BAA's Literary & Arts Magazine: February/March 2023

THE CARDINAL THE CARDINAL

Hi everyone! We are honoured to present to you the February/March issue of our magazine! Thank you to all of our creative contributors, and to our dedicated teacher moderator, Ms. Conroy. Happy Spring!

-Jenna, Nina, Sophia, Erica

(Executive Team)

Loop by Zephyr (page 1)

Leech by Anonymous (page 9)

The Lavender Field by Anonymous (page 13)

The Wonderful Nature of Spring by Pietra Melo (page 15)

TABLE OF CONTENTS POETRY ART

Cover Photography by Jenna Kim

Save the Bees, Save the Planet by Angela Budz (page 2)

Drowning by Daryna Tkach (page 4)

Pomegranate by Emily Neto (page 6)

Mirrorball by Katie Kim (page 8)

Road Runner by Jeremy Maccarone (page 10)

Night Lifters by William Litwin (page 12)

Friends by Emily Neto (page 14)

Under the Moon by Daniil Sannikov (page 16)

Adventure by Maksym Syagrovskyy (page 20)

Love Your Body by Daria Kulagina (page 22)

No More Stolen Sisters by Norah Ferlejowski (page 23)

WRITTEN PIECES

Fall for You by Anonymous (page 3)

Recipe: Springtime Brazilian Carrot Cake by Pietra Melo (page 5)

Writing Café: Submission Eight by Anonymous (page 7)

Writing Café: Submission One by Anonymous (page 11)

Catching up to Spring by Nora Nebraska (page 17)

Writing Café: Submission Nine by Anonymous (page 21)

Loop

By Zephyr

Acceptance is true peace

Spring comes, flowers sprout, New life begins.

Ice melts and snow turns to rain, As it always does.

Summer comes, the sun beams. The beaches fill with people, Ice cream is popular and school ends, As it always does.

Autumn comes, the leaves fall, Children run through its piles. School begins and the temperature cools, As it always does.

Winter comes, the water freezes, Flowers start to die.

The temperature reaches the lowest point, As it always does.

The loop continues

No matter what

Comforting or horrifying, nothing can be done

Again

And again

The loop continues

Acceptance is true peace

Fall for You

By Anonymous

I fell. Fell so hard, it hurt.

It started as a feeling of butterflies, the ones you get in your stomach. It was amazing, happy, beautiful. It was a feeling I had never felt before.

But, what started as this amazing thing, ended up too good to be true. I felt like I was sinking, and I couldn’t come up for air.

I was drowning.

The butterflies, the ones from our laughs, our whispers, and our smiles —they started to die. What we had, whatever it was, it was gone.

These shattering waves of agony crashed over me; they made me sink. My heart, my happiness, my everything.

Deeper, and deeper, and deeper. Until I couldn’t sink any further.

And now I’m stuck. Stuck at the bottom, with no way back up, because I fell.

I fell for them all.

The laughs, the whispers, the smiles.

They made me fall for you.

Recipe: Springtime

Brazilian Carrot Cake with Ganache

Ingredients:

4 eggs

3 medium carrots

1 tsp vegetable oil

2 tsp white sugar

3 tsp flour

1 tbsp baking powder

200g semi-sweet chocolate

175 mL (1 can) thick cream

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

In a blender, combine the eggs, oil, and carrots.

In a separate bowl, add the sugar, flour, and baking powder. Mix well.

Add the carrot mixture to the dry ingredients, and combine everything. Mix well until the batter is smooth. Pour the batter into a buttered/greased pan, then place it in the oven for about 40 minutes.

To make the ganache, melt the chocolate and mix it with the thick cream.

After the cake is out of the oven, pour the ganache over it. Serve and enjoy with a side of strawberries!

By Emily neto

By anonymous writing café submission 8

It was a bright and beautiful day. The birds were chirping and the flowers were blooming. The lovely scent of lilac filled the air and enhanced the sweetness of the tea sitting on the table. I carefully dropped some sugar cubes in the cup, and watched as it fizzled and quickly dissolved into the clear brown liquid. I swirled my teaspoon, stirring the tea leaves at the bottom. When it cooled, I gulped down as much as I could until only the leaves remained.

I stared into the cup and read my fortune from the shapes that remained. Fate has a habit of predicting lives, so why shouldn’t one believe her? I patiently waited for the fortune teller to give them their mysterious prediction. I swirled the cup around, gazing at what appeared to be a rose inside. I took the rose and set it down neatly in the center of the table. Once I had finished my food, I took the rose and tossed it in a stream, watching it float away from me as I turned to head home.

You spoke to me with curated words, whispers swirling like melodic birds. Crafted with malice to weave illusion, you told me tales of pain and confusion.

