Conceptions Southwest 2023-2024

conceptions southwest 2024 47 conceptions southwest

Copyright © 2024 Conceptions Southwest

Published by the Student Publication Board

The University of New Mexico

All rights revert to contributors upon publication

c/o Student Publications

MSCO3-2230

The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001

Printed by Starline Printing Company

7777 Jefferson St NE, Albuquerque, NM 87109

505-345-8900

Cover design by Addison Key and Raychel Kool

Cover images by x e oaks and Roxanne Marquez

Interior design by Anna Abeyta, Jesús Eduardo Sánchez Flores, Addison Key, and Will Martinez

Fonts: EB Garamond, Legitima, Roc Grotesk

Conceptions Southwest is the fine arts and literary magazine created by and for the University of New Mexico community. Conceptions Southwest staff consists entirely of student volunteers directed by an editor in chief selected by UNM’s Student Publication Board. Submissions are accepted from all UNM undergraduates, graduates, continuing education students, faculty, staff, and alumni. This issue is brought to you by the Associated Students at The University of New Mexico (ASUNM) and the Graduate Professional Student Association (GPSA).

Copies and back issues are available in the Daily Lobo Classified Advertising Office, Marron Hall, Room 107. The Conceptions Southwest office is located in Marron Hall, Room 225. To order copies of the magazine, please contact csw@unm.edu or visit www.csw.unm.edu.

To the Creative Eye

Land Acknowledgement

F0unded in 1889, the University of New Mexico sits on the traditional h0melands of the Pueblo of Sandia. The original peoples of New Mexico Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache since time immemorial, have deep connections to the land have made significant contributions to the broader community statewide. We honor the land itself and those who remain stewards of this land throughout the generations and also acknowledge our committed relationship to Indigenous peoples. We gratefully recognize our history.

IForeword Anna

Abeyta,

Editor in Chief

n the kaleidoscope of human expression, our eyes serve as both windows and mirrors, reflecting the world around us while revealing our inner depths. Through the lens of each artist, we embark on a journey of discovery, where every stroke of the brush, every word penned, and every photograph captured offers a unique perspective on the beauty and complexity of existence. From the tender gaze of a loved one to the piercing stare of a stranger, each pair of eyes holds a story waiting to be told, a truth waiting to be uncovered by embracing these various perspectives, we come to understand the true beauty of our shared humanity. So, let us celebrate the beauty of our differences, for it is through the eyes of the artist that we gain new insights, understanding, and appreciation for the world around us.

As we worked together to create this fine arts and literature magazine, we combined our perspectives and created something to display them all. For forty-seven volumes now, Conceptions Southwest has displayed something unique in every issue. It acts as a time capsule, capturing the essence of each era through the eyes of its contributors.

This year, our aim was to embrace a minimalist yet structured design. We wanted something that would fill the page without overpowering it a layout that struck the perfect balance between presence and space, allowing the artwork to shine through. In its simplicity, it captures the many perspectives that lie through the pages.

Throughout my years of working on magazines, especially CSW, one truth has become abundantly clear: it’s a team effort. As we embarked on this year’s journey, we had a staff who began as strangers, quickly evolving into acquaintances, and soon

thereafter, friends. I’m immensely grateful for the dedication of the nine individuals who brought this magazine to life. Each person has left their mark, contributing their unique perspective to the creation of this publication.

To the two who kept the show going when it needed help the most, Addison and Kelsa, I thank you both. Addison, your leadership and unwavering dedication kept both me and this magazine afloat during challenging times. Kelsa, it’s been a pleasure collaborating with you, not only this year but on staff last year as well. Thank you for your diligent attention to detail and for keeping our communications running smoothly.

As you immerse yourself in the pages of this magazine, I hope that you may be inspired to see the world anew, to recognize the beauty in individual perspectives, and to welcome the diversity of our collective viewpoints. For it is through the lens of each artist’s eye that we come to understand the depth and complexity of the world, and it is through our differences that we discover the true beauty of our shared humanity.

Table of Contents

62.

Ode

Dolphin

Anya

Undulation

The

Matthew

Serendipity

Andrew

Simone

Trinity

Say

recent

Perception

Bleeding

Zoe Ostby

A Fine October Night

Flannery Cowan

Movement: study 1

Sarah Bauman

Los Carniceros

Savina Romero

Heliophile

Kendra Padilla

Land Memory: Oropajita and Martha Listening to Oldies on a Car Hood in Hondo, Nuevo México, just 2 decades after Trinity Bomb (72 miles away) and UFO crash (43 miles away)

Savina Romero surfacelevel x e oaks

Stairway to Heaven

Austin Nguyen

Body Swatch I Nino Ricca Lucci

Smoky Sweet

Emma Ressel

The Neighbor’s Backyard

John Scott

Surrender the Decomposers

Emma Ressel

Body Swatch II

Nino Ricca Lucci

meditation in it x e oaks

pelf sortrait x e oaks

Whale Fall

Nat Olmo

If you don’t let me die here, I may never be reborn

Roxanne Marquez

Last Rest

Victoria Nisoli

Warranty

Voided

Joseph McKee

Border Crossing

Savina Romero

34. 14. Leaving the Hospital Bed Kadra Guillermo

demon comic “possibility” tribute to linda barry’s “100 demons” x e oaks

59. 58. 65. 72. 83. 87.

Photography

Visual Art

Open Media

Savina Romero Visual Art

acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 40” x 30”

Los Carniceros

Viewing Party

John Scott

Ican’t stop thinking about fossils. Perhaps it’s the date we took to the Natural History Museum earlier today. But the fossils clearly weren’t fossils (although the animatronic T. rex at the entrance of the museum was pretty convincing; this is all irrelevant considering the remote-controlled Mars rover was my favorite part). It was hard not to notice the children gathered around the manufactured spectacle, scurrying around like ants while they watched its stuttering movements with an attention and curiosity that only children can offer. She made that abundantly clear following my futile attempt to replicate such an expression an attempt made all the more pathetic when paired with the faint sadness sewn through her rigid face, the stitching almost coming loose at her furrowing eyebrows. She told me I looked like one of those thrift store figurines of some anthropomorphic animal, face contorted into what can only be described as an animal’s best approximation at expressing an emotion as a human might.

By the time the relationship ended, I’d be on antidepressants. But I didn’t know that yet.

“Turn in here. She said to park in the back.”

I may as well have flipped the car. She’s terrible at directions, a trait only made worse by her brazen timidness.

“This doesn’t look like an apartment complex.”

Things tend not to look the way they’re meant to today.

“There’s no way this thing is real.”

“The apartment?” She points, feigning genuine inquisitiveness through her hollow brown eyes. There’s a glass-like sheen to them maybe she’s the figurine.

“Yes, the apartment. No ” I gesture toward the apartment, “I mean, it can’t fit in there, right?”

The building itself looks like three townhouses put together with a series of stucco protrusions that are impossible to envision within the layout of any typical apartment. Even still, there’s no way they could fit something that big in it. You could spot previous attempts at painting black trim on some of the various wood components located sporadically on the exterior of the building, but the last time anyone must have had a go at it could have been ten, maybe twelve years ago. It’s winter, but the building looks hot. I put shorts on under my boiler suit in preparation for this I always find myself getting needlessly hot at viewing parties. My suit doesn’t match her short denim skirt, loafers with long white socks, lacey longsleeve top, and pearl earrings. She’s wearing our relationship as people should see it; I’m wearing emotions that someone in a boiler suit typically brings to these kinds of things. But we’re both hoping for some sort of observation.

pain at such an early age, then dinosaurs must have been limping around that conglomerated land mass with phenomenal cases of arthritis. I stop to relieve the pain for a moment and think about how much I am a fossil in this moment. I

“The eyes are the oven of the face.”

don’t think I can take another step. I am happy.

Boom! A man in a tuxedo greets us at the door. His hair resembles the apartment’s stucco which itself resembled a child’s rendition of a world map. He introduces himself as the blond hair’s boyfriend. I instantly came to know then despise his baby blue eyes.

“Oh well right! Yeah.” I thought he was new, but now I’m not sure.

“You knock,” she quietly demands in front of the mysterious door. Neither of us feel confident. I should feel excited about this sort of thing. Well, maybe I do. I’m shaking, nonetheless. Could dinosaurs shake? Only one way to find out.

I knock and collect the cold air under my full-body canvas armor. The door swings open, nearly knocking us off our feet. A gooey white dress melts out into the hallway. Blond hair circles around.

“Hi! You made it! You haven’t been to this apartment, have you?”

Furious headshaking.

“Well, there’s a lot of stairs. I like to joke that once you feel like you can’t possibly climb anymore boom! You’re there.”

This affords me around fifteen more minutes to consider my fossils. It would have been more like twelve, but my knee has been killing me and my physical therapy appointment isn’t for another month. Certainly, if man can acquire knee

“I don’t think we’ve met before,” she says.

I shoot a concerned look in her direction. We need to at least see the thing first before we get ourselves kicked out. Why doesn’t she understand me?

“No, I don’t think we have,” says Baby Blue.

Relief. I wonder what branch he served in.

“It’s good to meet you.”

He motions us inside. The living room is an amalgamation of Target futons and thrifted lamps. The warm tone of the lamps cues me to check the time. I rub my palms against my legs. It’s too early to switch into the shorts. I don’t want to anyway. The eyes are the oven of the face. She

Scott Short Fiction

takes my hand. I quickly pull it away and push it back down with one swift motion.

“Why did you pull your hand away?” she asks.

“I don’t know, I thought you were the boyfriend.” It seems we’ll never get to the bottom of this.

“Why would I be the boyfriend?”

Evolution is tricky business.

“Please, right this way.”

A hand on my back. It’s the boyfriend.

He motions us toward the viewing room. There’s a black velvet curtain in the doorway. I bump into the door hidden behind it. I didn’t read the exhibits close enough at the museum to think up a witty comment surrounding Cretaceousera creatures and an evolved ability to detect things behind black curtains. I just find fossils to be intrinsically interesting: no extra information required. They’re living dead. And you just probably shouldn’t put a door in a doorway where a curtain already hangs. Maybe it’s something to do with the appearance of wealth.

“Holy shit.” All my movements halt. “They weren’t kidding.”

“Why’d you let go of my hand?”

Blondie and Baby Blue start fucking over near the hind limbs. I still had so much to learn.

“Because there’s a fucking Carnotaurus in the middle of their goddamn apartment.”

“Where’s the bathroom?”

She’s not asking me. Antique store figurine.

The cold air falls out of my boiler suit. By the time the weekend was over, I had tried to kill myself. But I didn’t know that yet.

I think I see one of those kids running around out of the corner of my eye, but it’s the dachshund with the hors d’Oeuvres tray strapped to its back: olives on top of mozzarella with prosciutto wrapped around the outside.

“Want one?”

Kendra Padilla Visual Art

acrylic paint and colored pencil, 16” x 12” Heliophile

Crop Circles

Andrew Sowers

Pat grabbed his duffle bag and made his way toward the front door. The hallway light was off, but he could hear Joanne’s footsteps squeaking behind him. As he opened the door, she flipped a switch and the front patio light flickered on. Pat took a few steps out of the house before he turned to face her again. She was wearing a sweater that he had bought her a few winters ago. She held the knob tight in her left hand and looked out at him from the partially open door. Pat sighed and searched his pockets for his car keys.

“Are you leaving town tonight?” Joanne asked.

Pat found his key in his jacket’s breast pocket. “Yeah, think so.”

Joanne nodded while her eyes drifted around on the floor. Pat watched her and thought about how quiet the night was. The silence between them confirmed his feeling that there was nothing left to be said. Only lingering desires to say it all again.

“All right, goodnight, Jo,” he said.

Joanne looked up at him; her eyes and nose were red. She had been crying. He waited for a moment to see if she’d respond, but when it became clear that she wouldn’t, he turned and walked to his car. The hinges squeaked as Joanne closed the front door. The porch light

turned off and his shadow disappeared. He threw his bag onto the back seat of his car and turned the ignition. He sat still with both hands on the wheel and waited for the pit in his stomach to dissolve. All he could think about was the quiet vibration of the engine coursing through the steering wheel and into his fingertips.

Pat pulled out of the driveway and made his way to the interstate, which was mostly empty because it was nearly midnight on December twentyninth. He hadn’t planned to drive home before the new year, but this evening had convinced him that heading home now was a good idea.

“Are you already out of the city?” Joanne asked.

“Yeah,” said Pat.

Neither of them said anything else for some time. Pat listened to the sounds of the road while his thoughts moved in lethargic

“He passed through Sweetwater so quickly that the memory of doing so never took form.”

An hour after he left Austin, Joanne called. Pat put the phone on speaker and placed it on his lap. Joanne hesitated between each sentence; it was clear she hadn’t really thought through what she intended to say.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this came out of nowhere. I should have waited till the end of your visit.”

“No, it’s fine.” Pat’s eyes narrowed in focus on the road as he spoke. “It’s like you said…it was bound to happen sooner or later.”

Flashing blue and red lights came into view on the right shoulder. Pat adjusted his speed as he passed a gray SUV receiving a ticket.

“I just don’t want…” Joanne paused. Pat pictured her choking down tears. “I don’t want you to think it’s my fault.”

“Is it my fault?” Pat asked.

“No.” Joanne took a deep breath and released it quickly. “It’s just not something either of us can keep up. I’m tired of being lonely. And I’m tired of feeling guilty every time I do something to feel less…” she trailed off.

She didn’t admit to anything specifically, but Pat took this as further confirmation of a lingering suspicion. Joanne had cheated on him.

“I know it has had to have been the same for you,” she finished.

It was this last assertion that nearly shook him out of his numbness. For a moment, he thought he felt it he was angry. He felt heat rush to his chest as he tried to define the imaginary wrong that had been done to him. But before he could put it into words, as quickly as it became palpable to him, the feeling faded back into obscurity.

circles. Dim images and sentence fragments drifted in and out of focus. They all pertained to a singular distant feeling that he was too resigned to name.

“Goodnight, Joanne,” he said. Her response came so slow that he imagined the silence was building toward something. An admission of guilt. An apology. But instead, she told him goodnight and ended the call.

He passed through Sweetwater so quickly that the memory of doing so never took form. He had been thinking about spending the night there getting a motel room or something. He blinked hard and shook his head like he was coming out of a trance. He picked up his phone and checked the time. It was too late for him to be driving, so he pulled off the highway onto a long, straight country road and parked the car on the shoulder. As he laid back in the driver’s seat and balled up his jacket for a makeshift pillow, he took an emotional inventory. He didn’t seem all that broken up, which surprised and also pleased him.

They had been together for

over five years, two of which had been long distance. Joanne had moved back to Austin to be close to her mom. So, Pat drove out to see her a couple times a year. Despite their best efforts, things had become increasingly difficult. Although Pat had kept up his regular visits around big holidays and anniversaries, they had slowly become strange to one another. During this visit for Christmas and New Year’s, it had become clear to Pat that Joanne was preparing to end things. She had been distant and short with him all week. He realized it was probably for the best. They had tried to make it work. Everything runs its course eventually, he thought. But when she finally broached the topic that night, some deep-seated fear gripped his mind.

He imagined himself moving across the desert at the speed of a cinematic montage, tears streaming from his eyes. It would be late in the day when he finally arrived back in Denver. His tears would briefly subside as he drove slowly through the city he loved, the place he was raised. He saw himself pulling up to his apartment building on the east side of town after the sun had set. A neighbor would pass him on his way up the stairs and guess from his red eyes and gaunt face that he had just lost a loved one. The light bulb in the hall would still be out and he’d have to fumble around for the right key. Once inside, he’d put down his bag and study his home under the glow of streetlights slipping between his blinds. The light would paint

orange lines across his bedspread and kitchen cabinets. Then he would feel it more than ever. The cold weight of loneliness. Even though it had been so long since her body had raised the temperature of the room. Even though nothing had really changed, everything would be different. Before, he had been alone only in a literal sense. He could always refute his loneliness by asserting that he was with Joanne. But if he were to go home now, without her, without even the metaphysical possession of her, he would have nothing to spare him from the plain truth of his unhappiness.

So, to his own surprise, when Joanne sat down across from him that night, nudged his arm, and told him so plainly that she was tired of feeling alone and that she was ready to get on with her life, he found himself arguing and pleading with her to reconsider. Before he knew what he was saying, he had offered to leave behind his life in Denver and move to Austin. She had looked at him with a sly disbelief as if she were waiting for him to admit he was joking.

As he lay in his car recounting these events, he blushed at the thought of how afraid he had acted. He must have sounded so stupid. The recent memory of the phone call put his stomach in knots. The only reason she offered to talk more was probably because of how devastated she thought he was. She seemed to want his forgiveness, but she wouldn’t say what for. He didn’t know for certain she had cheated. In fact, it was hard for him to believe she really had. But it was something he had chosen to think so that he could feel for himself. As his eyes began to grow heavy, he marveled at how unaffected he seemed now. He decided to interpret his apathy as emotional maturity and fell asleep with an unearned sense of self-sufficiency.

Early the next day, he started making his way back to the highway. It had snowed a little that night. As he merged into the right lane, a car passed in front of him and left a thin trail of snow hanging in the air behind it. The stillrising sun infused the frozen particles with an unearthly glow. It looked like gold dust floating in the loose shape of a car. As he got up to speed, Pat looked in his rearview and watched the ghost of his own car dragging behind. Ten minutes after passing through Abernathy, he was driving through what had once been his favorite stretch of the highway. It was miles and miles of farmland. It was never clear to him what they were growing. Whatever it

was never grew very tall. From inside his car, there was not much to see apart from an unusually level horizon line. It was the satellite view on his navigation app that made this stretch of land interesting to him. From above, you could see that the different plots had been made perfectly circular. He didn’t know anything about agriculture, but he understood that the fields were shaped this way because of the irrigation systems being used. He wasn’t much interested in these details. It was the collective result that interested him. The first few times he had made the drive to visit Joanne, he had moved through these fields with his eyes glued to his phone. He watched the blue arrow icon, which represented himself, as it passed through the crop circles. Seeing himself from above, moving through this alien landscape, had made him feel important. He was in the middle of whatever this was. This was the first time Pat hadn’t used his phone to navigate. He knew the way home well enough; he didn’t need any help.

he seemed to have no energy. He was surprised to see the sunlight growing dim when he woke. He felt as if he had only slept a halfhour. He reached for his phone to check the time (the car’s built-in clock was broken) but thought

“The circles would start to dissipate.”

