EPISODIC
ep•i•sod•ic [adjective] divided into separate or tenuously related parts or sections; loosely connected Some events are larger than others, fleshed with more details, seeming to inspire more intrigue, seeming more fit for a story; but when we focus only on those events we cheat ourselves of the fullness of our own lives. Dig in to the smaller events: those we struggle to title, the experiences we tuck away into the corners, the images we witness and move on from in the same passing instant. There are jewels to be found there. As we collect them, we may find that every day is made up of a series of small, easily-missed beauties and insights threaded together by a common miracle: our lives.
Episodic
Issue 4 Nighttime
Episodic Issue 4 Nighttime Copyright Š December 2013 by Episodic Magazine Artists All rights reserved Founder & Head Editor: Cheyenne Varner Managing Editor: Naomi Zewde Literary Arts Editor: Renia White Visual Arts Editor: Alyson Fraser Social Media Manager: Mike Hobson Cover Design: Cheyenne Varner Cover Photography: Dawn Lawrence Fonts (in order of appearance): Code Light, Goudy Old Style, Great Vibes Episodic Definition: Dictionary.com, LLC Design and Layout: Cheyenne Varner episodicmag.blogspot.com
Portfolio Artists I. Siti Saliha . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 II. Kelsey Ipsen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 III. Desmond Owusu . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 IV. Mitchell Grabois . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Nighttime Artists I. Clara Bensen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II. Kelsey Landsgaard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . III. Richard Donnelly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IV. Stefanie Martin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . V. Sarah Van Arsdale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VI. Jeslyn Cantrell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VII. Anna Leader . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VIII. Sasha Burik . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IX. Adeline Hocine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X. Kevin Grijalva . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Siti Saliha
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Saliha
“Senyum” is the Bahasa Malaysia word for “Smile.”
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Saliha
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Text originally from The Perks of being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. 9
Saliha
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Kelsey Ipsen
Ipsen
Thomas, Later I met Thomas when I moved here to the mountains. I was in a coffee shop, with black coffee and a book but I was looking outside. He came in all pale iridescent, with ears like snail shells, all curled around the edges. I learnt later that it makes him a careful listener; the words go in slow through the aperture then melt soft in the whorls, coming together then apart until he thinks he understands. Only then does he reply, sometimes I’ve waited days until he comes up with an answer to a question, the words of others all swirling in his apex until they come out golden and new. He said hello to me straight away though, there in the cafe. Maybe he saw me looking at him through the window, I didn’t mean to, I was looking at everyone really, wondering if I had done the right thing to move here to the mountains. There aren’t many people living here, that’s why I came, I wanted to escape somewhere but I didn’t know from what. There were too many things spiraling around in my mind, banging against each other, causing explosions. Anyway the boy smiled and said hello. I didn’t see him again until three days after, he was picking up bits of shells off the pavement. Feathers were sticking out of his back pocket. I wanted to ask why but it looked beautiful so I didn’t. I kept walking home instead.
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From Sea We are running on crushed moth wings, our feet look like fish scales right after. We are silver. We are silver coins biting each other in ridges. You open your gills to breathe faster. “Come home� the water says but the tide wont take us and spits in our hands. Ridges feel like origami boxes folding over the places where thoughts are. I cry over baby teeth. Elegy. My alliteration is your face in the dark. Seen at a distance my alliteration is my face and your face almost touching. We stop thinking about coins. We are thinking bones folding over bones as a boat on the edge-water. You are all I want from this world. Here, baby teeth are growing into shark.
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We are all hiding in the jewelry box and we won’t come out. I am in a book as a character I don’t like. I keep trying to rewrite my endings in a way that will make me a hero. Four tier wooden jewelry box. Remember the sound it made, between the honey-sugar dipped finger a deadfull click. I lick my lips, tongue tutu spins. Dry cracked click of lip skin. The swans still chase me heavily. They have calm wings, soft wings, repetition wings. Things I could have done differently include spelling your name in my footsteps on the walk home. Wing click, in between song sings around throat. I am swallowing a drawer full of rusty ribbons. It will digest down into too many answers and rise up again on my back teeth. A girl cries desperately under my stomach skin and we don’t let her out. Dirty boots are pirouetting in my lungs.
