MYTHIC by Iconoclast Collective

DIRE CT ORS N ar a M o ntei r o Jeri k a Cadu h a d a A S S I STA NT D I R E CT OR S Catherine Cassels Ashna Thaya

H EAD O F GRAPH ICS Sh ir le y Jia n g

E D ITO R S Diya n a No o r y A b b y St e ve n so n

GRAPH IC D E S IGNERS Sis si Chen V in Venkatesh Ti an Tang

cover art by REILLY KNOWLES

photo by FAYADH AHMED

The sole responsibility for the content of this publication lies with the authors. Its contents do not reflect the opinion of the University Student’s Council of the University of Western Ontario (“USC”). The USC assumes no responsibility or liability for any error, inaccuracy, omission or comment contained in this publication or for any use that may be made of such information by the reader.

EDITORS’ Submerge yourself in the gentle semi-sleep of the first storytelling of our lives. You can see your parent from the corner of your eye, opening a book, leafing through its pages. That hazy bramble is where MYTHIC is set: in the gut, not the mind. The fairies and monsters of our subconscious don’t disappear when we wake—we want to find them, get to know them, learn to dance with them. It is in this misty woodland of stories that we may find the roots of who we are. The thick oil in Ashley Beerdat’s The Planet of the Apes obscures as much as it reveals. The softness of the lines allows the entire piece to flow into itself like a dream, building a landscape both mental and physical. MYTHIC is in large part an exploration of this world-building, but we are also enfolded by worlds already constructed through the stories that we are told. Danielle Solo’s “Prophet” communicates an uneasy sense of being force-fed a predetermined way of thinking, being, living; a self-fulfilling prophecy. Narrativization is a process we constantly engage in. The same strategies we use in storytelling impact our interpretation of daily experiences. MYTHIC is also the stories we tell ourselves: ideas about the world we live in that help us get through our day-to-day lives, thoughts that create our unique perspective, and connections that no one else could know. Stories change, perspective shifts, and all we are left with is the individual and ephemeral. We see and hear and do too much to remember it all—we have to curate our past, both personal and collective. History itself is a series of stories; that’s not a new idea. Roshana Ghaedi tears into Western historical narrative, exposing how it has manipulated events to its own benefit and stolen the right to other nations’ histories. Everything is a mirror: the stories that we consume reflect the world from which they come, and the stories that we write reflect the individual who wrote them. Truth becomes a shapeshifter that speaks with rather than speaks to. ICON itself is a narrativizing body. We arrange the lenses of each piece into a kaleidoscopic whole that builds a meta-commentary, tinting the individual works with the residue of each other. The hue of our mirrored gallery has changed, as it does with each issue: more instinctive, less crisply analyzed. MYTHIC is deeply mired in subjectivity—this is what we see in the works we’ve put together, but you might feel something completely different in the words and brushstrokes. Each of us carries a toolkit of interpretation, revision, and creation; perhaps we can deconstruct worlds as quickly as we piece them together. The stories that impact us don’t disappear when we close the book. Perhaps, years after you’ve shelved this issue, you’ll meet MYTHIC again in a dream. Love, Nara & Jerika

LETTER

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Prophet by Danielle Solo

Art by Reilly Knowles

To the Person Who Stole the Bag from the Backseat of My Unlocked Car by Elizabeth Sak

Photo by Jacqueline Shi & Linda Cako

Governance by Gabrielle Drolet Art by Mackenzie Desbiens Aphrodite Wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Stand for This by Emily Hayward

The Last Modern Eden by Jennifer Hillhouse Art by Nicole Feutl

Art by Ashley Beerdat Kykeon by Gareth Gransaull

Art by Reilly Knowles

Kaleidoscope by Julia Sebastian Orpheus by Danielle Solo

Art by Sissi Chen Collage by Mackenzie Desbiens

Old Magic, New Minds: The Power of Subjectivity by Nara Monteiro

Photo by Jacqueline Shi

Someday We Will Be Free by Aislyn Higgins Art by Reilly Knowles

Who Deserves History? by Roshana Ghaedi Art by Reilly Knowles

Photo by Jacqueline Shi

ON THE WEB There Is An Island, Spaces, and Where Hope Lies Poetry by Kristen Cote