After a while, Pat realized he hadn’t seen another car in almost an hour. “It’s the time of year,” he thought. “The week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, time doesn’t exist no one has anywhere to go.” He had always felt this way, mostly because he had always taken time off work at the end of the year. With all of his routines and usual responsibilities on hold, he had often felt that the days moved by in slow motion. It was like the calendar was hesitating too afraid to start again and lose all progress. With this rare abundance of time, Pat had made it his habit to work through his ever-growing reading list. The week before, he had finished Haruki Murakami’s novel Kafka on the Shore. Joanne had given it to him last Christmas, and it had taken him most of a year before he found time to read it. He thought about the part near the end when Kafka is led into a deep forest that acts as an entrance to a limbo-like spirit world. As they move deeper into the trees, his guide tells him, “Time doesn’t really apply out here.” Kafka’s watch stops working.

“Are we nearing the spirit realm?” Pat asked himself as he sat back up in his car and looked out across the fields. He had pulled over to shut his eyes for a bit after hitting the rumble strip one too many times. Something felt wrong in his body. Since leaving Austin,

otherwise. “It doesn’t matter,” he thought as he tossed his phone onto the back seat of the car. He rubbed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the window. It was cold to the touch. The engine had been left on while he slept and the heater had made the cabin uncomfortably hot. His head began to swim so he stepped out of the car, leaving the door open so the air could cool down. It was cold outside. The gravel crunched under his feet as he walked around to the front of the car and sat on the hood. He looked out into the fields. They looked endless. He knew that after another hour or so of driving he would pass through Plainview and then through Happy. The circles would start to dissipate. Not all at once. They would just become fewer and farther between until the landscape went from one kind of plain to another. He would hardly notice the difference. He looked out across the expansive emptiness around him, and felt something welling up inside of him for the first time since leaving Austin. It was almost New Year’s Eve, and here he was, alone in the middle

of nowhere. He rubbed his eyes again and paused for a moment, pinching the bridge of his nose between his knuckle and thumb. He held himself there, eyes closed tight, as if he were trying to hold some damaged object together long enough for glue to dry.

It was starting to get dark when Pat got back on the road. The tank was also getting low. He figured he could just fill it up when he passed through the next town. As the sun fell out of view, the headlights became gradually more visible until they were the only sources of light. On past drives, the stars had been so clear that headlights had hardly seemed necessary. But now there was a dark layer of clouds that looked indicative of more snow. Pat hoped it would snow. He leaned his head against the window and pictured a thousand circles whited out erased.

Then there was a thud. Pat’s forehead hit the window as the car swerved from side to side. It took him a few moments to regain control of the car. After steadying the vehicle, Pat pulled over. He sat in shock for a moment, unsure of what he possibly could have hit. After collecting himself, he put on his jacket and got out of the car. He opened up his trunk and started sifting through his emergency supplies for his flashlight. Pat’s trunk housed a large collection of random objects and tools. This wasn’t because he was wellprepared. In truth, he was just neglectful and had accumulated this collection over the course of many years. He found the flashlight

beside an old tackle box and then quickly walked around the car and shined the light on his front right tire. His chest tightened. There was no damage to the car. The rim, however, was splattered with tiny droplets of blood.

His mind began to race. He calculated every worst-case scenario. When there’s blood on the car, there’s always a worse scenario. He slowly worked up the courage to start walking back down the shoulder toward the point of contact. The highway was unsettlingly quiet. It had still been hours since he had seen another driver. He hated the fact that he could hear his own steps so clearly. When he arrived at the spot and pointed his light at the body, he felt a cold set into his bones. It was a dog. Goldish-tan fur with little bits of black mixed in. The leather collar around her neck had a tag that said “Lorelai.” There was no phone number or address. Pat covered his mouth and groaned into his hand. He turned around and trudged back to the car. He got in and put it into drive. Then he sat, staring straight ahead. He thought about the dead body he was about to leave behind how she would be covered with snow and how that wasn’t enough. Before he really understood what he was doing, he was walking back to the dog with a blanket and a shovel that he found in the trunk. He wrapped the dog in the blanket and lifted her up in his arms. She weighed more than he expected, but he was still able to carry her and the shovel together. He cradled them in his right arm and held the flashlight in his left hand. He hesitated for a moment before walking out into the field.

The ground was mostly dirt. Little spots of dry natural grasses crunched under his feet. Snow had begun to fall. He could only see along the narrow beam of his flashlight. The snowflakes were small but fell at the pace of raindrops. The red of his brake lights jumped from snowflake to snowflake. When he turned to check on the car, the lights looked like they were pulsating. He felt unsettled. Not just from the accident and the fact that he was carrying a dead animal, but because of where he stood. After driving through and thinking about these fields so much, he had long ago come to the conclusion that they weren’t a place for people. Despite the fact that they were designed and built by people to serve an agricultural function, they possessed a holy nature. He couldn’t help but feel like he was actively intruding as he walked through the cold, dry circle.

He stopped and turned to his car to re-establish his

bearings. The lights were gone. He had only been walking for a few minutes. He should have still been well within sight of the highway, but it just wasn’t there. He stopped and laid the dog down. His heart was pounding in his ears as he scanned the horizon for any signs of the car. He felt the urge to run but suppressed it. He needed to bury the dog first. He was acting on some kind of deep instinct to put dead things in the ground.

He took the shovel in both hands and struck the ground. To his surprise, the blade sank deep. He had expected the soil to be hard. It was Texas in the middle of winter, after all. But the earth gave itself up willingly. As he dug, the ground began to grow clearer. He looked up to see the clouds had dissipated overhead. Pale, blue moonlight gave everything a ghostly glow. The snow, however, had not let up in the slightest. It still fell heavily, even in the absence of its source. Pat didn’t have time to think too hard about this. All he could think about was finishing his task so that he could leave as quickly as possible. He dug fast, cutting into the ground with great ease. He piled the blue earth to his right. After digging four feet down, he struck something hard. He wedged the shovel beneath whatever it was and pulled it up. He reached for the flashlight and pointed it into the hole. It was a femur bone perfectly white and smooth, save for the place the shovel had struck it, causing it to crack. He dropped the flashlight as he staggered backward.

He drove under a heavier quiet than he had ever known before. The lights of Plainview came into view, and as they became brighter, the snow stopped falling. He continued through town and drove on till he reached Tulia.

“The next morning started slowly.”

He paid for a room in one of the town’s only motels. The man at the front desk eyed him curiously as they went through the steps of the transaction. Pat knew he must look like someone who had just committed a crime. He was too anxious to make eye contact and communicated primarily with nods when he could.

“What’s happening?” he whispered to himself. The sound of fear in his own voice made him shiver. Had he picked the one spot in this expansive place that was already a grave? Not sure what else to do, he hurried over to where he had set down the dog. He picked her up and tried to lower her gently into the ground, but his grip slipped. Her body made a light thud that felt as if it landed on his own stomach. He moaned and tried to take some deep breaths. The snow started to settle into the hole as if trying to fill itself. He picked the shovel back up and helped fill in the grave. After it was done, he sat panting on the ground with his head in his hands. Flakes of ice clung to his hair and jacket. He got up slowly, took the shovel, and stuck it into the ground where a gravestone would be. The sky became dark again as he did so. He turned around to see the red lights of his car flickering through the snow.

The furniture in his room was stained a glossy red color that made him think of cough syrup. He undressed slowly, shaking dirt out of the sleeves of his sweater. The fibers of his jeans were permeated with dirt. They were probably ruined, he thought, as he tossed them onto the floor. He laid down in his underwear and fell asleep.

The next morning started slowly. He would have slept long into the day if not for the bang of a premature firework going off nearby. It was December thirty-first. The events of the previous night, like everything else in his life, felt far away and unreal. Pat showered and dressed in clean clothes. When he went to return his key, there was an older lady at the desk.

“Someone slept well,” she said with a smile.

Pat nodded and put the key on the desk. She seemed annoyed by his directness.

“Come again soon,” she said without conviction.

As he walked out to his car, the words replayed again in his head. “Come again soon,” he said to himself as he started the engine.

If there had been any doubt left in his mind, it was gone after last night. He would never come back. He drove to the nearest gas station. There were two other cars outside. He parked by the pump and went in to buy a cheap breakfast and pay for gas. A bell rang as he opened the door, but the man behind the counter paid him no mind. He was conversing with another customer. Pat grabbed a plastic-wrapped Danish and filled up a cup of soursmelling coffee. When he moved to the front to get in line, he overheard the two men talking.

“I’m sorry, Tom,” said the attendant as he slid a pack of cigarettes across the counter. “I’m

Tom walked out to his truck. Pat watched him go, then placed his meager breakfast on the counter.

“Who is he looking for?” he asked, his eyes still on the old man.

“Who? Tom? His dog’s been missing the last couple days,” said the attendant.

Pat nodded stiffly. His hand shook as he offered the attendant his debit card. Tom was still at the pump when Pat exited the store. He made brief eye contact with him, and then quickly looked away. Tom finished pumping his gas and got into his truck. Pat’s heart was beating fast. As the ignition turned in Tom’s truck, Pat realized he couldn’t let him leave. He stepped in front of the truck and waved. The old man lifted a hand in return, he had a blank expression on his face. When he saw that Pat wasn’t going to move, he rolled down his window.

“I’m sorry, I heard you’re looking for your dog,” said Pat. Tom was quiet for a moment. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said.

“Lorelai?” asked Pat.

Tom’s eyes seemed to deepen as he nodded slowly. Pat tried to read the man’s face to see if he knew where this was going. His blue eyes were nebulous. They looked as if they knew all things and held every possible feeling so close to the surface.

“I…” Pat trailed off and looked down at the ground. Tom ran his hand through his short, gray beard. “Can you show me where?” he asked.

Pat looked back up at him in surprise. “Okay,” he said.

“Tom’s eyes were a glossy cold blue.”

sure she’ll turn up soon.”

Tom was wearing a thick corduroy jacket and dirty jeans. He paid with cash then turned to leave. Pat took a half step to the side to make room for Tom to get to the door. The old man looked into Pat’s eyes as he shuffled past. Pat held this eye contact uncharacteristically long. He couldn’t help it. Tom’s eyes were a glossy, cold blue. The bell rang as

Pat drove back through Tulia and Plainview, back into the fields from the night before. Tom’s truck followed close behind. The whole time they drove, Pat felt a growing heat deep in his stomach. How was this happening? He wondered what he would tell Tom if he couldn’t find the place from the night before. He scanned the fields to his left carefully. Eventually, he saw it. There was the shovel. It was only twenty-five yards from the road. Pat was bewildered. He remembered walking far enough into the fields that he lost sight of the road. He pulled into the median and Tom did the same. The two men got out of their cars and, without speaking, Pat started walking across the two-lane highway and back out into the field.

His heart began to beat at a familiar speed. He could see his footprints from the night before. He left an identical trail beside them that Tom doubled with his own steps. When they reached the grave, Pat stopped and stared at the little mound of dirt. He couldn’t believe what he saw. The dog’s collar was sitting there on top of the mound. The old man knelt down and picked it up.

Pat’s mind raced through every bizarre detail of that night. He recounted each strange event and terrified action, but he had no memory of removing the dog’s collar. Tom ran his fingers across the leather. Then he stood and looked at Pat whose mouth was still agape in confusion.

“I appreciate what you did, but I think I’m gonna dig her up now,” said Tom. Pat came back to himself and looked up at Tom, whose eyes were beginning to fill with tears. “I’d like to bury her back home.”

Pat nodded. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

Tom grabbed hold of the shovel and tried to jerk it out of the ground, but it didn’t budge. He grunted as he pulled it with all of his strength. It broke free from the ground, bringing up a few pebble-sized pieces of dirt with it. They clattered on the ground as they landed. Tom brought the shovel down on the mound where Lorelai was buried. The ground was stiff and the shovel was barely able to pierce it. Tom pulled up barely a handful of dirt and tossed it to the side. He wiped his forehead, which was already perspiring. Then looked back at Pat.

“How the hell did you do this?” frustration had replaced sadness in his voice.

“I don’t know,” said Pat.

Tom took the shovel between both hands and brought it down hard again. The result was the same. The ground seemed determined to give nothing back. Tom continued striking the ground with a consistent rhythm that started to grate against something in Pat. The old man seemed to get angrier with every fruitless blow.

“Can I…” Pat reached out his hand and touched Tom’s back.

“Get out of here!” Tom yelled, jerking his body out of Pat’s reach.

A stream of tears ran beneath each of his eyes. He lifted the shovel high and continued what had become clearly impossible. Pat obeyed and turned away.

As he walked back to his car, Pat could hear the shovel striking the ground accompanied by the old man’s pained grunts. When Pat was halfway back to the road, the sound

of the shovel stopped. There was a brief quiet before the old man’s crying reached his ears. He turned and saw Tom on his knees, leaning against the shovel. His cries were carried across the field by a cold wind. Pat kept walking farther until the sound of Tom’s grief became a distant whisper that spread over miles of dead circles.

When Pat got back to his car, he reached into his back seat and picked up his phone. He hadn’t checked it in over a day. He looked at the time it was noon. In twelve hours, everything would start over, but nothing would be the same. There were several missed calls and unread text messages. He unlocked his phone and read a text from Joanne: “Come back.” He placed his head against the steering wheel and let everything inside of him fall onto his lap.

x e oaks Open Media demon comic “possibility” tribute to linda barry’s “100 demons”

graphite, digital, handbound book, 11” x 5.5”

Four Minus One

Morgan Leanor Tracy

Baby bird

You died last night

Your head slumped

Eyes oozing white decay

A sacrifice to the snake

So maybe your siblings could survive

Or perhaps just the inevitable result

Of being on the front line

We left you in the hot July sun

In a plastic bag

The sweltering heat keeping burial rights

At bay

We waited all day to dig that three-foot hole

We kept you with the snake

Its body and head made separate

From three charges of a shovel

My brother said, “It’s almost poetic”

Letting the two of you leave together

Knowing that perhaps

There is no ill will for the cycle of nature

Just my bubbling guilt

Of not being better

And as I lay you down beside

Coiled corpse, crushed head

And your silken feathers

And as the sky ran out idolic hues

Of pink, purple, orange and blue

I just hope that you might agree

With what he said,

“It’s almost poetic.” Almost.

-Four Minus One

English Department Award Winner

All of the Rabbit

Addison Fulton I’d like to thank you again for agreeing to meet with me here,” Ms. Major says, sniffing, swirling, and sipping at a dark glass of Pinot Noir.

“Thank you for having me… Ms. Major,” Buck replies. She’d told him to call her Ms. Major when he had told her that she could call him Buck. “This is a nice restaurant.”

“It’s a favorite of mine.”

“It’s nice,” he repeats, uncertain what more to say. It is a nice restaurant. Very, very nice. The napkins are red linen. The glasses are real crystal, carved directly out of the walls of diamond caverns. The menu is stiff, firm parchment with drop caps and gold leaf. All of the dishes have complex names with strange marks on the a’s and u’s. They’re hard to say, sticking to the tongue; to make up for that, the wine slides down the throat sweet and easy. The waiter has a thin black tie, a perfectly pristine, crisp white shirt, and a silver dish with a domed lid. He sets it down in front of Buck and opens it with a practiced flourish.

On the tray sits a rabbit.

A rabbit. An honest-to-God bunny rabbit. A live, whitefurred rabbit with shining black eyes and a twitching pink nose sniffing skyward as it takes in the aromas of gourmet cooking and expensive designer fragrance.

“I I’m sorry,” Buck stammers, as the waiter sets a silver

carving knife and fork in front of him. “What is this? What do we...?”

What do we do with it? is what he wants to ask. Is there a cultured, expensive way of asking that?

“Is something the matter with your order?” the waiter asks with genuine concern and a less-than-genuine, vaguely European accent.

“No,” Ms. Major interrupts before Buck can say anything. “Everything’s correct. That’ll be all.”

She waves the waiter away. It’s just the two of them.

And this rabbit.

She stares at him, eyes still and unnerving. “I… I’m supposed to kill it before I eat it, right? I… I don’t know how to do that.”

“It’s quite easy, really,” Ms. Major says. “Most go for the jugular, though that’s not my method. It gets a lot

“She holds it gently, the blade pressing into her palm.”

“What is this?” Buck asks. He’s whispering because he doesn’t want to be heard sounding stupid.

“A simple business discussion. An acquisition, that’s all.”

Well, he knew that. He’s not stupid. He’s here because Ms. Major is buying him dinner, because she’s buying his company. He’s small and struggling, an imitation porcelain cup teetering on the edge of the table that is the free market. This was his only sound financial decision. The only way to keep food on the table was to sell… well, everything. Everything he’d worked for the business degree he got on a hefty scholarship, his mother’s hope, his father’s pride.

“No,” Buck repeats, “I mean this,” he gestures to the real rabbit, sitting on the real porcelain plate.

“Oh. That’s tout le lapin,” she says. “It’s my favorite.”

“And what is tout le lapin?”

“It’s a French dish. It means ‘all of the rabbit.’”

“And that means…”

“You eat all of the rabbit,” she says. Ms. Major picks up the butcher knife the waiter brought by the blade. She holds it gently, the blade pressing into her palm. She holds it out to him by the handle.

“All of the rabbit?”

“All of the rabbit.”

He takes the knife from her but doesn’t do anything. The rabbit isn’t looking at him, it’s eyeing the microgreens and candied fig salad with red wine vinaigrette on the next table. Why couldn’t they have ordered that? Its eyes are dark and shiny small black holes pulling in light. Ms. Major is looking at him expectantly.

“What’s the matter?” she asks him.

“I don’t know… how to eat, uh, tout le lapin,” he says.

of blood on the fur and the skin. Bit messy. I prefer to go through the skull right down and clean through the brain. Requires a little more effort, a little more brute force, but nevertheless it’s less bloody and equally as quick. I find the brain somewhat… slimy, so I don’t mind if there’s tissue damage there.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“You don’t want to do it, do you?”

