FALL 2015

A Brown/RISD Visual & Literary Arts Magazine Vol. XVI Issue I

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Dear Reader, It is an honor to present to you VISIONS’ sixteenth issue. This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of its founding, and in the many years of publication, our mission has seemingly stayed the same: to provide a space for the often unheard voices of Brown and RISD students that speak to the Asian/ Asian American experience. Yet past editors-in-chief have each interpreted this mission statement differently, leaving our magazine in a constant state of transition, fluctuating with the needs and wants of its community.

Drawing from a frequent theme of our published literature, this semester I tried to bring VISIONS back to “its roots.” The magazine was founded with an intention that was political, even radical, in nature. In the years since, as the magazine legitimized into a well-respected publication, that aspect of our mission has been swept into the margins. Yet, as people of color face intensifying acts of violence and racism both on campus and abroad, it is no longer possible for us to remain apolitical. Rather than assuming neutrality and looking inwards to typical questions of identity and belonging, we must ask: how can the Asian/Asian American community productively support fellow marginalized identities in their (and our shared) struggles? How can we corroborate our shared experiences of displacement and injustice while actively learning from the lasting injustices that we are privileged not to endure?

This semester, we approached these questions with an answer from digital heaven. We are honored to have been able to host on our website the collective statement by Asian American students in support of and in solidarity with Native students at Brown in their reaction to specific social injustices and transgressions. We’ve also used this platform to publicize necessary events organized by our fellow students of color. Additionally, we began to utilize our digital spaces to aggregate relevant information pertaining to Asian America, with the hopes of becoming a regular source of news and opinion. Not neglecting our role in occupying physical campus spaces, we collaborated with fellow student groups to create community-building social events and expose our audiences to the beautifully political and equally poetic spoken word artists, Jess X. Chen and Will Giles, at RISD. As VISIONS continues to evolve and transform straining beyond its printed limits, I invite you to engage with works that do likewise in form and content. Our contributors and editorial board have worked tooth and nail to put together an issue that ensures the continuing quality of our name.

Thank you for reading.

Sincerely,

Lisa Lee Editor-in-Chief

Editors-in‑Chief Lisa Lee ‘17, Mia Gold ‘17 Managing Editor

Visual Art

Printer Brown Graphic Services PrintNinja

5 Crowd Jenice Kim

30 Budongsan Hee-Jin Kim

7 Rear Window Aya Bisbee

33 Everyone Has a Story Jenice Kim

On the Cover

9 Untitled Ran Zheng

35 Boy Angela Yang

Dante Landscape Ellen Shi, RISD ‘15 Watercolor and gouache

11 Untitled Ran Zheng

39 Undercover Neilly Tan

15 8:15 AM Yuko Okabe

Postcards

Soyoon Kim ‘18 Art & Photography Editor Eveline Liu ‘19 Literary Editor Andrea Zhu ‘17 Layout & Design Editor Sarah Im, RISD ‘17 Layout Editor Emeritus Jason Fujikuni, RISD ‘17 Networking Chair Ananya Shah ‘17 Blog Editor

A very special thanks to ...

Kisa Takesue Undergraduate Finance Board Pan Asian Council Asian American Heritage Series Brown Center For Students of Color JNBC Public Humanities Center Office of Institutional Diversity Department of Comparative Literature Department of Music Department of East Asian Studies Contributors and staff

Grace Sun ‘16 RISD Outreach Chair Rosa Park, RISD ‘19 Publicity Chair Miranda Chao ‘18 Freshman Representative Linda Park ‘19 Copy Editing Staff Paige Morris ‘16 Alicia Devos ‘18 Atalanta Shi, RISD ‘17

Contact visions.brown@gmail.com visions-magazine.org facebook.com/Visions @VISIONSBrown

Inside Cover Shoot - One Oh! Oh! Eunyoung Lee, MFA University of Pennsylvania ‘16 Mixed media on paper

17 room, bag, etc.

Eliza Chen 20 Funeral for the Honeybee Jess X. Chen 22

Hot Hands, Feet Fingers I Told You Tomorrow Didn’t I Joanna Seul

Mission Statement VISIONS is a publication that highlights and celebrates the diversity of Brown and RISD’s Asian/Asian American community. We are committed to being an open literary and artistic forum for Asians and Asian Americans, as well as other members of the university community, to freely express and address issues relating to both the Asian and Asian American experience. VISIONS further serves as a forum for issues that cannot find a voice in other campus publications. As a collaborative initiative, VISIONS attempts to strengthen and actively engage Brown and RISD’s vibrant community of students, faculty, staff, and alumni, as well as the larger Providence community and beyond.

