FOOLISH 12.5

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Dear Reader,

We are so thrilled that you have found these pages again, and after a rough transition into this 2022-2023 academic year, we couldn’t be prouder to present them to you. In early September, Fools experienced a bit of an identity crisis, and we had to build our team up from the ground again. There were many moments when we questioned the future of Fools, but thanks to the dedicated creatives of our University of Iowa community, we were able to persevere through the late nights, frantic emails, Zoom calls, and other obstacles we encountered along the way. As we remembered Fools’ mission to curate an honest narrative of our little sector of the universe, we asked ourselves what it meant to be an authentic publication. And this semester, we decided to be honest with ourselves and take baby steps in the rebirth of Fools. While we work diligently back towards the main print issues we all know and love, in the meantime, we offer you an online issue of Foolish to show that we are still here and vibrant as ever.

So we find each other now in the midst of a cold Iowa winter, reaching for connection. In this issue, our contributors delve into the raw, honest truths of their own lives. Whether it be rainbows or ghosts, our desires or fears, this issue doesn’t hold back from the complicated realities which make us human. Our featured writers once again converse with the talented array of visual artists who encompass these pages, some of whom are on the Fools team. Here is a surreal world in which we fall apart and touch the moon, in which angels and enemies coexist, often within the same body. Here is a surreal world we invite you to enter for a while.

We are indebted to our visual and writing teams who wrestled with these vast themes in order to produce an issue which beautifully reflects the times we live in. This is our third year producing Fools during a global pandemic, and while we have adapted in many ways to our new normal, there are still instances when we ache for our old selves and the innocence of another time. In fraught moments such as these, we rely upon the contemplation of creative minds to guide us back home to ourselves and each other. To warm us in what feels like a neverending winter. While we may never go back to the life we once had, we hope that wherever you find us, you’ll breathe a little easier. When next we meet again, let it be spring.

With love, Aspen and Marriah

Editors

Marriah Talbott-Malone - Co-Editor-in-Chief

Aspen - Co-Editor-in-Chief

Katherine Steahly - Creative Director

La Della Gallagher- Treasurer

Anna McDonald - Design Editor

Sarena Gibson - Design Assistant

Tianyi Pan - Design Assistant

Aspen - Photo Editor

Erin Challenor - Writing Editor

Grace Champagne - Writing Editor

Parker Jones - Writing Editor

Abby Wedemeyer - Writing Assistant

Allusion Izui - Writing Assistant

Hannah Janson - Writing Assistant

Fidel RCJ - Web Editor

Contributors

Shame is Sticky - Caitlin Bissen

Growing Pains - Lanken Jensen

what is aliveness? - Lauren Lasswell

Painting Rainbows Over Gravestones - Jack Otterberg

On COnsensus

anonymous

I first came to the Iowa River to smoke behind the trees. Then, to throw glass bottles at the rocks under the bridge, the shattering resetting something else in my conscious like homeostasis. Now, I notice how the beat of music matches the rhythm of the waves in the river, the waterside plants bend in their dance.

On Consensus

I often wonder how you know the names of your symptoms in sickness. You think you feel healthy the majority of your life until you realize you can close your eyes and, if you’d like to, induce what you identify as nausea. We saw a river and both sides decided on bridge. We felt our own versions of imbalance and coined sick. I have never felt what they each have felt, nor have you ever felt nausea as Merriam Webster defines. And somehow decision and definition are never equated.

I first came to the Iowa River to smoke behind the trees. Then, to throw glass bottles at the rocks under the bridge, the shattering resetting something else in my conscious like homeostasis. Now, I notice how the beat of music matches the rhythm of the waves in the river, the waterside plants bend in their dance.

When we talk about high school, we all hate it. She had no friends, she told me “You were the only real one.” I smoked so much weed then that I couldn’t remember why we both enjoyed the same things. She was depressed in high school. I liked my math teacher, and I drank gallons of liquor, and I cried sometimes, and now we take the same medicine.