I transformed into a leech for you. To bite into your skin, Purge your blood and drink your sin. I moved the hair from my neck, to reveal my own pain and wreck. But you shed your skin to a snake, and Sun revealed your gore at daybreak.

My flesh: you ripped and tore. I’m helping, it’s fine, you swore.

Your incisors pierced my body holed like a sponge. You threw my soul in a river to plunge

your misery onto my porous frame. Blaming myself, I held on in shame. You put a bracelet on my wrist, Tied to rope in your clenching fist.

It was not jewelry, but a tether, dragging me along, now and forever.

I was pulled and tumbled, bruised and cleft. My knees scraped on rough ground. You seared onto my skin, but nowhere to be found.

Road runner by Jeremy Maccarone

writing café submission 1

By Anonymous

Click. I heard the click of the safety being pulled before I saw it. The hair on the back of my neck rose, goosebumps spread all throughout my body, and a profound feeling of dread overwhelmed me. It was suffocating. Frozen in place, it took all my willpower to turn my head, inch by inch. The barrel of the gun was staring right back at me.

My gaze slowly crept up to meet the cold, lifeless eyes that were glaring down at me. My heart ached as I remembered how those very same eyes had once been full of light. Bright with joy, and all things swift and beautiful. I recalled how those same eyes that bled hatred had once looked at me like I was a secret that only she knew. Because she knew all the secrets of the universe, and I was always the one who marveled at her brilliance.

“What happened to us?” I whispered. She didn’t respond. Didn’t move. Didn’t do anything that indicated human life or emotion I could only see those eyes, so dark they were almost black, melting holes into my face.

Finally, she moved. Her eyes flickered over mine, and I saw a hint of who she once had been.

“Simple,” she said suddenly. “You happened to me. And I happened to you. We were always meant to end up this way one way or another.”

Before I could respond, her hand suddenly jerked forward, preparing to pull the trigger

I watched the girl on the other side of the gun flinch at the click of the removal of the safety. I’d never been so thrilled. Excitement filled every corner, every vein, every bone in my body. I’d imagined this moment again and again over the last two months, planning it to the very last detail in the depths of my room.

“What happened to us?” she asked in a hushed tone.

What happened? In the broadest sense, every aspect of our lives had changed. She’d been a fool not to see it A fool not to expect this A fool not to raise her own gun There was no way around it; there was no possibility that we could co-exist. She was only too empathetic to see it, too blinded by the past to see the future, my future, and all the power I would soon have. I was no longer blinded by empty promises of returning to childhood carelessness. We had grown up now, and she was holding me back.

I pulled the trigger, then watched her body fall. A sense of emptiness washed over me, not from guilt, but from all the hours spent planning this. The payoff was not as exciting, not as fulfilling as I’d imagined it would be I left the room through the window and moved towards the future.

Night Lifters

By William Litwin

The Lavender Field

ByAnonymous

The lavender field is pumice to my calloused soul, where I shed my sins and abandon control. I am brushed pure to a fragile sapling, vulnerable, green and susceptible to collapsing.

The lavender field is where my mind hears my heartbeat slowly, where I relish and soak in silent stillness wholly. I am transformed until my blood is a medley of branches, open to a world of new capacities and chances.

The lavender field is where our dialect is the state of the sky, where all that pierces our essence can liquify, whither and simply die. I am stripped like tree bark of insular proclivities, listening to the cadence sewn into vast, infinite possibilities.

By Emily Neto

TheWonderfulNatureofSpring

ByPietraMelo

The snow melts away into crystalline streams

The cold bitter wind is warmer, it seems

The tree buds all bloom into colourful things

Thus is the wonderful nature of Spring

The birds will come out to sing once again

The lush floral hills seem alive with no end

The bees come around to buzz, not to sting

Thus is the wonderful nature of Spring

The people begin to fill picnic baskets

And thinner become their gloves and their jackets

They know of the beauty this season will bring

Thus is the wonderful nature of Spring

Catching up to Spring

By Nora Nebraska

During the pandemic, the more days that I was stuck in my own home it became very clear to me that spring would not begin in a while. Maybe if we look at the timeline or temperature it was spring, but that was a monochromatic lie. The outside world was more hostile than any other winter and the inside world was suffocating. When we couldn’t experience real life we made our alternatives, but no matter what they always felt empty. Can you really compare two hour online classes to being in an actual classroom full of peers? Blackboards with rough and dusty chalk markings were replaced with my teacher’s screenshots, rushing to handwrite notes were replaced with online pdfs, and the distance between everyone was wider than ever. For the majority of the pandemic, all I had was that distance between everything. The distance detached me from new experiences leading to progress. It was like time left me behind. That is why winter was a year long, the snow never melted into colourful green patches and the tulips bulbs failed to open. All I could do was dream of a spring and a life that had yet to come

Later, people started leaving their house regularly again but there were still too many restrictions for comfort. Covid-19 continued to fester and we all had to be aware of it. Only half of our faces were visible, and many events would still need to be cancelled; everything was too different and no one could have denied that.