Disclaimer The opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of VISIONS’s sponsors.

23 Waiting Room Jennifer Xiao 26 Mrs. Rasmussen Eliza Chen 29 Coolheadedness Carolyn Shin

Flower Ellen Shi Bandaid Yuko Okabe

Literary Art 6 Accountability Dianara Rivera 7 Tom and I Went to 7-Eleven Micah Lau 10 Passage Victor Ha 13 Pannonica I & II Micah Lau 16 Hiroshima Connie Shen

19 The Last Words of the Honeybees Jess X. Chen 21 antichain Haley Lee 24 sometimes a glass means a glass Elaine Hsiang 25 WASTE Anonymous 27 q/a/ps Andy Li 31 Old Gold Mountain Jacqueline Guo 36 All the World’s Apples Amy Py Ng 37 In Darkness, Earth Swings Moon // Eternal Dance While she ponders the promise of celestial marriage Kelsey Kawana 40 Jessica Victor Ha

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ACCOUNTABILITY DIANARA RIVERA ‘18 gets too excited

about outer space.

Co-act.

Co-llect.

Inte-llecture.

Lecture me a history that is not mine.

Spines are burnt alive for this feelingThe zero sum of coopt-ion, the impious halo of a spotlight on raise.

I am not a performer, and yet I am on stage.

Rasping beats in time to lineage; this is how I breathe, through the desperate root I was born of a tradition of fragmentation.

A tradition of diaspora sinking me by roots struggling for buoyancybattered histories lost in the sweep of normed rhythm.

These are words I did not know I was rasping until they sang right through me; this is a political stake through the selfpreserving sing song of my arteries.

Crowd Jenice Kim, RISD ‘17 | Graphite

Identity turned respectability game of politics; spindly spine roots mean nothing to the anchor of the sea.

All this weight, all this weight.

Collagen forests burning and I construct selfhood out of ashes.

Do not know (who) to blame for the alienating souls I co-opt deeper into.

Compelled to torch a forest that doesn’t know my name.

Intellecture the only way to justify the passion of immolation.

Accountability burns me down.

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Rear Window Aya Bisbee, Brown ‘19 | Photography

TOM AND I WENT TO 7-ELEVEN MICAH LAU ‘16 has been asleep.

July 11, 2012 For the first free Slurpee I poured a tight swirl of Coca-Cola; you layered Lemonade, Blue Raspberry, Sugar-Free Watermelon Punch, Sour Green Apple. How else will I know what’s good?

For two hot dogs we counted change from the cup-holders.

You were functionally high, smoke in your clothes and car with the windows down. This was before you moved back to New York City, grew your hair past your shoulders, left school for a year to wander through Asia; before I gave up on writing, dreaming us the New Modern, the Best Young Poets, luminary bohemian apathetics of midnight Maunakea Street.

Would it have been any different if I told you

from the passenger seat that I was already tiring of this endless work, sleepless nights cutting away at images and memories, while your eyes, tuned to read my weakness and doubt, were set on the open road?

From behind the houses lining the highway the south shore of the island opened up sky blue and glass-like until the next right turn.

I arranged Piña Colada over Banana and Orange Crème. Unnatural red of Wild Cherry Kiwi-Strawberry Fruit Punch coated your lips and tongue.

Your verse was stuck on the suicide of Thomas, your friend on the swim team, gunshot wound to the head. But of course grief is unwritable, I

said. My cousin Dylan hanging from the rafters in the garage – I’ve never told anyone but you – I avoid like wasps, needles, blood.

At Kaimuki we waited outside and watched young boys in bright yellow play basketball across the street while you had a cigarette.

Cherry Limeade for both of us but I threw it out halfway, nauseous with sugar. What a waste. You tapped the bottom of the cup to drink it all in.

You spent two months with one line: Red wine, street light, under a mango tree – a summer night with the girl you used to love. Another beginning, last December: it’s 2 pm on a sunday and I am going to the liquor store. You asked if

I’ve written anything lately. No, I said. I couldn’t have told you it was about the way we thought about poetry years ago: my bookishness and your black ink soul-rocket conviction. After all, I’ve kept none of it but the end: We were wrong about many things when we were young.

