Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine Volume 51

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The University of North Carolina at Charlotte Vol. 51

2020

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Dear Reader, How I see it, the arts are a temporal connector. Not only do they allow viewers to engage with voices of the past, they also enable artists to imagine the world differently from the way they have experienced it: the arts expose disconnections between ideal conceptions of the world and lived realities. This 51st eddition of Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine is designed to reflect societal progress and perpetual disconnections. The designers combined elements from the “Roaring 20s,” such as flapper culture and early technologies, with modern, digital effects. Two eras are existing simultaneously in this one book, yet they are clashing. There are glitches in some of the images shown just as there continue to be disconnections between society-imagined and society-actual. The 2019-2020 staff of Sanskrit invite you to consider your place in time and society while engaging with the arts presented in this publication.

Welcome to the Roaring 20s.

Melissa Martin

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RESURRECTION /// Andy Romero 4 GREAT HORNED OWL /// Teresa Lopez 5 AM I AN ARTIST? /// Zainab Elrahal 6 AT THE END OF THE DAY, WHO’S GOT YOU? /// Steven Reyes 6 ODE: IF I WROTE LUNCH POEMS /// Saramanda Swigart 7 PRINCESS WARRIOR SERIES /// Carolina Quintana Ocampo 8 THE “ITION” PROBLEM /// Emily Coulter 9 THE SPECTATOR OF CALAMITIES /// Frank Richards 10 UCHU /// Isabella Trivette 17 MESSAGE TO ONE WOODED ACRE /// Iris Litt 18 FOGGY SNOW FROST /// Catherine Traina 19 DEMENTIA STUDY /// Maggie Burgan 20 PONDERING THE POND /// Maggie Burgan 21 SEX EDUCATION/// Shawna Ervin 22 CERBERUS; NOEVIL/// Sheree Davidson 23 BLUE SWEATER MEMORIES /// Claire Scott 24 RUFF VICTORIAN /// Alayna Gorospe 25 SHE SENT THE WAVES /// Bonnie Larson Staiger 26 FERRY RIDE /// Teresa Lopez 27 ALONE /// Asantewaa Hooks 28 LONG SERPENT /// Hannah Clonts 28 ALAPORAAN THAMIZHAN /// Josephine Justin 29 THE ROCK IS STILL THERE ///Julius Shumpert 30 MESSAGE /// Gale Acuff 31 CLOUDS ON PARADE /// Bonnie Larson Staiger 32 A QUIET FOREST /// Kevin Canales 33 SKELETAL CITY /// Kelly Byas 34 UNTITLED /// Mekayla Johnson 35 MELANCHOLY, SAUDADE /// Lillian McKenzie 36 THE DEVIL’S RADIO /// Beth Escott Newcomer 37 DONUT JIM /// Lillian McKenzie 43 INFATUATION 1/// Grayson Sullivan 44 INFATUATION 2/// Grayson Sullivan 45 MOZART PLAYS BILLIARDS /// Katharine Gregg 46 REALITY? /// James Bourke 47 QUEER BAIT /// Mirelys Colón 48 COMING OUT /// Anonymous 49 LOVER’S DECAY /// Kevin Canales 49 MORNING TEA ///James Adams 50 TEA TIME /// Lillian McKenzie 51 TO WIDEN THE SIDEWALK /// Rochelle Jewel Shapiro 52 THE STREETS ARE STILL STAINED, FROM WHERE THEY LEFT US /// James Bourke 53 FIREWORK /// Cristian Ponce 54 THE DAY STALIN DIED /// Katharine Gregg 55 SPRITES /// Paul Hundt 56 ONE IN ALL, WE’RE ALL THE SAME /// Danielle Walden 58 2 SANSKRIT

FACADES /// Emily Sanders 60 SKULL STUDY /// Teresa Lopez 61 LEAF DETERIORATION /// Alayna Gorospe 62 MY SILENCED SPRING /// Mary Louise Kiernan 63 WINTER WONDERLAND /// Kelly Byas 64 ROSE GOLD KINTSUGI /// Danielle Walden 66 LOSS /// Emily Sanders 67 SAVANNAH /// F. S. Blake 67 SACRIFICE AND MUSA DWARF CAVENDISH STAGE /// Andy Romero 68 BLACK HAUS /// Robert Salazar-Guevara 69 SMITH & WESSON /// Lindsey Riggs 70 UNTITLED /// Mekayla Johnson 71 TO A FLIGHT OF FANCY /// Valerie Griggs 72 SMITTEN IN A CAT CAFE ///Emily Coulter 73 BIRDS /// Laurie Lessen Riche 73 JENNY /// Millicent Read 74 MIXED PATHOLOGY /// Alessio Zanelli 75 UNIDENTIFIED #17 /// Malik Norman 76 HYBRID /// Crystal Zapata 77 LAUNDROMAT /// Lindsey Riggs 77 KERALA /// Josephine Justin 7 8 EDGE OF DISMANTLING /// Bonnie Larson Staiger 79 DISPLACEMENT POSTPONED /// Bonnie Larson Staiger 80 COMIC /// Lindsey Riggs 80 LAST TRAIL /// Ellen Lager 81 COYOTES /// Patrick Bahls 82 CAROUSEL /// Ashlin Chavarria Ayala 82 THE SADDEST SHOW ON EARTH /// Kelly Gilbert 83 YBOR AT NIGHT /// Catherine Traina 84 AWKWARD MOMENT ///Paul Watsky 85 UGH /// Stephen A. Geller 86 RINSE /// Ashley Jung 92 PRESS PLAY /// Kelly Gilbert 93 LEMONS /// Anna Grace Thrailkill 94 LIL NAS X /// Anna Johnson 95 SURROUNDED /// Mirelys Colón 96 EAST FRONT /// Aslin Chavarria Ayala 96 EXOSKELETON FROM CARDBOARD /// Maggie Burgan 97 BELLA /// Mirelys Colón 98 OASIS /// Christopher Kuhl 99 RELATIVE /// Cristian Ponce 100 RAMMY /// Lillian McKenzie 100 AT THE DINNER TABLE /// Ashley Jung 101 BALLARD LOCK OBSERVATIONS AND ENVIRONMENT /// Aiden Williams 102 ANSWER ME /// Asantewaa Hooks 103 SMACKING GETS YOU SMACKED /// Asanstewaa Hooks 103 HOME FROM WORK /// Asantewaa Hooks 103 HOME FROM WORK TOO /// Asantewaa Hooks 103 DÉJÀ VU /// Malik Norman 104 FACE YOUR FEARS (LIVE PAINTING VIDEO) /// Miilo 105 BEFORE YOU /// Nia Johnson 106

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RESURRECTION /// Andy Romero

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GREAT HORNED OWL ///Teresa Lopez

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AM I AN ARTIST? ///Zainab Elrahal

AT THE END OF THE DAY, WHO’S GOT YOU? ///Steven Reyes

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ODE: IF I WROTE LUNCH POEMS ///Saramanda Swigart

O’Hara, how brilliantly you use the run-on sentence, almost as though a Bible story met and copulated with a school circular, and what lovely music you make from the quotidian ho-hum and the quite disgusting and urban, and how I admire the stream-of-consciousness way you celebrate moments as though they are now, or now, or even now, like you’re chasing chickens, and you catch each second in your exotic fixative, I would use an amber metaphor, but given your style maybe something more contemporary, like varnish, but really what could be more meaningless! Poems caught for millennia, as if by accident, in varnish, vanish. Oh, bravo.

I want to use the inside of your brain, its gravitas. Stuck with mine. A foundry, sparks flying from the arc welder, a tannery with something unseen burning behind it (that smell), a dry flowerpot with two struggling impatiens in it and no one to water, strange colors in my dawn the yellow of a partially-healed bruise, old junky-arm. Strip the sheath off those words and twist the raw sinew like a nerve. Drop your words in boiling acid and hear them sizzle, reduce to bones. Release the words, struggling, held by the tail, into an electrified maze and watch them dance, those white freeloaders, dance for their lunch, for the sinister delight of all those fonts. This is how I imagine your brain, but what nonsense, you went to Harvard and Michigan (go blue!) and were known as a warm, passionate man with many famous friends and lovers. Why see a tortured soul? Anguish oozing from the lines like Catullus, Ovid’s furious fecundity, all those words like tropical plants, or any of the countless others you admired and/or would have liked to sleep with. Your brain isn’t scary, they say, but really? Scary’s where the words are.

Shall we bring it all around, summarize, keep reading and writing here? Runon, copulate, in exotic fixative: varnish. The brain is a crowded place full of doves. Wing noise. Tanneries too. And mice sizzling for lunch. Dead flowers, dead among the broken fonts. A brain that scares and spews, brain words.

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THE “ITION” PROBLEM

///Emily Coulter

PRINCESS WARRIOR SERIES ///Carolina Quintana Ocampo

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THE SPECTATOR OF CALAMITIES ///Frank Richards

Lorena MacInnes always rose before dawn, and the first thing she did was put water in the kettle for her cup of tea. This chilly day was no exception. Then, electric lantern in hand, she picked her way through the darkness and out to the barn to feed the goats. The night’s moonless visibility enabled her to see the stars, her reliable companions, glittering in the early autumn sky; red, yellow, white, and blue, they were perpetual fireflies, shards of memory, spangling the darkness, looking down on her with their light from the past.

She spotted Orion, fully risen in the southeastern sky. Orion had been Caleb’s favorite constellation. He had always pestered her this time of year that he might be allowed up early to see the Orionids, a minor meteor shower of particles left over from a comet that had passed this way once, perhaps too near the earth, and inevitably destroyed by the tug and pull of gravity, had melted away, until only a few remnants were left to fall to Earth, fiery, burning with everything they had before fading out. None ever seemed to reach the ground.

In some ways, Caleb had been an easy son to raise, but in other ways, he’d proven himself a difficult child. Even when he was grown and had Willie, his own son, to care for and to teach, Caleb had a talent for being oblivious to the obvious. His keen perceptions of nature and the multiplicity of its interrelations were not mirrored by a similar perception of human motivations. He’d been flummoxed by even the simplest things, bursting into tears in frustration. Irony was lost upon him. She wondered at his perceptions. How had he seen the world? It wasn’t necessarily anything he lacked, precisely. It was as if his perception were off, somehow moved up the scale from that of the rest of us. He saw things we didn’t see, but he was oblivious to things that were plain to others.

Sometimes, when getting him off to school or to a party with acquaintances, Lorena felt fear for him, for the lightness of his spirit, 10 SANSKRIT

his easy frustration, and for his lack of social perception, as a sparrow might feel a pang of fear on watching her smallest nestling preparing to fledge. That sort of fear.

Caleb was partially protected by the isolation of their rural way of life, but Lorena couldn’t keep him isolated forever. He’d fallen head over heels for that Janey Staunton, just as Lorena had feared.

Caleb met Janey at the Redford Post Office, where they both worked. He’d given Lorena a tour one time, and she could see why he loved the post office. He had a job that mirrored the exactitude of the organization he preferred in his own life. It was a place of glaring fluorescent lighting and stark gray metal equipment; voices, clacking machin“Voices, clacking ery, and other unidentifiable noises echoed harshly to Loremachinery, and other na’s ears. Paper dust, from all unidentifiable noises the letters, she supposed, tickechoed harshly to led her nose, and she fought Lorena’s ears.” off a sneeze.

Keith James, the acting post office supervisor, looked up from his paperwork and introduced himself to her. He wore a wrinkled white short-sleeve shirt and a brown-and-blue-striped clip-on tie. Janey, wearing a post office blue blouse, tight-fitting shorts, and crooked, smirky smile, leaned against a nearby metal table stacked with packages and watched as Caleb began his tour.

“Letters go in these trays, but they have to face the same way. In the same direction, see?” He pointed to the letters standing on edge in a plastic tray. “And all the stamps go down, not up.