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We have always lived in the mountains When I was born I remember that on the wall facing us were a series of diagrams and sonograms, it was like they were proving our realness - like our place was firm and secure in the world. People say that I could never have remembered that, that I could hardly even open my eyes at the time. But I do remember, I remember them now. The embryonic ball of a child, curled in such a way that it looked like a moon, like the face of a flower with finger-petal fans around it like a halo. It could have been anything but we call it a child. There was something beautiful about them, something strange. Everything overlapped and blurred, like the world was becoming submerged in an endless flow of water. See the shadows of the sonograms looked like music playing softly in a lake. It’s so strange to think that’s us. It’s so strange that it’s a sheet of plastic and smudges, a farce of the light, and people just take for granted that it reflects a real thing. I remember there was a pot of flowers on the table underneath the pictures. They were bright and real and they made me feel safer than pictures. That’s why I ate the dirt when I was little, shoveled it into my mouth like candy or elixir or buckets. There are so many things people don’t understand. I knew about the dirt that covers the entire earth, I knew about how the plants drank the sun. I understood but I didn’t understand how I was part of anything at all. I’ve seen a child die already. Their bones dissolve into sap, their fingers white and becoming fine like petals. They fall onto bed sheets, they cease to exist as beings and people become scared of touching them. Pick up a flower and it dies from the roots. Then the earth is warm and will eventually swallow them. I’ve seen it, I’ve lain on top of earth like that and wanted to swap places.
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Switch It was getting to be nighttime but I was restless, standing in my back doorway like a guard all alone. I wanted to sleep and dream I was a cherry pit, spit and I’d go into a hole in the earth and grow into a cherry tree, blooming every spring like clockwork or moon-tides. If I was in a made-up world that could happen, if I were dreaming that could happen. My eyes wouldn’t close, though, they stayed open like on full moon springs, so I decided to go into the mountains alone like a wild thing. I wasn’t really scared out here. It was beautiful, the trees didn’t gape open wide under the milky-silver moon. They were like close-knit protectors of me in the night time, under a sea of blue-black ink. Remember, in the darkness space is either irrelevant or infinite. I walked softly between the trees, I was part of it all and yet not part of anything, my mind could shift between these two states. I could imagine being connected to nature completely, our particles all mixing in together. I was a night creature and the night, I saw the stars blinking at me through the tree canopy and they could be bright lights from fantastic explosions far away or pinholes in a black blanket above me, letting all the white light through. So close, so far, switching in and out. I could be irrelevant, I could be infinite. And I switched. I could feel myself becoming non-human, jut a billion pieces of spinning parts. We are all tiny earthquakes, we are all shifting ground. Under my feet the earth was alive and moving so I dug my toes in but the chill of the night air kept me wanting to move, it’s icy fingers tickling my neck and pushing me forward. So I ran, spinning and wild, still wild. I ran through the trees and further from any concrete idea of home, although on this night I felt home. I ran until I collapsed under a tree, my breath cold and face blushing hot. I tugged my coat over me, bringing the warmth in until I fell asleep. In the morning, when I woke, the wind-chimes called me back home. They were there, on the porch in the morning light, shaking dewdrops from their crystal flesh and the sounds were beautiful and filling my ears but they couldn’t reach far enough inside me. I felt cold and separate again, the sounds moving in my ears, making my insides shake and pull but I couldn’t feel a thing.