6:50 PM: If we hurried we’d make it to the 7-Eleven down Waialae Avenue, across from the old City Mill. But I was content to let the taste linger, to wonder if anything you drink after you leave again – Fire Island Mai Tai, Halong Bay honeyed tea, mango lassi on the river Ganges – could ever be so cloyingly sweet as to remind you of today.

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PASSAGE VICTOR HA Brown MAT ‘16 will miss you most of all.

They come proudly.

In crooks of arms crooked just so, their spoils rest lightly.

Hers: blisters of gold and amber; poms of citrine which threaten to scatter into the dusk. Her neighbor’s: thick clots of rubellite and spinel bleeding dry summer plum.

They press warm blooms to chests cooled by the thought of pouring water into vases atop tables in places that no longer hold love— only ten-dollar bouquets bent in transit— and pray stray petals won’t run away, too.

Untitled Ran Zheng, RISD ‘17 | Colored Pencil

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Untitled Ran Zheng, RISD ‘17 | Gel Pen Untitled Ran Zheng, RISD ‘17 | Gel Pen

PANNONICA I

PANNONICA II

MICAH LAU

MICAH LAU

I remember rain-scent of storms coming through the valley in the shaking lady palms by the window and the incense burning at the altar near the front door,

Rain-scent valley sacred dusk:

the glass of water we were careful not to spill but spilled anyway getting out of your unmade bed on the floor of your childhood room in the sacred dusk; the dust on the record at the part where he played the sweetest change in the history of all music ever heard within the last three minutes, so sweet he never played it again,

your music so sweet in the wet grass lamplight dreams – broken poems of springtime Shikoku eternal, the young girl the night we drank we danced,

lying in the wet grass under the mango tree in the lamplight where I tell you about the old red railcar America of my dreams and many things;

your word from Jordan Tangiers rifle lamb stew lover –

the poems I would write on the broken walls of the monks’ huts in the springtime Shikoku fantasy of ours put in our heads by Hackler, old image-carving eternal yugen pilgrim;

at Seven Hills we find ourselves strange roadways.

the young girl I almost kissed the night we drank for the first time and danced with the queens of the smoky rooftop nightclubs of Huế; the card you will send me from Jordan after we have been apart for three years to tell me of Al Khazneh, the rifle pointed at you at the border of Oman, your Brazilian lover, lamb stew of Morocco, hashish of Tangiers, to tell me to meet you at Seven Hills when you arrive on the Eastern Seaboard so we know what to say to each other when we inevitably find ourselves together again at Jōruri-ji the midpoint of our strange roadways.

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CONNIE SHEN Winthrop University ‘16 has IBS and a cat named Salem.

here is everything that I know about family: nothing makes sense when your grandmother’s stories sound like small children’s bodies carving out images in the water, fleeing from their own burning flesh. the soldier showed her pictures from a Sears catalog: clothing from his great land: America, wanted her to desire them as much as he craved her, Japanese girl with the proud face and dimpled cheeks. she wasn’t going to entertain his dull hunger: sighing with rocks nestled in between her teeth, she said, “your clothes are ugly. we are capable of creating fabrics meant for kings,” left him feeling lost. once his anger had subdued, he made it his mission: swearing that he would soon own her, small, yellow woman with lungs so full of loss she couldn’t breathe at night, seeing smokefilled, blood-red skies in her sorry dreams. here is everything that I know about grandfather: marrying a foreign object helped sustain his whiteness, convinced himself that 66,000 dead bodies with slanted eyes wasn’t his fault.

8:15 AM Yuko Okabe, RISD ‘17 | Watercolor

Visiting the Mushroom God Veronica Ni ‘16 Digital

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HIROSHIMA

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room, bag, etc.

Eliza Chen, RISD ‘19 | Mixed media

THE LAST WORDS OF THE HONEYBEES 20

JESS X. CHEN RISD ‘13 is thinking about the similarities between migration and radical imagination.

Honey, our hive is built and ruled by women. Honey, we were once wild.

Honey, look at the flowers. We raised them into artichoke, pepper, squash, and apple for you, Honey. You found our hive and renamed it colony–or a factory of Yellow, Black, and Brown honey–we are the silent workers who bring home your dinner, whether or not our Honey comes home.

Home was the wild flower you pulled out to plant your White monoculture.