They all face the same way. That’s so you can reach down and pick up a handful, like this, and sort them.” He raised the letters in his left hand, pushed up the top one with his thumb, took it with his right, and flipped it into a square opening on the distribution case.

“We have to do this with any mail that comes in unsequenced by the sorting machines. And sometimes it’s missorted by the machines, and we re-sort it. We distribute it to the carrier routes, and then the carriers put it into delivery sequence at their cases.” He LITERARY-ARTS 11

pointed to more metal furniture arranged in rows of U-shaped stalls on the other side of the office. “Every day is the same as every other.”

Precision. Just the way he liked things. He might make a good career out of this, she thought. The pay was okay, there was good medical coverage, and he had the job security that comes from working for the government. Lorena wondered whether her own routines in life, necessitated by the demands of rural Virginia living, contributed to Caleb’s routinized lifestyle. You never know what children are going to pick up from your example. Maybe she should have showed him more of the variety of life. She wished that he’d picked up what she thought was her own common sense about people. But his infatuation with Janey showed he had not.

When Lorena pointed to Janey’s prior opioid use, Caleb had been dismissive. “She’s not using anymore.”

“How do you know that?” There was so much drug use going around these days. Especially here in rural Virginia, where people have a hard time getting decent jobs. The newspaper said it was an epidemic. And some of these doctors and dentists prescribed opioids for any little pain at all. Lorena had seen one of the drug company sales ladies carting in a big expensive take-out lunch for all the staff down at Urgent Care. She felt sure it was some kind of bribery, out in the open, right in front of everybody.

“She’s taking a pill for it. I’ve seen her take it. And she has her blood tested. They won’t give the pill to her if her blood tests positive for opioids. For Chrissakes, Mom, she’s going to kick it.

Have some faith. Isn’t that what they teach you down at Calvary Baptist?”

“Mmm.” She thought she’d just wait and see about that. ###

Lorena’s best friend, Clementine Cummings, often stopped by the farm Mondays and Fridays for coffee and an afternoon 12 SANSKRIT

chat. But this was Thursday.

“So, Caleb’s dating again.” Clementine spooned a second teaspoon of sugar into her cup and gave her coffee a quick stir.

“They say it’s the Staunton girl, the older one. Janey.”

“About time he quit moping around and got over Betty,” Lorena said, adding, “Don’t you think?” Caleb’s wife Betty had gotten bored with the rigors of housewifery and child care. She’d taken off with a substitute teacher from the high school last year, leaving Caleb and Willie to fend for themselves.

“But Janey Staunton? Land o’ Goshen.” Clementine often dropped into the exclamatory language of her parents’ generation whenever moral rectitude was to become a subject for discussion.

Lorena knew what was coming next. “She still thinks she’s in high school, the way she dresses and carries on. Lordy, all that makeup.

Her momma shoulda tanned her hide for some of the stunts she’s pulled. Remember that time she was smoking in the girls’ lavatory and set half the school on fire? Not a lick of sense. And Caleb—”

“I know.”

“I figured you’d have a conniption fit.”

“At least Caleb’s a responsible person. And Janey, yes, she’s got her faults all right, like you say, but she’s got a good heart.

Remember when I had that sick kid last summer, and Janey came over every day and fed him? Nursed that little goat right back to health. And all that volunteer work she did down at Vet Moseley’s place—”

“Yeah, and Bonita Harris, bless her heart, said she saw Janey taking care of Caleb parked down behind Gray’s Tavern the other night.”

So that’s what this visit was about. Bonita Harris was wife of the sheriff and the town’s most voluble gossip. Caleb and Janey’s business would be spread all over town by now. She’d have to tell him to be more careful.

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###

On the day everything happened, Caleb was awarded a bid to work the day shift on the window service counter at the post office and had to leave Willie with Sadie, Janey’s younger sister.

Sadie would take Willie to school and pick him up. School started at eight, after Caleb was due at work, and ended at three in the afternoon, while he didn’t get off until five thirty.

They’d called Caleb up from Jubal Early, Willie’s school, to say Willie was sick. So, Caleb had to leave work. By the time he got to the school, the principal had called an ambulance to take Willie over to the emergency room at the hospital. That’s where the doctors questioned Willie and found out Janey had given him an orange-colored pill, Suboxone, the drug she was given to combat her opioid addiction. According to the article Lorena cut out from the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record: “These allegations stem from 25-year-old Janey Stevens Stauton’s desire to renew her prescription for Suboxone without being able to pass a urine test that showed Suboxone but no illegal drugs,” according to Commonwealth’s attorney Elizabeth Swann. “Giving drugs to a child. I can’t think of a more appalling situation,” Swann said Friday.

At first, Caleb couldn’t believe that Janey had given her drug medicine to Willie. But Sadie told Caleb Janey had been cheating on her drug tests for months. She had persuaded Sadie to take the Suboxone and give Janey her urine so she could pass the test and keep getting her medicine every month, even though she was still using.

Caleb said he had confronted Janey about what she’d done when he visited her at the jail where they were holding her. The judge had denied her bond.

“I didn’t know he’d get sick from it,” Janey said. “It’s kind of funny, actually, when you think about it.”

“Funny?”

“I never got sick. Sadie never got sick. Why would Willie get sick?”

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stopped using.”

“I was working on it. Even though it was hard, I kept trying. You know that. I knew this month I would quit for sure. I just needed one more Suboxone dose. One more. And Sadie wouldn’t take it for me this time. Can you believe that? My own sister wouldn’t help me. I had to get tested. What else could I do? You wanted me to get straight, didn’t you?”

When Caleb described this conversation to Lorena, she asked him where Janey was getting the drugs she was covering up.

“How could she afford them, Caleb? The nurse over at the Urgent Care told me Oxycodone sold for a hundred dollars a pill on the street. She couldn’t afford much of that on her pay from the post office, could she? How was she paying for her drugs?”

“I don’t know, Ma. She wasn’t getting high every day.” He paused. “I don’t think.” He frowned. “The important thing is, she was trying to get well.”

“But she poisoned Willie!” Lorena slapped her hand on the table in front of her. “I thought you were going to break up with her.”

“She didn’t know Willie would get sick. She thought he could handle it, just like Sadie did. She’s cured now, because of the time she spent drug-free in jail. You have to give her another chance, Ma.”

“Seems to me like she’s had a million chances. Don’t you see it, Caleb? She’s never going to change.”

But Caleb got Janey a slick lawyer from down Blacksburg way, and he was able to get her a sentence diverting her into treatment. She was out of rehab in less than three months. Caleb had quietly married her soon after. ###

Lorena had hoped, for Caleb’s sake, that her judgment about Janey was wrong. But the day came when Caleb was at work and Willie was in school. Janey had gone out joyriding up in the hills with Keith, Janey’s acting supervisor down at the post office. He’d taken the top off his new red Jeep Cherokee, it being a nice day and all. Clementine phoned Lorena right after she heard LITERARY-ARTS 15

about the accident from Bonita.

“Lorena, I didn’t want to be the one to tell you this, but I thought you needed to know. There’s been an accident out on old Highway 41. Janey and Keith.”

“Keith?”

“You know, the acting supervisor at the post office.”

“Are they okay?”

“Uh, no. Unfortunately, they’re both dead. Bonita says nobody seems to know where Caleb is. Sheriff’s looking for him to tell him what happened.” Clementine told her they’d been out in Keith’s new Jeep, speeding, and come around that curve, the one near Paw Paw Mountain, and the farm combine was right there, and they hit it head-on. The combine driver told the sheriff he saw only Keith with a look of open-mouthed surprise before the crash, but they’d found Janey’s body some distance from the wreck.

“You’ve got to find Caleb and tell him before he hears about it from anyone else.”

Caleb was due to pick up Willie right about then, so she waited for him to show up at her house. But he never did.

Officially, that’s all there was to the accident, but according to Sadie’s tearful account, later confirmed by Bonita Harris, her sister never knew what came at them; Keith’s fly was open, and she was busy down below, pleasuring Keith when he lost his head, severed cleanly by the combine, just as his penis was severed by Janey’s clenching rictus of death. Janey had been pleasuring Keith in exchange for drugs. Lorena had found all this out weeks later, of course. After Caleb, who, distraught, put a shotgun under his chin and let go with both barrels, blasting a hole in her heart that would never heal.

I suppose it’s true, she thought, watching a meteor flicker above and then flame out. We are always undone by our own weaknesses.

She finished feeding the goats and went back to the house.

Willie sat at the table in his pajamas, spooning down the last of a bowl of Frosted Flakes. A drop of milk dribbled down his chin. She 16 SANSKRIT

smiled when she saw he’d made her a cup of tea.

“Well, you’re up early. Have you ever seen the Orionids, Willie? It was your father’s favorite meteor shower.”

“Really? Can we go?”

“We don’t have to go anywhere, silly. It’s right outside. Get dressed and we’ll go out before it gets light. Make sure to grab a jacket.”

When Willie left to get dressed, she thought, I’ve got one more chance. One more chance to get it right. She took a sip of her tea and thought how she would explain the meteorites to him.

THE END

UCHU

///Isabella Trivette

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MESSAGE TO ONE WOODED ACRE ///Iris Litt

How can this puffed-up document say I own a waterfall, a bird, a tree, rights to sky?

It does and, noblesse obliging, I study you like a person, play god-of-the-land learn your stream patterns, shape and shade of wood, trees that die but still stand, language of squawks, grunts, chirps, buzzes, tenant voices little different from those of hindleg walkers trying to make themselves understood.

I watch eggs hatch and all kinds of babies grow as mine did, am doctor to broken wings, rescuer to orphans in snow yet, when angered, attack raccoons who stage garbage raids, catch moths and am murderer to ants and mice.

I watch them from behind glass and praise us for building in this wilderness this warm, dry structure of siding, tar paper and shingle with its technology of duct tape, hooks and eyes but take it all back and become another huddled ant when lightning sends a tree just-missing my roof.

As my tenants scurry away, slither under rocks, curl into tree trunks, burrow into soft sod I, having caught that storm’s eye, am my non-god self more helpless and huddled than they, and hearing no voices talking back from that forest to thunder and rain, like them, I bow to the power of the sky.

Foggy Snow Frost

///Catherine Traina

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DEMENTIA STUDY ///Maggie Burgan

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PONDERING THE POND

///Maggie Burgan

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SEX EDUCATION ///Shawna Ervin

Three. The bathwater is warm, The washcloth covers me, stomach to mid-leg. I push from one end of the tub to the other, water rushing into my ears. I need to help you wash. His voice is high, almost singing.

I close my eyes. Strawberry soap foams over my arms, legs, between them, his fingers moving in circles. I shake my hands in the water, listen to the noise. I hum a song my dad taught me, Jesus Loves the Little Children.

Nine. The door is locked, I need to go. The secret key is not a secret. Dad grunts. Mom lies like she fell from a few stories above, her arms splayed out, a knee bent, legs apart. Her face turns away.

Dad’s butt rises, falls hard.

Mom’s puckered, post-birth stomach jiggles, the rest of her body still.

Is she dead?

Ten. Black and white drawings, crinkled on the overhead. Adult figures, after the puberty I wish would begin. A man, standing sideways, his penis drooping in a lazy arc, tubes labeled. Urethra.

Vas deferens. It looks like my dad when he leaves my bedroom at night.

Will they tell us not to cry, to be still, and honor our fathers?

Ten. A tissue box covered in green butcher paper. Questions. Anonymous, the teachers said. A man with thinning hair, his back bent. A woman, nervous; her head jerks to the windows, the door, her fingers tug on her light brown hair.

Questions about us, puberty, the slides. I 22 SANSKRIT

want to know why Kendra, the first to wear a bra, takes it off at recess under the slide, gives it to a boy, why he wants it. Does she get it back? I didn’t ask. The box was empty. My handwriting, and everyone else’s, was distinct even from the other side of the room.

