Minetta Review Fall 2017 by Minetta Review

MINETTA REVIEW FALL 2017

Cover featuring art by Britta Fluevog (front) and Kai Thorlakson illustrations by Emma Brown. Minetta Review logo created by Carol Ourivio.

CONTENTS 6

A NOTE FROM THE EDITORS

Weston Richey Ahmed Sherif

POETRY 12

I DID IT FRANK SINATRA’S WAY

Heikki Huotari

PUNCH IN/PUNCH OUT

Jaclyn Shultz

RICHER THAN YOU

David Romanda

SOMETIMES

Anonymous

PRAYER OVER THE MOTHER’S BODY

Maureen Daniels

SPACESHIP PRETEND

Lisa Stice

FOCUSED ON

Heikki Huotari

POSSESSIONS

Aileen Bassis

REGULAR HUMAN BEING

Yunzhi Pan

THE HEART IS A STEEL WOOL SPONGE

Raji Pandya

THE SWORD IN THE MOUTH

Quinn Lui

SPIRAL RAIN

Larry Narron

TO MY COUNTERWEIGHT

Heikki Huotari

PROSE 9

IN MEMORY OF GOOGLE TRANSLATE

Sharisse Naomi Zeroonian

SPLIT

Amanda Morris

ART EXPOSURE

Karen Bell

SILHOUETTES

Cole Smith

ART 36

CORPSE

Magdalena Dukiewicz

W/T (FISH 1)

Magdalena Dukiewicz

CRANEO

Magdalena Dukiewicz

INSTITUTE OF MAKING

Britta Fluevog

42-43 TERMINAL BLUE

Amy Bassin and Mark Blickley

45-51 ANT FARM 3-7

Anna Ryabtsov

TESTIMONY OF A CRICKET

Ken Goshen

RED PLANES

Christopher Woods

56-57 UNDER THE BODHI TREE (PEONY, WATER, BUTTERFLY MIDNIGHT)

Roshan Houshmand

BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

Kai Thorlakson

TIL THE MEMORIES DECAY

Carlos Franco-Ruiz

ATOPIA 5

Aaron Akira

ARMOR OF ADAPTATION

Rosary Solimanto

ARMOR OF ADAPTATION: VULNERABILITY

Rosary Solimanto

62-63 THE DIGITAL VISION

Stefania Pinsone

Contributor Notes

Editorial Board & Special Thanks

A NOTE FROM THE EDITORS

Since Spring 2017, when we debuted our issue dedicated to social justice, the world continues to face challenges on that front as well as innumerable others. Everyone, it seems, continues to live their lives, and work, and love in the face of overwhelming uncertainty. Everything, it seems, keeps changing. We here at the Minetta Review have been no strangers to change ourselves, with new editors-in-chief, new section editors, new assistants, even a new workspace here at New York University. Newness reigns! And with that newness, we are thrilled to present the Fall 2017 issue. The prose, poetry, and art we offer to you is, as ever, multifaceted and varied, but much of this issue’s contents naturally in times such as ours? How do we cope, as we’ve always done? The answers are as wide a range as our contributors, hailing from Canada to Japan to here at home in New York, and beyond. Our front and back covers, “Draped” by Britta Fluevog and “Too Sweet” by Kai Thorlakson, suggest one approach in their mirrored hands, one up and open, one down and grasping. Perhaps an answer to how best to respond in these moments of instability, the thing that many of our artists and writers do in their pieces, is reach out to the world and hold its hand. Where there is isolation, we look to love. Where the road is uneven, we steady ourselves with the presence of others. Consider this issue our open hand, our invitation to you to connect with us through images and words.

But just as so much in our publication, country, and world has changed, so much has not! As always, this publication would not Derek Mizell, and Stephanie Wang, our Prose, Poetry, and Art Editors, to Sarah Anne McGough, for her support as our publicationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s advisor. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d like to offer a special thank you and outstretched hand to our predecesor editors-in-chief, Annesha Sengupta and Emma Thomas, for the new foundations for this magazine their work yielded over two years, and, of course, for their friendship. And where would we be without you, our readers? We are so grateful to you too. Thank you for being here. Our arms are open to you. Warmly, and with love, Weston Richey Ahmed Sherif Co-Editors-in-Chief Minetta Review Fall 2017

IN MEMORY OF GOOGLE TRANSLATE Sharisse Naomi Zeroonian

pardon me, asked the patient on the other side of the curtain in the emergency room, but what language was your grandma speaking? it was a morning prayer â&#x20AC;&#x201C; fresh, like a new child; her vibrant vowels were shivering.

