Fall 2020 | Illumination: The Undergraduate Journal of Humanities

illumination

The Undergraduate Journal of Humanities

Mission Statement

The mission of Illumination is to provide the undergraduate student body of the University of Wiscosin-Madison a chance to publish work in the fields of humanities and to display some of the school’s best talent. As an approachable portal for creative writing, art, and scholarly essays, the diverse content in the journal will be a valuable addition to the intellectual community of the university and all the people it affects.

Dear Reader,

Letter From The Editor

was three years old and comI s. cu cir a to nt we I e tim I remember the first rticular day had decided to pa is th on o wh r, he ot m pletely dependent on my 01 spring outing. The 20 a r fo g tin fit t, ha r we lo dress me in my denim sunf derwear out of hats, un ng lli pu s wn clo ll ca re n ca ht. memory is hazy now, but I phants stomping on spotlig ele d an , air e th h ug ro th acrobats cutting cus was over. A boy around cir e th en wh s wa r, ve we ho My clearest memory, le exited the tent. He op pe of s od flo as d ow cr e my age stood crying in th e with. I looked at his er th e m ca he at th s nt re pa e out. was lost and looking for th tighter as we made our way nd ha s om m my ng hi tc clu plight in horror, d s the worst thing that coul wa s cu cir e th at st lo g in be At the time, I felt like ugh strangers in a crowd, ro th y wa ur yo g in ak M . ne d. possibly happen to someo mom?? playing in your min my is e er wh of op lo al rn te a constant in e ize that being lost is not th gn co re to e m co ve ha I , ge As a senior in colle t, feeling lost as an emergfac In . ne eo m so to en pp ha worst thing that can ndition as we face some co l ra tu na t os m e th is c. et ing creator, professional, to a world that feels so ok lo we As . es liv r ou of s of the most uncertain year eciative for all of the pr ap am I e, in ag im en ev n’t ison fluid and a future that we ca ion and in the greater Mad at in um Ill in ls ua vid di in e talented and creativ community. fuzz, we can make our e th in y rit cla d fin n ca we into this Through creation and art, the messages we pour out t Le rs. he ot of ds in m e th ideas salient in world be good ones.

Madeline Rasmussen Editor in Cheif

Fall 2020/37

10

27

Art After Hours Matt Weinberger

Art After Hours Matt Weinberger

Art Your Helmet Doesn’t Fit My Head

By Madeline Rasmussen

05

11

28

Art Butcher’s Window Madeline Rasmussen

Poetry No Tetris In Sight Tyler Moore

Poetry jenny-in-ward Arden He

06

12-23

29

Poetry Camino del diamante Arden He

Art Digital Salad Ellie Braun

Poetry Fumigation Tyler Moore

07

24

30

Art After Hours Matt Weinberger

Art Frequent Blowback Rebecca Turk

Art Interrogating Results Ryan Prehara

08

25

31

Poetry Dead Skin Robert Georger

Poetry Even if I Only Know You Don’t Deserve it Marina Orozco

Art NoWhere To Go Emma Plitzner

09

26

32

Art

Art Jawbone Flower Petals Madison E Lecher

Prose I have a bone to pick with Mirriam Webster Molly Davis

Contents

COVER

Your Purple Heart, The Gift, The Second Acrylic and Ink on Burned Canvas

4

Ryan Prehara

33

40

Art Untitled Erin Coron

Art Untitled Genevieve Vahl

34

41

Art Odette Everyday Rebecca Turk

Poetry A (Love) Letter from an Ending Marina Orozco

36

42

Art Monday Morning Dogfight Rebecca Turk

Prose How it Happened in America Griffin-Blue Emmerson

37 Art Untitled Chris Zak

38 Art Gooseberry Breakwater Jarret Miles Kroening

39

Team Madeli ne

Rasmu ssen ° Editor-in-Chie Molly D f a v i s ° Depu Hanna t y Editor h Neub auer L a y ° Out Edito David r Riser Prose Edit Maggi ° or e Hend on Pro ° se Editor Sam W ood D Marina ° igital Editor Orozco ° Poetry Editor Arushi Gupta Poetry Ed Ambar itor Cornel ° io Ar t Briann Editor ° a Boec ker S ° taff Writer Kora Q uinn ° Staff Writer Tyler M oore ° Staff Writer Griffin Blue Sta Elizabe th Park ° ff Writer er Sta Evanka ° ff Writer Annya p u Robin ° WUD Publica Schmo tion Com ldt W mitte Dire U D ° ctor Publicatio Lily Mi n Commit ller W e e Advisor ° isconsin Un ion Presid ent

