. If you want to be like the ocean, you can leave no survivors.

I said, I only wanted to be a fish.

His dark eyes pulsed. You’ll be what I tell you to be.

The Beachmaster turned back to the black waves, and I was once again alone with krill air, sea glass, angel-winged skuas dropping bones back to the water.

Elemental / Katherine Seal

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d Fr Almond Milk an

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Sunbathing Cats

ori Wallace ied Tomatoes / T

/ Hanna Dice

MadalynMadalyn Dillard

Dillard

find it accidentally falling asleep on the couch at 5pm, weak eyelids give in while T.V. mumbles quietly in the background. the sound of your roommate boiling water for tea, shuffling from room to room as bare feet pitter patter on the white painted wooden floor boards followed by the familiar creak of the bedroom door shut. find it while you’re alone; stoned like the twenty something year-old you are, picking your nose like you did when you were 8. find it in the bubbles that creep up the skin of your spine in the bathtub. warm water like the palms of your mother’s hands; she’d use them to rub your back when you were too sad to talk. find it in the eyes of your dearest friend; they look just like your father’s. find it in the tart sweet juice of fresh strawberries, leaving the tips of your fingers stained pink, like the ones your grandpa fed you on camping trips. find it in the innocence of the naive child that rests quiet – deep in your belly. She is tangled up in your growing pains, but her pith; ageless.

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Charity Ray

To the girl with words itching on her tongue to speak to masses —

whisper the gravel vowels

screech the burning consonants

scratch the chaotic tangle

from your tongue with coal Not all art is beautiful to the people who swallow lilies for breakfast — the people who brush their hair away from their eyes like a butterfly wing brushes the salt from your lava face.

Jane Fonda’s Workout in Art Hisory / Olivia Shumate

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Cherub / Hanna Dice

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I Am What I Am

Facsimile / Erin Wohletz

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I Am What I W

letz Was / Erin Woh

Memory of an Ir is

/ Erin Wohletz

Wohletz Gay Birds / Erin

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Nicole Mathis

Rosalind Franklin worked herself to death. DNA her mistress, that helical body hers until Watson and Crick called it their own. Heat is all it takes to denature a helix, to break links like lightning kicks water from clouds.

How did bonds go before they exposed that genes so naturally divide? Denial is written in our barcode, cells programmed to self-destruct when things deviate.

Maybe the betrayal, maybe the radiation, her diffraction lives on—the first image of life— not meant to expire like cans on a shelf.

Playing with fire is a trait she passes down.

Her body buried, but her voice chants from the dirt of the men who planted her. From her grave rises a helical vine to show women that roots grow stronger the deeper the hole.

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Rarest Picture Ever Taken / Sarah Goldstein

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Fantasy of a Home / Eliza Razak

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Charity Ray I ate cat food, hiding behind winter coats in the laundry room.

Goldfish dissections performed by my brothers and sisters on a stump in the yard littered my memory like the trash thrown on the roof when the “For Sale” planted itself, but I swear it wasn’t me – Dented floors ached from scampering bare feet.

A mirror in the hall reflected the TV – we snuck glances at scary movies on the weekends.

My choppy blonde hair a bob, my brother cut it, laughed – I cut my dolls hair, but it didn’t grow back.

I threw tea parties with dolls, my pink lady.

My favorite book, pink and checkered like her, sat on the top shelf, a skyscraper – I scrabbled up the bookshelf until it toppled, boxing my body into language that called for mom – a fractured arm erratic footsteps Tomlinson eyes shaky.

Another I’m sorry.

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Somatic / Lauren Farkas

Fisher Sexton

“There’s no need for isolation,” spouts the talking head, “that is the state of the nation.”

Self imposed alienation has been suggested, but we wouldn’t be misled.

“There’s no need for isolation.”

Learning to love residential incarceration, and trying so desperately to suppress your dread.

That is the state of the nation.

The only mode of expression is frustration from a state-sponsored sickbed, but “There’s no need for isolation.”

Thinly veiled lust for segregation, “China Virus!” shouts the skinhead— that is the state of the nation.

Beware misinformation.

Please, God, don’t be misled.

“There’s no need for isolation, that is the state of the nation.”