car, a man played his accordion for free, against sweaty steam from cups of tea and sounds of a card game across the aisle â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it was a song he had written for his brother on the other side of the country, a waste of envelopes and stamps, with his black beard and hard head. a misunderstanding, he said to himself as the instrument whinnied, a terrible misunderstanding. I used to study this stuff, and assumed I had learned everything; schwa, alveolar, voiced velar stop, and all the other tools we use to get what 9

we want from other people – but no one had ever taught me about laughter; ships laughing on harbors and planes laughing on runways. back home, a girl had once sat in a balcony – a slave to her own estrogen, lips like a premature plum puckering, punching out a hymn into time clocks of twilight; she had wanted to feel the city boy’s silk shirt on her cheek. when your people unlock their jaws, baby, I remember sparrows shouting “hallelujah” at Him up there, my mother’s diamonds doing the shimmy, young Kissin caressing the keys; it all makes perfect sense, and no sense; it all sounds just like them, and nothing like them. so tell your grandma I wish her a speedy recovery, and sit a while with me; do an impression of your forefathers, for I want to hear the golden concerto from your mouth, to taste a new, strange alphabet.

Heikki Huotari

live without me? Would their barren regions merit graphing Martian what the difference is. It matters when the axis of rotation is not vertical but horizontal as it matters when the side-aisle usher challenges the law of the excluded middle as it matters when the waiting list for weightlessness is wrong.

PUNCH IN/PUNCH OUT Jaclyn Shultz

Each night we went to sleep, he slid his ring over his watchband, placed it on my nightstand and slept on my side of the bed. I didn’t complain – only adjusted to a new pillow and a twisting of the sheets I’d never been tangled in before. When he wasn’t there, I’d curl up on our side in the hollow left behind. I hadn’t known a pair of glasses, a watch and a ring, could take up so much space. With new walls around me, I sleep alone. My nightstand cradles unlit candles, a postcard of a gangster, my birth control. any longer – haven’t for weeks. Yet I catch myself every now and then checking pillowcases for eyelashes, wondering where he puts his time now.

RICHER THAN YOU David Romanda

Rich guys want trophy wives. (Rich guys are sometimes poor, with sad, crumbling lives.) Rich guys occasionally come quick. Rich guys stroke their blue-veined dicks. Rich guys are all bound for heaven. Rich guys never eat hotdogs from 7-11. Rich guys want pre-crumbling trophy wives. Rich guys lead such glorious lives.

SPLIT

Amanda Morris

my mother would battle my brown tangled curls with the sturdiest brush that we could buy for under $5. Every morning I sat crisscross applesauce on the edge of my faded white Disney princess comforter for my mother to force my hair into a neat little ponytail or pigtail braids. The process was anything but composed. Some days, I could hear the ripping of my hair like a shredding brush beat that I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t dance to. Some days, I just heard the brush handle split and felt the weight of the bristles velcroed onto my scalp. Some days, the room reverberated with my feral yowling as I writhed

getting faster with each yank. Thumb on my pointyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;O. Pointy, 16

She can’t hear the rattle in her exhale when she coughs. The sound shakes in and out of existence weakly, an image blipping up among screen. She’s in a blue cotton half-sack, held together with twill tape ties, and her scarf is a circle of bandages stitched by surgical tape. Her mouth is in a troublemaking curve when she giggles, wiggles her eyebrows and pulls up her paper gown to reveal her upper thigh in the empty examination room where I translated her biopsy. When she tells me the news, I look into her eyes and I think of my topaz birthstone necklace I got the year I turned eight, stuck underneath the faucet when I tried to clean off the rust. A gooey black poison is rooted within her chest. The blight latches on and swallows her up

I draw my ponytail across my face the same way I used to hold my stuffed animals inside a four white-walled box with a cutout looking into the living room. Sitting in my asylum that passes as a bedroom in a college apartment, I think over and over of her. She’s 110 miles away in the New England small town that is Farmington, Connecticut. Except that 110 miles feels like a 3,395 when you’re surrounded by buildings that take up miles of space on their own, reaching towards like me. I think of her when I curl my hair to go out dancing for the night. Having my hair just right was so important to me when I was sixteen pinching the soon-to-be-ringlets between her long nails and pressing the risk of burning the tips of my ears so that I could multi-task or turn my head for a lip read conversation. I think of her when I pop in 17

