The Gallery Spring 2024

the Gallery spring 2024

G allery

Volume 38, Issue 2 Spring 2024

Editors

Editors-in-Chief

Jenna Massey

Malvika Shrimali

Art Editor

Miranda Yañez

Poetry Editors

Shawna Alston

Paige Foltz

Prose Editor

Jack Gillespie

Publicity Editor

Lulu Griffin

Thank you so much to everyone who made this a fantastic semester, including the following, who helped assemble the magazine!

Lauren Mullaney

Sydney Shoulders

Ash Pyle

Srija Upadhyay

Maddie Lorente

Cover Art

Architecture

AbigailDavis seethefullworkonpage38

Contents

la jetée searching

On a Tuesday in the Field

Lyric after Teasdale the first time o continue

It’s foggy and dark and there’s too many damn cops Pondering the power of novelty or; the supposed import of stability

Cast Off Not

No Longer Evoking Fear

Self-Portrait

I learned about pollination in grade school

Two Vespers

THEORY OF CONVERGENT SEAGLASS TAXONOMY (CASE FILE NO. 303)

The Bather

The Order of Melchizedek

Green Collage

The Cataclysmically Calm Woman on an Insomniwalk through Suburbia

Scorned Touch return to sender sound

Bayfaring Stranger velvet daydream LIBERTINE

Baptism of Christ after Resurrection

Source

The Hanged Man

Lazy Sunday

Haikus for My Mother’s Mother Architecture

Recalled from a Dream

When Time Stops Reflection

Foggy Fall Morning

Walking in her Shadow

Two Half-Baked Truths and a Lie

Mind’s Eye

Creative Chaos

it was some random tuesday night Modernist, Thinking

Contributor’s Notes

Editors’ Note

Ean Casey

Elizabeth Walker

Miranda Yañez

Grant Yoon

Elizabeth Walker

Maddie Lorente

Paige Foltz

Alisa Yang

Soph Asenso

Daniel McArthur

Grant Yoon

Jenna Massey

Miranda Yañez

Ash Pyle

Grant Yoon

Elena McCullough

André Adams

Pooja Muthuraj

Abigail Davis

Rachel Rofman

Madeline Burdge

Elena McCullough

Srija Upadhyay

Daniel McArthur

Sydney Tamsett

Malvika Shrimali

André Adams

Grant Yoon

Madeline Burdge

Anna Longley

Ellie Berrett

Abigail Davis

Grant Yoon

Abigail Bennett

Isabella Thompson

Lucy Loudon

Tess Willett

Ash Pyle

Abigail Davis

Abigail Bennett

Shawna Alston

Grant Yoon

a man runs out onto the tarmac. he breathes in and holds it, because he knows how the story has been written, how he will die at the end of this scene. but still he runs, out to the observation towers at the end of the tarmac, a tragic silhouette, crushing the air tight against his sacrificial heart.

she is still leaning on the corner of the railings. she has never felt alive, and has the same smile a little boy once remembered in a dream. but in this moment, she is real, enough for him to hope to touch.

he feels the bullet from a distance, far enough away that he wonders if he was hit again this time, and not somebody else.

the round placidly splits his shoulders, parting tendon and sinew, puncturing his heart in an unbothered circle. he throws his arms back, his knees sinking to the glossy rainstreaked concrete. his palms look up, past the observation towers, entreating a deafened sky. but still he holds his breath, holding out hope that maybe the scene will last a little longer this time.

—Ean Casey

searching something beautiful. it is sublime, beyond comprehension— inside me, i cannot describe the great cavern of residing. nothing as simple as starving, nothing like desire. or — or yes, exactly that, stories told through touch. impermanent. a tall knotted oak, slamming onto the forest floor. accumulation of organic matter. sex fossilized, a crystalline structure. something better. something beautiful. your face opposite mine, hands–you are the easiest thing to want without understanding. this sedimentary shamble— witness, i’m begging, love me, make me exist.

