Red Wheelbarrow
Edited by Olivia Alger John Baird Allen Smith
With Immense Thanks to
David Griffith and Jennifer Steinorth
and to singer-songwriters Allie Kessell Maddy Silberman Vinny Rosales
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LITERATURE 5.
The Things I Never Thanked You For …………...Brittany Sando
8.
Table of Contents for Family………………………...Olivia Alger
9.
CPR Class……………………………………….....Angelica Parker
15. Sister……………………………………………….Sarah Arnett 24. After Death But Before Peace……………………..Mickayla Noel 26. How to Major in World Domination………..Grace Montgomery 30. Interstate 43: Collected Images……………………...Jehan Segal 33. Black Spaces in the Picture……………………...Alexa Curnutte
ART 17. Untitled…………………………………CiCi Yu and Shaun Hsu 18. Coercion……………………...…Ingrid Matison and Hannah Mills 19. Memory………………………………………….Oonagh Davis 20. NO!NO!NO!.........................................................Ingrid Matison 21. Reflection…………………………………….Veronica Kostyuk 22. Results and Reactions……………………………Jenna Trosien 23. Retention………………………………………...Oonagh Davis COVER IMAGE: Dresses……………....……………Oonagh Davis 38………………………………CONTRIBUTING WRITER BIOs 3
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The Things I Never Thanked You For
Brittany Sando
Dear Ariel, Thank you for the short black dress and stilettos you bought me for my birthday; maybe now I’ll look more like a girl, more like the way you always wanted me to look. Thank you for pestering my mom into letting me have a birthday party this year in the first place. Thank you for shutting my door so she wouldn’t hear me cry. Thank you for all the times you put butter on the movie popcorn even though I told you not to, because you wanted to help me gain back some weight. Thank you for telling me I didn’t need to starve myself to be beautiful, and that you liked stocky girls better anyways because they had bigger curves and better humor. Thank you for giving me something to laugh about. Thank you for putting a dead squirrel carcass in my brother’s pillowcase to get him back for the time he set me up with his jerkoff jock friend. Thank you for kicking that jock friend’s ass. Thank you for referring to your mother as Ursula, because it’s nice to know yours is mean too, and it always makes me smile. Thank you for making me smile. Thank you for smiling; your smile is so fucking beautiful. Thank you for teaching me that depression is not something that can be remedied by the contents in a bottle of pills, and thank you for taking those pills away from me. Thank you for tucking me in when I was nearly too drunk to remember my own name, and for dealing with my hung-over self in the morning. 5
Thank you for the giant teddy bear you gave me to snuggle with on the nights you couldn’t spend with me. Thank you for slapping me when I told you I’d started cutting myself. Thank you for telling me I was even cute in sweatpants and oversized T-shirts. Thank you for flipping me off under your desk when I scored seven points higher than you on the Calculus test last semester, and thank you for flipping the teacher off over the desk for telling me in front of the class that I needed to see someone about my eating disorder. Thank you for being debatably insane; you’re the most beautiful human being I’ve ever seen. Thank you for being perfect, scratch that, thank you for not being perfect, but rather for being perfect for me. Thank you for teaching me how to use liquid eyeliner. Thank you for telling me I was pretty without it. Thank you for being you, and for being there for me, and for allowing there to be an us for as long as there was an us, and then for letting me down gently. Thank you for all the time you gave me: three years, five months, two weeks, six days and an hour; I’m sorry for not remembering the exact minute you asked me out but I would next time, if you’d give me a second chance I promise I’d do better. I’m sorry I couldn’t be the person you needed me to be, but if you give this one more go around I promise I’ll change. I’m sorry I have trouble keeping promises. I’m sorry it took me so long to start eating again. I’m sorry you had to fix me, but thank you for doing it anyway. Thank you for giving me the strength and the pride and the passion to 6
write this letter. Thank you for making me feel, Ariel, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Love, The One You Taught How to Love Poetry
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Table of Contents for Family
Ray Kearns
Curry Powder clings To our eyelids The reflection Of Home Swirled into Thick lines Black, Blue, and Green Electricity Fried into the spiced Orange Tabletop 11, 11, 11, Feet Curved and Smoothed The slide of the rim. Sparkling Catching food, and vomit, and tears, and catching screams That I’m too far away to hear There is a pedestal An assuming home in black finish To hold the weight of a family Heavier than granite And children will toddle under the ledge Their heads just low enough not to connect They avoid the bruise from our dinner table They avoid the fights that we’re too old to know about To wish away the fighting Is to wish away stockings slid across the table Away Halloween candy being traded at 11:30 Away Family Eating across the orange dinner table 8
