Metanoia: Volume III
Kirsten Samanich -- Founding Editor Ellie Suttmeier -- Founding Editor Samantha Wallace -- Founding Editor Carly Doyle -- Assitant Editor Nicole Arocho -- Co-Founder
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam... There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” –Carl Sagan
Cover Photo, “The In Between,” by Gannon Teach
Dear Readers, Since our earliest nomadic ancestors made their way into the great wild world, distance has been ever-present in our minds. In the beginning distance was reaching the herd, outpacing the predator, keeping warm but not being burned. Later, distance became mapping the skies, crossing the oceans, creating vast schisms between peoples. Today, distance has countless more meanings and implications to us. Spaces between the quarks of an atom are unimaginably great, the known Universe has seen almost 14 billion years, a time we cannot fathom, and yet some of our technology has made it possible to see someone across the world in a matter of seconds on a computer screen. As time goes on, it seems the definition of distance itself is expanding—the red shift in our spectroscopes tells us that for certain. On a personal level, Metanoia experienced distance in a new way while creating this issue. Two of its editors were no longer physically close to the others. While learning to navigate this experience, Metanoia became curious about the ways art could help explain distances and change the way distance affects us. We asked our contributors to explore and discover the distances they feel in their lives. Collaboration is an exercise in distance: in some cases, the two artists are very far from each other; in others, they occupy the same work table. Either way, there are distances to be overcome and a closeness to be derived from making art with another. In this way, Volume III is a collection of pieces that push and pull at the fabric of our world, and create new understandings of our physical experience. Cheers, The Editors
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TABLE OF CONTENTS WRITING:
When I Return to Sardinia / Katharyn Machan / 4 Hands / Taryn Pire / 6 Morning / Evan Sommers / 8 Where Is Consciousness / Natalya Cowilich / 11 Flowers Turned Blue / Amber Donofrio / 13 The Foreigner’s Dissipation / Jillian Kaplan / 17 A (Completely) Uneducated History of the Future of the Universe / Liz Levine / 18 Mastryoshka / Jared Kelly / 20 Crushed Petals / Garen Whitmore / 24 Sunday Dinners / Taryn Pire / 26 Whorl / Katharyn Machan / 28 A Toast / Cristian Cucerzan / 31 Choker / Katharyn Machan / 34
PHOTOGRAPHY / ART:
Threefold Escape / Nicole Samanich / 3 Childhood / Valerie Ridgeway / 4 Taylor on Steps / Julian Cousins / 5 People, Animals, People & Animals / Nicole Samanich / 5 Where Is My Mind / Jordan Motisi / 6 Grass Hallway/ Julian Cousins / 8 We’re Not in Kansas Anymore / Gannon Teach / 10 Eroticist Erosion / Ryan Keller / 12 Loss / Angie Barry / 15 Day Dream / Gannon Teach / 16 Multiverse / Natalya Cowilich / 19 Energy Escape Routes / Jordan Motisi / 22 Sound of Silence / Gannon Teach / 25 Self-Portrait / Genevieve Cohn / 27 Tablerocks / Valerie Ridgeway / 28 Altered Book: ‘Hop on Pop’ [excerpt] / Nicole Samanich / 30 Industry & Indecision / Jordan Motisi / 33 Phosphene Afforestation / Matthew Feminella / 34
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DISTANCE
Nicole Samanich
Valerie Ridgeway
When I Return to Sardinia Katharyn Howd Machan
I’ll be too old to get pregnant again by a wild-smiled man who made me laugh as we climbed the hill above the harbor where St. Francis offers outstretched arms and the pale stone face of a Phoenician goddess waits quietly for time to pass. I’ll arrive in summer, not Christmas Eve with boxes of chocolates wrapped and ribboned, red garters thrown from wooden windows, small firecrackers in cobbled streets all bang and pop and smoke. Maybe the ghost of the woman with braids will open her door, new licorice vendors will nod as I find again the grand cathedral confettied with weddings’ broken china white and blue and green. I’ll go alone— or take my daughter with me, if she’ll leave her needles behind. We’ll walk on the sand where I walked with him, shells still the shape of tiny bottles liquored with gold, with wave-tossed light.