— Elizabeth Walker

On a Tuesday in the Field

Miranda Yañez Silver Gelatin Print

Lyric After Teasdale

Boy in long white flowing shirt I recognize from far away, I’ve mused on you since when I saw You kiss my friend the other day;

And he said nothing of your Sullen smile or wise, unhappy eyes. And I say nothing as you look over from your dull disguise.

— Grant Yoon

the first time

mimic the frenzy of the first time: the light, baubles of yellow cream drifting, anchor-less, through the darkened window. a boy, unlovered by a hair’s breadth, kisses the jugular, breath stops. stands still. the clouds linger, drawn by string across the sky. ugly sunlight cuts cocaine lines across his face. a play, pliable by time begins. dawn’s crepuscular glance. immediacy of bared skin. someone guilty in my bed. what, what? nothing, nothing at all.

— Elizabeth Walker

o continue

Rain from noon straight through to midnight and now delaying, just to find a place to stand in the rain in. By the metal statue, soft gasping of tin roof exclamations and tapping. Yet more quiet than my umbrella which I origami’d shut for this very reason: the constant slamming of my ears in the roof –canopy snapping.

Drowning the swimming streetlights on the ripped out bench seat, the twin shadows on the cobblestones way below me and winds across the road, moving cargoes of water. Secret breaths rolling over the empty face of pavement. Secret night chases given body, for a moment.

Rain from noon to twelve twenty two and rain on my screen, too much t

— Maddie Lorente

It’s foggy and dark and there’s too many damn cops

sunroof light pollution, reflections in the asphalt Streetlight, orange tree Streetlight, orange leaves hues like an empty city begging for some romantic, some intellectual, to cup it, caress it, pretend to know it and then sneak away in the morning. moths to a flame, bugs to a Streetlight wings too cagey to ever truly Burn.

I brake too late and his sirens ruin the ambience. Streetlight Streetlight street

— Paige Foltz

Pondering

Charcoal

Alisa Yang

the power of novelty or; the supposed import of stability

wastemen trawl the streets with cutters. looking for pearls before the swine take off.

{ when his head’s taken off by trotters he’ll be served with fava beans. }

contentedness is no man’s vice. you push for one, rotate for another.

groveling in front of crystals. the sight of you makes me remember miracles.

walk cycles do best in unreal engine. walk cycles do best in your head.

( walking’s a good way to remember how cold it’s been recently. )

affection extracts itself of my skin and reveals herself in dark times. it oozes like slime.

it’s an anniversary today. everyday’s the anniversary of a day.

(h) - was i there for you?

(i) - no.

fair play. it’s hard to recall without those numbers on the left.

( more things stay the same. )

i wish i set myself up to matter. i wish i cared more.

i know it’s not my place to be fooled. why try then?

i reach for a hand but find a lighter and a good story. i presume i’ll go without much longer.

( bring me your first born. )

he’s killed himself. his crimes too dimensional to bear.

he wakes in a pool and sees the road covered in sludge. the fuzz say “go commanders.”

championing made me forget my place as a cutting board. my triumph of expression rivaled only by my monumental spite.

i don’t want to remember loyalty. that’s on me.

( told her i was fine. )

the party’s fading and it’s just you in the mirror. one leaves six flags to beat the traffic of course.

i light my spirit on fire and pass it about. what wonderous lies i tell in my own home.

pretty boys make them happy. elder burls scratch these feelings.

it’s nice being a placard. i watch the time go and only feel contempt for its ability to move on.

( he was waiting for the other shoe to drop. is that why he wasted his miracle? )

vantablack’s not great under lighting. the bugs find me and at once i waste my title as apex predator.

they keep you alive, these moments. i prop up your currency.

i like it when you imprint on me. your honesty, my plebeian sympathy.

but i’m happy to make you happy. what bullshit that is, huh.

— Soph Asenso

Cast Off

Daniel McArthur Photography

NotTurn thick uneven flesh warm with love. I tried to make desire god, then naught.