proph·et /’präf t/ e

NOUN prophets (plural noun) 1. A man feels a ghost of a hand pressed along the sun-spotted skin of his back, guiding him along the river, its water bubbling, thick, and cool. His stomach is empty, his eyes blank, his mouth hanging open. Yearning is all he knows. 2. Sometimes if you lay on the banks to the sky, lay with your mouth open, you can sense the smoothness of the rocks in your palms, rocks warmed by sun, warmed by the flame, warmed by the rising of yeast; they soften. “Open thy mouth, and eat that I give thee.” You open your mouth and he makes you eat that roll. 3. The man follows the river back home, stomach sinking with dread. He mouths words no one can hear: “Ezekiel, Ezekiel. Go, shut thyself within thine house. And I will make thy tongue cleave to the roof of thy mouth, that thou shalt be dumb, and shalt not be to them a reprover. But when I speak with thee, I will open thy mouth. And thou shalt speak My words unto them, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear.” 4. The furniture is gone. Symbols carved into the walls. The floor stained with ink. Ezekiel mutters something about wheels of eyes that follow wherever he goes. 5. Can you taste the hunger? 6. Somewhere, my pen’s run out. I wake up to a dry mouth, and the rushing sounds of water.

text by DANIELLE SOLO

art by REILLY KNOWLES

To the Person Who Stole the Bag from the Backseat of My Unlocked Car: I hope my sparkly gold eyeshadow palette clashes with your beady thieving eyes. Please enjoy the limited-edition Kate Spade glasses—they're prescription. And despite its overwhelming floral aroma, even my Viva La Juicy Couture perfume can't mask the wretched stench of petty theft. My favorite sterling silver ring was in the pocket beside a ticket stub for the last Avengers movie my ex-boyfriend took me to which honestly wasn't that good anyway—the relationship or the movie—so you can keep that one for your scrapbook. And my new black heels, size eight and a half, I hope you put those to good use. I hope they trip you up on the sidewalk when you’re holding a coffee and it spills all over your white shirt, leaving a faint but noticeable brownish stain you can never quite get out while the contents of your purse (the one you stole from me) spill out across the street and fall into a sewer grate. Or better yet I hope your partner/lover/hook-up finds the shoes in the bottom of your closet, calls you a lying, good-for-nothing, sleaze of a person and storms out the door, still wearing your favorite sweater which always looked better on them anyway. And I hope when you sell the remainder of the contents of my bag on Craigslist or eBay or Facebook Marketplace—wherever the greedy creeps hang out these days—that it amounts to less than the $20 which you could have taken from my center console in the first place, saving us both a lot of trouble.

text by ELIZABETH SAK

art by SISSI CHEN

art by MACKENZIE DESBIENS

Gover nance text by GABRIELLE DROLET

It is not God but Something Else. Not the grapefruit sliced in half on the counter, seedless and pink. Nor the bear teetering on hind legs in the river, losing his balance. Nor the Mars Rover, singing itself to sleep every year for thirteen years too long. Nor the stars, which often look like bears and ladles. Nor the first gray hair, which signals many more to come. Nor the flour settling onto the counter like dust. Nor the child skipping stones. Nor the stones sinking down to the bottom of the body.

art by MACKENZIE DESBIENS

My body is a temple that leans over the lip of the toilet to satisfy the aching to see my own bones.

Aphrodite Wouldn’t Stand For This

My body is a temple where I sacrifice McDonald’s to satisfy cravings for greasy, salty GMOs.

I stare in the mirror pulling pushing prodding poking like a doctor with no medical degree, like a doctor that tells me my knees are deteriorating from the weight I’ve tortured them with. There are white-hot licking flames seared on my thighs belly the soft flesh between my legs on the part of my arms that would freely ripple if I won a game of bingo. They are burning sigils of proof; marking my body as a temple that has got me through what I have put it through. Every day my temple grows more ancient as it collapses around me, trapping my mind inside the frame of a mirror. It thunders with heavy strides on concrete, and displays etchings worn down to scars. Sometimes I pray on its steps to look different and cry because I cannot slice the extra bits off. I’ve tried. There’s this myth that everyone’s been talking about: nothing tastes better than thin. There’s this myth that everyone’s been talking about: I will be happy once I look different. And yet, everytime I see my body, a temple, I wish the myths were true.