4
Julian Cousins
Nicole Samanich
5
Hands
Taryn Pire My fingers fit into yours As do the floorboards of a ship: classic and worn, adorned with the scratches of former boots of former owners, but still strong in the present day. They welcome every new addition into their walls of skin, embracing each new minute, each new boot, until the ticks and steps become permanent, barnacles of memory stuck to the creases of planked hands. Tireless, they are. We are, you are, I am in love with the way your digits can grip my hips and the end of a drumstick with the same intensity. Your nails scribe lost languages into my back rambling over my avian spine giving me the purest of chills, like a feathered omen’s wings to a captain’s wet brow. Your fingerprints are signs of good fortune overseeing these creaking boards of bone. I shall kill no albatross— though to tie you around my neck would be the sweetest burden to bear. Your hands are already there.
6
A callused hand is a passionate hand, with a love that wears the flesh in the most artistic of manners, displaying the beauty behind blisters and hardness. The subliminal smoothness of fervent palms.
They take on so many faces, every thumbs up and fuck you resonating the zeal of your marrow, the genetic heat of your fingertips. Your fire ripples from you in dizzying vibrations, a haze of whirlpool vertigo. The round white cigarette burn on your forearm, ash that you pressed in yourself. A scar-tattoo to remind you that on that night, you were happy. Speckles of freckle across your wrists, let me kiss every dot until my lips draw the portrait that I see in you, for you— so I can paint the masterpiece that is my mouth to your canvas skin, the siren song that is our anchors intertwined. Blue-green rivers weave from beneath, twisting along tightly-wound pink muscle and red waterways until they reach the thumping love under your ribs. Let me be the ancient mariner who navigates the pulse of your thumbs, your seas— expansive oceans between us, before us. Let me sail this ship through every sinister tempest until each one wanes beneath our wooden home, raging currents reduced to foam. We were born to ride these waves.
Jordan Motisi
Morning
Evan Sommers The quietness tightens, preparing to tear. Black paper night crinkles its edges In birdcalls and feeble blue; I hear morning whisper To reach me, to coax me Out from where my silence echoes So my unhearing ears may listen, Out from where I can dance with my own shadow And be content: Where my skin makes all the walls of the world, Each hollow house and sunlit road; Where my eyes are relentless pursuers in fog And the redness brought the world at dawn; Where my heart is a phantom taking many forms, But none that are my own.
8
Julian Cousins
Gannon Teach
10
Where is Consciousness Natalya Cowilich
Hoes flying, wrists cracking, we work in the dirt and try to remember life before the Industrial Revolution. Airplanes, blocked out with the chanting of rhythmic breaths grabbing weeds in orange sunlight, the drinking fountain is red with blood of the Nile and our hands are dented with ropes strung across, tangling families from another time through intersecting trees or double helices. Maybe they are the same, the tree and the helix and our families from an African common ancestor are not so different. We are rope bridges traveled by consciousness, awakened by wonder at what life was like then. Did they wonder the same things too; did they lie awake at night and wonder if their carved stone slabs and clay pots were a trap like gasoline lawnmowers and billboards and cigarette butts on the side of the highway, and maybe wildness does not live inside cobblestone staircases and wristwatches and daytime television, but it is in our rib cages and waterfalls and in these we can travel through time.
R Y A N
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K E L L E R
Flowers Turned Blue Amber Donofrio
Rape. This word is something we are aware of from youth but don’t really understand, a dark mystery in our psyches that is petrifying in its ambiguity. Who should we avoid and who can we trust? We search for any signs of danger, vie away from any masks. But even then we remain vulnerable in our fear, vulnerable to the outside world that has told us about rape and has time and again proven how it could happen to anyone, that it will happen. Rape is everywhere. Rape is a seed we have allowed to grow, to fill us up and leave us dry. Perhaps the question now is what we will do about this, how to address (to avoid, prevent, and obliterate) this ongoing threat. He looks at you, his eyes surrounded in dark blue makeup and cheeks caked with white paste. Small top hat, red lips, his shirt cinched around him as his pinstripe pants billow below. Little girl, fear look up and cover your eyes as he nears. Click, click, click wooden stilts puncturing the ground, punctuating the stillness as your eyes squeeze shut. Feel your blue-flowered dress swishing as you run, cold air on naked legs. Disappear; he won’t catch you. Never catch you. Pain: I imagine it surging through me, looking up at a man who presses me against the ground. The concrete would be cold on my back and his rough hands would grasp my arms. I would be petrified, immobile, my breaths short and quick as I bite my lip in terror. How do I get out of this? How can I escape? What do I DO? The words would flash through my mind but I would find no solution. My body would feel limp and detached. I would grow lightheaded from hyperventilating, and would feel his breath on my skin. It would hurt, everything would hurt. I would feel as though I am no one and everyone at once, my identity draining away as I become a faceless stranger, the label “broken” projected from my eyes. At this moment, I could be anyone, anyone but who I actually am. Please, I would think, please let me be anyone but me.
