DAY PLANNER VOL 3::SPRING 2019
WRITINGS::CREATIONS::PHOTOGRAPHY
LIGHTNESS
JUST A SLIVER Jordan Jenkins
SEVEN CHAKRAS STROBE LIGHT Anna Hovland
RUST/EASE
.85 MILLIGRAMS
Benjamin Walker
Becca Brewer
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THE RAGGED COAST
RESPLENDENT Amy Broderick
Martin Phillip
DAY PLANNER team editor-in-chief Mattie Wong poetry/prose editor Benjamin Walker contributors Natasha Bennetts Becca Brewer Amy Broderick Christopher Ronan Conway Alexandra Haniford Anna Hovland Jordan Jenkins Natalia Moena Sarah Pekovitch Martin Phillip Emily Rampone Davis Shoulders Benjamin Walker Mattie Wong
cover image Natalia Moena + Sarah Pekovitch on the web at dayplannermag.com
DAY PLANNER was conceived as a way to encourage finishing projects and exploring ideas. Sometimes, all we need is a deadline to help us buckle down and work on those things we put off day-in and day-out. Life has a way of sneaking up on you and suddenly you realize you’ve set aside your creative goals for six months, a year, or even longer. DP is a contributor-based magazine that gives our artists the platform to display whatever work they can finalize by the submission date. We hope our words and pictures enlighten, surprise, and perhaps inspire you to start with renewed enthusiasm on projects inspired by your own unique brilliance. -MW
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TABLE OF CONTENTS 04 04 06 06
illustrations by Joani Maher
.85 MILLIGRAMS...........................................................................Becca Brewer A BRIEF MEDITATION ON THE GRAVITY OF LIGHTNESS..........Davis Shoulders JUST A SLIVER................................................................................Jordan Jenkins MY HOME HAS A LOT OF LIGHT IN IT........................................Alexandra Haniford
SEVEN CHAKRAS STROBE LIGHT................................................Anna Hovland RESPLENDENT..............................................................................Amy Broderick DESERT DAZE................................................................................Natasha Bennetts RUST/EASE.....................................................................................Benjamin Walker ON LIGHTNESS..............................................................................Natalia Moena Sarah Pekovitch 25 THE RAGGED COAST....................................................................Martin Phillip 26 FREEDOM IS JUST OUTSIDE MY WINDOW.................................Emily Rampone 27 CONCLUSION................................................................................Christopher Ronan Conway 10 11 12 17 20
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR To measure lightness, we simultaneously measure darkness. To hold an object in our hand and say “this is light”, we are talking about its weight, the amount of gravity exerted on the piece. To talk about the shadows in a room is to talk about the light casting the shadows that are so unnerving and beautiful to us. In fact, we would not understand light if it weren’t for the dark. This issue of DP gets at that conundrum, the lightness in our souls and in our lives that just cannot be present without darkness. Prompted with only the word, “Lightness”, our artists approach death, souls, duty, freedom, and our perspective in this infinity. Welcome to the light, and the dark, readers. -Matt
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.85 MILLIGRAMS Becca Brewer BECCA BREWER is the cofounder of Limitless: A Worldwide Adventure for the Environment. In April 2019, Team Limitless will embark on a journey around the world to tell the stories of what everyday people are doing to heal the earth. Using only bicycles, canoes, sailboats, and their feet, they hope to inspire you into action for the environment. You can connect with the project at limitless.eco.
A BRIEF MEDITATION ON THE GRAVITY OF LIGHTNESS Davis Shoulders
DAVIS SHOULDERS is a former preacher’s son. His retroactive intuitive abilities are still being honed after his clairsentient awakening in DC and his training with a guru for three months in the summer before a cross country RV trip. He currently resides in Knoxville, TN where he loves dancing and creating community around books.
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I could think of no better emobodiment of the quality of lightness than flowers.