Sixteen. Circle where your dad touched you. Do you know what an erection is, what it looks like? Did your dad ask you to touch him? Did he touch your breasts, your boobs, your body, take off your bra? Stand up.

Show me how you stood, put my hands where his were. I need to know exactly what happened.

Twenty-four. The handcuffs cut into my wrists, pink fur itches. Blindfold too tight, I cannot blink. Something sharp inside me.

Taste this. Celery. Eat it. Don’t spit.

Don’t be gross. The camera clicks.

I can’t wait to show my brother.

He wants to do you.

Twenty-four. I don’t say no. No means nothing. You’re going to like this. Hurry up and change. Leather.

Tied down, the room black. Something wet and sticky dribbled over my stomach, between my legs. He licks me, watches my body betray me, jams his tongue into my mouth, licks again. Jams a baby carrot into my ass. Eat this, bitch.

Thirty. Second date. I hold his hand to my mouth, close my lips around each finger, suck, think he’s like the many others, watch his face, his pants. No. He pulls away. I want to know you first. I’m not ready. I wanted to be ready too.

Eight. Daughter dances in front of the mirror, puckers pink lip gloss, hands on what will be hips one day. Do you think I will ever be kissed? “Someday.

What kind of person do you want to kiss? It had better be someone great for those lips. You can…” say no, Mo-om, my body, I know-uh.

I tell her again what I needed someone to tell me.

CERBERUS; NOEVIL ///Sheree Davidson

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BLUE SWEATER MEMORIES ///Claire Scott

We headed off to the sweater factory in Laconia a bunch of bored teens looking for something to do that summer of the sixties something to pass the time before night’s beer & whiskey & pairing off into pine shadows I bought a blue pullover with navy stripes for only five dollars that night sipping whiskey on the shore of Squam Lake the moon strolled across the water the last loon silent till dawn I noticed a loose thread & I pulled & pulled & others joined in until my sweater was one long wool thread piled at my feet & we were all laughing impossible to tell it was once a very cool blue sweater with navy stripes for only five dollars that blue sweater that first kiss, tongues seeking arms fumbling, not sure what was off limits afraid a clumsy hand would spoil it all I want to remember before time pulls the thread and unstitches that summer in New Hampshire

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RUFF VICTORIAN ///Alayna Gorospe

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SHE SENT THE WAVES ///Bonnie Larson Staiger

Into the tidal pool of her poems I wade

The tranquil seductive landlocked

undercurrent tugs at my ankles Water roils words flow

now lapping at my nose

She barely lets me breathe Her room a boat buoys

her precious cargo across the yard

a frigate to the ocean Enveloped in sage waves

I surrender synapse and sinew

and do not damn the sea

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FERRY RIDE

///Teresa Lopez LITERARY-ARTS 27

ALONE

///Asantewaa Hooks

LONG SERPENT

///Hannah Clonts

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ALAPORAAN THAMIZHAN ///Josephine Justin

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THE ROCK IS STILL THERE ///Julius Shumpert

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MESSAGE

///Gale Acuff I love Jesus but then there’s Miss Hooker, my Sunday School teacher, she gets me in -to the classroom and I stay for God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost and Heaven and the good stories from the Bible, it’s a pretty fair trade-off, she’s got red hair and green eyes and freckles and when she sings and pounds the piano it’s like I’m dead already and in Heaven with her. Will I make it? Maybe not. I sin a lot and even a little sin is too much, she says, and I’ve sinned so much already that when my body dies and my soul goes to Heaven I might not be able to talk my way out of Hell, which is where God will surely send me and He can’t do wrong since He’s perfect but at least I tried. If I want to see Miss Hooker forever I need like the devil to get saved or I’ll burn forever and meanwhile she’ll be an angel and forget all about me.

If she’d marry me one day that would help, God having to decide if He’ll break us up, Miss Hooker with Him but me on fire.

Miss Hooker’s 25 and I’m just 10 so when I’m 16, I’ll ask for her hand, she’ll be 31 then and say yes if she’s still single and if she’s not maybe I’ll jump off a bridge, Hell’s waiting for me anyway. That way I’ll set her free and maybe God will see that and save my soul for her and let me stay in Heaven and when Miss Hooker shows up dead won’t she be surprised? After Sunday School I walk home, I miss church service because Miss Hooker sits up front so far away I just can’t see her, only Preacher Pat. And the Cross, of course, and once when I was trying to spy the back of Miss Hooker’s red head I thought I saw Jesus Himself hanging there, on the Cross I mean, not Miss Hooker’s head.

I blinked and looked again and He was gone, risen all over again, I guess. I got the message. You have to die a lot.

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CLOUDS ON PARADE ///Bonnie Larson Staiger

Going about my way I keep watch on the skies for thunder bumpers building dark in the west mostly silent but sometimes they speak in tongues I envy stratus strands of wool carded & corded like a blanket comforts earth asleep before dawn Or celestial cotton candy in a carnival overhead Some days cirrus blades slice the sky give chase to their warring foes while I defer to those diffused beings Gauzed ghosts who pause to greet me as I escape gravity to join them

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A QUIET FOREST ///Kevin Canales

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SKELETAL CITY ///Kelly Byas

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UNTITLED

///Mekayla Johnson

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MELANCHOLY, SAUDADE ///Lillian McKenzie

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THE DEVIL’S RADIO

///Beth Escott Newcomer

Carol Kaczmarek was a screamer.

Back when we all played War in the connected backyards behind the houses that lined School Street and Willow Street, we made forts in the lilac bushes and used sticks like swords and flung mud balls and dog turds at our enemies from the basket of Dad’s old lacrosse stick; we took our prisoners to the shed behind the Larsons’ horse trailer, and we’d threaten to torture them with the snaffle bits and the other riding gear that hung on hooks on the walls, “Carol Kaczmarek was a screamer.” though mostly we never followed through—the worst we ever did was make them take their pants down. But nevertheless, whenever things got the least bit interesting or dangerous, it was Carol’s piercing scream that summoned the authorities—a parental dictatorship that would shut down the whole business.

So naturally, it was Carol who screamed the loudest and was the first to run to the nearest adult to tell on Big David and Annie when they tossed Tim Lenfers too hard and too far playing Statues. That was in the Lenfers’ backyard after supper on the last day of school.

Tim’s collarbone got broken, and it looked like he’d have to skip swimming at Miller Park Pool that whole summer. His mother, Cheri, made Big David and Annie’s mother, Joan, pay the emergency room bill. Joan didn’t really have the money, being the only single mother on the block so far. That was why there wasn’t money for the pool for Big David and Annie either. They’d have to miss out on swimming just like Tim, and it looked like they, too, would be stuck, staying home, bored to death, while their mother went off to work. It was a raw deal, but no one could say it wasn’t fair.

It was broiling hot the first week of summer vacation, and every day all the other kids rode off on their bikes to the Miller Park Pool, leaving behind Tim—who sat around feeling sorry for LITERARY-ARTS 37

himself, his shoulder in a giant cast with his arm out “akimbo” (that was the summer we learned that word), watching Gunsmoke and Bonanza reruns on the giant color console TV in the Lenfers’ living room, with all the curtains closed to shut out the sun, and the air conditioner in the window practically drowning out the sound of the TV—and Big David and Annie—who sat around feeling sorry for themselves, watching General Hospital, The Edge of Night, and The Secret Storm on the portable black-and-white TV down in the basement family room. Big David made Annie get up and change the channels all the time, and she’d have to set down her chocolate milk and walk all the way over to the other side of the room to click around the dial just to see what else was on.

That couldn’t last very long.

One day Big David said to Annie, “Let’s go see what’s happening over at Tim’s,” and so Annie locked up the house with the key she kept on a string around her neck, and they took off down the sidewalk toward Willow Street. By this time, they weren’t mad at Tim anymore for being such a fragile shrimp; instead they were mad at Carol for ratting them out. As they walked the two blocks over to the Lenfers’ house, they talked trash about Carol, saying how she was such a baby, ruining all the games, and blaming her for everything. And, come to think of it, what about her brothers?

Wasn’t it partly the fault of Carol’s older brothers being so wild, amping up all the games? Big David and Annie wouldn’t have been showing off so much with the big swinging way they tossed Tim if it hadn’t been for those Kaczmarek boys. Why should they get to go to the pool?

By the time they got to Tim’s house on Willow Street, and Tim had passed out the Popsicles and they were all hanging around on Tim’s front porch, Tim had joined in, adding some things that his mother had said about how the Kaczmarek house was always such a mess and smelled like basset hounds and cigarettes, about how Mr. Kaczmarek was so much older than Mrs. Kaczmarek, and how Mrs. Kaczmarek was so loud and full of 38 SANSKRIT

herself at the PTA meetings, wearing those low-cut blouses that showed everything. Tim threw in the word “slut” to sound like an authority. None of them were sure what the word meant, but it seemed like Carol’s mother must be one.

“I heard she sunbathes naked in the backyard,” added Big David, not to be outdone by Tim, who was one year younger.

“That’s why they have that high fence.”

“Let’s go see if it’s true,” said Annie, which shocked the two boys, given that Annie was usually more the innocent bystander type and rarely one to initiate a caper.

Tim said, “My mom said I’m not supposed to leave the house,” but no one—probably not even Tim’s mother—really thought mere words would keep him on that front porch. Big David ordered Tim to get his binoculars, and Tim said, “Good idea.”

They went around to the back of the house, ran across the Lenfers’ flat green lawn, the scene of the Statues debacle. Then they made their way up the steep embankment, with Tim bringing up the rear. With his akimbo cast, he required a wider berth than the others as they ambled through the dense tangle of dogwood trees and redbud trees and ornamental maples Mrs. Lenfers had planted a few years ago and then promptly neglected. Tim’s great white cast dazzled in the dappled sunlight.

At the top of the hill, a decorative split-rail fence separated the Willow Street backyards from the backyards of the newer, modern-style houses up on Rotunda Court. Other than at the Kaczmareks’, they hadn’t spent much time up in the new subdivision and really didn’t know their way around the cul-de-sac. But Big David was daring and led them on, sneaking around behind garages and through side yards, searching for a good place from which to spy.

A few houses away from the Kaczmareks’ place, they paused to get their bearings beneath a large forsythia bush that had been recently trimmed—its bright yellow flowers providing a LITERARY-ARTS 39

kind of camouflage and plenty of room for the three of them along with Tim’s giant cast.

They sat Indian style and Tim was able to rest his akimbo arm in the crook of the branches. Annie squirmed around, tugging at the legs of her seersucker shorts. “It feels like I’m sitting on an anthill and they’re biting me,” she whined.

“Be quiet and quit moving around so much!” whispered Big David.

Then he turned to Tim. “Give me those binoculars.”

Tim, who was hot and sweaty and had become slightly worried about ants getting inside his cast, said, “Actually, we should probably be getting home now,” but handed his binoculars to Big David anyway and showed no intention of abandoning his post.

Big David scanned the Kaczmareks’ yard with Tim’s binoculars. Ordinarily, there would have been bicycles all over the lawn, left where they had been thrown, but with Carol and her brothers off at the pool, the front yard was uncharacteristically neat.

The sun was at its hottest. The only sounds were the buzz of insects and the hum of the central air-conditioning units—everyone up there had central air.

“Let’s go in for a closer look,” said Big David. In a crouched sprint, he led the posse across the street to a spot with a better view—a mulberry tree beside “Everyone was the garage of the Kaczmareks’ disappinted and yet next-door neighbor. Tim somehow a little relieved.” couldn’t climb with his arm in a cast, and Annie was afraid of heights, so Big David left them hiding behind the trunk of the tree while he went for a bird’s-eye view of the action.

And that’s when they spotted the red, white, and blue United States Postal Service truck turning the corner and heading up the hill toward Rotunda Court. The driver, Mr. Lombardo, parked on the far side of the cul-de-sac, disappeared into the back of the truck for a moment, then emerged with his big leather mailbag.

“Oh no!” whispered Tim. “He’ll see us spying!”