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Bailee Wilson

We spent the night in an old monastery that stood like the eyes of God in the Roman hillside; a cobblestone paradise where the doors wouldn’t lock and the windows shined, dripping with olive oil.

The bed quilts smelled like honey and the air buzzed, full and heavy, all fuzzy with summer heat that sweltered and sipped until our bus broke down in the valley below. We had to push it out of the muck.

We took communion in bed, eating loaves of bread while giggling over an accordion player we’d seen in the Piazza di Spagna. We hummed “The Chicken Dance” until ite, missa est and fell asleep.

I remember waking up to gunshots like church bells; to screams that rang from our gaping mouths as we were caught in disaster, in heavenly rapture.

We called to God, the police, the accordion player— It was three in the morning and we were all going to die.

Mother Mary in a cream-colored quilt, I crawled to the window, peered out at the courtyard. Figures roamed there; demons with crooked noses, dressed in black and white.

At the gates of Hell, they were dancing the limbo to a techno remix of “Hotel California.”

A devil in a black suit contorted his torso to the floor and his palid companion lit up, red and blue.

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The Burning Place / Juniper Teffeteller They writhed and jerked in Bob Fosse choreography; beckoned me closer with little wrist flicks.

Cold dread washed over me, and I felt the floorboards melting beneath my knees. I was sprawled on my back, shouting: Saint Sebastian, pierced by arrows!

In Rome, under a sky pierced by bolts of color, a parade of demons feasted on my flesh.

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The Disentangling Pond / Juniper Teffeteller

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Untitled / Melissa Lozano Lykes

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“Racism is as American as apple pie and baseball.�

- Tom Morello

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Her first priority as SGA president is to amend the Code of Conduct to crack down on hate speech.

“Our Student Code of Conduct has been quick to reprimand students and student organizations for not adhering to COVID-19 university guidelines, yet we still have to approve and confirm a zero tolerance policy for hate speech as a form of harassment,” Jones said, speaking with the Daily Beacon.

Another form of ensuring that all students feel safe on campus is giving the university the tools it needs to discipline those who spread hatred: the Code of Conduct.

Amending the Code of Conduct would provide university administration with the ammunition it would need to discipline those who spread hatred through hate speech. To tackle this, Jones said that the SGA is looking into categorizing hate speech in terms of harassment—a charge that can lead to direct academic punishment.

“If you approach it from this angle, a student who is marginalized cannot function in an environment that perpetuates bigotry and hate speech. It becomes a distraction from achieving academic success,” Jones said. “Our university wants to produce scholars, so when you approach it from that angle, it makes sense that the university would want to eliminate that.”

Hate speech does more than hurt students who are currently on campus; it damages UT’s entire image.

“The thing about it is, the hate speech is not just coming from students who are on campus that have already been enrolled, these are coming from students who have been admitted, or Vols in Progress as they call them,” Jones said. “It makes it really difficult for other Vols in Progress to want to come here if the university allows the admissions process to not be affected when someone says something that is a racialized slur or something that is helpful.”

Still, Jones praised UT’s efforts. “We cannot continue to allow students to come into the university thinking that spreading hate speech or racialized harassment is ok,” she said. “We just want to make the university an environment where students of color or from LGBTQ+ communities want to come where respect is mandatory.”

Administration plays a major part in deterring students from spreading hate on campus. However, we cannot allow the administration to be the only proponents of inclusion on campus. We must take an active role in promoting love, inclusivity, and camaraderie.

“A lot of the changes we are seeing come from the outrage from students who are speaking up on

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Lap / Emily And erosn

Racism has long infected American society, spreading through cities and universities across the country.

The University of Tennessee is no exception. From a blackface scandal to multiple incidents of racist and antisemitic phrases painted on the Rock, the university has had to take a hard look at its policies in the last few years. Karmen Jones is one of the students leading the fight against hate speech and racism on campus.

Jones is a Senior from Arkansas majoring in English Rhetoric with a minor in Africana Studies. She has always had an interest in student leadership. In highschool, her focus was student government and as a freshman she made waves as part of the University of Tennessee’s First Year Council.

Now, Karmen Jones is your new SGA president and the first Black woman to be elected into the role.

Jones wants to help all students feel that the University is their school. That’s what her platform was built on. From her time on the Diversity Affairs Committee to her work on the First Year Council, Jones said that her focus has always been about expanding diversity and inclusion programs and finding ways to lift up marginalized communities on campus.

