amlit magazine
Literary Magazine
Speaking to the Issue
Dear AmFam, adjacent AU community, and any random person who might have picked this up in MGC,
This issue of AmLit exists only in the company of her sister volume that is to be published next semester celebrating AmLit’s 60th birthday. As such, we are reminiscing on how different and how similar the current AmLit finds itself versus that of baby AmLit. Much has changed, and much has stayed the same, and much has changed and then reverted and then changed again. Like any life, AmLit’s has been full of transformations. But every change, every setback, has only propelled AmLit forward. We want to thank everyone who has come before us, especially Beverly Epstein, the first Editor-in-Chief of AmLit, back when it was simply known as American. Her name and contributions will not be forgotten. If you are reading this, Beverly, thank you.
But let’s not dwell on the past! This issue of AmLit is the culmination of the talents of writers and artists alike, without whom we would not have a magazine to produce. In addition to student contributors, we have also reinstated the vintage tradition of faculty contributors! Shout out to Rhonda Zimlich and Kyle Dargan – rock on. Beyond the talents of the contributors, the always-passionate and driven staff of AmLit has made this issue a privilege to work on. A specific thank you to our design and copy teams who worked around the clock on a tight and tedious schedule to make the magazine you have in your hands. Abby, Kendall, Hope, and Ruth – AmLit appreciates you more than you can imagine!
Outside of the confines of the 8.5x11 inches of slightly glossy paper before you, AmLit once again stepped out and up to have an extremely fulfilling semester as an organization. Thank you to all of the AmFam who came out to support us at all our events. And a super special thanks to our Events Coordinator Emma DiValentino and our Social Media Coordinator Lex Berman, for holding it all together with a subscription to CanvaPro and a dream. To the Student Media Board, we are so lucky to have the support of so many great organizations and people. We couldn’t have afforded done it without you!
I (McKenna) would like to thank Sydney for showing me the ropes (and there are a LOT of ropes) and helping me transition into the role of EIC. She has been a great partner, fellow plate-juggler, and part-time feudal lord. Without her guidance and dry wit, I would have crashed out long ago. It has long been my dream to achieve this rung of the ladder at AmLit, and Sydney has been with me since we were wee freshman dreaming of rebirthing AmLit. Despite the busy senior schedules we both have, I know Sydney is always there on the other end of the line if I need help (or have a stupid question…I may have had a lot of stupid questions). Emma DiValentino is a bottomless well of knowledge and a great collage partner. Hope Jorgensen, you’re pretty great, even when you don’t refill the toilet paper. In general, I’d like to thank my friends and family, etc, as well as my lovely dog, Bella. Rest easy, pretty girl. AmLit has given me so much over the course of my college life, and I cannot wait to return the favor.
Oh God, the time has come. I (Sydney) have now completed my final semester as EIC and will be taken upstate for my “retirement.” AmLit is a core pillar of my college experience, I have met so many wonderful people with this organization including past EIC’s Charlotte Van Schaack and Emma DiValentino who are constantly willing to answer any questions I might have, and trust I have a lot. Beyond that, due to my involvement in AmLit I have had the pleasure of meeting so many talented writers and artists. Knowing that I exist in such a prosperous community only reinstates my love of the craft. AmLit doesn’t exist within a vacuum of isolation and can only flourish when visited by a greater community of people. I’m proud of the work we have done, overjoyed by the trust artists have placed in us, but even more excited by the community that we have planted, watered, and allowed to grow. As AmLit grows, I’m excited to see what next semester brings and am positively titillated to see what McKenna (and co.) brings to the table next. AmLit is an agent of change, fear us! Anywho, bye for now!
As EIC’s we encourage the AmFam to continue moving through the world as artists. To look out for that perfect photo. To write out words that sound good together, and make you feel something. To create from scratch. To remember that art is an essential part of humanity and without that, we are lost.
With love, respect, and so much happiness, we present the Fall 2024 issue of the American Literary Magazine!
AmLit 5ever and we <3 you AmFam,
Sydney
Hsu and McKenna
Casey Editors-in-Chief Fall 2024
Table of Contents
Fernweh, Clair Sapilewski
HEAVEN IS A SEMINAR RUN BY A DINOSAUR
THAT CAN ONLY SPEAK IN COUPLETS, Jasmine Shi
PDA, Emily Rhodes
Villa Borghese Ossessionante, Naomi Skiles
Bingo, Aiden McPhillips
Cleanup Time, Sophy Zhao il giardino degli aranci is missing all her oranges, Naomi Skiles
Off-path, Kathryn Squyres
Dripping Springs, Abby Tredway
The Boy, Riley Wells after noon, McKenna Casey Sunday afternoon in the garden, Kathryn Squyres
Endless Summer, Jamie Kula
Above Budapest, Clair Sapilewski
In 1700, Clair Sapilewski Birdsong, Aidan Deneen Home, Karla Cassidy Hemmers
Life’s a journey, etc., Charlotte Van Schaack
Buster Goes Over the Bridge, Julia Kane Northeast Corridor, Margaret Troast
Squirrel, Ben Ackman
Vibrant, Aidan Deneen
one memory, july, McKenna Casey after church and the wild west, Charlotte Van Schaack
My Grandmother’s Prayer, Margaret Troast
No Elders, Hope Jorgensen just the two of us, Emerson Katz
One Swallow, Julia Kane
One Swallow (ghost print), Julia Kane
April 6, McKenna Casey Cherry Trees, Riley Wells the sun is bright, but they cannot look away, Sophy Zhao Swan, Ben Ackman
Bushwalk, Clair Sapilewski
waltz of autumn, Sophy Zhao
Rotting Oranges, Silia Dimasi fall on your back, Andrew Gardner
She is the closest I could be to divinity, Aiden McPhillips woman lover, Emerson Katz
Frankenstein’s Creature, Jamie Kula I am an Abnormality, Sydney Hsu
The Funeral, Julia Weisenberg
By Any Other Name, Katie Hamilton Enemy Lines, Jamie Kula
A Child, Hope Jorgensen stuck, Maggie Melnik
acuvue oasys, Tyler Davis
Heaven and Earth, Noah Gocial
Polar Exploration, Alicia Zelmanovitz
Through the twisting tower, Kathryn Squyres
To the Root/Hasta la Raíz, Isa Serra
Deep-rooted, Gianna Piroso
faded, Emerson Katz
deer in headlights, Quinn Volpe
dawn, Tyler Davis
Solnedgang, Kathryn Squyres
Backwoods Waltz, Aiden McPhillips
Shire Strolls, Clair Sapilewski
The Madonna Whore, Isa Serra
To Whoever Loves Her After Me, Katie Hamilton
Pat’s Pigs, Ava Stern
Memories of Memories, Teo Nouve
Views in Valparaiso, Noah Gocial paper pushing, Andrew Gardner dead young girl, Andrew Gardner
Moon in the Window, Ava Stern
Unwritten, Abby Tredway
Dream Journal, Ava Stern
First In Flight, Sydney Hsu
To Venus from Eve, Naomi Skiles
Third Birthday, Kendra Papanek
forgiveness-for the most part, Tyler Davis pray for me, Tyler Davis
Someone’s Pockets, Aidan Deneen
Nostalgia Cradles, Jayden Caterina
xoai / dua / mang cut, Julia Wirths
Tornado Warnings, Katie Hamilton
Dancing for the Dishes, Katie Hamilton
magnetic mortuaries, i stopped listening to basketball shoes to gouge your eyes out, pinky swear, i wonder how long, all full up, Ella Forsyth Jazz, Eliza Silletto
The Tongue That Feeds, Emma DiValentino
From The Inside, Emma DiValentino
God, do you listen to your voicemails?, Jamie Kula how to eat sunlight, McKenna Casey Sticks, Oread Frias
I am a friend to, Natalie Hausmann
The End of Something Obsessive, Naomi Skiles
I have this dream, McKenna Casey
Splitting pain, Elliot Zeman
Long Distance, Julia Wirths
Kintsugi, Aidan Deneen
Lazarus, Jamie Kula
Icarus, Teo Nouve
The Elf, Margaret Troast
The Spider, Hope Jorgensen
In My Loneliness, I Sing, Teo Nouve
Bilingualism, Isa Serra
AGAINST DEATH (BY POISON), Kyle Dargan
FOR ALL MY DOGS, Kyle Dargan
Skin Smoke Stars, Rhonda Zimlich
editor’s pick
*Given when an artist is published in all genres: Poetry, Prose, Art, Photography
Fernweh
Clair Sapilewski
HEAVEN IS A SEMINAR RUN BY A DINOSAUR THAT CAN ONLY SPEAK IN COUPLETS
Jasmine Shi
Content Warning Death
Through you, is God’s replication. For Him, decent reparation
My dead friends. Little ends.
she’s alright, miss ammonite
Your warmer hands split open her harder rock. She was still curled inside, so close to dock.
And her shell is the only proof the ocean existed before you, seen more than a blue body you resisted
Triassic mother, controversial Jurassic father. Later, a man named Walter who tells me not to falter.
Your little friends. Their body bends.
Replacements are now drafted from sweeter wood. Still, flesh is longevity that never could.
Here I stand where Priam cries, to die here where home lies
No one alive to obey the dead Our graves are unmarked and unread
Let me turn around my mind to when I was three I had my name and you had yours and we were free.
PDA
Emily Rhodes
there is a beehive behind my nose, tingling. the whole world has an aura. Eyes fixed up. Are your necks broken?
My body once again turned traitor, all too aware the earth is spinning. I am tired of white-knuckling consciousness, rather let my eyes roll back blind white as the sun.
I know the danger of looking right at things. I can’t help sneaking a look. If I do it fast the sun won't notice.
spiders destroy their webs; The National Guard on standby in a dozen states.
the world has ended a dozen times before You won’t feel a thing.
Villa Borghese Ossessionante
Naomi Skiles
There in the grass lay the imprints of our haunting There, lovers hold hands, under the canopy of our jesting.
It’s stupid, I know, but I kick dirt at the pigeons who court their females
As if I am negating the harm of a past decade. How could he touch you, I wish we had met then, How could he lay in your bed and leave a branding.
Our imprint in the grass has only reached its one month birthday
If it was older could we lay there forever?
If I come home right now could we lay there forever?
Bingo
Aiden McPhillips
three weeks between a keg stand wedding and an irish catholic funeral headlight burns out 30 minutes into a 3-hour drive left side, my side, driver’s side–same as the ankle i’ve sprained twice. perfect for my stubborn clutch pedal. doctors say my uncle has the best kind of brain tumor: stage, step, or grade four depending on which cousin you ask. my dog waits until i’m home for the summer to stop running in the yard, half-human eyes telling me she’s ready to go. my one blonde eyelash falls out and grows back and falls out and grows back, and maybe it has been gray this whole time. the chickens squawk at the vegetable scraps from dinner, i’d rather walk on rotten greens than eggshells soft soles and loose tear ducts.
i apologize for all the times i kicked and screamed. i can put my thoughts together and i’ll still never have enough words. mom was my first, so maybe she can tell me when i stopped–when my lungs resigned, vocal chords gave their no-weeks-notice.
maybe i am the sunscreen in your eye maybe i am the shrinking pains maybe i took something more than space and air the day i was born head and heart indebted to the world cradle to grave and back again all i need is my decade-dead grandma at my sister’s wedding in a canadian tuxedo with a tricycle instead of a wheelchair for full-board blackout–free space off-center in my rib cage.
i run the red light and “forget” to tell you how i feel what did I win?
Cleanup Time
Medium Statement
5x7 film photograph
Sophy Zhao
il giardino degli aranci is missing all her oranges
editor’s pick
Naomi Skiles
My love is stuck inside an orange. The outside shines, as you do after you’ve just showered, when the tip of your nose catches the fluorescent lights of your apartment. The window sill behind your bed is adorned with dozens of leafy green plants that mimic your veins. This orange is speckled with your pores. They line the smile underneath your eyes, and in the middle of the night when I whisper words of love into your ear they become flushed with the blood from your leafy veins. It’s the same flush that exists among the speckles on this citrusy skin. These dimples, one on the top and one on the bottom, are nowhere near as beautiful or as soft as the sides of your hips, where your bones connect and glide to flaunt the rest of your beauty around a city that is no longer mine.