text by EMILY HAYWARD

art by NICOLE FEUTL

The Last Modern Eden Reconstructing Walden

text by JENNIFER HILLHOUSE

If you read Walden backwards it’s the touching story of how one man journeys from bean-farming obscurity and being thrown in prison with only one shoe to re-entry into polite society. If you read it forwards it’s the exact same thing. Thoreau’s soul searching is palindromic, and surprisingly, yeah, that’s most self-discovery. I’ve been in downward dog enough times to know that I’m always going to drip sweat off my nose, that the dentist will always hit a root, and that my inner peace will always be interrupted by that one hair on my arm that sticks straight up (why do you do that?). I’m always shocked out of my attempts at transcendentalism, sent spiralling back to the present and the erratic state of my arm hair. Every time I’m drawn out of myself I only drop down farther inwards. Historically, we look upwards for inspiration. Some toga enthusiast in the sky who knows. But what if you’re just really bad at paying attention? I try so hard to find the Walden in my mind, but it doesn’t exist. It can’t materialize for me because I can’t turn myself off long enough to grasp it, and I always come to the realization that Walden was a space and place only ever for Thoreau in his canoe drifting on the pond listening to the loon’s morning howls. In the summer we tried, we really did. Took a trip to Algonquin Park to see what Thompson and Carr saw before Thompson passed into lore. We even rented a canoe. But our campground’s small lake was cut off from a neighbouring one by a new beaver dam, so we paddled in lazy circles around the noisy families on vacation with their kids in blinding pink life jackets that you could see clear across the greens and blues of the still water. That night we canoed to a rock and set a fire. We claimed it like kings and shouted like Highlanders and I could nearly hear the beating drums from every indie movie score. But then I got too drunk and knocked my boot into a crevice in the rock. I’m not Thoreau, so I had to crawl on my stomach between the boulders in a space half flooded by the lake with my nose barely above the water and my back and stomach pressed against the wet rocks to grab the damn thing. I don’t understand how he could do it—just not have a shoe for a whole day. How could he turn off the feeling of sticks and pebbles burrowing into his foot and just be content with the itch of imperfection? Of people seeing him and knowing that’s what he was feeling? I risked my life for orthopaedic comfort and I’d do it again.

Then the car broke down. And you’ll never feel the constraints of modern living more than when you’re trying to call a repair service up to Algonquin Park on a Saturday so you can get back to Toronto in time for your 9am Monday serving shift. We spent the rest of the day eating marshmallows in the tent while Natalie begged her father to drive the five hours to pick her up. That night we played Go Fish because none of us knew any other card games. There was a fire ban too, so we played it by the sickly blue light of a dollar store flashlight I held between my chin and my shoulder. I think I won, but it really never mattered. There’s little room for self-affirming indie pedantics when your image of what should be bustles up against what is. I could watch the ice like Thoreau, vow revenge against the woodchuck, drop my axe into the pond, meet a wandering Francophone, sort through the relics of long dead neighbours, and cut myself off from everything for two years only to return to spit on the threshold. But I’m stuck. I’m adhered to the God of everyone else, of every other thing except the thing that I truly want. Of the clock on my phone, my non-comedogenic sensitive skin face cream, getting along with others with a purpose in mind, my boot with the foam insole—it’s not pantheism, it’s self-unreliance. I’m sick of it but the pursuit keeps me sane; if I refuse to believe in a dead iconography, in that cabin on the pond, then I have to construct my own derivative. My Walden would be listing sideways. Walls made of every book I’ve read, curtains of all the plants I’ve killed braided together, my armchair made of my mother’s warm hugs after work, and a hearth consisting of every lint ball I’ve pulled out of my dryer. It would look like shit and would humbly accept the .5 star on tripadvisor, but it would be enough for me. I’ll make a composite shrine to every single thing that’s kept me sane over the years and beg that for forgiveness, look to that for directions on self-discovery and the road to the sublime. Just because something doesn’t exist anymore doesn’t mean it’s gone forever. Walden still stands in some latent corner of my mind, and if I pause myself for long enough I can feel the fibrous connections between its wooden planks and the structures of my life. I may even see the sun poking through the knots in the wooden walls of my shrine, encouraging something to grow even where the soil seems most dry and disturbed by concrete foundations.

art by ASHLEY BEERDAT

KYKEON

text by GARETH GRANSAULL

Seed of the rain, children beneath the soils irrupt into the ground and pierce the earth-marked flesh of the motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s virile plains. The womb of the earth sheds its hide, so that dry husk may expose the fecund succour of fruity flesh, giving life to arid soils. Release the infant sow from the oppression of the lightâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Blood for the grain daughter, stolen by death. The shining ones thunder in windswept corridors until the sky shakes with tears, and rain bears seed by fierce winds, reaching beyond the skies to burrow in earthy skin. Breathe, mystai, into the light of the meadow, and be reborn, for Demeter, mother of grain, gives her flaxen gift. Hye (rain); Kye (conceive).

