Loose Tooth Magazine Vol. III: Déjà Vu

loose tooth literary & visual arts

“déjà vu” / may 2021

featured artists ryan purcell casper molina ruchi acharya rachael powles ania majsterek joe raguzin elbridge luther amanda r. livingston sean pollock Cover art illustration by Ryan Purcell 2

Loose Tooth Magazine. Volume III.

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Loose Tooth Readers, As summer approaches and the sky gets a bit less grey, I wish you sunsoaked mornings and peace. I can’t wait to see friends, share wine, and hug.

I had a problem really getting started with this issue. Haphazard thought, doubt, and the incessant need to feel more accomplished (about something, anything) set in like wet cement. When talking to friends and family, there is an air of hope that circulates with vaccine distribution ramping up--but still, things feel very cloudy.

Maybe that’s due to the American ignorance we all face, knowing that while our country is making progress, others like India are facing the widest spread of covid deaths since the beginning of the pandemic. It makes me feel lost and guilty.

If anyone would like to donate to India (or find other ways to help) to aid in distributing vaccines and save lives, please go to this shared doc link with resources and funds: https://docs.google.com/document/d/ 10ca5YH5YUtp7Qe63sVNX1SlepQcvzc4RCwLhMBvTJyE/edit Keep setting standards for our leaders. Keep making calls. Continue fighting the good fight, because we can only do it together. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this collection of art. Thank you for being patient with me and the process of production. You don’t know how much it means to know someone out there is flipping through these pages.

Thank you sincerely for reading Loose Tooth, Brianna Pulver, Founder

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Joe Raguzin, Photography

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Casper Molina, Photography

Ania Majsterek, Photography

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Family Trees

by Rachael Powles

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he ink on the brittle pages of the old Bible twists into a family tree whose leaves have known electric shocks and barred windows.

Bound in leather and stained with the blood of widows and gold star mothers who built glass palaces from rubble.

This book holds stories of women who hid tears behind migraines and panic behind asthma, held together by blackened, rotting roots that wouldn’t die.

Roots that lead to me.

I come from mad women.

I trace their names, I’ve known them, watched them all my life.

So when it was my turn to go mad I knew just how to do it.

Softly, but with force.

Like a leaf blowing in a storm.

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Elbridge Luther, Print

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Joe Raguzin, Photography

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Casper Molina, Photography

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seeing my mom

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by Amanda R. Livingston

sometimes when i look at myself in pictures i see my mom. i see the smooth curve of her cheeks when she smiles and her thin hair and her eye crinkles. i see the little bump at the end of her nose. i see her long willowy limbs and i see her lumpy stomach. people who knew my mom when she was younger told me she was beautiful. i saw her in my hair until i chopped it off. sometimes i see a person who refuses to let go of things that shouldn’t matter anymore. i see a person with a heart full of hate– a person who only knows how to look at things one way. i see a person who can be fun and who can laugh and dance and be light and loving but who can also snap and turn on someone in a matter of seconds. i see someone who has isolated her family and friends. i see a person who is alone. and then i squeeze my eyes together and press my fingertips to the middle of my forehead and it’s like my brain pressed backspace a million times. the last time i saw my mother’s house was when I was 18. sometimes i think my memory is betraying me with what i remember about it. sometimes i think my memory is betraying me with what i remember about her. it’s easy to demonize someone in your head. those memories kind of take over. she sleeps on the same side of the bed, still, i imagine. she keeps important documents in the dresser drawer on the left side, the side she sleeps on. i know this because when she wasn’t home one day i dug through the piles and piles of stuff that make up her space, looking for answers. my mother never was one to throw anything away. she used to say that we weren’t allowed to have friends over to the house unless we cleaned, but she threw things everywhere. and my sister and i never had friends over as a result. she kept everything—papers and flyers and clothing

