Botticelli Magazine Number 8 by Botticelli Magazine

MAG cover art by Kit Mizeres

Art & Literature

ISSUE 81

BOTTICELLI MAGAZINE Faculty Advisor:

Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis

Events Staff:

Erica Wander Brandon Molica

Literary Staff:

Burke Mayne Caitlin Wolle Anna Peluola Alicia Weninger Chloe Wagner

Art Staff:

Design Staff:

Submission Inquiries:

Kyle Kennedy Caitlin Tobin Alyssa Odenweller Mark Mounts Hope Taylor Analee Alford Rachel Kalaycio Botticellimag@gmail.com

Published by Columbus College of Art & Design 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS Welcome

Vicious

Alicia Weninger

Abecedarian poem Amber New

I Have This One Sweater Everyone Loves

09 10

Anna Peluola

Fairy Dirt

Caitin Wolle

Commodity

Carla Drysdale

5 a.m.

Carla Drysdale

Taxidermy

Lexi White

Evensong

Carla Drysdale

Sky Eyes

Carla Drysdale

Startled Charlene Fix 2

Charmed

Charlene Fix

Sestina Turner Stunted

Jared Sanford

Dress of Faith

Kierstin Bridger

Ergot Fauna, Gallows Humor

Laney Norman

Never to Wed, Never to Altar

Mariah Holmes

When I Am A Woman Grown

Laney Norman

What The Twig Wants

Rebe Huntsman

Overseas

Terrance Hayes

Saintly

Terrance Hayes

Whole-Town-a-Grave

Maggie Smith

Organic Body

Alicia Weninger 3

Daughters of Time

Yzella Viadaurre

1989

Maggie Smith

Burke Mayne

Dialect

Amber New

What is Death?

Amber New

Rotation

Maggie Smith

Three Children, Two Arms

Lexi White

Vive La Revolution Abby Vance

Biographies

Welcome to Issue Eight of Botticelli: Columbus College of Art & Design’s literary/art magazine.

This is the second print issue since our print resurrection and we have a lot to celebrate. Congratulations to Darren C. Demarree, published in Issue Seven on his forthcoming publication of The Pony Governor. Pause Press, July 2016. A big round of applause to our Pushcart Prize nominees from Issue Seven: Haley Behnfeldt: Life Drawing Darren C. Demarree: Unfinished Murder Ballad Meghan Privitello: Claiming What Is Ours Natalie Shapero: The Obligatory Making of Amends, You’d Better Run Katherine Zeilman: Web’s End Enjoy all of the beautiful arrangements of image and word inside these pages and send along some of your own. We read all year. Don’t forget to check out the anagram poems throughout the issue that are written off of the form created by visiting writer, Terrance Hayes. His poems and the description below are reprinted from failbetter.com* The Anagram Poems are adopted from the word game puzzles found in several syndicated newspapers: 1. End words must be derived from four or more letters in the title. 2. Words which acquire four letters by the addition of “s” are not used. 3. Only one form of a verb is used.

VICIOUS Alicia Weninger

you are the trash between my teeth, pick you out, spit you far away. i am made of splinters and strength. i was the prettiest girl you’d fucked, you are a blight in my memory. you are the trash between my teeth. you pretended i didn’t matter. pushed me down, deep in the dark, but i am made of splinters and strength. i thought something was wrong with me, but i realized that it was always you. you are the horrid trash between my teeth. you try to call me once in a while, think i’ll come crying crawling back. but i am made of splinters and strength. you thought i was all used up, tossed me out, I was barren, dry. instead, you are the trash between my teeth, and i am made of splinters and spectacular strength.

Okell Lee 7

Kit Mizeres 8

ABECEDARIAN POEM Amber New

Amberâ&#x2C6;&#x2019; Believing itself to be a stone Constantly traps those in its path and Decides their fate for them, Ending their lives by Framing them in a Golden shine that lasts Hundreds upon thousands of years. Imperishable like a fossil, Just reminding us of how powerful it can really be, after Kissing the side of a tree as it slowly hardens Like the sap that it is. Making unimaginable pieces of art that glisten and shine Night and day through every season. Only amber could be so Precious but deadly at the same time as it makes us Question nature and what beauty truly is. Reasons and theories cannot explain how Superior amber is to any other stone or gem even Though they are just as curious. Universes barely rank to the Vast spectrum of light and color Whispering to the stars and all reality as Xanthous droplets paint Yellow streaks reflecting Zillions of miles away. 9

I HAVE THIS ONE SWEATER THAT EVERYBODY LOVES Anna Peluola

i guess if my life worked itself seamlessly and not faulty and sputtering it would cease to be a life and become instead a well oiled machine. but as i sat in quite poor shape, heaving, in an empty flight gate i thought - for the first time, ever - that maybe there was a certain comfort to be found in a life that was actually a machine. i thought that i might quite like that kind of machine-hybrid life, in theory. for certainly the spontaneity of organic life was not for poor planners or for the faint of heart, alike. i could be both and what was happening now was a beautifully framed and well displayed example of it. i thought it to be very peculiar and quite coincidental that it was nine/ eleven and i was stuck on an unmoving plane watching synchronized clips on all of the small screens, three in a row built into the back head of the three seats in front, of firefighters in new york being interviewed fourteen years later. all day i had read things on screens and read things on navy blue t-shirts about never forgetting what happened fourteen years before. it was all very ironic, i felt. and i never thought i would find myself, in all places to find myself, on a plane and on all kinds of planes, a plane that i would have, not, been on had i not missed the first plane that i should have been on. i showed up to the gate only to be smiled at the way you smile at a child when itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s being foolish. then, with, at most, two keystrokes, i was placed on the next leaving plane. this next leaving plane, as it goes, turned out to have a bad battery at an airport too insignificant to afford a full-time