It would be a lie to say that a succulent and queer heart does not lay within every orange in the Mediterranean. The eternal city has passion. It is vibrant and warm. The Romans I meet meditate on their love for this city. Since my arrival, I have felt eternally alone, lost in the solitude that is being surrounded by an entire world absent of her. Heavy-footed and impatient, I walk, with a herd of tourists and want-to-be romantics to il Giardino degli Aranci. Along the safe haven that is a sidewalk, separate from the motorized prowess of little cars caught up in terrific traffic battles, we cross the Tiber. The river, a dull gray and devoid of life, sparkles with the Roman importance of its past. I approach the bottom of a grass covered-hill, feeling a sense that something great awaits me at its top.
A pixelating haze of the sun splatters the faces of lovers with rosy and explicitly golden light. Their heads, morphing into one another with deep and passionate kisses, barge through the slits formed by my squinting eyelids. The women sit atop the muddied edges of the hill’s lookout point, and their legs part for the men to stand right inside; here they offer their love up to my scrutiny, as the intimate moments they share litter the pristine blue of the Roman sky. Faces disappear in ripples throughout the crowds, as women nestle into their lovers’ napes, somehow by their own volition despite the orchestrated symphony of movement it creates. I imagine that bringing my cheek to the neck of a man, with unshaven hairs piercing through their skin, would feel like throwing myself out of the top of a cypress tree. The scaly needles would thrash against my clean and soft face, and the graveled path below would leave me bloodied and bruised at its base.
The needle-like leaves of the stone pine look beautiful and soft from a distance. Their deep green is solid in color and persists through the January gloom, but the edges are painted with an orange glow that hugs each of the intricate feathers. Their branches remain mostly uncovered, and weave together like the hale bones of my lover. If I climb up one tree, my fingertips can reach a smooth and vibrant fruit, hung with a single dainty green leaf. The light is soft and sparkling; the sun’s beams turn into rays by the freshness and abundance of the leaves. The orange and green hues litter the sky, and I can’t help but keep my vision upwards. For some, the enchanting view of an ancient city with an oil-painted sunset as a backdrop triggers joy. For me, it spits loneliness right into my tear ducts.
My fingernails are long, too long. I let them gently tear through your outer skin. To peel you open is to act sensually and apprehensively. I am careful not to disrupt your intricacy, to separate any part of your being from the rest of you would make your sweet and tangy blood drip down my fingers and forearms. Delicate pieces of you come together to form a beautiful taste, the sweet fragility of your entirety makes me worship you. My finger dives to your center to delicately pull apart the segments of illustrious zest, and to find my palms embracing two halves; their curves are perfectly attuned to my hands.
As the sun falls down the sky, my eyes are dragged down with it. Above the Mediterranean, oranges and yellows overtake the sky with a crystal clear background to hold them. I have yet to see the Mediterranean’s waters. I know that once I do, I will have spotted my love once again. As the sun is reflected in the swells of the sea, I will see my gentle waters holding her bright form and I will dive down until I have searched the entirety of its bottom.
It is dark out now; I guess I have reached the sea’s bottom within this garden. The sun is no longer in the sky, and the oranges have tucked themselves into their leaves for the night. As my recovering eyes scan through the crowds and over the vista, I spot two women, their legs intertwined in our signature style and their forms blurry as I begin to bawl. The only beacon that remains, as I no longer have the light to blind me from my solitude, is this pair of women interlaced and exuding queer love with every fiber of their being. If I walk up to them, might they turn into us by the time I arrive? As I stare with longing, the garden around me transforms into a haven of homosexuality and romance in the center of this eternally lonely city.
I have eaten the entirety of this orange, pulled apart each pore and segment. Inside, your body, your mind, and your eyes, are nowhere to be found. Despite this, il Giardino degli Aranci is where I will come to satiate my hunger for our queer love once again.
Off-path
Kathryn Squyres
Dripping Springs
Abby Tredway
And so we became the Hill Country. To hell they went, and to Texas we go.
You wouldn’t believe how quickly the day fades to night or how fast my boots became my first skin.
The glint of my grandfather’s belt buckle rivals the sun, and I soon understand the law of the land.
For Texas is and is not. Can and cannot.
And tonight, in this light, I cannot.
May God bless my grandmother and Texas football.
Alcohol may soothe the throat, but never the mind.
May we never have expectations that stifle us.
Years passed and Texas was not. Parading myself around this city, more lost than ever despite the map in my clammy hands.
The Boy
Riley Wells
The rickety train screeched to a halt in the station’s catacomb. The boy stepped onto the platform as hordes of people rushed by. He idled in place and searched around. He was alone. The boy took a few steps and bumped into a woman with a big coat. She marched firmly forward while he collected himself. An old man walked up to him and knelt down.
“What are you doing here?” he asked as his eyes filled with water, “why are you here?”
“I dunno,” the boy replied, “I can’t remember.”
“My god,” the old man said, “you look just like your mother.”
He cupped the boy’s face and stared with damp eyes. Another train rattled to a halt and coughed out more travelers. The boy wasn’t sure what to do. Certainly interacting with a stranger like this was forbidden, but this was a strange place, and the boy felt a kind of familiarity with the old man.
“How do you know my mom? Is she here?” asked the boy.
“Nevermind that now, take my hand and follow me.”
The boy did as instructed and the two set off down the platform. As the swathes of passengers started to thin, the boy saw a line of people. A line occupied by sad people who seemed more disgruntled than the average commuter. The line led to a staircase that cut into the floor of the platform, descending into darkness. As he walked by, the smell of sulfur wrapped around his nose and stung his nostrils. The boy watched the line inch down the staircase.
“Don’t worry,” assured the old man, “we’re not going down there.”
They continued hand in hand. The boy staggered as he saw strange people playing strange instruments. His mother always gave him a dollar to deposit in the musician’s case. But these were no instruments he had ever seen; they produced sounds he had never heard. The old man yanked him along.
Then the boy observed strange animals scurrying and slithering across the station floor.
“What are those?” the boy asked.
“Rats,” the old man replied, “now keep going, we’re almost there.”
They were no rats the boy had ever seen.
He watched as people ran into each other’s arms and were swooped off the ground. Groups clustered around passengers who got off with the boy. They cried and embraced each other.
“Alright, here we are,” proclaimed the old man.
They fixed themselves onto another line, this one made up of people who stood in happiness surrounded by others.
“I remember now,” said the boy. “How I got here.”
“Oh?” the old man said.
The boy nodded. “I was playing ball and went to catch it in the road.”
“I see,” the old man replied. He put his arm around the boy’s shoulders. “That happens sometimes.”
As the line slid forward the boy noticed that it too led to a staircase, one that climbed through the roof of the station into the bright daylight. As they got closer the boy smelled cedar and fragrances that reminded him of his mother’s garden. He planted his foot on the step and looked at the old man. As he ascended, he knew he would live forever.
after noon
McKenna Casey
We are smoked from our hives by a bell, released to stream forth into the daylight, gaping fish-mouths open and eyes squeezed shut–the sun a revelation.
Sunday afternoon in the garden
Kathryn Squyres
Endless Summer
Jamie Kula
The endless summer drums on with ferocity, sickeningly sweet like sugar water from my fingertips. A bead of sweat drips onto the pavement. It’s too salty, nothing will ever grow here.
I no longer feel heat, it melts into my skin like an aura I wrap around my low-hung head. The only evidence of hotshot UV rays is the condensation perpetually obscuring my bedroom window. A butterfly blinks at me slowly, in recognition of our familiar prison warden. I persist like a dog.
I am overcome with ravenous hunger.
I keep a full bottle of water and a chocolate bar stashed in my bedside table in case I need to bury my teeth in something.
My milk teeth are in a Tupperware container buried in the backyard. I wonder if the plastic wraps itself around my cavities, taking root in my skull. My stomach is packed full of bottle caps and fishhooks.
I am polystyrene, not dirt.
I will always be here, on the side of the road, fading into heat.
Above Budapest
Clair Sapilewski
In 1700
Sapilewski
Clair
Birdsong
Aidan Deneen
editor’s pick
I’ve listened to the birds With nothing else to do, Imagining the words I would say to you.
I took months for granted Like every other fool. Wrote the story we read, Pouring on the fuel.
You never expect fire Then I heard you admit Put my heart on the pyre “I think this is it.”
Our last conversation We felt our heartstrings break Raining tears in the sun The emptiness aches.
I sat outside last night My head was full of noise I listened to birdsong And remembered old joys.
Home
Karla Cassidy Hemmers
He told me he was confused about the relationship I had with my home. I guess the question he was trying to ask is why I was fleeing from what he was searching for. Comfort. Routine. The same couple running past our house every Saturday around the same time. They start at the other side of the town, she is a doctor, he is a banker. They pass by our house while we have breakfast, on their way to get bread at the local supermarket. A few years ago, she won two hundred and fifty thousand euros in a game show and the whole town was talking about it. During the town’s local carnival parade, they even announced it through the speakers. I’ve thought about this story a thousand times, I don’t need to relive it until I’m old. “So it is a backup home for me,” I said. He looked at me and started talking about his parents’ divorce. He never said what home meant to him.
My mom always has the best view from a window that lets her see the entire street and some parts of the houses standing further down the hill. Her eyes gaze back to us, and like every Sunday morning, she says, “They well deserve their breakfast now.”
Life's a journey, etc.
Charlotte Van Schaack
Buster Goes Over the Bridge
Julia Kane
editor’s pick
Medium Statement
Acrylic on gesso board
Northeast Corridor
(after “Country of Water” by Mahogany L. Browne)
Margaret Troast
editor’s pick
I believe I am my grandmother’s prayers: A pebble dropped in a riverbank, swept from the sands, pulled home to the seas, Coated in sticky, white foam, and I believe I am from a current, from a storm, from the hunger of Thetis
Waiting, on a rickety pier
At the shores of salvation
Where there are no tombstones
Just new planks
On old tracks
Stretching for miles, miles, further and further away.
And I believe words like water are a religion. Where weary Goddesses wave power to weather the stones and woods of who we are and who we used to be. Haunting, and inhabiting, steady as the train chugs along, And leads me back, back, back
To the sea;
Where the water is quiet and storms roll on, and the sands and the salts and the mother of Achilles weep.
Oceans, and oceans, and a fire underneath.
Squirrel
Ben Ackman
Vibrant
Aidan Deneen
Sparks from a flint wheel Wheel and drift and fade ‘Fraid life will stay gray
Someone lends a light Light and clear and real Steel finds flint, sparks yield
Fire races down the beam
Beam and dance and sing Wink as something takes wing
Blue soars like cranes
Cranes and stares and gleams Dreams of a new team
Umber flecks, a brace
Brace and breath and smile While reasons join the pile
Crimson streaks and bolts
Bolts and runs and races Aces paired in new places
Green as leaves of mint
Mint and fresh and new Pursue the other of two
Fireworks lift the shade Shade and tint and tone Alone but not on my own
Fresh suns fills the land
Land and breathe and rest West the grass looks best
one memory, july
McKenna Casey
I remember the storm rolling in over the ocean, how we all went out on the balcony of the Dunes Motel to watch it approach, darkness riding in from both directions. It felt like someone cranked up the oxygen, like we were breathing in pure air. I remember the starlings and their abstract art, swooping and swirling their inky calligraphy into the paper sky, soprano siren song for inclement weather. In the space between lightning and thunder it all hung in the air with the cigarette smoke–
after church and the wild west
Charlotte Van Schaack
My Grandmother's Prayer
(After ‘After the Bathe’ Natasha, Adrian and Henrietta, from an original oil painting by Barbara Beck Haines)
Margaret Troast
My Grandmother’s Prayer
I can Almost see The wind itself As it ripples Through the grass Across
The shores It sweeps a Green Waif’s Dance
And We follow it Down, down, down— Right on down to the Ocean’s waiting, Open mouth…
The sun is setting—and the water Is freezing. Summer, we know, is Fleeting.