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tags and jeans that didn’t fit her anymore and movie tickets and pens from conferences and broadway playbills. everything was important. everything in that house was hers, including the things my sister and i owned. including my sister and i. there was a small static-y television with old fashioned antennae. I remember being 9 and lying in her porcelain blue and white sheets and watching high school musical with my mom and my sister on that television. i remember the nights when i was younger when i couldn’t sleep and she would let me lay with her, watching whose line is it anyway and full house until i closed my eyes and drifted off. i loved how it smelled in there. it smelled like musty perfume. it smelled like clean laundry. it smelled like the insides of old, glued together paperbacks. it smelled like how home was supposed to smell. everything was white or brown or blue. everything was covered in papers and books and old clothes. she had a large dresser, which is where the old television was perched, with stacks and stacks of papers. the television itself sat precariously on top of several books. and dressers lined the opposite wall, laundry thrown over the sides. the dressers were a deep mahogany brown, with gold plated, rusty handles that clicked when you opened them. this is what i can remember, anyway. my mom had her own bathroom and a walk in closet. her bathroom was littered with makeup, and makeup stains covered the blue carpet. before my dance performances, she would carefully paint my face with blush, foundation that didn’t match my skin tone because it was all she had and she was darker than me, and curl my straight lashes with a curler. i wanted to be beautiful like my mom was-- she had been prom queen in high school. i’d seen pictures of her from when she was younger, with hair all the way down to her waist, bangs pinned up to one side, her skinny chicken legs and her gawky posture. she was beautiful. her big eyes stared back at me in pictures. i tried to make myself look like her, but i had my dad’s long face and nose and pale skin. i resembled her a bit, but I would never be her. i remember one day in 7th grade when i decided i wanted to shave my legs for the first time. sneaking into her bathroom, i stole her pink razor from the shower and took it back with me. i cut open my entire leg that day, bleeding everywhere. she yelled at me, but helped me clean up the blood and bandaged my leg. “jesus christ, amanda. you have to be gentle.” she showed me how, and now i know. i scrunch memories like this up and push them towards the back.

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Ania Majsterek, Photography

Ryan Purcell, Illustration

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Joe Raguzin, Photography

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Brianna Pulver, Photography

I look outside the window and I can see spikes of green.

Did March blow away like December?

Are we ready for the whimsical spring?

arch

There’s no March on my calendar.

I wonder, Where does it go?

lM

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himsica

by Ruchi Acharya

I love to hear cuckoos calling, I love to hear the sound of life like freedom’s voice when a chain is broken, like white noise when snow turns into water.

I can see sunny clouds flying above me and the wildlife is soaring.

I won’t say goodbye to the spring season, and all it gives me, the pure form of joy.

For I am an old lady lonely and afraid to die.

But the sun’s rays give me strength to survive every day that passes by.

I will remember the month of March, the month that sang me a lullaby.

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Casper Molina, Photography

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Ryan Purcell, Illustration

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ASTROLOGY, SEX, AND SMOKE

A String of Disasters

by Sean Pollock

CW: mentions of rape, incest, mental illness, intrusive thoughts, death, drug use, neurological disorders.

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I’ve only had one long-term relationship in my adult life.

It’s embarrassing to admit, but it’s the truth. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve been in a series of romantic shipwrecks over the years, with some overarching themes. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, then I’ve definitely been driven insane when it comes to dating. I have to admit fault because I am certainly far from perfect. I’m fat, balding, I hate working out, I’m sarcastic, I’m almost always broke. I’m also a really faithful person, and I value space and autonomy in a relationship. I don’t like to impose on people. If I’m also being honest, I think I have trouble accepting love from others. Why that is, I could go into all day, but what’s

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important is you are what you attract. If you feel disastrous, you’re gonna attract a string of disasters. Here are some common feelings of deja vu that I’ve experienced in romantic expeditions.

— What would make you think I would be into you? Rejection is a constant in this life, and it is for this reason, I avoid making the first move whenever possible. This is definitely because I grew up fat, and no one really ever had a crush on me. I do not mean that in a self-pitying way, but in a factual way. There’s an old saying, “the worst someone can say is no!” as if someone saying “no” isn’t totally devastating. It can significantly hurt depending on how the “no” is delivered. Therefore, I am highly selective about making the first move—especially in person; because the worst they can say is no. Being told no is the worst. I simply do not enjoy rejection, and my general rule of thumb is: “if you never ask, you can never get rejected.” It is for this reason I keep several crushes close to my chest. There are so many people I’ve had crushes on who will never know I had one. I prefer it that way. The less you reveal, the more you appeal.