Poetry Twin Bed

By Arden He

Fall 2020/37

Butcher’s Window Madeline Rasmussen

6

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iam

el d

//

od

Second by second, the wind whips me thinner and sharper. One day I will be a blade fit for cutting

in Cam

I did not scream at the sky as a means of catharsis. Someone far away had been asking me a question for hundreds of years which I had just begun receiving. I had wrung a new opening.

A piece of me that looked a lot like you, a dime-sized hole, had fallen out and for the first time I could feel the wind blasting through me. Diamond dust, pollen. On the topic of space, catharsis can still be useful. I learned power since I cried. In Santiago de Compostela, when you me, I was prying time open with my soft hands. I raised a small country in the period waiting for you to graze past again. Excuse the gestures of vastness, it’s not that I wanted my longing to fill great canyons. Just enough air carved out to not see anyone for miles and miles. A place to stand in the air. Where heaving things can come running off. Soda ash, silica, limestone. My old bodies discarded on the side of the road, oblations left to be shot with light.

O holy gorge, take I the blessed sword.

Receive the nothing I made for you.

Fall 2020/37

By Robert George I tied a blade of grass five times, nimbly moving my fingers to create the knots. She accepted it as a gift and we went on with our lives. Four ducklings socialized on a log suspended over the cold Midwestern lake. We couldn’t figure out how they got there. They couldn’t yet fly like their mother. I think of how passive my actions are when I’m not manic. Yesterday by the lake we thought about how useful a hammock would have been in our situation. Today we brought along one to use.

Due to a psychotic break lost in the memory of repressed semesters, most of my current emotions are flaccid and directionless.

Leaving the hammock, we waded through the shallow carpet of seaweed amidst water-carried conversations emanating from a crowd of boaters. It was Wednesday, it was sunny. In deep water, I removed my shorts and felt the water flowing through every inch of my body. She doesn’t like to skinny dip. Letting my hair drop from inside my cap, I asked her if she wanted to shave my head that night. She seemed excited.

She peels swatches of dead skin off my back, leftovers from a second degree burn that has caused explosive itchiness throughout the last few days.

We moved my mattress from my small room to a larger vacant room down the hall in this decrepit old house. Inside our new, spacious room are a mattress and a shelf full of books that both of us have read. This room has four windows, my old room had one. This room is carpeted. She sleeps with her socks on, but that night one had fallen off. I comment on it in the morning.

She is going to be a writer. I am going to work in an office building that is gray and brutalist and oppressive.

She is leaving in two days. We move through our abridged time together like heat seeking missiles; I’ll leave it up to the Mythbusters to appraise whether or not it is possible for us to collide.

In my dreams she asks if we can go to Dunkin’ Donuts. My fabricated consciousness is embarrassed that she doesn’t like my French Press.

8

Your Purple Heart, The Gift, The Second Acrylic and Ink on Burned Canvas.

Ryan Prehara

AFTER HOURS

10 MATT WEINBERGER

T

TE No Tetris

By Tyler Morre

R

S

i

The way ‘precipice’ flits on the edge of my tongue holds me to know the house that words and their concepts live like the treacherous fiancés we all know will last in the end.

Born before conception, hot and sweaty shouts, and it’s the paintings that blue over me like a treaty, contentious pupils waiting behind.

Dry paint, steel grip, deep under my fingernails.

Reversed nail polish. I know it isn’t long until technology catches up to me and I’ll be chipping away bones against those seamless sixty frames per second.

And I’ve played too long at the dice game where if I don’t look all that really matters is the clattering.

This is where I suddenly get confused on the entropy issue.

