What We’re About Symposium and Semicolon are the official publications of the Arts and Humanities Students’ Council at the University of Western Ontario, published bi-annually. For more information, follow us on Instagram at @ahsc_pubs or email us at ahscpubs@gmail.com. Previous editions are available online at issuu.com/ahscpubs. Symposium features creative works from undergraduate students in the Arts and Humanities. We accept pieces of creative writing and visual arts works. Sharing one’s work can often be daunting. The Publications team thanks you for your submissions and your trust in us.
Vice President of Publications: Julia Piquet Associate Vice President of Publications: Abbie Faseruk Academic Managing Editor: Samantha Ellis Creative Managing Editor: Asha Saha Social Media Coordinator: Mabel Zhao Copy Editor: Katherine Barbour Copy Editor: Kiersten Fay Cover Designer: Emma Hardy Layout Designer: Chahat Ghuman
Volume 11 Issue 1 Fall 2023 An Arts and Humanites Students’ Council Production
Copyrights remain with the artists and authors. The responsibility for the content in this publication remains with the artists and authors. The content does not reflect the opinions of the Arts and Humanities Students’ Council (AHSC) or the University Students’ Council (USC).
Letter From the Vice President Hi there, Thank you for picking up one of our AHSC official publications. A wonderful team of editors and designers has come together to bring this collection to you, and I am excited that you, dear reader, get to finally hold our efforts for the fall semester of 2023 in your hands. Our theme for this semester was “Art for Art’s Sake!” This term was first used by Victorian writers and critics as a reminder that there always remains the possibility of thinking outside the box of our societal norms. Art should have no obligation to the world; it should not be measured in terms of its “usefulness”. Art should exist simply as art. Some questions I asked you to consider when submitting were: what is art? What does it mean to you? Is art a reflection of your personal experiences or a reflection of the world? Are those the same? I am thankful for all this semester has brought. Amazing graphics on our social media, mind blowing pieces of art, fiction and academic essays for publication, a successful writing and arts contest, and an outstanding venue with delicious food for our launch event, and much more. Above it all, I am thankful for the Publications team - these collections could not have come to light without your continuous effort and care. To Abbie: you have been a force to be reckoned with this semester. You have been a rock for me to lean against, and this is as much my publication as it is yours. Thank you. To the rest of the Publications team: you have all exceeded my expectations, and I am eternally happy that I hired each and every one of you. To you, my reader: Happy reading!
All my warmest wishes, Julia Piquet
Vice President of Publications
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Table of Contents Transparent Soulz By: Chloe Serenko Window Display By: Michaela Yarmol-Matusiak The Dollhouse By: Marissa Slack This Season By: Hannah Hatzitolios Stop Talking By: Chloe Serenko Sour Stomach By: Amanda Stanghieri Peripatetic Petrichor By: Siddharth Maheshwari The Five Year Sunset By: Gray Brogden Stranger By: Shannon Fawcett our love is the ecstasy of st. teresa By: Sonia Zhang
Party for 2 By: Laila Bloomstone Woman in Red By: Laila Bloomstone Ode to the Bacchanal By: Claudia Kindrachuk no return/exchange policy By: Aanya Pereira Karmic Kitchen By: Marissa Slack
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Insomnia By: Hailey Shepstone i’m Gruen old By: Sebastian Karall Unnamed By: Isabelle Fox
Out by the Ravine By: Laila Bloomstone I can’t remember the last time it was quiet. By: Gray Brogden
Gloaming By: Ambar Kaushik Flag of Hope By: Zahra Musa Endless days By: Claudia Kindrachuk Roxanne By: Amber Carroll Boy Becoming By: Amber Carroll Dear Diary By: Krisha Enriquez Can I truly call you the neighbour By: Mabel Zhao
after the Poet down the road By: Katherine Barbour Unnamed By: Isabelle Fox A boat to Eden By: Afrah Fatima
No one told me I’d be joining the circus when I finally conceded to being an artist By: Cassy Player
Transparent Soulz By: Chloe Serenko
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Window Display
By: Michaela Yarmol-Matusiak
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The Dollhouse By: Marissa Slack
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This Season
By: Hannah Hatzitolios When the cold nights dwell
On the frigid, raring streets of ice, Just as gelid silence rests upon the lane, Although it has not seen the Spring or Fall, Fogged glass windows await its return. Undoubtedly and unmistakably, White, slithering spirals paint atop the sills, Flowering across stiffening window panes, Decorating every inch of numbed surface, Basking in the prepared, cool touch, And claiming the exterior as its canvas. The windows have waited nearly a year. The lampposts twinkle with gratitude. Sidewalks, driveways, and brick walls, All warmed at the frost’s chilling caress. A seasonal tattoo across towns. A promise signed in crystallized artistry. A hazy tingle coats wind-charging faces. With each blow, the clouds hum, The branches rhythmically chime, Their icicles clink like china tea cups. A spill of navy ink soaks the sky, The chimneys exhale, a steady ascend. The ground is made of cotton ball hills And small animal print paths twirl across them.