a piece of spearmint gum, the kind that I used to steal out of her purse before I had an income of my own. Once, I tried to make the biggest bubble I could by chewing a whole pack of her gum. My hair I tried to pull it out, the more entrenched the sticky wad became. With a little peanut butter and gentle coaxing under the shower, my mother saved the day, no scissors necessary. I hated cutting my hair. For me, each long lock was a branch falling on my back to stare at the autumn sky. I thought of my mother when I walked down into the Astor Place hair cuttery, tucked underneath a made me think of our negotiations when she used to cut my hair herself. Only an inch, I pled. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t cut it at all. She pulled out the ruler and snipped as little as she could while getting rid of my split ends. The mirror below Astor Place held me in an unfamiliar way, showing the Eastern European stylist behind my craning neck, and his frowning lips trying not to smile as they formed the words KEEP STILL. I pulled out the ruler and measured it, 12 inches. Just enough to make a wig.

SOMETIMES Anonymous

her rules and commands were reasoned with “just because.” my not yet grown heart knew there was more, must be more, than the emptiness of two words. i used to sit in the math classroom, as the school busses pulled away, and gaze out the window to boys tagging girls in the sun’s afternoon shadow, running laughing yelling running running running until they were heaps in the patchy grass, no sign as to what limbs latched to which body, only the blurry image of children exhausted in the afternoon of ignorant freedoms. she would call Ms. Canon, making sure i was kept inside, away from the raging drugs and alcohol being passed among 6th graders. my body would stiffen when the caller ID rang out her name, another mother’s breathy voice coaxing her anxieties. that yes, her A-student, mature, charismatic, all-star, Degenerate daughter isn’t eating any sweets while watching more than an hour of television.

the looks of agitation from mothers and daughters alike made me feel like iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d have to apologize. sometimes i wondered who was parenting who, sometimes i wondered if she could even see me.

picturing the kitchen set knivesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; stop. then why does it feel so good? will only ever be a fantasy. without her

she told me she had something heavy weighing on her mind. the tears i had watched fall down her cheeks for so many years and began to cleanse my resentful heart.

Maureen Daniels

1. Swindled is my mother lying dead in hospital. The mother on the bed and the mother in me, feral twins.

2. To remember my mother is to remember language, a litany of everything left, unspoken. Enough words to temper the body, the places I fray.

3. Now, those feral beasts unfurled, I let the knives of certainty circle my breasts, enter the belly, cut the mother right out of me.

ART EXPOSURE Karen Bell

1. I staggered dehydrated out of the Mumbai sun and stepped sweating into the silent National Gallery to cool cross-legged in front of a Rabindranath Tagore watercolor. The perspiration on my elbows and eyelids had dried by the time the trundling curator stopped to favorite pieces. II” by Lallan Singh. The chunky cactus had the texture of a cantaloupe shell, with the exception of a smooth slit carved near the bottom of the sculpture. “Is the title a joke?” I frowned. This felt like a sudden test of art analysis skills. If I pointed out possible genitalia, I might win a Shiva lingam from the gift shop. After introducing me to a primary colored landscape with

graphite lines looked like a black-and-white photo taken from space, a crevice between granite mountains. I cocked my head and tried to make thumb or tongue or tail out of it. Even curators succumb to projection, apparently. 2. Is it possible to look at art without projecting parts of ourselves? Can we have an undiluted emotional reaction without manufacturing meaning? I asked my oldest friend, Danielle, these questions. What else are we supposed to do with art? Hug it? We shrugged. When we were younger, Danielle and I emphasized quantity over quality of experience. We dragged our senseless half-starved bodies through the Louvre, eye-browed waggled over what appeared to be human turd sculptures in the Tate, and shuddered past decrepit gilt babies in the Danielle’s husband, Skylar, has a different approach. As a professional artist, he values process over product. Creative work is a gift, he told us. What we do with it after it leaves the artist’s hands is entirely up to us. Angeles Museum of Art underneath Henri Matisse’s ceramic piece, “La Gerbe.” My new friend, Sage, was next to me with a sketch book open on his lap. His hair exploded out of his head like a dandelion. I leaned over and whispered, “What do you like about it?” “It looks like leafs.” “What do you enjoy about the process of drawing it?” “I like that it is all my favorite colors.” He bit the tip of his tongue in concentration and picked up a blue crayon. “Anything else?” “Just that it’s awesome.” “That could be the most lucid art commentary I’ve ever heard.” Sage was Danielle’s four-years-old son. 26

mom. With him we didn’t have time to analyze or interpret. We accessed art at his emotional level and at his toddler-legged pace. Standing under squid-shaped glass sculptures was more fun with a child who never hesitated to offer his gut reactions. We spent two hours basking in an open air musical installation, “Gamelatron Sanctuary” by artist and composer Aaron Taylor gongs of robotic Indonesian instruments. “I feel comfy,” Sage whispered, and we joined him on the

3. I rarely feel that kind of pure transcendence in public spaces. After a trauma left me with dissociative PTSD, staying in the present

explored the Buffalo Albright-Knox Art Gallery last summer. I was slipping into a triggered bout of nausea that felt like grief. The edges of my vision blurred as a soft smother of memories skulked up from the Clyfford Still exhibit where I was subsumed by an environment screaming fractured memories and eased the pressure in my chest.

expanses of monochromatic canvas. No projections or analysis. My slowed. I breathed back into my body.

