The Public Garden by IsabellaMedina

Issue Nยบ2 1

Isabella Medina Editor in Chief Creative Director Photographer Madeleine Edwards Editor at Large, Contributing Writer, Dedicatee

Dylan Tibbetts Executive Managing Editor Delaney McLemore Head Writer Calli Layton International Correspondent Amanda Filloy Sharp Mentor, Advisor, Contributing Writer Ann Corey & Luis Medina Coordinators of Editorial Events

THE PUBLIC GARDEN Dedicado a ti y tu jardĂn,

en el cual estas cosechando tus deseos.

02. Masthead 2 Contributing Staff 5 Note from the Editor 6 Word from our International Correspondent 9

Jairo Medina 24 Miranda Acree 28 Madeleine Edwards 29, 30

(Letters)

Regina Kurapova 30

Dear XXXX, 11

Isabella Medina 30

To You, Standing 14

Andy Vaughn 31

At the Edge of the Trailer Park 16 Hermanas 22

(Poems)

Contributing Staff MADELEINE EDWARDS Our Editor, Personality at Large, and this issue’s Dedicatee merits recognition, not only for her deftly crafted poetry but also for her editorial support, without which, this issue would probably look like shite. Ms. Edwards is currently studying Marine Etymology, with an emphasis in Verbs, at Scripps College. She is, in her own words, ‘in constant state of disaster, but will edit for pizza or friendship.’ DELANEY MCLEMORE Our Head Writer, Ms. McLemore is a returning Oregon native after graduating from Marshall University with a Bachelors of Arts in Creative Writing, emphasis in Poetry and Creative Non-Fiction. Her writing focuses on the memories we’re collectively forgetting and The Real Housewives franchise. Her cats edit her poems. CALLI LAYTON Ms. Layton lives in London and is studying Culture, Criticism and Curation at Central Saint Martins with an emphasis in Abstract Expressionist Selfie Composition. She has a passion for free museum exhibits and the tiny bags of pretzels they give out on airplanes. Ms. Layton is a jewel in our literary repertoire and we are overjoyed to have her on for this project as our International Correspondent. DYLAN TIBBETTS Our Executive Managing Editor, Mr. Tibbetts currently studies Interior Architecture, with an emphasis in Neoclassical Marqueterie at the University of Oregon. He likes piña coladas and getting caught in the rain, he’s not much into health food, he is into champagne. AMANDA FILLOY SHARP Ms. Filloy Sharp continues to play her hand close to her vest. You think you know a person, then you find out she once worked for the CIA and has a criminal record. Then you check your sources, realize they are Ms. Filloy, and begin wondering all over again: passionate high school Spanish teacher, or witness relocation program? We still don’t know, but whatever the case may be, we are exceptionally lucky to have received her contributions and guidance.

This issue, bouquets and the letter to a friend, never sent.

Isabella Medina, EIC 6

THE PUBLIC

Word

From our International Correspondent

I salvaged a tiny poem I wrote when I was tiny drunk and thinking about my tiny friends which reads as follows: “You were never Some thing Made of eggshells and wet paint You’re spit and sinew You haven’t slept a day in your life.”

don’t think about it too hard because it won’t make any sense, but I think the sound of it is something empowering I would like to sticky note to the hearts of my nearest and dearest. If I had time I would put the dozens of postcards I’ve ferreted away (a habit I’ve had since childhood) to good use, recording pedestrian observations of the cuteness and crassness of life in the city. Little voyeurisms that don’t necessarily merit sharing but have been earmarked in my memory.