mechanic so one had to be contracted and called in and that took time. we had already been here awhile and the mechanic was still missing. people behind me were starting to reflect on fourteen years ago, and i thought, for the love of god, please, but she went ‘‘i remember …’’ and kept on going after that until her voice was drowned by the sound that accompanies the ‘‘fasten seatbelt’’ sign, like a sick pavlov experiment in expectation. each time, ding-ding, igniting fierce and instinctive hope that this time might be the time we would really be off. this happened four times already and i was now embracing the idea that the sound went off on a timer or maybe when a certain door opened in the cockpit. the man she was remembering-to was a farmer, and when i heard him say this i turned in my seat to see for myself ‘a real farmer!’ and i wondered stupidly why he was on a plane and if he did this often or if this was his very first time. i felt sympathetic that this might be, for him, a bad sort of first experience. he said his entire family worked on the farm and that his daughter worked with the cattle and in her i placed myself but i couldn’t quite make realistic for me that sort of a life. the flight attendant finished every sentence of every update on the status of the repair with ‘‘at this time’’. if i had counted her, i would have counted it at least eight times each update. time was really heavy here. everywhere i looked i could see people wading through it in their own way. some did it with the resigning unbuckling of seatbelt, some did it by dialing their phones and using their business voices to speak with secretaries, very hushed and very polite, on the subject of rescheduling their appointments. i was busy sketching boxy clutch purses i might like to make and when i finished that i started to read about ray eames and charles eames but after that i began to become a bit unsettled and quite anxious. the pilot came on and said the worst possible result had happened and the battery was unable to be fixed by the contracted mechanic. a replacement part would now have to be driven the distance from

cleveland and that would take ‘‘quite a few hours’’. they made us exit the plane. i noticed that the man in front of me, suited like a pilot, was very obvious in his displeasure. i felt mostly bad that my two day trip was shrinking shorter and shorter but i was happy to be out of the plane because when it wasn’t running it was very warm and very stuffy and i did not want to overhear anymore remembering. when i came out i noticed the small gate crammed with bodies, both fresh bodies that had gathered in our absence and our old bodies seeping back in the wrong way like pouring something back into a plastic gallon jug. they looked at us, puzzled, we looked at them, puzzled. before i went onto the flight, an attendant asked me if i would feel alright to assist in an evacuation. and now, as we evacuated, a different attendant told us to check the counter for more information about connecting flights we would be missing. i stood in line behind a woman with no hair, long silver earrings, and all of this skin like coffee when it’s strong. it was her birthday and she and her fiancé were going to florida and she was going to spend today in the dali museum, but not anymore. i told her she might get lucky and find a direct flight, make it there at a similar time. you see, i was trying this fresh thing for me called positivity. really believing that in just thinking a good thought when you would ordinarily think a bad one that it could influence reality. she laughed and said maybe. i told her all of this was happening because it was supposed to happen and she laughed again and said she was going to write a story about it all and call it ‘‘the curious case of boarding a plane that is going nowhere’’ i wrote that down because i thought it was good. i got excited and asked her if she was a writer. she said sometimes, but she was really a banker, downtown, at the same bank i used and at the same bank i hated using, but on the sixth floor, a corporate banker, so that is why i had never seen her, i guess. because i didn’t have money, i guess. i resisted

the desire to tell her the story of when i overdrew my account and went to the bank in humiliation to deposit the only other money i owned, four dollars worth of quarters. but i thought better of it. she said her name was linda, or maybe she said a different name starting with that letter, but i thought of her as linda because that means beautiful in portuguese and i didn’t think she’d mind my memory. i met another woman. actually, this woman met me. she had been looking at me while i was in line, and when i looked back, she told me that she had seen me yesterday. i was startled because she was quite striking and completely unfamiliar and she looked a lot like she might be a type prone to crazy. big eyeglasses and tall as hell and very skinny with a nice nose, all dressed in black and with lipstick. she looked like a real traveler in that she was carrying nothing with her but a book that she wasn’t on the first page of. i was quite taken with her. she had not recognized me as much as she had recognized my sweater, i was wearing the same one. she said she noticed things like that, and the way that she looked at me made me sure that it would have been alright if i did not respond back, quite like she had just wanted to think aloud but now we were here, looking at one another, so more or less she had accepted that this might take turn to conversation. she asked if i saw charlie’s opening. i didn’t know who that was, but from her look i got the hint that he might be an artist and she definitely was one because if artists look any sort of way they look like her, just so distinct like you can’t forget their faces. i said that i had been in class during that time and she mostly did not react but to shake her head up and down like she was thinking ‘‘yada yada’’, but she was the kind, i think, that was just always that way. very blasé, like nothing could really move her into feeling. i asked, the way continued on page 16

Annie Noelker

a mid-westerner might, if charlie was a fine artist and she just looked at me in a way that made it apparent that he was. i asked if she was one and she said she assisted him. she said he gave a terrible speech at the opening. she asked me again if i had gone to the opening. in the middle of asking she remembered my answer before and filled it in, doing all of this talking while staring me in the face. she said i should really look at the exhibit, that she was so lucky to work with him. that he made films and he made them all the time. she said he made a porno once. she listed some other film maker’s names and asked if i knew of them. i didn’t. she was not surprised. she said that any film artist i like looks up to charlie. she said the exhibit had a drag queen in it and that she was a political sort of drag queen. i was blown away. i said i would check it out as soon as i could. i asked where she was going and she told me before i even finished, new york, like she couldn’t get it out of her mouth fast enough, like i was unobservant to ask, like it had been the very, very obvious thing, and the way she said the word new york said so many things to me at once. more than anything it said that she couldn’t wait to be back there, like separation from this place called new york was causing her quite some harm. the way she said the word sounded not like ‘‘new york’’ but like the way a warm bath might feel to someone sick and i wished i was in that predicament. i told her i was going to california but she did not bat an eyelash and immediately i became embarrassed that i was not going to new york, too, and i wished that i could change my ticket and go with her. but instead my ticket was changed to houston, and if there was anything in the world that i loathed it was that texas was a place at all. to me, texas was a plague. really dismal as hell. there was not one thing, aside from this sort of a thing, that would ever bring me to a