Birds cry overhead And I hear her voice Like wind say “Don’t fear the Snow”
No Elders
Hope Jorgensen
Provincetown: a room of green and Frog and Toad
Elders telling us the story;
A deceased partner, victim of the ‘gay disease’
Remembered forever as Frog
His husband’s eyes are as pale and steady as the hand
Upon his shoulder
A comfort ripened by time.
I think of my father’s anger
‘There weren’t as many of those queers’
The falsity dripping off his tongue
Ripe fruit bursting and rotting
Like purple bruises on flesh.
There were patchworks spread across National Mall
Purples, reds, and greens
What once was colorful life
Snipped by sterile scissors and
A faceless crowd who
Jeered and watched
Yet lifted no fingers.
The husbands give each other a smile
As they retreat from the web of memory
Their love is soft like sap, golden in the sun
As they leave, I see two lovers
Alive despite everything.
just the two of us
Emerson Katz
One Swallow
Julia Kane
editor’s pick
Medium Statement
Pressure print with handset wood type
Medium Statement Ghost image of pressure print with handset wood type
One Swallow (ghost print)
Julia Kane
April 6
McKenna Casey
Content Warning
Disordered eating
I’ve been avoiding my laundry and starving myself.
The days flip over, turtles with their soft-shelled stomachs reflecting the sky.
Everything is dull, dirty, and doesn’t fill me up. Sleep is the norm, and wakefulness, a spiteful deviance.
Edinburgh blows around outside the windows.
I think about bed sores, infections of the bone, UTIs.
Tomorrow I’ll do my laundry. Tomorrow I’ll go to the grocery store.
As I write, the sun goes down–or rather, the world flips over, legs in the air.
Cherry Trees
Riley Wells
My love of life is fleeting, And cherry trees sway. Through pain and loss and bleeding, The last decisions weigh.
My love of life is fading, And fresh flowers bloom. The grief and misery braiding, The world is like my tomb.
My love of life is leaving, And the young birds sing. The only thing is grieving, And the church bells ring.
My love of life is parting, And the warm air blows.
The knock of death is starting, The blood river flows.
My love of life is fleeting, And cherry trees sway. Through the voices of prayer and pleading, I have gone away.
The thoughts they say may weigh, But only for a day. They do not stay at bay, They prey, decay, and lead me astray, they do not go away. In May when children play and the sun casts its ray, The world is gray, and I obey, While cherry trees sway.
the sun is bright, but they cannot look away
Sophy Zhao
Every Friday night at the local jazz bar the band plays a joyful set of songs, which is different from their usual sad soundtrack that tells stories of heartbreak and tragedy. On every day of the week except for Friday the band pours overwhelming despair onto the empty floor, exhaling melodies that every blue person breathes in, like a depressing air that threatens to constrict their lungs and crush their already broken hearts. But on FreeYourself Fridays, from seven to nine p.m., the band will play songs that are the definition of what it means to be joyful and carefree. It is during this short time that a young lady of about twenty-two or so is found in the dead center of the dance floor. She is always there, every Friday at seven o’clock sharp, right in the middle of the crowd. It’s kind of funny how the dancing bodies seem to circle her like moons, how they seem to glow just from watching her while silently swaying to the beat. This woman sucks them into her orbit, but she doesn’t notice at all. She is much too focused on the steps and the twirls; in fact, her eyes are closed in concentration the entire time she dances. But there is always a smile on her face. It’s almost like a glare from some glorious light reflecting— so bright that it burns your eyes if you continue to stare, and yet, you don’t really want to look away. She is the center of the universe for that brief moment every Free-Yourself Friday from seven to nine, healing throbbing hearts, and bringing everyone to a place that feels like home, like hope, even though the room is full of complete strangers.
Swan
editor’s pick
Ben Ackman
Bushwalk Series
Clair Sapilewski
waltz of autumn
Sophy Zhao
The wind plucks off yellows, oranges, reds, & browns
From the peeling branches, Forcing them into a short, yet graceful dance.
Leaves spin and twirl as they leave the tree
Reaching for one another, Basking in the sunlight as they Waltz across the grass and fall, Laying and all sprawled out, Embracing the earthy ground;
More and more whirl around
And land softly with the slightest sound. The remaining on the tree quiver in the breeze
Wondering when it will be their turn
To let go of it all and just fall
Knowing that they will become merely A layer above the surface, Broken and bent inwards, Wonderfully thin and caving in Coated in the need to be remembered–But only forgotten and stepped on.
Leaves spin, twirl, and roll
As the wind carries their crumbling bodies: Fragile, easy to break, snapping in two
At the slightest touch, Left out to dry and be crunched
Under the feet of humans; They lay, trembling in the breeze, Slipping, crushed into smithereens,
And yet, there is still beauty in the small pieces. Look closely, and perhaps some are crinkling, Smiling in the ever-flowing, prickly grass, Carried by the whispering wind, Exhaling their final breaths as they Slowly age a crisp brown.
It is a waltz of the entirety of this world, Swaying and holding on, Once absorbing the sun’s rays Now fallen and forgotten, Crumpled and sunburnt.
Rotting Oranges
Silia Dimasi
We’ve come to fear the day the oranges begin to rot.
Their end awakens a reality where our purpose is diminished. Our bare feet have no place being pressed against bike pedals, and we assume positions beneath terracotta. Beneath nameless sheet metal.
We assume new motive, trying to outlast the roots of the olive tree. Making space.
Trying to hold on until the next tree is impregnated, round with the promise of sweet juices and free labor. This time allows us to reconnect with the erotic burning of sweat against skin. The closest we get to the feeling of saltwater against our night skies.
In the time of waiting, some forget the joy. Of fresh oranges.
They divorce themselves from the land and create shrines to their foreignness. Accept fate, create streets made real with wood carving. Divorce yourself from the land and create shrines to your foreignness.
With time, we have become the people. Of rotting oranges.
We establish these putrid groves, where magpies pick at the flesh of our young, and fields sink deep with the weight of our waters.
When we are deprived of our purpose, deprived of our harvest, we seek to make meaning in the spaces unwanted.
The land burnt.
The home abandoned.
The oranges unpicked.
fall on your back
Andrew Gardner
Empire of sketches
I could see right through the skyscraper
Watched its feet compress all the little raincoat wearing children on the pavement
One little boy’s father was putting a sign up on the concrete chest
It read some name I had heard of too many times I got top heavy
I let my head fall forward and flip me on my back
All I could see was more names and sketches
she is the closest I could be to divinity
Aiden McPhillips
To those who blame Orpheus for his deeds, call him a fool, a coward, a weak man, I ask youwalk his path. Ascend with your light behind you, walls pulsing in time to conjoined heartbeats. Live without periphery.
And if I tell you that Adam bit the apple, tasted sweet sin because he believed Evecrisp and divine because he trusted her and he loved her and What is God to your wife? Your rib, your orchard.
Consume me like kudzu vines, Fresh blood on mossy stones
I’ll sink into the hollow of your side Drown in honey, dissonance, and fire The years I have spent mining salt.
If I am to sleep again, let it be at the altar. If I am to believe, let it be in something I can hold. Fold my hands together, but please be gentle. If I press my knuckles into the bridge of my nose hard enough, I can smell burning pews and baby’s breath.
Feel the whispers of consequence under costume jewelry and ACE bandagesEmbodied and buried, starved and reborn, eternally breaking and forever rising, A satin bow for a glass cannon.
woman lover
Emerson Katz
Frankenstein's Creature
editors-in-chief’s pick
Jamie Kula
I am Frankenstein’s creature, pieces of memories sewn into flesh from every control freak who ever tried to make me in their image. I let my body be strapped to the table in beautiful submission. You manhandle my dumb limbs like you know what’s good for me, like your doll needs fresh cotton. Please leave my marble eyes, my big doe prey eyes. I know they are useless to you, cloudy and unrevealing. But I need to bear witness. I need!
Like a human, I need to watch your scalpel cut into my chest, soft and relenting. I need to watch your mouth contort in broken eggshell promises. Whispers of comfort as you pluck the feathers from my wings. I know what comes next, but I need to see you do it to remind myself that gentle hands wield deadly weapons.
I am an Abnormality
Sydney Hsu
I want those large windows of wood with clear paned glass that open from left to right which might allow me to sit at the ledge to see the landscape of the garden below. I want to read Plath’s letters here, despite the horrible urge I feel to gather them all up and burn them in the fireplace. Brick. Red brick. Plath was institutionalized by her husband and later left by the same man. When she died, his name would remain carved into the stone denoting her final place of rest. He controlled the narrative of her personhood.
Or maybe I’ll see the garden and remember Anne Boleyn and her maids who looked over the body until she was buried deep within the earth, for they knew what a man might have done had he been given the opportunity to be left alone with her limp body. She had no head in the end, tried and convicted of treason. She was sent to the Tower of London and executed at the King’s orders. Her grave was unmarked.
It was Hephaestus who captured his wife Aphrodite and brother Ares naked and intertwined with one another. He paraded them around Mount Olympus for the other gods to see. His cheating wife. I hate my wife, Hephaestus tells a crowd of his fans. He’s been on the road for some time now workshopping his material. I’m in the audience. I laugh.
I don’t know if women have ever been people to the general public. I trace us back to those quiet moments before the separation of our species. A warm fire and grunts of acknowledgment. There’s something kind about watching the invention of the world. Sand melting down to glass. Our ability as a people to glance out a window, to watch rain clouds roll in over the hills. We are quiet people. Perhaps there is violence here too, some kind of common understanding of the tearing pain of separation between woman, man, other, prefer not to say. Man or other. Man or abnormal.
I am an abnormality. Aristotle said so when he correlated woman to something decidedly beneath man. To Aristotle, the primal, most human, part missing from the woman that remained embedded in the man was the unknowable, unseen soul that left its fingerprints on the glass but was never seen. This was where it began, I imagine. Some scholar in ancient Greece made the first “I hate my wife” joke and his defense became the relativeness of her personhood. She had no soul you see, there was no reason for her to be offended as she wasn’t human. Not where it counts.
The Funeral
Julia Weisenberg
Content Warning
Death of a baby
There was no body.
Izabela swore to herself that she would not cry, because crying was not meant to be done around other people. She had to look stronger than she was, stronger than a girl whose muscles were disintegrating and bones were brittle and broken until all that remained was a shadow. She wanted to hold everything she would never say to her mother inside like a storm ready to burst, to let her family see a girl whose skin was made of stone, let their eyes wander and wonder where she went, how her skin wasn’t dusting away like dandruff, collapsing in on her. She wanted the salt from her tears to dry up that storm and feel her heart shrivel like a dehydrated flower, feel the veins in her wrist tingle from lack of blood.
Her only black dress was too small for her, with childish details that made her feel like she was six. Three shiny buttons at the collar, a pleated skirt that cinched just below her chest, puffed sleeves and pockets. It was a dress fit for her little sister, but Halina complained about the buttons against her skin, and it wasn’t like Izabela had another option.
She could not stop thinking. All the time, she was thinking. Thinking about her mother’s broken arm, because broken bones were not meant to kill anyone. Then again, Izabela used to think of being Jewish as simply her family’s religion, until she saw an officer take a baby out of a woman’s arms and shoot him in the face for crying. Somehow, Izabela remembered more prominently the way her mother’s hands were fluttering like butterflies as she stitched a glaringly yellow star into the sleeve of her coat when Izabela returned home, rather than the screams of the baby and how they were so violent they seemed to pop holes in his windpipe before he died. She lost her childhood, and then the Nazis emptied a hospital as her mother was getting a cast for her broken arm.
There was no body.
She wondered if the dead baby’s family had a bodiless funeral, too.
One could hardly call it a funeral, rather seven family members packed into a flat hardly comfortable for four. It was spring, the air outside was mild like lukewarm bathwater, but inside the apartment was a heavy stillness. Izabela felt as if the heat was clogging her ears, her nose, the pores of her skin. The heat was so stifling that Izabela could see it floating like a cloud and wanted to reach out and touch it. She could breath in and taste the heat, which reeked of old socks and stale dust. Her head ached, so full of dizzying pressure and thoughts she could not stop thinking. Like her mother’s broken arm and her butterfly hands.