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And if he did catch you, what would you do? Squirm and fight as the makeup smears on your chest, on your knuckles. SCREAM, echoing out into nowhere. Dirty hands, dirty girl. You are disappearing into darkened sky. Watch as selfhood dissipates into gray, black loss. Standing in the college laundry room, I peer into a washer whose cycle just finished, finding a load of freshly washed underwear along with a rose-pink towel. I hesitate: should I remove the load or wait for the owner to return? I’m carrying a bag of dirty clothes and look down at the bundle of jeans and shirts, knee-high socks twisting around cotton sleeves. I really need to do laundry. I put down my bag and reach into the washer, gathering up the underwear inside the pink towel. I don’t want to touch the individual articles because it feels wrong. I wonder why this is. I place the pile of moist underwear on top of the washer and toss my own clothes into the now-empty machine. I hope this girl comes back soon to claim her belongings; for some reason I don’t want them sitting there too long. I know that touching them means nothing; they are just clothes. But it feels as though I am tarnishing them somehow, as though I am violating this girl’s private space. It is as if touching her garments equates to touching her, as though they are some extension of herself that should not be handled. Inside each piece of clothing is a person who can be broken. I close the washer door and start the next cycle, pouring blue-tinted detergent into its special compartment. I scrunch my now emptied laundry bag into my hand and head for the door of the room. I switch off the light and close the door behind me. And when you are there alone at night, blue bunny blanket curled around your fragile frame, do you see them looking in the window at you, liquid figures bending as they laugh on your dark wall? Do you see their shadows flicker as they stand, top hats upright
A N G I E and gloved hands tucked into their crossed arms? You wait. Waiting for the man with the van you heard would come for you. Step inside the backseat, he’d say, the musty scent filling your nose. Darkness, you see blackness. Cover your face, cover your ears. Ignore the pressure where emptiness once sat contented. Inside of you. Now full, now scarring. The blood seeps out the cracks.
B A R R Y
At twelve years old, I am venturing farther than most my age. It’s a Saturday afternoon and I’m sitting on the living room floor, my legs crossed beneath me as I read. A Clockwork Orange is in my lap, and I flip through the pages thinking how this story isn’t as bad as I expected, isn’t as terrifyingly grotesque or graphic as other people said it would be. I find it refreshing, inviting. I read on, one chapter to the next. I like it. I like the language. I’m only a preteen at this point, and I don’t know what I’m reading. I laugh at the “pitch of like young ptitsa’s hysterics” as the young girls in the story “jump” with the narrator on his bed, “unplattied and smecking fit to crack.” A frown covers my face when the girls leave, “the old Joy Joy Joy Joy” of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony “crashing and howling away” on the narrator’s record player. I feel bad for him; I want them to stay. Everyone seemed to be having so much fun, at least the way Anthony Burgess wrote them, all “smecking and peeting their highballs” as the pop records played. I don’t understand the actions behind the words. I don’t comprehend that an older man invited ten-year-old girls to his home to “play records.” I don’t comprehend that they weren’t there to have innocent fun, that just because the narrator is lonely it doesn’t justify him leading children into his apartment. I don’t understand because the language covers the truth, because all I hear are the pretty words. And under such words, the violence lies hidden.
Gannon Teach
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The Foreigner’s Dissipation Jillian Kaplan
July air spits shivers. I am stripped of language, a blob of chilled skin cells shifting over cement floors. At dinner I hover over warm rice. I breathe steam. High melodies of chatter slap my ears. I try to catch scraps of scattered syllables but they patter away like birdseed. My only agency lies in the gestures of a thawing body longing for warm wool blankets. I dump dishwater in the scrap-food pit and an inky blue sits behind stars, white-hot, unbodied in reflections of traveling gases. In the morning mist hovers over Montasoa, and I am only my limbs and naked thoughts unclothed in disintigrating syllables.