place like texas. i was born in the south and that’s where i wanted that relation to quit. the south fought progress like cowboys fought indians. Everything down there was exhausting and texas was this acclimation of every exhausting thing that was the south. i remember once, driving out to california and seeing during our short stint in texas, a factory farm full of cattle run along our car for a terribly long moment. i smelled it for long after that. no one in the car said anything for a little bit. and that is what texas is to me. a giant factory of the worst kind, turning mammals into just meat, blessing us with presidents slick as oil. not that good can’t live in a place like that, but it certainly can’t survive the climate for long, maybe it could, but i think it certainly would have its odds stacked against it, tall, like road-side billboards talking something or other about god or about hell or about abortion. there had been a flight leaving to denver before the one leaving for houston, but the attendants wouldn’t let me on it. i watched it taxi away down the runway with hungover eyes, like i was remembering the blissfulness and promise of the night before. i had never been to denver, but denver seemed, now, lush and green and grassy like colorado license plates that i saw sometimes while driving. suddenly denver contained every good in the universe, leaving what was left to texas like a will that made it clear you were not a favorite child. finding something vegetarian to eat in the houston airport was as good as pulling away my teeth from my gums and eating those, without teeth. i bought a hummus wrap for nine dollars and i sat on the ground and listened to football playing on the screens and the whole airport was quiet and reverent and i thought that everybody who might like to travel to texas must be at home watching football. if there had ever existed a city of dreams, los angeles certainly was the city. i had never met so many aspiring-somethings from nowhere, shit places. los angeles was a city of children with just that stupid kind of

faith. but then i thought, if it was a city of dreamers, it was the city of, maybe, ten dreamers total, each being furiously replicated at least one million times that number like similar-enough smiling rubber dolls, competing within their category, one through ten, for a chance to be on top. i met an eighteen and nineteen year old couple from st. louis who had lived here less than a month. they were doe eyed and together the entire night. they liked their apartment. they smiled a lot, really big smiles. even when they talked they were smiling. this birthday party was unlike any party i had ever been to. there was no music playing, just talking. a brand new apartment in old hollywood had been rented for the occasion, but the landlord had only prepared enough toiletries and small snacks for one person, as the agreement had promised there would only be one person staying. there were at least forty peoples here, now. most inside, shifting weight from one leg to another, the rest crowded about a small porch, begging for room to smoke, or to talk as loudly as they would like or to just not be in with the rest. there were many sweeds. they spoke sweedish with one another. the only sweedish girl had hair darker than my own and skin to match. i always thoughts sweeds had a beautiful and certain kind of look but hers had been altered to the point that i thought she might be mexican when i first saw her. her hair was long, black and in waves. her face was good bone structure. her lips were red. her hoop earrings were distracting. at this description i am realizing that maybe she was trying to be very hollywood. she had only lived here six months. she said she hated the way americans said i love you so quickly. she was angry, she kept asking what was left to say after that. she said she had a boyfriend here who told her he loved her after two weeks and she said that she loved him, too, but that she wouldn’t say it to him in sweedish. she said in sweedish there was no equivalent to ‘‘i love you’’, they said ‘‘jag alskar

dig’’ but it did not mean the same thing. she taught me how to say it right so that i could say it to a boy that i really loved. she said it didn’t mean ‘‘i love you’’ but that maybe, ‘‘i love only you’’. that was as close as she could translate it. everyone in this city was from somewhere else. i met one native and he told me i was the real deal. i didn’t know how he could know it, but i thought that it might have just been the fact that someone like me was very alien, here, and it showed almost immediately. or maybe people from here liked to think they had a good eye for the real. or maybe everyone was just always trying to find that next thing. i thought that they would never find it. people here were always saying the thing they thought you might like to hear. buttering you up real nice but not eating you quite yet, instead wrapping you up and slipping you into their back pocket. people had no clue how to be real. i had a suspicion that the idea of real might only exist, here, in the abstract for how rarely i ever saw it reflected in anything material. everyone looked a variation of one another. i met a guy who was in a boyband and i asked him what music he liked and he stared at me panicked like we were on jeopardy and like he had just been asked something terribly obscure. most everyone i spoke to hated san francisco because, one, it was not los angeles, two, everyone there was homeless or an addict, or three, they just thought it was boring. i had never fallen in love with a place, but i thought san francisco might be the place to do it. i noticed my life quickly becoming a series of intimate moments with strangers. on my way back home my bra popped open in the airport while i was going through a security measure and a short agent stood on her tip toes to help me clasp it back again. i was becoming completely open and a little fearless. at the party i remembered meeting a girl with all of this brilliant red hair and a shit job in film where she made sure of consistency from scene to scene. she seemed in pain being at this party, so i kind of felt for her immediately. she was the only one drinking whiskey and she

wore a green leather jumpsuit. we talked and she told me she wrote screenplays in her free time and she said sometimes she would just lock herself in her room and not come out for days, just writing these plays. the way that she said it implied that she had not expected to have this sort of a conversation, but now that she was, she could only be this striking sort of honest. she said some of her friends thought it was cool that she wrote them and she just shook her head and said how she always told them it wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t. the way she said it felt was like she had little choice but to do it, that if she had any other way she might not do it, and thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s immediately when i knew. she said she could never sell off her stories to have them rebirthed into film the way some writers did. she said they were painful. that she loved them. i told her that was the difference between a good writer and a great one. i told her she was an artist as if i were any authority at all on artists, i think i was a little drunk, but i could tell from the way that she looked at me when i said it that she knew i was right about her and that she would never again not see herself that way. she said that she and i should go to san francisco. i have a feeling that, one day, we might, and that we might become good friends.