Not just the body’s: outreach, hungry wind. What pulls of you— meant an exhaustion, almost physical, like

My arms got tired of holding you to your words. When you get too simple, I recoil to the shifting lines of my heart, gnawing inside your chest.

Wake up. What do I say to feel about you? Ought not I still love you? Or don’t I, do not I see through you, isn’t that something special. I

still miss you as you’re here. Do not ask me to speak past the hour or want you forever. It makes me sick with the heat of your heavy breathing into my mouth, my lungs, my blood.

— Grant Yoon

No Longer Evoking Fear

Danse Macabre, and I am there. Put on the mask and I am there –I undulate emphatic in this kaleidoscope of smoke. I take my own hand and remain unafraid.

A girl ago, I danced through the doorway with hands over my mouth and eyes, with language pressed at the base of my throat. Since then, I have memorized the steps. I know my cue; I will tell you when the music starts to swell.

And here, it does.

O tar-and-feather freedom, O sideways grace. O crooked hallelujah – it is happening again.

— Jenna Massey

Self-Portrait

Silver Gelatin Print

Miranda Yañez

I Learned About Pollination in Grade School

and sex education in junior high. Hold my love handles, uterine horns. Moldable child, avoidable, forgettable –forget-me-nots surrounded by tiny handprints in the soil.

Fresh woven silk of a baby’s skin, tiny veins that could almost resemble their mama’s, or a midrib, I’m scared of a swollen midriff, they taught me to be abstinent and yet

the birds and the bees bring the orchids to life, my grandmother’s favorite flower only she could foster, where I’ll treat festered wounds there’s an infant crying and an aloe plant –

oh, to be a midwife or botanist, to help in nature’s progression, profess, procreate – but still I’ll kill a cactus and wish that I could be made of the stuff it takes to be gentle

— Ash Pyle

Two Vespers

I. Eve

I know a secret. God didn’t open The sky; His shadow imparted in death.

What Eden and Hell are (uneternal)

And the hole occupied by the Godhead emptied. Divine light strew from everywhere, fluid from the rind of the word, myself dissolved in its truth; beauty showed at last, as an eventuality. Adam became a symbol of love: consummation, the condensed light of shame, breath going;

I made life worthwhile with a price you know. No more negation. I know a secret.

II. Adam

Gold chintz, the spilling splendor of desire— Light churning constant itself over you— The grace of the choreographed fall—I am moved in wanting more closeness with you, a shade of God.

What is love? I thought it sterile goodwill, but I Am of man. The naked infinity of desire— I see God in how I pull toward you. My Ecstasy is the arrangement of want in you, and

The subtle consumption of looking, the sky opening into duality of had and lost as I love you as an apple is an apple, as my longing drags down all the rest as we go.

Grant Yoon

THEORY OF CONVERGENT SEAGLASS TAXONOMY (CASE

FILE NO. 303)

Glass shards crest grey matter waves, bottled-message casualties eroded by axon’s edge, caught in cycles of synaptic surge, softened, frosted. High-tide beachcombers choke and drown beneath cerebral sediment, clutching throats with vestigial fingers, glass eye open, fixed on fractured multiverses, sequestered predestined detritus buried in grey matter graves. Glass bottles shatter in every timeline, glittering silica beaches dissolve vessels into living glass.

— Elena McCullough

The Bather André Adams Lino Print

[The

Order of Melchizedek

I imagine love a missionary Traveling island to island, Anointing them poets

And when he finally leaves (Because love is a busy man, Who always has to go)

Only poets remain In the waters, and The ocean is irredeemable

— Pooja Muthuraj

Abigail Davis

Green Collage Analog Collage

The Cataclysmically Calm Woman on an Insomniwalk through Suburbia

The breeze seduces spring back to winter neighbor’s cars hum without destination

Not like the trot of a dog & dog walker, warblers, starlings, finches chirping, everyone’s fucking wind chimes and me