17
a (completely) uneducated history of the future of the universe
Liz Levine
18
most cosmologists agree that the universe is expanding stretching its reaches through the void infinitely but even if the universe never tires of its race to the infinite edges of possible space not everything can withstand such acceleration one day (they say) the darkness now punctured by constellations will conquer stars will stop breathing light (the past pulled into present at 3.0 x 108 meters per second) on this day scientists will gaze up at the sky and see only their own reflections they will pour through the ancient cosmological texts of Galileo, Einstein, Hawking searching for a light that has been swallowed by one black hole at a time when we can no longer see the past encapsulated in balls of light how can we be sure that it ever existed? in 100 trillion years what does that even matter? still the universe will continue to fling itself into the darkness towards nothing until its own limbs cannot sustain the gravitational atrophy planets will dislodge themselves into the starless sky in 1040 years (how can time so massive be contained in such small numbers?) anti-matter will overshadow matter but as this supermassive black hole dissipates heat is generated a split second of light amidst trillions of years of darkness on earth in this moment that can be measured by the hands on a clock boxes on a calendar time that is no less elusive, but certainly more conceivable seven billion humans live teeming with conflicting energies and opinions and eyes we will never agree in the laboratories, astronomy towers, NASA rockets scientists trained in the truths of physics construct our deconstructing universe and in anywhere from 10100 to 101500 years it is calculated that those infallible laws of physics will self-destruct collapse into themselves stellar formations succumbing to the sweet emptiness of black holes
I watched a television program once—“The World Without Us” Two days after we disappear from the planet New York city subways will overflow with water from untended plumbing and piping Within years, flora will creep back into the cities in 500, forests will reclaim their territory jungles will swallow the vestiges of buildings equilibrium will appear to be near yet it might take 100,000 years (if not longer) for carbon dioxide to return to pre-human levels as much as it tries to escape us we will hover as specters in Mt. Rushmore, bronze artwork, radio signals for perhaps billions of years to come but one day we will be swallowed one day the laws of nature will collapse in on themselves and we will finally disappear I love how inevitable it is that one day the void will conquer (for all forms of life, all stars, all protons) Because at least that I can understand People keep trying to put a face to the emptiness They look up at the sky and call it god or allah or the milky way But emptiness cannot be named It is within us and one day One black hole at a time We will collapse in on ourselves
N A T A L Y A C O W I L I C H
Mastryoshka
Jared Kelly You are inside a very small box, so small that it restricts your movement almost completely. You are folded up like clothes in a suitcase, with your legs pulled up to your chest, your arms wrapped around your legs, and your head bent down and facing to the right so that your left cheek is pressed against your knees. You’re not sure how long you’ve been here. Every joint in your body aches. You fear that if you stay in this position much longer your bones will give out and you’ll collapse inward on yourself. There is a small plaque inlaid on the wall of the box. You are barely able to read it by the dim light that fills the box, a light which you now realize has no apparent source. The plaque explains the rules. There is a button somewhere in the box, it says. Your goal is simple: press the button. Upon pressing the button, the box you are currently in will disappear, revealing a larger box. There is a button in that box as well; pressing that one will make that box disappear, revealing a still larger box, which also has a button with the same function. The process will repeat, though the plaque says nothing about when it will end, or if it will end. You take a moment to picture yourself at the center of a never-ending series of boxes, with layers upon layers of walls continuing indefinitely in all directions; the image terrifies you. You are buried. You are folded up within an infinite number of walls. You feel panic setting in, but it subsides when you spy the button out of the corner of your eye. It’s on the wall behind you, and by shrugging and pushing against the wall in front of you with your feet you are able to press it with your right shoulder. There is a noise which sounds like either cloth ripping or a hammer pounding on metal; you can’t quite decide which. Sure enough, the walls snap out of existence. You drop an inch or two and find yourself in a slightly larger box. This one is somewhat better lit than the previous one, and the extra space comes as a huge relief. You find the button almost instantly this time; it’s on the floor near the corner to your left. You press it with the edge of your foot. You drop another one or two inches and find yourself in yet another box, just as the rules explained. You can almost completely stretch your neck out now. This time the button is on the ceiling. You decide that the noise is neither the sound of cloth ripping nor the sound of a hammer on metal, but the sound of a large stone hitting the bottom of a deep well.