My freshman year, there was a really nerdy boy in one of my groups of friends who was a bit of a loner from a few towns over from me named Dan. He kinda looked like Zach Braff but uglier. He was gay, but he didn’t hang with any gay people or talk about it much, which by the way, is a giant red flag. I thought he was really cute for some reason, and it was hard to find gay men at school that wasn’t actors in

the theatre department. But I had no idea how to ask him out because I wanted to avoid being told no at all costs. My friends encouraged me to ask him out anyway, and so I did. I asked him to smoke with me at the end of the year. It was the last week of school. Therefore, I knew if things didn’t go as planned that there would be minimal fallout. I asked him if he’d wanted to go out with me, and he looked at me like a deer in headlights. He apologized if he ever gave me the impression he was into me. I said it was fine and tried to shrug it off. I cried for hours after.

I felt like a gigantic idiot.

At the end of my sophomore year, there was Sully. He had green eyes, blonde hair, and was really twinky. This is not usually a demographic of person I am attracted to. Still, there was something about him that was so charismatic which drew me to him. He was a Musical Theatre major. He had a very classically trained Traditional Broadway sounding voice—so much so that when he sang, it almost sounded like he was meant for a different decade—but he was anything but traditional. He once shared with me he wanted to give up acting and become a chocolatier in Hawaii. Once, he told me he was molested on a playground when he was a child and that he liked it, which is one of the darkest things I’ve heard someone admit. He sold pot to my friends, and one time we egged his neighbor’s house because they called the cops on them for having a party.

When I was studying at the National Theatre Institute that summer, I was having a challenging time. He was studying at their Musical Theatre Cabaret program. The few moments I got to sneak off and rip a bong with him in his car away from the same thirteen people I was seeing 24-7 may have single-handedly helped me from going off the deep end. He was going through a breakup and talked to me about it at length, and one time he sent me a Snapchat that said “fuck me” at 1:00 am. One day, before he was about to study abroad in London, I took two vodka shots with him in his room and mustered up the courage to ask to hook up. The words scarcely left my mouth; I was so petrified of asking. He sharply responded, “What would make you think I would be into you?” It was one of the most viscerally painful rejections I had ever received in my life. I had never been more convinced at that moment that I was the ugliest person alive. When I tried to leave because I felt awkward, he scoffed at me. Our relationship was never quite the same after that.

After I graduated, we reconnected for a short period. Still, we had a falling out because I drunkenly told Sully’s ex-boyfriend I thought he used people one night when I was lost in the sauce at Rockbar (oops).

When word got back to him, he didn’t want anything to do with me.

Three years later, I ran into him on two different train lines in the same week. It was the ultimate deja vu experience. On the second encounter, I approached him and said I felt it had to be fate that brought us back together. He told me I had hurt him very deeply when I talked shit. He messaged me a few days later, asking me to meet up at a bar. I said yes. I never heard back from him.

There was another instance at Riis Beach in Summer 2018. I met a really handsome guy with a handlebar mustache named Jose. He was a friend of a friend. He wore a short-sleeved button-down shirt with a wide collar and a gold chain necklace around his neck. He was somewhere in between fat and skinny. He had a hairy chest and a glowing smile.

I shared some of my whiskey with him, and we kept drinking it and talking. I learned he was a teacher and a member of the DSA. I was not a DSA member yet, but I had always felt that belonging to the DSA

was an attractive quality in a person. We exchanged numbers and met up a few weeks later with my friend who introduced us and some other people at Mood Ring in Bed-Stuy.

I mentioned to this one woman that I thought he was cute. She responded: “Oh yeah. There’s totally a vibe going on.” She insisted that she heard him mention say something earlier, alluding that he was into me. Then, Jose and I went off to Happyfun Hideaway. As we sat down to get drinks, he showed me a guy he was talking to on Grindr who looked like he would be in a Bait Bus porno. I informed him that guy was not my type. He asked me what kind of guys were my type. I told him that I liked guys who were a bit bear-ier. Then he asked me one of the worst questions of all time: “Are you hitting on me?” to which I responded, “I’m not not hitting on you.” He told me that he wasn’t attracted to me like that and just wanted to be friends. I abruptly got up and left and cried on the train home. It was beyond humiliating.

I would like to take this time to illustrate that one could deduce these anecdotes as me complaining that I’m being “friend-zoned.” I don’t believe in friend-zoning, but I also think it can be complicated to remain friends with someone you’re really attracted to. For the recipient of the crush, it can be like being friends with someone who always has lipstick on their teeth. In the same way that no one owes me a date or sex, I do not owe anyone my friendship, especially after being rejected.