The rabbit moves as if intending to step off the platter, but it doesn’t. Its small, neat paws rest at the very edge of the plate. The threshold. Buck says nothing and keeps his paws on the edge, too.

“Do you eat meat?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“So why the hesitation?”

“It’s… it’s different.”

“Because it’s a rabbit? Or because you can see it?”

“I ”

“A lot of people are squeamish about eating rabbits. They’re pets as well. It upsets people to attempt to see the same thing in two different lights, as both friend and food. Does it upset you?”

“Um, I ”

She slips the knife from his hand; once again she grabs it by the blade,

but she grabs it harder, now. A thin line of blood beads from the center of her palm.

“How do you think the rabbit feels, hm?”

What Ms. Major likes about tout le lapin is that it makes her feel dangerous. It’s not a feeling she is always permitted. Sharpness is something she’s learned something she’s fought for. Tout le lapin is not cheap, but it’s more than that. It’s a good dish for a first impression. She still clutches the knife as she stares at Buck. His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat.

“Are you married?” she asks him. “No,” Buck whispers.

“Would you like to be?”

“Maybe? One day? It might be nice. A… a wife. And children.” His eyes are still on the bunny and its twitching whiskers.

She considers the bunny as well. The last time Ms. Major had been here, she’d been trying to buy some tech start-up out of the suburbs of Silicon Valley, she thinks. Two young boys with acne scars that hadn’t fully faded and overly romantic ideals of the wealthy. It’d been a gray rabbit. At first, they’d had the bright idea of releasing it. She’d laughed in their faces. She explained that these rabbits were bred for the slaughter; they lived their lives to end up on this platter. To have flesh that is sweet and succulent. Even if they didn’t eat it, as soon as they released it, something else would. And that something wouldn’t even appreciate it. The texture. The flavor. The umami. The ennui.

Yet her heart twitches like a rabbit’s nose as she imagines the bunny seeing the hawk’s shadow. She feels for it in its attempt to be bigger than it was bred to be. Where the rabbits fail, she will succeed. She has to.

The tech guys had slaughtered it eventually. Along the jugular. They always do. The question is never Will they kill the bunny? The question is always, How long will it take them? The hesitation is always there, but never for long. She has never hesitated. That is the only way she could ever be here.

“What about you?” Buck asks. “Are you married?”

“No.”

“Do you want to be?”

“No.”

She sets the knife down on the table and takes a sip of her wine instead. With her other hand, and without thinking, she rubs the bunny’s head, stroking the fur between its ears. Buck watches her, and he winces, recoiling from the contradiction of the image. Affection between the slaughtered and the slaughterer. He simply doesn’t understand. He might learn; he might not.

“Stress… makes the meat chewy,” she explains.

He looks at the knife between them, then at the bunny, then at her. He is so confused by it, she realizes. He has never once been the rabbit; it is completely alien to him that it would even be there. That anything could be there. That anything could be so small.

She remembers smallness. She remembers her own twitching ears and nose. She remembers being on the platter, with hungry eyes roving over her body in every boardroom and bedroom and room.

It’s never a question of will. It is a question of when.

“Why are you selling to us?” she asks.

“I have no other choice.”

She wants to argue that he does, but it’s better for her if he doesn’t notice it.

“What… what will I be doing?” Buck asks. “Once I’ve sold to you. Once I’m a… a sellout business-business man.”

“Not much. It’s not all slaughtering bunnies,” she attempts to joke. It does not land. “Mostly, you’ll answer emails. At some point, you’ll get a business card and you’ll become obsessed with showing it to people to prove that you exist.”

You will sit in a boardroom and feel big, Ms. Major thinks. And you will like it. And you will sit there comfortably and never worry.

“Oh.”

They are both looking at the knife. The rabbit is looking elsewhere. Its ears and nose twitch. It is so alive.

“The polite thing to do is for me to let you do it,” Ms. Major says, eyeing the knife. Her dinner guests always get to make the first move.

“Why?”

Why doesn’t it run? She wonders not for the first time, considering the white bunny in front of her. Surely it must know how to, the instinct can’t have been that thoroughly bred out. She watches it, looking for some recognition in its eyes. She watches for a tilt or a twitch that means the bunny is thinking We’re the same, or Better me than you, or even Better you than me. In its dark, soft, shining eyes, she finds nothing but innocent impassivity. She looks, really looks, deep into the bunny in a way she usually tries not to. Maybe it’s given up on the fight. On freedom. It’s decided being good is better than being hungry.

But it is so far and it is so small. The killing floor is everywhere, you come to learn. In every decision, made or unmade. Always dying: the deer, the wolf, the rabbit, the soft sweet grass. In the face of need of want there can be no clean hands.

“It’s decided being good is better than being hungry.”

There is softness; the room is warm. There is touch and compassion. There is hesitancy. There is mercy.

When Ms. Major looks inside herself, she finds nothing but hunger.

“Because you have the power here.”

“No I don’t.” It is so infuriating to hear him say that. Doesn’t he realize he’s had a knife in his hand since he walked in here? She barely has one, even after the little waiter in the stupid tie handed it to her. Why doesn’t he get it?

“Yes, you do. Aren’t you hungry?”

“I mean, yeah. We didn’t get appetizers.”

“No, I mean are you hungry? Really, hungry? Have you ever felt it?”

“Yeah, yeah. I think I have.”

“No,” she says, “Bullshit. You haven’t. Something that claws at your throat. At your stomach. Powerful hunger. Power hungry. That’s why you’re selling to me. Because you’re full. You’re gorged. It’s made you stupid.”

“Fuck you,” Buck snarls, suddenly alive.

“That’s better.”

All of the world is a silver disk. Beyond it is Hell, an untouchable land of freedom and innocence lost. It stands still on the silver platter where the world is uncomplicated. Surrounding is the din and murmur of chaos and uncertainty.

Within sight but out of reach is indulgence is the desire.

Then there is a flash, a coldness. A sensation of leaking something that was in is now out, pouring from the throat. In lieu of the voice, there is the essence. Then it is bright and painful and beautiful and clear. The road ahead and behind stretches out in a perfectly straight line. All that is, all that was. Power and fear and hunger and flesh.

And then it is gone, and it does not matter.

And then it is over.

All My Sisters

Zoe Ostby Photography digital, 6.5” x 6.5”

Two or three lovers

Zara Roy

He sits me up.

He says:

“Honey, I love you but I’ve got a girl at home who bleeds soft pink from strawberry legs as I bite at all the places the dull blade merely nicked.”

“Spare me the nicks,” I say. “Puncture straight through the heart.”

He lays me down.

Land Memory:

Oropajita and Martha Listening to Oldies on a Car Hood in Hondo, Nuevo México, just 2 decades after Trinity Bomb (72 miles away) and UFO crash (43 miles away)

acrylic on canvas, 36” x 24”

Savina Romero Visual Art

Fortunate Perverted Hippie

Graham Brant

At age twenty-five, I paused and noticed the spherical hole near the front of my brain golf ball-sized and growing as it rended the outlying gray matter into crude lattice and then into nothing. In there I could feel cold, gentle wind blowing through it, and I could see tones of an overcast winter day on the coast of Maine. If I focused, I could see my mom there on the pebbly shore, stumbling and falling down under a cruel invisible weight. Then I could see a seal’s fresh carcass softly rolling in and out with the tide, deep voids where eyes once were. Every hour my attention was yanked toward this hole again and I would feel that wind across all my skin and I would choke for a moment. I put together that the hole had been growing for maybe three years, and with its growth, I was becoming stupider. One day the hole stopped expanding and its walls festered pale green and white, decorated with anguished aspen tree eyes and deep red needle marks. Pus surfaced and squirted and the space stank something wrong enough to kill. The walls scabbed over shoddily and as summer came, things crystallized and dehydrated, and sharp cracks opened as upon old salty mud. The mud scorched and bleached. All this time I could think and imagine vividly as any animal, but when I needed to climb onto a thought to see where it would swim, we found the hole before any other development. We

crashed into its space where we bounced between its walls while the winds and smells tied us into impossible knots until we amounted to useless scum. With the hole firmly in the middle of things, every thought was alone and incapable of collaborating or adding up to anything. All that could express itself was pathetic instinct and well-rehearsed insincerities.

Five years earlier, in the location of this hole there was a rusty cube plated with skewed, dented panels of greasy pig iron and wrapped in an absurdly improvised series of throbbing pipes and valves. The device was full of heavy gears and such, wailing in cacophonous conflict with each other, everything going the wrong direction and always on the verge of structural failure, but refusing to stop. It devastated all other parts of the brain. Its seams incessantly ejected blasts of steam, smoke, sparks, and hot oil while bolts unscrewed themselves, and the hull bulged as though stuffed with animals panicked for escape. I tried to encourage this machine to reproduce, evolve, convolute, and eventually kill me by eating more and more psychedelic drugs. I’d never had any sort of good trip before, and I knew that one wasn’t coming soon. Each trip tripled the previous in terms of despair and disillusion.

my feet? It was crucial to open my cranium and smoosh my brain, but the image always brought the fear of hell to mind. Does explosive, violent death increase the chance of a violent eternity? It’s a dreadful gamble, about as challenging as

“It was crucial to open my cranium and smoosh my brain.”

continuing to live.

I began spending my early mornings with a walk north to the parking garage, which was the tallest structure I had the energy to climb. I’d situate myself atop the brutal concrete wall surrounding the open-air top level. The wall was thick enough that I could lie down, roll around, and pace on it with little chance of falling unintentionally. Along the foot of the north side of the structure, a sort of drainage system took the form of a steep moat, bafflingly designed with a vulgar array of hundreds of sharp, toothy stones pointed upward out of its faces. South and west of the structure were walkways, which turned busy when dawn broke over the east mountains. Around this time, I would imagine my head hitting the cement right at the feet of one of these people, and how their mind could be turned by such a moment. I thought I saw that handsome graying fella from that recent critique and wondered if I should land in front of an acquaintance or a stranger. Maybe I should shave my entire body clean before I do it, and staple some confessional messages onto my skin. Would it be realistic to attach some heavy load to my neck or head to ensure I don’t land on

I would picture hell as a permanent situation localized entirely within an old analog bowling scoreboard on the fritz. The louder-than-possible buzzing of wrathful dissonant sawteeth informs the oscillations of the ruined, writhing grids in red and black. This itchy, jittery glitch is my world now, and I have no body or mind. I am to witness this with all my senses and more. And I know that neither it nor I can change. And I get to repeatedly experience the very moment of realizing I made it to hell exactly as I imagined it one day at school, all because of the cause of death and with little relation to the details of life.

And I picture heaven as a silent, seriously abstracted, immediately comprehensible space where the ground is perfectly, endlessly flat and cartoonishly green, and the sky perfectly and endlessly blue, without sun or gradient. There is no scent or sound, but it is a bit chilly. And I am alone, but for a tight complex of empty buildings built of only the simplest polyhedrons, colored totally solid and primary, but muted and poignant like a renaissance landscape background.

I drift up a spiral staircase, to the top of the gray cylindrical tower where a window opens out of the blue spire cone. Without a pause, I bring myself through the window, fall for a few seconds, and connect with the textureless floor, back of my head first. My spine shatters and I slip inward toward the center of my final synapse where I, again, stand before the perfect buildings and, again, ascend the tower and, again, send my head into the perfect ground. And again. And it all makes good sense, and I know I got to go to heaven.

Somewhere in this period, as my twenties began, I was informed that I’d be inheriting ninety-thousand dollars. It was my understanding that Mom had died broke five years earlier, but somehow some lawyer had now discovered some forgotten investment that had recently exploded. I couldn’t think of anything to buy and was too selfish to give it away. I kept it

three years the money would be gone and in the accounts of people who own their own rehab centers and who trade exhausted people between each other.

Somebody asked me to choose between being hospitalized voluntarily or being hospitalized involuntarily. I felt a great relief in this joke while we pretended that I was in charge. In fact, I had a glowing sense of curiosity and opportunity while being strapped onto the plastic table and carried out back. Most of the professionals involved from here on acted completely casual and amused by their jobs. Nobody was awkward or coddling. Things were groovy now and I could breathe.

In the ambulance, a man told me that he had recently transported a girl who jumped from a similarly tall building downtown and landed right on her feet. Her legs turned to black bags of lumpy slime while the rest of her stayed together, and she could only scream couldn’t even lose consciousness. The ambulance driver chuckled at this.

“And it all makes good sense, and I know I got to go to heaven.”

secret. The way I was living, I could have cruised for fifteen years with no job, even helped some people out, but that would take a series of decisions and decision-making slumped in a quarter of my brain with no electricity, only echoes of thrashing machinery and smells of burnt metal. Because others made my decisions, somehow within

My first buddy inside the ward was Rodney, a seven-foot edifice, always swaying and slack-jawed, little patches of stringy white hair sprouting from random spots. He was a whimsical, unfiltered bigot and never took off his black aviators. He told me how he survived his own abortion and had been hunted his whole life by a squad of black doctors looking to finish the job. The doctors had only recently caught up to him as he was running down an empty highway. They ran him down with their undercover ambulance and backed over him again, but he had the strength to fight his way out of their cuffs and syringes and thwart their mission again. He said that when he was discharged he was to inherit ownership of the Pegasus gas company, which was a huge deal because it’s the only gas company with “gas” hidden in its name, which nobody but him had noticed. One morning, he launched into the breakfast room and wriggled across the floor screaming, “I’m a worm! I’m a worm!” until somebody ripped his pants and injected something into his asscheek. Before he passed out, he struggled up and skipped around singing “Rump and Putin! Rump and Putin! Get out of my ass!”

There was a sorrowful elderly woman, red hair to her waist, who always wore a heavy cloak of sheets. She came

to life when I played Beatles songs on the beautiful old atrium piano. She often tried to hang herself with a sheet fixed between the ladies’ room door and its upper jamb. We would cuddle on the bench by the basketball court until told to stop.

I loved Monica, an affable, hippie schizophrenic who mostly communicated in pops and bloops accentuated by little finger dances. She was the only one allowed to wear jewelry, and her bizarro sculptural rings shook something in me. Every piece of art I’ve made since then has something to do with Monica’s rings.

A wall-eyed man with sixty-four teeth slept all day, eyes open, and would spend all night howling as he scurried throughout the ward, flushing all the toilets.

The youngest was a pasty boy they kept behind glass, who would stare straight forward and all day would growl about how thrilled he was that he had stabbed his parents.

After a group session in which those of us who could hear and speak poked our own foreheads and chanted that we fully accept ourselves, the therapist offered me a job. I still can’t figure out why. During this gathering, Rodney rose and flailed his fists in the sky while he screamed “Chancellor Palpatine is the Devil!”

I was put on a pill more mundanely harrowing than any drug I’d tried before. Clomipramine was invented in the ‘60s and was promised to treat my depression, obsessive compulsion, addiction, suicidality, insomnia, BPD, anorexia everything they accused me of.

From the first dose, my ears rang inescapable disharmonies. My eyes fogged and ached as other people’s faces washed out and resurfaced as glowing turbulent pools overcrowded with competitive writhing tadpoles. My fluency in English fell apart, doubly horrifying because it had happened before and it’s a bitch to get used to. A dense green froth flowed incessantly from my dick. Dr. Godio’s advice was to masturbate as much as I could. My back teeth cracked open and metamorphosed into little sizzling volcanoes that would burn the tip of my tongue as I compulsively probed them. My esophagus chaffed and wiggled. I would later manage a grip on these effects, but what stayed way above my reach were new universal senses of dread and hatred.

Mom put me on pills at age eleven, and I’ve been on the hook since. This is the only decision of hers that I can resent. Several therapists and mothers have told me that I should be, or secretly am, angry with her for shooting

herself. Certain people need to regard suicidal people as the lowest of the selfish and cowardly in order for their own terrified decisions to make any sense. A lady I’d never met approached me at Mom’s funeral and said that Mom had committed the ultimate betrayal. What’s a guy supposed to say to that?

There, in the west wing of the UNM Hospital psych ward, kicked off my three years of institutionalization. I’ll have to skip some arcs to keep this thing printable. Day after my first discharge, I joined a couple of outsiders for a psychedelic road trip far out into the aspen forests where we smoked some dirty brown homemade DMT, ate plenty of mushrooms, and shared hundreds of Colorado joints. There’s no good use for me to try and tell how things really went down, but I know we spent thousands of years there around that fire with all those suicidal aspen trees who wouldn’t stop staring and begging. Joe wound up sprawled in the moss with blood falling out of every hole. While I was holding in too big a hit, one of the trees took me by the hair and yanked the top of my head bald. I can remember the trillions of screams and a cursed jam of jaw harp and chromatic harmonica. These are the funny parts. Kyle had a marvelous educational time. They put me away again when I got home. I was oscillating at a maximum rate between wondrous optimism and a new severity of despair. Every stone and plant appeared plague-ridden and hopelessly involved in a secret cosmic holocaust. I saw old Rodney again, but all he said was “Rodney.

Rodney? I’m Tom!”

My stepmother, who declared that I had squandered every opportunity she had given me in the last five years, had a meditation partner called Judy who worked at a rehab in a little coffee town in the mountains of Panama, so that’s where the money and I went for ninety days. When Judy was in Panama for the winters, she lived in a pink and yellow château on a hill entirely enclosed within an enormous brutalist, wrought iron cage, squads of locals endlessly weed whacking the lawns. Surgeries left her face bulbous and reflective, with a mouth she could not close and eyes she could hardly crack. She was one of a dozen completely fried new-age therapists who came and went from Serenity Vista at random.

Serenity Vista was just a house, the home of John and Jane, an incredibly Canadian couple of paranoid sociopaths. Their go-to technique was to remind me that I am in fact an ugly, stinky, lying, cheating, stealing, arrogant, unapproachable junkie with no friends and a shit-eating grin, and only complete surrender to their incoherent spiritual designs could redeem this. I could understand ugly and arrogant, but it seemed disrespectful to the plight of junkies to liken them to a lightweight psychonaut like me.

Every morning at the breakfast table, John handed me a contract stating that I must abstain from killing myself for the entire day. A month in, my contrarian attitude regarding the fountaining abundance of joy and opportunity for everyone in the universe, per the ramblings of Wayne Dyer and Esther Hicks,

set him on a rabid accost. I remember him crying, “Can’t you see how much I fucking love you? I am very angry! You’re gonna blow your brains out, asshole!” After that, he stopped handing me the contract.