Tamrin Ingram

FAIRY DIRT Caitlin Wolle

Little bottles all lined up in a neat little row nestled in the dirt. Hidden treasures that everyone too busy sucking down caffeine passes by but never wants to pick up. You don’t know where that’s been! Exactly! It could have been anywhere, a whole adventure tucked away in this tiny glass bottle, corked off nice and neat. A glimpse into a land of wonder- full of fairies, princesses and magic, with flowers as large as you are. Curls of colored smoke flourish through the air and reflect the crystal light in a million rainbows. Each bottle its own delight. Look at this one! These small beige bones, not quite enough to make a skeleton of any animal I’ve ever seen. But maybe that’s because it’s not from our world. How tiny is this creature that it fits in this bottle? This pointed skull no bigger than my thumb, and such a thin spine. The teeth are so tiny; surely it was not a predator. Small tufts of maroon and violet fur linger on the bottom of the bottle, mingling with the dust. It looks light as air. But we dare not touch it, lest we damage it in any way. How about this bottle? The plant looks so alive, yet there are no roots to be seen. The steams weave around each other like snakes, sprouting blooms with petals so bright they could be jewels. They all look connected, yet no two flowers are the same, they don’t even look like they could be related. Is this white one some kind of orchid? This tangerine one a type of rose? I can almost put my finger on what they are, but there’s just unfamiliar enough that I second guess myself. This last one is interesting, an inky dark liquid that somehow manages to not look disgusting. It catches the sun like facets of a diamond, appearing to be every color at once. I can almost feel it, isn’t that 22

funny? How can I feel something in a bottle that I haven’t even touched? But I feel the slightly syrupy concoction inside is somehow me. Swirling the contents makes me nauseous and tipping it from side to side makes me feel like I’m being pulled. I want to pull the little cork out of the mouth of the bottle and test this more. What does it smell like? It looks like it would smell foul, but something is telling me that it is not so vile. Something is telling me that it would taste as rich as an antique wine. It’s almost singing to me, can’t you hear it? No? Why am I the only one who can hear this? Why am I the only one who picked up these bottles? Where did these little beauties come from? Before they were hidden here in the dirt; a natural cavern of curiosities. Who put them here? Did a wondering traveler drop them as he rushed towards his next adventure? Is that tree over there a magical portal, and if it is how does it work? Surely it can’t be big enough to serve as a passage for people? But then again, this is magic! Anything can happen. Wait. What if it was an evil witch? I really don’t know what’s in those bottles, they could be deadly, and the poison could be airborne. What if I had opened one! I really have no idea about their past. All of this could be dangerous, I should put everything back and leave it be. Pretend I never saw them and keep moving, things like that should stay as they are, tucked away in their clean tubes of glass and hidden just out of sight. I don’t think I’m ready for this kind of discovery. Back into the dirt they go, half buried in the earth by a tangle of bushes poking out of the fence. I walk on, blending in with the monotonous stream of people milling around on their way to work. As I walked away a tugging inside of me bid me to turn around and get one last look at those small wonders. Something plummeted inside as I saw that already someone else had seen my discoveries, their face playing out their child like awe at them. Then they did the unthinkable, they tucked all three of the glass bottles into their bag and walked away with my magic. 23

COMMODITY Carla Drysdale

Veils of black nets repel hailstones, nipple pink blossoms open. Limbs trussed by wire, bent into rows of gnarled crosses â&#x20AC;&#x201D; straddled by bark gargoyles, arms linked, waiting for beesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; thrum to complete the red yield. Shakir Smith 24

5 A.M. Carla Drysdale

In the close noticing of things we become those things: sky bright as wind chimes felt with closed eyes. Inside the dream you wander shoeless in supermarket aisles. Loneliness opens its stone lid, invites you in. Even as they fly birds trust in landings. In the right tilt of rays you can become the silver thread pinned to the eave, the spider’s wide swoop over hayloft in honeyed light. Things spiral inward and outward at the same time — lines drawn on your fingertips before you were born — the scrawl of maps survivors carry to navigate Belief, Relief, Grief: those streets lit at dusk by a stream of thirst quenching stars falling through the trees. 26

TAXIDERMY Lexi White

It comes in with the tide by the side of the road; a quick exit. Dry white, other times soaking red as the earth collects its tax in a circumstance not so dire if thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s no one to mourn, no one dear to hold tight. So they take the body and dry it, that way the pose will last for the new term. Maybe someone will write about it in their diary.

Caitlin Tobin 27

EVENSONG Carla Drysdale

Six clangs, so it is 6:00 pm according to the next village. Birdsong still for the night. Late November under this gray dome between the Alps and Jura. We live nearly all winter like this, ambling through fog, chill, the comfort of not seeing a mountain view. World the color of mackerel. Sharp scent of pine and lavender from the patch of garden. I write with frozen fingers, sitting on the bench in front of our house. Planes rumble at 8,000 feet.Â Here

on the ground I wonder how she, meaning my mother, is getting along. Campfire smell on this breezeless night. She has asked me to stop writing about her. I will go inside now to warmth, to the bright orange kitchen wall. If I had fur, I would sleep outside all night in the cozy dark, underneath the birdbath next to the Chinese lantern plant, berry faded inside its ragged paper rib cage. In the morning, I would be changed.

SKY EYES Carla Drysdale

If, after a plunge and stroke you float on the surface body embraced by wavelets, inhabit your sky eyes. In the flow and wash of currents, overhear pebbles click across the stony bed. Listen to their waterish warble as the carbon in your blood calls to their cold mineral hearts—the secret’s tug through a fathom’s depth and the span between your outstretched arms.