1 This poem illustrates a scene of the Eleusinian mysteries with a cultic initiate participating in the renewal of life.

art by REILLY KNOWLES

photo by JACQUELINE SHI

. Old Magic, New Minds. The Power of Subjectivity

On my fourteenth birthday, two of my friends came over for a slumber party. We watched a movie, played some games, had cake, then said our goodnights to my family and went up to my bedroom. We did not, as I’m sure you can imagine, go to sleep. But neither did we devolve into the typical gut-churning, who-do-you-like-like, what’s-your-cup-size middle school sleepovers that I had previously found myself trapped in. Instead, my friend opened her bag and pulled out a mirror, a candle, three crumbling rose buds, and a sculpted bottle of orange bath salts she’d

stolen from her mothers. Her eyes were shining. The moon was full (I’m not kidding—I checked). My room smelled pungently of lavender essential oil. Thus began my foray into witchcraft. I never told her, but the makeshift beauty ritual she surprised me with led to a two-year stint as a Wiccan and a lifelong relationship with magic. I’ve been on and off with witchcraft. We’re tentatively seeing each other again now, infusing some oils, lighting some candles, occasionally ghosting each other only to text back at 3am when I can’t sleep, but I have never let go of the magic that witchcraft taps into.

I don’t pretend I can get myself a job or predict the future by chanting some rhymes—that’s not my M.O. The forces I manipulate when engaging in witchcraft are far more personal than that, and deeply psychological. Magic is the imagination and the imagination is magic. The human ability to create experiences that do not exist in observable material reality is astonishing. Your entire life is processed in your brain: all stimuli must pass through it in order for you to experience life. You can, with a great degree of effectiveness, also manipulate what is happening inside of your mind. You can essentially edit your personal perception of existence. That is the birthplace of magic: where reality enters and is interpreted by the subjective mind. We do magic every day. It’s the personification of your finicky car, the figurines you display in your house, and the positive associations you have with that old shirt. It’s is the act of embellishing the world with emotion and making it yours. Witchcraft became a revelatory tool in my arsenal against anxiety: it suddenly gave me a way to deal with irrational fears and thoughts. Magic and anxiety are both rooted in the subconscious, so they speak the same language. I wish I could visualize the giant spider-web of neural pathways connecting feelings and colours and faces and moments and places in my mind; everything I have ever experienced, given meaning through interconnectedness. Our brains make connections to process the overwhelming amount of information we encounter every minute. Similarly, witchcraft taps into an agreed-upon tradition of acquired meaning that crosses several intersections. Ritual is deeply symbolic. The elemental circle witches often cast to work in is a representation of a protective forcefield; it recognizes that engaging in these practices places you in a vulnerable position for which you require a shield. I’ve felt vulnerability in the context of witchcraft, but I’ve also felt it when giving presentations, chatting with friends at parties, and walking down a busy street in broad daylight. That feeling is just that: a feeling. If casting a circle, or wearing obsidian around my neck, or putting salt on my windowsill, makes

me feel safe from a threat that I know does not exist but that I still feel endangered by, then have I not accomplished something? I’m tying knots in my mental spiderweb, creating shortcuts and sewing up holes so that functioning on a day-to-day basis is easier. Leaning into this subjectivity can be both wonderful and extremely dangerous. Without a concerted effort to remain aware of what you’re doing, it becomes possible to believe only what is convenient: that climate change doesn’t exist, that we live in a post-racist and post-sexist world, that any criticism you receive is unjust slander. Ignorance of the thin, shifting line between conscious and subconscious makes self-reflection nearly impossible. This is why so many people—particularly privileged people— think their emotional reactions must stem from rational knowledge. It’s difficult to acknowledge just how vast a portion of our lives is constructed inside of our own minds. I don’t believe we are ever clear-minded enough to reach objective truth, but I do believe we have collective truths: things we have cross-referenced against each other’s thinking minds rigorously enough and for long enough that we can say with relative confidence that they are, indeed, the truth. We must hold on to these points of agreement fervently in the coming years, for there is a sect of leaders in power today using the magic of subjectivity to make themselves uncriticizable. This imagining, this magic, only works for me if I’m fully in control of the way I’m manipulating myself. I feel like I’m submerging myself into the warm layer of ocean just below the surface of my conscious mind: an underwater space still warmed by the light of self-reflection, still safe in its proximity to the air, but muted from the noise of the surface. I’m able to engage with the deeper recesses of who I am there; ideas and threads that inform years and decades of my life, rather than just days and weeks. This is a calmness that I cannot access without the slow burn of holding the metaphorical breath of everyday routine. I reemerge eventually with fistfuls of sand and shells, gasping for air and ready to wade forward a little longer through the shallows of life.

