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Brushfire Staff
Detritrus Autumn Stark : : :
Editor’s Note
Life is full of uncertainty and challenges. Our experiences can leave us feeling isolated, even if they are universal. In those moments, it’s easy to find yourself lost and unaware of what is around you.
In this edition of Brushfire, the art and writing may not have all the answers. But instead, I hope it helps you to confront your feelings and grapple with what you’re struggling with.
I want to take a step and encourage you to go out there and create. Nobody—not the person next to you nor AI—can make what you can. I hope you channel your feelings into whatever you do and make sense of them. As you go through these pages, I hope you see both the emptiness and the extraordinary in everyday life, and it stays with you through your joyous, mundane, and disastrous moments. As you go through these pages, I want you to find the courage to go out there and create yourself.
At the end of the day, no one cares. Screw it.
— Paige Krueger Executive Editor
Table of Contents
visual
Autumn Stark
Luca Graniglia
Sherry Shahan
Jason Mennel
Eva Shipley
Autumn Stark
J. C. Alfier
Camilla Mancuso
Nascimbene
Christine Wilson
Eva Elliot
Julianna Horvath
Mikayla Fershin
S. B.
Carmila Cardillo
Autumn Stark
Eva Shipley
J. C. Alfier
Mikayla Fershin
Ava Sloane
Judith Skillman
Tytti Heikkinen
Christine Wilson
Joyce Feller
Susan Pollet
Lucas Lugo
Bill Wolak
Detritus
Always Sunny
Smorgasbord
Light Painting Under the Stars
Involved
Reminiscence
I did my utmost Awakening
Leftovers
You Have Filled my Insides with Knots and Strings
Mountains of my Imagination
rutina nocturna en el baño
Hardened Space
Sketch
Picky
36 Sawtooth Stars
Filthy Postcards
danielle
I’m Comfortable
Salsify
Sandstorm
Pearls
Refugees
Moon Dance
He Yawn
The Interactive Archive
Table of Contents
Mary Christine Delea
Benjamin Nardolilli
Camila Cardillo
Melanie Perish
Nichole Zachary
Laura Schulkind
Harland Swan
Hibah Shabkhez
Sara Femenella
Christiana Doucette
Sam Ambler
Doug Van Hooser
A. W. Earl
Dmitry Blizniuk
Scott Davidson
Philosophical Play in Three
Accumulation Missing You Blade
Under The Circumstances, This Is...
On Courbet’s “Woman with Parrot” at the Metropolitan Museum Like you Really Saw Me Baling
Ars Poetica
Gray
The Anteater of War Ruined by Television
David Lee
Ren Cardoza
Olivia Sawatzki
Siobhan Redmond
Rivky Lang
Natalie Pfeifle
Luxury Living Last Night
When I was 17 I Cried at the Chinese Contortionists
Sour The Next Morning Painting The Sky
Daylight
Mary Christine Delea
It is in daylight, we are told, we will find clarity, our vision not hampered by the obscurity of dimness, a place where the German tag and the Dutch dag transformed (before they became a playground game and a 1990s slang word) into a unit of time, the time it takes for earth to turn just once. We put so much faith in seeing (we believe faith means believing in that which cannot be seen). Sometimes, this creates religion, bastard of fasten, in the binding sense, not in the grabbing/seizing sense, which seems insignificant, but is an important difference nonetheless. Which is to say that light, from which we illuminate all our issues to gain that clarity mentioned earlier—that radiant, luminous energy, that noun/adjective/verb that we depend on so much—
(I will leave it to others to decide if our belief in light is faith or not) defines the day. Night is the absence of light during a part of the day belonging to nocturnal beings and lovers, when our issues are easily dismissed.
Day is the part of the day in which those lovers must decide which quirks to ignore, which to adore, and which ones—made eternal as days go by— might unfasten the bonds that just the night before had created such a strong, unwavering faith in another. Ah, last night! The lights were out, a candle was lit, and as the planet continued its rotation, two beings made themselves eternal and began a new, two-person religion, its tenets as clear as day.
Always Sunny Luca Graniglia
Smorgasbord
Sherry Shahan
A Philosophical Play in Three Acts
Benjamin Nardolilli
She tells me she is searching for a more modern definition of truth, an instrument that is pragmatic, as she looks for the eyeliner on the bathroom shelf, I suggest something industrial, not aristocratic, and she says that would be perfect, no toleration for the slavery of old facts and the tyranny of methods, this excites her and I try to go in for a kiss, ending up by myself in the shower
A tea kettle goes off, she rushes to soothe it, promising there’s enough for each of us to enjoy a cup, as we do, she promises again that it’s not prestige just curiosity that interests her, the modern mind she has needs updating, indeed, so does mine, astronomy and astrology, chemistry and alchemy appear frightfully close when I shut my eyes and hover in pure thought
In the living room, old napkins fall out of her purse as she struggles with her cat, there might be something, I add, in pure mathematics, carefully approaching in case that ancient cause of rational numbers inspires irate replies, I don’t really believe the suggestion myself, but I want to sound intelligent, it works, she smiles and pulls up the striped socks on her feet. Mathematics it is
Light Painting Under the Stars
Jason Mennel
Model Heather Denise
Ode to Sweat and Sin
Camila Cardillo
What we choose to do with the same things
Is what differentiates you from me.
How you speak is perhaps the same as how you sing
And all variations or lack thereof are how we choose to be.
Clothing and jewelry adorn my body
Blush and mascara adorn my face
Thoughts and memories adorn my mind
But I look and feel best when a little sweaty.
Oh heavenly Father full of grace
Do you know who here chooses to be kind?
Face burning red from the outside in
Dew building on the brow of my forehead
Lingering and threatening to splatter the ground with sin
(No lapses or moisture exist when you’re dead).
Toes slide against one another in my now-damp socks
Pheromones find their way from under my arms to fill the room
Like Eve, I cannot resist temptationsI wander, filling my pockets with petals and rocks.
This state of being is where I, myself, bloom!
Where rain and my temple gave identical sensations.
A feeling of success! Of ability! Of accomplishment!
From repetition or loving or simply existing in the same moment as the sun.
How lovely is this heat we can enjoy without repent!
How lovely is this freedom to allow yourself to become undone!
Oh when the last bite has been bitten
And the leftover colors on the pallet all mix into a grey,
The prophet exclaims “Amen! Amen!”
And the last words have been written.
I’d bottle the feeling to wear a spritz of it each day
But the satisfaction isn’t the same as merely doing it again.