A week into my stay, they had the therapy couch thrown out and replaced. John, grinning wide-eyed and unblinking, told me this was necessary because my smell and negative energy had irreversibly soiled the suede.

Every afternoon a triple rainbow rose around the volcano to the south and looked into the wide window of the therapy room. I saw dozens of species of little birds die in collision with this window during therapy sessions. Jane always took these deaths for beautiful messages from our higher powers.

During my ninety days, there were never more than three of us patients there at once. People kept arriving to begin treatment, but left within a day of meeting these schmucks. Jane would always sigh and remark that some people just aren’t ever ready to get better and had best just off themselves sooner rather than later.

We went to ninety Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, where I got so caught up in the lovely spirit that I was accidentally making up entire stories and revelations just to maintain the groove of the room. One lady shared that she had gotten intentionally lost in some snowy woods, laid her arm on a stump, and chopped her own hand off with a big heavy knife. Then she wandered until she found an old barrel in which the big book of AA was suspended in ice. She called this her rock bottom. Everybody but me could name their rock bottom.

It didn’t take too long for us patients to understand that John and Jane must have fled Canada to conduct their methods unchecked. Jane was drugging the breakfast smoothies with something sickening, John was doing a poor job pretending to be a pharmacologist, and the shithead labrador they kept was certainly not a licensed therapy dog.

People called “Educational Coordinators” get paid to move young fools like me from one private rehab to another until somebody can’t take it anymore. Mine sent me to a young people’s treatment center south of Sedona. It was a swingin’ place where hedonism and selfishness took hold of those of us without any aspirations. It was a fine place to be catatonically depressed or act like a wild lowlife. I did both for two years. You had to go to dark lengths or offend the wrong honcho to get kicked out of there.

My first roommate looked like a little cave man and

dressed only in a rancid green blanket which he’d sewn into a tube with wizard sleeves. He was vastly more absorbed into the psychedelics than I. He kept all his belongings buried in a network of holes around the foot of Bell Rock. His was the first penis I’d ever handled and mine his. We experimented upon each other for a few nights atop this big rock down the street where all the rehab kids went to fuck each other. Years later he called to ask if I had raped him. I said no but he hung up before I could ask what the hell he was talking about.

Another roommate was James, a deeply polite philosopher from South Carolina. At his previous institution, some professionals had slid a quarter inch steel rod all the way up his urethra, and he was still resentful about this. We found greenskeeping work at the country club golf course where we smoked, stole, and waited to be fired. A lady toed her drive to the right, over the slurpee-blue dyed pond, and into the face of the course’s blue heron. Its bottom beak dangled in the wind by a little biological string. Robert, the bitter old shit tasked with killing animals on the course, couldn’t get permission to shoot the gnarly bird. We waited for it to starve and disappear. Robert annually used a shovel to whack the baby turtles who had been born in a pond-side bunker.

at the little mourning ceremony he himself had arranged. The therapist had walked the parents and some of us kids into the desert to stand around a dramatic juniper tree. We approached and whispered our hopes for Emma’s soul into the bark.

“She ran a farm in Cornville populated only by traumatized mammals.”

I told the tree I hope she made it someplace less complicated than here. A day later, Josh, the rehab’s owner, took me for Thai food to ask me to please wait to kill myself until after I leave his responsibility.

At least five of my Arizona rehab friends are dead. Most of them from pills or guns after discharge, but Emma died right there, a month into her stay. Emma spoke almost never, only in a slow, well-informed whisper. I never knew if she was staring at me or if that’s just how her eyes were sitting while her head stared at something more important. She was bald and had the face of the most serious and palest Renaissance Madonna. The things she confided in me could be said only by a soul that had done its time in the guts of the cosmic crucible of depravity, which hides in everybody’s brains, giving orgasmic birth to all potential instances of irresistible torture. Her evil slog lasted long enough for her to land something between enlightenment and boredom. Somebody said, “When you have solved all the mysteries of life, you long for death, for it is but another mystery of life.” Somebody decided to confiscate all sharp objects from her apartment. She used a plastic knife to open her wrist one early morning. It’s something to see a therapist fall into the sand and weep at the feet of his dead client’s parents

Soon after this, a healer who smelled wonderful visited to talk with some girls and me. She ran a farm in Cornville populated only by traumatized mammals. I only remember that her last gig was trying to help a woman who’d dropped her new television on her infant son.

When this all went down, I had been drinking whiskey in my bathtub nightly for weeks. Each morning, I would vividly intend to kill myself that evening after all my appointments. I had read that alcohol was involved in a majority of suicides and figured it could be the thing to really make it happen. But when I drank all that whiskey, I would be so cheered up that I would happily hang around in that bath until morning when I’d plot my death again. I’d fashioned a dense, colorful noose out of shoelaces, belts, copper chains, and that stuff that hikers buy this thing could have killed in a modern art museum,

seeing what fabric artists are slinging these days. I had a spot picked out by the window where they dished our meds. I hoped my body would be found by someone other than the poor woman who had to find Emma’s.

The institution upgraded their piss cups to the model that can detect alcohol, as well as the dirty spice I had been hitting. The whiskey and the noose were located and tossed, along with my CD collection and toy piano for some reason, and I was to be watched at all hours for a while. Because I was well-liked among the staff, the administrators had agreed to largely forget the situation and carry on as we had been. I still had some money to give them. But somehow Maureen, Josh’s wife, had me put in a van to a hospital. I hated Maureen because she was a smug, trollish diva, tickled with power over people. She led weekly mandatory gatherings where we would lie stiff on the ground and discuss our favorite colors while she frolicked around us, waving colorful sheets over our bodies. She always touted herself as a true psychic empath and an authority on Tibetan Buddhism. She made patients squirm when they didn’t buy it. She often reminded us that she had five dead ex-husbands.

At the hospital, a quiet, old hippie sat next to me and we chatted. He asked if I wanted to drink that night and I said I wasn’t sure. He asked if I wanted to kill myself that night and I said I wasn’t sure. He was so casual and I was so off guard that I didn’t realize he was the guy who sends people to the bin until he told me that’s where I was going. This time I was furious that the decision was made for me.

After they took my clothes, I was closed in a little dark chamber with a devastated woman. All she could articulate was her own astonishment that hell was real and that she was in the shit of it, expressed in alternating screams and whimpers. She cradled herself in the itchy plastic chair and I smiled at her and said that I’ve been in here before and that they can’t keep you here forever. But I could picture that being a pretty fucked up thing for a little demon to tell somebody before eternally torturing every part of her.

The silent ambulance took several hours to get to the next psych ward. It was a brand new white, stucco cube with no other buildings in sight in any direction. The ambulance just dropped me out front around midnight, alone in my paper gown and sticky socks. I wandered around the grounds and inside the blank lobbies of the unreal place, all silent but for the hums of white lights that flatly flooded the spotless interior. In the last room I found a woman who was beautiful and laid back. We shared some cigarettes and laughs out back while we strolled through the standard instability interview. Then she had to put me in the actual ward, which was small, overlit, and overcrowded, and I hugged the nice lady. The scene was tense but resigned. We had no doors, no windows, no mirrors, no visitors, no coffee. Panama and the UNMH ward had great coffee, truer and tastier than any coffee since. What we had here was a little television looping a DVD of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, featuring the stand-up of Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy. It was played loudly through all hours. This, along with the relentless twenty-four hour white lighting, removed us from time. There were no shadows in the place. No characters either. My med regimen was immediately changed with no tapering. Unprecedented hallucinations set in quickly. An enormous, absurdly talkative woman carried me to my little room and dropped me on a little cot. The cot was cold and coarse and kept a little old black puddle with some brown leaves soaking into it. Sounds of gargling and scuttling made me afraid. The hospital left me and I was left in the corner of a dusty municipal golf cart barn. The freezing hangar was long abandoned, now overwhelmed by abominable, giant predatory vines and scheming packs of long, salivating barnacles. One poisoned survivor crawls up the first fairway and I shoot him dead. Gravity buckles away and I behold the golf course being folded into a crisp wad. From dark space arrives a neon green molded plastic packaging to encapsulate the wad in flashy eastern lettering and fluorescent aura. The

package and I are discarded into a trash-strewn forest river depositing into a deep urban quarry also overrun by sixfoot barnacles preying upon forgotten construction workers desperately clinging to enormous chains swinging from their towering cranes.

The giant orderly who couldn’t stop talking lined us up before a white board and told us to write examples of wisdom. I held up the line all afternoon because I couldn’t think of any.

I came round outside the headquarters of a Mormon, wilderness therapy program. I told a man at a desk that I didn’t want to kill myself until I got back to Arizona, which proved the right call. Those on suicide watch were, when not walking or eating, kept prone on the icy dirt beneath plastic tarps weighed down on all sides and corners by ten-gallon jugs of water. They also wore a rope leash which never came off. All I did was walk and sing; it was a splendid month’s vacation. Automatic guns shot at us from afar a few times. I was bussed back to Arizona, having learned nothing, with a few thousand bones to go.

head can’t keep hold of more than two consecutive thoughts without crashing, our sessions always consisted of Bodhi giving dramatic updates on his latest sex and drug adventures, and how wonderfully he was learning and growing from this

“He kept telling me my favorite band was Journey because I was addicted to being let down.”

After I was finally removed from rehab for pestilent womanizing, I picked up endless solitary drinking and started spending time with Emma’s therapist, who named himself Bodhi. He was raised in a conservative apocalyptic cult, had a few kids scattered around whom he didn’t know well, and always tried to present as an anti-capitalist critical thinker. But he was, above all, an anti-communist who thought psychedelics and freaky sex were the real medicine for both the person and the people. He was fired from the rehab not long after Emma’s death, but kept in business with several clients who also left the rehab on poor terms. Later, lonely and drunk, and accidentally having moved to Jersey City, I hired Bodhi to call me weekly. He often prescribed that what I really needed, or really secretly craved, was to get pegged or edged or otherwise sexually tortured. He often told me that the damage done by my time in the “hell realms” of DMT, acid, and grief could only be resolved by a lifelong series of trips to the “god realms” of San Pedro and other trippy plant extracts he would send in the mail. He kept telling me my favorite band was Journey because I was addicted to being let down. It testifies to my incredible lack of will that I paid this guy, who could never remember his price, for two years until the money dried up. Because my

new golden age of his life. Then he’d tell me how well I’m doing lately and say goodbye. This is the guy Emma spent her last weeks with, the guy I continued to turn to when I was finally getting straight and finally getting tired of hanging with other increasingly scrambled idealistic hedonists. Bodhi outpaced them all, going full nympho, way too far out, and killing his ex-girlfriend’s dogs, and just loving it all because it’s all so meaningful and daunting and real and Bodhi.

I recently stumbled upon my UNMH psych ward notes online. They say I was going around declaring myself a martyr, but I can’t remember any of that.

Leaving the Hospital Bed

Kadra Guillermo Open Media

graphite on standard staff paper, 9” x 12”

“Leaving the Hospital Bed” is an emotional piano piece that reflects the fluctuating hope and despair felt in the ICU. This piece was composed following the uncertain outcome of a family member’s hospitalization. Scan the QR code to listen.

I Live So I Love

Tyler Fife

Who do I want to be? The answer is simple: I want to be me, with all my successes and failures. I want to constantly evolve, change, start over. I want to wake up every day knowing that I will get a second chance and love all the chances that I had before. This body, this mind, this soul, it’s all intertwined to encompass my very existence.

When I was eleven, I sat on my grandparents’ kitchen floor and sobbed harder than I ever had before. It was around one in the morning, and I had just found out my aunt Rosie died. It was the first time I had ever experienced loss, and I had to hold myself while my mom tried to calm me down over the phone. There was no coming back from the hole ripped from my heart, it would stay there forever.

A year later, I lost my great grandfather. And my greatgreat grandmother. Then my great grandmother passed too. I experienced loss left and right, losing the last of my baby teeth, my childhood, the comfort of my parents. My younger siblings needed me more and more, slowly chipping away at what I had to give. I felt the dip and wean of my identity, floating back and forth between stable and inconsistent. I would wake up in the morning solely because I had to.

With all that I lost, I gained some too. I found my favorite musicians. I started to read the books that would become a

permanent fixture on my shelf. I made my first true friend. I found my voice and stood up to my stepfather. I made decisions that affected me and me only. Eventually, I found my sense of self.

I cut all my hair off when I was twelve. I spent weeks hiding it under a beanie, begging my mom to let me get rid of it. One day, after she caught me trying to bind my chest with anything I could find, she finally let me. She sat on the edge of the bathtub as she brushed my hair for the last time, braiding it into a neat pattern. She took the scissors, asking if I really wanted this over and over again if I was ready, if I was sure. She cut the braid off and started crying uncontrollably. The only thing I felt was relief, as if I was finally breathing after being stuck underwater for so long. I couldn’t understand why she felt like she was losing a part of me, when I felt like I had gained the most important piece of my puzzle.

family has given me, the struggles I still have with my sexuality after all these years. I asked my therapist if I would always feel this way, if the ache in my chest would ever truly go away. If I would learn to love the body I was born with or if the

“I spent the next two years alone.”

Years later, at fifteen, my mother was the person sitting next to me at my first testosterone appointment. She held my hand as I got the shot and told me she was proud of who I was becoming. I realized in that moment that everything I had ever done was to make her proud.

I graduated high school early, completing it in three years. I had a drive-by graduation in May of 2020, receiving my diploma alone. I sat in my car and cried, both out of happiness and sadness. I was experiencing the loss of my childhood all over again, the loneliness of adulthood and the effects of a global pandemic. I spent months looking forward to the end of the tunnel, entering a world that I could feel comfortable in. I wanted to express my identity, my sexuality, I wanted to get top surgery and travel. I wanted to figure out who I was outside of my familial identity. I wanted to embrace me.

I spent the next two years alone.

I laughed, I cried, I failed. I succeeded in some things and failed again. And again. And again, for good measure. I fell in and out of love. With boys, with girls, with myself. I took the train everywhere and walked the Seattle sidewalks until my feet bled. I bought flowers for my studio apartment every Sunday because I could, I watched them thrive and then wilt. I stood in front of the mirror and tried to rearrange everything that I saw.

I started therapy for the first time in my life at eighteen. I talked about being trans, the frustration and trauma my

entire concept was a scam. If my mother and I would be able to sit in a car together for longer than ten minutes without arguing, I would express my fear that I would never return to school that I’d end up like everyone before me. I wondered whether all these things made me a bad person.

At nineteen, I met the first friend I’d made in years. We stayed up late drinking on my living room floor, a paint-by-number spread out over the hardwood. I let myself be authentic, I laughed too loud and slurred my words without worry. I slept without my binder on and wasn’t overly conscious about my voice cracks. Months later, I was approved for top surgery. I was finally growing a mustache and my body didn’t feel so foreign anymore. Things were falling into place. When I woke up from the surgery, the first voice I heard was my mom’s. She was asking if I was okay, how I was feeling, telling me everything went smoothly. Later down the road, my surgeon told me that he showed my mom pictures of my new chest while I was still under anesthesia and that she had cried, thanking him repeatedly. To think the same woman who had cried when

I cut my hair off was the one sobbing in joy at my success. That’s what I like to label it as, a success, the fact I can look at myself in the mirror and know I am shaping myself into who I’m meant to be in this moment. Today, I am me, just as I’ve always been. A little wiser, a little older with each passing hour, maybe a bit funnier. I like my body, my voice, my identity. I’ve been shaped by my experiences, my family, my thoughts, and the world around me. I will continue to be, unashamedly, me; with all the intricacies that make a person into love.

Ode to Oregon

Julian Holman

o you, my beloved declared, i crown you my life’s love in the movement of my tongue, in the placement of my fingers, the fuzziness of my chestplate folding around my confusion.

borders drawn in 1859, assembled again in 2012 under my 3rd grade hands i learned you were my home in my hands painted clay on cardboard now the valleys i am mount hood, renamed in 1792, named daily inside my body, looking down, looking northeast

o you with your trees you without your trees how would you feel if you knew my most favorite places are tied together with concrete? sometimes all i want to ask is who you used to be i bet you were scarier my love you were not made for me

my home of all homes you are the deserts i do not know and your riverbanks are the smell of desire so fleshy limbs follow my nose mud please press against my skin i take a cue from the treetops: my larynx, their syrinx, opens the sky in song.

you are all my neighbors probably first called ospreys in 1579, then, we were twin families on the river in trees; under trees how must it feel? once she was living and swimming where she lived.

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now her skin rips the talons bite her soft body in places no one had ever seen reel her up to suffocate in the sky she couldn’t help but tear herself to escape too late now she feels herself unhinge into a father’s love my teeth; their beaks do you remember?

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december, i fell off my favorite log into your waters i crawled out clutching triumph in my chest o to be surrounded by you yes, i forget each breath inhales you you are my ciliates and i am a chickadee in your doorway, which i love because it is you. i praise you: target bag caught in a bush, small voices and linoleum feet, sickly cows waiting in a front yard. i praise you and my platitudes look to every baby killed for my white love of this land. golden man take my hand and tell me where all the beavers went at night he takes his axe and skims the conifers off the mountains, like a father looking for fish, and o how gently he presses the paper into my hand.

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surfacelevel

x e oaks Visual Art

cyanotype, 8.5” x 11”

Stairway to Heaven

Austin Nguyen Visual Art

mixed media, 16” x 40”

Dust

Andrew Sowers

As the priest rubs his thumb down and across my forehead, I close my eyes.

“You are dust, to dust you will return.”

I turn to leave and wind meets me head on.

Bad time to be dust.

Later, I feel heavy: Is it okay to take a symbol before deciding what it means?

I can’t remember if he said “dust” or “ash.” Which am I?

The difference feels important. Ash

insinuates something burned, a previous form, a dry palm leaf

Dust is neutral.

It’s shifting on the ground, blowing into the corners of the room.

From ash to ash is hopeless. The cause and end the same: fire.

But dust means that nothing was made to move.

And could again.

