Montage Arts Journal
2020-2021 Issue
Editor-in-Chief Luke Madden Editorial Assistants Anusha Bansal, Madeline Blair (née Udelhofen), Abraham Holtermann, Maggie Katsoudas, Therese Kolodzik, Allison Nichols, Matthew Pettineo, Miranda Sun, Jordyn Wagner, Eman Zwawi Graphic Design Chairs Therese Kolodzik, Miranda Sun Social Media Chair Maggie Katsoudas Treasurer Allison Nichols Webmaster Madeline Blair (née Udelhofen)
Montage Arts Journal is an arts magazine created by undergraduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Acknowledgments Montage Arts Journal would like to thank all authors, poets, and artists who submitted to our 2020-2021 issue. Seeing such fantastic work from an unprecedented year was a consistent joy for all of the editing team. Thank you all for sharing your work with us. We would like to thank the University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign English Department and Creative Writing program for their help in advertising and promoting the journal. In particular, we would like to thank Ted Sanders, Chrisopher Kempf, and John Dudek for the committement to Montage’s success on campus. Thank you to the dedicated editing team that not only adapted to remote work but thrived and elevated the journal with their creativity, zeal, and insight. It cannot be understated how encouraging it is to have a group that takes it all in stride. Thank you to everyone reading right now. Your interest in Montage gives some fantastic students a platform to share their passion. Share it with your friends, submit next year, get a friend to, become an editor—Montage is wonderful because it is collaborative, so maybe one day we’ll get the whole campus participating. We hope you enjoy the 2020-2021 issue of Montage Arts Journal as much as we did. If you would like more information on how to submit or become an editor, please visit our website, montagejournal.com, or email us at montagejournal@gmail.com. You can also find previous issues linked on our website.
Table of Contents 06.
Glass Garden | Casey Daly
07.
Syd | Halee Pratcher
08.
Last Swim | Bobby Matzuka
11.
Blue Marlin Hotel, 2014 | Sydney Wright
12.
farewell to his box fan | Sydney Wright
13.
Gateway to Urbana | Lou Zeh
15.
untitled | Halee Pratcher
16. have you ever tried to spend the stars | Claire VanDerLaan 18.
Home | Mona Alrazzaq
19.
I’m Flattered, as in flat | Jason Brickman
21.
Loosey Goosey Meets Week 13 | Ari Kelo
22.
Love Letters From Lake Geneva | Sydney Wright
25.
Peek-a-boo | Bhavya Pardasani
28.
Pacified | Ari Kelo
29.
Wednesday Nights, Years Apart | Casey Daly
32.
it starts with a dream | Audrey Pride
33.
The Beat-Up Yellow Colander | Megi Mecolli
35.
The Lovers | Christel Thompson
36.
The Museum | JC Choi
37.
Dining Room Lights | Chaeyeon Park
38.
The Watercolor Rainbow | Meagan Vicens
40. Madame Fancy-Toes Poses For Her Morning Portrait | Ari Kelo 42.
This is a Classroom | Macksimillian Topinka
45.
Suffocating Room | Chaeyeon Park
46.
My Father’s Bar | Dylan Galassini
49.
etymological suicide | Erica Such
51.
Reading Room | Chaeyeon Park
52.
a Delay, and a Disaster in Munich | Dylan Galassini
54.
Roommate | Casey Daly
55.
Doodh-Cereal | Cystic
56.
The Storyteller | Samantha Blanc
Glass Garden CASEY DALY
I read a book about conservatory plants last night, watched my friends as they drank warm Daisy Cutters in the hot tub. There was a birthday, or there must have been. I wondered for how long the cigarette trail would be floating around in that glass pool house, maybe it would be trapped for months. We plucked apricots from the walls and swam naked under trees. They only grew in Haiti, Tom said. I’m beginning to learn that some places are good to be stuck in. I watched Venus sparkle through the ceiling, like the sweet glitter we tasted in our Sangria. Too many stars in our heads. July always seemed to be the month that could change it all, the month to swim topless in conservatories, and listen to the crickets breathe for a moment. I thought of how he kissed me two nights ago and probably never would again, thought of him peeling posters from the wall. There was supposed to be an eclipse soon. I want it off my skin more than anything, the question being if it was better to soak off the dead skin or rip into it with nails and teeth. I’m afraid some longing never goes away. Ella asked if I would take a nude of her while she blew out smoke – lanky, in front of an orchid waterfall, the decapitated head of a white marble Buddah, and another hardcover book about plants. She asked if I wanted one too; I said no, let’s swim. She tousled up my hair and tucked an electric blue flower behind my left ear. You look great.