text by NARA MONTEIRO

“Do you want to go through Bubby’s purses with me?” my sister asked, legs dangling over the dilapidated disaster of a pull-out bed that we shared. Over the past couple of visits to my grandparents in Montreal, my Papa had tried in vain to make it more comfortable by stuffing various orthopedic-shaped items underneath our mattress, including a flotation device and a plank of wood so rotten that I got splinters trying to remove it. I had started getting used to the feeling of a broken back in the morning, and was doing my now-routine stretches to regain my mobility. “No, I don’t really need any purses. Besides, I’ve never seen her wearing them, so I don’t even know if the association is there for me.” “Oh, it will be, trust me. You’ll know it was hers, even if it’s from when she was younger.” “I guess.” I stared past the paint-chipped white bedroom door out into the hallway, where an oil painting of a violin amid a heap of shining fake apples stared back at me. “C’mon, let’s go up to their room.” My sister led me up the bumpy, grey-carpeted stairs to my Bubby and Papa’s—I guess now just my Papa’s—bedroom. My eyes lingered on the intricate works hanging on the walls as I climbed. I wondered where all of these paintings would go once this house was inevitably torn down; how many could we fit in the trunk? How many should we fit in the trunk? My mother was already struggling to clear my grandmother’s collection of paintings from the storage space she’d rented; no doubt she’d rather donate or call “we got junk” on this house instead of salvaging every last probably worthless antique we could, like Scrat from Ice age clinging to an acorn for dear life. I didn’t want to go up there, didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to open the door and let her presence escape through the doorway and dissipate into the stale, perfumed air.My eyes clung to the contents of each ornate, gilded frame as I ascended the steps to the bedroom, willing my feet to slow the journey upwards, to delay the inevitable confrontation of the nothing. Staring at a painting of a barren, wintry landscape, I squinted at the glass and saw myself reflected in the snow: alone and cold. I passed by, staring into the next frame as though it were a window, and gazed into a Victorian nursery scene dominated by an unsettlingly anthropomorphic cat, its mischievous smile tucked behind whiskers. As I leaned closer to get a better look, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was falling through the frame like Alice through the looking glass, suddenly unsure which side of the glass was real, or if it was all but a dream. My eyes, brown and clouded, remained glued to the cat’s, glinting and slitted. My body and soul were wrenched apart, torn in separate directions: my feet continued their climb up the spiral staircase while I continued spiraling downwards, swirls of oil paintings and pencil sketches and gilded frames orbiting around me as I tumbled down a rabbit hole in the eye of a black storm to an alternate reality where there was no Bubby and Papa’s House, and there was no Bubby and Papa, and there was no Bubby and soon, no Papa, either. text by JULIA SEBASTIEN

Worlds away, what becomes of my sweet Eurydice now? Hades has his eyes on you, darling, and dancing Persephone’s emerged for spring. I’m stuck pacing these hallowed floors among the petals of our chrysanthemums (I haven’t watered them since you’ve died) my body consumed with grief, I’m mouthing please God please god please gods please please god gods God please— And for a moment, it is as if you are here, eyes wilded, pale skin shuddering, lips torn into that raw shape of anguish I cannot quite articulate. A milky ripple of an arm extends to mine— or does it? I shut my eyes, focus on shaping the words don’t look back don’t look back don’t look back. I still do.

text by DANIELLE SOLO

orpheus

I’ve become Orpheus, left without a voice, mouth gaping and gasping, wet with silence, the shadow of a scream.

art by JACQUELINE SHI

someday we will be free we swallow stars whole, hands encircling clenched heartsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; the river deepens its banks to knit us back together, hands encircling clenched heartsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; your skin is embers against the sky knit us back together, floating through a sea of lives your skin is embers against the sky can jaundiced hands bring us back? floating through a sea of lives hearts finally full and rested, can jaundiced hands bring us back? the river deepens its banks to hearts finally full and rested, we swallow stars whole.