It is three or four or five o’ clock in the AM all I want is a cigarette I don’t smoke (it’s gross) or have the moxie to choke up the truth that my next year is not with you in the Chapel Hill or Ann Arbor on paper or papyrus however I spin the needle pining to prick my sickled fingers frozen from the pseudo-winter sky you live to crave to cradle me back to sleep coo your lover and your litter but not in the devil’s hour of suburbia

notice the stars but don’t stare I’m a rabbit that dies when I let my guard down not an if, but a when?

alertly perked you call me rabbit, weasel, rat because I am the runt mousy, scrappy, silly maybe

long-locked & otherworldly I know what green eyed dough eyed women do for men how you must contain your enchantment with pet names I get it. Green eyed dough eyed women do it for me too.

Five year plans distill to five more months I haven’t lost feelings like mitten or keys but my direction is gone. Do I follow your lead like the rabbit, weasel, rat that I am not? again comes the trot of a dog and dog walker but boom-boom-boomI have footsteps too.

— Rachel Rofman

Scorned Touch

Madeline Burdge Pen & Ink

return to sender

enveloped earthy parcel; peaty post pre-stamped by sod; most clayful mailer crate; my corpse container; prime cadaver host; a maggot-masticated mealy plate

contains my cargo. creaturedom i crave (your packaged pulse, reciprocal pain-pill). core cavity’s corrosion merits grave priority morosement: mournful, still.

Sweetness! save my feeble, freightless shell! send sea-swelled ships, solicit first-class snails, for freely i’ll succumb: your letter’s spell supplies my fraughtly frame (soil-sick, it frails)

with finest serums, salves, and capsule-cures. to you, i mailed my heart – please send me yours.

— Elena McCullough

sound

supple water pools like molten silk; i part fingers and molt droplets that render sand into clay with silkworm embraces salt crusts beneath my nails and in the lag between sight and sound i slough seawater in sheets and stretch into the air’s chill, inhaling the king that bakes sandcastles and watches them break under fire from the sea

sandpipers skitter away from tongues of rolling sea foam and stamp on half-crumbled sandcastles in their haste

sound melts into shore in starbursts of burbling moon froth that efface prints systematically, an allusion to silkworm twisting into silk moth

— Srija Upadhyay

Bayfaring Stranger

Photography

Daniel McArthur

velvet daydream

Collage, Colored Pencil, and Pen

Sydney Tamsett

LIBERTINE

white knuckles, baby teeth woven between mama’s rosary. oh, i was her keys-in-fist against Father In Sky, rattling bones in his pocket currency for bitches. soooo feminine and fuck the gentle! when my mama swung her whole anger towards that canine sneer, it rained fangs like hailstorm. she, trophy hunter talamanca, nailed them on the wall. Father began the countdown and she promised i’d be next on the playground. she pushed me until i was face-to-Father-God, feminine and fucking (gentle men) my baby bones between mama’s tired fingers rattle the whole beyond. i grew taller where her dog-eat-dog double-edged dagger filled the gaps between my spine. rest assured Heaven made space for a creature like me, who fits into eternal handprints. she admits i am a beautiful thing, gift of birth, her pédé du ciel.

— Malvika Shrimali

Baptism of Christ

After Resurrection

André Adams Pastel on Bristol Board

Source

If I were the ground I would crack with cold. The weak sheet of light from your sun and Darkness. Dreamlike worlds. The stale self, the old Sickness of the scene behind the eyes; sand that cringes as a foothold; when you stare at night the birds’ cries shatter into sound. The searing ache of the pale, frigid air on graveyard stones shifts something underground.

~ I am free, the relief of rot downward into the movement of peace, I unfurl; then not slowing down, time not in moments, what we are in the lonely unheard requests of the heart throughout it all curl into this tranquil heartbreak, this essence.

— Grant Yoon

Madeline Burdge The Hanged Man Acrylic

Lazy Sunday

Anna Longley Ink Pen

Haikus for My Mother’s Mother

A puppet without Its puppeteer is just a Passive, spineless doll.