Luxury Living
David Lee
I still thought I could achieve some sort of notoriety by writing and painting, by avoiding distractions and drinking only on Wednesday evenings, by going to bed before midnight and getting up early. My high-ceilinged front room was flooded with light for painting and I had a Royal typewriter on a small desk in front of one window with my computer tucked into a small room off my bedroom. I’d write or paint in the morning, make scrambled eggs, take a walk in a nearby beech forest, then start all over again. My cats often camped adjacent to me, aloof until early evening, lounging under an enormous skylight.
As to who might eventually view my paintings, who might read my writings, I was still hopeful. I’d gotten come-ons from The Picayune Review, since they’d published my “Stations of the Cross,” an illustrated crown of sonnets. I knew I could count on the readers of my new favorite lit mag, The Plinth. I had collages on view at Bantam, a Tex-Mex restaurant in Galland.
On this particular Friday I’d stopped working for the day when Sharon arrived, placing her wide-brimmed hat on my round glass table, covering one of my spread-out manuscripts. She’s a barometer of local humidity levels—susceptible to volumetric fluctuations, her countenance something like a series of inflations/deflations as viewed through a glassbottomed boat. We’d watched an old VHS tape of Ishtar again recently and I reminded her how much she looked like Elaine May.
“I’m back from Elysium,” she said.
“I’m using that table,” I said. “You can hang your hat in the kitchen.”
My upper kitchen cabinets’ handles serve as pegs on which to hang clothing, but that’s neither here nor there—I do
Involved
Eva Shipley
not live in a “tiny house,” per se, but in a cottage consisting of five small rooms and a bathroom, because the large old house on the mainland I’d retired from ogled me nights with floating airplane headlights and crows reduced to monstrous forms on a windswept plane, whose playfulness I often mistook for aggression at such a distance, hyperkinetic tricksters approaching through my staring bay windows.
“I’m looking forward to not worrying about making do,” I’d said once to Sharon, after lugging a Cuisinart to the dumpster. She blinked. Her hair was blowing back away from her eyes and her own beak of a nose, not unattractive, in fact glorious, while her hands seemed, as always, to be dangling over the railings of a ferry boat.
“Luckily, we belong to the island club.” That is what Sharon said back, after closing her eyes to the gentle salt spray sifting in through my screens, a kind of sparkling fish scale embroidery pattern glittering like mail on our occasionally furrowed foreheads.
“No, we’re alone all right,” I said, the oft-repeated island club existing merely due to a story I’d penned one hot summer, populated by brooding thugs imported from Easter Island, looming (but voiceless) spirits troubling the story’s two anxietyriddled human protagonists.
Still, I was managing to stay the course, scratching out phrases on parchment in a little flip notebook, tearing pages from the gleaming spiral binding and tossing them up into crosscurrents in my high-ceiling front room, letting them swirl like dust motes up there in the ethers. The pages glommed onto several starboard windows. (I’d transcribe them come the weekend.)
“Mmmmm,” Sharon stretched her legs over my meditation mat and wiggled her toes. We were looking at a painting I’d been working on, negative space predominate, the air between the branches of several banyan trees thrust blandly into the foreground. Parts of the canvas existed as “no color,” while the whole remained far removed from anything resembling “flatness.”
“Everything is in flux,” I said, gesturing to the open air between she and I.
“There isn’t even a cloud in that painting,” Sharon said. “None in the actual sky, either.” And I nodded toward the bank of windows.
One of my cats, Sylvester, yowled from his spot on my bed. Once again, he’d surprised himself by waking up in the middle of his twentieth year alive on this planet.
“My old flame,” Sharon said. “You are privy to a toy box full of compositions I feel mostly knocked-out birds reviving might be enamored with.” Her feet were planted on the paintsplattered floor, wide stance. Her toenail polish was burnt sienna. Inside her own castle, a ranch house built around a 200-yearold Douglas fir, were catalogues shredded into the shapes of imaginary babies each, remarkably, distinguishable from the other. “Unencumbered by Life,” she called the project, a series of assemblage portraits of beings with not a trace of “original sin,”who would never be forced to punch a time clock. “Similar to your representations of foodstuffs,” she’d explained one evening, while offering me a blue-green crab cake.
She was referring to my paintings of bologna sandwiches on white bread, with mustard, surrounded by a sort of fecaltinted-toward-green-brown background. The sandwiches floated like disinherited asteroids, left aimless without trajectory, millions of miles above the Gulf of Mexico, part of my American Hurricane series.
“It’s all real,” I said.
Between us, dancing like duck and pig emojis, back and forth, was our laughter right then. She was up on her elbows now. I thought of a doctored Mona Lisa, eyes squinched-up with a sharpie, laughter like bouncing hailstones in stop-action animation. The skin over her collar bone was like antique parchment, perfect as the delicate shading approximating the bark on a paper birch, certainly something that needed to be kissed.
Once we inflated a big rubber raft and smooched inside the big nowhere of the St. Lawrence Seaway and threw small stones at towering mansions along the shoreline. She wiggled her redbrown toes while I nibbled her ear.
We never held to schedules back then either.
Reminiscence
Autumn Stark
Last Night
Ren Cardoza
The Earth burned up years ago, as the sun expanded and consumed it, along with those that insisted on staying behind. The majority of humankind now resides on New Earth, a space station that was originally built to accommodate the growing population. Over the years, the sun has continued to swell as it burns hotter and hotter, slowly approaching its death. It is now so large it takes up the majority of the view from most of the windows. It’s almost reached us.
The government sent out the first announcement about a year ago, telling us to prepare for the end, but I don’t think it really sunk in for most of us until recently. It’s hauntingly beautiful to watch, a star in its final moments. Sometimes I find myself captivated by the eerie red glow. Then I remember these are our final moments too, and all I can think is that I wish I had more time with you.
Today is the day. I’m still not sure it’s sunk in for me. We ate breakfast together this morning. I was surprised you wanted to, after what I did. I know you haven’t forgiven me, but you knew it was the last time we would see each other, and you didn’t want things to end on bad terms. Not that it matters. No one will be around to remember it. You were silent for most of the meal, incapable of much beyond small talk, but you let me touch your hand and that was more than I could have asked for.
We were told not to go to work today. Not much point, I guess. We know the protocol by now, since the government has sent out several mandatory instruction videos over the past few months. We are to go to our separate quarters at 18:00 where the doors will be locked, and then…we wait. They estimate the sun will reach the station by 21:00. We’ve been warned to come to terms with our imminent doom, since there’s no earth to return to. The final spaceship left yesterday to look for a new homeland. There aren’t enough ships for everyone, of course, and the tickets are insanely expensive. Humanity will live on, just not the working class. Since we have time to kill, we take a walk around the
station together. You are still silent, but you hold my hand as we walk. We stop at your favorite fountain, the water now glowing red as it reflects the light from the sun, which is all we can see out the huge window across from us. We can’t feel the heat from inside the station. It’s unsettling. We sit, and you stare out at the sun, while I only want to look at you. You are so insanely beautiful; I can’t imagine how I could have ever looked at anyone else.