Gravity in the body. In your own body. Moving as you move. Settling into yourself comfortably. A certain lightness when it’s all aligned, in balance. The secrets are ineffable. Glimpses of truth you will experience yourself. They may have already come yet unaware of the fullness. Now is the time for knowledge and understanding to align. When you stand. Concentrate on your gravity. Where. You feel the tug of the earth deep below you. It is mostly unconscious. It is there, it exists. Affecting you. Your core energy is bound together somehow. In this netting of skin and bones and blood. In sinewy structures. In the mind’s eye you see your whole self. Your Davincian bodily form all interconnected, patterned, and graphed. Where. Where you are. From a single cell of your body you are pulled toward the center of the earth, the center of the universe. Floating in a starry blackness, mystery at your every nerve ending. Feel it in you hips first. A radius point, out from your torso to your head, from your hips to your feet. You begin to feel the center, you stand with ease,
that is where it all belongs. Then it begins to move. Your knees hold the energy. Your hips are free, the weight gathers from your knees to your spine. Lightly bending. A support structure so steady. The feeling drops into your feet. A bar across your arches. The rest of your body is free, resting solely on your soles. You couldn’t move if you tried. That is it. Now rest here for eternity. Grounded yet airy. Lay back. Hands to the sides. Easy rise and fall of your chest. When you breathe, the air doesn’t leave or return. The pump of oxygen is constant. A place in front of your lower spine. A secret place of incredible peace and light. Deep breaths unforced, inhale…. exhale… let it go. The spindles of blood circle your veins, pouring outwards from just below your belly. Lungs tingling with the sensation of a cool warmth. You will not die. Your body is material. You will be transmuted. This feeling. This breath. This lightness. Letting go further. All the way into the self. A quiet seat in the universe. Nothing happens. Stillness. You must get here. Be present. Quiet the day around you. Absorb distractions and blow them out again. No one can touch you here. You are free.
Insubstantial, yet radiant beyond measure, flowers hold within them joy and uplift.
How little substance does each petal need to hold such vast potential for inspiration?
A single rose petal weighs approximately 3/1000ths of an ounce, or .85 milligrams.
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JUST A SLIVER Jordan Jenkins
I like it a little bit heavier.
Why’s that?
Security, I guess.
A reproduction of it, but not the real thing. What’s the difference? God, this again.
I guess.
When you carry it around? And it’s all easy and vulnerable? Ends up making me feel that way.
You are that way.
Yeah? JORDAN JENKINS has a Master’s in English and a dog. He is working on a novel. Please purchase it when/if published.
Yeah. Very easy.
What does that make you?
Me? Oh I’m not easy at all. Just lazy.
This is actually starting to hurt.
And there’s that vulnerability.
Couldn’t we turn on a lamp or something? I can’t hardly see you. You’re like a shadow, but one with no edges.
That’s hard for me to visualize.
Just look at me and you’ll know what I mean.
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My eyes are closed. I can see your face perfectly.
You know what I like about lying here in the dark with you? That all other sensations are heightened. When I touch you I feel more of you. Smell more of you. Taste more. You know that cosmic sense we don’t pay attention to? The one that happens and when you realize it you go, oh yeah that’s something, I don’t know what but it’s something? Well there’s more of that too.
That’s hard for me to visualize.
That’s not the point and don’t steal my lines.
Still but I mean, look. Ouch, see what I mean?
It’s ok. Maybe that was supposed to happen.
If everything is predicated on light and time, what happens if there is no light, that’s what I want to know.
Boy oh boy.
What was it he saw? Like the reflection of light through a bus window? And that’s how he came to
MY HOME HAS A LOT OF LIGHT IN IT Alexandra Haniford
understand time? What if the light never came through?
ALEXANDRA HANIFORD is a fine art photographer living in historic Statesville, NC. She works with philosophical concepts in her visual narratives, photographs lots of landscapes, uses natural light as often as possible, and when she has extra time, she works with special home brewed developers for projects shot on black and white films.
Feels weird.
It always comes through. Otherwise there’d be nothing,
Stop rubbing your toe against it. It’s not the kind of increased sensation I’m looking for.
What kind are you looking for?
There wouldn’t be anything. Yeah. Would it be a different sort of existence or would there be nothing there?