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Powdery, helium-filled snow drifts. The kind that can only be described as Clean. With a flavour of everlasting fresh, Followed by the inevitable desire for more. Each winter is cloaked in something new, Showered in different fluttering flakes, Echoing new whispers of a foreign-tongued breeze, Drawn over with an inimitable frosty coat. But nonetheless, The snow always returns, The breeze always blows, And the frost forever swirls back home.
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Stop Talking By: Chloe Serenko
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Sour Stomach
By: Amanda Stanghieri
My boy loved me enough to say You look rocky On the wrong side of yourself A ladybug in distress Hotter, bolder still Your sweat was peppery Leather bound but tied up in sadness and sex Like incense before burning Obnoxious girls cry louder Pink swollen candy fell from a tree Iris, morning glory, and cardamom You look good when you’re upset Lines muttered by dogs smoking wood Musty, they seemed fragile Fired up by my anxious, girlish interior I felt something rough fall on my face Sad peered in Icey cold and hot Like the ghost of my father
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Peripatetic Petrichor By: Siddharth Maheshwari I’m back in the humid streets of Dhaka
With lush trees stretching beyond my sight The chirping birds and joyful squirrels Allowing me to smell my childhood Even the geese are calm and quiet They can sense my romanticized satisfaction It’s earthy, even on top of a concrete tower It’s forming patterns, mesmeric and hypnotic Like lights and shadows dancing on the ground I feel like I am being rewarded No other soul can see what I see Perhaps it was my 9-year-old imagination I don’t know if it ever happened again I don’t really need it to, The memory is an event. The cold here is stifling Yet, on the day The heat relief and cold exhale Knew no boundaries or arbitration Or the climates that divide our ecosystems Simultaneous transversions, through time and space Coming to a unity where all becomes one There are finer details still But outside the continuum of natural variance So similarity becomes repetition In the way Sisyphus found validation My experience is singular and multifold It is the recollection of the screen That holds sensation together
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It has rained since, and never the same The liberation of melancholy clouds Were now encapsulations, limitations The grass doesn’t hold dew the same Dirt is sparse and the ground doesn’t slick It’s missing joy and euphoria No, I know, that’s just me Exhilaration was roaring thunder And sky-splitting branches of lightning Bloodrush and heart-thrill Now, I am more Experiencing the queer joy of vibrant rainbows Catching surrealism from dizzying heights When the waiting stopped I took a deep breath on the day of the season change And smelled the petrichor again.