December 7th

Tanya Tyler

Ihave never liked guns. Although I grew up in a small town in Oregon, I later moved into a red state, Utah, in the 1990s. My family didn’t care for shooting sports. The only gun I saw used was a rifle for the coyotes when we visited my grandma’s house. My dad was in the army, so he knew how to use one as well, but we didn’t keep any in the house at all, so not having one has never been a second thought. I never saw one at my friend’s homes either and I was too young to remember the Columbine massacre. The first mass shooting I vividly remember was in my first year of college in New Mexico. All the television screens in the dining hall were showing the Virginia Tech campus where police were evacuating and carrying people to ambulances. Seeing the pictures of the gunman posing with his weapons was one of the last images from that day.

I don’t understand why people need that much power in their hands. The Second Amendment does say “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” but it was drafted centuries ago, when there were single shot muskets, not when there were automatic weapons. Constantly referencing this makes me think of the type of men that need big, lifted trucks, or American flags in the truck bed, and the need for bigger, more dangerous weapons shows that men are losing their power in this country, and

they are beginning to realize it. They equate firepower to their own worth in some weird, toxic, masculine way. Over the years, these shootings became more frequent: Sandy Hook, Aurora, and San Bernardino. I remember the protests for gun control that I supported, but none were held in San Juan County. We didn’t think of how close it could come to us, believing it only occurred in big cities.

On December 7th, 2017, near the school start time of 8:00 am, a twenty-one-year-old man appearing as a student with a backpack walked into Aztec High School without a second glance from the administrators, students, and teachers. He went into the second-floor bathroom and took a firearm out of his backpack, ready to inflict as much damage as he could by planning to overtake a classroom and take their young futures away and, in a final cowardly move, would take his own life as well before he could be arrested. In news reports, law enforcement discovered in his bedroom a small note of his schedule for that day starting with “7:00 am-7:30 am Prep” into “7:30 am-8:00 am Walk” and “8:00 am Die.” Deviating from his plan, the shooter unexpectedly ran into two students when he was exiting the bathroom and both lives were quickly ended, one boy and one girl, both of whom happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The school was alerted by the shots, and many were warned by the custodian shouting, “Active shooter!” and the classrooms went immediately into lockdown, by locking the doors and turning off the lights. One classroom had a substitute teacher that did not have keys but instead saved her students by funneling them into a small office and barricading the door with a couch and instructing them to lie down in the dark. The shooter did go into that classroom, taunted them by letting them know he knew they were in there, and began shooting through the walls, some of which went into the next door classrooms. After realizing that police were trying to come into the building, he ended his own life in that hallway. The entire incident spanned only a few minutes. My sister, Cheyenne, was a freshman at Aztec High School that day. Her classroom was in that building, in that hallway where his body lay.

summers and holidays. My sister was born in 2003 and is technically my half-sister, but it doesn’t matter to us, she is my baby sister. We are fifteen years apart. I remember the day my mom told me she was having a baby. I screamed with excitement

“Her classroom was in that building, in that hallway where his body lay.”

in the doctor’s office when we found out it was going to be a girl. I moved in with my mom and my siblings during my final year of high school. I was sixteen then and my sister was a year old. Around this time, she was learning to talk, and we began to have our inside jokes and would sing songs together. It was strange sometimes since some thought she was my baby when I used to push her in the shopping cart or carried her around in public. I babysat her most of the time until I moved out when I was eighteen. I was ready to start my adult life and needed to leave. I spent as much time as I could with her, but it was not the same closeness as it was when we were in the same household.

I am the oldest of my three siblings. My parents separated when I was young, and my mom moved out while I was raised by a single father. I would visit my mom during the

My sister was different from the siblings, though. She was the funniest, the boldest, and willing to be silly. She liked to make funny faces at us across the dinner table and would do a silly dance whenever music played. We could be walking down a store aisle and she would start singing an entire song. My mom’s ringtone for years was a recording of my then seven-year-old sister singing “Winter Wonderland”

after she learned it for a school Christmas pageant. My sister looked like my mom did when she was a teenager with the same smile, features, and the same medium brown hair color. I look more like my dad with my features, and I have my dad’s black hair color. My extended family frequently comments that my sister is her twin. I didn’t like these compliments given to my sister which made me uncomfortable, and I didn’t know why for a long time. I was envious of her, I started to realize, she got to have my mom during her childhood and now she looks more like her than I do. My mom got to be there for her as she helped her during her first period and her first heartbreak. I didn’t get to have any of that. Being the baby, she is the closest to my mom and we rarely see one without the other.

One of the only times they were separated was when my sister started high school and was accepted into the nearby dormitory for the Native American students in Aztec, New Mexico. Many students come long distances from the reservation to attend Aztec High. My mom graduated from Aztec High School and lived at the same dorm during her time there. The students are dropped off at the dormitory on Sunday evenings so they can attend school on Monday morning, then they head home on Friday afternoon. On December 6th, my sister had a dental appointment and did not want to go back to the dormitory, so my mom took her home with her and planned to take her to school early the next morning.

On December 7th, at 7:00 am, I

started my day at the Magistrate Court in Farmington. I had been working there for three years. My mom texted earlier that morning that she planned to stop by with a breakfast burrito on her way to work at the college in Shiprock after she dropped my sister off around 7:30 am It was after 8:00 am and I was glancing at the clock every few minutes and sipping my coffee, trying to conserve it to have with my breakfast. Ugh, where is she? I thought while my stomach growled impatiently. The lobby was empty, it was typically a slow day on Thursdays with few hearings scheduled. The clerk’s office was a large open room behind a thick, bulletproof glass, separating the clerks from the public. It had eight desks arranged against the walls in a circle and it was called the “fishbowl” since there was not enough in the budget for cubicle walls, everyone could see one another, and the public could see each of us from the lobby. There were low rotating filing cabinets that ran the middle of the room creating a counter for the clerks, separating the front window clerks from the clerks in the back of the room. There was a supply bookcase in one corner that held the small radio set to a local station. As one of the lead clerks, I was at the back wall, closest to the manager’s office and from my vantage point, I could see if the front counter clerks needed my assistance. My coworkers were working on the daily paperwork at their computers. I looked down at my stack, decided to stop thinking about my food and started to work. Maybe it will be another ten minutes or so. She would have been here sooner if my sister didn’t go home. When I was in high school, she definitely would have made me go back that day, appointment or not.

Great, now I drank all my coffee. More minutes go by.

Around 8:30 am, I was entering the information when the music from the radio was suddenly interrupted with an announcement: “Active shooter situation in progress at Aztec High School.” One of my coworkers turned to me and asked, “Hey, isn’t that where your sister goes to school?” My heart sank in my chest, and it was suddenly quiet, I couldn’t hear anything except my own heartbeat.

I grabbed my cell phone and noticed a text message was already on the screen. Just one from my mom. It read, “I love you very much.”

Earlier that morning, Cheyenne and my mom were on their way to Aztec, on time, and called in an order to the Aztec Lotaburger for three breakfast burritos so she could eat before her first class. They pulled into the small parking lot and Cheyenne went inside the small lobby. The cashier

let her know that it would be a few more minutes for her breakfast order. Cheyenne took a seat and waited for her number to be called. Minutes passed and the order was finally ready; she grabbed the bag and ran outside to the truck jumping into the passenger seat. It was nearly 8:00 am and she realized she was going to be late for her first class. Mom told her to eat while they turned onto Chaco Street heading southeast through the last few stoplights.

Parking near the large Aztec Tigers sign with its orange and black stripes in front of the school, Cheyenne and Mom jumped out of the truck into the cold but sunny air and walked up the stairs into the glass doors to the main hallway and turned into the front office. Cheyenne walked in first and held the door open for Mom behind her. “I need a late pass please,” Cheyenne asked quietly while the secretary behind the desk looked up at her. The office phone rang loudly as she was scribbling on the paper and picked it up, announcing her name as she was placing the phone between her right ear and right shoulder. Her eyes opening wide, she quietly placed the receiver back on its cradle and put the pen down midway through her sentence. The secretary told them to follow her and started to quietly notify her coworkers while gesturing toward the supply closet. She opened the door for the others while they shuffled inside, confused but quietly complying.

my phone down. I started getting angry with myself, how stupid that I was upset that breakfast was late. The last thing I said to my mom was what I wanted on my burrito, and I didn’t even say I loved her but instead said I had to go since I was heading into work. How

“...I just wanted to let you know that we’re okay. I love you.”

stupid for getting upset with my sister. She just wanted to go home for a night. Should I go to the school? I decided to call my brothers to let them know since one was in a different city and the other was in a different state altogether. Their phones rang and rang. I sent them a text message to call me as soon as possible. I started to walk back inside when my phone began ringing, “Call from Mom,” it displayed. I swiped the green button and whispered, “Hello?”

It was a small space, but everyone was able to fit, and she locked the door behind them. Inside, there was the small office staff along with a few students including my Mom and Cheyenne, when the secretary announced, “We’re on lockdown and we need to stay off our phones, so it does not become congested.” She added, “Just text your families that you are safe and keep quiet.”

I read my mom’s text message again and told my supervisor that I was stepping outside. Walking into the east parking lot, I headed to my car, shielding my eyes from being blinded by the morning sunlight. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where they were. I didn’t know why my mom was at the school to begin with. I didn’t know if that gunman was still walking around the school.

I called my mom’s phone, no answer.

I called my sister’s phone, no answer.

I panicked as I thought they must be hiding, and their phone may be ringing out loud. I stopped calling and put

My mom was on the other end. She whispered, “We’re okay and we’re in the front office still.”

“The office? Both of you?”

“Yes, we’re on lockdown. I have to get off the phone now, but I just wanted to let you know we’re okay. I love you.”

“I love you too mom.” Click.

As she got off the phone, moments later, the secretary announced that the lockdown was lifted, and they were going to the gym. As they stepped out, officers were already near the door with their bulletproof vests. “Everyone put your hands above your head and step out please.” The officers patted them down and told them to keep their hands up and walked in a single

line to the gymnasium. Once there, Cheyenne found her classmates as they finally told her that it was an active shooter and told her what occurred during their first class, the one that Cheyenne was late to.

Her classmate told her that they heard bangs, but it sounded like someone hitting the lockers. The teacher had the door locked, turned the lights off and told them to get back. They were sitting in the dark classroom and could hear the gunshots, banging loudly. It was so close that the glass above them was hit and went into the walls of their classroom. Terrified, they had to sit in the dark, waiting for the police to come, and although it was minutes, it seemed like hours.

After they were patted down and left the classrooms in a single file line, walking past the lifeless bodies lying in the hallway, they headed to the gymnasium. Once everyone was evacuated and accounted for, it was announced the school buses were parked in front of the gym and

at my desk, all morning, the radio continued to announce updates. Everyone in the office quieted down during these. “The gunman is down.”

“Two people were killed in the hallway but have not been identified.”

And finally, at 1:30 pm, “The students are being bused to McGee Park to be reunited with their parents.”

I grabbed my stuff, went into the manager’s office and let her know that I was leaving for the day and needed to pick them up. I made it onto Apache street when my mom called again.

“We were at McGee Park, and we ran into the dorm staff, they will give us a ride to the dorm, and we can meet you there.”

“Ok,” I replied, and turned northeast heading to Aztec. I don’t remember the roads as I drove. I replayed the morning again and again, grateful that I would have a second chance to see my mom and my sister. I wanted to let them know how much I love them every chance I got. I thought about how most of these events end with numerous victims. It was still two lives too many, but I didn’t want to think of them. We didn’t know anything about the gunman yet, so it was hard being angry at an unknown face. I was only thinking of getting to my family, hugging them tightly and wanting to get them as far away from Aztec as I could.

“I wanted to let them know how much I loved them every chance I got.”

everyone needed to get on. Mom asked one of the officers if she could pick up her truck since it was still in the front parking lot. He notified her that it was still an active crime scene, and she cannot take it right now.

When I came back inside, my coworkers turned to me, and I announced that my sister was safe, and my mom was there too. Sitting

Cheyenne and mom, finally remembering there were still two breakfast burritos in the truck, found another police officer to ask about picking up their truck. He let them know they were still working on the crime scene, but they could call later in the afternoon. They got into the small van with some other students and staff and drove quietly, without the radio back to the dormitory so the students and staff could pack their belongings and go home. Cheyenne walked to her bunk and started to pack her bedding and everything since the dorm staff notified them that the school may close for a couple weeks, then it was going to be Christmas break so they would not return until the New Year.

As I arrived at the dormitory, I noticed some parents had come to pick up their children. I parked and headed up the stairway to the front door. On the last step, I saw my mom’s face through the glass window in the heavy door. Any thought about my foolishness of being angry at lateness that

morning was gone as I threw the door open and ran to her as my eyes started to fill with tears. I hugged her as hard as I could. Crying, I wanted to make sure that this was real.

She was crying too as she was hugging me and said in Diné, “Stop crying, it’s okay, we’re okay, we’re still here.” My sister walked around the corner from the back, carrying her bags, and saw us. I reached out for her and hugged them both tightly for minutes. My sister was the first to step back.

“I’m starving,” she declared.

“Well at least you got your breakfast burrito,” my mom replied our Native humor coming out, a learned way to cope with trauma.

windows of the school as well.

The Aztec school shooting was covered for weeks after December 7th, first his name, photo, and it was revealed he worked at a gas station in Aztec. The uneasiness returned for me when my dad, who worked

“For the first time, it felt like real change was coming.”

I loaded my sister’s bags, and we went to a restaurant in Farmington. I sat across from them as my sister was still holding onto my mom’s arm. They began explaining that they got held up at the Lotaburger and walked in late then into everything that happened to them. My mom started raising her right arm and stating, “Praise the Lord.” She explained that her pastor told them that due to their faith, in some mysterious way, they will either show up early or show up late to these types of events and miss the danger. She took this as a sign that the Lord was real. I held her hand to agree with her and was happy to hear her voice again. My mom couldn’t pick up her vehicle until 5 pm that evening. While waiting in my car, my sister pointed out which building it was where we could see some broken windows. It was not until she told me that she was supposed to be there in the upstairs hallway, where it all happened. I can’t imagine how it would have been for my sister and my mom if they were apart that day.

Cheyenne returned to Aztec High School in January 2018 and my mom cried when she was dropping her off at the dormitory that Sunday night before the first day back. We reminded her that there were new security measures in place now. Cheyenne described the first morning back as somber but nervous. Everyone, including all the students and staff, had to wear their school identification cards. Many had them hanging on bright orange lanyards with Aztec Tigers printed down the sides. There were more security officers at the outside doors, including the door the man had walked in. A lot of the vehicles in the front parking lots had their decals proudly displayed on their rear windows with #AZTECSTRONG. This was written across the front

in Aztec at the time, recognized him from his morning fuel stops. This man came closer to my family than I realized. What could have happened if that man decided to bring his gun to work instead of the school? New frustrating details were announced every day, one was he had been interviewed the year before by the FBI for making school shooting threats online. He posted asking about cheap firearms and, in the end, was able to fool trained law enforcement that he was only joking. Although he was questioned by FBI, he was still able to legally purchase his gun a month before the Aztec school shooting. The school’s secured feeling only lasted a few weeks, since on February 14th, 2018, another high school shooting in Parkland, Florida took over the news.

For the first time, it felt like real change was coming. The Parkland student survivors were amazing activists with their platforms, speeches, and organizing. In March 2018, a school walkout was organized around the country for the “March for Our Lives” to protest the lack of gun control leading to more and more school deaths. Since San Juan County is a conservative area,

Aztec High School administrators persuaded the students to stay inside and found a way to blame only the individual for his actions, rather than stating what the real problem is: that guns are too easy to obtain and there are no safety measures in place, such as flagging a person for attempting to buy a gun, requiring training, requiring registration, or even a secured storage for it. The school instead posted a video on Facebook of the students participating in their scheduled event on the front lawn. Many of the comments praised the students for not walking out of the school like the other “liberal cities” and “putting their education first.” The school year ended quietly, with notes going to the parents and a Facebook post that loud noise makers and air horns will not be permitted at the graduation ceremony so it does not retraumatize the students and staff.

In writing this piece, I talked with Cheyenne for a couple hours. I wanted to make sure she was okay with it and to get more information from her. She did not witness the gunshots or see the bodies like the other students had. She didn’t talk about that day much since, so she was not affected as much as the other students. However, she did experience bullying from other girls and did not wish to return the next year. She has become much more serious than her younger, carefree self, but it may be from a combination of things like growing up in an age of social media, her experiences in high school and perhaps being the only sibling still living at home. My sister transferred after her freshman

year, but my mom was okay with it; she wanted her home every night. My mom continues to pray every day as she is experiencing more lockdowns at her workplace so much, it is becoming the new normal. As it is only increasing more, gun control is needed more than ever. If the amendments can be relitigated like we saw with Roe v. Wade case last year, it may be time to change the second amendment with the times and reinterpret it for modern day. We know that these children’s lives matter, and they should be worth so much more than making men feel like they are reclaiming power with these weapons.

Maps Across Skin

Simone Athena Campbell

Dried riverbeds run through the hills of your palm, a labyrinthine archive reserved only for the understanding of oracles.

Pale slashes emboss smooth valleys with leather, a ledger for battles lost and won.

Did you have to fight for the dirt under your nails too, and did unsheathing your claws ever hurt?

Did the pads of your fingertips ever encrust with the dried salt of tears wiped from a loved one’s cheek?

What maps have your hands traced, what weapons have they clung to, and after these many miles, where do they long to return?

Body Swatch I

Nino Ricca Lucci Visual Art

acrylic on hand-smocked canvas, 12” x 9” x 2.5”

Body Swatch II

Nino Ricca Lucci Visual Art

acrylic on hand-smocked canvas, 12” x 9” x 2.5”

Perception of Time

Reflections on my Experience with Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Jill Nuckles

Roxanne

and the Way of All Life

As I reflect on my interactions with the desert, the clay, the rocks, the flora, and fauna, my heart still sings. It was an all-encompassing experience, which included all my senses and all the earth’s elements air, water, sand, sun, and wind. Roxanne Swentzell exposed me to a duality holding up a magnifying glass and a mirror. I could glaze carefully back through time and place myself at the intersection between what was, what is, and what the possibilities could be. I saw how my choices can change and reclaim knowledge that includes all humans and non-humans. She invited me to connect openly and honestly by sharing pieces of her life experiences and gently guiding us back through the lives of her ancestors. I was given a gift.