There wouldn’t even be a ‘there’ for nothing to exist.
Do you like this?
Mmm yes. I like that.
Is it better in the dark? It’s different in the dark. I used to have this thing that would happen when I was a kid. It was like the room was closing in on me in the dark.
Very cliché imagery.
It’s not cliché if it actually happened.
So the room would close in on you. It only happened during this one period of my life. I used to share a room with my brothers. It was in the basement of our house. My dad had done this thing where he’d hung a bed from the ceiling. I slept in that. He hung the bed? Like a hammock?
It’s even more cliché if it happened.
Like a hanging bed.
What is this?
My ankle.
Of course.
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And the basement, when we’d turn off the lights, would get really dark. We were underground, you know.
I’m familiar with the concept of a basement.
So the light would just get sucked out of the room. That’s what it felt like. And I would lay there, not being able to sleep. Then I’d start to notice this blackness, even darker than the darkness of the basement. It would start to creep in around my eyes, from the outside, and work its way inward. But it would never cover my eyes completely. It would stop just before I couldn’t see and then hold me there. Like I was drowning or something. Not quite drowning, but that feeling, that intense feeling that you’re about to?
Like when you dive down to touch the bottom and you swim back up but the surface is further than you thought and you start to panic?
Not exactly; but I know what you mean. It’s more like your entire body is underwater and just your lips above the surface and you know if you drop down at all you’ll fill up with water. It’s like that but with the dark. But the dark doesn’t fill you up. It covers you. Wraps around you and paralyzes you. All while floating in bed. Hanging in bed.
Did you ever sleep?
Eventually. You know when try to stay awake and you end up falling asleep anyway? And vice versa? I would try to keep my eyes as wide open as possible, to keep the dark out, but eventually I’d wake up and the sun would be creeping through those tiny windows at ground level.
You’re like a mole person.
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No.
What’d your parents say?
I don’t think I ever told them. I was never sure any of it was actually happening.
Is anything ever happening?
Everything is always happening. Oh. Tell me something.
Like what?
Tell me about your first heartbreak.
Hmm. Here. Ouch.
Ouch is right. Wow you got a hard head.
and he threw a bottle up front and it got stuck under her brake pedal. My grandparents’ house sits on a pretty hard bend. A lot of people have messed up, trying to go too fast.
Like you don’t?
Better hard than like a baby’s. You don’t want a mushy baby head? Is that it? That’s absolutely it.
Something getting stuck behind my brake pedal is a worst fear of mine.
Really?
I talked to my grandmother today. She said hi.
Did she really?
Well. I don’t think about it all the time. But when I do, the thoughts are very disconcerting.
Yeah she said tell whomever it is I have in my life that I’m not telling anyone about that she said hi.
I’m sure. There have been so many stories about that curve. One time a whole toolbox flew out of the back of someone’s truck and my grandpa cleaned them all up and gave them to me. I still have them. You’ve used them.
Kind of depressing.
She said there was an accident in front her house this morning. A car careened off the road. She used the word careened.
Pretty good word.
She said it was this woman, a mental health worker. She was transporting a kid she works with
Ahh yes, the tools. Screwdriver. Hammer. Wrench.
One time when my mom was a kid she was sleepwalking and went outside and took her bike out of the garage. Luckily a car came around and
the lights shook her awake before she was able to get on. Sleepwalking. Another big fear. Whether I’m doing it or someone else. I don’t like it.
Once a guy had been coming around the curve way too fast on a winter night. He was drunk, they think. He slid off, down into a ditch, back out and through an electrical pole. Just straight through it.
Kidding. The man died. I don’t know what his body looked like. I imagine it looked the same. Or maybe not. I don’t really know what being electrocuted looks like. Hair sticking straight up, surprised look on your face.
No, a wooden one. Just clear through. It exploded, I like to think.
Yeah me too. Let’s think that.
So the car came to a stop in the middle of this wheat field, empty wheat field, and the guy gets out and starts walking toward the road except he didn’t realize that he’d severed the electrical lines above and they were strung exposed along the ground.
And alive? All buzzing and whirring?