Calli Layton

itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s about the night you stayed and left, and then about another night a long time later. 11

D Dear XXXX,

Now that we’re kind of friends I thought I’d tell you this - it’s about the night you stayed and left, and then about another night a long time later. The night you left, it was still dark I guess, you set a doll (a tiny wooden girl holding a machine gun) and a bottle of half-drunk whiskey on my desk. The whiskey was something cheap, American, maybe Old Crow? Maybe. Anyway, you left them (I don’t know if you remember doing so); I found them when I woke up, and at the time I thought the tiny doll was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. I marveled at her intricate indigenous clothing with the Zapatista mask over her face, and I loved the contrast with the crude miniature machine gun. I cherished the doll and the whiskey that was a sign, a meaningful deposit, your sure oath that you’d return. In retrospect I imagine you were just cleaning out your backpack before traveling, but then it was a most inspired gift, a perfect ellipsis, we were (I knew it) to be continued. I kept both things for a long time, not daring to open the whiskey. (This is true.) The doll stayed on my desk, and the whiskey I kept in my underwear drawer, at the back where I would forget about it. I moved it from apartment to apartment, keeping it at hand, thinking you’d show up and I would have it. It would be waiting, and you’d come in and we’d sit and chat, and then casually I’d get out

the whiskey and we’d drink it. This would be proof. It would be proof that I understood you, that we spoke the same language, that I alone was “the one.” I’m sure you remember the early moments of our every reencounter – the tension always so high it would make my teeth hurt and my stomach clench. I wanted nothing more than to just be yours. So I kept the whiskey for a long time. It was four or five years later (can that be possible?), and there was a party. I had not seen you in all that time, though it felt less than a week to me. Somehow I’d become popular and more attractive, was socially tough enough to behave truly boldly. I was not intimidated by much, and I yearned for you to turn up and see that about me. At any rate, there was a party – some guys I worked with at that Italian restaurant hosted it in a house they were just about to move out of, and they invited everyone. I took the whiskey out of my underwear drawer and put it in my purse. I can’t tell you why. Why never before then? Why did my devotion waver on that particular night? I don’t know. I was tired of waiting, sure. I figured it was really only a bottle of cheap booze, not even the whole bottle. Why be superstitious about it? What difference would it make? There are a lot of fuzzy images from that evening. Most of them are average – drinking, cigarettes, people inside, people outside. The buzzing noise of party. Someone found a bb gun and a fairly short search produced bb’s. I watched friends take turns shooting at a space above the couch and a constellation of bb-sized perforations bloomed in the drywall. A girl peed in the kitchen sink and everyone thought it was hilarious. I didn’t know her. I kept my coat on

the whole night because it was so cold in the house. I drank most of the whiskey. I shared some of it. The head dinner chef from the restaurant came late, and he was stinking drunk. He was a deadly alcoholic, a skinny Yakima Indian called Jep. Eventually we had to load him into the prep-chef ’s Mercury Topaz to take him home. I drove. I waited in the car while Andrew helped Jep to his bed. I’d been there before, and I didn’t want to see it again: a room strewn with newspapers, a bed, a TV on the floor - nothing else, not even a refrigerator. While I waited, a car pulled up behind me and I tried to maneuver the Mercury over and back, to get out of the way. I hit some parked cars; I’ve never known how badly. I’m pretty sure I did serious damage. Andrew came back and I drove slowly to his house. I didn’t want to go there, didn’t want to sleep with him, but I did. The next day we walked to a coffee shop, awkwardly making conversation. I went home and sat on my bed and cried. I hated you, was angry at you, puzzled by the feeling of betrayal. Later I realized those tiny dolls are just tourist junk. I found out they sell them everywhere, that you used to buy them by the bag-full to support the indigenous community, and that you gave them to everyone as souvenirs. I’ve never forgiven you. We’re kind of friends now, yes, but I want you to know I’ll never forgive you, and I wish I could make you feel what I felt for all that long, empty time.