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The Five Year Sunset By: Gray Brogden
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Stranger
By: Shannon Fawcett
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our love is the ecstasy of st. teresa By: Sonia Zhang
our love is the ecstasy of st. teresa marbled by gian lorenzo bernini i remember it all my body canonized and yours aglow with angel wings i remember it all my incurable lovesickness and your golden spear i remember it all the way you played with me like i was thoughtless i was thoughtless but you didn’t need to know that i waited as i stared at the beautiful angel in front of me oh god, i moaned after you pierced my heart with an iron tip floating on a cloud with glimmers of golden sunlight maybe it was funny to you your forever treasure in memoriam a fragile little human writhing in pain and pleasure my hellenistic expressions and your baroque blurriness in harmonious composition i guess this is the end, i thought to myself when you penetrated my heart several times several times you caressed my entrails
when you pulled out my entrails those several times i felt you inside me taking me with you part of me wished you would take me with you to the heavens where you lived away from the earth where i died
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our love is the ecstasy of st. teresa marbled by gian lorenzo bernini there was physical pain somehow the emotional pain hurt worse perhaps you’ve forgotten it all i remember it all after piercing my heart me at my most vulnerable i watched as you ascended to the sapphire sky enveloped by cloudbursts cupcake frosting swirls of blue and grey i watched as those swirls hugged your angel wings and you left me there bleeding red in a white dress as i lay there with a maimed heart falling from the sky i wondered if you’d be kind enough to bury me in versailles i guess this is the end, i thought to myself i guess this is what i deserve, i thought to myself for falling in love with an angel a devil in disguise now people watch our broken love like we’re in a museum the ecstasy of st. teresa marbled by gian lorenzo bernini
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Party for 2
By: Laila Bloomstone
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Woman in Red
By: Laila Bloomstone
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Ode to the Bacchanal By: Claudia Kindrachuk Cast off your demure veil,
Tonight we dine on nectar! In the eye of a hurricane gale We become ephemeral as spectres. Time slips ’tween fingers Though it be no cloth. You’ve spun me like a globe, And touching so lingers As a flame burns a moth. Snake-skin shed your robes; Let these ivy arms grow About your marble neck. I have a purple-stained, enchanted tongue That licks the room dark in one go. Slowly we come to rest, statuesque, Our duet, out of breath and sung. In this state, are we not most pure? Drunk on green-glowing absinthe, Succumbed to a fast-flowing allure? Indulgence, ’tis said, far wiser than absence. In peripheral of epiphany, I see The wild girls dance in ecstasy. You may think all this uncouth, But this is decadence; this is youth.
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no return/exchange policy By: Aanya Pereira
the human body, my biology teacher starts over the low-drone-hum of the slide
projector, and i find myself looking at a colourful diagram that means nothing to me. i’ve seen human bodies before, saturated with blood and pinned down like butterflies in my mother’s medical books, labelled in ink print. whatever is on the screen is a fake, but that’s not what i have to take away from this. the human body, my biology teacher starts, and i think of the time that i dreamt of unfolding, not in the way a butterfly sheds a cocoon, but like a martyr of old, flayed open and singing, vocal cords exposed and ready for the sting of an arrow point, my scapulae reformed with the crack crack crack of wishbones snapping, bent backward— like i could be something both holy and doomed. your body, my mother starts, like i haven’t heard this before, is a gift from god. treat it with care, and i want to carve myself out of it so i could have something that would finally be mine & exposed to the moonlight— not a gift that came with a vow that i didn’t agree to, not a prenuptial between god with its many mouths, and a smattering of embryonic cells. i want to be ever-shifting, birdsong, resurrection, jasmine buds, streetlight on wet asphalt, and i hear my mother telling me that i am all blasphemy and ungratefulness. that, for now, is enough.
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Karmic Kitchen By: Marissa Slack
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Insomnia
By: Hailey Shepstone
A jittery, jumbled mess Cords tangled, Spilled all over the page; A car in a dress Concepts not quite fully baked And there’s red in this room that I trapped myself inside The words repeat themselves, Poorly structured lines Messes in crayons An empty box of checkers Numbers in phrases Like silent, deadly letters And blood in the chair Unmade beds I should-but-do-not sleep in Another mixed-up fantasy My mind tricks me to believe in Rats in my dresser Shoes in my sheets Emptied, ordered thoughts, No wonder I cannot sleep.
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i’m Gruen old By: Sebastian Karall
why do old men’s trinkets and tchotchkes smell like that? mossy like an old wood church with green felt laid pews, musky like the human personification of a walking redwood, old and groaning and creaking with moistness. do all men of the silent generation favour the same cologne? that what persists in the fabrics and stitches and leather bands of their beings is some cheap novelty outdated scent that refuses to relent bringing time to its knees in assent with its stench. musk and moss, age and mothballed blazers. i smell it in the cracks of this brown leather band shriveled in service and poor maintenance, a failed union of upkeep like a veteran’s old mementos stuffed in a rigid box under the bed of some great-grandson whose great-grandfather lay decidedly (drunkenly) un-great undulating in some underworld, decaying into the winding, sporadic entrails of some odd atolls, and bursting from them geysers of memory. a musky olfactory remembrance shedding barriers like snakes to skin, latching onto the trinkets
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that remain. this scent of past centuries, of all decades before the 80’s, lives on in this vintage Gruen watch still ticking behind years of missed daylight savings adjustments, ticking and stinking beyond deaths and births, a machine masked in the scent of man. when i spritz myself with fragrance each morning and it seeps past the pores on my wrist and into the leather, will these scents coalesce here in some heirloom tradition generationally accepted— is this how old men are made?