SPACESHIP PRETEND Lisa Stice

around the couch and coffee table super sonic speed you shout and veer us off onto a tangent I thought landed us in that open space we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t use as a breakfast nook but you say this is not earth anymore we are on the moon and you show me how to walk because I need to know how to move my feet just right how to stay semi-grounded in this half

becoming more distant with each lightyear

FOCUSED ON Heikki Huotari

I feel focused on by coyotes, eyes and ears, and even of decidedly unprecious metals I cost more to make than my cash value, neither mother nor grandmother, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m the burly sergeant slapped by Richard Nixon at the airport and if feeling sorry for myself is really what I mean to do I need not tell you keeps a secret.

SILHOUETTES Cole Smith

David walked me to my house and asked me if we were calling it a green pond off the interstate and the soles of our shoes were heavy with clay. David was very dark with his shoulders squared against the sky. An upright shadow. He slouched down and kissed me without warning. His lips were soft, his chin rough. The kiss was wicked and quiet like smoke on his mouth and I couldn’t speak when he pulled away, like there was a thick lemony balm on my tongue. David’s cheeks and throat were scarlet. I thought he would burn back of his hand and said, “Night, Jon,” and then departed down the hill.

I waited there in my front yard. Waited for something. Maybe for heaven to strike me down. Maybe for something to help me swallow what I had done. But then I realized that I wouldn’t ever throw away

I saw darkness perched in a window of my house. My mother. She had been watching. I turned coldly towards the front door. When I was inside, I heard her in the sitting room off the entryway. I shrugged out of my jacket and greeted her. She sat rigidly in her chair to keep the back of her dress from creasing and her lips were tempered with a wrath that could raise bodies from their graves. “What have you done?” she asked. “I don’t know what you’re talking--” She hushed me. Her pale face and hair phantomized her.“Don’t you dare lie to me, Jonathan. I knew there was something in him.” “You don’t know anything about him.” “You’re going to pray,” she said. I didn’t know if it was a demand or a plea. Her voice was quiet and quivering. She folded her long hands

“I don’t need to pray.” “It’s an abomination. That’s what it says.” That word crashes over my shoulders like a brick wall. “I don’t want to talk anymore.” “Did he rape you?” “Shut up.” 31

“Did you lie with him? Because a man who lies with a man--” She triggered something. A chemical reaction deep in the hollow of my soft belly. I had to spit it out. The words came red and raw out of my throat and scraped the roof of my mouth. As they left me, I wished I could grab them in the air and lock them back behind my teeth. “Shut your fucking mouth!” It rippled through her. She rose from her chair and struck me across my cheek where her diamond ring cut me. I looked up at her and her eyes are black stones.

was about my age and doing crosswords on a newspaper that looked like it had been saved from a wet gutter. I was bussing tables and offered to pick up his dishes, but he wasn’t done, even though what remained of his breakfast was a smear of yolk and a toast crust. He nodded at the devotional medal hanging around my neck. “Are those saints?” he asked. “No, it’s Jesus and Mary.” Well, they were supposed to bee. The shapes were too muddied with patina to really see. And Mary was a saint, but I wasn’t about to discuss the technicalities of Mariology with a boy who smelled like cigarettes. “Oh, I didn’t know it was just Jesus and Mary.” “Yeah, they’re kind of the big ones, you know?” I said, wiped my hands on my apron, and turned back to my bus tub and rag on another table, expecting our conversation to be over. “No shit.” His face broke into a wild grin. “Except, maybe it’s not them. Maybe we’re the big ones.” I remember freezing. Staring at him. 32

He made sacrilege sound like something to believe in. Our friendship began on a heresy and ended on a heresy. After my mother saw us kissing, she called David’s father, who whipped David with his hard leather belt, kicked him out onto the porch, and locked the door behind him.My mother wanted to throw me out too, but she told me, “I’m in the habit of practicing grace these days.” David left town and the brightness he put in me soured like milk after a while. Curdled by the thought of us burning together. I’ve sat in the back of mass for three years now. If I fold myself up in my dark little corner of the parish, away from the black-shrouded David’s breath on my mouth. Maybe she’ll look right through me. When David kisses me in dreams, we have company. The saints are a hundred silhouettes circling us. Hovering below and above us. Staring at us with white eyes in the windows of my house with my mother. All of them ready to cut us to pieces with their belts and diamonds.