20
You emerge into the fourth box. You have enough room to sit cross-legged now. You press the fifth button, and the sixth one. The seventh is directly behind your head and you have to twist around to find it, and you are relieved to find that you are able to do so. Now you can easily raise yourself into a crouch. The image of the walls continuing indefinitely is not quite so terrifying now. It’s still terrifying, just not as much as before. A few more buttons and you can finally stand up, but not without the top of your head brushing the ceiling. One more button, this one also on the ceiling, fixes that. The twelfth box is lit well enough for you to easily see, and is large enough for you to stop thinking of it as a box and start thinking of it as a room. Indeed, after the next three buttons, furnishings start to appear. There is a single lamp in one corner of the fifteenth room. You’re surprised at it, and are forced to wonder how, with the lamp taking up space in this room, there had been space for the fourteenth room, which was only one a few square inches smaller. By all logic the lamp should have intersected the walls of the fourteenth room, but it didn’t appear until you pressed the fourteenth button. After pressing the seventeenth button, you find yourself in a carpeted room with brick walls. Along one of the walls is a bookshelf, filled with what must be at least a hundred books. Against another wall is a large sofa, and in another wall is a fireplace, which burns softly. On the other wall is a door, but it’s locked. You decide to rest for a while and take a short nap on the sofa. When you wake up you skim through some of the books on the shelves. They tell stories about rolling green fields, villages, lovers, vast deserts, majestic palaces, bloody wars, sprawling cities, thriving empires, solar systems, and starships. Nowhere do they mention walls or buttons. Upon removing one particularly large tome, you spot something on the back of the shelf behind it: the button. You look around the room one more time, and finally press the button. The book disappears suddenly from your hands. The next few rooms are bare. You resume your routine of finding and pressing buttons. You realize that, while sitting on the sofa and reading the books, you had forgotten all about the image of yourself within the infinitely repeating walls. Patches of grass begin appearing on the floor, walls, and ceiling. Soon a problem presents itself: the twenty-sixth button is on the ceiling, but the ceiling is too high for you to reach. Fortunately, you discover that you can walk up the walls and across the ceiling without falling. With this new discovery, you realize, the terms “floor” and “ceiling” have become obsolete; now there are only walls, or perhaps only floors.
21
Jordan Motisi
The grass has become thick enough to completely cover all the surfaces of the rooms. This, combined with the ever-increasing size of the rooms, makes finding the buttons a daunting task. It now takes you hours and sometimes days to find the buttons. Soon hills begin appearing, followed by rocks and trees, and eventually small lakes. While wandering the planes of the thirty-seventh room, you come across a small walled village. The people there greet you cheerfully, and you take up residence in a room above a coffee shop. To sustain yourself while you look for the button, you get a job as a carpenter’s apprentice. Every evening after your shift ends, you venture outside the gates of the village to continue your search. You have covered the entire wall the village is built on, and most of the wall to the east, but thus far have found nothing.
It soon becomes clear that an attractive young shopkeeper’s apprentice has been seeking your affections ever since you arrived. You begin spending time with the shopkeeper’s apprentice. Now the two of you search for the button together every day after you get off work. You don’t explain what will happen when you find it. In time, however, you almost completely forget about the button, and soon you are wandering the plains of the thirty-seventh room just to be with your new partner. One day the two of you are walking together on the wall to the south of the village and you stop to rest under a tree. Your companion leans on your shoulder and clasps your hand. You sigh as you both stare lazily at the village, high up on the perpendicular wall. You feel something strange on your companion’s hand. Your gaze drops slowly to the button imbedded in the palm of your partner. “Is something wrong?” the shopkeeper’s apprentice asks. “I’m sorry,” you say, and you press the button. Everything disappears.