If it all stacks up, I’m fucked. If it all breaks apart, I’m fucked.

But if all I have is the sound then what?

Pigs don’t get full off acorns and seeds.

So I gum my way through the words, down and out the throat like liquor and syrup, waiting until the aspartame runs out.

Fall 2020/37

DIGITAL SALAD

INE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE

ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE Z

INE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE Z

ELLIE BRAUN

INE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE

ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE Z

ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE

DIGITAL SALAD

INE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE

ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE Z

INE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE Z

ELLIE BRAUN

INE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE

ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE Z

ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE

DIGITAL SALAD

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ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE Z

INE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE Z

ELLIE BRAUN

INE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE

ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE Z

ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE

DIGITAL SALAD

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ELLIE BRAUN

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ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE Z

ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE

DIGITAL SALAD

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ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE Z

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ELLIE BRAUN

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ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE Z

ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE

DIGITAL SALAD

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ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE Z

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ELLIE BRAUN

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ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE Z

ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE ZINE

Frequent Blowback Rebecca Turk

24

EVEN IF ONLY I KNOW YOU DON’T DESERVE IT after Amanda Lovelace

By Marina Orozco i akin the loss of you to the ache of resetting broken bone. i have cracked my ribs on a breath waiting to be exhaled. i know it’s all just growing pains, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less. i think about the way surgeons will put pins in shattered bones to aid the healing. they feel to me like railway spikes, a wooden stake through the chest. still, i am trying to become myself again. i am loosening the shackles that held me to you for so long that i convinced myself it was fine jewelry instead. there are no strings on me. i think my old shape is coming back to me. i know you will choose to remember me as the serpent out of Eden, temptation before the fall. i just want to shed this false skin. it’s so long overdue. i think i loved myself in a past life. i want to love myself in this one. i’ll leave you only with this final act of kindness- I bless you never to be the window instead of the brick.

Fall 2020/37

Jawbone Flower Petals (Left) Madison E Lecher

Your Helmet Doesn’t Fit My Head (Below)

By Madeline Rasmussen

Fall 2020/37

jenny-in-ward (from installations by Jenny Holzer, 1994, 2002) in the train seat conversation folds to song / closed-eyed you watch a rumbling trek through cirrus, stratus / but sometimes the membrane of the dream grows thin and the real corners of the world scrape you . PROTECT YOU FROM WHAT YOU WANT / only because you saw birds nobody else saw / you know the eyehole is merely a wound where air laughs through / & you know that by way of panic is still a way / & other truisms they don’t want you to utter / as each season of coerced journey came you saw road flowers survive the sky’s cruel loving words

By

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e

& you were full of joy

28

N

By Tyler

A

U I I F MG TO M

oo

re

A thousand invisible parasites living inside.

Must pluck them out with a fingernail. Fuzzy words like honey trap. One note dissolves them.

Sucking on sugar; silver sweet memories.

Bite through. Bleed to change the scent. Attack.

Break in. Handle the sharp claws. Make the devil screech.

Be still. The apple: The seeds.

Just give in. The taste so tart.

Cut inside with the sharp scissors.

Choking the whip so soft, so soft.

One grain.

One bug.

Fall 2020/37

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Interrogating Results (Above) Ryan Prehara

NoWhere To Go (Right) Emma Plitzner

Nowhere TO GO

By Molly Davis There is something about standing outside your house with your pajama shorts on backwards at 7:00 AM on a balmy July morning that is a bit funny.

Call me morbid, but I’d still say it’s a bit funny after you factor in the black smoke rising from the basement and climbing up the walls of bedrooms where we lay sleeping just moments before.

What was not so funny was waking up to the sound of distant fire alarms and my mother’s voice telling me to GET UP NOW. But, funny still, after the important component of relative 32

safety was achieved for myself and all the members of my family: standing outside in our pajamas.

10 fire trucks, lights flashing, pulled into our circular driveway, firemen in suits shooting the shit around our little yellow house, now extinguished: funny.

My mother, her blonde hair in a messy ponytail, picking her cuticles as she does when she’s nervous, watching the scene unfold: not-so-funny.