Corpse w/t (fish1) Craneo d1 ink on c-print (Corpse, Craneo) and Caballo paper(w/t, d1)

Magdalena Dukiewicz

institute of Making Mohair, rocks, silk, stoneware, wool Britta Fluevog 41

Text based Archival Print

from Dream Streams

Amy Bassin and Mark Blickley 42

Ant Farm 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7 Digital Photograph Anna Ryabtsov

Testimony of a Cricket Letterpress

Ken Goshen 53

Red Planes Digital Photograph

Christopher Woods 54

Under the Painting/Collage Roshan Houshmand

Sculpture: Ceramic, Metal, Wood, Plaster Kai Thorlakson 58

Til the Memories Decay Oil

Carlos Franco-Ruiz 59

Atopia 5 Aaron Akira 60

Armor of Adaptation Armor of Adaptation: Vulnerability Forged Steel

Rosary Solimento 61

The Digital Vision Acrylic on plexiglass

Stefania Pinsone 62

POSSESSIONS Aileen Bassis

I’m to marry. He wrote: Fidelia, possessor of the empire of my heart. Promises get spilled This is what I have: My dowry is my virtue, a father’s promise of one thousand pounds, — my trunk of petticoats, shifts, lace and linen, opalescent buttons on a milky shot-silk gown. Tiny stitches pierce rows of ribbons on the hem of every skirt. From the tailor’s shop, I can hear Dogs barking in the alley. They sniff, they stray. The tailor’s girl runs thread in and out through sateen roses gasping open and tulip petals hushed as voices in a whisper and when the needle grazed my skin, she paused to say, Never mind. One drop of blood won’t show.

Yunzhi Pan

I’d caught a glimpse of me at the eye of this storm. I’ve lost touch with myself, taken another spin in hell. I saw my maker’s hollow eyes, crushing it all from above. I know those eyes are so like mine, and when my fuel of unrest drain, pierced by my tears and despaired in vain, poisoned by monetary stench in the rain, I know, I cannot sustain as a modern idealist, self-proclaimed; and tomorrow stretches long and thin like a muddy stain. When arriving at the translucent horizon, I only fear that nobody shall feel my anger, nobody shall know my name. Someday, they say, I’ll become one of them. The snide, the servitude, the institutional brain; reaping, rising from a golden pile of disdain, disguised as thinkers, chanting the fraudulent refrain:

“It’s ok to be deaf to their pains; it’s ok to be insensitive and sane; it’s ok to idolize those who put us in chains; the imperial venoms of the past shall rise again.” But if I still have my wits about me at forty-three, I know that I don’t want to be just a regular human being in this rotten age, selling

THE HEART IS A STEEL WOOL SPONGE Raji Pandya

The heart is a steel wool sponge with four thousand microscopic chambers; four thousand tendrils of spray-paint gold Four thousand trumpets and gramophones Two thousand white-wood signboards above two thousand ventricles— “For Sale, By Owner” The heart is a steel wool, plunged to the depths of a kitchen sink wasteland, diving into the wreck of last week’s dishes Two thousand pre-war pulmonary valves gathering four thousand cobwebs within the curls, so brassy like a bleach-blond brunette The heart is a steal, so lock it down while you can—we’ve got four thousand competing offers on a newly remodeled aorta, Four thousand single families, kids running to claim their atrium, their ventricle, Cross-legged, gaze lowered, muttering the fourth-grade mantra, “The heart is a steel wool sponge, the heart is a steel wool sponge.” And is this heart just not the dumbest kid in the class? The could-be doctor (or Supreme Court justice), if only he could sit still for seven goddamn minutes? wife of one F. Scott, Posed at the banister in perfect violence when he spoke with Someone Else at a party, Thin rosé lips in the S.E. ear, whispering the secret, “The heart is a steel wool sponge.” Z.F. shattering her yellow metal self off the superior vena 68

down the right atrium, down the right ventricle, curled broken and proud at the bottom of the coilâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Because the abyss is not a boring black body of water or a putrid kitchen sink of pasta, provolone, and a single soggy mushroomâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;no, the heart is a steel wool sponge And the abyss a bright marble staircase, not that you would of this scrap of steel.