CPR Class
Angelica Parker
The CPR Class was four hours and held in the ice-locked month of February. I was twelve, or maybe I was one year into teenagehood; I’m not sure, one of those ages. My mom had dropped off my sister Julia, our friend Carley and me in front of the cinder-blocked building, an off-white hue against the snow. Inside was a room; the walls were peeling like eggshells do from hardboiled eggs, gray linoleum floors and fluorescent lights bleaching our skin into a corpse-colored wax. We were given sugar-sprayed doughnuts and apple cider. The class began. It dragged me along. We watched videos with poor special effects and even worse acting. The hinged voices of the half-baked actors were punctuated with long sighs from each of us. The fake plays of concern made me cringe and the awkwardness wafted like a gas from the screen. I tried to focus, but apple cider did little to wake me and the flickering light was somehow injecting me with exhaustion. Somehow a CPR dummy was laid down in front of Carley and I then, Julia was given hers. Severed torsos with gaping chasms for mouths. It was odd how human-like they looked. Their hair was actually outlined in plastic waves, as though they were giant Ken Barbie Dolls.
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The teacher chirped and then we were doing compressions in the rhythm of that highly annoying song, “Staying Alive.” I suppressed a laugh, talk about ironic. Besides me Julia was bashing into her dummy far too hard. I could hear the sproing of the spring as the chest heaved up to again meet her crushing fist. His wide mouth made it look as if he were screaming on and on. I elbowed her and told her she needed to calm down, “If this were a real dude you’d kill him again, idiot.” This was a great example of why we needed this four hour class. Saving lives had to be taught. You weren’t allowed to just rush in and wrap bandages around a bleeding cut, you had to be “trained in first aid” and you could get into a lot of trouble if you splintered ribs or something while attempting to crush a stalled heart into a rhythm. You had to practice on these false rubber-humans first. So, I molded my hands into one giant fist and began the compressions, pausing to breathe and I figured this would never happen in real life. Then the teacher, who had been more of a instructing noise than a person said, “This is very important everyone.” I paused from my chest thumping to listen. “If you see this card on an unconscious person you do not resuscitate them.” Instantly that foggy not there feeling I’d been struggling to shake was tugged away. The teacher held a small rectangle in her up-stretched hand, she waved it. 10
My hand stretched upward, as though the ceiling had become a magnet and my hand metal. She called on me, “Why would someone not want to be saved?” I didn’t understand why someone would want to die, when there was a chance to be brought back. The teacher smiled, her lips tugging back from her sharded teeth, her makeup creasing. She explained how some people didn’t want to be brought back. They didn’t want to risk becoming a vegetable, or they were too old... At that time I felt horrified. Not that I didn’t understand, but at the fact that if I were to come across a real person with this card that I would have to let them die. What would it be like to have that card weighing you down in your pocket? To have that constant reminder of impending death in the form of a piece of paper? The teacher’s voice sliced through my mind again, “Also students, check the wrists for a small metal bracelet. Some prefer that to the card, since it is harder to misplace.” Metal death? I couldn’t figure out any reason for someone to want to not take the chance to extend their life. At that time I was twelve, or thirteen. Death seemed to have that capital D. It’s something I was just beginning to realize it didn’t only hang above the elderly, or men that drink too much liquor and get behind the wheel. It’s constantly there, when you
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cross the street, or get behind the wheel; your heart could go to sleep at any moment. I know these two things for sure; I was fourteen and the hospital room walls were the color of puke. Pink and white, thick like paste. The ever-present snow was shivering outside a large window with a faded pink curtain folded neatly off to the side. I heard the bleeps of a heart monitor, like a clock marking the seconds in angular peaks and valleys. There was a white hospital bed with bars, as though the patient was a prisoner. And there was a man in the bed, he was old, old enough to be somebody’s grandfather. His hair was black but the gray was creeping in and his face had bits of salt and pepper whiskers sprouting from it. I couldn’t see his mouth, he was swallowing a tube. His chest would rise with a smoky groan and then release and the tube would grow foggy with condensation. I glanced at his hands, they looked like rubber, like they weren’t real and on his left wrist I saw a bright purple bracelet. The color little kids would dress up in when they play princess, on it in white were the letters DNR. I could hear the thick syrupy sounds of crying just outside. I didn’t want to be here and yet I couldn’t leave. I was just as trapped as he was. 12