Caitlin Tobin

STARTLED Charlene Fix

Nothing is as quiet as a star. Wrapped in light, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll lead myself to a brilliant rest from ambition that darts like a twenty-something tart scantily drest and dancing like a sled on slick ice. Nothing can rattle those distant fires started long ago. They travel far. They last. Those made of stardust can restart.

CHARMED Charlene Fix

Off with our boots. Let’s not march but idle in cafés with bears drinking mead under an umbrella moon. No one is armed but for open hands. The head of each bear is familiar. The dream of hirsute lumbering under an arch of leaves. Read everything—a ream of movies and books—for the charm of the stretch. When a child says, “I dare you,” it’s not a green poisonous dram but a rubber tipped arrow. Speed without harm.

Linda Dimitroff

Burke Mayne 35

SESTINA TURNER STUNTED Jared Sanford

The moon is ripe, its beams illuminating my white knuckles on the wheel. Oh how I would like the straight and narrow, but the road keeps on turning with the bends in the water’s spine, vertebrae of proud rocks standing guard over licking tide. Please Mother Mary keep me going my north star that keeps me rolling as I’m chased by gleaming river. The guardrails keep watching but my ebbing nerves take little comfort. River I’m not your Grace Kelley. My roulette wheel won’t be stopping my ball will keep on rolling My eyes fixate on the wholehearted moon, as my mind keeps on turning My thoughts like garish painted ponies on a merry go round, and my father must be so proud.

DRESS OF FAITH Kierstin Bridger

The moon makes lace of the landscape. Top branches frill on the cuff of midnight. There is a white church beyond the tall elm and the shadows of men lurk after hours, faceless suits, hands pocketed, reading matchbooks blind. While under a scrolled gable lies a simple window, half black, half white. Above the door only the lintel is dry-wood gray, darker still the chalk-smoked gravel pathway. Some nights I long to be courted in my Sunday best but by morning I remember the hem has been let down again and again and cannot rise past the curve of my hip.

Annie Noelker 39

ERGOT FAUNA; GALLOWS HUMOR Laney Norman

I dance in a long line of women, feet pounding a tattoo into the soil. Painted lips part, a howl rips through them as the moon shows herself for the night. Secrets whispered, trapped in my bone marrow, My blood sings as I take flight. I swim with a long line of women drowning like pearls in vinegar, sharp and sour. Those who help you enter the world seen with claws dug into pregnant bellies. Running through the mud in a white night shirt, a finger once pointed, bitten off and bleeding. I stand in a long line of women, rasping voices plead to deaf ears. Threads of their craft tied around their necks. Women in a row, one by one by one by one. Twigs snap! echoing over a crowd, dangling toes scrape a path into the dirt.

NEVER TO END, NOR TO ALTER Mariah Holmes

The woman was on fire. This is the first of two screws cutting the way the knife had cut into my wound with the sinuous track of a snake. The woman is perfected This cold, these captive stars. I shake through colorless dreams And her dead mouth sings And her voice was faint and sweet: ‘Rest easy.’ And we danced mad till night’s low-burning wick I’d counted maybe thirteen years or more Where has she gone now, whose laughter comes down in thick black smoke, taking human form? You died just hours ago.

Anna-Lisa Eriksson (right)

WHEN I AM A WOMAN GROWN Laney Norman

This night lays gauze upon My crimson knee, my arm Retracting, expelling the sounds It left to haunt me I grow frail and wary, As the refrain coddles me, An infant appropriately Oblivious to the nature of the beast. This chance gathering, A burning pile of brush, warm colors That could only exist, only exist Suspended in this place and time. I am Hester and I am swallowed by The sins of the ones who damned me. By design the breeze begins To methodically graze my Exposed nape, leaving behind A string of skin that wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t forget. They look like pearls and I wear Them like a rosary, But they feel more like a lariat. 42

WHAT THE TWIG WANTS Rebe Huntman

I. What the twig wants is to split open, step out of its skin. Its wanting is there in the way its bark knots at the joints, furrows like a river. There, where it would rather become the sea: A bird, wing tucked, broken but tough. Alligator rough. A baby bird with an alligator mouth, one round eye staring before takeoff. There is something delicious in the bump on smooth wood, the ruffled feather in flight, the pimple of the eye. That cautious offering—a dog’s snout waiting to be smoothed. The ridge on a lover’s forehead, that tender stretch before brow bridges into nose. Underneath the skin waits a living being, wanting touch. You have to sneak up on an animal like that, feed it beer until it warms up under the black lights of a bowling alley, allows the girl to drape herself over lap and neck, her French manicure glowing bright as bowling pins.

II. It’s March, a mercurial month. The snow that fell overnight covering Sweet Gum and Gingko, already 44

melting. Not in drips but chunks that fall under the weight of the sun in kaleidoscopic shifts, the world changing with each turn of the lens. Plunk: the order of tree falling. Plink: the geometry of sky and ground falling with it—one version dissolving, making way for the next arrangement. I want to talk to you about watery things. Those places we pulse at the surface of our lizard skins, tender but separate. The first touch always tentative. A refitting, that period of awkwardness as we re-remember who we are when we come together. The moment snow turns to water, loses its grip on branch, begins its slide to Earth. The dog sighs, nuzzles into the couch, dizzy from holding its whirling head on such an axis.