Honey, we pollinate thirty acres of White apple trees to bring home one pound of honey, to bring home one pound of bodies. The poison in the pollen is poison in our colony is poison in your children. Honey, tell me: was your breakfast sweet? Honey, when this colony collapses into a pool of Yellow Black and Brown honey, the women are always the first to go.

I close my wings and hit the ground.

I open my wings and my colony drops dead. I close my wings and every flower at my funeral begins to grieve. Honey?

Who will raise the flowers when we are gone? Honey, do you see our queen?

She is next. And then the Earth, and you, Honey. Every drop of my Yellow Black & Brown is falling into a field of White.

Honey, I’m home.

Funeral for the Honeybee Jess X. Chen, RISD ‘13 | Scratchboard with digital color

First published in Issue II of Nepantla, a Journal for Queer Poets of Color in 2015.

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Hot Hands Feet Fingers I Told You Tomorrow Didn’t I Joanna Seul, RISD ‘17 | Oil on illustration board

antichain HALEY LEE ‘18 enjoys eggs benedict breakfasts and early 2000’s hip hop. as far as the last, and then i am. sitting in your underworld, criss cross absinthe sauce, listening to you read me out loud. your voice like a minor deity. coarse, could use some vitamin C. i left dimensions of our being in the station between performance and the obscene. what if you lose me before translation? of or resembling afterglows, i think. even a boyman with sandpaper hands cannot level every edge. there are paradises oxidizing in the lost and found. crepuscular overflow. rhapsody of the bodysoul. (what if you lose me before we build our own?)

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sometimes a glass means a glass

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ELAINE HSIANG ‘15 is still searching for that hot winter sun.

in a play. october is an absent child wishing she could love change half as much as her mother. she sits in a well-dressed room with well-dressed people lets two hours pass until raising her hand to ask how they would feel if everyone breathed all over their eulogies in her next dream. she will meet a girl who does her lipstick uneven on purpose. she will buy her orange flowers and red blush and write her letters about falsetto and house sparrows and how she walked past a dead one the other morning. she kept walking because it died like an exclamation something not yet cut out of cheap manufactured plywood a long time ago. she was fifteen or so steps from the sugarloaf. she would tongue its name inside her mouth in all of the languages she knew would tug at her mother’s osteoporosis when it was time to go before the rain would come to flood her little house, little heart of gold.

Waiting Room Jennifer Xiao, RISD 18 | Wood, sculpy, acrylic paint, and fabric

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WASTE ANONYMOUS

I live in heaps of trash. Clothes and plastic bags and class papers, juice bottles and bandage wrappers, empty cracker boxes and rolls of tape and cigarettes and empty pill bottles. My bed is the only surface uncluttered by dense litter, and instead is piled with blankets, and these themselves are likely soiled as well, from sweat seeping in during the hours and days that I spend encircled in sleep and haze, in this strange wooden box that is my room. We call it the cathedral because, in many ways, it resembles one. I spend all my days in it like a priest, or perhaps a prayer candle, melting and burning and dying day after day, as long as there is someone to light me. What remains of a candle after it burns? Whatever it is, there is much of that in my heap as well, building up with the tissues and candy wrappers in mountains all around me. Someday I will have to clean up.

Mrs. Rasmussen Eliza Chen, Brown/RISD Dual Degree ‘19 | Mixed media

q/a/ps (SEX AND THE CITY COLLAGE, EXCERPT FROM A SELF-HELP BOOK) ANDY LI ‘17 does not fux with white respectability.

a how-to for chinese-american ghostbusters: GHOST /gwai/ noun : the soul of a dead person in the realm of the living. : a disturbance.

BRING-BRING BRING-BRING

when a ghost calls your restaurant for their takeout, keep your composure. remember, chinese food is a convenience store. the ghost comes into your ears, then they leave a small tip and walk away with your food. a wet willy, they call it. they tell you, it is a night for a grubhub & a netflix. when they proceed to tell you their whole life on this exchange, breathe in… and breathe out… remember, it is just a long-time no-see // a loveyou long-time. there’s no real difference between the bring-bring of the telephone and the sound of their voice. but pick up the phone because they always so funny:

/shanghai garden~~ may i help you~~/ i am never your warrior. no mu lan. no maxine hong. i sit at takeout counter, and i recite: i am, simply, your ~quivering~aries~poser~savior~

/i’d like to order some chicken with broccoli and br—brown sauce with brown rice, cold noodles/ & aiya—this fortune cookie, once i feed you, is a performative speech act. its arms offer you luck and prosperity~ break them apart, and white serpent spills out to you~ while bruce lee speaks: be formless, shapeless, like water… water can flow or it can crash~~

your fortune: Q. What is H2O? A. Caring. 2 parts Hug, and 1 part Openmind.