Why was he wearing that bracelet? His heart was beating, the tube inhaling. What was the point? “We’re going to take out the tube soon. You all should say your goodbyes now” “Okay.” Then, there were people and their faces were swollen. I wanted to leave. I already said that, but that was the only coherent thought in my head in that moment. “Mom, why’s Grampa wearing that bracelet?” There was a girl, her face overtaken by blue eyes. “We don’t want any doctors to accidently bring him back. There’s too much brain damage he needs to go.” I wanted to melt into the wall. So I did. In CPR Class I was twelve, or thirteen it really doesn’t matter. I was young and I didn’t know the color of those walls. I didn’t know about the hospital bracelets, or life support. When I heard the phrase, “pulling the plug” I took it literally. I imagined a doctor weeding a plug out of a socket, a person sighing away. Not, drowning in not enough breaths. Not the way your brain isn’t the same after a couple minutes being unconscious.
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I envisioned the movies, a person pressing down a few times, an ambulance with shrieking lights and suddenly they woke up, like a stalled heart was an excuse to sleep for a while. Back then I couldn’t see any reason why you would let someone die. Why you wouldn’t do everything in your power to restart their heart. To give them a second chance, or just keep them alive as long as possible. Sometimes it’s better that they don’t come back; not if they can’t really live. Julia was talking to the teacher; Carley too. Both of them asking questions. The room buzzed with them. They became white noise and I stared down at the screaming dummy. I wondered if that’s what people felt like when they were locked inside of themselves with a person pounding, slamming their ribs like bats against their heart. Was it worth it to be alive and not really being able to live? Was it worth the gamble to just leave when you could’ve been fine? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to be there. Julia began pumping into her dummy’s false heart again. I did too. When I bent over to breath in him I thought, if you were real and had that card I would have to let you go.
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Sister
Sarah Arnett after Jamaica Kincaid
Put your hard toys in the bin and your soft toys on the bed; make sure you don’t swallow your bubblegum; only step on the sturdy branches when you climb a tree; tap the doorframe three times whenever you walk through, because it brings good luck; this is how to clean a scrape from riding your bike; is it true that daisies will tell you if he likes you back?; no, baby, there’s nothing for that but time; don’t go looking for frogs, you might catch something; stop stealing my CDs; this is how to make a friendship bracelet; this is how to make macaroni and cheese for dinner when Mama doesn’t come home until midnight; this is how to make toast for breakfast when she doesn’t come home at all; this is how to write a boy a love letter; when he breaks your heart for the first time, this is how to burn the love letters that he wrote you; this is how to pump the brakes when your car spins out on the ice; only paint your nails red for Christmas, never for parties; is it true you’ve been kissing the neighbor boy?; this is how to look under your car as you walk toward it on dark nights so you can see if someone is hiding under; this is how to carry your keys between your fingers; when you do laundry, always separate the whites and the colors; this is how to make a hangover remedy, and this is how to make sure Mama drinks it all; stop stealing my green sweater; don’t ever 15
take a drink from someone if you didn’t see who poured it; this is how to throw a punch, no, don’t do it with your thumb inside your fist; soak your socks in vinegar to break a fever; put toothpaste on a burn to make it heal faster; stay inside and do your homework so you don’t end up kissing the neighbor boy; this is how to write an essay at 4 AM; this is how to braid your hair so it won’t get tangled at night; this is how to patch a hole in your favorite pair of jeans; when you’re in church, pretend to pray even if you don’t want to; stop stealing my lipstick; this is how to set a broken nose; what about a broken heart?; no, baby, there’s nothing for that but time; use a penny to check the pressure in your tires; this is how to cross your ankles when you wear a dress; this is how to walk in high heels; always carry an extra tampon in your backpack; don’t believe everything Mama tells you, even when she is sober; don’t shake your hips so much when you walk; this is how to make your eyeliner look even on both sides; this is how to avoid eye contact with the boys who look you up and down; this is how to do a waltz step; this is how to dance with a boy you like; this is how to tell a boy that you don’t like that you don’t want to dance with him, and if that doesn’t work, this is how to walk away.