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Old Mirrors, New Towns I stood in front of the mirror. I studied the position of my head, it’s trustful proximity, it’s weight on my shoulders which were covered with frayed blonde hair. I was extravagantly slender, I kept forgetting to eat, I wanted to feel light, like I could float away. I remembered shoveling dirt into my mouth when I was five, wanting to feel heavy, wanting to feel connected. Now I seemed the opposite but for the same reasons. There was no more dirt beneath my fingernails, I was clean, my ribs showed, the knobs of my hipbones framed a concave abdomen, so flat I didn’t know if it still represented the notion of a belly. My breasts were small and firm, pale, they seemed to represent a girl younger than my 22 years. I turned, a ballerina’s back with two hollowed out spaces, like places a child would hide secret, treasured items of no importance. I wore no makeup, my eyelashes were glued together by a few tears of no particular reason. I put on a long blue dress, I filled my days. I wondered what I was still doing in the mountains alone. But I loved the mist. The rain where miles would go missing and you could be anywhere and nowhere and everywhere. And the blue, forever blue, as if the sky was touching everything, as if it were an embrace or a shy curtain. I had a lover, before I came here, he used to count the notches in my spine. He lived in a room that smelled of burning computer and cold breath. I used to stay beneath the blankets, curling them around my feet like anchors, and leave before breakfast. The rest of his house scared me, looked like wires and sinking carpet. I used to tip-toe, imagine I was only that empty space. I kissed him like I was invisible but he said I was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He wasn’t looking for a home and I longed to be far away. At the bottom on an ocean maybe; surrounded by lovely slow-dancing creatures and that hypnotic, heartbeat underwater noise lulling me to sleep. We were supposed to be going to another party but instead we slept together for the first time. I felt like a tide, a rip, a tsunami. We weren’t lovely creatures under the sheets. We got drunk, all the time. At parties where we looked the part. We got head fuzzy, floor-spinning, bass shuddering against the walls, against our ribs, breaking the veins of
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our hearts like twigs. I would feel the indents of his fingers against my skin and it felt like ripples from a stone thrown loudly in a lake. In his room I looked out the window at the trees on the lawn, they looked like looming forests in the night-time. I hated them. Their dark throat, their slump-shouldered and knuckle-knotted gloom. I was trying to create a kingdom but the letters were dropping as I mouthed them, fake-words shattering on the floor. I stayed still on his bed. The words frozen, the creatures frozen, the movie theme music leaking out of the dead-eyed television. Explaining this will get us nowhere. I remember wondering if I should just leave but leaving is the hardest thing to do, until you do it and then it’s the easiest thing in the world. He came back with drinks, we left them sweating out ice on the windowsill and twisted our bodies into each other, into the sheets. Our bodies dancing and pulsing like animals. I held his hand. I wanted to be in love but this wasn’t it. I wanted to be in love but I didn’t believe in it. I didn’t hate him, the opposite of love is only indifference. I had this dream where people as tigers were eating him up and they said “It’s beautiful, it really is”. Then came the part where I was meant to feel sad but I only felt lighter. I felt like a monster, fangs and everything, my claws digging horrific trenches of nothing into my own palms. “Sleep with me again.” He said. I shook my head. “Well what do you want, sweetheart?” Sweetheart, like a sugar cube melting onto my tongue; a toxic, gluey, sickly thing. How are you meant to say what you want? Here I am leaving you clues, we’re all just trying to dance something we don’t know the words to. I had to make up the words myself, so I left.