The moment Izabela stepped into the dress that should have been too small on her but was made bigger from starvation, she felt the back of her throat burn and tried to swallow but gagged. The tears came quietly with a slight prick, an itch, in the corners of her eyes. She pulled on the top button that her mother had stitched on the dress, her fingernails digging under the knot in the thread, feeling the knot in her stomach give way to a gaping hole that squeezed and pressed on her lungs like a heavy hand. She never meant to cry, but it was like there was no room left inside of her body for her grief. The tears spilled over, dripping from her lashes like raindrops, and killing her softly as she drowned in tears and suffocated in gasps of air.
Halina tried to take Izabela’s hand, but Izabela found comfort in those childish pockets cut into her dress. Shame took the form of a knife and twisted deep inside her, savoring the discomfort of dull, jagged edges relentlessly skimming her stomach in circles and circles of embarrassment, because she promised she would be stronger than this. They saw her crumble when she stepped into the room, and when she felt the dirt break to dust beneath her touch and burrow under her fingernails, and when she dirtied the flowers meant to represent her mother by watering them with dust and stones and broken earth. They saw her shoulders shaking and maybe she could have played it off as the cold, only the heat was overbearing, and Izabela’s chin was wet and her heart hurt from longing and thinking and knowing too much. She thought briefly of sinking her nails into the corners of her eyes and ripping out her tear ducts, but settled for pushing her thumbs into her eyelids until the room blurred and darkened at the edges. Izabela wished she could go blind, because she was sick of watching the world die right in front of her.
Halina asked if she was okay, her voice gentle and her eyes pleading for comfort, and Izabela broke the skin of her palms and felt her own blood pulse against her fingers to keep from hitting her sister.
Izabela needed to breathe again, but the hand that was pressing down on her lungs had begun to punch them inward, and as her ribs snapped one by one from the pressure of an expanding hole of loss, she thought about her mother’s arm snapping in a burst of blood and the shattering of bones, just like the crying baby who was shot in the face. His shrieks died suddenly. There and then gone.
By Any Other Name
Katie Hamilton
Look at me. At me, over here. At me, a Katherine, but never Katherine. Always Katie.
Look at me, named for my dad's great-grandmother, a woman passed on to her Lord that I'll never meet, but will be forever intertwined with. I'm told my four-foot-something great-greatgrandma would wipe the sweat off the back of her neck and slyly slap two cards together so she could discard them together in secret. I don't cheat at cards, but I like to think she'd be proud of how many times I've been damned and told to go to Hell to dance with the devil whenever divine intervention inspires me to win a never-ending game of gin rummy.
Look at me, great-great-grandmother Catherine with a C. Are you proud of the heir to your name? Have my green eyes upstaged your cocoa-colored ones that subtly sparkle in pictures stored in a box in the basement? Or have I honored them, now wearing glasses to stare in solidarity with your white, square-framed glasses captured in the photos? Have I disgraced you, replacing your C with a K, always a reminder that my name is never exactly yours? Or have I made you proud for the artistic freedom my parents used on the spot for the name on my birth certificate? There will always be a K on my Starbucks cups, and there will always be a C on your gravestone marking when you met your heavenly Maker.
Look at me, God. Katherine means pure. Are we pure enough for you? Will any amount of penance make up for our sleights of hands? Will you keep my memory pure, not damn me to the same dementia-ridden life I imagine she lived, stuffed in a yellow-flowered wallpaper room with a chatty roommate in a nursing home? I don't want to forget my skinned knees, first crushes, door-slamming teenage angst, and my daydreams of walking down the aisle and probably tripping. Will you tell my children that I was born pure, with my name carried down from the heavens to inspire my parents?
Katherine, look at yourself. Do you think you're spelled wrong?
Grief is staring me down from across the battlefield. He is not my enemy!
We are both condemned to this eternal punishment, neither will know salvation. The stalemate will always end in emptiness. I never meant to wage war, led here by some vague phrase mumbled in the dead of night, like a promise or a prayer. But I swear, I never asked for violence. Is it my fault that blood and blade and barrel all taste the same when you’re starving?
That I would give anything to be strong again? Is it so terrible to crave His body dissolving on my tongue?
To swallow the bitter pill, let Him unravel in my vengeful stomach?
I am wrought and rotten. The iron fist of the Father guides humanity in repentance, fever broken by the Divine hand. The first time I felt it, strung up on the wooden beams of my childhood church, I drowned out the scripture with my six-year-old adorations: I Love You Jesus, But When Will It End?
Enemy Lines
Jamie Kula
There once was a girl?
With pink lips screwed so tight
Not a sound ever issued forth
Pale eyes watched and watched
As the body unfolded, taken away
Now looked upon
Like the cycle of leaves
Budding and growing and falling
A cycle out of her grasp.
She wishes to stay preserved
Like a flower behind glass.
A Child
She sits with the burden of she
Breasts and hips and vagina
Budding nipples visible through shirts
Red that now oozes through white cotton
A body no longer her own.
Hope Jorgensen
Maggie Melnik
acuvue oasys
Tyler Davis
vision blurry, eyes red not dead, might as well be.
there’s a certain level of humility that comes with mistakes like these.
no consequence (technically) all-encompassing (definitely)
cried them all out once. thought i had one stuck behind my eye.
easier to convince yourself of things you can’t see.
Heaven and Earth
Noah Gocial
Polar Exploration
Alicia Zelmanovitz
The older woman’s braided hair turned further away from the brown of her skin, and closer to the white of the snow that stood still all around them. The two exceptionally long plaits straight down her back were formed into existence by the lean calloused hands of the younger woman. The weaver liked to admire her masterwork, while the sun shone on it and snowflakes coalesced with it—but its practical purposes forced it to be covered by a fur hood.
“Thank you, love,” the older woman spoke.
The younger woman only grunted. They had spent more than enough time together for such subtle signals to be completely decipherable.
Each day was filled with a similar routine. It was a nomadic lifestyle with research baked in. The two took turns with the walking stick, poking it a couple feet ahead to warn of feeble areas in the snow, while the other pulled a small sled of supplies. They wore layers of leggings, tunics, and scarves— with little regard for any cohesion of colour, pattern, or texture. Their packs and tent were similarly quilt-like.
The freezing wind whipped past their faces in a way that burned. They took their minds off any pain or discomfort with plenty of breaks for journaling but little for conversation. They sat faced to the sun and felt it on the patches of exposed skin. Or with their back turned to it, to feel it seep through the fabric. Or with one person that blocked the glare for the other when it proved too bright for their dry eyes.
They set up camp for the night any time the sky switched from light to match the grey-blue of their outer coats.
In the shared tent they slept back to back, except for nights when the older woman rubbed her partner’s shoulders after a day of particularly heavy lifting. Her companion was broad-backed with short black hair and a beautifully epicene quality. She was the opposing sharp edges to the older woman’s soft ones—the muscled limbs and abdomen to her slightly rounded stomach, arms, and legs. As she rubbed the knots with the pads of her hands, notes gathered in her throat. She felt her companion twitch.
“I’m sorry, is my humming keeping you awake?”
“No, I like when you sing me to sleep.”
The mornings called for an attempt at hunting, one which was often unsuccessful. The task usually fell to the younger woman.
“Your fingers are defter than mine. That happens with age,” the older woman reasoned, or rather, excused.
The younger woman shook her head, not in denial but confusion. She was younger only in comparison, and it was hardly an outstanding difference.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Don’t believe what?”
“That you’re nearly as bad with a blade as you claim to be,” she pushed her weapon towards her, “or with a bow.”
“I have a terrible aim and I don’t have your stillness.”
“Shoot it. Just once.”
“And my target?”
The older woman looked around at the powdery vastness, only some larger rocks breaking the surface of the sheet of snow. Any rivulets would be frozen over, and the little wildlife there was easily blended in.
“We hunt the fat hares—or whatever else you find. We don’t have the choice to be picky.”
The older woman held the bow in her stout hands, headed to the outskirts of their camping area, and hoped that a husk of hares might gather where the snow was thinner. She thought she might’ve seen a blur of quick movement or the glint of a black eye.
She looked ahead, so she wouldn’t miss possible prey, and her mind was occupied holding the arrow in just the right place. She didn’t see where the snow covered a loose set of pebbles, and she slipped down a slight slope.
The dwarf trees were few and far between, but a welcome sight for the spectacle of green peeking through white or the crystals of ice. The older woman was flat on her back. She cared more to admire them than to get up again. The younger woman’s head popped in, blocking her view.
“Are you alright?”
“I’m fine…” she responded softly.
She felt a dampness beneath her right arm and moved to feel it with her opposite hand, scared to find blood. It was only snow that had entered through an open seam in her overcoat’s armpit.
“...but ripped. I must’ve slid against a jagged rock,” she continued.
“I can fix it,” the younger woman put her pack down and began rummaging through it. She offered her hand to pull her partner up. “Give me your coat.”
The older woman removed it and held the bundle out, expecting it to be taken. Instead, the younger woman moved to remove her own outer layer.
The older woman interrupted her, “No, no, don’t be silly. I know you run warm, even so, you need your own protection more than I do. I’ll wrap myself in the bedding.”
The younger woman’s kit held a handful of tiny thread spools in multiple colours. She settled on green before getting to work.
The older woman watched as she thread the needle and pulled through each stitch. She was mesmerised by the steady and precise movement.
“I wouldn’t have imagined you could do such lovely embroidery.”
“And why is that?”
The older woman didn’t have a decent reason. “You’re so different from me. I thought I’d get to be an amazing seamstress, like my mother was, but I was hopeless with any domestic skill aside from cooking. I was never ‘feminine enough’ for her.”
“Then we’re a lot alike.” The younger woman finished tying the end of the thread and returned the jacket.
The older woman admired the branching stitches, “Why this pattern?”
“A vine, both strong and pretty—reminds me of you.”
Through the twisting tower
Kathryn Squyres
To the Root/ Hasta la Raiz
Isa Serra
editor’s pick
Medium Statement
Acrylic and multimedia
deep-rooted
Gianna Piroso
Since the day I hatched from my cocoon, I have been fused to the tree that sustains me. My arms intertwine with the branches, stretching thin as they try to embrace the earth
My legs bury underground, running miles with the roots
The sap drips down my face, coating my eyes with a hazy film
Each day I watch the amber silhouettes come and go, They come, And they go.
And each day I feel the same rumble in my stomachIt grows more carnivorous each day, nourishing me with a sense of fullness. A seeping emptiness.
faded
editor’s pick
Emerson Katz
deer in headlights
Quinn Volpe
i’m a deer in headlights, saying things you’ve already heard, does this sound familiar? look at me and think of her.
i’m only secondary, here to remind you tell me what hurts the most, and i’ll open the old wound.
you’ve never seen a hit like this, driving till i hit a curb heard it on the radio death in your hands till i swerve turn up the volume! till i get what i deserve!
when a mirror image is trying to be different this beat is going platinum everything’s deliberate
all i am’s a copycat, appearing in your dreams, a pop up window living in the low notes of your screams.
dawn
Tyler Davis
do you remember racing to the beach
hoping to beat Apollo as he dragged the sun across the sky,
only to discover that we were right on time.
almost, as if, he had waited for us.
Solnedgang
Kathryn Squyres
Backwoods Waltz
Aiden McPhillips
And if I only heal halfway
If you have to pry me from the cocoon Wings crooked, a tired second spine
Dirt in my fingernails and lungs
Born from a place where trust felt like desire and desire felt like rage
And horizons hummed in my chest like a boiling star-
If you find glass at the edges of my teeth
Dragged through eggshells and frost-
If you find I am trading answers for seawater,
Watching the world pass through the cup of my palms,
Would you still lay with me, warm breath on cold ribs?
The bandage, silk after the needle.
Would you fall from me like tangerine peels?
Daisy petals and sunburnt skin
Rush past me like the roadkill wildflowers.
Does the salmon not swim upstream?
Does the deer not get caught in the headlights?
Does the moth not find the flame?
Does the forest not yearn for wildfire, not teach and preach succession?
You know I learned how to hold my breath before I ever tasted water.
Put on some music, dear.
Play me a song you could love me to And I promise I will dance.
Even if the brambles cut my feet, I will dance.