A ma nda F illoy Sha r p

To You, Standing

We forget the imposition of our race that mother’s blessing of birth which holds its subjects desperate for lightour skin lies open weeping in reminder, with the red kisses of blood raised on unprepared ankles, pricked by thorns and brambles, that evidence of a trail’s reformation, the imprinted pathway pressing back, the gentle repair of nature from our blasted booted feet. Miles from the closest town, the buzz that shuddered through my hands and teeth with every passing car has settled beneath the still air entering me, like burn healing under aloe, the cool clean I feel safe within an Oregon-only moment, the fallen trees marking their own graves, death by snow’s weight, each needle bleaching slowly, the copper creasing the spindly fir stage - Christmas clustered and over the hill a clearcut lies like a crime scene, the skyline’s new shape leaving the locals restless. But outside of this small peace? In the lightning crackle of my heart healing, moss crawling, knitting together the tears rent by deaths that towered higher than a tree’s, I am ignoring you - all of you - in Ferguson and Times Square, throwing with a sneer the tear gas cannisters hammering out of a policeman’s handsTrayvon is standing silently in the corner of my mind watching with eyes too grey to read as he exhales the smoke of his honest exhaustion, his killer a caricature for our American audience, clad in pearls and the poltergeist of ignorance. I haven’t forgotten that this shaded grove (where my fear dissolved with a bite of apple) was a luxury of birth, my connection to the earth of this area, nightly dissolved in bike rides and bus windows, dancing in alleys and leading me to stranger places, mountain hollers populated with pear trees and bees. My graceless ascent into adulthood couldn’t overwhelm my armor against that breeze which seems to follow me westward, clearing the fog of five years covering shaking hands with cigarette smolder.

My home is a whale’s throat singing, its steady echo heard in my veins and syncing as I blink away the last tendril of smoke. In the past, my wandering heart would hop any number of trains away from home at the first sign of trouble elsewhere the kind of trouble worth writing about where the boundaries of what make us human seem so limitless and intertwined, holy taking on a meaning justified but those easy leaps from faith to frenzy have slowly leached away my desire to leave now that my trunks have been placed safe in a home where the memories held can stay silent another day in the night only do they whisper and ask me to live with them again, to strap in my pack that slight story of my past deaths and carry the dead to their next resting place only to wake and find the whispers turned shout, celebrating their freedom with a swig of whiskey and their forearms cigarette-burned. As they frolic, the memories of those outer brutalities in Ferguson, in Florida, forever amen are left in the dust of the tracks where Jim Crow leans grinning, picking his teeth with his nails. The living are the reason I keep going. I come back from the memories and the burnt henna needles are sliding down the hill in waves with every step I charge forward. A cherubic man, ringleted in gold, leads me away from the mausoleum to the winter’s storm as I prepare to depart from heaven and him. You are waiting out there for me, calling. I’m ready. I’m coming.

Delaney McLemore

Edge of the Trailer Park

At the

By Delaney McLemore

This is about the shotgun wedding I heard you had in Reno and makes me wonder about what you’re doing now, if you still sleep every night with your husband and child (children? are you multiply blessed?) resting under the same protective cloud your breath makes, or if that same air is left making cold cumulus in the night, hands gnarled with the same desperate drunk grasps that have marked my bare-earth fingers, digging deeper, clawing downward and sometimes aimlessly at the sky, howling at the moon. Are you out there in the same night, under the same stars? I’m listening to the Holy Bible on my computer but it’s not what you think. Not that book we never had read to us but the band, staccato disruption to this letter to you, bringing me back to the moment I am in and not those shared with you. The light is green through my door, reflected off the vines and leaves laced with spider-web glint, and I am looking at our past time through that same verdant glaze. You are somewhere in this same state of ours, green with the rain that is slowly coming back. I wonder if you’ve ever left, if you’ve come back, if you have the same crushing sense of defeat when you look at what we believed we could be and where instead we stand.

The light is green through my door, reflected off the vines and leaves laced with spiderweb glint, and I am looking at our past time through that same verdant glaze. You are somewhere in this same state of ours, green with the rain that is slowly coming back. I wonder if you’ve ever left, if you’ve come back, if you have the same crushing sense of defeat when you look at what we believed we could be and where instead we stand.

What was your dream? I can’t remember now. It was so long ago, but if I close my eyes there are the dust clouds at the edge of the parking lot in front of your house, so

close to mine, but how did we meet? Children have no control over their connection and make no plans of their own. Our parents must have created our civil union. The bowling alley? I don’t know. What did you pretend to be out on the hot concrete wanderland of the street you called home? When I close my eyes and look through the dust, there were no babies at 20, no Reno elopements, no small-town addresses. That thick air, cracking our lips and knuckles, staining our ankles, was a fantastic land of pop star loves (primarily Hanson) and being stars, living far away from the shrews we called lovingly mother.