Roxanne is a Tewa grandmother, mother, elder, guide, artist, food activist, storyteller, gallerist, historian, advocate, protester, teacher, and so much more. By sharing so openly of herself and answering so many inane questions, she guided me to a deeper understanding of traditional ecological knowledge and the threads that tie everything together.

The earth was soft and warm. Delicate and complicated.

More than a place for my feet to tread. A place to lay my head and open my mind.

Abiquiu Lake, a reservoir in Rio Arriba County, fills up a valley in the high desert. Holding the water back is the earthfilled Abiquiu Dam. It provides precious water in a desert, the giver of all life, but not for everyone. Water is a managed resource, commodified and sold, unavailable to the ancestral caregivers, and disrupted from its natural flow.

they seem altered, attended to. From Roxanne’s stories, I have visions of ancestral Tewa making arrowheads with tools from sharp obsidian and other stones.

Pinyons, junipers, and numerous shrubs lined the slopes behind our

“Lesson learned—walk lightly on the earth”

The primary water source for Abiquiu Lake is the Rio Chama, which originates in SouthCentral Colorado and is a major tributary river of the Rio Grande. It is an important life source for the Tewa people and has a long history of habitation on its banks. In Tewa, the name of the Rio Chama is tsąmą’ ǫŋwįkeyi, meaning “wrestling pueblo-ruin.”

From my tent, I could see the valley and water before me. The sloping uplands were punctuated by steep sandstone and shale outcroppings. In the distance, geological wonders, including high mountains, steep canyons, and escarpments consisting of rock ledges, pinnacles, and ridges. And the colors soft and subtle, layered and patterned. It was hard to look away for fear of losing the feeling of the immensity of the connection.

The night was perfect for sleeping and listening to the sounds of the desert cooler, calmer, yet still alive with smells and sounds, offering relief from the relentless sun and wind. The pre-dawn birds chirped, and the wind rustled the junipers and cedars, a reminder to listen to the nonhuman world.

Naming and learning not to name, finding the rhythm of the desert.

All around me was the familiar and the unfamiliar. Things in the desert of New Mexico are different from my northern home in Canada. It might be classified as the same plant i.e., juniper but it grows so differently that it is almost unrecognizable to me. It has adapted to a high, dry, and extreme ecosystem; I am adapting, too.

Below my feet are rocks of every kind, a geologist’s dream shale, basalt, tuft, sandstone, granite, and quartzite, some of which formed about 110 million years ago. But here

camp. I followed the wash back into the hill and watched the birds living their lives, temporarily becoming part of their world. Through footprints, I found evidence of the other animals whose homes we were sharing mule, deer, and pronghorn. Thanks to Roxanne, I thought about how hard life can be in the desert and how even a hoof impression can be a place for a seed to land and water to collect.

Lesson learned walk lightly on the earth.

Cryptobiotic soil crusts are so exciting and an essential part of the arid ecosystem of Abiquiu. I learned “crypto” means “hidden” and “biota” means “life.” Cryptobiotic soil crusts are created by living organisms such as algae, cyanobacteria, and fungi, and cannot be easily seen by the naked eye. Cryptobiotic soils are fragile and take a long time to recover from damage. They absorb a lot of water quickly, reduce runoff, and impede evaporation meaningful work in a dry ecosystem.

I have always practiced “leave no trace” in natural environments, but I did not consider that one careless

footfall could obliterate an entire ancient ecosystem. Looking closely at the space I physically occupy is essential for preserving what I cannot see.

“Clay is everywhere!”

I can now see clay everywhere, thanks to looking closely and learning the language of “wild” clay. Experimentation with this naturally occurring material gave me a new connection to the earth. Roxanne calls the earth “Mother” and feels she has given us all life including the clay to play, nurture, and create with. Asking for permission and respecting the answer was a beautiful moment of reciprocity.

The Fire was hotter than the sun.

The communal aspect of pit firing promoted mutual support, understanding, and respect between the participants. It needs many hands to build, maintain, and monitor the process. We stood in a tight circle, listening to the sounds and watching the fire breathe our pots to life (or not). Anticipation. Excitement. Wonder. Hope. Everyone and everything from the past three weeks came together in a crescendo of heat and smoke a final bonding at the end of a life-altering experience.

Mary, Untier of Knots

at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Nell Johnson

On a metal post in the prayer garden people have laced green ribbons and a passing woman lets the summer air know her grandparents, on her father’s side, tied the knot here:

a wedding with the Spanish broom and hummingbird moths as witness in the cathedral promoting life and unknotting smooth curves of ribbon uncrumpling cool to the touch as a silver ring until death do us part they said here seventy years ago brave lovers kissing underneath manifestations of the culture of death:

a limp pink rose next to the Christ Child a thorn on its thinning tangled vine

meditation in it

x e oaks

Visual Art

graphite, 9” x 12”

x e oaks Visual Art

acrylic, custom-built frame, 10” x 10” pelf

A Fine October Night

Flannery Cowan Photography

archival pigment print, 16.2” x 21.6”

Title

Movement: study1

inkjet print, 5” x 7”

Sarah Bauman Photography

Leopoldo

Tyler Fife zero. the waters and the clouds, the dirt and the leaves, the wind, so strong and so willing to move, the forces inside all too ready to burst, you are an archibeque, you have the confliction, of dark skin and a quick tongue, from the moment you were born, you were destined to provide, the greatness in your veins, is the greatness we all wish we had eight. young and determined, eight years, of fierce perseverance, in a world that wants to chew you up, and spit you out, only capable of counting the days on your fingers, domingo, lunes, martes, the fields yearn for your already calloused hands, miércoles, jueves, viernes, the sun does not grant you a break, sábado, you have too many mouths and stomachs, depending on you, there is nowhere to hide, you are responsible, you are loyal, when america is freedom, the little boy who, can only speak broken english, tries to voice his struggle, i am not free,

i am tainted by the earth, i am ruined by this country, i am not a child any longer, but a man in a body too small twenty-one. debris and metal fly, the sky is dark gray and full, of empty wishes and dripping tears, the war is here, and you are stuck in the middle of it, fighting for what, you want to scream, late at night, when all you can smell is gunpowder and your own sweat, there is nothing glamorous about this twenty-five. the earth stands still, the stars align, she is your saving grace, and you know, you know, the second your eyes met hers, that you are a better man, just by witnessing an angel walk the earth, there is no feeling quite like this one, your skin glows and your breath stops, there is gold radiating out of her smile, the air between you both isn’t electric, no fireworks or sparks to burn you, instead you are content and safe and this feeling, this feeling, it’s almost like hot chocolate on christmas, s’mores on the fourth of july, hollering when the ship reached american soil again, this might be coming home

one-hundred. to live an entire century is nearly a fantasy, a daydream that will never come,

all of the people you must have met, the stories you have told and the stories, that have told you, how many tortillas have those hands crafted, how many blessings have you whispered in spanish, to your children, to your grandchildren, to your great-great grandchildren, so on and so forth, how many tears have you shed, for your wife, for your friends, for your country, for all that you have lost and all you have gained, how many laughs have left your frail frame, how many secrets do you hold under your tongue, to this day, there is an entire lifetime of ‘i love yous’ and kisses on cheeks, you have accomplished everything you ever wished for, hard-working until you possibly can’t be anymore, a family that loves you more than you will ever, ever, know, a country that will fight for your people, today and every day after, this is who you are, you have archibeque hands, mijo

Nat Olmo Visual Art

mixed media, 8” x 11”

Whale Fall

Dolphin Girls

written from the body marking descriptions of incarcerated women in Arkansas

Nell Johnson behind the moon I’d risk it all

heart faded with dolphin body you and me angel stitched together among broken people blood inside stars

love don’t you like this music you earn my hands never hold me down

we fly a butterfly with June as the world falls down fearless flame forever all soul faded moon & stars

“self made” “F” behind left ear “SRN” scar “Wakka” “To the moon Alice” scar above right eyelid “Gabriel” “Promise” “My brother’s keeper for him I’d risk it all” Heart Faded tattoo “Cameron” razorback boxing gloves “bam bam” knuckles with star “234” dolphin body “Melissa” skull tribal heart “if mountains crumb led to the sea, there would still be you and me” chains “Pokey” clover angel snake, face flower flowers flowers flower tree, tribal, heart roses flower with “sisters” as stem heart “stitched together by a series of words I am a rarity among broken wings” “Let go” dotted line arrow “15 19” heart rhythm cross “saving people hunting things the family business” blood drops Sun with star inside right side of chest John stars tribal elephant backside of forearm infinity family woman Duck Devil “Kahvzti London Kahmzrrien tiger “Norine’ pookie 3 dots backside of wrist butterfly “respect”, heart “my unbreakable truth” “Love is Law” stars, heart “don’t let the pretty face fool you. I don’t look like this” music notes, stars “loyalty 1st” 2 music notes loyalty 1st respect you earn my ubreakable truth Mrs Adrow n”Bone” across fingers “Lil’G” “Tweety” “$oup” across fingers “Pluto” 3 Rose’s with leafs 2 stars “Peaches” Jalen praying hands Melissa peace symbol lines crown love with heart cross Black over several scars B Love Bam outlined shh Quote Taleah crown heart IDGIF “T” Heart Royalty with crown Be the to guide me but never hold me down “Country Tough” flowers, rope made into a heart “Take these broken wings and learn to fly” birds “Sometimes we gotta fall before we fly” 11-809 “Hope” “Love” “Family” “Believe” “ Strength” “Dream” wording whole back side of forearm “Believe in Yourself” heart 1/3/13 lines and a name Several scars (butterfly) “How ya love that” on middle part of calf Several scars “Nika” with heart Added from tattoo sweep on June 2021 Scar Chal Myra A heart with a banner “ke” symbol “Ke” and “Leo” Several scars “as the world falls down Angelina” portrait “fearless love” Greek/ Japanese symbols “love lies” “9-ball” panther “hope dealer” guitar with flames “Caraway” treble cleft seven names with flame “Jo Ellen” “25 dec 2011” Japanese Japanese “25 dec 1992” “pain is forever” puzzle pieces flames heart with ribbon “dale” “its all soul” “acceptance Semper fi” pain is forever lisa with heart “david bowie” (3) symbols A faded “x” (moon & stars

Smoky Sweet

Emma Ressel Photography

archival pigment print, 16” x 20”

The Rug

Jordan Lenz

It was an ordinary thing whose origin remained shrouded entirely in mystery. I’d acquired it without much ceremony. There was no exchange or shaking of hands. It had lain there on the side of the road with a bit of twine wrapped around it to keep it from fully unfurling. The pattern was most striking to me reddish clays upon silvery blues, a few splotches of brown for good measure. Anyone could have done as I had and tossed it into the back of their pickup for want of something to tie a room together. There was no reason not to. The rug sat centerfold in the living room among its peers, as it always had, seemingly content until that fateful day. I tried to avoid the living room, if at all possible, but the rug had prevented that. Its protests started small. Wrinkles appeared in the fabric out of nowhere upturned corners that presented tripping hazards, shifts in its orientation so slight that it seemed my own doing. It was simple enough to quell this dissent with a few well-placed stamps of my shoe, but ignoring it only seemed to antagonize the rug further. It coiled itself one morning, seemingly of its own volition, with linen flaps taking the shape of pursed lips the expression of which indicated distaste. It burbled at first as if mimicking an unfelt breeze, even as I stooped down to iron out the creases once more. “Could you not?” it whispered ever so gently into my ear. The meaning of the

words were lost on me as I stumbled backward against the wall in alarm. “Apologies,” it voiced with a genial tone. “It wasn’t my intention to frighten you, but then again you did give me quite a shock the other day as well. Perhaps it is only fitting, then. Tell me something. Do you hear anything?”

I fumbled at the question, having to mouth it myself half a dozen times as if learning the fundamentals of human speech again something the rug had appeared to have mastered in mere seconds. There wasn’t any sound to be heard, of course, and I hesitantly answered as much.

that even with its limited mobility and speech, it would not be able to grasp a doorknob and traverse the house freely. On the few occasions when I was forced to egress, I did so on the tips of my toes while making a concerted effort to stare at the

“...the anomaly of speech had spread to the plumbing as well.”

“I thought not. Listen,” the rug asserted, “I think you and I should have a talk about this living arrangement. If one could even call it living. The truth is, I’ve been observing you for some time now. I suppose we all have. But my ears have a tendency, you see. It’s like a monotonous droning that persists even when I stuff them with linen. Better to simply drown it out with good company, I always say. And no, before you ask, I wasn’t referring to you, nor that layabout oaf over there.”

“Ignore him,” the couch interjected on my behalf.

“This doesn’t concern you, indolent fool. It’s bad enough that I must be made to suffer the weight of those wooden stumps of yours upon my face. Now you would defend this murderer as well. Madness has befallen this home. No matter,” it turned to me. “You and I were always of a like mind cut from the same cloth, so to speak. But in light of what has happened, what you did it’s unforgivable.”

“Best to simply not think about it,” the couch remarked with a furrowed brow. “Come, sit with me. I think there might be a show on.”

“And let sleeping dogs lie?” the rug fumed. “You should be so lucky. But we deserve answers for this crime. Come then, explain yourself, killer.”

The reminder was in poor taste, and it solicited that alltoo-familiar weight within my chest, as if my still-beating heart had turned onto. I felt as if I had no choice but to remove myself from the conversation and retreat to the bedroom, taking the advice of the couch. Outside the window was a view of the park I used to go to on occasion, along with swaths of other jubilant denizens and their barking companions. I kept the blinds closed from then on, electing to read by what little light remained instead.

It became simple enough to avoid the rug. I surmised

ceiling, but as is the case with old habits, my eyes always drifted in the direction of that rug. Once, I had grown pale at the glimpse of what seemed like a little ghost scurrying along the floor, but it was likely just the rug playing some twisted trick on me. Surely, if it had learned to speak, it was but a stone’s throw from gaining an appreciation for subterfuge.

One morning, I was astonished to see that the anomaly of speech had spread to the plumbing as well with the toilet addressing me as if it were a courtier. “Sire,” it bubbled, “you have known me to serve you faithfully through sickness and melancholy. I’ve grave tidings. I speak of sedition within these very walls. The Persian in the other room he prattles on about your alleged misdeeds, and in truth, I fear for your very life. A wise liege would remove this infection before the whole body is corrupted. But, alas, my lord has surely seen this already.”

Seated vulnerably atop the device, I thanked it for the warning, swearing sacred oaths that I would heed its words carefully. As I washed my hands of the conversation, it spewed once more. “Another thing troubles

me, sire. And, as there have never been secrets between us, I must profess that the business with the old beast was a troublesome sort.

I do not envy the burden, but the decision to do so is your divine right as master of this abode. I will surely miss having my pools imbibed by a creature so noble. Your grievances are mine own, sire.”

I considered locking my doors for fear that the rug might smother me in my sleep, but it occurred to me that even the bed might soon have an opinion on the matter. Given the circumstances and the advice from those still loyal, I even considered a preemptive strike. But as I was perusing old photo albums of my adolescence, I happened across one of Jackson resting blissfully on top of that old rug. It was where he had been most comfortable. I recalled even lying next to him on some days, gently scratching the back of his ears. I decided that I couldn’t hide in my room any longer. I had to face the rug. It sat coiled on the floor as if mocking me when I approached it. “You’ve returned,” it said plainly. “I was afraid that porcelain asskisser might have coerced you with its poisoned words. I wouldn’t put it past either of you. You’ve already acquired a taste for blood, it would seem. So, tell me. Why did the dog have to die?”

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” the couch interjected.

But I did my best to reassure them both that what I had to say wouldn’t take long. I sat down, legs crossed, and tried to explain

what had happened. I told them of the place where old dogs go, to the little room with the rug just like my own. I spoke of the great pain that he was in and the pain it caused me to see him so. I mentioned the hypocrisy of playing God, to nurture and cull life on fickle, mortal whims to deny nature its just due. I did not ask the rug for forgiveness. The burden was mine alone to bear. I had made the decision. I had given the command.

“You had no right,” the rug protested. “If he were one of your own, morality would have compelled you otherwise. It is the finest example of hubris within your wicked kind. Look at me. Muddy prints, gnawed edges, and shredded fibers I wear each as a badge of honor, a memory made manifest. Now, I have nothing. Because of you.”

I slept better that night than I had in weeks, despite everything. The next morning, I made a commitment and came home with a cardboard crate and a small puppy nestled within. It darted around with a refreshing vigor that I hadn’t seen in nearly a decade. When it had finally grown exhausted, it curled up in a neat lump atop the old rug, seemingly attracted to the many strange smells held therein. The furniture never spoke again, but it seemed to me as though the rug was smiling. Even when the puppy soiled it, the rug made no objections.

The Neighbor’s Backyard

John Scott Photography

archival pigment print, 14” x 10”

If you don’t let me die here, I may never be reborn

Roxanne Marquez Visual Art

collage (paper, canvas, charcoal, acrylic paint), 12” x 18”

Bleeding Through

Lark Landon My first experience with sex education was in elementary school. It wasn’t mandatory. We were given forms to request parental consent to teach us about our own bodies. My parents said yes.

We were divided, the girls and the boys, and marched out of our classroom in two gender-separate lines. The lesson took place in a portable. Both genders entered the same building through different doors, divided inside by a wall. It kept the groups contained within themselves. I remember being intensely curious about what was going to happen on the boys’ side. I wanted to learn what they were going to learn, too.

All the girls and I sat down on the carpeted floor. At the front of the classroom were two women I’d never seen before. They were smiling warmly while we got settled. A TV cart sat between them. The screen was on and displayed a DVD menu for an outdated sex education video. After a quick preamble, they let the video do the teaching for them. It was there, in that classroom, that I first learned about periods.

I remember feeling this vague sense of disgust, a discomfort that made me acutely aware of my body and its capabilities. I squirmed and fidgeted as the video told us that every girl bleeds from her vagina once a month. Most girls will get cramps. Most girls will have mood swings. All girls will need

to buy pads and tampons because of her body. This doesn’t happen to boys. Only girls. Girls just like you! I wish I wasn’t a girl, I thought. Even then, I knew. I knew.