Crushed Petals Garen Whitmore
Question anyone who tries to tell you how to think (So, question me) But for the moment let’s think about the Renaissance-era ideology in Western society which dissociates mind and body As if this part were any more or less me than that Still, we are surprised when children cannot speak without othering. I was raised to believe that my body was somehow immaterial That the next plane of existence was somehow better than this A supposed message of hope But there are no cheat codes here they say people should not be aborted early for fear of eternal consequence Suicide and abortion equated to the highest form of sin Sadistic rules to ensure that disadvantaged humans wander displaced in corporeal existence Hounded by power systems which would do better to leave their crushed-petal subjects alone Conversely, I was told “Treat your body as a temple.” No tattoos, no piercings, no drunken antics, no drugs, no sex before marriage, no lust, no homosexual actions or feelings, no dressing in clothing that was made for a woman. But the next day in Church, the pastor’s last words are: “And remember, this is a temporary home.” Fuck. That. Shit. I’m sick of wondering what part(s) of me matter more All of me does Or is... My mind is the nucleus of my cellular containment It and my body are not equilateral They are the same Each a function of the other There is no body soul or spirit.
There is me. I am a body. Of flesh. Of thought. Of energy. Interacting with the world through limbs, extremities which have adapted to process my reality
Gannon Teach
Sunday Dinners Taryn Pire
I have Sunday dinners with the skeletons in my closet. It’s not so bad except the lighting could be better, and we all tell the same stories. But sometimes it’s nice to be reminded— we sip the same glasses each week like new blood, flooding marrow with the elixir of memory, I look my past self in the face and see its present place beyond empty eyeholes. Skeletons can dance. They samba behind old sweaters, courting each other in top hats and hair ribbons while we sleep, grinding hips and banging elbows, stroking femurs, tickling scapulas. We all have our skeletons: that tingle in your ear that wakes you in the dark a bony finger giving you a wet willy— “Remember me” the skeleton says, incisors clicking as its index has planted a seed to grow, weeds dipping through membranes of your mind, thin like cellophane, forcing your next dream of before off the backburner. Cause that cortex is their domain, and the hoards in your closet remind the brain that it is not simply an infinite cosmos of things you’ll forget, or things you know you remember, or things you pretend to coax out of your skull with slips of the tongue and fine wine; the skeletons are really all you’ve wanted to remember all over again in the first place. I endorse the practice of spring cleaning but I haven’t brought myself to push past ash into a dustpan and clear my closet floor of corpses— my doors are busting at the seams but it seems that I still want to be reminded despite the clutter, cause what do I remember without these bones?
Behind closed eyes in slumber, I am seduced by beckoning phalanges; my reveries of reality petrified of being pulverized, each dream an attempt of an old friend to survive the cleansing of a new day, each body a test subject in the study of how time has changed me. I need these bodies on tables of mental metal, my lab rats and artifacts— behind closed eyes is this dig: the archaeology of the soul. So covered in dust, I will brush off these old friends night after night, like relics in a museum constructed of my own ribs, my personal exhibitions: I can’t throw away the things that matter. I’ll let the skeletons creep, week by week, smiling and weeping, bones creaking with the sound of time, cause Sunday company is all that I’m seeking.
G E N E V I E V E C O H N 27
Whorl
Katharyn Machan Today I hung wind chimes at the edge of my cave, to test my temperament, perhaps, or maybe to please the goats. The quiet of this hollowed stone has suited me for seven years; it’s time for a change, perhaps. I’ve counted and fingered and even named each gleam of mica, each silver vein of quartz that sparkles the outside walls for hours of sun and sun. Here is a word I closely define, my eyes still good, no need for lenses, my head a gleaming cap of skin. I love the grasses far below and the shape of the sea beyond: flat, both, and the same green-blue, the sweet and the salt of the world. It took me nine full moons to find the glass and string and shells.
Just right--yes--and the one small bell --and now the breeze begins.