Shire Strolls
Clair Sapilewski
The Madonna Whore
Isa Serra
Medium Statement
Acrylic and multimedia
editor’s pick
To Whoever Loves Her After Me
I once met a girl who Likes her eggs sunny side up, Soaked in pepper, Toast ever so slightly burnt because she likes the crunching noises it makes when she takes a bite. She takes her chamomile tea hot And her black coffee cold, One sugar, no cream:
A brew weak enough that she still has the capacity to think, And strong enough to compensate for hours of sleep lost over crying over fictional characters in books she can’t put down when it’s time to go to bed.
She cuts her sandwiches in triangles, And cuts her pizza in squares; She found things taste better when she did things differently.
Hydrangeas are her favorite flowers, The bright blue ones have her heart; The brilliant azure that catches her eye on walks in the park and remind her that there’s still beauty left; Whenever she walks down the aisle, she’ll do it with a hydrangea bouquet in hand. She loves stuffed frogs And broken clocks, Books with severed spines, Brick houses covered in ivy, Singing softly to the hum of the kitchen radiator, Black and white movies, And dancing,
Dreaming of make-believe worlds and kissing someone in the rain, Being as well loved as the overplayed songs on the radio.
And she loves to laugh At dumb videos on the Internet, People doing something stupid in public, But mostly at herself and her one liners, Blowing bubbles in her chocolate milk like a seven-year-old, and she falls victim to skinned knees from being too clumsy to stay upright on a bike.
Her laugh is like a Sunday morning and seeing the ocean for the first time; Her voice is like wind chimes singing in the breeze; And she stumbles when she dances, Losing her footing on slippery floors; She sings like no one can hear her, Unapologetic for her tone deafness.
I once loved a girl who kept good company and collected 1970s vinyl So that she could raise her household with Led Zeppelin and Elton John And say she was classically inclined.
To whoever loves her after me, Write this down
And never let her go.
Katie Hamilton
Pat's Pigs
Ava Stern
If I hear someone say the words “Mac salad” again, I will stick my head in The brisket smoker.
Sweet barbecue courses through My newly brown veins
As I grab another chunk of Coleslaw that Mom says Has too much vinegar.
Stinking of sticky sauce, I push the heavy door open Hoping to catch the tail end of The pink streaks across the clouds mirrored On the calm stream.
Small talked until the extrovert fully converted
Now I am reserved, Butting in only to make sure they get extra Sauce on the side.
Most days, When I am so bored I can hear my eyeballs move And there are no more weird positions To sit in my chair, I add a little less vinegar to the Coleslaw.
This way, If I didn’t do anything at all, At least I tried to fix the Coleslaw.
I.
If I witness somebody, I hold my breath. The breath is sculpture, the sculpture is prayer.
I inhale life, a heartbeat, I hold my breath. My soul vibrates, I exhale ghosts, memories.
II.
When I was eleven I electrocuted myself. I could not cry, but hoped somebody would forgive me.
I let myself spend hours, decades, staring into those eyes, holding time, memories.
I wasn’t cut, the sink was red, I could not stop crying. I read my arm like a story.
When I was six, I was so sick it was quiet and amber skies and you were holding my hand.
Memories of Memories
Teo Nouve
III.
Wrapped under stars, his skin was hot like my skin, my blood, like we’re both animals.
I slept in a stranger’s bed, my dreams were sweet, strapping myself down so as to not wake up.
There is too much beauty, my soul rubs raw. I cannot stare into her eyes begging for answers.
IV.
My notebooks are empty, I eat through days like an eraser, I am older now I think.
Bleeding time and space, bleeding love and pain, I am spilling out everywhere, I am memories of memories.
Views in Valparaiso
Noah Gocial
At the top, I am transported to a painting. My eyes descended the colored stairs surrounded by the colored houses—brilliant blue, shining yellow, scathing red, adorned with flowers and murals and graffiti and lightness—and made their way to the drab streets of Valparaiso. The difference between the cerros (hills) and the streets were clear: a portal where only one side’s sun blessed the vegetation, allowing our eyes to see—possibly for the first time—joy in form.
The cats are well-fed, are well-groomed, and lazily sleep in the sunny spots. Those artisans are smiling, creating handcrafted masterpieces that it is almost impossible to put in writing. We are so high that I can watch as birds sink below. Trains that grow up the sides of mountains, buildings that change the sun’s path. The blue ocean rises up and crashes on the rocky shore while the clear sky, dotted with birds, is captured only by the murals that display its elegance. Houses are scattered like rocks, fitting anywhere they can; their roofs are art painted in time. I smile.
The feeling is unlike anything I have witnessed before. The heat coats my skin as a blanket covers one from the dark; I feel it rise from my leg to my neck and it whispers in my ear that everything will be okay. It is my protector: with the sun, with the light, with the heat, with the sight. With everything comes fluidity that leads to ability, taking my hand and guiding me to life.
But as the sun slowly sets, the cold air is peaceful. The shadows, dancing against the light, normally push me further away from tranquility; but here, and only here, I welcome it. It is a space to truly understand where I am. There, here, then, and now. Changing temperature brings unease, maybe; but in this unease a sense of confident transience becomes apparent: I am among the air, wistful and something.
I walk, guided by my eyes, down the cerro. Through everything, I feel a palpable change. The walls are stained with graffiti. The streets are littered with filth. The color turns to rust. I look back up the hill, wondering if I could get back up. But I need to go, I can’t turn back. It’s not who I am. The cold recognizes my trapped body and becomes icicles which stab my skin. The sun is now gone. The cats are replaced by dogs that look sickly. The roads become open. The people wear frowns. They hold their phones close to their chest. Smiles die.
A sense of loneliness takes over my body. No, not loneliness. I love being alone: the trickle of thoughts that fastly fall when I realize an avalanche will hurt no one. No, this wasn’t being alone, it was isolation; it was forced, not desired. As now, when Valparaiso expands to show that there is more than just beauty—the birds! the sky! the sea! those roofs!—I put on a jacket.
Then I see someone walking towards me. He looks to be middle aged, sporting a black hat, black joggers, and a red shirt. A snarl is imprinted on his face, his eyes are darting straight ahead. I look around: wires above the streets, business behind bolted locks, gray roads matching the cloudy sky. There is no one else on this street. No signs of cars. I see a dog. Then a man appears at the bend of the street. No one else. I look behind me, wondering which way to go. Even with the jacket, the air still feels frozen.
The man gets closer and I see him look at me. I take a step back, afraid to turn my head. I hear the dog bark and feel a jab in my heart. I want to trust the beauty of this place, to keep the illusion. But my blood thickens with thoughts of danger. I quickly go back up the cerro, abandoning my determination. Everything slips off, and I wonder if it was ever who I was. I don’t look back. I am scared of going back to the bottom. I am scared of the streets and the dogs and the people. I am terrified of seeing what isolation looks like in a physical form. I want to return.
But no matter how much I chase it, the beauty of the sun has already set.
paper pushing
Andrew Gardner
He woke up alone in the house
His contract with his mother had expired, so did his contract with the dog
And the contract with the mailman He went to the corner store and his contract with them had expired too
No one served him
dead young girl
Andrew Gardner
A lot of young people are going to die
You can say you won’t be one
But you’d know that you’d be lying
A mislabeled package
Now she’s packed in the dirt
It wasn’t her fault
I died for a rounding error It really wasn’t her fault
A natural disaster can shake you right out of bed
See how quick your hometown can get sent to hell
A couple of Chris Kyles show up
And shoot you just for taking some bread
She was coming home to write that letter that she’d been meaning to write
The motorcycle flew out from underneath
And the worst part is all her ambitions went with her
No one makes a graveyard for all the dead pipe dreams
How are they supposed to know that they’re even lost
The executioner makes sure potential gets its tail clipped
Moon in the Window
Ava Stern
Welcome back, I’ve only Been waiting forever,
Twiddling my thumbs until They disintegrate.
Sometimes you dance across My eyelids at night
While curdled apologies sit Lump in the back of my throat.
Tonight, I bathe in the lavender moonlight, Looking at the same crater, Hopefully.
Unwritten
Abby Tredway
Everything is about you, yet I cannot bring myself to write.
The world’s greatest muse entangled with the world’s worst writer.
I cannot be untouched by your calloused hands. Callouses from before me and callouses because of me.
Everyone else will call us an unlikely pair, but we know our hearts.
Our souls are one, intertwined before our oldest ancestors graced this Earth.
And when we die, together of course, all that will remain is your radiant glow and a thousand unwritten poems.
Dream Journal
Ava Stern
A yellow butterfly visited me in my dream last night.
The Internet says it’s someone saying hello, but my roommate says it’s just because I saw one yesterday. My coworker says it’s because Mercury is in retrograde, although my mom says I need to go to bed earlier. My astrology app says “more power in your love life.” The nice girl sitting beside me in bio class says I am mourning summer and, of course, my little sister says I am delusional. That one book I read in the spring semester of sophomore year says I am heading towards a big change, shocker. My dad says I have to stop thinking about my dreams and study. My best friend sent me the song “happiness is a butterfly.” Fifteen-year-old me who wrote in her diary about dream theory says to look on Google, and my gut tells me it’s a sign.
First in Flight
Sydney Hsu
To Venus from Eve
Naomi Skiles
Venus Goddess of Beauty,
If I am a woman, why was I not made to look like you? If all the women on Earth are my daughters, then I have cursed them to a life of doubt and mental solitude.
If you are what a woman is meant to look like, then as the first why can’t I see myself in you? True damnation is the way we are subjugated to an idealistic view of a body that exists as an outfit residing solely on you.
I felt no shame when I was naked. I chose to know and my body grew visible. I chose to know and my goals and liberties were made flaccid. I chose to know and I broke my back serving my husband.
This is the fate of my daughters who are taught to be biblical.
I was made from the bones of man made from the soil of Eden. I did not look like you so I was taken hostage by the bones and land that formed me. I did not look like you so my love became a servitude to God’s brethren. I did not look like you so I was made to be soft spoken–“May all ignore her pleas.”
Eve.
Third Birthday
Kendra Papanek
brother takes my stuffed toy by the neck the soft one that talks has little to say i hear its plastic skeleton click as it chokes snapping its head helplessly it stares at me groaning and squealing out painful labored breaths whatever life it had is taken away though i’m not so sure it ever lived in the first place he thinks it’s funny.
departed velcro rips and tears i am too frightened to shed tears he plunges warm squirming digits between fuzzy membranes cold weak little bones brother Judas he wrenches something sinister free holds it high enough for God to see throbbing mechanical larynx oozing lint Pandora’s mouthpiece screams its tinny lament laugh-sings to me in a language i will never understand.
i climb wordless up filthy cellar stairs they and i bend and squeak and tremble together i come to mother what is it dear i claw at my throat cavernous as my eyes she embraces me. i tell her nothing.
forgiveness - for the most part
Tyler Davis
Content Warning Mentions drugs
change of scene, change of pace
men like you–addicted to the chase.
you’d be better off addicted to weed, meth, cocaine. at least those are self-destructive.
at least people would know to stay out of your way.
toxicology report came back! turns out you’re all bile and foam.
maybe they should just kill you! maybe then you’d leave me alone.
pray for me"
Tyler Davis
you ask. you’re joking, mostly. in need of a savior from some godawful party.
i don’t respond. i can’t, really.
the truth is, god has heard more than enough about you from me.
i am the soap opera he turns on whenever he’s feeling feisty pulls aside the cumulonimbus to peer down at us, technically,
although those beady eyes of his always manage to find me;
on my knees, peering up at him, laughing at my own godawful comedy.
Someone's Pockets
Aidan Deneen
When you go to the bar, look for me on the shelf
Playing a sad guitar, I’ll be there by myself
I’d be your cameraman, the Jack to your Diane
Your pockets and hand warmer, I’m just around the corner
If you see this, come find me
I’m ready for my person
The road is slow and windy
So I’ll stay until the curtains
I’ve got a life to share
I’m saving a chair
And saying a prayer
For someone to fill these pockets.