And he stepped on one. My grandparents were inside watching TV. They hadn’t heard the noise from the wreck but then their lights flickered and everything went black.
I want to show you something.
Not more dog videos, right? I feel like we’ve seen every dog video out there. We haven’t. But no, not a dog video. It’s, wait a second, it’s over here. I have to grab it.
That was years ago, but even now, when the wheat comes in, nothing grows where the silhouette is. It grows around it, always revealing itself just as summer really gets going. The light brings it out, or I guess highlights its nonexistence.
There’s too much mystery going on here.
I like your grandma. I like her chalk jokes.
A metal one?
How’s this? What does it feel like? Feels like your lips on the space behind my ear. Don’t be so literal. Feels like someone’s telling me a secret without words.
Just, ok. Wait. Here, here it is.
How can you see anything? Alright, alright. I’m going to turn on the light.
The sooner the better because I’m pretty anxious. Relax. Deep breaths.
Yes. Deep breaths. Ok? Ready? 1…2…3
That’s better.
Do you love me yet?
Geeze.
When the ambulance and emergency people showed up and shined light on the whole scene, it was like the man’s silhouette was burned into the shreds of wheat stalks and dirt. My grandma joked about chalk outlines.
And the man? Was there anything left? Oh god.
Ever leave something in the oven for too long?
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SEVEN CHAKRAS STROBE LIGHT Anna Hovland In the shower, I sing. I tilt my head back and let the water vibrate along my chakra line; my forehead, my exposed throat, my chest. I imagine myself as the arc of a rainbow, the curve of my back all lit up in vibrant fluorescents. I open my mouth and let the water run through my teeth into the back of my throat. I hold my breath.
ANNA HOVLAND is a multidisciplinary writer and artist. She currently lives in Washington DC.
There is the root, the first, a chakra smelling of pine needles, of smoked meats, and dank lake water. The community I built of friends are touching by invisible strings of light, waiting to be plugged into an outlet to light up like a constellation stammering across a winter sky. My sacral chakra is overabundant, paintbrush strokes of brown and orange. It feels like being exhausted on a dance floor, too happy to call it quits. I see the flames of San Bernardino racing across my skin, behind my damp eyes, as a tattoo artist lays a needle into my thigh. My solar plexus chakra sparkles, like a flashlight glow in the middle of a dark night trained on a book of mythology. The feeling that nothing can go wrong
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when you’re careening downtown on a bicycle in 5:30pm traffic. There is a spot of sun in the middle of my belly. My heart chakra is shielded in a block of ice. There’s an ice pick next to the block, and you can try to crack it open, if you dare. Caution is suggested - a flamethrower hose may inflict collateral damage, a lit match handled clumsily would hurt the pursuant more than crack the ice. My throat chakra is as sharp as a knife. Handled with care, it can cut through bullshit easily with any style of cut imaginable: julienne, Brunoise dice, en chiffonade. If left unsharpened or in a soapy sink, it slices with less accuracy, glimmering, wavering on the edge of each surface. My third eye sees your past and future in my dreams, but I won’t tell you what they are unless you ask. I find a glittery paper crown on the street and hang it above my bed. It’s busted, but it’s perfect. I tape its tears together with mailing packing tape. With every small act and movement I feel the ripple effects. The seventh chakra is a filter for human emotion, distilling with it a knowing that the human experience is as impermanent as smoke, or stars. The night sky is like the connections we make — endless and full of light. I open my eyes, the pounding of water on my back.
There’s a charming way lights shimmer when you can’t see. Riding in the backseat of my mother’s minivan bundled up in the bucket seats I was reluctant & jaded. Still, we took off – no, we crawled off – sluggishly rolling through the neighborhoods laced with lights in December. At the house too garishly garnished with bulbs and blow-up reindeer, I’d carefully tuck my glasses in the pocket behind the driver’s seat and brace myself for a new perspective – for neon bubbles hovering in pixelated streaks. It’s the only time I don’t crave clarity just the quiet magic of blurred bursts of color and the knowledge that no one else sees just the way I do tonight.