I often wonder how you know the names of your symptoms in sickness. You think you feel healthy the majority of your life until you realize you can close your eyes and, if you’d like to, induce what you identify as nausea. We saw a river and both sides decided on bridge. We felt our own versions of imbalance and coined sick. I have never felt what they each have felt, nor have you ever felt nausea as Merriam Webster defines. And somehow decision and definition are never equated.

I have a tattoo of a fish swimming upstream. I wonder what people think when they look at it and how a good tattoo is supposed to mean something deeper, but it mostly just looks like a fish. You didn’t find peace with medical diagnosis; disorder and syndrome and -ism suggests definition, not preference, not a variable existence of healthy.

I don’t mind that the popular girl from high school has a butterfly tattoo now. We both have the same drug dealer. No one is ever upset that they don’t know exactly how a fish lives under the waterline.

Where’s Daddy?

Mom won’t say. She brings home her Boyfriend every few days. Where is he coming from? Does Dad know?

Mom’s Boyfriend hit Mom today. He got home from work. They argued. She screamed. He approached Anne, but you got in the way. You get what you deserve; consider yourself lucky. But Anne is just a baby.

Mom’s Boyfriend likes painting, but he’s an abstract artist. Mom is mad at you because you got into his paint. But it was either me or Mary! He likes green paint, but finds red more suitable to his palette. Wear green or get pinched! Everyone knows that.

Mom’s Boyfriend taught you a lesson today. This is where he likes to do his painting, but he ran out of paint. He leaves your canvas all bloody and red, up and down. What do you say?

Mom’s Boyfriend took Mom’s money. Where’s he going? Anne, Mary, let’s go! Shh! He goes to the gas station and buys a Redpop. He keeps walking until he gets to I-75. He’s gonna cross it?! Don’t follow him, Mary. But she’s the oldest; “I have to!” Where’s the logic in that, Mary? Don’t do it, Mary. You pull on Mary with all your little might until Mom’s Boyfriend makes it across. “You let him go!” Mary says. You wouldn’t have made it! Anne and Mary go home.

Mom’s Boyfriend is gone.

Scott had a stroke.

You wheel Scott into Anne’s baby shower. You kiss Keith on his head and hand him a crisp $50 bill straight from the bank. Happy belated birthday! Are you excited to be a brother? Mary’s kids drove together. They hug you, kiss you.

Drives with Scott are silent. He was the driver. He was the talker. Where did he go? He was the savior. He stood in the way for you. Now what? You get home and lay him in bed.

You go to your Boyfriend’s house. It’s been a month now. You met on Valentine’s Day. How romantic. He’s an abstract artist too, but he has a stable job at GM and two kids and he’ll give you money if you don’t put up too much of a fight when he’s in the mood to paint.

“How are you feeling?” Mary asks.

“It was great to see you,” Anne says.

“We love you.”

I’m fine. It was great to see you too. I love you.

But you’re out of options. What options? They were there for you the first few times you reached out for help. You have the scars to show for it. How bad can one more time hurt?

Your Boyfriend pinched you for not wearing green. Better apologize to Scott, and Anne, and Mary, and Mom. What about Dad? That day—Drop!—you decided to gnaw your tongue off and claw the skin from your neck and pee your pants and froth from the mouth and pop the blood vessels in your eyes.Wheeee! I guess this time you didn’t realize it would be forever.

You reached out for help the only way you knew how.

The Solitary Thrush

Sophie

Mitchell

Flightless beaked thing spits bile in her feed trough, willing to die hungry in a steel cage. The hunters aggravate her fits of rage and laugh through overflowing spoons of broth. They thought it odd, the rock in her gizzard, and her happy seclusion from the pack— so, they hung her body from Hydra’s back, where the heat of stars browns raw bird liver.

Feathered thing, little seen in company, hoisted heavenward despite somebody hoping to starve you from your quiet glow, bending your squawk to fit the tongues they know, denying your light reached the naked eye, Solitary thrush, entombed in the sky.