Nostalgia Cradles
Jayden Caterina
I’m scared no one will ever have my heart the way nostalgia cradles it as things come to an end. That no lover can compare to the way I see my hometown streets from the passenger seat of a beat-up minivan with a CD in the player. Driving lap after lap past my house because no one’s ready for the night to end, just one more song, one more sentence, because we’re growing up and soon there’ll be no more laps to take. I’m worried that I’m so reluctant to let go that I won’t be able to fit the future in between all of the past I hold so dearly.
What if I never miss someone else the way I miss my best friend on a rainy day?
I know one day I’ll move on and realize these memories have faded to the bottom of my heart, not gone, but foggy as my windshield on the last day I drove through this town. But right now I’m worried no one else will ever have my heart the way nostalgia cradles it and the way I wish you were in my passenger seat with your CD in the player.
mango green mango grandma smothers me with tight-lipped smiles bitter from longing.
coconut plucked early from home, father floats in knee-deep rain, sixteen, seeking land.
Julia Wirths
Julia Wirths '
mang cut
Julia Wirths
mangosteen
small, scarlet-stained hands feed four mouths with fulfillment, worth every moment.
Tornado Warnings
Katie Hamilton
There’s nothing more intimate than tornado warnings, Your hands in my hair as we sit in the basement, The sounds of whisperings of fragmented prayers and I love yous Competing with the local news channel’s meteorologist’s voice.
I don’t particularly care that we didn’t have time to clean up the kitchen Or that I had to leave our dishes in the sink when I said I’d get them washed before dessert, Because the only thing I particularly care about is you holding me when the sirens go off.
There’s nothing more intimate than the sound of the power going out, Looking at each other through dancing flames from the emergency stash of candles; My fingers can’t catch on the lighter, hands too sweaty with anxiety to produce a flame, But you aren’t afraid of matches, and I’m not afraid of letting you burn me.
I don’t particularly care if the roof caved in on us now Or if the roaring winds of a twister carried us out of Nebraska and into Oz, Because the only thing I particularly care about is you next to me in the dark.
Dancing for the Dishes
Katie Hamilton
I want to slow dance with you in the kitchen, Drunk on church wine, In love enough to steady each other so we won’t stumble in the dark; In love enough to not notice when I step on your toes as I lose my balance.
I want to memorize every single detail of your body as you wrap your arms around my neck and sway to the buzzing of the refrigerator, And I want you to keep your eyes on me as we dance for the dishes While the peeling yellow wallpaper watches, Never taking our clumsiness too seriously.
I can see us being the ones who last, Turning our domestic choreography Into a wedding first dance While everyone we love watches, drunk on champagne.
But that’s the catch, isn’t it— I can have you behind closed doors and in the quiet, But you won’t have me any other way, So I stopped keeping the eight count and Following your lead blindly.
So, after you leave me, I want you to remember that I loved you enough to create music to move to when there was silence, And I trusted you enough not to let me fall and break my heart, As I bared my soul for you Stepping on the linoleum floors, Dancing in the kitchen.
magnetic mortuaries, i stopped listening to basketball shoes to gouge your eyes out, pinky swear, i wonder how long,
Ella Forsyth
all full up
i have been reading about desiring machines: magnetic mortuaries for the self outside i. you told me my body is an overheated factory fortunate enough to nod off for disempowered outlets. i answer by offering restitution to the opalescent man god. my tenderness is secured by an unfortunate remission that writes home when all is frozen and inconsumable. my mind is buzzing with parsimonious cravings for metaphysical demise; what could satiate the pounding vexation that pours over my minor reflection?
last songs and leftovers loiter watching time lapse on the cushioned ledge. i am clawing and clinging at starving skin. becoming a rubber banded system of metal heartstrings, i pour between balconies. here we come, windowless flight; my body falls through canopies of tongue and teach me. the asphalt below is shaped by hands full of want fighting for a body filled with earth settling for father and child. life letters of shade and shadow stick me together into one mostly sunny giant. i am crying to be opened by an electric can opener, preferably one invented before 1931. wrought iron flowers for you and me and the dead.
once called to live as a wounded man blood pouring backwards, i am learning about my insides out.
i stopped listening to basketball shoes to gouge your eyes out a violent act i typically wouldn’t designate utterable but i am feeling emboldened tonight by a particular ache that washed over me when my yellow didn’t saturate your skin i promised myself i made peace with the unrelenting burn for reciprocity pinkies and all i am fingerless confined to mouth makers and a recommendation algorithm that refuses to release your covetousness as i tell this story of unrequited innocence i wonder if you will ever willingly hold an exhibition for truthful scarcity: an inventor’s inventory the body i wear no longer unwillingly dirty somehow your stained skin
cleaned me with particles of a portrait pictured are my most insufferable fibers disassembled old friends i admitted how you torture me today i am not sure they saw the good pain
incessantly melting between the couch cushions something about bug eyes burned through my reason i engraved a detailed chronology waiting for our next addition i explicitly write about your tenderness sealing myself to words of rage and admiration to carefully document
i know you don’t think about me like that but that is why i am required to narrate maybe one day the world i carry pridefully across the blade will be consumed graciously i want to swallow you i don’t think you know how bad i am
i promise to keep your dreams packaged in my primal scream so long as the bus doesn’t stand me up today the cessation i cradle indoctrinates revenged throats and metal fingers firmly gripping my planted base you congratulate the body with wise chords you hailed laudable my primordial displacement predicated circuitous sleep sun spilling onto my sheets i rest my heavy ears on the edge of discovery
patiently awaiting your textual analysis of my softness a handler of the infinitely fragile and dismantler of the tenacious i was tenderly descended into wide eyed rage i invite you to learn that anger hailed a symptom of mouth breathing clothespinned lip fantasies package the knitted top and bottom affirming my congruous desire to be stationed my seams are bursting with sweetness
but i rip with the feet pounding across my 7 broken parts to find the homeliness of collapse an effigy of emptiness that never ceases to disassemble the shake our hug falls into a weaving of cells prohibited from losing contact i keep finding your wrist extended from the my cervical and i am falling back into the hand again i trust knows me the least i am comforted by your hunch hiding behind me i wrap my backspace with the words my mom taught me consumed absence and you perform our mixtape emerging confused and dripping sunglasses roosted on your small head i state after a long night of giggles and coughing this is most certainly a mistake lots of hands can’t fix but the questions you asked me tonight filled my composition with syrup viscous bones perched on the spine my hunger for a pine rocks me to sleep wrapped around the shins of a gardener who’s stench i find embracing my eyes meet destruction and weep a journey of generative consumption i wonder how long my hands will ruminate on their medicinal satisfaction waiting for distance enough i search for my handles saturated in royal blue investment controversy shot out of your appliances built to spill across the bowl that sits between left and right i thought we agreed your newfound love for prodigious landscapes was tentative a greased infatuation with the dying ridges pasting my palms to ordination i never came close to exalting the good morning dog properly play with me i am enveloped by the environmental prowess of a weeping man i aspire to house him just below the ledge to study his archival footage sorting through the tragedy of our uncouth conscience if i were to hold the limbs of a scorched pet pried from below my pointer’s bed i hope you would arrive with teeth and tongue the jester of depravity for exposed ribs
bound by thick slabs of history i wear maps of linear heritage posterity yearns for an unraveling relentlessly bowed to enclosure the lamp’s grip on my fragile settlement embodies the practice i buried a stampede of extended fingers reach for my most flummoxed parts i hope to absorb her one day consummated with a disposal of my metal clemency
i asked my mom about love and she told me she was all full up her despotic bartending bought her a lifetime of bastard babies and an urn engraved with wilde’s wisdom for their father so i am floored by her enamored exposition. after 10 dollars and some change, their overtly tragic conclusion doesn’t tamper with her resounding commitment to her moon and all the stars. this is an optimistic depiction of love lost and yet it feels wholly adequate her grief is cradled by a loop of anti-entropy. refurnishing our world with paternal passion, his absence a shape she taught us to draw eyes shut. we cling to bright glitches of this white house where a mason made us whole again i wonder if my love has ever been that naked
Jazz
Eliza Silletto
Patience can kill you, Wait long enough and you die. You molded me into the shape of your home, Is my name still attached to something living?
But now I’m sitting in my mother’s kitchen, Listening to her feet like jazz And reading a poem in a book my sister gave me about love, She told me it was good and I guess she’d know
And underneath it all I’m still feeling that ouroboros hunger That grounds my soul like a plane crash And I can only watch, forest-fire-bystander stone-cold As the widening gyre imposes and grows, And I know now that insecurity has only ever smothered the spark of revolution, So you can call my music noise if you want, I don’t care, I know it’s a joyful one
There’s a smell to spring in the northeast, A sweetness in the chill that portends the change, And like the curve of my jaw against your hand, The path ahead is well-traveled
You responded to bad news the same way every time: Blink twice and hang up
And I swear I could hear the imagined sound of tears running down cheeks That revolting feeling of worry rising from within; I Thought I had cut that out with the brain tumor last spring, I tried to wipe away the tears but the grief won’t budge
I will always love you Or at least, I will always have loved you now.
The Tongue That Feeds
Emma DiValentino
Bite the tongue that feeds the way blood comforts as it seeps through teeth. Don’t say that. Don’t do that.
Memorizing the way atrophied muscle slumps like a musician practices scales to properly carry the music. Here, only silence, minced words. I place my tongue on a chopping board to be severed and diced, to be burned clean in a chef’s hands to aid their swallowing.
God, do you listen to your voicemails?
Jamie Kula
i.
God, do you listen to your voicemails? Do you let them fester in your inbox until they burn out like digital dust? ii.
God, there are things I’m scared to say out loud. Are my pleas just background noise like sitcom television while you cook dinner?
iii.
iv.
v.
God, would you listen to my breathing for 3 minutes while I try to pry words from my teeth? I’ll leave my name and number in case you ever want to get back to me. I wait for the tone.
God, I am a lover in a soldier body, soft flesh under hard armor. The battlefield of my hips, no man’s land between my thighs. I am a defensive player.
God, I’m so wrung out. I exist only to serve you. And if I fail… Well, I will not fail.
vi.
vii.
God, I wait by your door like a dog, pathetic and whimpering. You love me like a dog, in the way you could never love me like a man. Please let me sit at your feet.
God, please. I only hope to bathe in your warmth. It’s so cold out here. I’m a man, I swear it.
ix.
Love me like a man.
I crave blood under the moonlight. I pick the flesh from my teeth.
I bruise and break. Love me like a man.
I wait for the tone. God, I want peace. God, I want to go home, to lie in my lover’s bed, not in the emptiness of bone.
From The Inside
When I was a child, the trees began to die. Their bodies soured from the inside and dropped their desiccated limbs. “The trees are infected,” my grandmother said. I sat beneath my weeping willow. “Not you,” I told her. “You’ll be here forever.” Years after moving away, I returned to find a rotted stump in her place. Nothing was left of the tree whose hair I used to braid. I stretched out on a rock warmed by the sun’s rays. I wondered if he, too, missed the touch of the willow’s shade.
Emma DiValentino
how to eat sunlight
McKenna Casey
Content Warning
Disordered eating
1.
First, it has to be summer.
2.
The second step is to starve yourself. This is easy because you don’t have to do anything at all, just let it slide. The world spins but it feels like falling asleep, and the hunger gnaws but it’s just a lovebite, a familiar ache–the pain is mostly in the body, you see. Blink the spots away.
(Photosynthesis is the process by which plants use sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to create oxygen and energy in the form of sugar. You are not a plant. This is not step three.)
3.
It is important to recognize that when you open your mouth it makes things worse. It is important to recognize that you have a sweet tooth that will kill you and you can’t take the heat. It is important to floss every day. It is polite to swallow, and less of a mess. It is important to mention your allergies before ordering so they can inform the chef. It is polite to finish the plate because someone somewhere is starving. It is important to not let food go to waste. It is important to not let yourself go to waste, and if you must, to do it somewhere else. Step three is to eat sunlight and pretend it fills you up.
Sticks
Oread Frias
We come apart too easily. I dissolve under you, down to white stone. You peel my softness away. God, they can’t see me like this; the work is incomplete. I was not built for it, or so they say. What mighty twigs they left in us! Groaning lumber at the base with a brick foundation. Well, look how it crumbles now. Rumbling grinding joy in the wet places. It snaps, destabilizes bone, crumble-cracks me into slush. Your words unmake me. Yes, the softest gaze undoes us.