As president, she’s taking things one step farther—actively designing strategies to combat what she sees as a prevalent sense of bigotry at UT. “In short, we are dealing with racism, homophobia, and antisemitism,” she said. “We are dealing with a lot right now.”

Speaking with the Phoenix over Zoom, Jones went on to say that the root of many of these problems can be traced back to a lack of diversity on campus.

“We got here Freshman year, the student body was less than 10% Black students, and it remains around that percentage today,” she said. “So, on that end we have not done a good job of recruiting more students of color.”

But UT’s lack of diversity is not affecting just students of color. Jones pointed to an atmosphere of exclusivity on UTK’s campus, citing numbers from the Princeton Review. “We were ranked #4 in the least LGBTQ+ friendly campuses,” she said.

In truth, the numbers have only gotten worse. According to the Princeton Review's latest rankings, UT is second in LGBTQ unfriendliness and fourth in lack of race/class interaction.

The senior noted that the university is actively working toward creating a safe environment for all its students where racism, homophobia, or anti-semitism will not be tolerated in any form.

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“Chancellor Plowman has been very progressive and productive, but we have work to do in recruiting students of color, LGBTQ+ students, and creating an environment where they want to stay on this campus,” said Jones.

But there is still so much to do.

In fact, it was a racist incident that drew Jones to public office at UT. In 2019, several students posted a Snapchat in blackface with a racist comment undermining students of color who received scholarships to attend the university. That incident struck a nerve with Jones, as well as the rest of the student body.

“It was traumatic, the most horrible thing I had ever seen, and I tried to guard myself from that, but it was just so in-your-face and you couldn’t ignore it,” said Jones.

It must also be noted that UT did not expel these students for the incident. They left on their own accord.

“They didn’t respond properly. They are aware that they didn’t handle the town halls correctly, and they were not prepared to speak to students,” she said. “They gave us administrators of color and told them ‘y’all can go talk about it,’ but they did not put the right people in the room to address the problems and say, ‘hey I’m a white person in charge and I’m going to do something about it.’ That did not happen, from the top all the way down to the bottom.”

Since the incident, the University has gone through extensive training measures to deal with other racially charged incidents. They’ve enacted bias and sensitivity training for all faculty, staff, and administrators. They also included sensitivity training into First-year Studies classes.

Additionally, the university posted a response to the acts of racism on Campus. “We strongly reject all forms of hate speech and rhetoric that focuses on the superiority of one group over other groups,” their website reads.

UT is also taking steps to encourage diversity by offering up scholarships designed to recruit students from diverse backgrounds. Still, the programs have their limitations.

“We do need to get more specific in terms of supplying scholarships to students of color,” she said.

Still, more has to be done.

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hezzaz Arach / Sarra G

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social media,” she said. “One of my friends even made a hashtag, #beingblackatut, during the blackface incident which has come to the forefront of these changes.” #Beingblackatut has since inspired students at other SEC universities to take up the call. “#Beingblackatut centers around the trauma that students of color have faced at UT, and it’s so bad because we tend to normalize racialized trauma, but this is not the norm, and we cannot be content with saying ‘racism is always going to exist,” said Jones.

Jones highlighted the students’ role in protecting other students from hate speech, especially when it involves the Rock—one of UT’s dedicated free speech zones. Jones says that in order to combat hate speech at the Rock, her and many of her colleges have come out to cover up messages of hate with messages of unity.

“We are just conveying that message of mattering and belonging to everybody on campus,” she said.

Jones’s commitment to equality on campus is baked into her ideology as a Tennessee Volunteer. “Are we not torchbearers that light the way for others to be better?” the SGA President asked at a Black Lives Matter rally in late August.

For her, the rally—which came in the wake of unrest caused by the police brutality of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arvery, George Floyd, and Jacob Blake—is just another way for the student body to promote equality and reform on campus.

“Black Lives Matter is just what it says. It is a movement that shows that Black lives have value and worth, and that we should be respected,” Jones said. “This is a continuation of 400 years of movements for Black progression. It is born out of Civil Rights and subsequent movements.”