AMY BRODERICK currently resides in Providence, Rhode Island but she has called many places home throughout the years. She wants to make it very clear that it has always been the people in her life who have afforded her the privilege of calling each those places “home” and who have been steadfast in helping her define the word.
RESPLENDENT Amy Broderick
photography by Mattie Wong
When you died There was nothing careful about how I tore my glasses from my face to claw away the tears and cradle my head in my hands. I’m not fully convinced I’ve put them back on since. I’m not ready to see again just yet. Maybe where those harlequin bursts overtake the darkness I can feel your light. Maybe in that space lacking lucidity I can be that light Ambiguous, unfastened, and calm Maybe it’s ok that love is blind; Maybe it’s ok that I am, too. Because with my plastic frames clasped in my fist I swear I can still see you shining.
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NATASHA BENNETTS is from the Flathead Valley in Montana. They like hikes and bikes and human connection. You can catch more of their work at flickr.com/photos/ natashabennetts.
DESERT DAZE Natasha Bennetts
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RUST/EASE Benjamin Walker
I wake up to Jonah yelling from his room – periodic, like a pulse. I can’t hear exactly what he’s saying yet, because his mother and I are down a long, horror-film-length apartment hallway. I stumble up, wait for the blood to return to my head and feeling to my feet, then amble down to his room. Jonah is yelling that he hurt his finger – this, somehow, happening in the crib overnight. I put on my iPhone flashlight and pull his hand towards me, peer at each finger, flip the hand over, look again. All looks fine. Whatever he did, it’s seemingly passed by now. An instant later, he’s not concerned that I came in to see that he was hurt, doesn’t care that I woke up. He’s just happy that I’m here so he can be lifted out of the crib and onto his bedroom floor to play with his toys. My phone? One of the toys. He sees that I have the phone’s flashlight activated to check his hand, and asks me to point it at the ceiling so he can watch the shadows that appear. He asks his mother and I to do this sometimes before he goes to bed – I’ll make a shadow puppet of a barking dog, or if I’m feeling silly and tired, it will be an indeterminate digit monster that is eating his mother’s hand (she’s also a digit monster, growling in a deep voice, “I love you Jonah. GO TO SLEEP”). Then, the prince announces his real agenda: “watch moviecars?”, he asks.
He means the 2006 Pixar film Cars, which he has now seen so many times in the last few months that the DVD is beginning to degrade, skip, and show artifacts on the television screen. I’m in love with his mother, Meg – that means I’ve seen Cars thirty or forty times, at minimum. I can quote it, analyze it, write a research paper on it. I can provide commentary on how Cars 2 was a travesty based on a juvenile spy subplot, revolving around the most superficially entertaining character, played by Larry the Cable Guy, who gets a few lines among the best in the first movie and way too many in the second. I can tell you how Cars 3 is a return to form that makes the second feel like it never happened, and updates the universe with a soundtrack fueled by blues rock and tells a real story about knowing when to grow, give up, pass on. I can feel Cars sneaking into my brain during the quiet moments, when my guard’s down, ready to lo-jack me to it. For good or ill, the quiet moments are few and far between – when the toddler naps midday, or after we read books and tuck him into bed at night. Hell, I’m writing this while the boy sleeps. I’d be lying if I told you the routine as unimaginable a year ago – I always saw myself eventually building a family life and falling into a pattern not unlike this one. Still, it’s a paradigm shift from where I was in 2017: single, fearful because of the coming of Trumplandia, doing the
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same bachelor thing I’d been doing for years. I spent most of my money on beer & whiskey, on video games, on tacos and nachos and pizza. I got up when I wanted, and went to sleep a few hours after my body gave the signal to turn it in.
ME: Jonah, Jonah?!
Jonah: Yes, Papa?
ME: Eating sugar?
Jonah: No, Papa!