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Â
untitled
CiCi Yu and Shaun Hsu 17
Coercion
Ingrid Matison 18
Memory
Oonagh Davis 19
NO!NO!NO!
Ingrid Matison 20
Reflection
Oonagh Davis 21
Results and Reactions
Jenna Trosien 22
Retention
Oonagh Davis 23
After Death but Before Peace
Mickayla Noel
Knife plucked out of its flower bed let rivers run let metal slide like cutting through butter‌or paper. Feet sneaking because this was an act of cowardice, and I don't know why I decided that I'd wanted eternity that day, but like cutting a pound cake, I did, greedy to eat death-and it was sweet. She took her life because it didn’t matter-that is what the pastor will say, if only he knew I did it out of pure misery, hurting, deeply in the tissues of my heart and all I wanted was to die with a little bit of fame, like Marilyn or Clyde. And I wonder if they think of me and where I must be, somewhere in the clouds, or in the flowers they smell. I wonder if they mourn, tears cascading, a Hoover Dam breaking, hearts delicate as trinkets. 24
I would say I am sorry, but in that moment I was not, and now there will be roses on my coffin, they have already forgotten that I liked lilies. Speakers that I never knew will wail, about a tragedy they understand nothing about. ....I wonder if the pastor knew I was agnostic, for I’d tell him that the other side is Godless, that silence is your only company, and that death is not as sweet as pound cake.
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How to Major in World Domination
Grace Montgomery
An Excerpt
Get rejected by Ivy League. Tape the rejection letters to the refrigerator so you don’t have to tell your parents out loud. Your mother will cry. Your father will pat you too hard on the back when he says it’s okay. Don’t listen. Watch his mouth instead. It will press into a hard line of disapproval. He will look a bit like a frog. Say: if I put an ivy plant in my dorm room, it’s basically like going to an Ivy League anyway. Your mother will laugh out of pity. Your father will consider slapping you across the jaw with his frog tongue. Live the next three weeks in shame. Avoid going home. After track practice, watch your friends get high behind the gym. When Hector offers you a smoke, politely decline. He’ll shrug his shoulders and pass the joint to Kaylee. Before she takes it, she’ll kiss him. Look away. Don’t think about kissing Kaylee. Try not to think about Kaylee at all. Watch Amber try to blow smoke rings instead. Tell her she sucks at it. When she asks what your damage is, tell her you have none. Drive yourself home in silence. Think that no one in the world should ever have to feel this low. Sit down for dinner with your parents every night. When your father asks if you’ve decided on a college, change the subject. His frog face will come back. Offer to build him a pond. 26
On your final decision day, eat lunch with your friends in the middle of the hallway. Tell them you can’t make up your mind. Amber will say: you can’t or you won’t? Hector will shrug, I don’t know either, man. Kaylee will say something knowledgeable and practical. Don’t think about kissing her. Do the opposite of whatever she says. Decide you may as well seek higher education in a warm climate. Pick California, or Florida, or Texas. Leave the midwest in a hurry. Arrive in the sub-tropical climate with a potted ivy plant and not much else. Plop the ivy right in the middle of your dorm room floor. Nice, your roommate will say. His name will be Orville. He will keep a six gallon fish tank on his desk and major in some type of ology; whether it’s biology, or ecology, or scientology, you can never remember. Find him stupid and scrawny. Figure that he must like frogs. When he asks your major, tell him it’s world domination. This is the first time you’ve said this out loud. It feels right. Begin to give this answer to everyone, even your counselor. He’ll laugh, say: so I’ll put you down as undecided? Tell him sure, that sounds about right. Take a class in international relations; in war and strategy; in theory of revolution. Decide that a world leader has to know many things, not just how to run the world. Take a class in macroeconomics; in business law; in dental hygiene. 27
It will hit you towards the end of first semester that dictators don’t get personal lives. Aim to live your entire personal life in the next semester. Drop all of your serious courses. Take introduction to welding. Take bowling or yoga. Take theatre workshop on a whim. Meet a set design major named Julie or Lydia who always wears paint-splattered jeans. Kiss her over a cafeteria dinner the first Friday night you’re able to. Have the greatest love affair of all time in just one weekend. Drop theatre workshop on Monday, never see her again. Fail out of introduction to welding by melting your partner’s phone to a slab of stainless steel. Skip bowling or yoga to get high with whoever has weed. Call Kaylee. Tell her you’ve always loved her. Listen to her stammer, talk in circles, tread water. Think: this is what heartbreak is. Think: one day, I will miss this. Realize that some days are just murders in disguise. Smoke more, party more. Stand near the wall in a dark room full of grinding bodies. Do your part to fill the air with smoke. The room will feel like a giant magician’s hat -- you’re never quite sure where the rabbit will hop out from, or if it will be a rabbit at all. Put your hands on girls you’ve never met. Take one home, only to learn that she is the best friend of Julie or Lydia. She will leave you in your dorm, completely naked and utterly alone.