I was born with strings, Frayed from mother’s womb that are Generational.

Wrapped around my throat In a chokehold, twenty years Still wasn’t enough

To disembody

This miscarriage in the flesh Of needle and thread.

Passive acceptance

Surrendered my agency And humanity,

Because what am I If not the making of kin? Ancestral trauma?

Sewn all together, Passed down the assembly line Until it reached me,

I wear the skin of My mother and all before Her—bloody and bruised.

Soaked in resentment And in pride, I hold tightly To strings of strangers

And pull and pull and Pull until I am left with Only skin and bones;

And, upon finding An untouched, unfractured spine, I choose to let go…

— Ellie Berrett

Architecture

Abigail Davis Analog Collage

Recalled from a Dream

It was an afterlife in a marketplace And my mother had gone (people could go) So just before I had to go I protested—I asked aloud, against the dull hum of shouted prices, Thinking of how she had loved music and so many small things; isn’t that enough?

— Grant Yoon

When Time Stops

Abigail Bennett Ink Wash & Micron Pen

Reflection Fiber Isabella Thompson

Foggy Fall Morning

The autumn morning is crisp yet the road disappears a few feet from my face as I call out your name

A decrepit crow caws and the cornstalks tremble as the fallen leaves dance around my feet

Yet flashlight or foresight can’t warn of what this misty mirage hides or what it wishes for me to see

A muddled road view mocks me for I thought you were only a few steps ahead, yet the silent responses suggest you are much further leaving me alone

Or maybe my heart has left my head running along the foggy fall road itself falling into fuddled fantasies and you were never really there at all.

— Lucy Loudon

Tess Willett Walking in her Shadow Photography

Two Half-Baked Truths and a Lie

You stole my mother’s pie from the windowsill, split it with me and called yourself generous.

I licked streusel from the corner of your mouth and called it my first kiss.

A pair of bodies and forks, we started at the same edge;

amidst the sharpness and sugared cherries, you promised to feed me like how you were then, when we are old and can only manage porridge and bitter things.

— Ash Pyle

Mind’s

Eye Analog Collage

Abigail Davis

Creative Chaos

Abigail Bennett Mixed Medium

it was some random tuesday night

and we drank mimosas out of styrofoam cups; mine filled to the brim with stale prosecco and orange juice and a glassy girlhood laughter; you make me laugh.

and at the fizzy bottom of that styrofoam cup was an admission of guilt; wrought iron and wanton and boozy. you asked me to tell you a secret and i whispered my middle name. it rolled off your tongue like chardonnay.

i asked for more juice and you told me to finish yours. it was then when i realized that we are two different people; broken and uncorked and feeling fucking sorry for ourselves. and so i finished your juice and got mad that it didn’t get me drunk.

knocked on the door across the hall and asked the boy that lives there if he thought i was pretty; he got high and said yes and i asked you for your middle name. you poured me more orange juice.

— Shawna Alston

Modernist, Thinking

So we have killed God. What am I supposed to feel When I look at my daughter? Make divinity of the fact that she or I die first? The fields are overfull, suffocated with meaning. Too much truth, and still the days

sigh and chug along, like a train in a dreamlike desert. Say love. Say desire. The trick has lost its logic.

When the plane of this dread sags, tilts like a questioning glance, then tears apart what I thought from what is when I hold her— the mirror is broken, showing nothing;

the face of God is absent for my having locked it into her frame or for being illusion. I don’t know. Callous, strike, strike, strike, callous. Pressure and nothing more. Notches in dumb translucence.

Sit by the body of water. Do not ask it to be anything else. Things were good. Things were bad. I apologize for trying to characterize you.

Children die, the sun rises, and a mouth opens. The poet asks for release.

And the dream persists, like a threat.

— Grant Yoon

Alisa Yang is a junior at W&M who loves nature, traveling, and many different types of Art.

Anna Longley is a sophomore at William & Mary majoring in art. She loves cheetahs and all things nature.

