Portals Magazine

2019 PORTALS LITERARY ARTS MAGAZINE

Sax by Hope Brown 2019 Portals Cover

Created in 2004, Portals annual literary and arts magazine features works in short fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art by CFCC students, faculty, and staff. Submissions are judged anonymously and winners are chosen based on creative merit. Here, we’ve highlighted a few works from many outstanding submissions. You can view the entire collection online at cfcc.edu/portals/portals-archive.

Boxer, pen and ink Anna Lawrence Art Award, 1st Place

Math for English Majors

Poem by Colette Strassburg, Faculty/Staff Award

Our marriage counselor tells us it takes two to tango and only four syllables to mutter a cordial, passing phrase. “How was your day?” “Would you like tea?”

She’s not the one, however, crunching numbers with an uncommon denominator. In our ledger, one syllable still equates desire, and we are nine parts division. Obtuse. Unequal. Fractional.

For us, it’s easier to let conversational opportunities chuff and sputter. We are city buses, leaving Chicago at 6:00 a.m., whose doors, in obligation, hiss open at empty stops.

When our monomial chatter blends like owls into bark, we speak in camouflage. Tiny barbs disguised as backyard flowers. You like Zinnias, so I plant Russian Sage and marvel at the absolute value of bees.

Sunshine excerpt Nonfiction by Anonymous, Best Overall

My dad was a proud man. He could walk into any room and know that he was the smartest one there, and I’m not just saying that because he is my dad. Even now, every time someone talks to me about him, they always talk about how smart he was. “You know, us Cosgroves are all pretty smart,” one of his brothers once told me, “But Peter, Peter was a genius.” He was brilliant, and he knew it. However, being that intelligent and having that much awareness of it made him arrogant and proud, which, ultimately, led to his death. A heart attack might have been what killed him, but he died from the inability to seek help. His early death rocked me to my core. I think about him every day. Some days, I’m mad at myself for not moving on already. “It’s been ten years,” I tell myself. “Just get over it.” There is no getting over something like that, though. I forget sometimes that not everyone walks through life feeling like this. People don’t have an acute awareness of our mortality or how fragile humans really are. They don’t hear a song on the radio and start crying because the only other way they ever heard that song before was in their father’s voice. When they fight with their mom, they don’t worry about losing her too and being alone in this world.