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When your mother calls, tell her everything is fine. Ask about her work, about home, about her perennials. She’ll tell you everything is fine. When your father calls, he will ask why you’re failing half your classes. Tell him you are choosing a major by process of elimination. Ask him if he’s eaten any flies lately. Realize that dictators need a clear plan for successful world take-over. Try to think of a plan between parties. Ask Orville for help on a Thursday night. He will take out a legal pad, a calligraphy pen, and a six-pack of Budweiser’s. The two of you will wake up Friday morning with very little recollection of the previous night. Check the legal pad. You’ll find one word, underlined, scribbled largely in all caps. The word will be “Muppets.” What the fuck is wrong with us? Orville will ask, laughing. Tell him: nothing. Tell him: everything.
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Interstate 43: Collected Images
Jehan Segal
gradient nights give way to gridlock mornings lines on the road are increasingly more neon I am in the passenger seat. “STOP FROM YOUR THROAT your radio station breeds black holes souls in fluid chunks rise from gendered dead your voice echoes through stereo. “ATE FIRE IN PAINT HOTELS the grimy rest stop with pink lights is liminal we pass tattooed graffiti mimicking abandoned roller coasters we pass faces illuminated only by telephone screens. “MY OMNIVOROUS LINES AND MUST trees flash by, chopping parallel roads like a butcher’s knife your voice is echolocation, I can see road signs that quote Whitman and Ginsberg instead of directions. “BLOWN BY THOSE HUMAN SERAPHIM, THE SAILORS passing cars are easily mistaken for UFOs tornadoes break up billboards advertising hitmen you peel back your skin and show me your bones “THIS GRASS IS VERY DARK TO BE FROM 30
we pass salt lakes with floating corpses and storm clouds on a planet 15 feet about us you reach your hand into its shadowed pine trees “WHERE YOU BANG ON THE CATATONIC blue lights float above our skylight, chasing our car, scraping over the sound of your voice your hands have never been so soft as when coated in ink “CORPSE WITH ITS DABBLED HAIR, I NOTE in the mirror, you adjust your makeup, mascara dripping with liquid gold. I pay the toll booth with promises of bullet-shell lipstick cases “TO DROP ANGELIC BOMBS THE HOSPITAL we stop the car on a ley line. you give me a ring of wormholes, fresh lemons drop onto the dust around my feet. “TRANSLUCENT MOULD OF ME IT moles grow eyes slowly, and see a cloud-soaked earth. the engine spews sterling silver dreamcatchers I pour latex over our shoulders. “DREAMT AND MADE INCARNATE we leave the car to be overgrown by phosphorescence. our silkworm blanket falls to the moss, ghosts lie parallel to our sleeping forms. 31
“TUBERCULAR SKY SURROUNDED BY ORANGE the canyons above our dreams are filled with toxic waste the canyons above our dreams are filled with chlorine I think that I kissed you (but you are urban myth).