III. The first shape any child will draw is the circle. A round head, then the body, also round. Later she will add arms and legs, lines that with practice become contours, the edges of the self claiming its borders: Inside. Outside. “Me” in a body facing out onto the world. Still, the child understands the way the skin opens, how porous the passage. The self can be a dancer, a ninja. A head can be a sun covered in hair or rays. Her skin made of butterflies or ears, even mouths. Outsides become insides, a sweater she doesn’t yet know to pull right side out. continued on page 48 45

Zach Kitzen

IV. The stuff in my eight-year-old palm is not wet. Not dry. Neither solid nor liquid but rolling. Moving like a living thing. Reflecting like water. Quicksilver: This element that once lit Egyptian tombs and Mayan divining pools. This substance that will animate fluorescent bulbs and surface mirrors, expand and contract inside thermometers, fill my teeth, then be removed when the world discovers how unstable this type of matter can be, how easy to catch under the skin. My young hand offers itself, brings silver to eye so I might see myself. Watch as metal beads and un-beads, rolls down the gutters of my palm, pools over a lifeline, splits into lives and half-lives... V. ...and continues rolling. Four hundred miles to Ohio. Forty years to the moment. Reaches three fingers into the mouth of this orange bowling ball that has been shared by so many. Now release. How perfect you and I become here, converging over the common goal of bowling a good ballâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a spare, a strike, even a gutter ball bumping off bumpers and making its way slowly, so slowly, over the smooth floor of the alley. Every score or non-score cause for hugs and hand slapping: fourteen billion-year-old bursts of hydrogen disguised as skin swapping mid-air with each palm-to-palm exchange; twelve billion-year-old 48

stardust circling from one breath in Lane 1 to the next in Lane 2. In Lane 4, a booty shake. In lane 13, a four-yearold in pajamas spinning round and round, stumbling in and out of lanes. In Lane 12, you and I draped under the shimmering lights of the bowling universe. Could we have opened to each other in any other place? Without the Miller Lite in narrow-necked aluminum cans? Without those children bumping across our borders? Without the intersection of Van Halen and Bee Gees bouncing through speakers? VI. I almost trip over the twig’s wanting as I run by. There it is lying next to a Gingko leaf left over from Fall: halfclosed like an accordioned fist, its skin brown yet supple, plump from winter snows that keep it from going papery dry—its stem stained dark, that rough nub marking the moment when leaf first separated from the idea of itself as tree, when tree first let go of the version of self that included this leaf. There and then gone. The Gingko’s imprint on my mind becomes an umbrella, a crumpled fan. A sprig of Paper Whites pushing through wet snow. Aim for the third arrow, you tell me each time I release the ball. And each time I squint I find it lacquered on the slick floor. Let go, I whisper. Breathe. Follow breath’s path as it ribbons through lung and ribcage and out into the day. 49

VII. Not umbrella. Candy apple. Death star: My foot crunches over a spiked seed ball dropped by a Sweet Gum tree, but I am already running past. From New England to Mississippi these star-apples fall common as dirt. Only later will l pick one up, notice the long, black hair curled around its stem. Who left it here to thread through these spikes? Nestle into holes left from releasing seeds, craterous as eye sockets? Did she touch the thing or did the thing touch her? I am wanting to force this story back to its beginning, find that root where hair met object, boy touched girl, song entered skin. Determine if one belongs, or is only visiting.

Shakir Smith 50

Kyle Kennedy 51

OVERSEAS Terrance Hayes

I traveled so far West it became East again, over the mountains & through the woods until the mountains rose again. I knew no one & knew no one could save me. I learned to savor the soft pink flesh of fish & listen to the odd verse whispered by my stooped eavesdropping neighbor, the shy old woman obliged to serve green tea from a stout yellow vase. All the kneeling made my knees sore. I moved with the ease of an ink stain on a white kimono in a skin I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t erase.

SAINTLY Terrance Hayes

What the Bible said. A satin cassock. A tail that never drags in the dirt. No nasty acne. No yellowed armpit stain. And no nails in the hands & feet. No salt in the wound. Just satiny sanity. No narrow slit to stick the tongue through. No tiny pin pecks for eyes. No last minute pleas to be added to the list. Â

Shakir Smith 53

Kit Mizeres 54

WHOLE-TOWN-A-GRAVE Maggie Smith

Gettysburg That year in whole-town-a-grave, I lived or imagined living alongside ghost daguerreotypes, gray against so much Pennsylvania green. Everywhere I stepped was a grave. A path of graves to Food Lion for groceries. A path of graves to Ping’s for crab Rangoon, where a table away, men in period uniforms slopped lo mein into scruffy period beards. That year I left Ohio and the man I’d marry for whole-town-a-grave. One college building had an elevator I’d heard might carry me down two centuries, impossibly down past the ground floor, and open to the sawing and screaming of a battlefield hospital. That year I took the stairs. I lived or shadowed the living, lovesick, gaunt with insomnia. Everywhere I stepped was two centuries deep and filled with sleeping boys, so I walked lightly, gray ghost of myself, willing my feet to float so as not to wake them.

Kit Mizeres 56

ORGANIC BODY Alicia Weninger

i am irrelevant. a waste product, fished and pulled from the earthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bowels. my body vomited from the guts and skinned genitals of this toxic soil. my innards twistinga winding trunk, quelching and pained, cut and bled from branches. my lips cracked like dirt, pale, bleeding and burning. in complete contrast with my guts, red and gushing and raw, begging to be dissected, pulled and aired, let out to breathe and feel the wind coursing through.