Annie gasped.

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“Shhh,” admonished Big David from halfway up the tree.

“Stay calm.”

They watched Mr. Lombardo walk along the sidewalk and up the front walk of the first house. He stood on the stoop, briefly checked through the envelopes, then deposited a bundle of mail into the box by the front door before retracing his steps back down the front walk, then making a left onto the sidewalk. Then they watched as he repeated the routine, “In their making his way up the front walk of the not-so-good second house, placing the mail into the box hiding place, they by the front door, and turning left onto the froze in terror.” sidewalk toward the next house.

When Mr. Lombardo started up the front walk of the third house, Big David hoisted himself the rest of the way up and began to inch his way out onto an overhanging limb. He raised the binoculars to look into the Kaczmareks’ backyard.

“Is she naked?” Tim asked in a loud whisper.

Big David could see Mrs. Kaczmarek in a bright yellow twopiece swimsuit, gigantic sunglasses, and a wide-brimmed straw hat, stretched out on a chaise lounge-style lawn chair. A cold drink sat on a small table, next to a bottle of Coppertone suntan lotion, a pack of Pall Malls, and a transistor radio. He could hear the station identification, “Double-u Ell Ess! In Chi-caa-go!” followed by the opening bars of the top ten hit “Bend Me, Shape Me.” Mrs. Kaczmarek turned up the volume a little.

“Nah,” said Big David. “She’s wearin’ a bathing suit. Nothing to see.”

Everyone was disappointed and yet somehow a little relieved. But before they could abort the mission—get Big David down out of the tree and head back to Tim’s in time to catch Gilligan’s Island, which started at 3:30—they were startled to notice that Mr. Lombardo, after placing the bundle of mail in the box by the front door, instead of heading back down the front walk, turned and moved directly toward Annie and Tim. In their not-sogood hiding places, they froze in terror, their minds churning with LITERARY-ARTS 41

possible excuses about what they were doing there. But apparently Mr. Lombardo didn’t see them. He came to a stop at the gate in the side fence, took out a handkerchief, and wiped his face, then knocked:

Shave and a haircut, two bits.

A moment later, Mrs. Kaczmarek opened the gate, took Mr. Lombardo by the hand, and led him, mailbag and all, into the backyard, shutting the gate behind them.

Annie and Tim looked at each other with eyebrows raised all the way to the top of their foreheads, and they both put their hands over their mouths. Still officially on duty, Big David continued to peer through the binoculars at the scene unfolding below.

“They are kissing,” he began. “And it looks like they’re dancing to the radio.”

“I love that song,” said Annie.

“Now they are going over by the garden shed,” Big David continued in a hoarse whisper.

Tim and Annie struggled to understand the strange details of what came next. Big David sounded out of breath as he described what he saw: Mrs. Kaczmarek had ordered Mr. Lombardo to take his pants down, and now he was just standing there by the shed with his mailman pants around his ankles, and Mrs. Kaczmarek was down on her knees, and it looked like she had his thing in her hand, rubbing it. And then she put it in her mouth.

“She put it in her mouth?!” Annie repeated, incredulous, glaring at her brother up in the tree, remembering all the times he’d fooled her in the past with his nonsense.

“I don’t believe it,” said Tim, but remained intrigued.

“I’m not kidding!” said Big David. “And it looks like Mr. Lombardo is about to start crying or yelling or something.”

“Oh my goodness,” said Annie.

Just then, Carol Kaczmarek appeared out of nowhere, whizzing up the block on her pink Sting-Ray bike with the white banana seat, in her bathing suit, bare feet pumping the pedals, head down, mouth set in an expression of determination—no doubt preparing to tattle on her brothers.

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When she got to her house, she threw the bike down in the front yard and ran up the steps onto the porch and into the front door.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Tim.

Big David panicked and jumped out of the tree in one leap, twisting his ankle as he hit the ground. He was limping as the three of them ran across Rotunda Court, back toward School Street and Willow Street. They hadn’t even made it to the forsythia bush when they heard Carol’s high, piercing scream.

THE END

DONUT JIM

///Lillian McKenzie

LITERARY-ARTS 43

INFATUATION 1

///Grayson Sullivan

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INFATUATION 2

///Grayson Sullivan

LITERARY-ARTS 45

MOZART PLAYS BILLIARDS ///Katharine Gregg

A great composer he told me never spends all he’s got on his first shot. He must be a master of spinning out implications, spilling them into extensions of oblique angles so instead of dropping into the first cadence the ball dances off on a tangent of perilous runs and arpeggios till it drops down to rest. Outside and above, the Vienna spires are cream and gold against the perfect blue of Heaven. Below the rectangle of street and façade insists on its rightness while inside all is oval, curving the straight line till the gilt vines bind walls to ceiling. Even in the narrow room in the Schulerstrasse arched cherubs peer down on the green baize table placed in the light from the window. For the piano candles are sufficient. Notebook and pencil he keeps balanced on the table’s rails, and always humming he bends, sighting the line— the turn and extensions, the whole exposition in his ear as he draws back the cue, as he taps the ball on its trajectory. The tune hums, unrolling back and forth across the felt, and now stepping back, he follows the web of notes, the counterpoint of colored balls, his face radiant watching them spin across and across, weaving a fantastic trompe l’oeil onto the table’s predictable rectangle, and when the last drops into its appointed spot, doesn’t he throw back his head and burst into godlike laughter!

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REALITY?

///James Bourke

LITERARY-ARTS 47

QUEER BAIT ///Mirelys Colón

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COMING OUT ///Anonymous

Women are not beautiful.

They are the same sex as me.

It is immoral and unnatural to be attracted to them.

I am not attracted to them.

I need to bury my feelings under heterosexuality. avoid invalidation and choke on repression like the good girl I am.

What would everyone say?

Supple, sensual, secrecy.

I want to hold her hand and kiss the tips of her knuckles.

She catches me gazing and I stare at my cuticles, blushing.

I need to bury my feelings under heterosexuality.

What would everyone say?

LOVER’S DECAY

///Kevin Canales

LITERARY-ARTS 49

MORNING TEA /// James Adams It is quiet and cool.

The ivory cup and saucer make me consider yesterday’s elephant.

Mukwano tea steeps beside me the masala and ginger steaming against the John Constable baltic blue sky, just gathering.

A treasury of pink cloud, white and gray forming faces and places in this predawn delight.

1,000 ill and forlorn people behind us crammed into three long days an impossible load finishing last night in the dark to drive without lights all the long, rough road home.

I believe we have done well.

I hope we have done well.

But there’s unease in the soft light and early dawn.

Someone hurries toward me, a co-labourer who is three times what I will ever be.

“Come, habibi,” he says, out of breath— “we are again needed.”

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TEA TIME

///Lillian McKenzie

LITERARY-ARTS 51

TO WIDEN THE SIDEWALK ///Rochelle Jewel Shapiro

They cut down the cherry trees, petals like pink crepe paper bunched in the hands of children, the bark scored and scarred like fairy-tale trees.

They cut down the flowering pears that showered white petals on my hair and shawled my shoulders.

They ripped out the roots that held me steady.

First, they lopped off limbs that left gray-lipped open mouths.

I can still hear them scream.

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THE STREETS ARE STILL STAINED, FROM WHERE THEY LEFT US

///James Bourke

LITERARY-ARTS 53

FIREWORK

///Cristian Ponce

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THE DAY STALIN DIED ///Katharine Gregg

It was summer—the French doors were open onto the terrace and the mower droned far then near setting the rhythm of the day that widened in circles from the house. I remember the day-old Times arrived by mail and spread on Grandma’s table, how it shouted the death in black letters and we all stared at the face.

But I am wrong. The death occurred in March, the sixth of March when it was cold, snow and school—the year we learned cursive and the solar system and the boys were bullies. On Grandma’s table there was a bowl of zinnias like pinwheels.

Sitting in her chair I could read the words, looking at the terrible face with its black mustache, its hair swept back like a movie star. Perhaps he smiled a little, but the eyes were cruel. Perhaps he rode a black stallion wearing a fur hat to Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, the part where the little birch tree whirls in a tempest of violins. He’d have a saber too like the Cossacks in the movie at Carrie’s birthday who rode so close we saw their shouting mouths and teeth and ducked behind the seats till the music swept them away. It was summer. Mom wore her flowered dress. Frowning at the face she said he even wanted

to come here, but now he was dead, and no one scolded when we ran barefoot or slammed the screen door, and after lunch we would go swimming while the house breathed its heartbeat over the lawn. Looking at the face I promised every day to read the tiny words that made no pictures I knew of Cossacks--or Peter with the wolf by the tail (and if you listen carefully you can hear the duck quacking in his belly). Looking at the face something shifted; I was different, responsible for understanding the words that meant the big things like death and freedom, that had no pictures. Sitting in grandma’s chair I wasn’t sure I wanted them, just black and white on the page. They had no selves like things you could pick or smell, like the bowl of zinnias, which were themselves— pink and yellow pinwheels and part of the self that was the house, the droning mower, the smell of cut grass, And beyond—the self we were part of that rayed out beyond the fence to the whole world, sweet and green and not death. Which is how I know it was summer and later it would be time and we would go swimming.

LITERARY-ARTS 55

SPRITES

///Paul Hundt

This has been a tough two years. I have watched the election of a mi-

nority president, who with his venal cronies has launched unrelenting attacks on our political institutions and the Rule of Law.

Long retired, I lack the refuge of a responsible job to distract me. In

addition, the inevitable health and physical issues of advancing age restrict my chances to escape to the outdoors to hike, climb or fish. I have become a pris-

oner of the endless loops of TV news coverage bewailing our perilous situation.

Thus, there have been few opportunities to forget about the deconstruction of the freedoms, norms and protections of the country I have lived in all my life and of my body as well.

But one of those opportunities occurs each Wednesday afternoon at two

o’clock. At that moment Puck, Ariel, Titania, and all the other sprites, fairies and magical people in Shakespeare’s lexicon dance through our front door in the

personages of our two grandchildren, aged seven and eight. Denizens of two alternating caves about twenty minutes away, they flit into our staid, quiet household and turn everything topsy turvy. Like Prospero, my wife has loosed them

from the confines of school, apartments and car seats and they rush to our front door to perform a weekly ritual: the senior sprite rings the bell insistently and the junior sprite hides; when I totter downstairs from my office computer and

open the door, much is made of his absence. Did he run away at school? Did he

find something to do elsewhere? Did the teacher keep him? Who is going to get his share of the afternoon snack? At which point he materializes from nowhere and they cross the threshold shouting, laughing, interrupting each other and

me, claiming my attention with “important things” to tell me. As they cast off

their coats, I am transformed into a line cook, waiter, busboy and dishwasher so they can fuel up on French toast or grilled cheese before the wild dance begins in earnest.

However, before that starts they must dispatch one insignificant admin-

istrative matter that burdens their joy. The chief sprite, who as a baby would

cry bloody murder whenever I approached, now insists I sit beside her, while

she races through her English and Math homework at my wife’s desk upstairs.

However, I am not permitted to look, help, or check. I just sit there. To pass this very short time, I color in an adult coloring book (inevitably going outside the

lines) or I take my 2B pencil and draw the same desk lamp I have been trying to 56 SANSKRIT

capture for months.

When her book slams shut, my time on the dunce stool begins. We im-

mediately shift into a student-teacher relationship in which I become in her considered judgment an incorrigibly inept student, a Denny Dimwit, who deserves the lengthy punishment assignments that she inflicts, like writing “I will not

(do whatever she says I did)” fifty times. Should I become truculent, or make

light of the seriousness of my infraction, as I inevitably do, she sends me to the

principal’s office where she, now the principal, threatens to suspend me and call my parents. I explain this will be a very hard thing to do since I have been an

orphan these past fifteen years, a fact which elicits no sympathy from her what-

soever. Although I do not tell her, it’s very difficult for me to be in this situation.