There was one more overwhelming truth there from the beginning: that period of isolation still happened and that never gave me the normalcy I wanted In person classes were too foreign, constantly reminding me of how difficult it could be to open my mouth. Unlike online courses, something as simple as an exam decreasing my mark was like a monster lurking under the bed. I was more used to Zoom calls and Google classroom turn ins than I would want to admit. Everything was in front of me yet the distance between me and life itself shrank very little. Despite it all, time finally gave me days that wouldn’t be taken away.

During those early days of in-person school, I ran around to see how many new mundanities I could experience for the first time. I took walks around the school hallways with my friend during lunch because we hadn't seen those hallways yet. When I was given the chance to talk to new people, I went to school with the goal of getting to know them. From looking for the best place to eat outside to seeing my new desk arrangement, these small experiences mattered; perhaps they were boring in the grand scheme of things but they were infinitely more alluring than being suffocated by screens and trapped by walls.

My most prized mundanity was found on the third day: I realized I vastly preferred taking longer walks to the train station than navigating the crowded buses after school. The reasoning is simple: crowds make the mere fact that I take up space feel wrong. I found the company of my walking companions freeing in comparison. If we were still trapped in our homes, our casual conversations would still exist in the forms of phone calls, but it would be blind sided to discount that walk’s merits. I memorized the twists, turns, and slopes we take like the back of my hand and I remembered the daily colours and shapes of homes and trees with pleasure. Most of all, the people I walked with became more radiant in real life than a phone call ever let them be. Within close proximity I was stunned to see how much bolder their laugh was and how their pace slowed down when engrossed in conversation No matter what the topic was, we were always in a hurry to discuss everything we possibly could before we reached our ends of the road. In those small moments talking about nothing, life was starting to mean something.

Soon, life and its school days merely became routine. Every day, my mind was kept busy with thoughts about my friends, my tests, my assignments, and what I was going to eat after school. In a blink of an eye it was May and I realized the world has started becoming a little colourful. When the weather became warmer, I rushed to replace my bulky jackets with light cardigans and discarded items like gloves and scarves. When the birds returned from their hibernation I heard their declaration so vividly that it drowned the engine of the nearest cars. Even on my concrete home street, the green on the trees and the grass was brighter than I ever remembered it being. After long periods of closed curtains and lying down in boredom, I never realized the sky could be this blue.

On the Saturday after my realization, my family went out to see the cherry blossoms. I noticed that the trees were uniquely delicate that day; their pink colour and cotton-like shape framed the sky, capturing everyone’s attention. Down the park path were families, couples, and friends who could finally watch the world and smell the blossoms with those whom they loved. I remember examining how many branches were on a tree and where the clusters of blossoms were located. There were trees that stuck close together and there were trees in secluded areas My favourite one was a tree that lived beside a pond. It wasn’t the grandest or the most eye-catching tree that day, but it was content to live around its surroundings anyways. My train of thought was interrupted by my father, waving his phone around and beaming for the tenth time that afternoon.

“Nora! Go over there. I will take a picture of you and your mom!”

After that photo was taken, I thought it would be funny if the world suddenly stopped spinning. Like the photo my dad would later turn into his screensaver, time would freeze along with the falling petals and I wouldn’t do anything but stand still. Time didn’t stop that day. No matter how grotesque or beautiful life was, the clock’s hand kept ticking and I followed the sound. The trees were only white and pink for a moment, children would grow into adults one day, and I wasn’t going to be the same teenager that had a science test the Monday I came back. Even though everything was in rapid motion, I was catching up with the days that left me behind. A wide grin spread across my face when I left the park, knowing this was the last time I could see the blossoms before they progressed into a lush green It's spring it really is spring.

Writing Café: Submission 9

Together we walked, hand in hand, towards the edge of the stream. The sounds of rushing water and birds filled our ears as we approached our destination—a large, smooth rook where we layed out our picnic blanket and began to set up. We brought out the tea set, took out the heart-jam cookies, and marvelled at the beautiful cake we had made the day before. The colour of the frosting was so vivid—a light but bright blue with lavender petals scattered across the cake. It was the most beautiful thing we had made. Although the creation was purely icing and fondant, we felt as if we had truly captured a dazzling moment. I placed the cake into the display box we had prepared and secured it all with our prettiest satin ribbon. The display was effortlessly elegant; its beauty clear and pristine. One could tell time and passion went into the presentation of the gift. It was ready to be sent out, perfectly wrapped for the lucky person to receive.