When I close my eyes and look through the dust, there were no babies at 20, no Reno elopements, no small-town addresses. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe all of the idealized lives we created with our Ken and Barbie dolls was practice for a life less lived, kept locked within a sadness I imagine finding in women whose lives have been so different than mine, as I push against taking one for the team, settling down and getting married and having those babies that anchor a wealthy man to me like a kid to country. That isn’t how I imagine you define your life, but it’s not you who polishes my disappointed mask, the look of discontent with all around me permanently fixed the moment my plane, train, or truck rolls over that state line, home again home again, immediately sinking into my bones the way bark lines trees, a protective layer from the barbs I fear coming, my small-town’s sounds echoing the childhood resentment I carried like a hatchet on my shoulder, the deference to difference that pushed me away from my small Western World. Coming home will always feel like a breath not taken, smothering and comfortable. The grey air pillows me in, letting me rest into a motionless, amorphous slumber. Maybe the dream of the nineties now so easily dreamed about in Portland is actually just the in and out of a morphine kiss, boundaries lost as we live without direction, acceptance first of all those empty dreams.

You define that dream for me, mother-friend, young lady who I had hoped to be like when I grew up - but the difference between us became a slimmer year with every rotating day. It was you I missed so much in my mid-childhood move, you who defined those years before my hometown was defined, Full-o-meth, Oaree-gone. When my mom was married, when I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t bleed with every new moon, when singing along with you at the bowling alley on Friday nights was better than any other adventure I could dream. Before my dreams had left the dust and became the concrete. Where are you now, mother-friend, bleeding in the night?

AT T H E ED G E O F T H E T R A I LER PA R K Delaney McLemore

hermanas A

ndrea was not so much my sister as she was my mirror, and my timepiece.She stuck with me,like a heavy metronome sewn to my lapel. Keeping tempo with me, while reminding me that in other incarnations, I could have been morena. She had proud Colombian shoulders, an avalanche of dark hair, and a smile that could be broad, and very beautiful, but more often was politely fake. Her confidence and dignified sense of entitlement made her irresistible, and frustrating. She always had the scent of her family’s home. Something like her mami’s felt blankets, and their clean carpet, and their dog. The ambiance of that house was static: Andrea’s beauty products in the bathroom, her toothpaste leaking on the counter. Her mother, in varying stages of belleza and preparation, her father, in sus propios varying stages of casual businéss. Her brother, Dani, in his cuarto, or watching TV downstairs. Daniel, square-jawed, jovencito, always falling asleep everywhere. The sounds were unvarying too, when I’d knock at the front door, (dog barking) Andrea: MILI, YA! SHH! DANI THE DOOR. DANIEL! We’d go up to her room, I sit on her floor reading magazines until her Dad would come in to calmly remind her of chores with that extra Colombian syllable of sing song in the diminutive,

Mamita, Si señor?

daughters: skinny niñas with long hair and sweet faces. I wondered what that house would And again, be like for them. Would they leave their shoes at the bottom of the Andrea, porfavor… stairs, or at the front door? Would Si señor. they affectionately pick off bits of the stucco walls, or would they know Then there was la mamá calling from better? Would they, when their downstairs that dinner was ready, parents threw loud parties, decide to sneak plates of chicken upstairs Andrea? to avoid besando every guest as they SEÑORA? arrived? Would their niñez be our (…) same walls, our same bedrooms, our I can’t hear hersame stove? Or would they move YA VOY UN MOMENTO out in a few years? I guess, to me, our best moments were Other days we might not have a in that house. sit down meal. I’d follow Andrea An afternoon when she is driving me downstairs: her, descalza, in activewear home in the middle of a school day and pulling her affluence of hair into a letting me sleep off a migraine on her messy bun, me, all hands-in-pockets, couch, tucking me in and everything. asking, is this bowl of fruit fake, or can An evening when she is showing me I eat it? some two chords she’s learned on the She’d open the fridge, guitar and trying to sing me “Brown You hungry? We have grapes, gogurt, Eyed Girl.” arroz con pollo, pasta… are you thirsty? A day almost a decade ago, when Papi puedes hacer un choqueque para they’re first moving in, moving back sabela, porfiz? to Oregon after living for three years Choqueque was the childish slang we in Puerto Rico. It’s August, the whole used for Nesquik chocolate milk, family is in long sleeves, their heat on something that could never exist full blast, still transitioning from the in my household. Like cable tv, or Caribbean climate. I’m sitting on her makeup kits, or the cheap parmesean porch, sweating. I’m annoyed with cheese that came in cylindrical-green her, like always, but I’m happy too. containers, the drink was something I She’s come home, and it feels like we secretly coveted. In my mind the house remember each other. was a treasure trove of brand name snacks and perfumed hair products, waiting to be discovered. When Andrea graduated, the whole family left Oregon for good and moved to Florida. I briefly met the family who would move into their house, a couple with two young