Devin Goetz 58

DAUGHTERS OF TIME Yzella Viadaurre

We Thrive Here in our tranquility Entrusting knowledge Upon those who seek our aid Eager to know life’s meaning We’ve seen miracles In our fateful eternity here Have we not seen Time’s patient Its tolerance unfathomable Its persistence unparalleled Its mercy alone Accomplishes great deeds Time Our abiding father

We Banished Here in our misery Bestowing pointless realizations To those too clueless to Already realize their meaning We’ve seen all In our mundane eternity here We are forced to watch As time consumes Its vengeance unavoidable Its destruction unescapable Its wrath alone Ends all things Time Our eternal master

We are the daughters of Time In all things, we’re resilient yet fair Beware the riddles that reach your ears For the changing of time is constant And forever irreversible We are the hands of time-sharing one face Only agreeing on one thing that Death is inevitable We are the daughters of Time 59

1989 Maggie Smith

When the Berlin Wall fell, my white Palmetto’s jeans were so tight, I pulled them on damp at night and let sleep teach them the curves of my body. Who could learn? Middle-school boys were pock-faced, Drakkar Noired in their turtlenecks and tennis sweaters, their gold chains and jersey number charms. They carried their stacked books low, on one hip. Girls clutched binders to their chests. I didn’t make the rules. In Spanish One, I learned how to buy an apple from a grocer, how to pack a suitcase for Sevilla, how to call a stray dog in a town square. I learned which man in Destinos could not be trusted—Arturo es un mujeriego. Arturo is a womanizer. But Pre-Algebra, that new language of letters plus numbers, I couldn’t write or speak. I doodled cubes instead, tracing each line until I tore the paper, carving the desk. The teacher called the skinniest girl in class Isosceles. Isosceles had a blond home perm and silver braces. Isosceles had a name, and it was Natalie. When the Berlin Wall fell, Germans chiseled away pieces and held them high, as if they were moon rocks, as if they were gold, but they looked to us like hunks of concrete. We thought we knew nothing about life divided. The same gray locker repeated down the hall, copy after copy of itself.

Komikka Patton 61

10 Burke Mayne

We fade in on a man. One of those slow fades. An expert barber may start with a 10 and end on a 2 kind of fade. The “I’m in 4th grade there is no way I’ve been laid my hair’s still in braids” kind of fade. We should cut to his feet. He hasn’t got any shoes because he feels he can run faster in the grass this way. IDK what I’m running from. That piece of sock lint is stuck under the right foots big toenail. His jeans need work. Sewn so the bone can go home. Maybe work is the last thing this guy needs. Yeah, pan up around his belt. continued on page 64

Komikka Patton 63

There is that stain from getting brain, suffocated while being lain. The leather in the pan will make for a good dinner. Filet Mignon. As a child he thought this was the best. It’s just leather. Let her cook dad would say with meat fumes filling the patio. The fingers of chocolate yank his esophagus he has to piss, he missed. His dick was always to small to sit, it just fit in the space between the seat and the porcelain then all again he’s filling in, he’s never felt less masculine. He stands in his unwashed jeans held up by the same belt he’s worn since high school. Sometimes it catches his unshaven pubic hair and hurts. Costuming forgot the damn shirt again. But at least we can get a clean view of the inny where jenny’d shimmy her outty. They pulled his appendix from there you know. 3 scars, like that lion king VHS that we broke. Does this guy ever cut his fingernails? My god no wonder his arms are covered

in claw marks. That reptilian skin should shed again in the winter. Hopefully he’ll still be with her. His nipples belong on a pizza. Show me the phony pepperoni. Lets move on to the face. I feel like the majority of this… What is this? A poem? *inaudible voice* Oh… Hmmm… Okay. His mouth turned up to the sky as he touched himself. He knew she couldn’t see him It was so bright in there and the window was so pixilated. Pan back up we have already been there. Wet teeth buried in a saliva lagoon with only a serpent to call it home. Three or four pillows at night helps him keep the mucus out of his septum’s handsome rectum. Dumb income keeps to the slums. Come cum on my bottom. The lens must be pretty heavy or you’re just a pervert. Caves pave the way. Mays just always- fuck all this maize. Theres the shot… The money… The poster. Green wanted out, Blue pushed in. What a violet battle it was between each.

His friend never liked the yolk “cut it out, I just want the whites” he would cry. It’s his eyes. More complex than anal sex. Keep moving up the hair and the forehead. There stop, drop the F stop. The wet dew on his hair looks like grass in the light. The bokeh of flowers each follicle shines. He’s mine. With all of his flaws he’s still a dime. Later she’d use the word “fine”. Cue one of those swoosh sounds as we go inside his head. (Its a big telephoto.) Inside is naked. A universe spent alone. Unreachable by even one of those Amazon drones. An idea for phoems. The credits are about to roll. The audience can feel it. All rise no fall the director dropped the ball, all in all, not too bad. Then we see him, siting there. Alone in a chair, chocolate hair. Is this his lair? We keep zooming. We should cut to his feet. He’s bare foot. A piece of lin*Fade to Black.* 2

Komikka Patton 67

Artist Title Medium

Peter Franz

DIALECT Amber New

Tongues of lacy detail speak words of acid that burn my ears as they idle with a thought. This ideal language sounds like lead, distorting this idea growing like a tidal wave as it approaches the late night shore with a teal glow that blinds my eyes. Edit these phrases to dilate the meanings that are tied, creating a perfect lie.

Mariah Holmes

Kit Mizeres 72

WHAT IS DEATH? Amber New

With an elemental joy I split the dream In this world, I am the surest thing. For those of us young Each is another and no other: A purpose, maybe there are too many of us All of us bleeding in and out like itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s breathing, Seems unbearably cruel until I saw how we connected to make a shape More like the stars Going over the hill. Death is coming Where it is easy to be beautiful

Mariah Holmes 74

ROTATION Maggie Smith

You are spinning, but slowly, not blurred by speed, not flying into space with your feet lifting out of your shoes. You’re spinning so slowly, the change in your pocket doesn’t know to fall, chiming, to the floor. I remember lying in bed a child, knees aching, stretched to the point of breakage, but childhood is like that. Your body slows into focus. While you sleep, you grow a fraction of a fraction of an inch, but most mornings you look like yourself. Others you wake missing some roundness in your cheeks. Back up against the doorframe, heels down. If you can stand still, I’ll pencil a line just above your head and date it.