What changed? Love – love is the mother of invention. One day I’m sitting at work, when my friend and coworker asks if I’m interested in being set up. She’s cute, smart, likes Star Trek, has a one-year old. I agree – and after hearing more, seeing a photo or two, I eagerly agree. We meet a while later at a double date in her town. We hit it off, even when the couple that introduced us was on the outs. A couple weeks later we have our first solo date – a Mexican-Peruvian place for dinner, followed by a BYOB arcade where she proves fierce at Mortal Kombat and we spend half an hour trying to take out a helicopter in a shooting game featuring Aerosmith. Fucking Helicopter, Fucking Aerosmith, we both think when we remember it.
ME: Telling lies?
Jonah: No Papa!
ME: Open your mouth.
Jonah: Ha-ha-ha!
Fast forward nine months later and I’m at their apartment at least three days a week. They’re over at mine once a week or two, as well. I walk around home now and see they’ve left aprons, clothes, toys and toothbrushes that remind me that while my life remains my own, I’m not living it just for my sake, or for the sake of the longstanding friends and family I’ve already factored in. They’ve wormed their way into being essential. This morning routine I’m doing – I can’t imagine losing it, and already have trouble remembering what it felt like before it came to be. Routine becomes ritual when you give it value, when it strengthens your bonds with a boy still learning his nursery rhymes. When he’s going crazy and I want to bring him back to earth, I throw him into the rhyme:
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I’m thirty now. Sure, in a thousand ways that’s still young, but I feel it just the same, in case you’re older than that and inclined toward gatekeeping. Things ache more than they used to. I regret eating what I eat, both on the day in question and cumulatively, as the rolled-up damage of years. Financially, insurance and pensions no longer seem like the concerns of another life. I look at my liquor shelf and my video game collection and don’t quite feel regret, or a desire to abandon it, but rather a desire to right-size it to what’s ahead. I see the pictures Meg’s taken of her family and primed for hanging in her apartment, whenever we find the frames and the time. I think of the home videos my dad took on that toddler-sized 1980’s camcorder when I was growing up. I grow deeper in sync with a woman who still finds me worthwhile, and watch a child change a little each day. This is a life worth living, worth investing in, worth nurturing and protecting. Something-something-the-abyssstares-into-you. You wake up earlier all the time and learn you can handle it. You meal-prep and learn you can juggle two cooks and a toddler in little more than a galley kitchen. You watch Cars until the Stockholm Syndrome kicks in and you start to appreciate its rhythm. You stop wondering so much
what Cars World War II, Cars Jimi Hendrix and Cars breakfast could be like, since they’re all referenced in the film but a human is never seen. The nitpicking doesn’t go away – you find a balance. I write things like this while Jonah naps. Sometimes when I’m at Meg’s place, I’ll be in the mood to game or eat terribly – and often when I’m at my own home, without her and the boy, I’ll wish it was a night when I wasn’t. When we get back from a day at the park or the grocery store, Jonah will often insist we carry him upstairs. When my hands are full, it’s a problem, and an opportunity for him to grow. But I know he won’t ask it forever, and someday I won’t be able to indulge him. For now, he’s light. We get him upstairs and feed him dinner. After another hour of playing and TV and books – and seriously, it was like six books tonight and not even my favorite ones to read to him, where I get to make gorilla sounds or snore like a hibernating bear – we put him to bed. The shadow puppets make an encore as we tuck him in. I go back to the kitchen and finish making chicken soft tacos with cotjia cheese and black beans for dinner, hoping I can finish my work and watch some Captain America with the lady. I’m exhausted – and yet there’s a purpose that propels me forward better than actual energy might.
BENJAMIN WALKER currently writes and works as a civil servant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University in 2012. His poetry has previously appeared in PANK, SOFTBLOW, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Prick of the Spindle, and OccuPoetry, among other publications.
Adding this dynamic to my life seems to validate all that came before, no matter how pointless or awful. Maybe that’s because it resembles finding a home. Maybe it’s because it’s given me the nerve to adjust or abandon things that needed the work. But I think it’s about someone having your back, sharing in the chance to craft something new. It’s knowing when and how to make that change that’s the chall– Hold on. He’s awake. Excuse me.