H ER M A N A S Isabella Medina

Querido,

Q U ER I D O Bogotá, julio 22 de 2014 Querido Jesus: Hace muchos años esta carta perdió su rumbo, no en una bolsa de un cartero distraído ni en la profundidad del mar debido a una fuerte tormenta. No, fue en mi mente que se ha extraviado, en una maraña de retorcidos recovecos llamados memorias. Fue en una época en que no existía la Internet, cuándo aún nos saludábamos mirando al rostro y con un fuerte abrazo y no mirando fijamente una pantalla de un dispositivo de mano, parecido a un espejo, pero que en lugar de reflejar nuestro rostro parece absorber el alma mientras nos aleja de los seres queridos. Fue una época en que aún se disfrutaba de rodar colina abajo en precarios carruajes hechos en casa con sobrantes de madera, cuándo aún era bien visto y permitido trepar un árbol en busca de deliciosas cerezas, una época en la cual los niños, nosotros, podían salir con tranquilidad a las calles de lo que entonces se llamaba “el barrio”. Durante muchos días y años compartimos juegos, risas, caídas, llanto, abrazos, peleas, caminatas, cantos desafinados, historias de amores inalcanzables, pinturas en las paredes y almuerzos preparados por nuestras madres, en casa, con sabor de hogar. Fue en esa época en que escribir no era tan necesario

para nosotros porque sabíamos todo uno del otro, nos contábamos todo... Bueno, casi todo. Fue pocos años después de dejar el colegio, durante mis inicios en el trabajo y cuando me sentía importante por tener unas monedas en el bolsillo, ganadas con mucho esfuerzo y dedicación, cuándo dejamos de contarnos todo y se fue haciendo necesario escribir ésta carta que nunca fue, por tiempo, por olvido, por no encontrar ese recoveco en mi mente en el momento justo. Durante esos días sufriste en silencio hacia mi, una terrible y dolorosa enfermedad que te separó, en menos de una semana, de mi mundo terrenal y laborioso para llevarte a un plano espiritual en el que aún habitas, al menos en mi mente, con una paz y tranquilidad envidiables. Estuve trabajando mucho cuando supe de tu enfermedad y me prometí ir a visitarte tan pronto tuviera tiempo, pero fue el tiempo el que ganó la carrera e impidió que ese encuentro se realizara. Al llegar del trabajo unos días después recibí la noticia de tu deceso. La mente quedó en blanco, la culpa sobrevino, el dolor me lleno por completo sin dejar cabida a ningún otro sentimiento. 25

Te acompañé, pero ya estabas ausente, te acompañé pero ya no había sonrisa en tus labios, te acompañé pero no disfrute de tu compañía. Ahora en mi cumpleaños 52, sin pluma en mano, te escribo moviendo un dedo en una danza ridícula sobre el dispositivo móvil que consume almas y seguido de un trazo azul, la carta que nunca fue, tratando de decir lo que nunca se dijo: “Haces falta amigo, mucha falta. Espero que al encontrarme contigo haya podido realizar lo que tu no pudiste por tan temprana partida y que aquello que haga sea digno de ser contado en otra carta, en su debido momento y sin extravío y así poder vivir eternamente, en papel, en circuitos electrónicos o mejor aún en la mente y corazón de seres distantes y queridos. Un abrazo Jesús! Tu amigo del alma Jairo”