The End of Something Obsessive
Naomi Skiles
It will never be the end of us, but it’s the end of something obsessive. I’m now obsessed with the sea and the sun and I see you nowhere within it. I picture your form, sparkly and tailed, somewhere beneath this surface. The speckled white sun reflected on the aquamarine ripples disperse into a seafoam at my feet. Your hand might break through this surface, the water parting for your gentle fingers. Your body might depart from the water, salt droplets would wick off the sides of your hips, and your auburn locks would curl in an instant. You look like the Birth of Venus, if she had a tail. You do not leave the water, and if you had you’d no longer be able to meet my eyes as you did when you could stand tall on your two feet. You’ve swam away, I know that’s true and at the depths of the sea a whole world waits for you. To meet me here would be suffocating. So I stare out at the sea and lay in the sun and collect pieces of glass that you have softened. I know that the sea is yours and that can never be forgotten. I come here to say goodbye to what once was all encompassing. And as the sun shines down on my cherried face, salty droplets float through the wind and land nowhere else but my lips. What a lovely treat it is to taste your memory in the air, to hold your eyes in my stare with the glass in my clutch and your sparkle under my sun that has reached the surface of the sea you have escaped to the bottom of.
I am a friend to
Natalie Hausmann
I am a friend to the half moon above me. To the space in between clouds and stars and birds and planes. To hangnails and stomach aches and headaches and a terribly bruised toenail on my right foot. To four leaf clovers but the fourth leaf is just the third leaf broken in half. To ashtrays, blueberry muffins, knuckle cracking, cliche doodles and probably writing too. To bad haircuts from good people and good people with absolutely horrendous haircuts. To sidewalks. To the worms that slither in between the cracks following a storm. To the dirt underneath the sidewalk, the cracks, the worms, and the storm. To the last bite of a PB&J, warm laundry fresh out of the dryer, damp pockets of pants which didn’t quite dry in the dryer. To weeds masquerading as flowers, to picnic blankets, to sweet-smelling nights and the sweet, sweet, nearly crescent moon that bends toward space and Earth.
Splitting pain
Elliot Zeman
When I had growing pains as a child, And I would writhe in bed, tying knots in the sheets, My dad told me that he would take on the pain if he could. He said if there was a morphine button he could press, He would stay up all night clicking it for me.
If there was some sort of machine or electrical nodes That could transfer the pain to him, he would do it, So I could sleep soundly.
I told him, if this process exists, That we could split it, Or maybe he could even just take 10%.
When I was born, They placed me bare on a steel table, And my dad announced to the operating room, “The baby’s cold!” as I shivered into my new reality, Much brighter and colder than before. He broke the sterile silence in order to let it be known, That his child was cold.
I would grow up to experience pain that couldn’t be solved by advil and well-wishes, That can’t be penetrated with a magical machine, But I always knew that if I was ever 7 again in bed with growing pains, He would take them away for me.
Now, I search for the person that would be willing to take 5% of my headache, Maybe 2.5%
If you could, would you take 1% of my pain?
I have this dream
McKenna Casey
I have this dream my whole family is in a room and we all pick up instruments. We play together and I shake an egg or a tambourine and nobody’s unloved by anyone else. What a lovely song that nearly existed under the grainy lowlight lamp of my memory, my whole family in a room.
Long Distance
Julia Wirths
Seal me in a letter and send me by truck, By plane, By boat,
I am only a folded note, Ink-blotch hope, The memory of cramped fingers clasped Around a ballpoint pen.
When will I see you again? If the answer isn’t easy on the ears, Why did I ask the question? I should learn to keep my mouth shut, I should learn to keep my heart locked To those who knock Yet cannot stay.
Seal me in a box and mail me to your door, After all, what are friends for If not a shoulder, a crutch, support— Our strength is tested by how many postage stamps Are stuck to my forehead, How many tons of jet fuel we belch into the atmosphere For the privilege of a single hug.
I pillage clocks and watches and hourglasses, I am the pirate of days and nights, I will the Earth to turn faster than it should, I will another birthday to come and go, Just so I can see you for two weeks that evaporate Like rain on summer pavement.
A blessing, a curse, You decide which is worse: We’re buried on distant continents, half-suffocating ‘neath the earth, The weight of missing you is worth The waning confidence in my ability to crawl out of this grave One more time
To see you face-to-face, To link arms and skip down slippery sidewalks, Heedless of staring eyes and the ocean between us.
Kintsugi
We are shattered clay
Painstakingly made
Broken by their hands
One relationship
Left scars and jagged edges
Askew on the leaves
One relationship
Took scars and jagged edges
From the foliage
We were shattered clay
Painstakingly made
Whole with our own gold
Aidan Deneen
Icarus
Teo Nouve
Tonight is half-empty night, see each thing, indistinct. Swimming through mud-water, half-concrete in my face.
Weighted sound of tires and rain pulls brains into bodies. A strange space above the sky calls out, like an animal.
I catch the light as it falls, flying to my eyes. He stands there with me, in shadows he smiles.
Bear the elements, let the earth wash over us. It will take us apart, filling up our lungs.
Conjure our history, without sight or sound. Time does not have words for us, we pass through ourselves.
I forget the ground and become infinite. I see only white, I feel no pain.
Machine hits body straight through asphalt. Bone breaks clean, the flesh opens into soul.
The rain stops falling, glancing over my Icarus, he takes flight into the dawn unstirred, unscathed.
Lazarus
Jamie Kula
Collapsed on the ground like the earth will swallow me up, flies swarm around my twitching ears, but I am not dead yet.
If I were a poor, broken lamb, I would have already been led to slaughter, hand over my eyes as He whispers sweet things to me.
He would be so gentle, sharp knife against my neck, hot blood against cool soil. The spring wind would feel like peace against my torn vocal cords.
He would tell me I was good.
But humanity is an unkind fate.
They will not let me die, no matter how much I pray to the great farmer in the sky. He will not run His fingers through my soft curls, will not cover my wanting eyes.
He will taunt the cold press of barrel against my skull.
Laugh and laugh, punishment for being bad. For wanting more than I can carry on my back, more than what has been graciously offered to me.
He will tug at my scalp, make me watch the roadkill-eating maggots. Again and again, I am tugged away from the earth, small patches of dead grass where my knees were planted.
Again and again, I collapse into unwelcoming hands.
I am soft with moss, but I am not dead yet.
Mushrooms peek out from my exposed ribs, but I am not dead yet.
I am a poor lamb named Lazarus, again and again. I am not dead yet.
The Elf
(After William Goscombe John’s ‘The Elf’)
Margaret Troast
Come in, close— Closer.
Unearth me without restraint, craft me in your image, and let us see what burrows underneath. Under this muddy crust, under me, under you, under us. Where we may link hands, dance in a dying fire. See the flicker of flames—
See, how the worm will turn. See, and learn to crawl (listen, can you hear the Earth turn?)
To scrape and scratch your knees across the beaten floor; How to breathe when breath is cast in stone and breath is just out of reach.
I wonder: was there any hope for me?
Dive in, crawl deep Find me, the changeling—the worm, we creatures of dirt.
The Spider
Hope Jorgensen
It was no longer childhood: Our house had a front door And a broken furnace
With a spider in the corner Who watches and chews flies and Remains silent.
There is a barren kitchen: Scattered chinese takeout boxes
Picked clean like bones We crave and crave and crave I envy the spider And her home.
In the open field I imagine the truth of me, not spread around but rather inside like bones.
In warm silence, soft glow enters, I feel my soul shaking, hungry for more life.
I walk in the street because it is empty. I am empty and so are the cars that pass.
The noise dies, the colors dissolve, and if I close my mouth the grass will speak to me.
I grow worn of humans, racing towards their freedom, or toward each other like bullets. I move like clouds move.
I sit in the empty street, snow falls on my back, playing strings, strumming, melting into suns, stars.
I skip stones across river, holy water reflecting light. I watch a leaf float down stream with specks of rainbow.
I forget all my love in the morning, I watch his or her lips move, I can’t hear a word, I hear only blue.
I wash my body off (the flesh is not mine). Shards of white fly into space, like dying forever.
The sky does not storm for us, the fruit does not grow for us, the earth is not our mother. In my loneliness, I sing.
In My Loneliness, I Sing
Teo Nouve
Bilingualism
Isa Serra
When one is learning a new language
You use your eyes to hear and your ears to see
Words become separados y no puede understand
Exactly what they mean
But you can see a word hanging above tu cabeza mientras
Los otros slip away from you
Because they speak too fast o tu entiendes demasiado despacio
And all you see are words swirling
Swirling
Until you hear the phrase again
But this time you use your ears to make a picture de lo que podrían significar
Mañana means tomorrow but it also means morning
Okay.
Did they say the sentence in past tense or future tense?
Were they smiling y hablando con jubilación
O are they tired of having to repeat themselves?
If 70% of communication is nonverbal then
Debes use tu ears ver y your ojos to hear
AGAINST DEATH (BY POISON)
Kyle Dargan
Sugar would do, but I begin with honey again. Then warm water. Then borax. I proof the cocktail with one night’s worth of moonlight, then the ants come giddily (to die). Nature has a rule of tongue–that what is sweet will not kill, and for extermination’s sake, I exploit this.
How I used to think myself savvy. How now I never again want to kill something else by feeding it.
I would watch the ants usher their kin towards my small speakeasies and think fools. But I never embraced ignorance as a fair reason to die. These traps more ignoble than nerve gas or neurotoxins or plutonium–poisons tucked into tasty pockets nature has assured never needed checking. The ants never stop trusting the sweetness. No matter how many times I corrupt it. There is no know-better to them. There is no fair choice before the trap. Whatever duet conniving and wrath dance, this spinning is no more than that.
FOR ALL MY DOGS
Kyle Dargan
When I trace my canines with my tongue, I am thankful that the gift of them survived–delivered to my mouth by evolution’s entrust. Something in me is sharp–sharp by design. When I open my jaw, these four teeth mark the corners of a doorway. I was never made for hiding inside the room of my maw. Its closed door, and behind it, I am the growl that attests that there is my love inside, and peace inside. There is ancestry, and I will shred the flesh and fabric of who or what lurks before this door, testing the deadlatch, deluded that they won’t pay blood for any intent to intrude.
faculty contributions
Skin, Smoke, and Stars
Rhonda Zimlich
Mom putters around the fire adding bits of kindling and straw from the dried grasses that punctuate the dunes. Tonight, the wind has abated so the smoke reaches directly up to the zenith of stars above us. For the last two nights, the smoke followed me around the campfire, burning my eyes and lungs each time I settled in a new spot. But not tonight. Tonight, only Mom is transient, flitting within our glowing circle on the desert sand, so far from anything tame.
My dad sits in his lawn chair like a king! He wields his bong like a turkey leg in his fist. He pulls it toward his mouth, sucking the smoke into the cylinder with magic breath and flame. The gathering smoke looks more solid than gas, as it accumulates behind the blue glass then disappears as soon as he clears the carburetor. The king’s heirs, all four of us, watch this action with great curiosity and I wonder if I am the only one who knows this is illegal. What a scandal I would face back at my elementary school if my dad was arrested by who he calls “the man.” What if he were taken away to live a life behind bars?
This thought returns my attention to Mom still putzing around the fire, unable to settle. She never takes the bong but will, occasionally, instead smoke from a slender twist of paper they call “a joint.” I’ve seen her craft this homemade cigarette with deft precision and skill. It is no wonder my two older siblings, Lisa and Kim, also display such precision as they peel the tissue-paper layers of skin from each other’s yesterday-sun-burnt shoulders. All around the campfire, our flaking skin molts in sheets, much like the desert gecko or even the tarantula who leaves behind her shelled shadow as she outgrows herself.