In the hours that followed we learned a lot about what happens to a family after their house is rendered unlivable

due to a heavy cloak of black soot and charred basement walls. We learned we are extremely lucky. Lucky to have woken up to the sound of fire alarms and smell of smoke. Lucky that we still had floors, walls, windows and doors. Basement fires are some of the most dangerous on account of the flame’s sneaky ability to creep up behind the walls and through the air ducts, engulfing an entire house within minutes.

We learned that we would probably live in a hotel for a couple weeks. We

learned that it would actually be a bit longer than that. Maybe two or three months. Maybe a few hotels. A rental house… or two.

In the eight months that followed I learned a lot about what the word home means. I learned that when a family is uprooted, people tend to pass around blame like a hot potato. The event was not the fault of anyone or anything except for a defective appliance plugged into the wall; the same significance as a single ocean wave, but with catastrophic

Untitled Erin Coron

Odette Everyday Rebecca Turk

consequences. Sometimes it feels better to shove blame somewhere, hoping it will stick. Blame is easier than asking yourself over and over, “Why do things like this happen?”

34

I learned that through the storm, through the chop and the fog, my mother was at the helm all along.

I learned that she held all the frustration, all the blame in her arms when no one—nothing else could.

She wrapped herself around the anger and confusion until it melted into grief. I learned that she is the reason each place we live is built up, safe and aglow, a home. Our house was scattered in pieces, each item needing meticulous cleaning. The interior was gutted, furniture sent off for repair. The organizing force, the glue that held us

together was my mother.

I learned I want to reclaim the word “homemaker.” If I could, I would snatch it from misogynistic lips, wrap it up with a bow. Erase it from the collective hive mind that associates the term with 1950’s housewives or trophy wives or whatever it is called when moms go to hot yoga and host book club (not that moms don’t deserve to spend time on these things. They just don’t deserve to be labeled as useless and wasteful).

If I could do all this, I would box up the word and present it to my mother. I would tell her, “This is for you. It means whatever you want now. It means what I want it to mean.”

My mother, who packs up the home.

Who makes it and makes it over. Who picks out the linens and picks up her children from school. My mother, who beat back literal fires and kept things afloat in what seemed then like a hurricane.

into my college dorm and my first apartment. She made shelter out of wooden shells, warmth out of ashes.

She arranged a certain type of comfort that indescribably amounts to more than the sum of its parts.

My mom called the shots when she and my dad bought the first house I grew up in. I know this for certain, although I was not yet born for the first year they set down roots. She, who painted the walls and picked out the living room furniture (first a beige-toned buffalo plaid pattern set of loveseats which were then reupholstered to a more fashionable mint green), went about the slow and silent labor of making a house into a home.

Once more she went about this process when we moved to the second house, the yellow house. She did more than just tell movers where to set down the dining table and decide which paintings would be hung in the stairwell. She coordinated the alignment of universes in that house. She woke us up to catch the school bus every morning.

She made magic happen on Sunday mornings with nothing but coffee and chocolate chip pancakes.

Herself, her home, her work isn’t perfect by any means. I struggle with the fact that I’m not sure even she really knows the impact of her imperfectly perfect home-making. I struggle with the fact that she doesn’t see things the way I do, and I fear I won’t be able to explain it to her in the right way. I’m proud of myself for trying anyway.

I’m proud to say I know what my mother is capable of. I know that she is capable of much more than homemaking, but I also know that this word can’t possibly encapsulate what it takes to make a home, over and over. I learned that a home isn’t the arrangement of furniture and family portraits, but that it comes down to my mother’s capacity to enfold the world into a small, warm and safe place. My mother, my first home and the reason I woke up on that balmy July morning.