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/—i know, every night the same ha haha ha/ ghosts think that everything you say is about them.

a ghost always opens the fortune cookie before the meal. for ghosts define predestination. they define your dictionary. they define your meal. sweet and sour. fast and cheap. kung pao and kowtow.

我 pledge allegiance to the 旗 of the 美国, and to 那个 Republic for which 它 stands, one 国家, under 狗— I mean, God… GOD… indivisible, with liberty and justice for 全世界..

/the chinese take-out lady thinks i’m pathetic/ and when i say dog, i really mean GOD. maybe the other way around too. you’ll have to taste it to find out.

scared? so funny, the way whitey obey your words because the words they create so much like guzzling water and they need to understand if you understand, their orders, OBEY, you bow and cackle at their angry pink faces. (not so whitey anymore!) thank you, have nice day~~

i love you whitey because you so funny, i love you so i pray my flesh to the queeracles, sexy yellow ghosts who 等着你回来, break out in hives at your lactose loving, and right before you yu mo gui gwai fai di zao~~ my demon goat with white serpent tongue, with this fruit for you, this fortune cookie, my fortune cookie goat who eat everything

your fingers

your eyeballs

your dog so hungry~ so happy~ so

oh god,

oh god,

oh god! ! ! !… ... . . .

/Miranda realized the giggle wasn’t about her at all. It wasn’t about anything./

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Coolheadedness Carolyn Shin, RISD ‘17 | Pen and gouache

Budongsan Hee-Jin Kim, RISD ‘17 | Oil on canvas

OLD GOLD MOUNTAIN (EXCERPTED) 旧金山

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JACQUELINE GU ‘17.5 will never be a vegetarian.

I am four years old when I start kindergarten at my first American school—doe-eyed, chubbycheeked, eager to begin a formal education. At this point I can’t read, write, or speak English; like my brother, I enter our private k-8 institution speaking only Chinese. This, I thought, would not be much of a problem.

But according to my father, I wouldn’t let go of his hand on the first day of school when he led me to my assigned classroom. I’m scared, I whisper to him in Mandarin, clinging to him in the doorway, looking into the sea of light hair and light skin.

He pushes me forward gently. Just practice. It’ll be easy. He turns and leaves me in that classroom full of children who don’t look like me or talk like me, children who later that year will pull their eyes at me on the playground and jeer at me when our teacher calls me to read. But I have no way of knowing that then.

I don’t remember anything about the rest of that day. My brother, two years older than me, tells me that as we waited together for our mother after school a golden-haired boy from my class ran up to me and asked why I couldn’t pronounce my Rs and Ls. I couldn’t tell him what I know now—that my thoughts still ran in Chinese, that I was American-born but not American-bred, that I lacked the requisite curl of the tongue and purse of the lips to sound like I belonged.

After he leaves, I begin to cry. * * * The California Gold Rush began in 1848, when James W. Marshall found gold at Sutter’s Mill. In the subsequent months, people flooded into San Francisco by land and sea in search of the precious mineral. Within a year, the population of San Francisco exploded from 800 to over 50,000.

Immigrants from all over the world flocked to the mines, hoping to strike it rich, dreaming of a better life.

A significant proportion of them hailed from China—so many that by the late 1850s, onefifth of the population in San Francisco and its surrounding counties were Chinese.

Upon being hit with the reality of the Gold Rush, however—out of the tens of thousands of forty-niners who toiled in the mines, very few actually found gold—the Chinese immigrants began creating little pockets of settlements, communities of dis-placed migrants. They began moving into other occupations, seeking more long-term sources of income from laundry businesses, domestic servitude, and small restaurants. * * * My grandmother packs my lunch every day for the first few months of school. I usually eat leftovers, rice with a side of meat and stir-fried vegetables, but sometimes my mother makes dumplings or steamed pork buns.

The first time I use the classroom microwave at lunchtime, my grandma has packed shi zi tou, our homemade meatballs simmered with Chinese cabbage. A group of girls wrinkle their small button noses. “What’s so smelly?” I take my container out of the microwave and go outside.