THE SWORD IN THE MOUTH Quinn Lui

i. the weight of jawbreaker consonants chip enamel off your baby teeth, swell up your mother tongue. your sister, you tell me, sounds like death with the grating rattle of her laugh, like death with thief ’s fingers and hungry eyes, too clever for mortal men. your sister’s mouth, you tell me, is a razor blade; close it and the sharpness goes winging out from her gaze.

ii. i want to be something better than immortal, so i bite summer down to the bone and it still smiles with the same sweetness; maybe i could slaughter every season in my sleep and have them thank me for it. cradle the thought on your tongue like it could seal you to hell or heaven, let it melt as we swallow our truths and self-destruct for another dare. bury a heart in the trenches of the ground or the body — we’ll wind up in the same place someday, and what does time mean to a grave that will never be visited?

iii. my mother says i love you to end fights fast and i say i hate you to start them back up again. i know better than to open the curtains and let the light cast the corners of my mouth redglazed, sharp-edged, savage. outside, the spectre of my guilt grins with too many teeth, too bloodless for crimes of passion.

iv. smile; there is nothing too sacred to weaponize.

SPIRAL RAIN Larry Narron

These chimneys canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t breathe; they choke on the sky & drown. A grandmother wades through her living room with only the aid of her walker. Her remote

to the half-closed front door. Just a short drive away, by treading the hurricane, its crosses close-lipped, wrapped in the shroud of interior darkness where silent alarms blink red in the sanctuary waterlogged with their tithes as an invisible moon who loves to play hide & seek plays tug of war

with the tides that splash against the soundproofed cry room walls. Outside, asleep at a four-way stop, streetlights gone dim on their cables sway against music made by a spiraling rain. The drowning praise their Creator as they are baptized.

TO MY COUNTERWEIGHT Heikki Huotari

Love me love my exoplanet, love my exoplanet love my exoplanetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s exomoon. Let bones their bones behoove and entrances and exits educate themselves â&#x20AC;&#x201C; let there be nothing left to the imagination and through molt and metamorphosis a brain.

AARON “KIRA” AKIRA is an artist from San Francisco, living and working in Brooklyn. His works of varying scale are primarily on paper. He works with mixed-media materials, ink, paint, pastels, and charcoal. His work represents a world where certain pieces pertain to a mental, abstract “skyscape”; others are bound to the plane of earth; and some are buried beneath or unearth the earth’s crust. His oeuvre has its own system of symbols established through mark-making, shapes, and color. Kira is invested in preventing specific symbolic recognition; his images solely reference one another. is a visual artist in Jersey City working in book arts, printmaking, photography and installation. Her artwork can be viewed at aileenbassis.com. Her use of text in art led her to explore another creative life as a poet. Her poems have appeared in Body Literature, Spillway, Grey Sparrow Journal, Canary, Amoskeag, Stone Canoe, The Pinch Journal and Pittsburgh Poetry Review. She was awarded an artist residency in poetry to the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

and writer who collaborate on text based art collaborations and videos. Their text based art collaboration Dream Streams was featured as an art installation at the 5th Annual NYC Poetry Festival. Their video Speaking In Bootongue was recently selected for the London Experimental Film Festival. They recently published a text based art chapbook, Weathered Reports: Trump Surrogate Quotes From the Underground (Moria Books, Chicago). The publisher has sent their resistance book to the White House and members of Congress. Bassin is co-founder of the international artists cooperative Urban and proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American 86

Center. is a graduate of Edinburgh Universityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s creative writing program and has spent time in India as an ESL teacher. Her work has appeared in the literary journal River River and the Scottish online magazine The Grind. MAUREEN DANIELS teaches English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where she is also a doctoral fellow in creative writing. She is an editorial assistant for Prairie Schooner and Western American Literature. Her work has recently been published in Sinister Wisdom, Neologism Poetry Journal, Gertrude Press, Third Wednesday and the South Florida Poetry Review. MAGDALENA DUKIEWICZ graduated from Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and from Complutense University in Madrid, currently lives in Brooklyn. She is writing her dissertation on the topic of altering nature, mutations, transformations, and genetic experiments in art. Dukiewicz recently received a Grant from Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland and was invited by Carlos Amorales for 3 months art residency at his studio in Mexico City. is a third generation artist who primarily uses weaving and ceramics to create sculpture, installation, and performance. She received her Interdisciplinary Bachelor of Fine Art from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, where she studied art theory, art philosophy, art history, and studio art and her Master of Fine Art from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2015. In 2007, she established a small ceramic co-op in Ghana, West Africa. Born in Vancouver, Canada, Fluevog is currently living in include such things as: cycling from Vancouver, Canada to Bogota, 87