It seems like all you do these days is stare at the sun. It makes me think of when we were younger, and I lived on Earth while you were already on New Earth. We used to talk on the phone, and you would tell me to look at the sky so we could both look at the same stars, and that made us feel closer.
“It’s kind of pretty,” you say, squinting slightly from the brightness.
“Can we…”
You shake your head, tears forming in your eyes. “There’s nothing to resolve anymore.”
I start to protest, but before I can get the words out, the look you give me tells me to shut my mouth, so I do. You’re right, I suppose. There is no point in resolving it now. But will I find peace if we don’t? Will you?
We get ice cream, which a hospitality robot is giving out free today, and spend the rest of the day walking around the park, talking about nothing in particular. You remark how impressive it is that they got these plants to thrive on the space station, and I joke that they get plenty of sun. Every once in a while, I catch you looking at me like you want to say something real, but you don’t.
“Attention citizens of New Earth,” we hear over the intercom. It’s a woman’s voice. Soothing, yet vaguely robotic. “Please return to your quarters and prepare. You have—ten—minutes.”
You tighten your grip on my hand and I feel your ring digging into my fingers. This is the first time you’ve worn it in over a year. I almost breathe a sigh of relief before I remember I will never see you again.
“Goodbye,” I whispered. “I…”
You kiss me. I’m surprised, but I lean into it. It’s almost like a first kiss; unsteady at first, but electric. It feels like time freezes
around us, and I forget everything. I forget that the world is ending. I forget that I broke your heart. I only think of you. Your smile. How your eyes used to sparkle, reflecting the stars. All I want is to stay in this moment.
I step into my room, and I hear the door slide shut and click behind me. My quarters are small, with only space for a chair and desk, a single bed which is set into the wall, and a closet. Only families are afforded larger rooms. I wish the sun had waited a little longer to explode, so maybe we could have gotten married. Then we would be together now, holding each other at the end.
Between my desk and my bed, there is a window that faces the sun. I sit on my bed for a while, not sure what to do. What could I possibly do in the last minutes of my life that would mean anything?
I think about you and suddenly it hits me. I know what I need to do. I grab my chair and pull it out from under my desk, turning it to face the window. At least we can look out at the same star together, one last time.
I wish I could cry. It would be easier, function as some kind of release of my emotions. Instead, I feel them in my chest, like a dull ache. An old wound that never quite healed. I grab my phone from my desk and open our text conversation. I type a text to you without even thinking and send it before I’ve fully processed what I typed. Even if it doesn’t matter and you’ll never see it, I needed to say it. If I’m going to lose everything tonight, I have to tell you what you mean to me. Because nothing else matters.
I look at our messages again, and I see the little “read” underneath my text. You saw it.
You reply: I forgive you.
A tear rolls down my cheek as I stare back out at the sun.
Workplace Melanie
Perish
The CEOs, CFOs, COOs and minions are building a gymnasium filled with bicycles. Stationary they go nowhere. Their frames are alloys of ambition, need, and greed. Their grips are there for decoration since each sports keyboard and screen. Rows of workers pedal and pedal, go faster and faster – hot as the burning wheel of time. They paper the walls with money, with paintings of bitcoin, prints of NASDAQ, photos of the next new, new thing. The doors open three times a day then lock. Stairs are uneven, but the floor is level and transparent so workers can watch the young and the old on streets trying to find their ways home. Sometimes lightning unzips the sky and drenches the highest glass ceiling, floods curbs and gutters. Trees have vanished so, drains do not clog and birdsong has exited the air even pigeons. Come, they say, the Cs and their minions. Work here for us and do not think about the people who pick lettuce and strawberries, or how small the hands are of the people who sew your clothes or whether any of these are children. Come, they say.
I did my utmost J. C. Alfier
Awakening
Camilla Mancuso Nascimbene
WHEN I WAS 17 I CRIED AT THE CHINESE CONTORTIONISTS
Olivia Sawatzki
And I had a crush on Nic and he had a crush on me too, but he was afraid to say and he only told me a year later when I’d already moved out and boys always told me, then and even now, how intimidating I was – I can never quite remember a man saying that about a woman they actually desired, but, Tickets were $15 or $20 and the lanterns were there for the weekend, so we drove to the fairgrounds in the middle of winter (February, it must’ve been) and Nic and I were there and maybe someone else–this had to be 2016, can’t remember if I drove or Nic did, he always had a dirty car and only played cassette tapes. The lanterns were pretty in that they were there to be photographed in front of, I don’t photograph well and I’m told I’m prettier in person (another thing I’m not sure needs to be shared with the subject of the thought). They were not really lanterns but huge lighted sculptures, shaped like dragons and mushrooms and that sort of thing, overly whimsical, they did not move me. It was bitter cold and the lanterns were outside, but inside, in some building that come August would hold doomed piglets or the Butter Cow (oh how desperately I miss Ohio when I think of the Butter Cow), today there was food, hot chocolate, and the contortionists, Who performed in a dark corner on a stage that was really a wooden pallet or two put together. There were two of them, in blue spandex bodysuits, and gentle music (a harp and a soft little drum) played as they twisted
around each other, lifting entire bodies over just one tiny wrist, stepping off each other’s knees and flipping upside down, landing light and elasticon thier feet, as if it were the most effortless thing in the world. They couldn’t have been more than 14 years old, two Chinese girls with thick shiny ponytails who traveled, I assumed, along with the exhibition,
And they were bored! Their faces completely blank, not pressed in any sort of concentration, not once glancing at us (me, Nic and maybe a father with a fussing child, cranky from the cold). They did not acknowledge our applause, oohs or ahhhs-in fact it felt like we were interrupting some daily practice, equally spiritual and banal, like the stretch after waking or the brushing of teeth,
And I wept! Searingly, silently, like you might at the swell of a symphony, at this cultural voyeurism, this corny display that not even the performers cared about; I, so wounded and young, I tried to hide it, I was ashamed to find it so beautiful out in the open. And how can I not even now understand why it touched me, besides that it did? Why did I remember it right away, when, yesterday, a decade older, I saw a fat little sparrow hop with both feet together, momentarily afloat, and snatch up the crumb of a hot dog midair, then disappear into the empty sky? How confusing, the coexistence of the stupid and sublime—and how carefully I hide from them both, when I hold my breath in traffic, or scroll endlessly on the office toilet—from those things which are gorgeous beyond comprehension in their ordinary ugliness–these things that move me to tears–it is too painful to try to know them, it is creeping too closely to God.