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Unnamed By: Isabelle Fox
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Out by the Ravine
By: Laila Bloomstone
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I can’t remember the last time it was quiet. By: Gray Brogden
I am afraid of silence / that’s when it gets too loud / I am afraid of pausing / I live my life by Newton’s laws of motion / sometimes I wonder about meditation / sometimes I wonder about space / most of the time I turn the volume up / until the neighbours complain / I only sleep with the tv on / and my brother compares me to Hamilton songs / I write / and I read / and I sing / and I scream / and I never, ever stop / I’m waiting on the edge of my seat / on the edge of a swing / on the ledge of a canyon ready to leap / I wonder if mountains get lonely / even in the middle of the chain / even when the tectonic plates shake / I wonder / what is it like to spend most of your life perfectly / Still.
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Gloaming
By: Ambar Kaushik
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Flag of Hope By: Zahra Musa Fuji and Honeycrisp
All the way to Red Delicious. Roses, raspberries, pomegranates, rubies, and hearts. Crimson gore. Streets heavily coated in death, destruction, and decay. Blood splattered across the nation. Arctic foxes and polar bears All the way to bunny rabbits. Linen sheets, chalk, snow, diamonds, and daffodils. Sarin-filled air. Tears of children holding loved ones’ faces covered in scarlet, milky dust. Reaching their hands to the sky and pleading for peace and equality. Answered with white fog. Lemons and cheese All the way to apricots. Ducks, bees, sunflowers, stars, and citrine. Mustard gas lungs. Glaring through the thick yellowish-brown air, trying to make sense of the scenes unfolding. Bright, beautiful, shining high in the sky, a sun of hope and freedom. Twenty-one beams offering their warmth to the Vegetation and lifeless figures scattered across the ground. Grass and weeds All the way to parsley. Clovers, grasshoppers, lady’s mantles, go light, and emerald. VX nerve agent mountains. Grassy-coloured vomit-stained clothes, bodies, and land. Once bright, lively, fresh greenery, but now shrivelled and gone. Bijî Kurdistan.
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Endless days
By: Claudia Kindrachuk
The days, the days, the endless days, the drowsy days, the sleepy romaine-raspberry days, the days of sunshine-sweat and lemon balm-blood, the bathroom floor-tears and grease-soaked rags, the coffee grounds caught under jagged nails, the hazy-streetlamp nights, the nights of lonely rain-soaked streets, the nights of tickling bugs picking their way through dew-laden
grass, the smoky dawns, the bird-chittering starlight dawns, the days of pollen-puff winds, the light lilac scent along rotting-garbage avenues, the nest-fallen baby bird crushed to a pulp, alone as the queen of malaise, the violent summer-storm bellows inescapable fate of irony, infinite bathtubs to drown in on moonless mournful nights.
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Roxanne
By: Amber Carroll
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Boy Becoming By: Amber Carroll
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Dear Diary
By: Krisha Enriquez Dear Diary,
Plucked from a market stall on the bustling streets of Nice, a stack of parchment bound in leather, dyed as blue as the French Riviera Sea, embossed with flowers and butterflies, carved by a man weathered by time. His olive skin creased, littered with sunspots, as he handed me a priceless artifact in exchange for five euros. A piece of string holds it together. One firm tug and it u n r a v e l s. Fragments of my life coming undone after being tightly bound. Spilling out in midnight ink— eggshell white sullied by the spidery scrawl of anecdotes and affirmations, rebuttals and regret. Confessions that died on the tip of my tongue, buried unceremoniously in a pocket-sized book large enough to consume me. Inconspicuous in design and irrepressible in truth.
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Can I truly call you the neighbour By: Mabel Zhao
Can I truly call you the neighbour, if our apple pies are averted eyes, and doorbell dinner invitations have turned into the briefest nods. I like to think I know you well, your grass grows three inches more, and the scent of your spice cooking traverses the crevasse, three metres long. You dry your clothes in the sunshine, beside your row of zucchini squash on that picket fence no longer white. America died at the property line. Your house is a strange look-alike, your presence as present as the wind, I suppose we are neighbours then, neighbours of familiar anonymity.