It’s profoundly uncomfortable. In my opinion, the constant sting of someone telling you they are unattracted to you after you have worked up the courage to express your feelings is one of the worst forms of deja vu out there.

I’m not ready for a relationship/I’m not over my ex. I dated a guy named Eli, who had the same Astrological sign as my ex-boyfriend: Cancer—which is supposedly a “perfect match” for Scorpios, despite the fact that every Cancer man I’ve ever met has driven me fucking insane. Eli and I slept together on the first date and hit it off immediately.

We were both theatre directors, and we were both passionate about horror theatre. This is such a specific personality trait for someone who is not me to have that for a second, I thought I had found “the one.” He shared that he had a mental breakdown in college because he struggled with intrusive thoughts that he wanted to have sex with his brother. I thought it was fucked up, but I flexed my radical empathy muscles and told him it was okay. Intrusive thoughts are really common for those with anxiety disorders. As someone with anxiety, I have also experienced unwanted thoughts several times over. I tried my hardest not to judge him. We went out for about a month before he told me he wasn’t over his ex and wasn’t ready for a relationship. Him and his ex were still so intertwined, Eli’s mother was paying his ex’s credit card bills. I accepted it for what it was, even though it hurt until I tried to reconnect a few months later, and he informed me he was dating someone else. I was fuming. I threw in his face that his new partner probably wouldn’t understand his intrusive thoughts about incest because I knew it would hurt him. I wish I hadn’t said that, but I was hurt, and I wanted to hurt him back because he made up a bullshit excuse to break up with me, and I really liked him. A part of me still does. I’m a Scorpio. What can I say? Sometimes my Scorpion pincers come out.

A few years later, it happened again with a guy named Arnie.

We didn’t have sex right away. He was a comedian that appeared on Howard Stern once. By day he was a professional baby portrait photographer, and he owned a dog named Stormy Daniels. He told me he wanted to wait a whole year after his last relationship to date

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again. It felt like a real romance. We were really intimate, and one time we kissed against metal scaffolding on 14th and 6th Ave. Our last date was at an IHOP. Then he stopped following through with plans we were making. When I told him that it was hurting my feelings that he was texting me every day but bailing on our plans, he said wasn’t responsible for my emotions, and that he wasn’t ready to date anyone.

Six months later, he got in a relationship with a new man. They are now married and live in Atlanta.

This kind of deja vu has only ever taught me that “I’m not ready for a relationship because I’m not over my ex” usually means “I actually am ready for a relationship but not with you.” But, c’est la vie. No one owes anyone anything, not even our exes.

Marriage falling apart? Come over here; the water’s fine! For some reason, I seem to attract men who are in the process of going through divorces and/or rocky marriages. The first one was a professor in the film school at undergrad, who I later learned was married with kids (oops!). After I graduated college, I went on my first dinner date with a man who had a wedding ring on and was very coy when I asked him about it. He was surprised I was a vegetarian because I was fat. He revealed to me that he used to have an affair with his Catholic priest. It was truly one of the worst dates I’d ever been on in my entire life. But, a free dinner is a free dinner, regardless of pointed comments about ones weight.

A few months later, I met the most handsome lawyer for the DEA named Jeff. He owned an adorable French bulldog named Captain, and he was one of the best kissers of all time. He used to cry to me on the phone about how his partner was a cold lover who told him he regretted marrying him. Jeff was one of the best kissers I’d ever met.

When things didn’t work out, it low-key destroyed me because I was worried I would never find someone who kissed that good ever again.

I’ve kissed a lot of frogs in this life, so it sucked when I thought I’d found a prince. Still, he turned out to be just another frog. It would’ve never worked anyway, though. A DEA lawyer that was fifteen years older than me? Good kissing alone wouldn’t have cut it in the long run.

Not long after, I had a brief affair with a Jewish Orthadox fitness instructor named Gabe who was going through a messy divorce who insisted on smoking meth before we had sex. He kept calling it “tina” and said meth was a “harsh word.” He told me, “Look. I’m here. And I wanna smoke. So I can either do it in front of you or I can do it in the bathroom.” I let him smoke in front of me. When we had sex, he was into brat roleplay and tried to get me to be his dom. He shouted “fuck me! Fuck me!” and wanted me to slap him multiple times. It was truly an experience, to say the least.