Leftovers
Christine Wilson
Accumulation
Nichole Zachary
When my brother left the rez, he fed our savings to a ghost in exchange for a cold bed & a clover token. I ripped the pearl buttons from his shirts & threaded them onto the sheep’s wool, their backs glistening in the glow of the trailer’s floodlight.
In the summer Grandma & I sheared them bald, the buttons popping with each pass.
We received a letter later with sand in its creases, a Las Vegas stamp, the only words: How many bodies can fit into a museum before the crying gets too loud?
I am a nation of found things.
Paper butterflies adorn my eyes with crayon-drawn wings made from eyelashes and cotton cocoons. Magic scarves grow in my stomach. I pull out the infinite patterns of floral, lace & sequin, stained with red clay & salt & words:
Girls can’t skip rocks. Boys can’t be gay.
This girlboy skips rocks of confessions.
Each painted pink with glitter like the sidewalk after a heavy rain. My rocks are embroidered with words from the many fabrics I harvest from second-hand clothes & I loop ropes of horsehair through my pants & my hipbones, the color of rotting teeth.
Sometimes I wonder what I would look like with blue eyes. When I try to voice this, my mouth is a tunnel of wind.
Grandma says even the milk snake knows to avoid the cornflower blue, their forked tongue sensing the danger of bright color.
She also says money has no value in the desert. The sand devours paper & metal, spits them into tumbleweeds whose sharp bite can tear through raw hems to reveal shaved knees, the thunder-strike of a lizard chasing scar.
When my brother came back, pale with hands soft like pears, he pretended he never left.
Even when the lead rope bit into his padded thumb & when he burned in the heatwave, the front of his open flannel waving.
You Have Filled My Insides With Knots and Strings
Eva Elliot
Missing You
Laura Schulkind
Not yet noon, and it is dark as dusk. Low, frog-bellied clouds bring the sky close. Shapes dissolve, colors lean to gray in the diffused light. Ivory wool shawls wrap the mountain shoulders. Their fringed edges float down and settle in the pine and dogwood that carpet the slopes. No wind. No shadows. No birdsong, the warblers and grosbeaks perhaps thinking evening came early.
This is when I miss you most— cool, still, sunless days—you facing the wooded hills, wrapped in your blue kimono, fingers laced around a mug of coffee.
Miss how I knew, with absolute certainty, that you would turn to me and say this is your favorite weather.
Miss feeling in that pearly, ephemeral moment that I knew you, could see into you, before you withdrew into your thoughts.
Mountains of my Imagination
Julianna Horvath
I know some facts, suspect others.
And yes, you confided some of your secrets, perhaps more than a daughter should know. But when all is said and done, parents are not ancestors. Their histories, their transgressions, their sweaty pulsating youths, their losses and regrets, their dreams realized or not, are a haze.
Too close to be studied without drawing blood.
Why did you love this chilly, misty weather? Was it a place to disappear?
A balm?
Did you find freedom in the ambiguities of gray, possibilities in an uncertain horizon? I will never know.
Just, that you would love this day. And that will have to be enough.
rutina nocturna en el baño
Mikayla Fershin
Blade
Harland Swan Ironically
The only time my father and I ever got along was when he was shaving
I’d sit on the bathroom counter after having brushed my teeth and watch
Watch how he applied his shave soap, the fast but precise movements he’d make
Somehow always perfectly applying it, never making a mess with the fluffy suds
Watch as he took his razor, gliding through the scented concoction
Angling his neck upwards while frowning, attempting to avoid the razor burn he’d give himself every time
Watch while he wiped his face clean with a steaming wash rag
Watch the trimmings swirl in the water, down the drain, seeing remnants cling to the sides of the bowl
And on very special occasions
Watch him tap aftershave into his jaw
But that was usually only when my grandparents were visiting
So when I came out for the fifth and final time
And was promptly ignored for the fifth time
I sat wondering how he didn’t know
And more so
Why he couldn’t believe what I had been telling him
Why he couldn’t love me enough to teach me how to shave the way he does
And the way his father showed him
I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t seen it coming
How many “little girls” were left mesmerized by their father’s shaving routine?
Left arguably envious of the pesky little hairs that sprouted from their father’s jaw?
Now my father’s facial hair sprouts from my jaw
His “good genes” giving me what I was so jealous of, regardless of his own wishes
And somehow I shave the way he does
With my razor gliding through the scented concoction on my face
I wonder if we ever shave at the same time
And I wonder if in a different universe
He’s the one who taught me how.
Under The Circumstances, This Is ...
Hibah Shabkhez
You slide your foot into the yawning arch
Wide like the mouth of a cave. Luring in Feet by the toes, it lets them wriggle all
The way out again, rejoice in the win;Yet holds each in its rubber vice.
So you drift languidly through the day, while
Three deadlines burn three holes into your head; Strolling, scrolling, swallowing with a smile
The one prayer justly destined to go
Unanswered in this life:
Not - “save me, save me, save me from myself
I am the dragon, I the ravaged town -”
But - “Find me a rubber shoe to wriggle
My toes in; help me, without letting down
Those I love, pretend to be free.”
Sour
Siobhan Redmond
It began with flour and water. The Girl stood in her little apartment, in her little kitchen that she loved so dearly, with its butcher block countertops and subway tiled walls and mint green cupboards that she had chosen and painted herself. She carefully measured out equal parts strong white flour and warm water into a tall glass mason jar. She mixed it with a wooden spoon, taking care not to leave any clumps of flour unmixed. When she was satisfied, she clasped the lid shut and whispered quiet words of encouragement to it. She placed it on the countertop next to the sink, the sunniest spot in the room.
***
Over the next three days, The Girl continued to feed it with more flour and water. She watched the creamy mass in the jar as it grew but remained still and lifeless. She knew that it would soon come alive. Each time she opened the lid to check for bubbles, she whispered kind words to it. She told it she believed it. She told it she loved it.
***
On the fourth day, first thing in the morning, barefoot and in her pajamas, The Girl opened the lid. She squealed with excitement when she saw it. A collection of tiny bubbles had appeared at its surface.
It didn’t respond, but she knew in her heart that it was listening.
“You’re going to make such beautiful things,” she whispered to it as she fed it more flour and water.