When I open the Tupperware, alone at a table, I am embarrassed to see the guilty circles of moisture that have condensed inside the plastic.

I take a bite, decide that yes, the girls are right, my lunch is smelly, and I eat the rest in shame.

From then on, I prefer to eat my food cold. * * *

The earliest Chinese restaurants were catered I do wrong? I eat by myself. I don’t heat my food. I towards the Chinese palate, predominantly can’t even smell my food most days. featuring stir-fried, rice-based Cantonese dishes That night, at home, I ask my grandmother to that used parts of an animal completely foreign stop packing me lunches.At first she is confused. to American Is it bad? Would I rather she cuisine—chicken Chicken Livers and Gizzards stop packing leftovers and feet, for example, 2 lbs. chicken livers instead prepare food in the or pork intestines. 8 oz. chicken gizzards 1 tbsp goji berries mornings? No, I tell her. I After the first 1 tbsp sliced ginger just don’t like Chinese food Americans 1 tsp salt anymore. I’m tired of it. discovered the ½ to 1 tsp soy sauce It is a lie, and one that I know restaurants, 1. Clean chicken livers and chicken gizzards in cold will hurt her, but it achieves however, Chinese water, then parboil for 5 minutes. my desired outcome. My dad restaurantlooks at me, taken aback, owners realized 2. Dry off and put in large dish. Add goji berries, and his face settles into that they could sliced ginger, salt and light soy sauce. Mix with an expression of resignapotentially have a chopsticks or fork. tion—as if he knew this was much larger body 3. Heat pan with water until water boils. Put the dish bound to happen someday. of customers in the pan and cover with lid. Steam cook for 30 He agrees to pay for the at their door, minutes or longer if required. school’s lunch plan. I pretend an enormous not to see the lines of regret resource they had 4. Check livers and gizzards with chopsticks or fork that have crawled into his to see if fully cooked. Livers will be fully cooked when yet to tap into. forehead, because finally, I will they are no longer pink. * * * fit in with everybody else.

After my brother So I settle into a routine: and I move schools when I enter second grade, every day at lunch I swipe my card in the I hope that maybe things will get better. But cafeteria line, I hold out my tray, I carry my months go by and I still don’t have any friends; school-sanctioned and school-prepared food I still spend recess by myself; I still eat lunch into the cafeteria, where I eat with my friends. alone every day, tucked into my desk with a book, Sloppy Joes, hot dogs, Hot Pockets, peanut butter my unheated Tupperware hidden shamefully sandwiches—this becomes my daily fare [...] in my lap. Finally, in December, I throw up in the classroom when a stomach bug is passed around. This is humiliating enough on its own, but it becomes a genuinely traumatic experience when the first reaction that comes of it is a classmate screaming Ewww, it smells just like her dumplings! I panic. How does she know? What did To continue reading, please visit:

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Everyone Has a Story Jenice Kim, RISD ‘17 | Digital collage

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AMY PY NG ‘17 is picking at scars and waiting for human flight.

Teenage boy Sepik tribe member torso — nian wangay, mbandi wangay The crocodile spirits alone give birth to children and initiate men.

This place is Papua New Guinea, a land of people—children of crocodiles—with deep-rooted traditions and rituals. The myths of this land recount the makings of the Sepik tribe’s world.

Crocodile spirits created the universe and then floated on the sea. Using their ancestors as land, the first children padded along their backs and wandered around the world. In this land of crocodile-people, the scars they bear on their bodies carry their stories—their history, culture, beliefs, and values. Scarification is an initiation rite for boys, an identification of strength for men, and a sign of splendor for women. To the children of crocodiles, it is art, laced in the beautiful pattern of carefully engraved wounds.

The skin protects, shelters, and insulates. It guards against wound and disease, threats and blows. Unexpected consequences caused by accidents, trauma, and silly play are memorialized as stories on the canvas of our bodies.

Yet in this part of the world, not all wounds are made without intent.

Boy Angela Yang ‘19 | Photography

Here, male initiation and painful scarification are synonymous. The blade, a shard of sharpened bamboo, traces the skin of a sixteen-yearold boy, symbolically removing the last drops of female blood remaining in his body since birth. The boy tightens his arms around his brother, his face burrowed between the other’s shoulder blades. The boy stands naked before an old man holding a bamboo sliver covered in red. His chest, back, and buttocks are wet.