Valerie Ridgeway
29
Nicole Samanich
30
A Toast
Cristian Cucerzan
I walked across the parking lot car-weary, stepping to the side to let my dad pass me and not through me. Inside I corridored as if the architecture gave me no choice. Plants of an artificial green burst out from pots arranged like so, and I’d later realise the left wall was painted in blue fish scales. It’d later give me a feeling of being turned slowly in a stomach. It was about the right time: when he shimmied right behind me and uprighted a finger in front of his lips to my sideways turned head; when after I went to the birthday boy and warmed him with a hug; when he surprised the birthday boy because he had convinced him he wasn’t going to come because he was feeling sick. I noticed the desks had corners and menus were in front of every chair and on the far wall friendships were sitting like so, deciding or waiting to decide what they would pick to digest. I complimented his her and she wasn’t listening, her head wearing hair to the shoulders like a cape, granting the selective hearing superpower. My own head turned towards some other corner of the room. She said her hellooh and asked if I noticed the clinkety red and white leaves vined around her neck, the ones I had complimented her on. I knew almost everyone. I wanted to sit down with her, so I did, only waiting to see where the birthday boy would sit, like scouting satellites. Other bodies weighed the seats down in front of me, beside me, at the other long table. I noticed, then, that there’s always clusters, scaffoldings that govern what bodies are seated where, and I figured, then, that it must have to do with the sense of gravity each has, with how bodies couple together and a phone comes out and those coupled bodies are stored in a removed memory bank away from just being there. Slips just happen. A porous silence slimes over their flesh, plugging words inside mouths and attaching particular concentrations of weight to foreheads so as to pull whole heads down in between sentences. Two clusters of helium-filled balloons strung with cheap ribbon, one on each table, existed. Conversations orbited around them, pirouetting dizzy coughs and throat clearings. I think for the first time in months I noticed how planetary I had become. Dinner came around half past eight, my linguini a too cheesy marsh of alien tentacles feasting on the scraps of dead poultry. A mise en abyme of digestion. 31
He sat a seat away from me but later swapped with his she so that he then sat next to me but at a distance of chairs probably explainable by his want to be closer to her than me. He pointed out a Swedish drink on the drinks menu. He’d mentioned it to me a month or two ago. We got three different ones. Mine came first, then the message that there were no more of the two they’d ordered, so they offered two other flavours. His tasted the best out of all three, hers the worst because the aftertaste reminded me of eating the little legs of white bacteria. As I was standing next to him at the bar while he was tapping in his eftpos pin, the boundaries of space seemed to polarise. Suddenly I went from feeling like I was among the familiar company of friends to being the alien disguised as a human being. I don’t recall him talking like the others were, moving around the helium maypoles; we sat next to each other but he looked away a bracketed second before I thought he would. The continuum had stretched out long before he said he hadn’t seen in me in ages and asked what I’d been up to. Me, reading mainly. He’d seen me walk and read The Forrests days before. Him, work and parties. The universe had expanded and the past few months our fibrous lives had unravelled away from each other and coming back like this, in this room, for this occasion, was like looking out from the edge of one ocean at the landmass that could be glimpsed just just past the miniscus of the horizon. Continents drift apart centimetres a year. I got the sense that we were far quicker. In between us lay an asterisked calm. I felt something that later would manifest itself as the need to apologise. I was the one that left, that said I didn’t want to talk because I was too busy and felt too interrupted I left with more conversation between my teeth than cheesed monster. I hadn’t realised our lands had drifted so far apart that the possibility of him spotting me standing alongside my smoldering signal after maybe just one more day’s navigating to my shore became the possibility of seeing an entire planet in the sky. Only at night, and then. I walked off to be picked up by my brother around half past ten. Inchoate hazes migrated across the darker sky. I spotted a not quite fully thought-out face up there looking towards me, but probably not seeing me in the empty parking lot.
Jordan Motisi
33
Choker
Katharyn Machan She bought it on Duval, longest street in the whole U.S., rough strands of golden weathered hemp woven tight with blue-glow beads: thirteen, sturdy, what she had to have to hide the bite of one a.m., his teeth too strong after Sloppy Joe’s, breath of beer and cigarettes, she saying yes too soon, too close, her boyfriend up north all the while asleep, their azure-eye sleek cat curled on their pillow, missing her, the way her careful faithful hands curved perfectly around pale fur.
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M A T T H E W F E M I N E L L A 35
ANGIE BARRY
CONTRIBUTORS
A senior Writing major at Ithaca College. She is a founding editor of the publication Collage Comics and has had her art published in Stillwater. To see more of her work, visit fictionpress.com.
GENEVIEVE COHN
A senior at Ithaca College, with a double major in Art and Culture and Communications. She may or may not be a squirrel.
