spring issue 2017
“Poetry is not a luxury” – Audre Lorde (1985) In the same vein, art and creativity are not luxuries but vital aspects of being human. Special thanks to everyone who contributed to and helped this zine become a reality. Just as importantly, thank you to everyone who has taken the time to share space, share stories, and feelings with us on Wednesdays. You are all what makes The Word such a special space.
Thoughts #1 I’ve always convinced myself that the sea couldn’t carry the fish I was seeking So vast and plentiful This sea only ever drowned me It always feels like waves crashing against my bones My body breaks at night Hurt and confusion It’s the symptoms of meeting someone who has no intentions of seeing you again I have always been one to learn through touch Quickly becoming only able to accept what I could touch I became conditioned to take words with a grain of salt Compiling the pounds into What eventually stopped the tears falling from my eyes I lied, saying everything was ok I was not ok This was not ok But I am alive And that’s all I need to make me happy To smile and be happy must first require oneself malik flournoy - hooker
art by sookie kwak
Messiah Ear drums catch a lick from his Freudian thought slips. Scripture always dripping off the Christ-like prophet — it gets scribbled on some brick at night when he births gnosis. The chosen one has come to save our pebble from a comet. You may have seen him singing his sonnet on the train or in the park or preaching from the rooftops, like Pride Rock — we're all watched over by this lion, whose tear ducts drown out the sirens. Growing gills so he can breathe when the sea swallows his island, borrowed time then blew it on survival. Meanwhile, a smile and cardboard sign is his persuasion — swap a dollar for thoughts bred by hallucination from the son of shamans of the most poetic races who prescribe the purple haze Jimi played with. Darkened by the jargon every schizo comes laced with, enlightened by revelation sent from the mothership. The Sidewalk - Prophet decrypts celestial code, then finds a slab of concrete and let’s the paint flow. Behold the father of modern graffiti. Better in tune with the infinite, he gleams with an affinity for locking eyes with passersby's who do so unwillingly. Then he visits their dreams to plant seeds of tranquility. Who is he? Nature’s test of excess DMT? Maybe the missing link to Jesus symmetry that we see and still don't believe.
cale schoenberg
art by sookie kwak
Dust
Let me dissolve into the microscopic dust particles that line my window. Let me cry tears that become bigger and bigger and bigger, warping and shape shifting until I am pulled into a tear like some magnetic force and everything becomes quiet. I close my eyes and feel the pressure of deep water against my temples and ears. I have never been good in deep water. I open my eyes through the water despite the sting of salt. The same salt that comes from me - My eyes, my body. It comes from me but it hurts me, you see. I see you, foggy, through the water. You look at me and I recognize your face even through the murkiness of the water. You are disgusted, a look of confusion on your face and I feel ashamed. Shame. Shame of what I do not know but it travels instantly all the way to my bone marrow. I try to show you, I try to pull you in as one last attempt at showing, “look, I’m not what you think I am, Just come with me and see what it's like over here.” I thought maybe you’d understand. But you push away with such a force that I am propelled out of myself. I watch as my lifeless body floats calmly, serenely, deeper and deeper into this flood of tears. All I can see now is my paleness, glowing and getting more microscopic. But as I watch I wonder if maybe my mind should have sunk, kept my body an empty vessel, one that walks and talks but is not affected by the swells and storms that take place when I am in the quiet of myself. There is too much quiet. Too much thought. Too much trying to avoid and to not feel. And still so much feeling but still avoiding but feeling. There is too much back and forth, too many trips from one side of my feelings to the other. Too much not wanting to experience what might help me understand. Its not a product but a process but the process is what scares me. So I take another. One, two, three. Until my edges are so fuzzy I cannot make out who I am, what I look like, what I feel like. They are so fuzzy that I cannot distinguish the difference between you and me. Differences that are usually so glaring they make my vision white and I turn black. I imagine myself turning black as I char, disintegrating into the wind, inconspicuously tucked in between my heart and conspicuously spilling out. ami katagiri art by sookie kwak
art by sookie kwak
Ode to Shoes I buy shoes based on prediction of how cool they’ll look when fucked up after six months of use. Over time, how will they handle Padawan raw and uncouth? How well will they scar, or help me get a grip upon a roof? My old vans became legends by the light of many moons. ’Twas like lacing up my soul-strings, I swear it worked like voodoo. Weathered by four seasons of a city; they were tattooed in sharpie; they eroded between gravity and concrete. They bore faces that I etched on, I specialized a few: one was man from street, one was God, one was boy in room. This shit was written in my room, cooped up, while God lives somewhere on the street— I hope he’ll recognize me in new shoes since time ripped a hole in my old sneakers’ sole and I know that one day the same will happen to me, too.
cale schoenberg
Choking hazard
ami katagiri
The Word on Wednesday meets every Wednesday from 7(ish) – 9 p.m. in the Kerckhoff Art Gallery ~Everyone welcome~
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