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ON LIGHTNESS
photography by Natalia Moena styled by Sarah Pekovitch
NATALIA MOENA is a Brooklyn based photographer who specializes in the beauty industry. In her spare time she enjoys taking her chihuahua, Tina, out for walks as a way to lure people to getting their portraits taken.
SARAH PEKOVITCH is the owner of SP Landscapes; a full service landscape firm that provides design, installation and maintenance to residential and commercial clients in New York. If you need a plant email sarah.pekovitch@ gmail.com or visit her SHOP at www. splandscapedesign.com
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THE RAGGED COAST Martin Phillip
Billy awoke again to the soft sound of rain on the tent. He knew before opening his eyes that it wasn’t really raining, wind was just knocking dew drops from the leaves to make a fine simulation of rain. When his eyes finally came around, he saw the inside of his yellow tent illuminated, as always, in the flat gray light of the sickly sun. Billy struggled into a sitting position and stuck his sockless feet out the door, where he slid them through damp, chilly air into his stiff leather boots. The leather stuck and rubbed against his bare feet. A fishing boat on the nearby bay revved up and began to putter and splash unseen on its way out to sea. As the engine’s rumbled faded into the gray nothing, it was replaced by the soft lowing of a ship beyond the fog. Stumbling out of his tent, Billy stretched his back and cocked his head to each side, vertebrae cracking like ice in the sun. Staring vacantly out into the woods, through the trees that hid the bay, he reached down into one of Blue’s saddlebags and fished out a flaked metal blue mug and a dented half full plastic container of Folgers with the label missing. From the large black bag strapped to Blue’s rear fender he extracted a drawstring bag containing a single burner camping stove. Billy shuffled back to the picnic table, and began to assemble the stove. His head seemed to track the movements of his hands, but lazily, wobbling slightly on his neck as he extended the stoves legs, screwed the pump into the red fuel bottle, connected it to the stove’s hose, pumped the bottle 22 times to pressurize the fuel. He released a bit of cold liquid fuel into a small tray under the burner and lit it with a match. The pale flame danced around the base of the stove, heating the fuel line and atomizer. As it died down Billy opened the valve on the fuel bottle, sending liquid fuel through the now-heated atomizer and turning it to gas. With its dying burst, the pale flame sparked the gas coming out of the burner
above it, bringing the burner to life with a jet-blue roar. Billy emptied the last of his water bottle into a small pot that had been packed in with the stove, and placed it on the burner to warm. He dumped of the instant coffee into the flecked blue mug. He resented the little dirt-colored mound in his mug, and dreamed of real, percolated, slow-drip, anything-butinstant-fucking-coffee. He lit a cigarette, and sat on the bench to wait for the water to boil. When the “coffee” was ready, Billy steeled himself against the foul, dusty taste. He drank two cups, smoked three cigarettes, packed up camp and loaded it onto Blue. All of these things happened more or less at the same time. Billy drifted from one task to another, never really finishing any, before he started or resumed another. He unclipped the tent’s rain fly, sipped his “coffee,” carried the stakes over to the table, put a cigarette in his mouth, walked over to Blue to retrieve the tent bag, lit his cigarette, put the tent bag on the table, rolled his sleeping bag. Despite the total lack of thought or order, Billy had drank his two cups of coffee, smoked his three cigarettes, packed up his life and possessions and prepared to depart in about 25 minutes - pretty much average for Billy. “Fucking state parks,” he said out loud. His words felt hollow as they crossed his lips with a lifeless thud. They caught and twisted in the cobwebs of early morning mist a foot or so in front of him, and stared back at Billy. He was 280 miles away from them before he ventured to speak again. Billy rode East along the ragged coast. Not a drop of rain fell, yet in short order the mist had collected sufficiently onto Billy so that he was as soaked as if he’d passed under an Oklahoma thunderhead. Blue and Billy skirted around iron blue inlets. It was low tide, and the shoreline was spotted with piles of yellow seaweed, the color of pus and dehydrated urine. Wooden three-story houses faced resolutely into the salty wind, barely holding back a gnarled and untamed
forest. The towns fared little better against the advance of twisted bark, raising only small white steeples above the pine, their little white crosses lost in the fog above. The houses and buildings were not built from wood and stone, as they seemed in a certain light, but contrived from fog and hardened by the salt. Perhaps, after so many generations of fishermen’s intimate moments on deck in a silent fog, even the people here are now more salt and spray than bone and flesh. He was heading East to Quoddy Head lighthouse, the most Eastern point in the US. Just a year earlier he had stood on Cape Flattery, in the far Northwest corner of Washington. He felt like he had been in a daze since then, buzzing from one ear of the country straight through to the other. When he set off this way, he must have thought the East would help clear his head. He would have laughed at his own naiveté, but the stern gaze of the haughty Victorian mansions advised against laughter. The emerald rainforests of Cape Flattery had been primeval - lush, wet, warm. Here, under the tattered brim of America’s tricorn hat, the forest is primordial. It is damp, old, heavy, and patient. The sea breathes on the forest with the rattle of an old Protestant staring silently at his ill-mannered cousin. It endures like the smell decaying fish and empty husks of lobster discarded along stone beaches. The breath of the sea clung to Billy, enveloped him, and welcomed him home.