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Desmond Owusu
Owusu
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Mitchell Grabois
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Hacked My wife’s i-phone was hacked It sent thousands of messages, to friends and colleagues, announcing the emergence of a new form of mosquito a mosquito who wishes to atone for malaria and will fly from house to house in the middle of the night and kiss people on the lips thereby eliminating greed and violent urges from human society My wife was still on her lithium though she complained that it made her dopey and lethargic but her friends and associates remembered the last time she stopped taking it A buzz went through her world like the sound of a thousand mosquitoes in a squadron of peace Her boss sent her a telegram firing her I took it at the door and examined it— I didn’t know the world the world in which my wife’s i-phone was hacked carried telegrams I was still standing on the stoop when a team of exterminators in haz-mat suits showed up with tanks on their backs
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Pollack At midnight Jackson Pollack went to my mother’s gated community in Boca Raton, Florida and dripped paint on her driveway and on the driveways of many other residents At dawn when the old Jewish ladies went to the curb to retrieve their garbage cans they witnessed what had been done and dozens died instantly from heart attacks and strokes
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Chemo Nanci’s back on chemo trying to keep the tumor down so she can attend her only daughter’s wedding By force of will Nanci’s already a month past the two weeks her doctor “gave her” The days go by like a mountain of sand pushed by a bulldozer in a beach replenishment project Off the coast the dredger buzzes like a cheap alarm clock with a fang of plastic broken off its case
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Landlady My landlady worked as a police dispatcher in Oakland but was a habitual gambler and though she owned a pink Cadillac she won in Vegas she never had any money I suggested that she let me sell the Caddy and put the money in an account that I would manage for her but though we’d become lovers and I’d moved in with her she didn’t trust me enough Instead she sent me on daily missions to the dumpsters behind the Safeway two blocks away for their best produce She had a saying: In America only the very rich and the very poor understand that resources are limitless I didn’t want to do it but she wasn’t making me pay rent so I gave in I was already clinically depressed and dumpster diving put me even further down in the dumps so when I was arrested for trespassing and theft and placed in the back of a squad car it felt right Alone in the jail cell I felt lonely
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and longed for company even if it were another prince of degradation My landlady bailed me out in the morning told the cop that she’d warned me not to dumpster dive (as if I were her juvenile delinquent son) but that it was my drug We cruised slowly in the pink Cadillac headed for home
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Virus A thrill ran down my spine when I saw the e-mail with her name on it but then… I knew she’d been hacked I sat in my office chair missing her yearning for her so much so that I opened the hacker’s e-mail as if it might really be a message from her though I knew it was a foolhardy act Of course, she wasn’t there Nothing of hers was there and my computer caught the virus delivered by the hacker The Motherfucker of All Viruses said my computer guy The AIDS Virus of All Viruses He was a failed novelist and liked to load on the metaphors mixed or otherwise six or eight at a time Don’t you know any better? he berated me
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Editor’s Note It must have been about midnight when we got into the car. We were going to a hotel roof to take pictures of the city from above but we had to make a stop first. I sat in the backseat and took these pictures, with the window rolled down. Funny thing is I think these were the best pictures taken that night. I couldn’t get over the greenness of the light over the door, or the blueness of the smaller one in the window. I’d never noticed that before. During the day those lights weren’t on I guess, or else they just weren’t bright enough. And I thought that was a beautiful little detail to consider. How darkness is not always about the absence of light but the accentuation of it. This reflection is just one of many the nighttime has given to me. In the rest of this issue you’ll read poems, stories and see images of other peoples’ nighttimes. I hope you read them, see them, enjoy them. I hope you share them with a friend. I hope you remember them later, when it’s dark outside and you close the front door, turn off the hall light. I hope you have a good thought. I hope you have a good night. Cheyenne Varner
Episodic
Clara Bensen