Colombia; cycling the highest highway in the world in Himalayas of Ladakh, India; living in a rural village in Ghana; doing a textiles residency in Peru; and other travels to places such as Turkey and Haiti. CARLOS FRANCO-RUIZ graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Miami in 2011. In 2013, he moved to Uruguay, where he recently had a group exhibition La Mirada del Otro at the Museo De Las Migraciones. He currently lives in Sauce, Uruguay. KEN GOSHEN (‫ )ןשוג ןח‬is a NYC-Based (Israeli-born) visual artist working primarily in oil, various drawing media, and printmaking techniques. His work is an exploration of the role of analog art objects in an era of digital image ecstasy. It touches on the dissonance between the fragility of memory and the severity of documentation, highlighting the function of the subjective in perceptions of the “real.” He seeks to compose pieces embodying both the weight of nostalgia and an exhilaration of the unexplored. Goshen earned his BFA in Fine Arts with a minor in Printmaking from Parsons School of Design (NYC). He is also a graduate of the Master Class program at Hatahana Studio for Figurative Drawing and Painting (Tel Aviv). ROSHAN HOUSHMAND is an American artist who was raised in Iran and the Philippines. She received her BA is from Bennington College and her MA and MFA from Dominican University’s Rosary College Graduate School of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy. Her work is exhibited and collected in Europe and the US. She has received grants from organizations including NYSCA, The Michelle MacNaught Foundation, The O’Connor Foundation, NYFA, and the US Department of State Art in Embassies Program. Her work was featured in the exhibition 21st Century American Women Artists at the US Mission to NATO in Brussels, Belgium. She received Special 88

Principle/Phenomena at “The Next Big Idea Festival” SMART Contest in Los Alamos, NM. In 2015, her work was presented at Italia Docet/Laboratorium, a Collateral Event of the 56th International Venice Biennale, at Palazzo Barbarigo in Venice, Italy. Other major collective exhibitions include Totem at the Boca Raton Museum of Art in Florida, Evolving Perceptions at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and solo shows at Marianoviche Arte and Rene Metras Gallery in Barcelona, Spain. She lives in Andes, NY; teaches painting and art appreciation at SUNY Delhi, NY; and online drawing courses with SNHU. She loves travel and kids and is very active in community arts projects with local schools. HEIKKI HUOTARI is a retired professor of mathematics. In a past century, he attended a one-room country school and spent summers recently in The Journal and The Penn Review, he’s the winner of the 2016 Gambling the Aisle chapbook contest. Forthcoming books will be published by Lynx House, Willow Springs and After The Pause. QUINN LIU is a Chinese-Canadian student from southern Ontario who wishes they could live far closer to a big city’s heart. They have more of their poetry at abstractedfocus.tumblr.com. AMANDA MORRIS is a senior at New York University graduating with a double-major in Journalism and Media, Culture & Communications. She is a tomboy with three older brothers and a love of hockey, running, and swimming. She dreams of being a foreign correspondent and getting closer to the heart of the world through her reporting. She feels most free on speedboats in turquoise waters, looking for coral reefs under the sunshine. LARRY NARRON’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Hobart, The 89

Brooklyn Review, Whiskey Island, Berkeley Poetry Review, Phoebe, Literary Orphans, Minetta Review, The Boiler, and other journals. Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been nominated for Best of the Net and Best New Poets. Originally from Southern California, Larry currently lives in Northern Michigan, where he serves as a literacy coach for elementary school Review. YUNZHI PAN is originally from Beijing, China, and is currently a freshman studying sociology at New York University. RAJI PANDYA graduated from New York University in 2016 with her Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and minors in Politics and Creative around themes of diasporic consciousness, South Asian American womanhood, and Western philosophical ideas of language and identity. STEFANIA PINSONE holds degrees in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and in Art History from the University of Rome. She works in a style of digital-realistic acrylic painting in which she reproduces her chosen subject with photographic expertise. homage to the digital image with its disturbances such as jpeg effects, glitches, chromatic aberrations, and loading symbols. Reproducing images taken from social media, dating websites, and mass media, she has created a series of paintings that are in dialogue with modern technology. She is interested in the processes and aesthetic results of digital printing and untraditional surfaces (i.e., aluminum, plexiglass). DAVID ROMANDA lives in Kawasaki City, Japan. His work has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine and Hawaii Review. was born in Moscow, Russia and emigrated to the United States in the early 90â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s to pursue photography while attending 90