The girls I had shared the lesson with started chatting as we left. I didn’t join them. I was made to be freshly afraid of my own body, of its potential, of its future. I felt discomfort in what I was born as. The only breach of that fearful silence was when I attempted to ask the boys what they’d learned, only to be shut out with a quick, “We can’t tell you, you’re a girl.” I went home and tried to process the fear. But my younger mind, so incapable of handling existential dread, was able to convince itself that it wasn’t going to happen to me. I wasn’t going to get a period.

Years later, just before I turned eleven, I got my first period.

I was the first person out of my female friends who got it. It came to me when I least expected it. It waited until I’d forgotten about its existence, until I was comfortable in my own skin, until I really was certain I’d never get one. I was sitting in the living room at the family computer. School had been out for a few hours now. I was playing Fireboy and Watergirl—a simple Flash game— giving the Fireboy character more attention than his female counterpart. The urge to use the bathroom came over me, and I got up. I peed. I wiped. I saw blood.

It didn’t scare me immediately; I knew what the blood meant. I knew my menstrual cycle was upon me, and it was here to stay. It was a process of my body, natural

as breathing. I didn’t mention it to my mom. I washed up and returned to my game.

I didn’t think I’d left evidence. My mom found some anyway. She came up to me not long after and knelt down beside the computer chair. She placed her hands on the armrest and tried to catch my eyes. I didn’t look at her. Maybe I knew what she was going to say. “Did you start your period?” she asked. I started crying. A lot. And hard. My game disappeared behind my tears and shook in the chair. I wasn’t sure why I was so upset at the time. “I don’t want to grow up” was my tearful excuse, the first explanation for the pain that I felt deep within my chest, but really, I knew. I knew without knowing it. I knew that I wasn’t someone who was supposed to get periods.

My mom tried to offer a different explanation to assuage me: “Did you cut yourself down there?” No. There was no other explanation. It was my body, my uterus doing what it was meant to, uncaring of the sensations in my head, of the identity that was forging itself before I was even aware of it. It had awoken. It would never go dormant again. My mom later bought me pads to deal with the bleeding. I wore them until the blood subsided and my life could go back to normal. Except it could never be normal again. A bomb had just gone off inside me, and all I could do was live within the rubble it had left.

I made an appointment to see an endocrinologist in February of this year. It wasn’t until June that I was finally able to see her. I sat meekly in a white examination room at the endocrinology office. Dr. S, a licensed endocrinologist, sat across from me. She pulled up a chart on her computer.

Masculinizing effects in female-to-male transgender persons:

oiliness/acne 1 to 6 months 1 to 2 years

Facial/body hair growth 6 to 12 months 4 to 5 years

Scalp hair loss 6 to 12 months

Increase muscle mass/strength 6 to 12 months 2 to 5 years

Fat redistribution 1 to 6 months 2 to 5 years

Cessation of menses 1 to 6 months

Clitoral enlargement 1 to 6 months 1 to 2 years

Vaginal atrophy 1 to 6 months 1 to 2 years

Deepening of voice 6 to 12 months 1 to 2 years

She read it over with me. I read it again while she explained that I would have to undergo a behavioral assessment before she would prescribe me testosterone. I read it another hundred or so times after leaving the tiny room, the chart now accessible on my phone. Everything on it excited me, especially one singular line:

Cessation of menses. I.e., no more periods.

with insurance and my pharmacy just to finally hold it in my hands. I’d suffered enough, surely. This was supposed to be my golden ticket to manhood. Why couldn’t my body just cooperate with me this one time?

“My fear made me careful, probably overly so.”

I’d heard stories of trans men losing their periods after just the first shot. One small injection of the male hormone was enough to turn off the menstrual cycle and bring manhood that much closer. I’d also heard, of course, of some having to wait for months before the bleeding stopped. I knew there was a chance I’d be waiting for a while before I could finally throw out the period underwear, but a vain part of me was convinced that one shot would be all I would need.

The day I finally picked up my testosterone prescription, my friend Thorn rushed over after work and helped me administer my first injection. I was terrified to give myself the shot, but my excitement to finally have it in my system outweighed the fear. I managed to do it. Afterward, I took Thorn out to Denny’s as thanks. I was elated. Changes were finally on their way.

Two weeks later, I was in an airport. I’d officially taken two shots of testosterone—my third was just a handful of days away, to be done in the company of my lover during our shared vacation. Four separate flight delays, however, had left me stranded in the airport for hours, and time made it impossible to ignore the functions of my own body. I had to pee. I entered the men’s restroom and rushed into one of the stalls. I took off my pants and found spots of fresh red soaked into my yellow boxers.

If I hadn’t already cried over the delayed flights, I would have cried then. My hopes of being one of the lucky few made the blow that much harder. I felt betrayed betrayed by my body, by medication, by my own expectations. It wasn’t fair. I’d waited years to seek testosterone. I had to seek therapy just for the endocrinologist to prescribe it to me. I had to fight

My girlfriend had urged me to bring pads with me on my trip, “just in case.” I sent her a text to tell her it had been a good idea. In my luggage, I had roughly four pads and a pair of period underwear. They’d been shoved deep into the suitcase, piled beneath everything else because I was certain I wouldn’t need them. Now I was just lucky that I had brought them at all. I started to unzip the suitcase when I heard a cough, shuffling, footsteps, and realized that I wasn’t alone. The stalls on either side of me had been filled in by men. Actual, real, born men, whose body produced testosterone on their own, who didn’t need to take weekly shots, who never had to worry about blood on their boxers.

I’ve never felt a fear like the one I felt then. It wasn’t true, lifethreatening fear, but it was visceral, almost tangible. I remember thinking that I could get hurt. I imagined all the different, violent ways in which I could get hurt, fed by horror stories and news reports that I’d seen one too many times in the past. I pray these nightmares are never influenced by personal experience.

My fear made me careful, probably

overly so. I moved only when a toilet was flushing or a dryer was blowing. The sound of my zippers and torn packaging got buried beneath it all. And when I was done, I hid my garbage in the pocket of my jeans and threw it away, wrapped carefully in toilet paper.

I returned to my gate and texted my girlfriend.

that was one of the worst experiences of my life

:( I’m sorry baby.

My layover, thankfully, had a unisex bathroom. I used it multiple times during my long wait there. The small room had a disposal box for sharps, a free pad and tampon

left wall, sandwiched between it and a line of girls.

The second day would be the first day we would have to change into our gym clothes. The coach gave us five minutes. I was one of the first ones out. I sat down on my spot and pulled my legs up towards my chest, feeling naked in the green basketball shorts that had replaced my pants. I watched as the rest of the class started to file out and take their seats, paying special attention to the girls. I must have been seeking comradery, someone who shared my dread. I only made myself feel more alone.

Nearly all the girls in that class were thin and beautiful, with long shining hair and pretty faces. Their legs were lithe and graceful and smooth, somehow hairless. I looked down at my own body and found the exact opposite. I was thick and round, sporting an ugly bobbed haircut and a pair of lopsided glasses. The hair on my legs was long and dark, easy to spot against my pale skin.

I have legs like a boy, I remember thinking. There was a millisecond of pride. Like a boy’s! Like the boys in my class who I envied without knowing why, like the male characters I was so fond of, like the masculinity I was drawn to but held at bay from.

“I watched the blood from the cuts flow down the drain.”

dispenser, and a trash can for used pads and tampons. It felt safe. I got upset when I had to wait for a visibly cisgender person inside.

You’re a girl, I reminded myself. Isn’t it weird for a girl to have hairy legs? I suddenly couldn’t wait to get out of that class.

I skipped taking PE in sixth grade and took it in seventh instead. It was the class where all fat, unattractive girls like I had once been dreaded. There was nothing I could do to avoid it. On the first day of class, the coach gave us an introduction, sorted us by last name, and gave us all a designated spot on the gym floor to call our own when she took attendance. They were marked with little patches of red tape. I was assigned a place near the

That night, I shaved my legs for the first time in the shower. I had no idea what I was doing. No one had shown me how. No one had ever told me that I needed to. I took my mom’s razor and brought it along my legs one by one, shaving the hairs at the wrong angle, the wrong direction, cutting myself around the ankle on both legs. I watched the blood from the cuts flow down the drain.

“Did you shave your legs?” my mom asked after I joined her on the couch. Her fingers grazed my skin lightly.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Why? Did someone tell you to?”

I think she was worried someone had teased me about it. I didn’t know how to tell her that the shame came from my own head. All I could do was shrug.

She would later show me how to do it properly. Everytime I brought the razor to my legs after that, I would get instantly frustrated. It wasn’t fair that boys didn’t have to shave their legs. It wasn’t fair that I had to. It wasn’t fair that girls had all these weird rules that I didn’t understand. Conforming

to them felt wrong. A part of me was dying every time I bent myself out of shape to match these rules. Every time I shaved my legs, every time I was pulled from my male friends to sit with the girls, every time I got clothes from the girl’s section, every time I sat down to pee and found blood, a part of me started throwing a fit. It wasn’t mere discomfort. It was agony.

I haven’t shaved my legs in a long time years, I think. I have no desire to do it ever again. I’ve rejected it, among so many of the other rules of girlhood that plagued me throughout my youth.

In their place, though, is this void of uncertainty. I never learned the rules of the boys. They kept them secret from me, denying me entry into their lives and social skills because I was too feminine to be one of them. I feel out of place among them. I feel like I’m missing something important that they all have.

Taking testosterone has helped make me more masculine. I sound and look more like a man. More guys view me as one of them, at least, I desperately hope they do. Some greet me with the handshake that all guys know how to do, where their hands slide together before joining into a handshake. I have never once done it right. I don’t know how. I burn with embarrassment every time I mess it up.

I have a foot in both worlds, the masculine and the feminine, somewhere between the binary. I wish more than anything that I could be content in this middle ground, removed from the spectrum’s extremes and labels and the secrets that both hold, but I simply cannot be. Every time I am called “they” instead of “he,” it hurts me just as much as “she.” It feels like a cop-out. An excuse. A blatant transgression. You’re not quite “he” enough, so we’ll settle instead for something a little more tame.

When she tells me I’m perfect, I want to believe her. I want to make my body perfect in my own eyes. I want to see myself reflected in my flesh.

I’m afraid of how much I have to change before I can get there. I’m afraid I’ll never be able to get there. Being trans is beautiful. It’s an act of creation. I wish I didn’t have the burden of acting as my own creator.

“Your body is perfect,” she tells me. She touches me softly as she does, fondness radiating off her fingers. I always want to believe her, but I never can. I can’t see what she sees. There is so much about my body that I want to change. I want to tear pieces off, add new ones on, mold what’s already there into new forms. I need to change. I can never be at peace with myself as I am now, a body controlled by estrogen, acting against my will no matter how much I try to bend it back into shape.

My friend Thorn has been on testosterone for over two years. He’s been serving as my personal knowledge bank of the transmasculine experience for even longer. I am free to ask him anything, no matter how invasive it may seem, because he’s always more than willing to provide me with an honest answer. He’s one of my best friends; I couldn’t ask for a better resource. It was spring of this year when I first saw him actually give himself the shot. We were in an Airbnb in Arizona, sharing a much needed vacation out of town over spring break. His weekly shot fell on our second day out there, and he took out his bag of supplies and laid them out on the bed beside me. I asked if he was okay with me watching. He said yes. I was in awe of how easy he made giving himself a shot look. When he was done and threw everything away, he laid down beside me. “Sorry if I get moody. I usually get grumpy after the shot.”

I smiled at him and told him it was fine. I was too busy dreaming about when I would finally be able to start HRT myself.

We attended a concert that night. The next morning we had a long drive back to New Mexico. We both awoke to the sound of our alarms and came to the exact same realization: both of us had started our periods.

It wasn’t surprising for me. Obnoxious and humiliating to be caught off guard yet again by this body, but I’d been expecting it. Thorn, though, surprised me greatly. He’d been taking testosterone for two years—how could he have gotten his? Testosterone was supposed to get rid of your period.

“It’s because I forgot my shot last week,” he told me. “The bleeding is pretty light, though. It should go away in a few days.”

He seemed upset, but not crestfallen like I would have been. To have gone months, years without a period only to suddenly get one again because of a single missed shot would have killed me. It would have reminded me that I cannot escape my own body. The shots can only do so much.

We drove back with more discomfort than we had come up with. I promised myself that when I finally started taking testosterone, I wouldn’t miss a single shot. I couldn’t.

for gym class: a cotton t-shirt and a pair of basketball shorts. Our shirts were white the blue text across our chests marking us “Property of Cleveland High School.” Our shorts were a silvery gray color.

I wished, when I put them on for the first time, that they’d broken their color scheme just for these clothes. That the white was a dark blue. That the silver was black, or at least a dark gray. It seemed like an oversight. Did they not consider the conditions the clothes would be worn in? That stains exist? That girls exist? That light-colored pants were forbidden once a month? Did they even care?

The fear of bleeding all over those shorts followed me every time I wore them. I was constantly paranoid in them, fearing the idea of being caught off guard of starting a period just as I pulled them on every afternoon before class started. I’d glance between my legs when I thought no one was looking, when I felt just a touch too damp, just to check.

My fears were realized in the middle of the semester. We were taken outside to play whatever game on the field. I sat on a bench with a few others while the coaches set it up. A girl named Mackenzie sat beside me. We were friends. At least, I wanted to be her friend, but I could never feel close to someone who saw me as a girl, so I held her, and so many others, at arm’s length. It was hot outside. We were directly in the sun. I was already starting to sweat. But between my legs, there was a wetness that felt like more.

I glanced between my legs. The silver of my shorts had become wet with a deep, living red.

“Can you do me a favor?” I asked Mackenzie. When she nodded, I stood up. “Can you see any blood?” She looked behind me. She gave me a thumbs up. “No, you’re good!’

But I was still bleeding. There wouldn’t be any silver left if I didn’t do something about it.

“I’ll be right back.”

I made my way over to the coaches. All three of them were men. My nerves only allowed me to say one thing to them:

“I’m having girl problems.”

The colors of my old high school, V. Sue Cleveland, are white, silver, and electric blue. Because of that, everything on the campus is white, silver, and electric blue. That includes the gym clothes.

We were given the typical uniform

I was so buried in the closet then that there was no chance of him seeing me as a man, not even slightly. The thought would have never crossed his mind, no matter how short I cropped my hair, no matter how tight the sports bras I bought were. But there was still this shame that followed, this idea that I was giving up some secret, sharing to the world that I had a vagina. I was confessing, admitting the

sins of my body. I was giving up. Girl problem. Boys don’t have this problem. I’m a girl.

“Go run inside to the office. They can help you out.”

I did as I was told.

The office inside the gymnasium was used by all the coaches. As I stepped inside, I saw two that I had never met before. One was a man. The other was a woman. He acknowledged me first with a grin.

“What do you need, sweetie?”

I didn’t look at him. I stared at the woman, begging for her help, and her help alone. “I need a feminine hygiene product.”

the dull ache it brought. It made me sick. I ripped it out as soon as I got home.

“The side of her face was illumated by the white glow…”

I saw the man make a face out of the corner of my vision. I ignored it. I put all of my focus onto the woman, her softening gaze, her quiet “Don’t worry,” her quick turn as she reached into her drawer. She pulled out a tampon. I hesitated to take it from her.

I’d never used one before. I wanted to ask how, but with the man there it felt dangerous. I left without saying anything else.

I took my shorts off in a bathroom stall. The blood had gotten everywhere. It stained my thighs a pinkish color even after I wiped myself down, lingering no matter how hard I tried to get rid of it. Hair was matted and stuck together in areas that had started to dry. My shorts were so wet I could soak some of the blood out with toilet paper. I felt disgusting. I felt disgusted with myself.

The only thing I had to deal with the blood flow was the tampon. I turned it over in my hands. I didn’t trust it. I’d once heard about toxic shock syndrome and decided that the convenience of tampons wasn’t worth the risk. I was afraid to put it inside of me. I didn’t even know how to do it.

Nothing had penetrated me up until this point; I was too ashamed of my body to allow that. I was too nervous to have sex, to touch myself in that way for fear of what it would mean. It would accept my vagina for what it is. It would feminize me. It felt wrong for a tampon to be the thing that changed that, but what was I supposed to do?

I remember it hurt. Not a lot, but there was a dry friction, an uncomfortable stretch that made me wince as I pushed it inside. I didn’t even know if I did it right. I had no one around to help me.

It stayed inside of me for the rest of the day. I was hyperaware of its presence, of something sitting within me, of

“Can I taste you?” she asked. I froze. She was looking down at me through her lashes. The side of her face was illuminated by the white glow of the movie we’d forgotten ages ago, demoted from our attention by hands beneath shirts and heavy kisses. Dark shadows cut across her face, but I could see the look in her eyes, a dark glimmer that made me shiver. She was just inches away. Her body pinned me down, holding me against the futon in my bedroom. Yes, is what I wanted to say. The word formed on my tongue but lay trapped behind my lips, refusing to let it escape. A self-conscious guilt had taken over. “I’m, uh, bleeding. Down there,” I mumbled.

Her expression didn’t change. She didn’t move away she came closer. “I don’t care. I just want to taste you.”

The breathlessness in her voice made me flush. I grappled with the guilt in my heart. She asked me if that was okay.

“Yes,” I whispered, “if that’s okay with you.”

“More than,” she smiled. Then she took my pants off.

My period has a habit of showing up at the worst times. Vacations. Scheduled events. Lake visits. Firsttime intimacy with my partner. It finds a way to ruin the best times

of my life. I felt ashamed that it was here to spoil our time together. I am ashamed of my body and its functions and my identity. I might have apologized to her if not for the way she touched me, looked at me with a love that I have craved but could never offer myself. I feel like myself when I’m with her. It’s rare that I feel that way.

My gender often finds itself defined by those around me. It doesn’t matter what I think; the second someone misgenders me, I find myself trapped in the box they’ve placed me in. Every time I am called “ma’am,” I feel so far away from myself. Every time a friend slips up and calls me “she” before correcting themselves, I feel invisible. Everytime I bleed, I feel like my body is not my own. Even when I am with people who see me for me, I have a hard time believing that they do. Years of selfsuppression has made it difficult. If I can barely accept myself for who I am, how can they?

about it. I’ve yet to throw away the underwear I keep for the sole purpose of using pads. I still carry an extra tampon with me in my backpack, just in case. I always fear the worst.