J A I RO M ED I N A 26

“Ahora en mi cumpleaños 52, sin pluma en mano, te escribo moviendo un dedo en una danza ridícula sobre el dispositivo móvil que consume almas y seguido de un trazo azul, la carta que nunca fue, tratando de decir lo que nunca se dijo: Haces falta amigo, mucha falta.” Querido Jesus, Jairo Medina

(POEMS) Miranda Acree

HE/HIM He reentered the car wielding a box Riddled with oil from a seeping pizza. Clutching Sierra Nevada Ale by a thin cardboard handle A bottleneck grazed my ankle as he set them on the floor, The shock from the chilled glass was less than next When he took my hand in his. I admired the single brass key Igniting the engine. The golden glow of a traffic light gleaming behind his head, Cast the silhouette of a chiseled jaw setting up as if a rigid skyline. As the traffic lights changed from crimson to a hue of corn fields at dusk, Ruby lights danced across his lips and Golden flecks streaked straw hair. Overlooking the glowing emerald dashboard Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m admitting I glanced at the speedometer, He drove under the speed limit, but it didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t seem to matter.

T R A I N H O P P ER I wish I could reach for your black greasy palm Running to hop rusting trains, Squatting in ghostly abandoned shacks and drowsing in the cold desert air. To explore winding splitting roads Stopping at shabby diners plastered with dusty neon signs And cheap roach motels. There would be stores, markets, and country stores You could pick out a pair of tinted sunglasses, To shade the world into a colored hue. I wish to drive with you in the passenger seat of my beaten-up car Holding my right hand or thigh and a crinkled folding map of America.

When I sweat and I can smell my perfume coming from my pores. When it rains during the summer and I am drinking hot coffee with a cold sandwich, or when my purchases get put in a brown paper sack at the store. I feel like a fucking queen fallen from the throne, retaining her dignity. This morning I was an animal. Early, without makeup, eating plain eggs I worked myself until sweat dripped down my back.

Now I am ascending the food chain. Excerpt M.M.E.

(Excerpt) I felt that my roots were digging deeper and deeper there. Every day they were churning earth, scratching down, tangling with each other -making it impossible to get out. One day, in the chaos of the thing, I realized suddenly quietly. uneventfully. I’m ready to go.

M.M.E.

Ex-spiration, 9/1/2014

(Excerpt)

A light-year has passed since our passions have exploded into separate realms of space.

I find one of your long dark hairs on my jacket. I hold it up to my ear and gently pluck it like a violin string, This is what your body sounds like when it is very, very, quiet, I think. twang, twang.

Now we float like Pluto; Our souls have long ceased twisting one another, fading in and out through the other’s life.

What are you doing? But what continuously breaks my soul against the ocean’s rocks, Is if the moonshine falls just right, I can still see my stars in your eyes.

Nothing, I say, trying to scratch my ear casually. You give me a look. I stare across the room and make a disinterested face.

Regina Kurapova

I.M.

I wrote you a letter A letter unread To share the alarms That went off in my head

Now that you’re gone My words they don’t matter My warnings unheeded Your faithful have scattered

I couldn’t let that happen Your life long forfeit So I stood quietly by And felt no regret

You’re doing it wrong You’ll miss out on so much You push her too hard She’ll flinch from your touch

She’ll never feel pity For the old Mob Boss It’s everyone’s gain And only your loss

You asked how to fix it You said you’d repent But I held on to my letter A letter unsent

She needs her close friends Not pitted against Standing beside her Stop driving a fence

Perhaps you’d still be here If you’d just read my letter Thrown out your old self Became something better

My message was pleading Urgent and true She has to stop fighting For her, Not for you

But don’t you remember? You hurt me as well Stole all my friends And left me a shell

Andy Vaughn 31