college at Montclair State University. She currently splits her time on the road. JACLYN SHULTZ is a recent NYU graduate from the Media, Culture & Communication and Comparative Literature departments, where she focused her work on German cinema theory. A native of Pennsylvania, she now lives in New York City as an Assistant Editor for a publishing company. COLE SMITH is an emerging writer, a book lover, and currently completing a BA in English at Purdue University. He has lived in Indiana his whole life. ROSARY SOLIMANTO is an interdisciplinary activist artist who explores oppression and societal stigmas of living with multiple sclerosis. She encourages political and social discourse on disABILITY identity to unfold and to empower the disABLEd. She approaches biology, healthcare and medicine from a humanitarian perspective. Since graduating from SUNY New Paltz in 2015, she has exhibited and performed in the United States, Toronto, London, China, and Spain. She has performed for O + Festivals, The International Human Rights Art Festival, Itinerant Festivals, Nuit Blanche, Inverse Performance Festival, and exhibited and/ or performed at eleven international museums. Awards include Parnassus Award in Fine Arts at SUNY Adirondack; Kulakoff Award at SUNY Albany; Art Garden Community Supported Art Award at Arts Unbound, New Jersey; and the Sojourner Truth Fellowship at SUNY New Paltz, New York. She was a selected participant for the activist program Emerge NYC at New York University. In 2017, her work was featured in Art in America Magazine and Hyperallergic. She currently lives and works in the New York metropolitan area. LISA STICE is a poet/mother/military spouse who received a BA 91

in English literature from Mesa State College (now Colorado Mesa University) and an MFA in creative writing and literary arts from the home is, she currently lives in North Carolina with her husband, daughter and dog. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of more about her and her publications at lisastice.wordpress.com and facebook.com/LisaSticePoet. KAI THORLAKSON is a Canadian artist currently based in New York. Graduating from Parsons School of Design with a BFA in 2017, she specializes in mixed media, photography, and sculptural installation. and when the moon stays up past its bedtime. CHRISTOPHER WOODS is a writer, teacher, and photographer who lives in Chappell Hill, Texas. His published works include a novel, The Dream Patch; a prose collection, Under a Riverbed Sky; and a has appeared in many journals including The Southern Review, New Orleans Review, and Glimmer Train. He conducts private creative writing workshops in Houston. SHARISSE NAOMI ZEROONIAN, born and raised in the Boston area, has had her work featured in the May 2016 issue of Storyteller Magazine (formerly eFiction Magazine), the Fall 2016 issue of Minetta Review, and on NPR (90.1 WCAI FMâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s weekly Poetry Sunday segment, March 2017). Zeroonian is currently working on a collection of short stories and poems about Armenian life in New England. She is a senior at Boston University, where she is majoring in Film/ Television.

MINETTA REVIEW EDITORS-IN-CHIEF ART EDITOR POETRY EDITOR

Weston Richey Ahmed Sherif Stephanie Wang Derek Mizell

PROSE EDITOR ART ASSISTANTS

POETRY ASSISTANTS

PROSE ASSISTANTS

Emma Brown Cecilia Delmer Manchen Wang Jenny Choi Devanshi Khetarpal Omolara Omotosho Angelica Chong Alexandra Dennis Chandler Wald

TREASURER

Coty Novak

COMMUNICATIONS COORDINATOR

Sarah Colvin

EVENTS COORDINATOR

Christine Wang

PUBLICATION STAFF

Aditi Agrawal Alex Cullina Amanda Morris Jamie Ryu Elliot Williams

PROGAM ADVISOR

Sarah Anne McGough

Minetta Review, established in 1974, is a literary and arts publication managed by undergraduate students at New York University. Please visit our website for submissions guidelines. Book design and layout by Aditi Agrawal, Alexandra Dennis, Derek Mizell, Weston Richey, Ahmed Sherif, and Stephanie Wang. Mizell, Weston Richey, Jamie Ryu, and Chandler Wald. Art design and layout by Emma Brown and Stephanie Wang. Proofread by Weston Richey, Ahmed Sherif, and Stephanie Wang. Minetta Review logo created by Carol Ourivio. All rights revert to the contributor, whose authorization is required for reprints. ISSN 1065-9196 A special thank you to Sarah McGough and the Student Activities Board at New York University, for their continued support of Minetta and its dedicated editorial board. An enormous thanks to Randy Reeves at Art Communications Systems, Inc. for printing yet another beautiful issue.

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