Though my sisters are older, they are not much older than me. We are one year apart in age, us three, often described by grinning relatives as “Irish triplets” or our parents’ “busy time.” I am called “the baby,” though I am not the youngest of my siblings; my brother is younger by three years, but he is a boy. He sits near the campfire in his walker, a metal contraption that allows him to sit up and toddle around (though not too far) or else slump over and sleep in his wet diaper. From across the fire ring, I see his baby shoulders, the skin flaking and soft in the warm firelight. I want to engage with him, with his skin, the way my sisters do with each other. I want to groom him and pluck him clean, extract the loose layer of his healing skin, his own exoskeleton coming off in small sheets, mimic my sisters the way they preen each other. This act reminds me of Wild Kingdom on T.V., the monkeys in their grooming clusters. How deftly they remove small parasites from one another. This family is just like that, I think. We are wild monkeys in the jungle, far removed from our tame neighbors with their clean kitchens and smoke-free lives.
faculty contributions
At home, we have a jungle in our garage. Enormous pot plants grow hydroponically in buckets of water and fertilizer. They stretch above my head toward the rafters strewn with lights. Our giant dogs lap the water in buckets like wild animals to a watering hole. I taste the water, too, then put my face down and pull up a mouthful from its surface. My sisters tell me it’s poison and I know they’re right; it tastes like poison, tastes like chemicals, and it burns my throat when I swallow. But I love our big doggos, and I want to be more like them, wild and silly, finding their satisfaction wherever they please. So, I drink more.
I’m not sure why I think about these wild dogs and jungle plants in my garage at home as I sit by the fire, but I follow the thought all the way to the submerged roots green with algae as the king exhales a cloud that becomes the breath of god. His breath mixes with the smoke stretching up to the zenith and I follow its path as it leaves.
Mom finally settles near me. Her fingertips trace the loose skin of my sunburned shoulders. She lightly scratches the edge of a swatch of skin. Before I can fully turn, she has pinched the tissue paper of me and pulls straight up. I hear a sound like duct tape from the roll; it fills my left ear. But this is not a painful sensation. Instead, I feel comforted with the low itch of this action climbing along my shoulder blade. In this way, I know that she loves me. I know, too, that she needs to be near me the same way the wild monkeys need to be near each other. When I turn to watch her face, I see her gentle expression gleaming in the firelight. I catch the expertise in her eyes, not so much in the skill of her handling my loose skin the same way she deftly handles the Zigzag paper of a joint, but more in the expertise of how she has become a mother without training or practice, a mother of four by the time she is twenty-three. I sit back into her legs and allow her hands to continue.
Across the ring of firelight, my sisters giggle. They show-and-tell bits of removed skin before they flick it into the night; their eyes shine with laughter. My baby brother stirs from his walker, coming back from his upright dream of baby things. His languid eyes drift around to locate each of us, taking stock, checking in. Dad lights the bong again and I hear its gurgle low and purring. Mom pulls strips of my tissue skin as I lean my head back and shut my eyes, just after I follow the path of smoke upward.
Masthead
EDITORS IN CHIEF
McKenna Casey
Sydney Hsu
CREATIVE DIRECTORS
Abby St. Jean
Kendall Spink
COPY EDITORS
Ruth Odin
Hope Jorgensen
ART EDITORS
Teo Nouve
Ani Costa
PHOTOGRAPHY EDITORS
Charlotte Van Schaack
Tyler Davis
POETRY EDITORS
Abby Tredway
Thomas Weaverling
PROSE EDITORS
Ava Stern
Jamie Kula
BLOG EDITORS
Julietta Orciuoli
Peyton Dortch
EVENTS COORDINATOR
Emma DiValentino
SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATOR
Lex Berman
Masthead
DESIGN ASSISTANTS
Mira Liu
Grace Hill
Dania Reza
COPY ASSISTANTS
Arin Burrell
Abigail Weidenfeller
Charlie Mennuti
ART ASSISTANTS
Sophy Zhao
Dylan Schwartz
PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANTS
Kendra Papanek
Andres Jara Romero
POETRY ASSISTANTS
Tara Parsa
Maggie Melnik
Katie Hamilton
PROSE ASSISTANTS
Stevie D. Rosenfeld
Cristopher Ramnath
BLOG ASSISTANTS
Owen Belamaric
Alexandra Valdez
Meet the Artists
Abby Tredway is a gem!
Aidan Deneen is a senior from Connecticut majoring in biology. After graduating, he plans to pursue a Ph.D. in plant biology. Aside from writing poetry, Aidan plays on two soccer teams, lifts, and works in the community garden.
Aiden McPhillips is currently thinking about resurrection, but like, in a cool and interesting way that no one has probably thought of before. Their version of being resurrected would be really epic with a sick soundtrack and thoughtful commentary on being trans.
Alicia Zelmanovitz is a Literature, Creative Writing, and Cinema student. She’s currently working on anime/manga video essays and creating a website for her short stories. More information can be found through @azelmawrites on Youtube and Instagram.
Andrew Gardner is a student of philosophy and audio.
Ava Stern is behind you. Yeah you.
Ben Ackman is a sophomore studying Economics and Photography from Jersey City, New Jersey. He enjoys writing, reading, and working out. You can find his work at benackman.com.
Cassidy Hemmers is from a small town in Germany. She started reading and traveling to get far away from this home, and now she writes with the hope of creating a new one.
Charlotte Van Schaack is a writer, not an artist. They don’t even know what a camera looks like. You can find her art and photography in the Fall 2024 AmLit Magazine.
Clair Sapilewski loves mountains, clouds, and brie. She believes she would make an excellent Hobbit. Eliza Silletto is smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold water flats, floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz...
Emerson Katz (she/her) is a sophomore pursuing a major in Justice and Law, complemented by minors in German Language and Communications. With a passion for capturing the nuances of daily life, she has been using film and digital photography since childhood. Emerson is eager to blend her artistic vision with her academic pursuits to make a meaningful impact.
Emily Rhodes is a junior Literature major from Pennsylvania. Her poetry has appeared in local and national publications including Pittsburgh’s Ralph Munn Creative Writing Anthology and the magazine Persephone’s Daughters. She collects books and knits in her spare time. This is her first AU publication.
Emma DiValentino is on the 14th step of her 20 step plan to descend into madness.
Gianna Piroso is a freshman majoring in Communications. Her notes app is littered with poems that will never see the light of day, but somehow one managed to escape into this magazine??
Hope Jorgensen can usually be found gazing wistfully out windows. When not preoccupied with this, they’ve been know to write.
Jamie Kula is God’s little puppet, strings stretching up to heaven.
Julia Kane is a senior Art History major whose hobbies include napping, yapping, and junk journaling.
Julia Weisenberg is an aspiring writer from the Philadelphia area. She tends to write historically set short stories with a focus on World War II and human connection. Her writing has previously been published by Blue Marble Review, Consequence Forum, and Bridge Ink
Julia Wirths is smiling and nodding.
Kathryn Squyres is probably lost in a museum or a park somewhere.
Katie Hamilton is a sophomore with a major in SIS and Law minor. She likes to write, watch Marvel movies, and drink coffee.
Kendra Papanek is a sophomore at AU and enjoys writing poetry about the feminist, the divine, the mundane, and the mechanical. She’s probably somewhere right now sipping from her water bottle and getting drugstore lip gloss all over the straw.
Maggie Melnik is a photographer and writer who loves to explore the beauty of the body and mind. She believes that a medium should not define art.
Margaret Troast is a senior citizen who loves talking at her TV. She has been writing for an amount of time, with a glint in her eye and a click of her heels she injects magic into her prose. Her poetry’s OK too.
McKenna Casey is like if a girl was a beam of light.
Naomi Skiles is a senior studying Anthropology and Creative Writing who seriously cannot stop baking and longing to be a witch.
Natalie Hausmann is from Buffalo, New York and she is currently a junior studying Political Science and journalism. Natalie loves dancing with her friends, exploring hiking trails, and reading.
An aspiring photographer and writer, Noah Gocial adores capturing small moments in a unique way. Oread Frias writes to escape the dream.
Quinn Volpe is a musician and songwriter studying Journalism.
Riley Wells is a junior studying History and Political Science with a minor in Russian. He recently founded AU’s first historical review journal and also spent time in student government and AmeriMUNC. He loves Star Wars, reading, and spending time with his friends. He is from Bristol, Vermont.
Silia Dimasi (she/her) spends her time at AU trying convince others that dance and international relations should be studied together. With that said, she has more fun dreaming of hiking trips with her future cat, fishstix.
Sophy Zhao is currently a freshman at AU who enjoys photography, writing poetry and flash fiction, and is trying to write more short stories. Much of her inspiration comes from observing the world around her, specifically when it comes to family and nature. She hopes to one day write for the big screens! :)
Sydney Hsu has finally received a PPAP (AmLit’s EGOT). She can die happy.
Teo Nouve is a body, a friend, (a quiet call), a dumb idea, a heavy book full of ink and dog-eared corners.
Tyler Davis is a longtime writer, even longer time self-critic. A journalist as well as a poet, they suffer a love/hate relationship with the Oxford comma. You can find them on Twitter (X) @tylerrdavis_
Abby St Jean can’t talk about anything other than her cat Louis.
Abby Tredway is becoming her 53-year-old dad at the ripe age of 19.
Abigail Weidenfeller is a freshman Literature major who does not know what she wants.
Alexandra Valdez is an extremely caffeine-addicted freshman in the SIS Global Scholars program who wants nothing more than to get a dog for her dorm, spend all her time traveling and photographing the world, and use all her free nights to bake while listening to The Weeknd or watching Netflix.
Andres Jara Romero is a photographer and first year Film major.
Ani Costa is an intense and deep lover of chai tea lattes, the sun, cats, and the magic of words. <3
Arin Burrell is probably in a corner right now reading another gothic or horror novel.
Ava Stern sleeps with her book under her pillow in hopes she will sleep-read.
Charlie Mennuti is a senior studying Literature, or something.
Charlotte Van Schaack has not seen sunlight in years.
Cris Ramnath is a freshman majoring in Creative Writing and Philosophy, and can be found loitering around the Bridge or working there!
Dania Reza is a freshman who firmly believes that naps are an art form and that cats are superior beings.
Dylan Schwartz !
Emma DiValentino is begging the men of the Literature department to stop using AI.
Grace Hill is convinced she can speak French after 3 Jacqueline Taieb songs. (She can’t.)
Hope Jorgensen once had a debilitating Chapstick addiction. You have been warned.
Jamie Kula wishes they had more time in their day to make little hats for bees, like top hats and baseball caps.
Julietta Orciuoli !
Katie Hamilton is a sophomore in SIS and law. She loves coffee, creative writing, and cats. You can find her studying in the Dav or exploring DC with friends on the weekend.
Kendall Spink is still searching for the best hot chocolate in DC.
Kendra Papanek is an avid patron of the AU Library. During the day she can often be found reading or writing poetry at one of the big tables on the second floor, and at night she hides away in one of the janitorial closets to sleep in the sink. Please don’t tell Housing & Residence Life.
Meet the Staff
Lex Berman is still waiting for the Great Pumpkin.
Maggie Melnik is procrastinating by going on Pinterest.
McKenna Casey knows where the Holy Grail is, but won’t tell you.
Mira Liu is known to have an endless playlist for every situation. They’re usually found editing photos, finding new fonts, or picking out the next place to explore, all while sipping on their third cup of coffee.
Owen A. Belamaric is the kind of man who quotes himself: “better to be modestly arrogant than arrogantly modest.”
Peyton K. Dortch is a senior studying Philosophy and Literature but cannot give you a solid definition of either.
Ruth Odin is growing, growing, growing.
Sophy Zhao loves writing creatively, listening to music, taking photos, karaoke, and watching movies with friends! She thanks you for reading her works. :D
Stevie Rosenfeld is a Journalism major doing her best. She loves reviewing niche media a little too much.
Sydney Hsu is looking forward to her retirement upstate where she’ll reunite with her childhood dog.
Tara Parsa is a second year student studying Political Science and can be found reading or writing somewhere under a tree.
Teo Nouve is proud to receive the honor of furiously and endlessly searching for the right words.
Thomas Weaverling will always find a way to tell you that the imperfect is our paradise.
Tyler Davis has a truly disgusting amount of tabs open and an affinity for cycling through them like a tiger in a cage. They’re also a junior studying Journalism and Literature if you must know, you nosy freak.