Following this, I dated a Pisces actor who narrowly escaped a sixyear abusive marriage with an older man. I really wanted to like him, but deep down, I knew I wasn’t that into him. Plus, there was a lot of pressure to be his first relationship post-divorce.

This kind of deja vu is odd because you begin to wonder what it is about you that attracts cheaters and/or men going through divorces-primarily because most of these experiences occurred in my early twenties. I feel like most people don’t encounter divorcees in their dating pool unless they’re of a certain age. This means I am a good rebound from a failing marriage, which makes me like I am a bad omen of some kind.

Guys with a history of brain surgery. This one is very, very niche, but for New Years 2019, I stayed in DC with my friends Owen and

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Tommy in a very bizarre Air BNB that had a shelf of very realistic animal masks, around 30 different Nutcrackers, racially insensitive Christmas ornaments, and a bathroom with a weird vibe. At one point during the trip, I decided to duck out and get my fuck on. I don’t know where I went precisely, but I Ubered to the apartment of a man named Eric. It was very sparse. There was an air mattress on the floor and some drawings on the walls. He told me he was an artist who drew dog portraits professionally and that he had a long list of people who read his e-letter. He had very big, sad, brown puppy dog eyes, and he was noshing on a thin crust Domino’s pizza he ordered that had no cheese, just sauce. I tried it, and it was really fucking weird. He seemed very spacey, and he told me he was on the spectrum and that he had major brain surgery where the doctors had to stop his heart. He looked me straight in the eyes and told me, “on the other side. There is nothing.”

It shook me to my core because it didn’t seem like he was lying. It was very disorienting to go back to my friends afterward. To this day, I still don’t know if he was telling the truth or not.

About two years later, I was talking to a guy on OkCupid named Jaylen. He worked in social services but was a writer. He called me “babe” right away. We FaceTimed and immediately compared Astrological charts. He was also a Cancer, like Eli and my ex. He told me he felt like we would have a really great connection, and I was so lonely because of COVID that I wanted it to be true. He told me that he had just had major brain surgery because he suffered from a super rare condition called IIH where your brain is basically deprived of oxygen. He came over one January night and got lost on the way to my apartment because it was raining. It was clear to me right away his eyesight was not very good. He had horrible teeth. He shared extremely personal things with me, like that he was an incest survivor and that he and his sister had escaped his dad by moving to New York. For the first two years, he told me they both shared a bed in an apartment in the Bronx to save money. He told me he thought we were meant to be together, which scared me. He kept telling that to me. I feel like we’re meant to be together; I really do, babe. We had sex, and afterward, as we were going to bed, I noticed his phone was on at maximum brightness. I asked him what he was doing. He informed me he was looking for apartments for him and his sister, along with his sister’s girlfriend, who didn’t want to work. When I asked why, he explained to me she lost her last job as an after-school teacher because she ignored a young kid who wandered onto a bus and was in the middle of a lawsuit.

He explained that he was trying to calculate how much both he and his sister could afford without the girlfriend’s income. We left together the following day because I had an errand to run, and he held my hand on the subway. Eight hours later, he texted me that he just wanted to be friends and needed more time to heal from his brain surgery. I felt so emotionally whiplashed and clowned, that it made me quit dating apps for three months.

This kind of deja vu is hard to make heads or tails of. What does it mean to attract men with rare neurological conditions? I feel like there is no takeaway here because this veers into ableism territory. I’m learning disabled and struggle with executive dysfunction disorder--so my brain isn’t all that either. That being said, I can’t help but think that attracting this kind of person indicates something. However, I can’t put my finger on what. Much like the waves in all of our brains, I can’t help but notice a pattern.

follow the artists ryan purcell.........................................@ryanpatrickart casper molina.................................................@siknaste ruchi acharya.....................................@ruchi_acharya rachael powles.....................................@rachael_lizzz powles.....................................@rachael_lizzz ania majsterek.........................@chronically_chilled joe raguzin........................@thereandbackagainhv elbridge luther..............................................@el.bridge amanda r. livingston...........@amandarlivingston sean pollock....................................................@seanp_yo

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