Catherine Norwood

THREE CHILDREN, TWO ARMS Lexi White

I first saw her by the lake in the middle of the grass Oh my stars, your mother was so beautiful! Her hair was black as the beast’s shadow Her skin was clear as the gathered rain Oh my stars, your mother’s so beautiful She swept her frail arms along the dew With the skin of her hands as clear as gathered rain My nails met the silk of her skirt, unlike my wool Her soft, frail arms swept along the dew I gathered the embroidered train with haste My nails met the silk of her skirt, and unlike my cursed wool It was graceful, like her goddess step I gathered the embroidered shirt with haste Hid them far beyond the mountains to rest forever Gracefully, undisturbed like her goddess step towards me. I asked her to be your mother. They rest hidden far beyond the mountains. Forever her finest clothing, the unknowing dowry paid to me. I convinced her to be your mother. We’ll stay bound together, her home does not await

Her â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the finest clothing, the unknowing dowry paid this is my most valuable treasure, my daughter It has bound us together, her home is with me She will stay if her silk sleeps in the mountain Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s my most treasured thing, my sons Never speak of where my wedding gift lies She will leave one of you when she finds her silk in the mountain.

Annie Noelker

Okell Lee Graphite

VIVE LA RÉVOLUTION Abby Vance

Closed eyes, breathing halted, she pressed her face against the wallpaper. Outside, cannons exploded, throwing dust and rocks into the air, rubble raining down like confetti. Her fingers quaked, the glass rippling, light piercing under shut eyes. Around her, the floors shift, jumping, as if they too, were startled. The dead laid in the streets, their blood being soaked into soil, while inside she was told to keep silent. To hold her breath as her corsets were laced, as men died just outside her walls. Now and again, she heard a cry. A plea for help from those not yet dead. It wouldn’t be long until it grew silent… and she was again left with her thoughts and pretty dressed, talking about the royals and what they would wear at a gala like this.

Seulki Choi

BIOGRAPHIES Kierstin Bridger Kierstin Bridger is a Colorado writer and winner of The Mark Fischer Poetry Prize and the 2015 ACC Writer’s Studio award. She is editor of Ridgway Alley Poems, co-director of Open Bard Poetry Series and contributing writer for Telluride Inside and out. Her work has appeared in Fugue, 3Elements, The Lascaux Prize 2015 Anthology, Prime Number, Tulane Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, Mason’s Road, Pilgrimage, and others. Her book Demimonde will be published later this year by Lithic Press. She earned her MFA degree at Pacific University.

Carla Drysdale Carla Drysdale is a Canadian poet who resides in France just over the border from Geneva, where she works as a communications consultant. Her chapbook Inheritance is forthcoming with Finishing Line Press. Her first book of poems, Little Venus, was published by Toronto’s Tightrope Books in 2010. Her poems have appeared in such literary journals as PRISM, Cleaver Magazine, The Same, LIT, the Literary Review of Canada, Canadian Literature, The Fiddlehead, Global City Review, and others. She was awarded the Earle Birney poetry prize by PRISM in 2014.

Terrance Hayes Terrance Hayes was born in Columbia, South Carolina. He received a BA from Coker College in Hartsville, South Carolina, and an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh writing program.

He is the author of Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; Wind in a Box(Penguin, 2006); Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), which won the 2001 National Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

Mariah Holmes Mariah Holmes is a junior at CCAD majoring in photography and minoring in cinematic arts. Other interests of hers include poetry and creative writing, music, theater, and good food. In recent years she has been involved in vocal and drama performances and has been awarded in excellence in both areas.

Rebe Huntman Rebe Huntman’s essays and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Sonora Review, South Loop Review, The Pinch, Tampa Review, and Quarter After Eight (where her essay “Falling” is a 2014 Robert J. Demott Short Prose Contest finalist.) A former professional Latin dancer, her work as a choreographer has taken her to Cuba and South America to collaborate with native artists, been featured in Latina Magazine, Chicago Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Fox and ABC News. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Ohio State University and teaches writing at the Columbus College of Art and Design. Find her at www.rebehuntman.com.

Burke Mayne Burke Mayne is a conceptual artist working in a variety of mediums. His work is experimental in that it is pushing the borders of the mediums where the concepts take place. The didactic created by the work as a whole flows in a cohesive style that allow the viewers to form ideas and reactions from a body rather than a single work. Burke Mayne currently lives in Columbus, Ohio and is a student studying Cinematic Arts at the Columbus College of Art and Design.

Amber New My name is Amber New. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m a third-year majoring in illustration. To be honest I never thought I was very good at writing poetry which led me to take a class on it. That class showed me how much I enjoy it and how relaxing it can be. Poetry is a great way to express yourself and create some amazing imagery from words.

Laney Norman Laney Norman is a junior of Fine Arts at CCAD. Her Pagan faith base is an inspiration to her work, whether itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s painting, sculpture, or writing. As an aspiring tattoo artist, ancient cultures and modern day are her focus in study and in daily life.

Jared Sanford A junior at Columbus College of Art and Design, he is studying Illustration with minors in Creative Writing and Business. He has twice taken part in CCAD’s Red Wheelbarrow reading series, and is currently working on his first book of poetry and illustration. His writing is inspired by observations from life and reflections on memories of the past.

Lexi White Three Children, Two Arms is a pantoum based on the Korean Fairytale “The Woodcutter and The Fairy”. Lexi White is a 3D animation major at the Columbus College of Art and Design who aspires to work in game art as a 3D modeler.

Caitlin Wolle Caitlin Wolle is currently finishing her degree at CCAD with a major in illustration and a minor in fine arts with an emphasis in glass sculpture. She takes most of her inspirations from Nordic and Eastern mythology as well as ocean environments and creatures.

Zach Kitzen