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Black Spaces in the Picture
Alexa Curnutte
Dad probably wasn't there. Our dark porch lingers in the camera flash. Blue painted slats, red trimming, brick steps. I imagine Mom took the snapshot. My brother, Chance, and I grin down at the bright ray of light. He's Buzz Lightyear. I'm a fairy. Our cheeks are round balls of dough, red veins blushing in the cool air. My right hand clutches a plastic white wand, glimmering plastic strings shooting out the top in tired rainbows. I'm two or three, Chance four or five. His mask is crooked and my ears stick out like broken eggshells. If you look carefully you can see Chance still stands oddly on one leg- the foot, born clubbed, still struggles to be normal after surgeries and casts. Mine have already started to bow slightly in the creamy pink sweatpants. Our hair looks like duckling fluff. For most Halloweens Dad was deployed. Christmases too. Easters. Birthdays. Above the 'Take 1!' sign, hiding in the shadows, is a grimacing pumpkin mask on the door. It's square white teeth and shiny blank eyes hover in the spaces between color and mystery. It looks like it's trying to sneak up on us. Childhood felt like that a lot. We learned to be afraid of what every phone call or knock on the door had in store for us. Anything sudden. Life hovered in the background. We made it through summers sucking smooth watermelon seeds and running to Wal-Mart, carts full of frozen beef and Band33
Aids. I was an army daughter among army sons. In North Carolina you wait for the sky to roll out it's dark blue eyelashes, the smell of grey rain coming down cool and fat. Our cheeks stung and peeled. Mud itched at our ankles, our knees. If you didn't come in for dinner bleeding you were doing it wrong. Somebody's father came home and you couldn't see them for a day or two but the grocery store cake lasted in the fridge for a while. You wait. Leaves died and made the air smoky and sweet. Fall came and Chance started kindergarten. I stayed home with Mom. She was raising us on hell and a prayer. We ate homemade bread and peanut butter, rubbed dandelions on our hands. She cut her blonde hair short and carried me on her hip. I was learning that being tough meant keeping up. Looking back I think those were the bravest years of our lives; though bravery in my family is certainly no small thing, it's not as big as it seems. Every year the three of us found costumes, filled jack-o'-lantern bowls with candy, and hung up Dollar Tree decorations without Dad. We'd ask about him- Mom, where's Daddy? But we weren't allowed to know that. He was a fish on the end of our line, fighting against the waters, waiting to be pulled up into the air. Somehow God's grace kept Mom strong and pliable- a clear line tugging unceasingly. Every day was a new decision. Your leave your family to fight; you become a single mother for a
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while and pray it won't become permanent; you stop being afraid of the dark. Then that call would come. Our car raced down freeways in the dead of night, blue paint beaming under the mute streetlights. And there he was. I was always surprised by his face. Something in his dark skin, flat nose- the harsh light in his hazel eyes. I could never remember the camouflage man that got back into the car with us. Photographs don't speak baritone, don't have skin that radiates heat like a desert sun. I can see our kitchen dimly, his towering body slumped against the kitchen counter. Chance and I asked him things. In lamplight that tossed black orbs on the ceiling we had to learn about death. And sacrifice. This odd, rather large man that smelled foreign, with the bruised eyes and cracked fingers taught me what it meant it to be gone forever. I don't know why I'm talking about this. I don't know why I can't separate the right from the wrong- different noises in the background like radio static, his laughter, him telling me good night. Some of it seems kind of wrong. I can't remember him in my life any younger than eight years old. Of course, I don't have the heart to tell him that. Clearly I see the hospital beds and the wrinkles near Mom's lips and the hope in my heart that they were from sun and not pain. I see the dark mass of shrapnel in thigh, the
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size of a thumb nail. In my head there's wet sobs coming from bedrooms doors. But I can't see him. One thing I do understand perfectly well is emptiness. The feeling of Mom's hands cupping the camera and pressing the button, the flash touching particles of light and gluing their color down onto paper. Something lost. He kept this photo in a leather pocket album on all his trips. In the back in a folded up letter I wrote when I was small. In blue pen- 'I miss you'. He sent it to me when I left home and went north. So what I can tell you about my family is this- he always came back. War is child's play. Little boys and orange tipped guns darting against the burnt bark of the pines, triggers sticky with lemonade. I'm still trying to understand this man I'm telling you about. He sleeps some four hours a night, has blank ink sunk deep into his brown skin, insists that in this world there is good and there is evil. That that is all there is. Mom held my hand when my tonsils were choking me. She watched Chance spend his first year of life in a cast. Dad lingered in the foreground and Jesus, he did everything he could. More, if you know. We were brave so we could love each other better. I wouldn't change the family I have. Helicopters still pass overhead and we feel a familiar weight on our shoulders.