Eden We went skinny dipping on a dare The third night we met In the shallow creek that runs behind town Near the spot Jim’s tractor got stuck Two springs ago, I think Cypress lined the banks With giant, sprawling roots That reached to grasp the tempest Of underpants and socks, carelessly tossed I was unsure of how it would feel To strip Before a man I barely knew But I found the easy starkness exhilarating Our bodies the same variation on a theme Of god-breathed bones And dust We invaded the creek bare-bottomed With a volley of obscenities I shrieked at the cold, but you dove right in And when you surfaced The moon must have been angled Just so Because I could see inside you And what I saw was good Like god in the beginning I swam towards you then And dark rivulets encouraged the way I climbed in your arms Innocence entangled Without hesitation or pause We were Eden’s first loves Who knew nothing yet of sin Naked in the cypress garden And god said it was good
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Binary it’s midnight and we’re ambling into Cheer Up Charlie’s for a vegan bacon cheeseburger I’m wearing a black silk bathrobe with no sash you’re wearing an Indian kaftan with no pants and we’re racking up the stares but it doesn’t matter because this feels like a dream then again the Big Dipper is still hovering on its axis above us just like earlier when we drove through the hill country singing that old Waylon song about the ramblin’ life which appears to be what we’re living now because we met some Jesus kids and found ourselves with an “amen” on our lips under interstate number 35 dispensing expired applesauce and peanut butter jelly sandwiches into the worn hands of war vets whose minds have drifted as far from home as the grungy runaways and when your phone rings it’s a stranger who claims to be “The Universe” and why should I be surprised that the universe appears to be a soft-spoken French Canadian fresh from the Mexican jungle who photographs the moonlight
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and makes a bed on my floor and we can’t forget the lovely, blue-eyed scientist with a braid down her back who sits poised at my table as she describes the way the letter “j” is predominantly red-purple and cilantro feels like a sharp wedge through the head then it’s dark and we’re alone and that’s when I say, “none of this is real” which makes you laugh in that particular way you have when you know I’m right and somehow when you round the corner you’re holding the chocolate I was just about to ask for as if you always knew
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W i n t e r 2 013 Kelsey Landsgaard
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Richard Donnelly
The Dark House in the middle of the party we walked outside and down the street holding hands admiring the huge homes on the way back it got dark very dark we could almost not find our way back we stayed for one more glass of wine everyone smiling and happy everyone seemed to have gotten richer and better-dressed while we were gone we drove home through the dark leaving the party early after making up what seemed at the time a very plausible excuse
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Evening Drink let me tell you about McCormick's on Nicollet with the old bartender and the staff of smiling attractive delightful helpful trim young women the light slanting in at five the quiet traffic just around the corner the white tables the glasses shining waiting finally sitting at the end of the bar a dark-eyed woman in high heels with a newspaper in her lap here Frank a man says leaving him a tip buy that pretty girl a drink over there I've got to be home by six
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Give Me A Job give me a job oh please give me a job I won’t miss a day I won’t miss an hour a minute a second I don’t smoke I don’t even drink or not very much only wine occasionally at night when I am tired and the world closes in and I lie awake and the dog is barking next door and only then because I have no one and no one will come and help me I don’t have a husband or boyfriend I don’t have anyone but you I’ll have you when you give me a job and you will have me because I will do anything because I have done anything because I am always doing anything I’ll do anything you want because it’s not me it never was
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Episodic Stefanie Martin
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Sarah Van Arsdale
Finding the Cosmography Imagine the night licking at your windows bold marrow of night imagine the stars stippling the dark, low to the horizon, bars of light fractured into chips like bits of bone, straining to cast up heaven’s spine. Dip into night here, at last, night of your imagination, alone, dreading your own voice; cast into the shifting dark and light, the animals watching from under stones deep in the cortex of disarticulated night
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Jeslyn Cantrell
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Anna Leader
Friday Night, Quai 10 Do you know which bus stop it is? The air is too thick to think: one more drink and we’re out on the street. We walk a straight(ish) line. Heels scuff slick cobblestones & hands rub hands for heat. My watch says Saturday: the world didn’t end. I think it’s quai 10. Her cheeks are red from December and the honest slurred words: of all my ex-friends you’re the best ex-friend I remember. We can’t find the bus. Her phone buzzes with boys who love her finitely, with ego and noise. (They ask after her heart: how to find it, and where? I say her heart’s like quai 10—it just isn’t there.) The rain isn’t stopping. The bus will not come. Sitting in silence, I want to tell her how much she is lovely & precious, but my lips have gone numb and she’s too far to reach, too cold to touch.