Lindsey Cox

A feast for the dead

Manasi Kinikard

Thanksgiving Dinner

a gold bird, asleep on its silver bed tucked in with a rain of spices admirers from far and wide that fast all morning to bury the bird in awe. its wafting soul mingling with the admirers and mourners strong, spicy, and pungent. a prayer for a sacrifice children and parents alike grateful for this blessed burial. the golden wings wrapped in butter ripped apart delicately, shared and stained disappears in the darkness of a churning cave. finally laid to rest in peace and pieces.

My Church had storage rooms full of babies they gave out to married couples like Halloween candy, which prompted me to wonder how my mother heisted my sister as a single twenty-year old woman. Or so I mused during our after-school escapades as Cassie, Tommy, and I huddled on the hot concrete curb of 7-Eleven holding ice-cold raspberry slurpees in our sticky fingers. Cassie would regale us with tales of her dad’s pig farm and how serial killers would dispose of bodies there (because “pigs eat anything in their path, *slurp* that’s the facts” ). Tommy mused about what God looked like, if he or she were real, and why they would let the moral atrocity of pineapple pizza occur. We’d watch Deacon Jim load two 12-packs of Busch Light into his red pick-up truck, then throw a “Quiet down!” at the improper nature of our existence. His wife would be in the passenger seat nursing her second daily pack of Camels between her yellowing teeth. Sweet tartness dancing on the tips of our tongues, the smoke of nicotine and burnt rubber intermingled with our festivities as the sun beat sweat down our necks. Sleepy Friday afternoons usually transpired like this: the deacon buying his beers to make evening adoration bearable, the farmer’s wife smuggling her dollar-store concealer to cover up yesterday’s shiners, and the child misfit’s brain freezing the innocence drained from their bodies.

Childhood is a string of strange, manic whispers that metastasize into the truest parts of ourselves. ***

Shame is Sticky Caitlin Bissen

Years later, Tommy and I are walking down Burlington smoking Hungarian cigarettes (which his roommate says “are the shit,” but I think they taste the way a litter box smells.) We’re talking about shame, which is one of our favorite topics as two writers who have followed the ex-Catholic to depressed artist pipeline.

I bring up the slurpee story to him, one of those vague memories that you only convince yourself really happened once you say them out loud.

Tommy takes a hearty Hungarian puff.

“Your point?”

“It was happiness. Dumb happiness.”

“All happiness is dumb. There’s never any sense in it.”

I look disgustedly at my cigarette and toss it into a trash can. We pass a balding man handing out mini-bibles without any ounce of acknowledgement. I used to feel such secondhand embarrassment for those people that I would stop and accept their hand-outs and wellwishes that meant nothing to me. The temptation to stop is sometimes still there.

“True. But, we were having so much fun that we didn’t feel ashamed, even when they yelled at us.”

Tommy smirks.

“Fucking shameful. Us doing something for the sake of enjoying ourselves, and, get this, without caring what other people think. Blasphemy!”

He says it sarcastically, an abrasive tone to put the conversation to rest.

I look behind me at Bald Bible Man flagging down students. Tommy tries to finish the terrible cigarette out of some all-consuming pride, each flick of ash a past insecurity he wishes to shake off.

But when did that stop?

what is aliveness?

Lauren Lasswell

when bodies fittogether

there’s a sense of Completion in the touch a type of touch that feels so raw - right - okay a type of touch that makes you want to stay

it starts with slight slight a slight touch of the knees hips nearer, then further a light head on a shoulder an arm around a

lips are softly connected softly skimmed softly bitten lips move more hastily they ebb and flow

they touch with grace

they touch with a voluptuous strength

they take their time, caught in a waltz

Painting RainbOws OveR gRavestOnes

Jack Otterberg

October rain tastes the softest—don’t ask how I know that. I’ve flavored many mundane objects, painted rainbows over gravestones. Just to make the dull ache a little more punching. If I’m in pain, let it at least be fruitful. Let a new angel arise from my tattered shoes That’s much like the old saint but a little flimsier— let him sink every time a streetlight flickers off or the bus driver isn’t thanked. Let him tip gas station clerks, Or the unofficial practitioners of God, As they are holier than the white-robed priests. But I’m not here for some overarching theme— Simply, I enjoy poking holes in straw wrappers And misidentifying flowers. There’s a threadbare music if I press my heels against the cement And it’s got more glowing reviews Than any Elvis tune. This is how angels should be birthed: recklessly, haphazardly, fallen. When they wake up, their headache is the holiness.