MARTIN PHILLIP is a DC-based author and aspiring lunatic. Over the past three years, he has traveled over 30,000 miles by motorcycle, crossing the country 4 times via the back roads and small towns of 43 states. He is currently working on his first novel, a psyched-out sci-fi adventure based on his travels.
LIGHTNESS
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FREEDOM IS JUST OUTSIDE MY WINDOW Emily Rampone
A woman, a warrior. Cast by a man enslaved. Freedom is outside my window. Sitting six floors high, ensnared in comfort Caught between earth and heaven Cells of marble, iron, glass keep me from her. Eternal optimist, seeking an ally Even here, Earth promises renewal waltzing pink blossoms, a May snowfall Freedom is - afterall outside.
EMILY RAMPONE describes policy and politics by day and welcomes this opportunity to use her own voice at night. She hopes the reader will find this piece more compelling than technical accounts of federal rulemaking procedure. She lives in DC with her two cats and husband.
26 DAY PLANNER
Tethered to ego, paralyzed by the possibility of letting it go Routine restrains me. Guilt precludes me from shedding its chains. Heaven is patient. She is time itself, an intoxicating invitation to frail humans. Freedom - maybe just is.
CONCLUSION
Christopher Ronan Conway
CHRISTOPHER RONAN CONWAY is a student, writer, photographer, player of the accordion, currently based out of Minneapolis. Lover of old city blocks and the layered years of stories on them.
Conclusion: at some point today, you reached over and placed your phone On your bedside table, face-down, and became tired. The final placements Of your belongings, unopened letters, postcards and papers scattered And permanent, an incoming call vibrating the wooden table as you die. Drawing each breath like a heaving of a survivor’s bucket from a lifeboat Deluged and battered, each splash of oxygen a victory of deferment Here in the liminal moments we wait together before your family arrives, Too stable still to die, organs having failed too far to live, waiting stably, Sketching your face, reading you poetry from a Christian year-calendar With such diversity—Roman Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, convert, Malcolm Muggeridge and C.S. Lewis abounding. Once you were young, Even minutes ago young enough to scroll through your phone, your texts, The texts and messages from your children, your friends on Facebook Which even will memorialize your profile for you in death, these elements Of modern media too tawdry to poetify, yet elements of your life all the same, And you read and looked, became tired, and set your phone down, face-down, And folded your hands, breaths slower and slower in their wayward coming. My grandmother died quickly—from her remarks and her discerning gazes Of the room and progeny around her, down in minutes to the bright oblivion That her ruined lungs generated for her. Other deaths I have seen came sharp And astonishing, bodies torn and broken before the final rushing coma. In this room is only a parabola’s end: trajectory down towards the foundation, Sailing soft on momentum. From an unshifting still mouth, each watery breath Declining to a halt like an engine cut and depowered, into a considerate death.
:: LIGHTNESS
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write it in your day planner and do it every day; write it in your day planner, before you fade away.