I was a very good boy in school, so good in fact that I never got a single demerit, something I am now embarrassed to admit and have been trying to make up

for all my adult years. To find myself in the principal’s office for something other than an academic award is beyond my wildest dreams. It is a chance to make up for all the fun I missed when I was a kid.

After spending a few moments in detention, which is mercifully much

shorter than it would have been in real life because she has the attention span

of tsetse fly, we play ZOMBIE; and it comes as no surprise I am to be the walk-

ing undead. She buries me again and again in a pile of pillows so I can stick out first a twisted claw and then rise from my feather covered grave with contorted face and limbs, making the appropriate horrible noises in the process. I resur-

rect myself again and again. On any given afternoon, I beat Jesus Christ handily.

After all, he only had to do it once.

Meanwhile, the junior sprite is down in the kitchen barging through

his homework so he can pepper Prospero with questions: does she know that

dinosaurs still exist? Does she know the wingspan of an eagle? After her unsatisfactory responses, he turns disgustedly to my birding manuals and copies out the names of all the hawks in North America.

(Obviously we think our sprites are geniuses. As grandparents we are

entitled to fantasize that our combination of genes has finally produced a couple of Einsteins. Let their parents face reality, just as we had to do when we were parents. The genius factor was not apparent in the intervening generation.

The two Palookas we produced were so busy slugging it out whenever they got within three feet of each other, and stubbornly resisting all things intellectual

and artistic that their genius remained under wraps. But such dogged resistance LITERARY-ARTS 57

was in itself a form of creativity which seems to have stood them in good stead in adulthood. They are sound, brave and good men. What more could one ask for?)

Suddenly, Ariel or Puck or Titania or whoever has been busy abusing

my Caliban decides it is time to draw if the weather is bad, in which case I

struggle with my pencil and pad while she and her brother draw pictures so fast it’s like watching a printing press. If the weather is good, it’s time to ride bikes, play catch, and roll on the front lawn. I toodle along behind the bikes, giving

the occasional push if a hill is steep, or I try to throw balls or kick balls around the yard as well. If we were to graph their increasing athletic skills against my decreasing capabilities, the lines are about to cross. Rolling on the grass went out for me about thirty years ago.

At 5PM precisely, they grab their backpacks, run to the car and, led by

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Prospero, give me a ringing good bye as she drives them to their appropriate

cave. The energy, the life force is gone and a deafening silence settles over the house once again. I sit down for a while and then begin to warm up, for Pros-

pero’s return, whatever take-out we picked up in anticipation of how tired we would feel.

I am exhausted. But I live in hope that, in seven days at two in the

afternoon, those sprites will come dancing through our front door once again to create that loving pandemonium for which we thirst. And that, despite the political turmoil and my health issues, I will still be here to enjoy it.

THE END

ONE IN ALL, WE’RE ALL THE SAME ///Danielle Walden

LITERARY-ARTS 59

FACADES

///Emily Sanders Supple pearl and silk strewn across valleys of skin Through billowing purple smoke and scattered erections Soft skin dances in the spotlight of 100 gazes Eyes emulate desire, casting harsh fragments of grey light that Broke apart her velvet mask which oozed darkness of Lost hope and melancholy dreams It pooled at the feet of a man who didn’t notice the stickiness of sadness Which clung to the bottom of his boots That his wife asked him to take off before he entered the living room because “honestly, dear” But he did notice the creamy pallor of lust The titillating, taunting, intoxicating aura of Affection that must be hidden under the folds and ruffles of eroticism He surely noticed the drop of silk To reveal the niches and corners of her body Corridors and secret doors without locks His eyes devour her silhouetted form His hands grasp at the ghost that dances with her demons His body throbs and pulsates with her precise movements His cold skin yearns for a warm, liquid body Enveloped in the natural desire to feel something And bury himself in lust that didn’t belong to him The extension of his widened pupils explores her body, stumbling around Full breasts his wife didn’t have and a pussy that dripped honey and Promises of emptiness And when her vacant eyes met his in languid hesitation Both pairs of eyes silently beg for redemption and forgiveness and They realize they have nothing to offer one another The only thing they had in common Was the grainy, white and black memory Of some melancholy dreams 60 SANSKRIT

SKULL STUDY ///Teresa Lopez

LITERARY-ARTS 61

LEAF DETERIORATION ///Alayna Gorospe

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MY SILENCED SPRING ///Mary Louise Kiernan

A Call to Mind: 1970-2020 Oh, when will they ever learn? ~ Pete Seeger April 22, 1970 What do we want? / Clean air!

On that first Earth Day, with my high school friends, I skipped down subway steps (Flushing’s Main Street station), the mission to save the nation from the General of Motors, who had yet to drum out loyalists to Rachel Carson’s warnings of future songless mornings. White surgical masks donned, our peacoats from the Army & Navy store buttoned down, up the stairwell we charged. We paraded past barricades out of line, giddy & fearless in our freedom to chant: What do we want? / Clean air!

When do we want it? / Now! May 4, 1970 What do we want? / Peace!

Bared bayoneted rifles aimed to halt our college students with civil rights to assemble. Without warning, Guardsmen of our Nation, who never intended to kill their fellow American citizens, randomly struck down protestors and passersby.

Speakers against war sprawled on the ground felled by bullets.

States away, in my parochial uniform, I disassembled. Too shattered to wield my will, too numb to cry out: What did we want? / Peace.

When did we want it? Then.

LITERARY-ARTS 63

WINTER WONDERLAND ///Kelly Byas

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LITERARY-ARTS 65

ROSE GOLD KINTSUGI ///Danielle Walden

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LOSS

///Emily Sanders Her words tumbled from her lips like a waterfall And mixed with her salty, crystalline tears, Forming opalescent stars in her dark and empty room That said “I miss you”.

The stars floated past the pale, chipping walls of her room Through the cracked, water-stained ceiling Through the dusty attic littered with tucked away memories And past the roof dotted with debris – Upward towards the sky, Catching the moon’s translucent rays That dripped faint hints of light.

These stars danced with every undulation, Every timbre of her soft, velvety voice, Following every soprano and contralto that formed In her throat and climbed to her lips.

As these stars floated and swayed past the sky And to the gleaming, blinding ivory of the heavens, An angel dipped past the pillowy clouds Reaching his hand down past the midnight sky In a desperate effort to catch the stars, So he could hear her honey voice once again.

SAVANNAH /// F. S. Blake

Fog hangs low on the rooftops of the city Pressed flat on treetops Clouds brought down to our level Like parents kneeling to children Fine mist tickles windowsills And buildings huddle together around the warmth of public squares Domes and spires dance in the distance And live oaks drip with approval

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SACRIFICE AND MUSA DWARF CAVENDISH STAGE ///Andy Romero

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BLACK HAUS

///Robert Salazar-Guevara

LITERARY-ARTS 69

SMITH & WESSON ///Lindsey Riggs

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UNTITLED

///Mekayla Johnson

LITERARY-ARTS 71

TO A FLIGHT OF FANCY ///Valerie Griggs

A solitary mourning dove sits on a telephone wire high above the midmorning din of roaring garbage trucks and insolent busses.

Is she David’s sparrow, Hitchcock’s harbinger?

I cannot leave her just a bird, when, from age to age, birds have perched as deities and archetypes in wood and stone and gold.

I imagine species by sound: a forlorn cry across an autmned lake, a coo, a hoot, a chirp, a screech— then the wily scavenger darts, the heroic predator dives; enchanted swimmers, colorful climbers to heaven and flightless woodland dwellers migrate across my mind’s eye.

As stationary and plump as Hopkins’s dauphin is glorious, this dove carries my fancy across miles of ocean on wings outstretched and still— until the shrill honking of the car behind me snares the reverie.

SMITTEN IN A CAT CAFE

/// Emily Coulter

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E

er

BIRDS

///Laurie Lessen Reiche My mouth opens sounds emerge primitive consonants ancient hieroglyphics.

A bird flies out and I am glad he is free, speaks a fluent language communal harmony he is free. I am darkness a perfect foreigner I don’t know what I say my mouth opens and I cannot hear my voice.

I am straw and twigs there are birds in my eyes I will not speak.

LITERARY-ARTS 73

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MIXED PATHOLOGY ///Alessio Zanelli for mom It’s still all there, in that slowly-shrinking pulpy mass a little bigger than a pomegranate, in that jumbled fistful of withering cells no longer capable of recognizing themselves.

Every word said or heard, every dream or thought, every image or sound, every emotion or feeling.

Every single moment of her life as well as many of mine.

Everything’s buried deep in there somewhere.

It must be.

Only, the last thread left along which all she was and is can resurface is becoming thinner and thinner.

Until it breaks, she prisoner inside.

Or who knows, finally free from walls and ceilings, unshackled from the chains of pills and concoctions.

Yes, free to range at will outdoors.

JENNY

///Millicent Read LITERARY-ARTS 75

UNIDENTIFIED #17 ///Malik Norman

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LITERARY-ARTS 76

HYBRID

///Crystal Zapata

LAUNDROMAT ///Lindsey Riggs

LITERARY-ARTS 77

KERALA

///Josephine Justin

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EDGE OF DISMANTLING /// Bonnie Larson Staiger

“…to see if I would go

or change into something else.”

Galway Kinnell, “The Gray Heron”

In a stroke of evolutionary voodoo like casting off false selves who bear no resemblance to you Parodies in ill-fitting regalia you have been loath to abandon The sky slides into inked water a murky sludge reaches up from the aquifer to transform you an ancient throwback a lizard in leathered skin basks in the heat of the day as though awakened from shedding the past Now wears an avian costume a heron feathered in a charcoal coat appears like sweetgrass arcs along a lazy lake You move on eyes blink at the speed of eons Reedy legs high-step lapping water

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DISPLACEMENT POSTPONED ///Bonnie Larson Staiger

the space I take up gradually recedes layers of living peel away like sunburned skin seasons slip hidden in cellophaned sight and mineraled knots of bone air lunged in and out of its own labyrinth memory goes the way of dry ice like a handprint left in a pail of water nothing stays where I left it to fill those places not even me

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LAST TRAIL

///Ellen Lager She’s explored hundreds of trails through these woods tracing the edge of nightfall, but this one is untracked.

Lured by light— crystal stars of the Big Dipper over the lake like luminaries hastening her egress, flickering their welcoming lamplight— her passage heightened by the North Star— the duet hooting of owls across the expanse of water.

What summons her is the obsidian fringe of pines bending shadows, impermanent histories of other companions bound in kernels of memory.

A canine’s life never long enough.

Behind, a whistle and call but she’ll not linger.

Nose low to the ground,

COMIC

///Lindsey Riggs

she follows her waning dynasty in and out of the tree line, the throaty yodeling of loons and strawberry moon lifting the night’s lanterns.

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COYOTES

///Patrick Bahls I tell myself that one day I’ll not be so busy at bein myself that I’ll be able ta buy that suitcase a Natty Light an take it up th hill to where them good ol boys are settin an always yellin to me cross my driveway bout weed whackers n lawn mower parts and on that one day we can set on their hill and watch the sun set down like an orange in a pool of blood and pretend how we’re a pack a coyotes. won’t them stars be beautiful?

CAROUSEL

///Aslin Chavarria Ayala

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THE SADDEST SHOW ON EARTH ///Kelly Gilbert

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AWKWARD MOMENT ///Paul Watsky

Early evening, most everyone having left the beach, my father and I, seated among low sand dunes, face the ocean, silent until he blurts, I don’t want to die, and starts crying a little. He’s in his later 70s, seems healthy—actually has half a dozen further years—and, unlike Mother, doesn’t manufacture scenes. Now at 70 myself I’m still trying on what’s best to tell one’s parent: There, there, Dad, don’t worry your head. Proffer a religious fairy tale? Bluster and deny all the morbid possibilities? Maybe he intuits the esophageal carcinoma, incubating from generations of dental x-rays he’s performed, unarmored against obsolescing leaky machines. It wasn’t an especially pleasant finish:

YBOR AT NIGHT

///Catherine Traina

pipes encircled by muting neoplasm, terminally fuzzed out on hospice meds. I said little there or at our seaside preview where I gave him a hug, like he was my child, and today realize could have thrown in, I don’t blame you. Which mightn’t have helped but would at least be true.