Ash Pyle is a rising junior who has no idea what she’s doing and likes to write about it sometimes.

Abigail Bennett is a freshman intending to study philosophy, and her art often explores themes of authenticity and beauty in the mundane. She can typically be found debating the edibility of avocados, watching way too many Not Just Bikes videos, or playing board games in a way so competitive that it could be (and has been) deemed childish.

Abigail Davis is a senior studying Anthropology at William & Mary. When she is not conducting digital ethnography on fandoms or working at the Muscarelle Museum of Art, she loves to press foliage from around campus and incorporate them into collages.

Grant Yoon (‘27) is a prospective English major. They enjoy watching time turn over the seasons and sitting in front of large bodies of water.

Isabella Thompson is a rising junior, double-majoring in Computer Science and Art & Art History with a concentration in 3D Design. Isabella hopes to go on to graduate school in 2026 to pursue her master’s in architecture.

Jenna Massey is sad to be leaving The Gallery.

Lucy Loudon (‘26) is a Biology major and (future) Creative Writing minor on the pre-veterinary track from Columbus, OH. Her interest in writing originally stems from her parents who have always encouraged her vast, though sometimes odd, imagination. She likes to write about vulnerable moments of the human experience while often using imagery from both nostalgia and the natural world.

Madeline Burdge (they/them) is a freelance artist and student double majoring in Linguistics and Film & Media Studies.

Notes

Malvika Shrimali (‘24) can’t put it into words.

Paige Foltz (‘25) is begging the gallery editors who fed her wine cheese and taught her to be pretentious to please be super seniors and not leave.

Pooja Muthuraj (Business Analytics & Public Policy, ‘25) has been writing poetry unseriously since the seventh grade and is the current president of Inside Out Theatre, a spoken word group at W&M that she encourages you to join/check out on TribeLink! She published her first chapbook, “18—Whatever That Means,” in December 2022; it’s available both on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble’s website, in case you like her work and want to read more.

Rachel Rofman (‘24) is from Gainesville, Virginia. Aside from poetry, she loves trivia, ice skating, & ecology. Post-graduation, Rachel is moving to Philadelphia, PA, where she will teach 7th grade science!

Soph Asenso (‘24) is just a silly little guy who’s just a silly little gal who’s just a silly little they. Predominantly writing music/being funny on FKA Twitter, her poetry is written from her various stances as a black queer woman.

Sydney Tamsett (‘27) makes art for fun, communicates mainly through Seinfeld references, and can get you all the printer ink you want.

Editors’ Note

Dear Reader,

We hope you’ve enjoyed our fourth and final issue as Co-Editors in Chief of The Gallery. As several former editors have stated, writing this note is often one of the hardest parts of the publication process. This is especially true now that we’re graduating; it’s bittersweet to say goodbye. Our time with the magazine and the connections we’ve formed with William & Mary’s creative community have been irreplacable.

The Gallery has grown quite a bit since we joined in 2021, both in terms of membership and presence on campus. This year, fundraising allowed us to distribute “The Gallery” tote bags. Many people we spoke to expressed their appreciation for the magazine, even without being active members. It has been a pleasant surprise to see so many strangers wearing their tote bags and representing this club around campus.

We’re very proud to pass the magazine to our successors Shawna Alston and Paige Foltz. We are excited to see The Gallery’s legacy continue in their capable hands.

As always, thank you for submitting to and reading our magazine.

— Jenna Massey and Malvika Shrimali Co-Editors in Chief, The Gallery #awww #goodbye

Colophon

The Gallery Volume 38 Issue 2 was produced by the student staff at the College of William & Mary and published by Carter Printing Co. in Richmond, Virginia. Submissions are accepted anonymously through a staff vote. The magazine was designed using Adobe Indesign CC and Adobe Photoshop CC. The magazine’s 52, 6x9 pages are set in Garamond. The titles of all the pieces are Derivia. The text on the cover is set in Letter Gothic STD.

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