“It recognizes that we have not been respected. Our men and women are being disproportionately murdered by law enforcement compared to white people—two or three times more likely to be murdered or pulled over than their fellow white citizens,” she went on.

Jones said she has a personal connection to police brutality toward Black men. “My mother and I both know Black men that have been murdered by police. One of them was a Black boy who was younger than 10 years old and had a toy gun. Police thought it was a real gun and he was a grown man, supposedly, and killed him,” she said. “Another Black boy was shot on the courthouse steps and we still do not know what happened to this day.”

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Black Lives Matter is not just focused on Police Brutality. ABC News reported that queer voices have always been a centerpoint for BLM. One of the heroes of BLM is Marsha P. Johnson, a trans woman who kickstarted the LGBTQ+ rights movement following the Stonewall Riots, but she only saw those rights extended to white members of the LGBTQ community.

“BLM is the center sport for the Civil Rights work we are doing right now, but within that you have, for example, ‘Say Her Name’ which is a campaign for Black women. That movement stemmed from Sandra Bland’s murder. It is the intersectionality of all genders and sexualities but at its core it is for Black folks,” said Jones.

Jones tries to invite people into conversation when it comes to racial matters because she has found that people just do not understand BLM’s true purpose. “But for those who are open to receiving the truth, I try to call them into the conversation as opposed to the call-out culture we live in now,” she said.

To change people’s minds, Jones says that the best way to persuade people is by asking them why they feel that way, and questioning those feelings using statistics and facts.

Still, Jones noted that it is not the responsibility of the Black community to educate white people about injustice. “We have to be careful as people of color not to exhaust our minds or ruin our mental/ physical health to explain to white people why you exist,” she said.

The senior says there’s a disconnect when white people are constantly walking up to their Black friends to ask, “what is racism?”

“Toni Morrison once said, ‘racism constantly has you explaining your existence: why you do this or that as a distraction.’ Black people do not have time for distractions in the fight for equality,’’ Jones said.

Karmen Jones is the epitome of student activism at UT. Her fight for equality and justice in our community is inspiring. But she will not succeed alone. We must come together to stand against racism and bigotry in a united front of Volunteers. Hate is an infection caused by ignorance. We cannot ignore the problems that Karmen is working so hard to eliminate.

We must acknowledge the infection before we can begin to cure it.

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The world has changed so fast, so quickly.

The COVID-19 virus put us back. It put me back personally. Isolated in my small apartment in The Fort, I watched hours melt into days, days into months. The virus set us back, but it also gave us time to reevaluate our design process and our organization as a whole. Today, we reconfirm our commitment to our students and to all those who have supported the magazine over the years. We are here for you.

To my staff: Thank you. You have kept me afloat through one of the hardest times of my life. The compassion this team possesses is immeasurable. A special thanks to our lead designer Carrie Garrison, who came into our dysfunctional world with a great attitude to make something absolutely incredible, despite the challenges.

This Phoenix has been a home for me for more than four years. As I move forward with my life, I will miss the serenity of our small office. So much of my professional work was crafted in that office. Plenty of time was wasted too, sleeping on our raggedy couch and blasting music towards the newsroom. Every day I would find a reason to stop by, just to make sure it was still there.

It is so hard to say goodbye, but I know that the Phoenix will go on. It has for more than 60 years. In that time, it has meant so much to so many people. People like me. It is impossible to put into words just how important this publication is. For decades, the Phoenix has served as a beacon of hope, a bastion of free expression, and a home for the university’s best artistic minds. I know that it will continue to do so for many years to come.

Thank you and keep reading.

Collin Green Editor in Chief

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The Phoenix Editorial Staff: Collin Green - Editor in Chief Lead Designer - Carrie Garrison Copy Editor - Benjamin Hurst Art Editor - Zoe Evans Poetry Editor - Jenna Driksen Prose Editor - Peyton Vance Social Media Coordinator - Emma Vieser We are advised by Director of Student Media Jerry Bush and supported by staff members: Garrett Anderson, Laura Lee Cochran, Sadie Kimbrough, Taylor McMickle, and Tori Mullins.

A special thanks to the Office of Student Media, our faculty advisors, and all those who make the magazine possible year after year.

The Phoenix is an editorially independent publication of the University of Tennessee Knoxville, in print for more than 60 years. For more, visit us at our website: phoenixmagazine.net.