JULIAN COUSINS
A photographer who works primarily with a film camera. “I think the colors that film produces are unmatched and remind me of the old movies that used technicolor. That’s really my favorite aspect of photography.” All of his photos and other works can be found at ligeroriginals.tumblr.com and crookedarrowclothing.com
NATALYA COWILICH
A third-year writing and sociology double major at Ithaca College. She was born and raised in Upstate New York and is very grateful to be with you here today. “Thank you for reading my poetry, it is my life. Ideally, someday I’ll start some kind of nonprofit poetery organization that creates a safe space for underprivileged and unrepresented people to come write and workshop, but for now, I’m eating oranges and trying to keep my shoes tied.”
CRISTIAN CUCERZAN
Cristian Cucerzan is a Romanian writer-teacher-learner living in Auckland, New Zealand.
AMBER DONOFRIO
A senior Writing major at Ithaca College with minors in Art and Art History. Her interests include poetry and philosophy-- particularly the intersection of the two. She enjoys experimenting with genre and form and seeing what will result.
MATTHEW FEMINELLA
A recent graduate of Ithaca College, with a major in Cinema and Photography and a concentration in Cinema Production. “I’m inspired by the natural beauty that engulfs all of us. Photography is like freezing the mind and taking the time to evaluate that single moment and find the meaning in it.”
JILLIAN KAPLAN
A recent Ithaca College graduate with a major in Writing. Currently, she is a TEFL Peace Corps Volunteer in the Madagascar highlands. She enjoys eating (but not peeling) mangos and getting her students to sing English songs that aren’t Justin Beiber. She also wants to bring poetry to her village if she ever works through that pesky language barrier. “Misotra betseka (thanks a lot) to the Metanoia staff!”
RYAN KELLER
A film student at Full Sail University and a photography enthusiast. “I experiment with lighting techniques and subject matters, trying to evoke different emotions from an audience.” To see more of Ryan’s work, visit theinfectionofryankeller.wordpress.com
JARED KELLY
Sometimes thinks he died a long time ago and didn’t realize it, or maybe he was never alive to begin with and he’s just a dream that the universe is having. He likes writing about talking signposts and schoolteachers with detachable heads.
ELIZABETH LEVINE
A Senior Writing major with minors in Honors and Politics from Madison, Wisconsin. As she prepares to be unceremoniously launched out into the so-called real world, Liz has been daydreaming about spending a year writing and reading in the mountains. She also dedicates much of her time to feigning an understanding of astrophysics and amusing herself with puns.
KATHARYN HOWD MACHAN
The author of 30 published collections, her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and textbooks, including “The Bedford Introduction to Literature and Sound and Sense.” She is a professor in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College in central New York State. In 2012 she edited “Adrienne Rich: A Tribute Anthology” (Split Oak Press).
JORDAN MOTISI
Jordan Motisi is a freshman working on her associates degree at Bergen Community College. Her work has been on exhibition at the One River Gallery in Englewood NJ. She focuses on painting, digital photo manipulation, and graphic design.
TARYN PIRE
A junior English and Writing double major and an Honors minor from New Jersey. She is a staff writer for IC’s alternative magazine, Buzzsaw, as well as the Event Coordinator for Spit That!, IC’s only spoken word group. She enjoys slam poetry, good food, good music, and good people.
VALERIE RIDGEWAY
A Bio-Education major at Ithaca College who has almost no experience with any type of photography.
NICOLE SAMANICH
Currently a junior in the Illustration Department at the Rhode Island School of Design. Most of her work is either painting, drawing or a combination of both.
EVAN SOMMERS
Evan Sommers graduated from Ithaca College in August 2013. He now resides in Maryland where he spends his time reading, writing, thinking, tutoring DC public school students, and teaching guitar privately. He also has some friends, who he sometimes spends time interacting with.
GANNON TEACH
A recent graduate of Ithaca College, with a major in Art. “In my collages I aim to create a sense of chaos v. serenity while using familiar imagery.”
GAREN WHITMORE
Garen grew up in Groton, NY. He is a queer performance poet and social activist. He will be graduating from Ithaca College in May 2014 with a BA 37 in Creative Writing and a minor in Sociology.
“At a distance the fine oak seems to be of an ordinary size. But if I place myself under its branches, the perspective changes completely: I see it as big, even terrifying in its bigness.” –Eugene Delacroix
For complete versions of excerpted works, and for more information regarding our contributors and the magazine at large, please visit metanoiaexperience.tumblr.com or facebook.com/metanoiaexperience
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