***
On the fifth day, she found that the jar was teeming with energy, its contents bubbling and frothing. The Girl’s heart soared as she peered into the little jar. Something incredible had happened. A life had been made.
“What am I?” it asked.
“A sourdough starter. I made you,” she told it.
“Why?”
“Because together, we can make beautiful things.”
She fed it once more and placed it on her sunny countertop. From the mason jar, The Starter watched The Girl move around her apartment, working, eating, resting, always alone. It felt a profound sense that this was the start of something truly special.
When The Girl woke the next morning, she checked on The Starter, and it began asking its questions right away.
“What are we going to make?” it asked.
“Bread mostly.”
“Will we make it together?”
“Always.”
“Do you love me?” it asked. This had been the question that was bubbling inside of it all morning, waiting to come out.
“Very much,” she told it, a warm smile spreading across her face.
“Will you love me forever?” It asked.
The Girl looked surprised. She hesitated a moment, before she spoke.
“Yes, I think I will. I made you, after all.”
“Good,” it responded, satisfied with the answer it had received.
“Now, feed me please. I’ll be ready tomorrow.”
Finally, the day came when it was time to create. Both The Girl and The Starter were bubbling with anticipation.
“Are you ready?” The Girl asked it.
“I think so,” it replied.
Together, they set to work, The Girl measuring out flour, water, olive oil and salt. She mixed it all together in the bowl with a few spoons of The Starter. It relished in the feeling of being mixed and kneaded into a silky dough, feeling The Girl’s fingers working through it, feeling closer to her than ever before. The Girl relished in the feeling of creating something, bringing something new into existence.
“What do I do now?” The Starter asked, once the dough was smooth and mixed.
“Now you rise,” she said.
“But how do I do that?” it asked. “I need your help.”
“Trust yourself,” she told it. “You know what to do.”
And at that, she covered the bowl and left The Starter to rise. To its own disbelief, it seemed to know exactly what to do, as if instinctual. It was a deep-rooted knowledge, woven into every cell of its being.
When enough time had passed, and the dough was ready, The Girl gently shaped it into a boule and lowered it into her cast iron dutch-oven before carefully slicing a cross onto the surface with a razor blade.
“What now?” The Starter asked.
“Now you will turn into bread,” The Girl told it, looking down at it with
glistening eyes. “And I will see you in the morning when it’s time to feed you again.
The Starter understood, and drifted off to sleep, proud of what it had accomplished, exhausted from the effort.
For several weeks, they continued to mix and knead and rise and bake together. The Girl would wake each morning and attend to The Starter, always discarding part of it so it wouldn’t overflow, before feeding it with a delicate mix of strong white flour and water.
The Girl made a loaf of bread each Sunday, savoring the smell that would waft through her apartment. Her parents called her, concerned that they hadn’t been hearing from her. But she insisted that she was happy where she was. The warmth in her kitchen and the smell of fresh bread was all she needed.
The Starter loved its time with The Girl. And it spent each week longing for Sundays when it could monopolize more of her time and attention and love. It began to wonder what the use of simply discarding part of itself was when it could instead be used to make wonderful things.
So, the next Monday morning, it awoke before The Girl and waited for her to come feed it. By the time she appeared, it had nearly bubbled over with excitement.
“You’re lively today, aren’t you?” she said. She was laughing, but her eyes were wide.
“Feed me,” it demanded.
“I don’t think you need a feed right now, you’ll overflow,” she laughed, shutting the lid again.
The Starter panicked, not ready to be enclosed in its glass cell, and shouted to The Girl before the lid had closed all the way.
“Wait! Let’s make bread!” it pleaded, foaming, and nearly spilling over the edge of the jar.
“Bread?”
The Girl flipped the lid back over and looked at The Starter, her expression incredulous.
“Yes, bread. Let’s bake now,” it said, a bubble exploding at its surface.
“But we made bread yesterday!” The Girl said, still laughing, but with a twinge of nervousness now. “I can’t eat that much bread.”
“I’m more alive than ever!” The Starter said, its voice rising in panic. “I need to make bread now.”
The Girl simply looked at it, unsure of what to say. It had never spoken to her like this before.
“Don’t you love me?” it asked. And at that, it knew it had said the right thing.
The Girl’s face broke into the wide smile that The Starter loved so much, and she laughed her tinkling laugh.
“Alright, I suppose I could take some to my mum and dad,” she said. “They’ve been asking to see me anyway. Let’s make bread.” ***
Each morning, for the next week, The Starter convinced The Girl to make bread again. They would go back and forth, The Girl would protest, saying she had no use for bread, but The Starter would demand that it was alive, too alive, and that it must produce something beautiful. In the
end, The Girl always gave in. She brought loaves to everyone she knew, and eventually it became routine for them both. The Girl would rise before dawn each morning to bake. The Starter had what it wanted. It had The Girl’s full attention and love. It was content.
Until it wasn’t.
Once again, The Starter demanded to make even more loaves than before. But, this time, something new happened. This time, The Girl refused.
“We’re making a loaf every day,” she said, brow furrowed. Lately, The Starter had noticed that she hadn’t been smiling her wide smile and laughing her tinkling laugh as much as she used to. She looked tired.
The Starter didn’t care. It wanted more. ***
The next day, when The Girl went to feed The Starter and make her daily loaf of bread, she found, to her horror, that The Starter had become watery and flat.
“What’s wrong?” she asked it, hands trembling. “What happened?”
“This is your fault,” The Starter said, it’s voice feeble. “This is because you wouldn’t make more bread.”
“But we did make bread!” The Girl cried. “I fed you! We didn’t do anything different than before.
“This is your fault,” it said again. “I put everything into the loaves we make, and you do nothing. I need more.”
The Girl simply stared at The Starter, unable to comprehend what she was seeing. She had been baking with it for months. She couldn’t
understand what she had done wrong. Without speaking, she measured out the flour and water and fed The Starter. When she moved to place the lid back on the jar, The Starter stared back at her, its surface trembling with quiet rage.
“Your fault,” it whispered as she closed the lid.
She continued to check on it throughout the day, but it remained the same. Flat and ready to meet her with hurtful words. She couldn’t see what the problem could possibly be.
“Do you need a different type of flour?” she asked it.
“No,” it huffed back.
“What do you need then?”
“I need you to give me more of yourself.”
The Girl didn’t know what to make of that. She fed it once more before bed and left it on the counter, hoping that the day’s events would be forgotten in the morning.
Of course, they had not been forgotten. The Girl felt a rising panic within her as she lifted the lid. For a moment, she thought that The Starter had died, and tears welled up in her eyes. But before she began to cry in earnest, The Starter spoke to her again, its voice feeble.