Against the ebony of his skin, the blood is barely visible. But the cuts are packed with clay and ash and once healed, will rise above the skin’s surface, pronounced.

The healed scars form a picture: teeth marks from the jaws of a crocodile that closed on the boy during the ceremony and opened again to produce a crocodile-man. The patterns, also resembling a woman’s breasts and genitals, leave traces of female crocodile spirits interwoven with the boy’s marks of manhood.

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IN DARKNESS, EARTH SWINGS MOON // ETERNAL DANCE WHILE SHE PONDERS THE PROMISE OF CELESTIAL MARRIAGE

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KELSEY KAWANA ‘16 eats all her Girl Scout cookies with peanut butter.

I.

III.

IV.

V.

Like a fool I fall into orbit with My Love.

My Love is tectonic.

He grinds with worry.

My Love, we continue to dance.

Two mismatched tempos.

I count hundreds of time zones between us.

Tonight, I am full And My Love,

My Love is a head of moss, wet with spring.

A volcanic smile.

My Love is a canyon-bellied laugh Far as the eye can see.

My Love is a river of doubt But at night I push the shoreline back.

Smooth and smooth his sandy temple.

II.

I have creatures in me, he whispers.

Icebergs too. Sunken treasure chests.

Glass bottles, a message in each one.

When he tires, and it is often, Of the city smoke.

The civilization strapped to his chest, I hold his light for him

Shipwrecked. Just.

Floating.

He is bone-dry, sandstorm and desert.

My Love erodes me.

He leaves wind-chill in my throat.

My swampy, quicksand, Mudslide Love Can’t take his eyes off my magic.

Listen, he breathes All the artists in me are painting.

All the poets in me have a sonnet Clutched tight for you.

You hold my light so well.

Who are you? His voice in the void.

If only I could drift alone in space.

Don’t worry, I murmur.

And he serenades me into beauty.

He says pick an empire, Any empire.

I can make them believe you are magic.

Hear them— howling for you!

My Love is a cave of calluses.

My Love is a mountain of trouble with Graveyards to spare.

You’re not afraid of my vastness?

His eyes, a flicker on the horizon.

I stare back at the brightness, then blink.

You, are nothing but a sliver.

A collection of craters.

I could have my pick of the stars!

You said our love was cosmic, I feel like howling. Please No more thunderstorms.

We may not last the winter.

My Love holds me light As an avalanche.

He says I’m a bad moon rising.

But when I wane— and I will Tomorrow and again Every century for a lifetime, I know that I’ll be grateful for his gravity.

We have meteors on the way, you know.

There’s nothing so beautiful As a meteor shower at dusk.

So a fool I stay. Just.

Floating.

Lost in orbit.

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VICTOR HA

Tendons pull fairy threads taut.

Arched foot releases plush force as toes, polish faded, dip through, slip past broken folds pushed round as she dances in her sleep, running daydreams, running playthings through fingers bent tending pulp of eggplant, dust of charcoal, spent tendering silent traces across hands and backs, my hand, my back, and back again.

Stained in dew light she asks me to hold back time, so I slip past broken folds pushed round to dance with her in our sleep.

Undercover Neilly Tan, Brown ‘18 | Oil on canvas

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JENNIFER

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From left to right, self-portraits in order of:

THE FAMILY Lisa Lee ‘17 has the smallest hands of all.

Soyoon Kim ’18 would like to be a sea otter in her next life.

Rosa Park RISD ’19 is probably eating granola right now.

Miranda Chao ’18 often resembles a human blanket.

Yvonne Fong ’18 will do anything for a pet axolotl.

Ananya Shah ‘17 finds solace in the light filtered through stained-glass windows.

Eveline Liu ‘19 always kills her houseplants.

Andrea Zhu ’17 is putting her feet in the air and forgetting to stretch.

Sarah Im RISD ’17 drinks melon smoothies in her daydreams.

Grace Sun ’16 wishes that she could taste colors in late-night munchies.

Linda Park ‘19 has an unusual love for comfy sweaters & scarves.

Jason Fujikuni RISD ’17 denies his lactose intolerance and spreads his jam against the whole grain.

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Flower Ellen Shi, RISD ‘15 | Gouache and digital

Bandaid Yuko Okabe, RISD ‘14 | Digital

VISIONS 2015