LITERARY-ARTS 85

UGH

///Stephen A. Geller

Charlotte ate at Holly’s seafood restaurant more times than she could count. Annual gatherings with a dozen or so friends, beginning in their senior year of high school and still continuing as a few of them were starting menopause, even though none of them were fifty yet. A niece’s graduation party. An occasional date.

Holly’s was convenient, the food was usually delicious and reasonably priced, the ambient noise didn’t swallow their conversations, and the familiar view of San Diego Bay was always wonderful.

Leonard Smalley’s wife died almost a year ago after a long illness. Leonard was a shy accountant who came weekly to review the financial records at the firm where she worked. Leonard asked Charlotte out and suggested they go to Holly’s. He always wore a suit, white shirt, and tie and stammered a little when he asked her for the date, although she never heard him do that when he was with any of the lawyers. She told him she would respond next week when he came for another review of the books.

The last time at Holly’s, just ten days ago, was awful, one of the worst dates Charlotte ever had. His name was Dan but she became accustomed to saying “ugh” on those initially painful, now laughable, occasions when she discussed him with her sister or friends; “Ugh” was how she now thought of him. Tommy, her best friend Maggie’s brother, worked for Ugh and arranged for the date.

Tommy told Charlotte, “He’s a really good guy and a hell of a lot of fun.”

“I’ll meet you there,” Dan said when he called. “Eight on the nose. Just stand outside and I’ll find you.” But it was one of those rare rainy days in San Diego, and by the time she got to Holly’s, there was an uncommonly heavy downpour, with gusty winds making the palm trees sway frenetically. She ran from the cab and stood outside the restaurant under her umbrella for a few minutes, enjoying the rain until the dampness crept under her shoes and cooled the soles of her feet. Then she waited just inside the door so there wouldn’t be any confusion when he finally arrived.

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More than fifteen minutes late, he put his big spade of a hand out to shake hers. “You Charlie?” She nodded “yes” and waited for the usual lame excuse for being tardy, but there was none as he shook some drops from his jacket sleeves, sprinkling her ankles and feet. She assumed there had been a lot of traffic.

Head completely shaved, he wore white pants, a gray, ultra-suede jacket, and a blue-and-white striped shirt with the top four buttons open. She expected his chest to be ape-hairy but it wasn’t, reminding her, instead, of a deeply tanned Chihuahua. A big, bronze, muscular Chihuahua. Then Dan––she had not yet renamed him––took a half-step back to look at her, head to toe and back again, slowing his stare to gape at her chest. Oh, God, is this going to be that kind of evening? He nodded, seeming to respond to her thought, his eyes slightly wide and his jaw pushed forward, lower lip protruding, as if he had just made a good deal on a tractor. I should never have worn this dress––a soft burgundy, with a scoop neck revealing the fullness of her breasts––oh, lordie, don’t let this be as awful as I think it’s going to be. He put his hand on her elbow and steered her to the maître d’ stand. “Let’s go, Charlie, I could eat a horse.” He paused, a wide, toothy grin filling his face. “Or maybe a whale, since this is a fish restaurant,” he said, cackling loud enough that people seated at nearby tables, a busboy, and even the bartender, who had been a taciturn presence at Holly’s for years, turned to watch as they walked by.

She slowed her step, his hand still squeezing her arm, forced a shallow grin to her face, and said, “Charlotte, not Charlie.”

“Yeah, good, whatever you say.” He moved his hand to where the back of her bra was and pushed her slightly forward.

Holly’s was well known for fresh-caught fish, but Dan ordered a gorgonzola-encased steak. “Make sure that meat is rare enough to moo, or you’re gonna take the son of a bitch back.”

He stared in the waiter’s eyes. “And I want Burmese sauce on the side.”

He didn’t ask what Charlotte wanted to drink but ordered two Heinekens, one for each of them, exhorting the waiter, “Be LITERARY-ARTS 87

sure those sons of a bitches are damn cold or they’re goin’ back.”

She started to say, “Iced tea,” but he didn’t let her finish, and she was determined to get through dinner as quickly as possible. She sipped the beer once but mostly just drank water.

Dan reached over twice to taste her food. First a piece of the swordfish, then the vegetables.

“Nobody is this “Here, try this,” he said as he pushed a piece of red beef, dripping a few bloodcrude nowadays.” drops, to her plate. Is this guy for real?

Nobody is this crude nowadays. She kept reminding herself about Maggie’s brother, Dan’s employee, who arranged the date, and she told herself to be patient.

The restaurant wasn’t crowded and they could hear each other clearly, but he still leaned forward to talk to her. She was sure he was doing it so he could look down at her cleavage. She tried to ignore his chatter about the Chargers, about how the city was better when Pete Wilson was mayor, about how much money he made, or about his new car, all of which he managed to stuff into one long, nonstop sentence. Every time he laughed, inevitably after one of his own “I just remembered” off-color jokes, he would reach under the table and pat her on the knee.

Twice she reminded him her “Her little finger was crooked high name was Charas possible, as if she was lotte, not Charlie, transporting a three-day-dead, but he just said, “Whatever” both rotting and stinking mouse from times. He was a under the kitchen sink to the realtor––“makin’ a goddamn bundle, trash.”

Charlie, even when we had all the foreclosures”––divorced from “that bitch,” whose actual name he never used, and he wished he could have voted for Giuliani for President––“That wop from the Big Apple could really fuckin’ clean up this country, but I don’t have any complaints with the Donald. I suppose you voted for crooked Hillary. Right?”

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He was from Youngstown, Ohio, but “I sure as hell am never goin’ back to that burg. Right?”

She wished she had worn her Hillary button and hoped he wouldn’t say anything about Obama because she knew she wouldn’t be able to refrain from responding. Or even walking out.

As his coffee and the dessert-she-didn’t-want were served, his hand patted her knee more than once and then stayed to rub the top of her kneecap until she gingerly reached her own hand under the table and, thumb and forefinger on each side of his wrist, moved his hand back to his own knee. Her little finger was crooked high as possible, as if she was transporting a three-daydead, rotting and stinking mouse from under the kitchen sink to the trash. Each time that happened, four more times in as many minutes before he seemed to get the message, she wanted to rush to the ladies’ room to wash her hands, but she was afraid she would sense him staring at her backside and she didn’t want that; she briefly shivered just thinking about it. When dinner was over she twice offered to split the check but he twice ignored her.

It was no longer raining. Waiting in the crisp night air for the valet to bring Dan’s car, menacing clouds still filling the sky, she said, “Thank you for dinner. It’s been very interesting to meet you.” She extended her hand to shake his. “I’ll just take a cab home.”

“Hey, what do you mean a cab? That sure as hell wouldn’t be very gentlemanly of me, would it?”

“No, it’s okay, I’ll just walk a little and get a cab. I need a little fresh air, and I can get a taxi down near the convention center.”

“At this hour? You kiddin’ or what? It’s gettin’ chilly and I have a nice cozy Beamer. Real comfy.”

“I’ll manage. Thanks.” And then a little louder, “Really.”

“Hey, look at those clouds. It’s gonna rain again.”

Then, as if he had ordered it, the downpour resumed just as the valet brought the car up from the garage. The drops were large and full, plopping noisily on the roof and hood of the car, and in only a few seconds, the ground was again very wet and the sky completely dark. Walking around to the driver’s side, he tipped LITERARY-ARTS 89

the valet and said to Charlotte, “Don’t be stupid. Get in.” The valet stood there staring at his hand while Charlotte gaped at the now black sky and then at her umbrella before getting into the car.

Later she told Maggie that no one made an effort to help her get into “the Beamer.” Ugh was sitting there, grinning up at me as if I was his next gorgonzola steak. The poor kid who brought up the car stood there looking at whatever measly amount Ugh had tipped, having no reason, no incentive, to run around to open my door.”

By the time they got to her house, the rain was stopping, and she was furious with herself for not walking out, for not telling him what she thought of him, for not getting a cab or an Uber.

“I’ll just come in for a minute or two,” he said. The living room light had gone on with the timer, and she was grateful that she remembered to also switch on the front door light.

“Maybe some other time,” she murmured.

“Come on, baby, how ’bout a cup of coffee. It’s damn chilly out here,” and he winked at her.

“No, really, I have an awful headache. I don’t usually drink beer.” She had only taken two sips.

Now he leaned toward her. “Just a quick cup. To warm me up for my lonely ride home. Be a pal.”

“No, really,” she managed to fashion what she knew was a sad excuse for cheerfulness on her face. “Really, not tonight. It’s a very bad headache, a migraine, and it’s getting worse.”

“I can fix that real well,” he said, winking again.

“No. Not tonight,” and then more forcefully and more loudly, “no,” looking directly at him.

“Come on, baby,” and he leaned forward to kiss her ear.

Ugh was a big guy, tall and muscular, middle-aged former-football-player-size, and, for a moment, she felt threatened. Then she said, “I never had a worse evening. You are barely a step past a Neanderthal, or maybe not, and I never want to see you again.

Ever. If you come any closer, I’ll scratch your eyes out.”

His jaw fell slightly, a little saliva trickling from one corner of his mouth. Otherwise he barely moved. Then he barked, “You 90 SANSKRIT

fuckin’ with me, baby? I gave ya a good time.”

“Yes, well, I’m not planning to give you a good time, baby,” she stretched the “y” out into a long “eee.” Then she quickly left the car, half-ran to her front door, key already in hand, and went in. She tried to make the sound of the bolt locking as loud as possible.

Before taking her shawl off, she went to the kitchen cabinet and poured herself a half-tumbler of Glenlivet. Bolting it down in one quick swallow, she poured another one, this time even fuller, spilling some on the counter, and then gulped the second one down.

Later, standing in front of the bathroom mirror brushing her teeth, she absentmindedly pushed a finger through one of the holes in her worn cotton pajamas, the roses and buttercups almost colorless from many washings, and whispered “disgusting” and then “ugh.” She chuckled and said it again: “Ugh.” The warmth from the scotch was circulating through her body and her cheeks were flushed.

I guess I’ve been pretty lucky. There haven’t been too many Ughs over the years, not like this one. “No more Ughs,” she whispered, pushing her lower lip forward and squinting at the Charlotte in the mirror. Raising the half-full paper water cup she had used to rinse the toothpaste, she toasted herself. As she shook her head side-to-side, a small half-smile forced itself to her face, and, now loudly, she again said, “No more Ughs.” Then she went to bed and tossed and turned for some time, considering whether or not she should give up on dating.

She eventually drifted into her usual deep sleep after murmuring, “Leonard seems like a sweet man.”

THE END

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RINSE

///Ashley Jung

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PRESS PLAY

///Kelly Gilbert

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LEMONS

///Anna Grace Thrailkill for mom i still see her squeezing lemons into a glass the murk of pulpy, syrupy sweetness sugar, blurring my sight i saw her ease in doing good joy in loyalty simplicity in discretion now it’s all clear in the glass the pulp has fallen less sugar clouding my sight i see her pain in doing good hurt in loyalty difficulty in discretion yet somehow in bitter and sour she always sees sweet grandest power i know because she believes beauty and pain must be in the same glass

LIL NAS X

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///Anna Johnson

LITERARY-ARTS 95

SURROUNDED ///Mirelys Colón

EAST FRONT

///Aslin Chavarria Ayala

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EXOSKELETON FROM CARDBOARD

///Maggie Burgan LITERARY-ARTS 97

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OASIS

///Christopher Kuhl Tall, straight trees linger over the river.