saint trash

Annie Flood

The darkened street lies barren beyond the age earned scars of the life its surpassed. Chunks of asphalt crumble under the ghost of vehicles past, leaving a broken road in their wake. The air caresses my face with her cold yet comforting hand as she continues down the shadow of a once neatly paved street. I’m left to my own devices, sheepishly seated on a curb in front of the house I’ve grown to know so well. My knees are pressed to my chest as I muster a comfortable sitting position, leaning into my legs with my head atop my kneecaps. I gaze out upon the neighborhood surrounding me, the streetlights infecting the night sky with their luminescent glow. The stars are drowned out by the haze of car exhaust and overhead tree branches. My friend Taylor shifts beside me and lowers herself onto a slab of broken asphalt, leaning intothe curbside for support. Her head rests upon my knee, and together we relish in the brief moments of collaborative solitude. She breaks the silence with a quiet sigh and points to the house across from where we sit huddled.

“They’re moving,” She relays, and what appears to be a twinge of guilt enters her voice. I don’t interrupt the silence, and instead invite my friend to bask in the small hum of electricity in the overhead power lines. She straightens her posture and extends her legs out into the street.

“Somebody died there.” It’s a blur what happens next, as she slowly details the story of the wornhome and the family it once housed. I feel the overwhelming weight of memories sheltered by this withering home press upon my shoulders. I slump down into the curb and the structure transforms in front of my

eyes. The once quiet street suddenly bustles and roars with history, as if demanding to be heard. To be remembered.

Taylor recounts that the family was rather abusive and led their youngest son of three to kill himself on the other side of this very same street. The father, an alcoholic, struggled most with his addiction towards the end of his years. The youngest son felt the grunt force of his father’s behaviors during childhood, and decided that a revolver was the only painkiller strong enough to remedy his chronic situation. The ghost of a gunshot rings in my ears until I break my gaze from the house ahead of me. The potted succulent in the driveway appears to be the only life that’s inhabited the residence in a long time. There it sits, as if to serve a reminder as to the potential for life to live in places it never should’ve in the first place.

i wish TMB

My eyes could take pictures and my ears were recording tapes that my hands held melodies while my feet followed bass

I wish my shoulders were never tired my lids not heavy, legs not sore the nights lasting, lasting evermore.

I wish I was an insider-outsider; a sky-seeking reaching narcissist; a dust devil turned lonesome wanderer loathsome that he should exist–

And when I open my eyes to see velvet skies I know I am still sleeping. sElf portrait

Sarena Gibson

the sky within Hannah Franke

I am walking in the woods, at one in the morning— the world is thundering through my veins— and the moon hangs in the sky like some coin on the verge of flipping, some fate on the precipice of making itself known. And I am walking, I am walking home, hair a mess and heels held by straps twisted between my fingers, I am walking home, and instead of the path in front of me I am staring at the moon. And my heart misses a beat, and my foot misses a step, and my left big toe does not miss the root in front of me, and I am on my knees in the dirt.

And I am thinking about how long it’s been since I worshipped. And with sudden clarity I learn the world around me does not sleep, choruses of bug-song and the echoing hoots of owls. At this hour, I suspect the plants would come awake if not for the stranger in their midst.

I am on my knees and humbled, my hair hangs bedraggled in my face, my shoes lay discarded on the ground, and I look up at the moon, who grows bigger and more grand with every passing moment, and I feel my heart leap in time with this darknoon chorus, feel my soul swell and break the dams I have so carefully, callously placed, to keep myself, inexplicably, from wonder.