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God knows better if my father cries. I like to think he does. Maybe when he got this photograph he let his head fall into his hands just like I did. It’s easier to think about him that way- seeing similarities between us, real or not. He’s an earth giant with thunder in his heart. It’s possible I’m such a strange creature in his eyes as well. Either way we’ve made it this far. My family has moved past the echoes of things we’ll never get back. All that’s left is innocent and blurry; my mother finding the strength to put away the camera and head down the street with us, hand in hand, courageous.
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CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: Sarah Arnett is a junior Creative Writing major from Castle Rock, Colorado. Although she generally tends to write poetry, she has also enjoyed experimenting with fiction, creative nonfiction, prose poetry, and other hybrid genres this year. She hopes to someday find a career that is both enjoyable and financially stable-- she isn’t quite sure what that is yet, but she’s hoping to find out soon. She was first published last October in The Red Wheelbarrow, and was grateful to have the opportunity to edit its December 2014 edition. Alexa Curnutte is a sophomore creative writing major at Interlochen Arts Academy. She is from Jackson Springs, North Carolina. She has been published in the Red Wheelbarrow, and is the recipient of a Gold Key, Silver Key, and two Honorable Mentions in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. She loves a warm evening on her front porch to write. She's long been inspired by classic literature; Harper Lee, Leo Tolstoy and the Brontë sisters endlessly fascinate her. Ray Kearns is a fourteen year old sophomore from The Villages, Florida. This is their first year in the writing program and they’ve been writing seriously for a over four years. Ray is mainly a poet and this is their first time in the Red Wheelbarrow. When they're not writing Ray can usually be found reading pieces like, ‘The Radioactive Boy,’ ‘The Aftermath,’ and, ‘I’d Like it more if I could Win at it.’ Ray has been awarded three silver keys from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for their previous poems such as: ‘Inky Chains’ and ‘I am Not a Woman.’ Outside of the artistic world Ray is most passionate about the science world, specifically things like chemistry and quantum physics. Grace Montgomeryis a junior at Interlochen Arts Academy with -3 plans for her life. That said, she hopes to not be homeless or live in her parents' basement as she continues to wander around and attempt to find the meaning of life. More notably, Grace is the recipient of two Silver Keys in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and has been published in Epigraph, and Vending Machine Press, among other places.
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Mickayla Noel is a second year junior, creative writing major at Interlochen Arts Academy. She is from Alexandria, Virginia. She has not been published in any literary journal yet, but in late 2010 and 2013, was chosen to perform her original poems, My Fathers Expressions and Drinking Glasses at the Kennedy Center and Lincoln Theatre in Washington, DC. Her favorite place to write is outside, but since coming to cold Michigan has been at midnight with a lot of blankets and Nutella next to her. She likes to listen to J.Cole, Taylor Swift, and G-Eazy for inspiration. Angelica Parker is a poet, a bookworm, Tumblr-addict and avid ice cream eater. She is a sophomore majoring in the wonderful art of Creative Writing and resides in the microscopic nowhere town Manton, within the peninsula state of Michigan. She has been published in the Red Wheelbarrow (obviously) and online for Teen Ink Literary Magazine. Angelica is a recipient of two honorable mentions, three Silver Keys and a Gold Key in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. She was also a first-place winner in regionals for the Patriot Pen Essay Contest. Brittany Sando is a freshman creative writer from Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. In 2013, she received third place in the Philadelphia Young Playwrights national competition, which extends from grades 6-12. Along with being the chief editor and writer of her middle school yearbook, she has also been published in Red Wheelbarrow twice. She prefers to write in her room where its quiet and dark. Jehan Segal is a senior high school student at Interlochen Arts Academy, where they study creative writing. They grew up in the Netherlands but currently live in Traverse City, Michigan. They primarily write poetry but have developed interests in non-fiction and hybrid genres. Additionally to writing, they’re interested in music, visual art, social justice, ecology, journaling, and taking care of their succulents. They have no idea what they want to do in their future but are sure that it will be radical and involve tie-dye.
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