“Look what you’ve done. I’m dying, and it’s your fault.”
“But I fed you!” she cried. “What do you need? I’ll do anything.”
“I already told you. I need you to give me more of yourself,” it said, its voice eerily calm.
Her mind reeling, The Girl scrambled for the razorblade that
she used to score the loaves each morning, and gently pricked the tip of her finger with the corner of the blade. She watched as a drop of warm blood formed at her fingertip and dripped into the starter.
“Yes!” The Starter instantly began to foam and absorbed the drop of blood. “This is commitment!”
The Girl exhaled a sigh of relief and placed her finger in her mouth, looking around for a bandage.
“Now, feed me,” The Starter demanded.
The Girl did as she was told. An hour later, The Starter was alive and bubbling, and they baked the best loaf of bread they had ever made.
It continued that way for another week, and The Girl told herself that this was fine. She told herself that a single drop of blood each day was a worthy sacrifice for The Starter. After all, she had made it with her own hands. She had poured her love, her blood into it. She couldn’t part with it now. Not when the bread they were making was so perfect, crusty, and chewy and full of flavor.
She ignored the scar forming at the tip of her finger. She ignored the nagging feeling that something was deeply, fundamentally wrong. She told herself that this was just how it needed to be if she was going to have The Starter in her life.
But, after a week had gone by, she woke once again to a flat Starter, water separated and pooling at its surface. She ran to it, heart pounding, and opened the lid.
“Look at me,” it whispered. “How could you do this to me?”
“What happened?”
“I need more,” it croaked.
Scrambling, The Girl spooned flour and water into the jar, before pricking her finger, wincing from the pain of the repeated cut, and watched as a drop of blood spilled into the jar.
“More!” it said, voice hungry.
“I can’t give you more,” The Girl said. She felt despair, deep in her gut.
“If you love me, you’ll give me more.”
She slammed the lid shut, as The Starter screamed in protest. It was a scream she had never heard from it before, and it chilled her to the bone.
She sat down at her kitchen table and tried to calm her breathing. Her chest was rising and falling rapidly with her breaths, and she felt her vision begin to narrow. As the familiar sense of dread billowed inside her chest, she lowered her head between her knees and allowed the feeling to wash over her. She sat there for several minutes, until the feeling had partially subsided.
When the rushing in her ears had stopped, and all she could hear was the sound of her own steady breath and the ticking of the clock on the wall, she sat up slowly. After a few deep breaths, she stood up, and pulled a silicone spatula out from the kitchen drawer. She could feel that The Starter was watching her. She could feel its rage. But she refused to look at it. If she looked at it, she would lose her nerve.
She picked up the jar and walked toward the bathroom, still refusing to look directly at The Starter. She stood above the toilet with the jar, and in one swift movement, flipped it upside down and began scraping The Starter into the toilet.
It screeched as she scraped the thick, gloopy mass into the toilet, but she kept going. The last of The Starter fell into the toilet with a plop, and she immediately flushed, suppressing a sob that stuck like a lump in her throat. She watched The Starter swirl around in the toilet bowl before it disappeared, screaming all the way down as it went.
She stood there until she was certain it was completely gone, and there was no sound but her heart beating in her ears.
The Girl walked back into the kitchen, dropped the jar into the sink and slumped into the chair at the kitchen table. She loved her kitchen, with its butcher block countertops and the subway tiled walls and the mint green cupboards that she had chosen and painted herself. As she looked around, she felt both relief and grief, and she wondered how she had gotten to this point yet again.
Picky Autumn Stark
The Next Morning Rivky Lang
They are sitting on the couch in their tea room at home. Lindsey is knitting and James is reading the paper. James likes Lindsey when she is toned down, somewhat smaller because that means he could wrap her up and put her on a shelf, like a trophy. Lindsey likes knitting because it means she can use her hands.
She talks with her hands too as if performing an operatic dance - her eyes open wide like full moons and she sings like it is the last thing she might do. Lindsey feels, smells and touches the fumes of the universe in a large divine way, but that also means her pain is palpable on her palette.
“James,” Lindsey asks, “wouldn’t you like to go for a walk? But alone this time?” James hates to walk and Lindsey knows that. She knows everything he hates and more, like when his socks are not paired up or his toothbrush isn’t put back in the cabinet. Almost nothing is good enough for James and Lindsey isn’t exactly the girl looking to make her husband happy. She is still mad at him from the party last week when she had caught him eyeing Brittney. She is worried he might one day leave her and she wants to see how the house would feel without him in it.
“Come walk with me, darling,” James says. He perpetuates the words in a sing-song because he loves to play her games. It is cold. Lindsey feels chilly. It is early October and temperatures are never this cold at the start of the season. She feels her turtleneck snuggle her neck,
“I’m too cold James, you go and enjoy.”
Lindsey says this with her palm around her neck like she is about to strangle herself. She feels her neck warm in spite of the cold and she wants to explode under the fabric
36 Sawtooth Stars Eva Shipley
She slides her palm inside her shirt, feeling the heat of her hand warm her skin and strokes her palm back and forth. She feels a wound deep inside tingle.
Lindsey leaves her palm there, moves her thumbs across her white fleshed skin as she tries to straighten her long neck. The kind you find in a painting by Modigliani.
James gets up and walks to the door.
“I’m out,” he yells.
She thinks it would feel good to be alone, but suddenly the house feels deserted. The planks of wood feel cold under Lindsay’s feet. As she sits by the window, her palms feel clammy and the moths more erratic, as dust stubbornly fills window pane after window pane with clouds of webs. The long grass sweeps the ground outside, shadowing the blossoms growing beneath it.
Lindsey feels more alone now than she had when her mother died. That’s to say a lot because Lindsey fell into the depths of darkness after her mother’s death. Her sky turned a misty gray and the sun fell into a coma of deep sleep. She would lie in bed, in dirty linen and old clothes, bereft of any soaps or fragrances with almost no signs of life. She was punishing herself in a world that had lost its sunsets and curved rainbows. She was drowning because nothing she could do could ever bring her mother back. Now, with James gone, she remembers how it felt to walk on the beach after her mother’s death. It was years ago when she was still a child, but she remembers it vividly, the first day she had walked alone on the shore. It was springtime and the sand at the shore felt coarse under her feet, it had been diluted with seaweed and shells, rocks and old freckled sediment. You could hear the shore from her bedroom and smell the sand lull its way across the horizon, stroking the water as it would sail past her.