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after the Poet down the road By: Katherine Barbour she has a Gleam in her eye
like she is going to tell you a Story of an ancient mariner, or lead you to die at the foot of the dark tower, or she’s going to tell you the Secret to Writing, to Poetry, to Living she sneers at Stability, at Summer Jobs & Affordable Housing, she has a printing press in her kitchen a basement full of books with her face on every cover, she writes angry letters to angry corporations, she Believes in things she talks about Mysticism about playing devil’s advocate about the trap that is Education, she spits on the idea of paying someone to teach her how to Write, she spits on any idea that does not dance or bow before her, like Organic fruit or temporary tattoos, she’ll tell anyone who will listen that temporary tattoos are for Pussies & people with jello for spines, every word out of your mouth
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better be an anagram for Permanence, if she catches you selling out she will slit your throat & write a new book of Poems with the ink of your blood, it will be her best work yet she just Knows it
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Unnamed By: Isabelle Fox
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A boat to Eden Asynchronous pathways, working in mysterious ways Remind me of faces, twisted dark secrets come wavering up with sickness Beneath unnerving sights, rekindled fires of remembrance, Parted ways with unkind love, Discrete locations, melancholic hurt. The dimmed lights now call for ease, For glory dies, Knights none to decree, And the nights none to fare. Petals lay upon my drunken eyes, Soothing me for a long stupor, Purpose none remain and for long I have fared with no anchor to bind, the sea takes me, to the Eden that lies beyond the bays.
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By: Afrah Fatima
No one told me I’d be joining the circus when I finally conceded to being an artist By: Cassy Player IT WAS TIME that I performed. I rode in a unicycle and blasted a horn but I fell into the lion’s pit. It was the only way that I’d sit. I croaked and hoped that it was just a joke, but as any Artist knows the gods like to provoke. I was sure they called it a test, as part of a quest, but I called them all bloody pests in protest. IT HAPPENED FAST. I carried Burden around me like a sash and walked down Burnout Road. I had a meeting at the round table where I was paired with Paranoia and Doubt. Both of them fought over how they made me freak out. I proclaimed that the universe had made an Artist upside insane.
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So it was nothing for me to cross the crosshairs hung in fright on a tightwire. IT WASN’T AT ALL STRANGE when the siren went off in the asylum. I sat by a part of the Poet and stared as if not knowing whether it was alive or dead. With no time of arrival, I just decided poetically unproductive was running through my reproductive organs and was better than going completely deranged. THERE ONCE WAS a musical mauling my brain. The gods drove me to insanity on purpose trying to propose a purpose. Opening up my cranium was merely too entertaining. I heard the poems calling and my skin started crawling.
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I didn’t pick up the phone because I wanted them to leave me alone. THE CEILING SMILED and, gadzooks, the room filled up with a bunch of kooks. I was spooked when the Clowns came from the corners, crawling all over the room. I was a bundle of nerves trying not to swerve all around all the curves thrown into my words. Surrounded by some clown posse, it was insane. And they somehow all knew my name. BEING DEALT THE UNDERHAND, I reached the age of insanity since I had to run the Fool’s errands. Absolutely was reduced to tomfoolery. There was a knock-knock in my head, but the joke was broken, and I was stuck
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somewhere in la-la land counting grains of sand. I CLIMBED UP to the summit. It was all or plummet. I knew they knew I was coming, I wasn’t hiding I had been up to something. The Muses stood guard throwing me the cards. I clapped together all the clichés I could come up with, but they had hit me with a damn guitar. And that was the story of how I got that scar. I REMEMBERED WHEN I first opened the curtain and sat down with the circus. It was hard to entertain the so-called Clown Cartel so I spun a web of cotton candy, tied a knot out of the wannabe that I wanted to be. My lips turned to wands and
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I whipped my words out for everything. That was when the Fairytales found me because I had started to drown in the downers devouring my dignity. I THREW the switch to lights-out and fights ensued amongst the Suits. The Master Lunatic showed up real quick to poo poo on the party tricks. They said I was sick, so the circus took me out in a straight jacket for Hysterical Laughter. I wondered exactly what part of my brain it was they were after.
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