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Snakes + Ladders (A Monologue by Medusa’s Mother) I won’t tell you twice: don’t go out tonight. Boys’ lips will climb the ladders in your tights— up to the hips, dear! Their fat hands will slide down your dark hissing curls risking snake bites for a touch of your shoulder. You might think it is nice— until it gets light and their faces turn white with hatred and fear. Dear, take my advice: don’t go out tonight. Until you are older you’re better off here.
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Sasha Burik
secrets between sisters night is the sister - no, heavier: twin coconspirator ribbing against my mischief, my missions, my solitude like the black quartz electric mines spigotting the bruise-bellied doldrums of my energies; oh, dearest night, how we birth one another
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Adeline Hocine You leave in the evening and I assemble your drawing pencils together, stack your unfinished works of art on the aging leather ottoman. I find myself collecting the scraps you’ve left behind dirty dishes on the kitchen tabletop and eraser shavings on the floor. I think to myself what a beautiful image this would make if only you were here. I am always assembling mental photographs, little vignettes of moments whose very existence lay in question - the sound of your voice forming words that were never truly said, motions assumed but never occurring, imaginary sounds always drifting from my mind with an echo. I take the photograph, anyway, your absence emphasized in the dim of the room - the only light source emanating from the slats in the blinds, distant moonlight fading. I smear toast with jelly that resembles blood more than it does anything else. I begin a painting and the sketch can only resemble you. I pace the room, pick up the phone, and lose the resolve - to make contact, to harness all that was, to fix what is now broken. I lose the resolve to chase after you, afraid that my feet will not carry me where I need to go, afraid that running means giving up. I was always stubborn in love. “Falling in love like falling down drunk like falling down stairs.” I wake up the next morning. I wake up, blissfully unaware of the previous night’s events until the space of where you once were crashes against my skull like a handful of crushed glass. I roam the silent apartment, the humming of the refrigerator the only audible breath of life, the murmuring of the couple in the above apartment rendered indistinct by my carelessness to conversation. I find the painting that I’d begun, resting lonely in the corner like a punished child. I assemble my drawing pencils together; I assemble paintbrushes and a mason jar of murky water. I sigh, dipping my brush into cobalt blue. I close my eyes, slowly open them, and begin again.
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Kevin Grijalva
In The Dusk Your skin asks, “Who are you? How sharp are your shoulders? Where does the labyrinth of hair end? Are you brave enough to disappear without imagining things swept away with you?� Wander into a room, lick the teeth of the walls, wonder about geography and walking back into the ocean and all the tenuous pebbles leaving watermarks on your lids. I wore a hat big enough for us to dance in. I lie and lie and lie until I am out of sleep and questions and am left speckled like a winter breeze. A lamp has colored everything red and blue and wail, the city buzzes by the window like every guitar took to its balcony tonight. We stumble to drain the light from the dark. We stumble just to stumble.
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Good Morning, Wonder City Good morning, wonder city locked in half-savage embarrassment, my forehead split clearly as the clouded sky. Mystery keeps walking by the window, what’s with all the feelings leaking from my ear, it’s an accident, I’m just here for a slice of pie and a hard-thought moment I can euphemize on the way home. The ocean is honey, there are squirrels in the trees, I’m a little tired from a night looking for time in seashells.
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One Hundred Places I dream of traffic jams in one hundred different places in the city, of wine opening night like a burn, of being cavernous like the trail of a worm. On my way out of the stranded sun, making do in the cold, I remember I’m guarded against promises made about what can be accomplished in my best suit — I’m pretty sure the weather won’t come home with me even if I buy all the drinks and the cab home. What could happen, though, is a rebuilding where I don’t end up an ineffectual puddle of purple whining — I break the top of every pyramid for their false sense of longevity — if we cannot advance, then I propose we redo everything from the beginning. I play the piano on the dash in a thousand intersections waiting for the lights to whistle a new melody like they’ve been practicing all fall’s sauntering sleepy dark, like they are a full bloom.