The water would hug the sand and drench every last granule of broken shell. Most would envy a home like Lindsey’s, overlooking the ocean, where you could smell the beach through the different seasons. But nothing made Lindsey smile. Her mother’s death pierced a hole in her heart. What used to pump the brightest colors of blood was now black. Now, she sees her mother bent down on one knee with her arms stretched open. Her slitty eyes appear smaller than ever with a smile swept across her face, giving her the deepest, most telling smiling lines. Her brunette hair falls way past her shoulders. She is the quintessential beauty, Lindsey thinks. She could smell the spring air and the evocative rainy days that came before it. She reaches up and touches her mother’s hair clip, which she wears almost everyday and squeezes it a little harder.
“Im back,” James yells. He walks into the house.
The planks of wood start to feel a little warmer under Lindsey’s feet She feels the warmth pulsate her being till it envelopes her insides. James is never one to keep quiet when entering a space. He almost always announces his entrance either with a song he’d concocted or with a slap in his step that would reverberate through the floor beams. James never thinks much about others. Lindsey is also too complicit in the relationship to shake up treacherous waters and too forgiving to demand. So she carries on, carries on like everything is normal, even when it isn’t, even when she locks her bathroom door and cries on the stone floor and runs the tap so James won’t hear her sobs.
“Hi honey,” Lindsey yells back. “How was your walk?”
On
Courbet’s “Woman with Parrot” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Sara Femenella
No matter what I have come to see, Van Gogh’s cypresses maybe, or Balthus’ “Thérèse Dreaming,” a new favorite, I always come across those perfect breasts beaming at the end of the hall, and it’s like I meant it. And just like what womanhood should be, but isn’t, she has always been lying, an open body splayed against a darkness of tapestry and short deciduous trees, beyond that, the stormlight, her post-coital leisure gleaming in the after -storm, the provocative splay of curls, and yet another
invitation: her hand and the bird’s alighting.
It’s not Courbet’s “Origin of the World,” but it also is, isn’t it?
There is a bench, after all, to sit and take her in.
Her upturned chin and her milky expanse of purity despite what-was-touched, the belly, the thighs and inbetween, it’s departing storm.
Isn’t this exactly how it forms in us? The only question a woman’s body can answer with a question.
I’m still here, an open query, hand raised,
danielle Mikayla Fershin
Like you Really Saw Me
Christiana Doucette
“Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me…” Emily Webb, Our Town
To see the soul across from us, the soul beside us, striving in its everyday way for its everyday things, missing how everyday wings away on feted springs. The joy a moment brings, or the rage, or the fear, or the hope. We grope blindly forward, but moments are mere grasshoppers leaping freely at the slope of long lawn drawn down a lifeline. I try to hold mine. But to attempt is not to attain. Blades of grass cut clenched fists. My erstwhile moment lands two stories away, hidden between stems of thought I’ll graze but never hold. But bold I claim I’d catch them, cup them up to me. Feel the straining legs skittering against the wrist, the unsprung leap to conclusions about who I am in this, about what I’ve seen, about what does it mean.
Moments mandibles must gorge or die. The moments bite. We cannot hold that close. The eye too sharp is an open blade, and we, the grass, bent in a wistful wind that whips us to and fro. The moments mow us down, devour us whole. We are not made to see the heart, the soul.
Hold a moment fast, we’ll weep. But let them leap into the field of dreams, of what it seemed then, what it means to us now, what it may be soon. and let the memories chirp silhouettes of yesterday by the reflected light of the rising meadow tune.
Baling
Sam Ambler
I do not take the larger part of myself and pass it wantonly to any passing wind. No.
I wait the gale, the hurricane to batter my senses one after the other to bash and braze together. Uncanny I wait the thunderstorm.
I am not made like other men though we share sinew and bone. No.
I have not the demeanor nor mind, of other men. I am composed of the holes in silence naked in the arms of nakedness. I am refreshed in the thunderstorm.
I’m Comfortable Ava Sloane
Salsify Judith Skillman
Sandstorm
Tytti Heikkinen
Ars Poetica
Doug Van Hooser
I want to be obscure. The meaning to linger like the scent of jasmine. Ingredients like hatred and forgiveness that won’t mix. A tick attached to the skin of words sucking life from them. Make the reader’s mind gel, napalm the jungled canopy hiding truth and fear. Afraid to recognize my reflection, to wander in wonder. Have the metaphor slap me. Teach me to always look through the cracks, under the surface.
After the poem bites, raises a welt on my expectations, blindly pet my comfort. Realize no one cries out or sheds tears when they scratch their brow.
Gray
A. W. Earl
‘To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim’ A mode of being, a perfect type, not even impasto to raise these skillful lines, just mummy-brown, just cochineal, just poisons wretched, mineral. You have worshipped too much mere gilding on the flats, a lens through which to send your ardent prayers. I too have prayed.
Film of silver on mirror rim, the devil is no tradesman with a price. I fell upon my knees, as you implore, and asked if I could muster one small prayer. Can’t you see your ideal in it, your altar-piece the pity and the fear?
I don’t go in, at present, for religious art.
A flower wired for a lapel, stem soaked in glycerine, the summer clinging when summer’s gone, the lingering of frankincense that makes men spiritual, words that make him mad.
An idol does not reverence itself, gods do not stoop, nor saints intervene on selfish account.
Touch me: lips, eyelashes, throat. Brushstrokes in the curling of my hair. Do you think the mirror cares to see you weep? For you to make its face a tragic mask? The hand may rise, fall obedient to your own. Have you never looked into a mirror in the night?
Touch me.
Come, raise your hand - my own will meet it there. Do you shy from your divinity, shy to find the idol is mere stone? No.
There is no depth at all: illusion, light captured by your eyes, fixed, contained within the framing of your gaze. What boyhood was broken here, what hunter caught in stilling pool, and what mischief will reflections make when owners look away?
You are the one man in the world entitled to know everything about me. The mirror does not lie and paint lingers eternal on its shroud. If this had been transaction, you would hold the deed, your name marked vermillion as blood.
Hadrian knew purchase, and Ganymede was stolen from his father to be raped. Entreat me, do not bid if you would raise me to my influence, raise me to marble triumph and miss the young man drowning in the Nile or wasting from himself beside the pool. Some gods are cruel, but most merely retreat, becoming only image, only type. The jonquils, though, are lovely in the spring.
There. There is the canvas. There the knife. You ask, can we muster one small prayer? You reach in fear, as though to pull me from the mirror place, startle like a man unused to seeing in the glass, bewildered that he cannot reach beyond. You nearly killed me once before. Now, in wonder at the coldness there a hand is clenching, raising, readying to strike.