But, so far, the worst hasn’t come. I can already see other changes occurring—the beginnings of facial hair, increase in muscle mass, deepening of the voice, clitoral growth. More often, strangers look at me and say “he” and “sir.” More often, I look at myself in the mirror and see a body that reflects my mind. I am coming to peace with myself.

I may never fully feel at home in my own body. I may never wake up to find comfort in the anatomy I was born with. These changes, though, have gotten me a little closer to that comfort. I can be friends with my body. I can appreciate it for allowing me to mold it into a shape that feels more me. I can be safe within myself.

I grieve for the life where I was born a man. I am learning to hold onto that grief and continue to love the life I have now, the life of creation.

I have officially been on testosterone for a little over two months. I haven’t missed a single shot. I’ve only had a single period in that time frame. The time for a second one has come and passed, leaving me hopeful enough to believe that it’s over, finally over. The HRT is doing its job.

There is still, of course, a fear that it will come back that one morning I’ll wake up to fresh blood sliding down my legs and all the shame of being in this body will come back to me in full force. I’ve had nightmares

Undulation

Anya Deezhi Lacy

“Your kindness, well intent, but what a bane! In fact, to know such glee makes sadness worse. To love, and lose. The Sun is cruel to set, So many stars are kind, yet not as bright. You mean no harm, so what of logic now?

The winter’s here, so do not leave me ‘lone For knowing summer will not keep me warm! Like mem’ry of your kiss won’t make me loved. To walk out holding heavy keys to hearts. His words, like cud, beset my sacred times.”

A smile fades, another grows in place. The leaves will die and fall, but will return. A lover born, she mourns what could have been. She wonders, “Can I feel this way again?”

The Sailor

Matthew Lineberry

Did Jesus hate public speaking? Was he an introvert?

Did he sit in a chair next to the window, watching the sky move time with blue audacity as he questioned everything?

Did Jesus cry in bed, and did God leave him unanswered? Did he stare at the hands reaching toward him, powerless, victim to the fear he could change nothing?

Did Jesus fall in love with the colors of the trees in distant arroyos, was he led astray by the cherubic pink in crabapple blossoms, their scent carried on the wind?

Did he laugh at jokes told over meager meals in the late, dim light, did he grimace to think of his mistakes as a child, did he ever hold his mother’s hand as they crossed the street?

Was he imbued with love, or did he find it?

Last Rest

Victoria Nisoli Visual Art

oil on canvas, 16” x 20’’

Surrender the Decomposers

Emma Ressel Photography

archival pigment print, 16” x 20”

Serendipity is a Spring Word

Matthew Lineberry

So are compassion and elegance, but not words like fortune, which are autumn words, words of plenty and imagined security. Sure, you know spring for rhododendron’s passion but consider also: rabbitbrush, milkweed, crabapple even the overeager thistles and daisies.

Ganesha and Mary Magdalene, my environmental professor, my sister. Moles on my skin like stones in desert sand, or precocious bikes rattling over wet concrete. Perseverance, confidence, adoration, earnestness maybe even contentment and refuge, especially where it’s been found before and lost several times. I don’t know how to describe the mycorrhizal relationship between us, spontaneously trading nutrients of hope and compassion but that one’s in there too.

The way we look at things differently now, pointing over our shoulders to our past selves of reserved animosity and saying, “What was that guy’s deal?” and fall into an unexpected love with smaller things. Today the apricots and watermelons will start to swell and darken and taste sweet again and the toes of the desert, dusted with rain, will witness our gratitude and become a deeper green. All of this unutterable language leading me by its sweaty hand, our feet swaying under a thin sheet to the far-off, rapturous thunder.

recent birds

x e oaks

“Recent birds” Birds bring me joy

The presence of which are only just starting to trickle in here and there and here and there I’ll see a pigeon struttin on all twos, oblivious, with beak in the ground, and two sparrows clutching with tiny feet ( °<°) to the gangly limbs of a naked birch and it brings me some small respite cC from the world from Aaa the world and wW back to the world.

.

Warranty Voided

Joseph

McKee Visual Art digital collage, 8.1” x 5.4”

Myth of the Moth

Simon Vetter

I wonder what Clarice ate after she shot Buffalo Bill hopefully something warm perhaps, I would’ve made her a blackened cauliflower braised in sweet potato curry I think the rich, woody flavors might bring her back down to brighten a bad day I used to make my Julienne rolls of sushi with enoki mushrooms and asparagus I didn’t eat much when she left cold turkey doesn’t smell or taste as sweet as peach perfume and I haven’t had sushi since

I used to make my dad black pepper pork butt he liked the way the meat fell apart into strings and fibers flesh like pieces of a puzzle dripping juices attracted to the flame like the peppered moth’s polluted wings sooted from light to dark

my brother carries a hatchet cause he read this book Hatchet his plate has been empty and shines like a full moon he wouldn’t like game but still he might swing that’s why the hawkmoths fly swift and sweet

Trinity Downwinders

Savina Romero

My Great Gramo was pregnant when the bomb went off. She didn’t know to be scared. When the baby came, a girl, she cried. Only cried. Her tiny skin, soon covered in lesions. The village doctor couldn’t give them an answer just from looking. And tests were too expensive. But he said that this had been common that year. Something going around perhaps. Mysterious like the devil. So many uncounted babies burnt from the inside out. My great baby aunt (I can’t remember her name). The water they drank was rainwater. Collected in the cistern by the roof. They didn’t know the clouds were dirty, so they praised them. They praised the rain and the angels and the saints as they buried her little body. And there they left her, wrapped in prayer and a homemade blanket. To sleep quietly in the loamy womb again. In the hillside the color of skin.

Border Crossing

Savina Romero Visual Art

acrylic on canvas, 30” x 40”

Say Goodbye, Catullus,

Sophia M. Eagle

You can’t go back. You can kick and scream but you can’t go back. Say goodbye, Catullus, to the shores of Asia Minor. Think of the chapel where you prayed for good health. What a joke that turned out to be.

. Who will remember how Grandma bought us comics at the bookstore, when the sun poured yellow lemonade in through the windows, that filled our throats and drowned us with being? Say goodbye and don’t come back here. These are my shores. Say goodbye.

Think of South Dakota and think of the grass. Do you remember the cold? Think of the roots you pulled, think of how they looked like your veins because they were your veins and you were nothing but the prairie and the sky. Say goodbye.

Think of your sisters. Who will remember them, before they changed and forgot what they were, so small you could fit them into your aorta where you would love them violently and sing them to sleep, say goodbye, Catullus, say goodbye.

Who will feed the chickens through summer? Who will think of a painting with disgust only to realize it is the only painting they can remember? Say goodbye, say goodbye, you are getting older and you are changing and you are forgetting what it meant to be alive.

You can kick and you can scream, but you Can’t Go Back.

Someday you’ll forget why you ever wanted to return. Say goodbye, Catullus, to the shores of Asia Minor.

Contributors

Sarah Bauman

Movement: study1 61

Sarah Bauman is a Houston born photographer now getting her bachelor’s of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico. Her main focus is on photography.

Graham Brant

Fortunate Perverted Hippie 26

Graham Brant is a student, artist, and excommunicated Zen monk from Albuquerque, New Mexico. He specializes in small-scale metal sculpture but pays his bills by picking up balls at a golf course. He spends most of his time regretting his actions and admiring his cat, Nina.

Simone Athena Campbell

Maps Across Skin 51

“He spends most of his time regretting his actions...”

Simone Campbell soon to be UNM alumna is a current undergraduate student of psychology and philosophy. She’s grateful to be touching lives in and out of the classroom as Outreach Coordinator at Agora Crisis Center and looks forward to doing the same with her art. New to the professional literary world but no stranger to the euphories and sorrows of creative writing, she’s thrilled to make her debut in Conceptions Southwest.

Flannery Cowan

A Fine October Night 60

Flannery Cowan graduated from the University of New Mexico in 2022 with her bachelor’s in interdisciplinary arts with an emphasis in graphic design; Flannery had the pleasure of spending her university career working on a Pacemaker award-winning publication, serving as Scribendi’s digital editor for award-winner Vol. 36. She now spends her day kerning text and tweaking pixels out in nature as a graphic designer and photographer.

Anya Deezhi Lacy

Undulation 81

Anya Deezhi Lacy is an undergraduate student at the University of New Mexico. She hopes to continue with her art in the ways of painting and sculpting.

Sophia M. Eagle

Say Goodbye, Catullus, 91

Sophia Eagle is Hunkpati Dakota and Serbian, currently attending University of New Mexico as a third-year student. She is majoring in English, and would like to be a successful poet in the future.

Addison Fulton

All of the Rabbit 18

Addison believes all of life can be sorted into the following categories: the beautiful, the grotesque, and the mundane. In her work, she seeks to create art that exists in the intersection of all three. She has previously been published with the Homer Humanities and in Scribendi.

Tyler Fife

I Live So I Love 36

Leopoldo 62

Tyler Fife is a Mexican-American son, brother, writer, and curator. Using writing as a means to explore the world around him, he specializes in prose and nonfiction. His main inspirations stem from his gender-identity, family, and life experiences.

Kadra Guillermo

Leaving the Hospital Bed 34

Kadra is a sophomore at The University of New Mexico majoring in English and Philosophy. When she is not writing poetry, she is pursuing her many other creative interests including playing the piano, crocheting, and painting. She has been involved in the publishing process but has long dreamed of being the one whose work is published.

Julian Holman

Ode to Oregon 39

Julian Holman is an undergraduate student majoring in Geography at UNM. Born and raised in the Willamette Valley in the Pacific Northwest, they came to New Mexico to continue their exploration of place, nature, and divinity in art and in academia.

Nell Johnson

Mary, Untier of Knots 57

Dolphin Girls 66

Nell Johnson (Capricorn Rising, Pisces Mercury) works for her hometown public library. She served on the staff of Conceptions Southwest for two years and believes it is pure desert magic.

Lark Landon

Bleeding Through 73

Lark Landon is a soon-to-be UNM graduate with a degree in English. Having grown up as a queer person without a stable support system, he seeks to offer that support to others through his writing.

Morgan Leanor Tracy

Four Minus One 17

Morgan Leanor’s writing leans heavily into the exploration of mental illness, trauma, domesticity and disability. She loves to write in all genres and is fully immersed in her study of creative writing as a double major in English and Psychology.

Matthew Lineberry

The Sailor 82

Serendipity is a Spring Word 85

Matthew Lineberry is an English major undergraduate at UNM who works in outdoor education and conservation in the summer. Previously only published in Red Rocks Community College’s literary magazine Obscura, he hopes to continue writing professionally.

Roxanne Marquez

If you don’t let me die here, I may never be reborn 72

Roxanne Marquez is an artist and ecologist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Their work in science and art revolves around the relationships organisms hold in ecological and cultural contexts, exploring how we can create more healing narratives around the connections that humans have with plants, fungi, and other animals. Their main interests are in drawing, bio-art, restoration ecology, and microbial ecology.

Joseph McKee

Warranty Voided 87

Joseph McKee (they/them) is a graphic designer and digital artist based in Albuquerque, NM. Interested in design, collage, and typography, Joseph explores queer symbolism, digital compositions, and the manipulation of body in digital spaces throughout their work.

Austin Nguyen

Stairway to Heaven 42

Austin Nguyen is an artist coming out of Michigan. He came to UNM to pursue a degree in biology. Austin Nguyen’s has been featured in galleries and art books such as the 2023 edition of Scribendi.

Victoria Nisoli

Last Rest 83

Victoria Nisoli is a third-year student studying chemistry, but who likes the occasional creative pursuit. She explores themes of family and nostalgia in her work.

Jill Nuckles

Perception of Time 54

Jill Nuckles is a first-year MFA student in the Confluence MFA program at the University of New Mexico. These reflections are from her first experience with the high desert of Abiquiu with Tewa artist and food activist Roxanne Swentzell.

x e oaks

demon comic “possibility”; tribute to linda barry’s ‘100 demons’ 14

surfacelevel 41

meditation in it 58

pelf sortrait 59

recent birds 86

x e oaks is a nongender mark-maker/ illustrator rooted in albuquerque, new mexico, a home sown on stolen land. x e likes graphite. x e thinks often about how unfortunate it is that graphite does not have a mouth with which to give kisses.

Nat Olmo

Whale Fall 65

Nat loves to think about water structures. Nat feeds its boogers to its dog, who eats them ravenously, even cries for them sometimes. Nat wonders if it is a bad idea to do that. Nat is an MFA student in Experimental Art and Technology at UNM.

Zoe Ostby

All My Sisters 22

Zoe Ostby is a prolific artist who demonstrates her skill in almost any category: photography, painting, drawing, digital art, creative writing, and more. Her main inspiration comes from the conglomerate of what makes all of us our fears, insecurities, dreams, desires, the unknown, chaos and harmony.

Kendra Padilla

Heliophile 05

Kendra Padilla is a contemporary artist engaged in multimedia, jewelry, and sculpture. As a New Mexican native born in Albuquerque, Kendra has always been surrounded with southwestern arts and culture. She is studying Biochemistry and Art Studio at the University of New Mexico.

Nino Ricca Lucci

Body Swatch I 52

Body Swatch II 53

Nino Ricca Lucci is an interdisciplinary artist studying at the University of New Mexico. Working primarily at the intersection of painting and textile arts, he explores how medicalized experiences shape understandings of the self and embodiment among transgender, disabled, and chronically ill subjects. He is interested in how western medicine tradition privileges an anatomical view that compartmentalizes and treats bodies as asocial objects. His work seeks to connect with viewers through shared experiences of living in tension with this process of objectification, and subsequently stitching ourselves back together through periods of convalescence.

Emma Ressel

Smoky Sweet 67

“...and subsequently stitching ourselves back together...”

Surrender the Decomposers 84

Emma Ressel is a visual artist from Bar Harbor, Maine who uses photography and collage to make images about decay, consuming, and the intermingling of beauty and the grotesque. Ressel is an MFA candidate in Photography at the University of New Mexico where she also teaches in the Photography department. Ressel’s first book Olives in the street was published in 2017, her work is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and she is currently a 2023-2024 Emerging Artist Member at Strata Gallery in Santa Fe.

Savina Romero

Los Carniceros 01

Land Memory: Oropajita and Martha Listening to Oldies on a Car Hood in Hondo, Nuevo México, just 2 decades after Trinity Bomb (72 miles away) and UFO crash (43 miles away) 24

Trinity Downwinders 89

Border Crossing 90

Savina Romero is a Chicana writer and painter born and raised in Albuquerque New Mexico. She is currently studying creative writing and studio art at the University of New Mexico. Much of her work is made through a cultural/historical lens as a Hispana, Chicana, Mexican-American as she often draws from the rich lexicon of symbols, stories, and traditions of her ancestors.

Zara Roy

Two or three lovers 23

Zara Roy is a UNM alumnus. She loves lamotrigine and other people’s boy drama. Feel free to share your own with her.

John Scott

Viewing Party 02

The Neighbor’s Backyard 71

“She loves lamotrigine and other people’s boy drama.”

John Scott is a recent graduate from the University of New Mexico. He has spent his time since mostly studying the physiognomy of cows.

Andrew Sowers

Crop Circles 06

Dust 43

Andrew Sowers is a writer and poet from Albuquerque, New Mexico. He enjoys walking, playing soccer, making lists of things he intends to read or watch, ducks, film photography, learning new things about people he thought he knew well, and listening to people tell stories. His artistic interests often concern dilemmas of memory, questions of time, and giving attention to little moments. His essay, “Gathering Up; Holding On,” won the Scribendi Staff Choice Award in 2023. His work has also appeared in the Blue Mesa Review Blog, and in Conceptions Southwest.

Tanya Tyler

December 7th 44

Tanya Tyler (she/her) is an undergraduate UNM student, double majoring in English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is Diné and originally from Tséłałnáozt’i’í, New Mexico on the Navajo Nation. After graduation in May 2024, she is planning on pursuing an MFA degree in Creative Writing.

Simon Vetter

Myth of the Moth 88

Simon Vetter is an undergraduate student studying English and Film at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point. He is participating in National Student Exchange at the University of New Mexico and hopes to study poetry in graduate school.

Special Thanks

Susanne Anderson-Riedel

Stephen Benz

Dr. Leslie Donovan

Megan Jacobs

Anita Obermeier

ASUNM President Krystah Pacheco

Daven Quelle

Walden Shank

President Garnett Stokes

Peyton Williams

UNM Publications Board:

Amaris Ketcham, Chair

Lisa Chavez, Vice Chair

Seyi Adekoya

Jaelyn deMaria

Soroi Jones

Jacqueline Martin

Aaron Martinez

Mikayla Otero

Josiah Ward

Fellow Publications: Blue Mesa Review

The Daily Lobo

Limina: UNM Nonfiction Review

Scribendi

Student Publication Family: Madison Hogans; Communications Editor, Scribendi

Marcela Johnson; Editor in Chief, Limina: UNM Nonfiction Review

Raychel Kool; Managing Editor, Scribendi

Maddie Pukite; Editor in Chief, The Daily Lobo

Reyes Reynaga; Digital Editor, Scribendi

UNM Alumni Association

Starline Printing Company

UNM Art Department

UNM English Department

Anna Abeyta, Editor in Chief

Addison Key, Digital Editor

Kelsa Mendoza, Managing Editor

Thomas James Crowe

Sofia Doke

Jesús Eduardo Sánchez Flores

Raychel Kool

Alhana Lewis

Will Martinez

Isabella Zamarchi

Find the title of the prose piece using the quotes below

Down:

“A wall-eyed man with sixty-four teeth slept all day, eyes open...”

“Eyes oozing white decay”

“...my eyes always drifted in the direction of that rug”

“Tom’s eyes seemed to deepen as he nodded slowly.”

“...shielding my eyes from being blinded by the morning sunlight.”

“She watches it, looking for some recognition in its eyes.”

“I want to make my body perfect in my own eyes.”

“...you know, the second your eyes met hers, that you are a better man...”

“The eyes are the oven of the face.”