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Artist Bios Siti Saliha is a preschool teacher living in Singapore. She enjoys spending her solitude drowning in words (a.k.a. reading) and drawing to depict feelings that sometimes words cannot describe. She also appreciates poetry and photography. When paired together she thinks they make a lovely combination. Kelsey Ipsen is a writer and filmmaker, currently living in France. You can find her attempting to speak French or hiding under bedsheets with books. She is in the middle of writing a novel and making a movie out of string. You can find more of her work at her blog: kelseyipsen.tumblr.com. Desmond Owusu is 25 years old. He’s a Chicago based creative who recently has fallen madly in love with photography. His two main cameras are disposable cameras from the local Walgreens and his trusty iPhone 4s. Photography keeps him hopeful. It keeps him hopeful and optimistic and reminds him that all of the world isn’t full of shit. Mitchell Krochmalnik Grabois was born in the Bronx and now splits his time between Denver and a one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old one-room schoolhouse in Riverton Township, Michigan. His short fiction and poems have appeared in literary magazines in the U.S. and internationally. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, most recently for his story “Purple Heart” published in The Examined Life in 2012, and for his poem “Birds,” published in The Blue Hour, 2013. Grabois’s novel, Two-Headed Dog, is available for all e-readers for 99 cents. Click for Kindle. Click for Nook. Click for the print edition. Clara Bensen has no formal qualifications for writing a poem, but she sometimes channels little rows of words while sitting in the shower. When not bathing she is a freelance writer and editor based in Austin, Texas. Kelsey Landsgaard is a 19-year-old photography student who has a deep love for pastel colors, sparkling clementine juice, and John Frusciante. She splits her time between residing in Baltimore where she attends Maryland Institute College of Art, and her family home in Florida where she grew up. She hopes to continue taking photographs that express her constant awe at the beauty that can be found in the seemingly mundane moments in everyday life. She also hopes to get that BFA degree eventually. You can find more of her work on her blog: kelseylandsgaardphoto.tumblr.com. Richard Donnelly‘s writing has appeared in Queen’s Quarterly and Rattle. He understands poetry is a journey into the wilderness, but hopes the trip will include good hotels and a reasonable wine list. His first book, The Melancholy MBA, is published by Brick
Road Poetry Press of Columbus, Georgia. Stefanie Martin attempts to create photographs to explain unfathomable feelings. She values the simple, little things in life such as the golden light that goes through leaves in autumn. Through photography, she’s trying to learn more about herself and how to survive in this world. Sarah Van Arsdale earned an MFA in poetry from Vermont College. She has had poems published in national magazines, but is better known as a novelist. Her third novel, Grand Isle, was published in 2012 by SUNY Press. Her second, Blue, won the Peter Taylor Prize, and her first, Toward Amnesia, was published in 1996 by Riverhead Books. She is also a photographer and painter, and she makes short animated films from her watercolor drawings. You can find more of her work at her site: sarahvanarsdale.com. Jeslyn Cantrell is an illustrator currently living and working in California. Using pattern, composition, color, and technique she creates whimsical images that are reminiscent of old storybooks and Japanese prints. Anna Leader is a seventeen-year-old high school senior in tiny, rainy Luxembourg. She has written a novel, Tentative, and published a collection of poetry, Squeak Like Dolls. Her guilty pleasures include painting her nails and chocolate mousse. Sasha Burik lives in London, where she studies English Literature at University College London; she is originally from Los Angeles. There is a high probability that she is currently drinking tea. Adeline Hocine is a writer from Chicago, Illinois. Kevin Grijalva is an elementary school teacher living in Brooklyn. His work has been featured in Red Skeleton, Underwater New York, Radius, and decomP magazinE, among others. You can find more of his work at his site: www.thetargetbird.com.