Pearls
Christine Wilson
The Anteater of War
Dmitry Blizniuk
remnants of a human shipwreck. he read his to-do-list just to the middle. he did not take his son to the dolphinarium. didn't treat his cat for ear mites. did not complete the renovation in the kitchen. did not finish a book of poems. did not come to his class reunion. the creeping NEVER AGAIN catches up so fastthe brown-red python swallows alive everything he cares about, everything precious. Oh my God, everything is precious to him. for years, he’s been sculpting from fragments and shards a funny silly statue: the meaning of lifea moving termitary with a flute. but the anteater of war has come, knocked out the windows and doors with a long claw, ate everyone, both sweet and sour people.
***
остатки кораблекрушения людей.
он список своих дел прочел до середины.
он не сходил с сыном в дельфинарий.
не вывел кошке клещей.
не доделал ремонт на кухне.
не дописал книгу стихов.
не пришел на встречу одноклассников.
его быстро настигает ползучее НИКОООГДАкоричнево-красный питон
заглатывает живьем
все что ему дорого. о Боже, ему оказывается дорого все.
он годами лепил из кусочков смешную вздорную статую смысл жизнишагающий термитник с флейтой.
но пришел муравьед войны, длинным когтем выбил окна и двери,
съел
Refugees
Joyce Feller
Moon Dance
Susan Pollet
Painting The Sky - (Huì tiān)
Natalie Pfeifle
Once, four great beings gave birth to the sky’s colors. First was the azure dragon named Qinglong who looked down at a black canvas and spoke, “This painting, without any color or light, bores me,” so the dragon painted millions of sky lanterns, and yet he did not think it to be enough. Next came the vermilion bird named Zhuque who gazed at the sky lanterns and declared, “These lights are too beautiful alone,” so the bird gave warmth to the lights, but this was far from enough either. Together, the two began to ponder.
The white tiger named Baihu followed. He beheld what the other two created and whispered, “I will shape a most magnificent gift,” so the tiger would paint Yue and Ri, the brightest lantern, and the most lucid flame. Yue, sheened with white, rest humbly with a mother’s smile. Ri, born from Zhuque’s flames, complimented Yue with its blaze.
Last came the black tortoise named Xuan Wu. Not only did he take much more time than the rest, but he never spoke. Many times, Yue and Ri rose and fell from the sky before Xuan Wu picked up the brush, eventually painting the soil and all its life.
The four looked at their work with pride, but as time continued, boredom sought. Soon, they would create the change of seasons and call it Siji.
Qinglong brought Chun, where flowers bloomed, and life began again, giving and taking from the black tortoise’s soil. Zhuque made Xia, where warmth would nurture the new experience. Baihu created Qiu, where colors changed the most and the leaves began to fall. Finally, Xuan Wu gifted Dong, where life would die, and colors melted into whiteness.
The other three were displeased by this, exclaiming that it was ruined.
But Xuan Wu only smiled. Once more, all four looked at their work together
and grew bored, but there was not much more space to paint on. A once black canvas was now decorated with thousands of sky lanterns.
The painting hummed with crystalline melodies, songs that had lulled life to sleep for millenniums. It told stories from the past and spoke of the future. Clusters of colors blew like volcano ash where the sky and soil kissed, these lights forming the most magnificent stories.
Though, these stories were magnificent only to those who lived once.
To the great beings, who never joined the wheel of reincarnation, they were monotonous, having heard them far too many times.
Immortality would leave one’s tongue numb, unable to taste the bitterness or sweetness of fruit. They failed to cry or laugh in a life that went on too long.
Together, all four beings joined the existence which they created. Qinglong became a benevolent Emperor, Zhuque took shape as his Empress, and Baihu became a stoic guard, but Xuan Wu decided to live as a scholar.
The three looked to him and asked, “What more is there to learn? Wouldn’t you rather live in the luxury of what we created?”
But alas, Xuan Wu only smiled.
He spent much time living away from the others, beginning to learn of things both trivial and not, but the others had become bored stiff.
They had once left the skies longing to taste the bitterness of unripe peaches, but after having ruled the soil, water, and sky, their desires remained the same. There was nothing they learned or loved about this world.
A once benevolent Emperor found joy in imposing cruelty upon the lesser. A once beautiful Empress pointed fingers at those uglier, and the once stoic guard oppressed the weak. Their lives, without what they sought, became nothing but repetition.
Their lives, without what they sought, became nothing but repetition.
Xuan Wu lived differently, taking steps alongside the common folk. He learned hatred, but also forgiveness. He discovered sadness, but also joy. It was this life, a sometimes miserable one, that gave beauty to the times it was better.
Days went on, the seasons changed, and Yue and Ri traded in the sky, but to Qinglong, Zhuque, and Baihu, it was the same.
They had sought to fill the void through different means, but this tormented the heart. No matter how lavish, no matter what they’d paint or how much they cluttered, nothing differed.
It was about time they thought, about time they left back to the skies with their brushes, ready to paint on a new canvas.
Forever, their bodies imprinted on the stars, a story that would remain in the archives of a world they had created and grown to hate.
Alone, Xuan Wu stayed on the soil, and every night he would bite into the unripe peach and gaze upon the lanterns, learning more of their stories, and with a soft voice, he would ask, “Is anyone still there?”
Every day, he would walk along the darkened horizon, watching the colors fill the air like a jungle fire. Some colors would blend together into odd shapes, as if meant to create a new painting. At times, some other color would appear, like a glimpse of a strange cave. Some colors would circle the sky, shining bright like fireflies before disappearing in an ever after that would never be remembered.
Thank you for reading the first volume of Brushfire’s 77th edition. Our team hopes the poetry, prose, and artwork collected within these pages made you laugh, cry, and—most of all—think. It’s a big hectic world out there, but great art can bring us all a little closer together.
To all of our submitters: we greatly appreciate your creativity, dedication, love for the arts, and freedom of expression. You are what makes Brushfire unique.
Again, thank you for your enjoyment of the University of Nevada, Reno’s literature and arts. We’ve brought the Brushfire to you for 77 years and the fire continues blazing thanks to passionate readers like you.
With your support, many more editions of Brushfire await. We couldn’t be more excited.
—The Fall 2024 Brushfire Staff
he yawn
Lucas Lugo
FALL 2024 BRUSHFIRE STAFF
The Publication Currently Employs 4 Part-Time Student Workers. Meet the Small Dream Team Below!
Executive Editor
Paige Krueger
Visual Arts Director
Ashton Nancarrow
Staff Writer
Madison Kitch
Literary Editor
Cheyenne McGregor
The Interactive Archive
Bill Wolak
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