text by AISLYN HIGGINS

art by REILLY KNOWLES

Who Deserves History? text by ROSHANA GHAEDI I travel Persepolis in parts. First in my dreams, in murky images I paint from secondhand stories and transplanted mythologies. Here it is still alive, still full of colour and movement, in the piles of saffron and turquoise where I store my soul. Years and years later, I visit the ruins. The ruins, too, come in stages. First in Iran, on a day so hot my head is swimming. I duck under the looming shade of the Gate of All Nations, wrapping my hijab around my sweating palms. There are inscriptions on the gargantuan gate singing of a king’s glory, the glory that’s left nothing behind but ruin. It’s a reminder of another story, a different story about ourselves, one we’d written a thousand years ago and all but forgotten. In these stories, doorways are guarded by animals, and this, the grandest entrance of them all, protected by two colossal bulls. Only one of them stands there now. The door is desecrated, and everything within it. The ruins are haunted: I walk among them imagining what it had been like all those years ago. I squint my eyes against the sand in the wind. I hear my grandmother crying in the distance. She hasn’t been back home in years, had never imagined she’d one day see Persepolis. I am swimming through a vast but undefinable sadness. Next, I see it in the British Museum. I’m sitting in class, staring at the projected image of a bas-relief of a tiger and a horse in battle. My heart is immediately tight, my body tense and restless. I cannot sit still while looking at this image. The professor speaks energetically, excited as she draws out all the historical detail she can find. At the end of her speech, she talks about how she once as a foolish undergraduate felt ashamed that the relief was in England and not Iran, but that upon seeing recent developments in the region she was glad it was out of the hands of “Modern Moslems, who are savages to their own history”. The entire class nods, writing

down diligently her history of the world. She clicks the page over, wiping clean the relief. The last time I saw Persepolis, it took me by surprise. I wandered into Chicago’s Oriental Institute ready to be angry, to look at tablets and pots and wish my family was allowed south of the border so they could see them. I was ready to read museum explanations with an executive, high-handed tone, to get annoyed at their condescension and then at myself for being so easily baited. I wasn’t expecting to come face-to-face with the colossal bull, to be rooted to the spot in its unflinching gaze. It is almost too big for the room, too big for the building. It sucks out all the air – it belongs to another time and place. I feel caught out, guilty, as if I am seeing something I should not be, as if I’m being seen somewhere I should not be. I have been dreaming of this bull for months. He and I look at each other: him, so grand and unchanging and powerful, everything I’d never seen of my country; me, as small and twisted and angry as they’d made me. Two little Orientals in a Western box. I stare for too long. The museum workers fan out around me, watching with anxious eyes. I don’t ever want to see an oriental museum without an explanation of why you deserve our land, our history, our myths. I want to know why these bulls are reserved for blue eyes and not for ours. I want to know the names and the stories of the men who stole these treasures from us. Don’t tell me you are the only ones who can take care of these artifacts. History is not your sole possession. We have eyes too, and brains, and hearts. We do not exist for your consumption. How can you spend your whole life jacking off to Cyrus the Great and then be surprised that I can speak English? How can you quote Hafez and Rumi with such love, and yet never once listen to a single word their people are saying?

And don’t tell me you’re saving remnants of a lost civilization because we are here, we are alive, even if you wish we weren’t. Don’t sing me songs about lost Byzantium, don’t feed me crocodile tears about ashen libraries. I’ve mourned for Tehran longer than you’ve dreamt of Damascus.

Maybe I am. I did not grow up with glory – I was born into the gaping maw of decay, as if the time of my people had come and gone, our sole purpose fulfilled when we made some ruins for you to photograph and pillage and bomb.

I don’t want to see photos of your lovely member events where you sip wine and nod smugly at your own brilliance. I don’t care how interested you are in our history while our people are starving and illiterate, suffering from the same history that allowed you to steal ours. What for you is pilgrimage is for me a prison.

And when people scan their art and bring it back you look down your nose at them. And when people dirty your walls with their life and their refusal to die you shudder away as if from a plague. And when you look at us you wish we were ghosts so you could study us in peace, hum our poems under your breath without remembering who wrote them, collect our blood and soil as monuments to your own greatness.

And how can you study our ancestors then look at me with that crooked, suspicious gaze? Do you view me as undeserving of these monuments, these hymns, this ancient glory?

But I am not a myth. And you have no right to live unmarred by my existence.

art by REILLY KNOWLES

art by JACQUELINE SHI