In the autumn, they share their bright leaves and needles in a soft place for me to sit and read, or burrow into beneath the afternoon sun for a long, warm nap, waking just as the sun goes down and a chill hangs in the air.

I know it’s time to dig out of the leaves and continue on my way, destination unknown, as the moon rises from the east, silvering the trees’ reflections in the water winding between its deep, ancient, clay-rimmed banks.

BELLA

///Mirelys Colón

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RELATIVE

///Cristian Ponce

RAMMY

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///Lillian McKenzie

AT THE DINNER TABLE ///Ashley Jung

LITERARY-ARTS 101

film.

BALLARD LOCK OBSERVATIONS AND ENVIRONMENT ///Aiden Williams

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ANSWER ME

///Asantewaa Hooks

HOME FROM WORK ///Asantewaa Hooks

SMACKING GETS YOU SMACKED

///Asantewaa Hooks

HOME FROM WORK TOO ///Asantewaa Hooks

LITERARY-ARTS 103

DEJA VU

///Malik Norman

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FACE YOUR FEARS (live painting video) ///Miilo

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BEFORE YOU ///Nia Johnson

Find all these film submissions by scanning rhe barcode. Or visit us at our website: https://www.sanskritmagazine.com/film/ 106 SANSKRIT

LITERARY-ARTS 107

staff biographies.

MELISSA MARTIN Editor in Chief

AUSTIN DEMEGLIO Associate Editor

Austin DeMeglio is a senior at UNC Charlotte. He is an English major focused in creative writing. He also has a minor in Diverse Literatures and Cultures.

Austin loves video games almost more than books. He also enjoys writing poetry from time to time. Watching a good show is a good way for Austin to not be productive. Austin hopes to be a published author one day.

Until that day happens, he will continue to connect with the natural and digital world.

ELISSA MILLER Volunteer

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Melissa Martin is a senior pursuing dual majors in English and Psychology, and double minoring in Linguistics and Cognitive Science. When not reading books for class, Melissa can be found reading books for fun. She aims to work for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind Sesame Street, researching best practices for educating children through media.

YESIKA SORTO ANDINO Volunteer

APRIL LIN Designer

April Lin is a senior at UNC Charlotte studying Graphic Design with a minor in Japanese. She enjoys finding new shows to binge, traveling, and taking naps. Her talents include: looking tired, illustrating, and eating a lot of food without gaining weight.

April hopes to be a graphic designer for an organization that focuses on being sustainable and eco-friendly.

ANDREW WALKER Content/Copy-Editor

Andrew Walker Watson is a junior International Studies Major. He loves Brazilian rap music, discovering useless facts, and, naturally, writing. If he could ever stop staring out into space, he would like to start a global movement to change the world and guest host Saturday Night Live.

CLAIRE HAMBRICK

DANIEL JOHNSON Content/Copy-Editor

Daniel Johnson is a third-year Philosophy major with a minor in Public Health and Math. His hobbies include music, reading, and watching any manner of film. Daniel’s goals include practicing medicine, artful entrepreneurship, and all manner of leisure.

Promotions Coordinator Claire Hambrick is a freshman Communications major with a minor in women & gender studies. Besides working at Sanskrit, she spends her time doing photography, listening to music, and planning movie nights with friends. She plans to one day be an editor in chief of a high paced culture and arts magazine.

LITERARY-ARTS 109

ART JUDGES Karen Shinn

is an alum of UNC Charlotte with a BFA in Graphic Design & Photography and minor in Art History. She is a former Editor of Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine, through which she met her husband, Adam. Karen loves traveling the world, experiencing new cultures, and documenting them through her and her husband’s blog: Appetite + Adventure.

Nathaniel Lancaster is a North Carolina native and alum

of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, with a ’09 BFA in Painting. Much of his personal work is a ponderance of propositional absurdity of everyday life. When not writing third person autobiographical statements, he enjoys clean living, eating healthy and waking up early.

Tina Alberni has been practicing as an artist, administra-

tor and teacher in the visual arts field since the early 1990s. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree in art education and has received awards, exhibited and sold to collectors on several continents. Alberni is a fulltime artist. Her bi-cultural heritage and upbringing weaves into the fabric of her art. Her current works are reactions to present-day events and plights of endangered animals.

LITERARY JUDGES

Edison Angelbello is a poet, filmmaker, and student living

in New York City. He received a bachelor’s degree in English from UNC Charlotte in 2019, and he currently studies at the Writing Program at Columbia University. Edison’s work has been published in Sanskrit and Atlantis: A Creative Magazine. He also creates marketing and event videos. For more information on his work, visit edisonangelbello.com.

David E. Poston is the author of three poetry collections,

most recently Slow of Study (Main Street Rag). His book reviews appear regularly in Pedestal, and he is a co-editor of Kakalak.

Christopher Davis is a Professor of Creative Writing (Poet-

ry) in the English Department at UNC Charlotte. He is the author of four books of poetry: The Tyrant of the Past and the Slave of the Future, The Patriot, A History of the Only War, and the recently-published Oath. His poems have appeared in many prominent journals and anthologies.

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LITERARY-ARTS 111

CONTRIBUTORS literary.

Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has been accepted by the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam, and Healing Muse among others.

Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.

F.S. Blake is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet. His first chapbook, Terminal Leave, is available from Finishing Line Press. Blake has also been nominated for the Georgia Author of the Year award. A Bronze Star decorated U.S. Army veteran, he is a published photographer, traveler, advanced SCUBA diver, philanthropist, entrepreneur, and proud husband and father.

After many years of restless seeking, Beth Escott Newcomer now lives a quiet life with her husband and a pack of dogs in rural Fallbrook, California.

Her stories have appeared in a good number of quality literary journals. Her story “Tightrope” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2014. To support her writing habit, she manages an eponymous graphic design and communications firm and sells plants in the family cacti and succulent nursery.

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Mary Louise Kiernan holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications in Written Media from The State University of New York. Writing workshops she has attended include Finding Our Voices: Women and Creativity, with the late Lucille Clifton; The Omega Institute, with Sharon Olds; The New York State Writers Institute, with Peg Boyers, at Skidmore College; and the 2016 Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, with past U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera.

Saramanda Swigart completed an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and a supplementary degree in literary translation. Her work has received an honorable mention from Glimmer Train and a 2017 Pushcart Prize nomination. Saramanda is working on translating some of the more salacious stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Saramanda teaches at City College of San Francisco.

Valerie Griggs earned an MFA in CreativeWriting at Brooklyn College (1986), studying with John Ashbury and William Matthews. She enjoys being a part of the vibrant community of poets in Long Island, NY. She currently works as a full-time writing consultant and adjunct English instructor at Molloy College. As a singer/songwriter, she recorded 3 original music CDs. Alessio Zanelli is an Italian

poet who writes in English and whose work has appeared in some 170 literary journals from 15 countries. His fifth original collection, titled The Secret Of Archery, was published in 2019

by Greenwich Exchange (London). For more information please visit www.alessiozanelli. it.

Iris Litt’s most recent book of poems is “Snowbird” from Finishing Line Press, inspired by her winter home on Anna Maria Island. She has had many poems, stories and essays in literary magazines. She has taught creative writing as adjunct at SUNY/Ulster, Bard College, NY Public Library, etc. Woodstock, NY, is her upnorth home.

Rochelle Shapiro’s novel, Miriam the Medium (Simon & Schuster, 2004), was nominated for the Harold U. Ribelow Award. Her poetry has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and she won the Branden Memorial Literary Award from Negative Capability.

Spry Magazine nominated her poem for the Best of the Net. She currently teaches writing at UCLA Extension.

Frank Richards has attended numerous workshops, including the Algonkian Novel Writers workshop, Writers Online Workshops, Gotham Writers Workshops, and workshops at The Writer’s Center in Maryland.

Frank is currently taking writing and literature classes toward an MFA. He lives in rural Virginia with his wife and an assortment

of rescued cats and German shepherds.

Bonnie Larson Staiger was the inaugural recipient of the Voices of the Plains & Prairies Poetry Prize for her debut chapbook, Destiny Manifested (NDSU Press, 2018) as well as the 2019 Independent Press Award: Distinguished Favorite. Living on the edge of the Badlands brings balance to her professional life as founder and chairman of the board of Staiger Consulting Group.

Ellen Lager is a member of the League of MN Poets and the Federation of State Poetry Societies. She has a Bachelor of Science degree and a Master of Education degree from the University of Minnesota. Her favorite haunt is a lake cabin in northern Minnesota.

Shawna Ervin is a Pushcart nominee and an MFA candidate in the Rainier Writers Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.

She is studying nonfiction and poetry. In 2017 she attended the Mineral School residency thanks to a fellowship from the Sustainable Arts Foundation.

Recent publications include Tampa Review, Raw Art Review, Euphony,Talking River, Summerset Review, Hiram Poetry Review, and Steam Ticket. Her poetry chapbook, Mother Lines, was published by Finishing Line Press.

Anna Grace Thrailkill is an English Major working on her undergrad at UNC Charlotte.

She has worked in journalism

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and finds great fulfillment in all writing pursuits. After she finishes her B.A. in Creative Writing, Anna Grace hopes to work in a field related to publishing and editing. In her spare time, Anna Grace finds joy in baking for her small business, cuddling with her kitty, and taking care of her extensive houseplant collection.

Katharine Gregg is a retired secondary school teacher. She has previously worked in book publishing and publicity, as a self-employed writer, and as the managing editor of Sacred Fire magazine. Gregg has a BA in English from Bennington College; an MA in English from Mills College; an MFA from Vermont College; and worked on a Ph.D. in English at UC Berkeley.

James Adams was nominated in 2007 for a Pulitzer Prize for his collection, Noble Savage: Poems. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Rattle; Light: A Journal of Photography & Poetry; The Muse (India), and other publications. His work has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian.

He is a co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Elusions: Refugee Poetry (WaterWood Press, publication expected 2020).

A Little Piece of Me (2014), received numerous positive reviews and has a five-star ranking on Amazon. Stephen Geller is an internationally known pathologist, chaired the Department of Pathology and Labora114 SANSKRIT

tory Medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, for twenty-two years, and served as professor of the Department of Pathology at Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York. Geller maintains an active blog at www.stephenageller.com.

Patrick Bahls is a Professor of Mathematics and Director of the University Honors Program atthe University of North Carolina, Asheville. He is an ardent believer in the ability of a well-written poem to say more than any mathematical theorem.

A writer, photographer, painter, and creative writing facilitator, Laurie Reiche lives part-time in London, where she concentrates on photgraphing the city, particularly Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury. Reiche is the author of The Dance of the Carbon-Atom (Mellen Poetry Press, 1996) and has won first place in several contests, including the riverrun Literary Publication of the University of Colorado Poetry Competition.

In addition to several poems forthcoming this year, Christopher Kuhl has several collections of poetry, includingmost recently one on the Holocaust (2019), and just released, It’s Like Asking Who the Ocean Is. Three more books are scheduled for 2020. Individual poems and short stories have been published in Tulane Review; Alabama Literary Review; Big Muddy; and Round Magazine.

He asks, in a nutshell, why we

don’t fall off the earth.

Emily Sanders is an English Graduate student who enjoys gothic horror fiction, vampires, and the uncanny. An old soul, she spends her time collecting vinyls and comic books, and drinking overly sweet coffee at antique bookstores. She loves writing short stories and poetry with her rescue pitbull, Winnie, cuddled up next to her.

Gale Acuff has had hundreds of poems published in several countries and is the author of three books of poetry. He has taught university English in the US, China, and Palestine.

Paul Hundt is a retired lawyer who writes exclusively in the personal essay/creative non-fiction genre. His efforts have been published in the Palo Alto Review, Notre Dame Magazine, Ducts.org, Oxford Magazine, and The Massachusetts Review.

create amazing stories to share with people in the hopes that they can be as inspired as she is when viewing others’ artworks.