She performed this routine repeatedly, for years. She created homes out of hotel rooms, tiny rental homes, and cheap takeout food. She moved me Fall 2020/37

Monday Morning Dogfight Rebecca Turk

36

Untitled Chris Zak

38

Gooseberry Breakwater

Twin Bed

By Arden He after midnight i awake holding the sound of my voice like winter trees clean limbs and air pulling

gleaming blue reaching up into the fissures i shake crumbling to a new death over me

Fall 2020/37

40

A (Love) L

ett e rf

rom

an

ing nd

E

By Marina Orozco you only ever meet in fever dreams anymore. it’s the only time your memory does him justice and captures all the shades of oxidizing copper in his eyes. you don’t quite remember the sound of his voice anymore, but it still exists as echoes pounding in the back of your mind, in scattered whispers like the downpour of rain over California. you don’t hold on to his gifts or possessions he forgot anymore, but you still go around the space those things once took up, out of respect for the ghosts of what were and could have been. you don’t let yourself think about how it all ended anymore, but you’re still Atlas shouldering the weight of the heavens, replaying the reasons why in an act between pride and suffering. you are not a hollow reflection of him anymore, but he still carries weight over all that you do, and your shadow never seems any less like him.

Fall 2020/37

H OW IT HAP PE NE D I NA M RICA How it Happened in America

By Griffin Blue Emerson

The bulldozer’s forward momentum sputtered into reverse. It parked over by the toolshed. Its job had been done: the tree uprooted to its side. Mr. Schuler stepped down from the driver’s seat, onto the treads and then to the ground. He wiped sweat from his hairline. Becca watched from the porch. “Come look,” he called, motioning. “The roots.”

“Is it safe?”

“Of course it’s safe, now get over here.”

She scampered down the whitewash steps from the farmhouse, ribbons waving behind, her bare feet conditioned to the gravel driveway but carefully navigating around the big rocks and the tree branches from the crab apple tree.

“This tree’s from Africa,” Mr. Schuler said, hands on his belt to either side of his overhanging gut. “It was planted here by my grandfather.”

“Why do they look like that.”

“That’s just how the sap looks, darling. This weren’t an American tree, Wild Teek has red roots like this. You don’t see roots like these in America.”

Becca shook her head. “They look like blood.”

Mr. Schuler saw this as a teaching moment.

“You don’t see roots much at all, really. You see how they all stem from the central shoot there? That’s called the taproot. That’s what was infected first and that’s why the tree had to go. It must have caught the sickness young.

Got into the bark and went down to the roots and stayed with it, in the shadows, not making itself clear until it began eating the tree from the inside out an now that’s where you can see it started its havok.” “…Ew.”

42

“Right.”

F I R G Y N B E E F BLU E M E N O S R “They’re huge though.”

“Yes, yes they are..”

“I’m gonna miss the shade.”

“Mmh,” Mr. Schuler said. “What book you reading now?”

“It’s a teenager fighting against a dystopian…

It’s very good,” she concluded.

“Mm. Sounds interesting.” He thought of the conversation he’d been having with Angie about potential Catholic schooling. “You go run along inside now. Your mother should be about ready to leave for practice. I’m gonna… give the lumber company a call too.”

She ran along much like the way she’d come.

Teek was rare in the States so Smith’s Woods would pay a premium for the logs. The call ended after a payment for removal was negotiated. “It’s already down, I don’t know what happened… a wind must have blown it down.”

Mr. Schuler needed an excuse. No way in hell he’d tell them the wood was diseased. This way, he could say natural disaster incentivized his sale of the lumber. The pricing eventually came to weigh in Mr. Schuler’s favor and the call wrapped up with a “have a good day now.”

He phoned his buddy and told him he could take his bulldozer back anytime.

Inside the house he fixed himself some hot food from the microwave and sat back in his recliner. Angie moved through the kitchen like a fuss bagging a sandwich and a thermos and her pills; ushering Becca towards the garage, grabbing the size six cleats from the shoe rack, packing it all in the SUV and leaving as soon as the garage door rumbled up.

“No kiss goodbye, no nothing,” Mr. Schuler moped, turning on the box television with the bloop. A correspondent went on about Black Lives and another went on about riot. Mr. Schuler began coughing up a wad of phlegm he caught in a Kleenex. He moved on. Breaking News: The President is sick. He waves reverently from the back seat of a black SUV to crowds gathered around the hospital. God bless the man, Mr. Schuler opined. He thought bitterly of Angie. She was voting Democrat this year.

Fall 2020/37