Anna Johnson is a junior studying special education. She loves to draw her favorite Kentucky basketball players and other people who inspire her. She posts her work on her Instagram @MarbledArt. Aiden Williams. Architecture student intertwining necessary actions with hobbies including biking, cooking, reading, and working on a zine called A Dollar and Thirty Five Cents Spelled Out. Can be found seeking out a place that serves Singha or perfecting his secret broth recipe.

art.

Andy Romero is currently pursuing an MFA degree at the University of Washington.

He holds a BFA from Brigham Young University-Idaho and a Post Baccalaureate from the University of Florida. Romero has also been a Resident Artist at San Diego State University.

He recently received a merit award in the 11th International Art Competition based in Salt Lake City and has been included in the 2020 NCECA Juried Student Exhibition.

Danielle Walden is a sophomore pursuing a BFA in Illustration.

Danielle, an avid anime lover, enjoys watching YouTube, reading webcomics, doing yoga, and studying French and Japanese. Her main goal is to

Zainab Elrahal was born and raised in Charlotte, NC, and is a sophomore attending the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is currently pursuing her B.F.A in Ceramics. Zainab has always held a passion for creating artwork

Kelly Byas is a sophomore at UNC Charlotte where she studies architecture. When she’s not in studio, she enjoys running, swimming, and reading. Kelly is very thankful for her friends and family and loves to spend time with them.

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and strives to explore many different media separate from her specialties. She has been recognized in art shows at UNC Charlotte and Scholastic ceremonies.

Carolina Quintana is an Illustration major who loves to create imaginary worlds and characters that not only inspire others to create but also remind them of their inner child. She loves watching cartoons and reading comics, and she strives to make stories that will move others to act or to feel something different. Whenever she has free time, she likes to watch movies, eat pancakes at iHop, and go out with friends.

James Bourke is a graphic design student and fine artist attending the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

They have been an art student their whole life which evolved into their gravitation toward graphic design. As a trans artist and designer, their work revolves around the existentialism of human journeys, thoughts, personhood and identity. More of their works can be seen at jamesbourke.myportfolio.com or on their Instagram @jamesbourkedesign Malik J. Norman is from Mineral Springs, North Carolina.

He is pursuing a degree in the COA+A BFA concentration Photography program. In his composition he explores his southern Black identity while investigating the resilience of Black gold.

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Josephine Justin was born in Tamil Nadu, India and moved to the US when she was a baby.

She enjoys creating art that captures the moments and feelings of everyday life but also what it’s like being an immigrant. In her free time, she likes spending time with family and friends or reading a good book outdoors.

As a political science major at UNC Charlotte, she hopes to create a positive impact in her community.

Lillian McKenzie is currently studying Illustration, Art History, and Computer Science here at UNCC. She cares about showing the inner workings of human emotions and relationships through her art. She tries to focus on her communication skills within her work to create a strong dialog with the viewer.

In this way, she hopes to spark conversations and new ideas for those she reaches.

Cristian Ponce is an Early College of Engineering student interested in computer and data science who is also an enthusiast photographer. His photography is usually focused on nature on campus, however, it also covers nature in California, South Carolina, and Detroit, as well as interpretations of local art in Windsor, Ontario.

Teresa Deanne Lopez is an Illustration student at UNCC with a love for creating art in colored pencil. She plans to become a children’s book illustrator and hopes to illustrate colorful and

amusing stories that will inspire children everywhere. She also enjoys crafting with Washi tape, journaling, and teaching Sunday School.

Alayna Gorospe is currently a senior pursuing a degree and career in Graphic Design. Aside from digital work, she has a passion for film photography and fiber arts. Her work aesthetic is very detail-oriented, clean and is represented in all the work she does.

Millicent Read was born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, and is a second-year Illustration BFA Major here at UNCC. She prefers to work in graphite but is learning to love all sorts of mediums! If she’s not working on any art you’re bound to find her watching Star Trek.

Julius Shumpert is a BFA Painting major who is interested in exploring themes in religious art and how we relate to iconography in the modern world.

Emily Coulter is a physics and philosophy major who still can’t solve crosswords without cheating. She has been observed making armies of origami cranes, cooking cuisine she doesn’t have the tools for, and abusing 3D printers for her instrument collection. Currently advocating for a Makerspace chicken to keep her company.

Maggie Burgan received degrees in Studio Art and Art History from UNCC with extended

coursework in Psychology. Her interests are in museum work, non-profit community arts programming, and art therapy.

Currently, she is working as the Public Programs Coordinator at the Mint Museum. Maggie values the creative process and its ability to facilitate learning, healing, and community building.

Aslin Chavarria Ayala is a sophomore pursuing Photography here in UNCC’s Art program.

Her favorite thing about photography is experimenting with different styles and trying to gain better skills. She plans to continue finding her own style and putting her life into her work.

Mirelys Colon is a Freelance Illustrator based near Durham, North Carolina. Mirelys is a recent UNC Charlotte graduate with a BFA in Studio Art with a concentration in Illustration.

She loves comics, animation, and video games. Mirelys’ favorite genre is definitely fantasy.

She loves creating characters and telling stories. She hopes to someday be a part of the media she reads, watches, and plays every day. She is slowly working on a comic of her own.

Kelly Gilbert is a junior pursuing Graphic Design at UNC Charlotte. The first time she stepped into a painting studio, the instructor encouraged everyone to chuck paintbrushes at the wall. This experience, along with countless hours spent watching Studio Ghibli

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films, has shaped the way Kelly approaches her practice. She tries to include the same spunk and whimsy into every project, while creating explorative atmospheres viewers can momentarily get lost in.

She draws in a more anime/cartoony style due to her influences from anime and pop culture.

Besides drawing, she also really loves sewing and cosplay.

Robert Salazar-Guevara is a Mexican-American photographer from Greensboro, NC. Robert sees photography as a way of capturing history and his own memories. Because of this, he rarely goes somewhere with the intention of taking photographs. He simply carries his camera around and captures his own real life experiences.

None of the photographs taken

by Robert are staged in any way.

They are all real moments from his life.

Miss Asantewaa Hooks: dragon slayer, graphic designer, professional empress and shower singer, a 20-year-old Senior at UNC Charlotte.

Crystal Zapata is a graphic design student who loves being Catherine Traina is 20-years-old able to break away from the and an artist. She is from Floricomputer from time to time to da and moved to North Carolina get her hands dirty making a seven years ago. As a child, she physical work of art. loved Van Gogh and Picasso’s works because of the vibrant Lindsey Nash (Riggs) is a phocolors and how these colors tographer and graphic designer served as beautiful lenses to see from Charlotte NC. She has the world through. This gave been photographing for 10 her an artistic passion which years now and loves learning she used to fuel her exploration new photographic processes into new media like oils and and trying new things. Street acrylic paints. photography is where she feels most at home, but she is always Mekayla Johnson is a prospecexcited to step outside of her tive Graphic Design major from comfort zone and try something Jacksonville, North Carolina. new and exciting.

Isabella Trivette is an 18-yearold art student from Greensboro, NC. She really enjoys drawing and designing characters from traits, themes, and random thoughts in her brain.

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Sheree Davidson is a Junior at UNCC, majoring in Illustration.

Her goal as an illustrator is to show others how she perceives the world. Illustration has given her the freedom to explore beauty and boldness. By doing this she hopes to influence others so they develop their own interests in the art world.

Miilo has been doing art for as long as she can remember.

Nothing stopped her from achieving everything she could ever want. Art is her life. She

loves the risks she takes, the way she thinks, the way she makes people feel with her art and more! She has a YouTube channel in which she posts all of her art timelapses. Find her at: https://m.youtube.com/ channel/UCCXnV1tZRGDVWczuL3ewgJA?itct=CBkQ6p4EIhMI_6v7kOrR5QIVk-ecCh0wOw1e&csn=OMTAXZWwOsyEhwa5ooMY&wlfg=true.

Her works can also be seen at www.instagram.com/miilosart and https://miilosart.com Here’s to taking more risks and making more art!

Ashley Jung is a junior at UNCC studying illustration and painting. She loves pastel color schemes, mixing oil paints, and reading obscure manga. If she’s not in her studio painting then you can probably find her running around drinking copious amounts of coffee. One day in the distant future she would like to become some kind of artist. She’s alive, not well, and can be found on Instagram @Yelhsajung.

Steven Reyes is a self-taught artist who discovered the art of self-expression through painting. Growing up he was always a quiet kid, and for about three years now he’s been able to find my voice through art. Steven has been able to meet and connect with his idols through art and is relieved that he’s finally found his purpose.

parents from Honduras. As a kid, I never thought I’d be a creative artist. I was mainly focused on video games but at 15, I discovered a hidden talent when Illustrator came into my life. Through many obstacles in life, I was able to express myself through digital art and illustration. This is my life.

Hannah Clonts is a painter who is inspired by objects forgotten or abandoned by humans. Ancient cultures fascinate her, and archaeology heavily influences her work. She experiments in utilizing nature and found objects in her paintings, resulting in unique products.

Nia Johnson is originally from Cleveland, Ohio, but grew up in Pinehurst, NC. She is a senior at UNCC graduating in May 2020.

When not studying, working, or participating in clubs on campus, Nia is creating music. The song, ‘Before You,’ was written and co-produced by Nia, hoping to connect with others struggling with self-love. The music video was inspired by Spike Lee, an influential artist for Nia. Grayson Sullivan

Kevin Canales, 18-years-old, born in New Jersey. I am a first-generation student, with LITERARY-ARTS 119

THANK YOU.

Contributors: Thank you all for choosing us to showcase you work. Without you all, this magazine would not be possible.

Volunteers: Thank you all for your help putting this magazine together. We wouldn’t be here without any of you.

Wayne Maikranz: Thank you for your support and the helpful advice you gave along the way.

Kelly Dudden: Thank you for your patience in answering our constant stream of questions and for always having a positive attitude.

Joshua Wood: Thank you for always coming to us in our time of need and not judging us for tainting your magazine.

Kelly Merges: Thank you for your help with circulation and encouraging us to showcase Sanskrit to the world.

Laurie Cuddy: Thank you for being a wonderful Business Manager and an important part of Niner Media.

Art & Literature Jury: Thank you for dedicating your time to helping us pick the very best work to feature in Sanskrit.

Wallace Printing: Thank you for taking our idea and turning it into a reality. Without your team, there would be no printed version of this magazine.

Student Union Art Gallery: Thank you for coordinating with us to display this year’s art and literature and for creating an amazing exhibit.

Janitors of the Student Union: Thank you for always keeping the office clean and pristine.

Students of UNC Charlotte, SAFC & Readers: Thank you for all of your support and interest in this work. We hope you enjoyed this issue.

Family, Friends & Loved Ones: Thank you for being there to support our handiwork and encouraging us to follow our passions.

We love you!

To all of our incredible and dedicated staff members and volunteers, thank you!

We have come a long way from our initial literature reading parties and calls for submissions of Sanskrit. We should all be proud.

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Copyright 2020: Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine and the Student Media Board of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form electronic, mechanic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the copy holder.

Wallace Printing, Newton NC: 2,500 copies for Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine were printed on 80# Cougar Opaque. The cover was printed on White Neenah Clearfold. The back cover was printed on 100# Cougar Opaque Cover. This magazine contains 121 pages, with a trim size of 6 x 9 inches.

Typography: Charter Roman, Charter Bold, Charter Black, Charter Bold Italic, Apple SD Gothic Neo (9) Bold Appropriated: iMac computer Adobe Creative Cloud 2019+2020 Microsoft Office Wendy’s Fries Gallons of Coffee and Coke Blood, Sweat & Tears Credits: Cover Design: Crystal Zapata, Melissa Martin, April Lin Artwork Design: Group effort Poetry & Prose Design: Group effort Staff Biography Pages’ Photography: Claire Hambrick Copy Editing: Group effort Submission Guidelines: Please visit sanskritmagazine.com to view past issues, submission forms, and general requirements.

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