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Syd
HALEE PRATCHER
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Last Swim BOBBY MATZUKA
The sensations of it are really unparalleled. There you are, almost eleven years old, walking alongside your sisters, one older and one younger. You feel a bit out of place, ducking through the halls of the hotel in your swim trunks. Still, your smile beams like it never will again. Your eyes blink a bit more than they usually do, but it doesn’t matter how tired you are. This is something you have to do. You can see it when you turn the corner, through a big glass wall. The water shimmers with an unnatural candy-blue reflection of the pool floor. White tiles surround the rims of it, and a collection of empty wooden chairs waits for you. You and your sisters are excited to see that no one else is in there. The place becomes all the more magical when you have it to yourself. And why shouldn’t you have it to yourself, here at seven o’clock in the morning? The glass door feels heavy, like it was vacuum-sealed shut. Your bare feet, just a moment ago squishing and sinking with every step into the carpet of the hotel halls, slap against the tiles. Right as you walk in, you say something just to hear the echo. You have no shame about it, so you shout “woohoo!” or something like that. Your older sister, more covert in her indulgence, asks you to grab some towels in a voice just loud enough to produce an echo. The only thing that could be more compelling than the acoustics is the smell. A sharp, humid scent of chlorine hangs in the air. It wouldn’t be so exciting if you had smelled it in your kitchen, or in your bathroom. But since you’re here, it’s the greatest smell in the world. On one of the chairs, you set down your things: the keycard that will let you back into your room, the towels you collected, and the quarter you brought along, in case you want to flip it into the depths and dive in search of where it lands. You try to step in from the stairs of the pool, but as your foot breaks the plane of water, it feels like ice has collected around it. You retreat back up the steps with a new plan. Mom and Dad always told you that the only 8 | Montage
way to adjust to cold water is to dive in and fully submerge. Your walk to the deep end is more of a strut. You back up, a few feet from the edge. You make sure to wave to your sisters. Everyone has to see this. You take a deep breath. You run for one or two strides. You leap. You tuck your legs to your chest. You close your eyes. And can I even describe what you feel next? The way that the world goes so quiet, the echoes reduced to murmurs. The way the cold surrounds your body, and then flees in an instant. The water that rushes through your nostrils and stings your eyes open enough to see a murky vision, a blur of blue bliss. Was that the lightest you ever felt, there in the bottom of the pool? You bounce back up, inhale sharply, and throw a triumphant hand in the air. Your sisters holler as the waves buckle back around you. Everything is euphoria for now. For the first hour or so, you and your sisters play games. You chase each other, race each other, tackle each other. You play Marco Polo, and you find the quarter so many times that the bottom of the pool looks strange to you if there isn’t a glimmer of silver on it somewhere. But after a while, you split up, floating to opposite ends of the pool. Because you remember something. That Mom and Dad are packing up your hotel room. That they’re looking under the beds for toys you may have left behind. That all of your outfits, except for the one you’ll wear on the trip home and the bathing suit you wear now, are being stuffed in a suitcase. It isn’t necessarily a terrible feeling to remember this, because you had your fun over the last few days. But the somber sense that crawls through your chest is inescapable. The sense that this is your last swim of the year. So you think to yourself: what am I going to miss? You’re going to miss feeling so light, so buoyant, so you dive deep under the water and tumble and flip and do handstands, all of the things you can’t do once you leave this place for the year and go back home. At one point, you lay back, submerging yourself. You keep your eyes open, and watch the barrier between water and the air above. It waves and glistens with clashes of blue and the bright white-yellow of the lights above. You feel, in some strange way, that you’re watching your life up there. It’s 9 | Montage
all so hazy ahead, but at least it’s quiet in the depths. You watch for so long that a pinch develops in your lungs. You stand, take a deep breath of the chlorinated air, and wonder what else about this place you will miss. But it’s too late. Your parents are opening the heavy glass door so that they can come in and tell you that it’s time to go. You have to dry off and get back to the room so you can get dressed to leave. You have to prepare for the trip back home. You have to wonder when your next last swim will be.
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Blue Marlin Hotel, 2014 SYDNEY WRIGHT
To relive when I was thirteen standing on sticky bleach-scented Miami art-deco tile in a little motel wearing the colors of 1960 Key West. To wrap my arm around Grandpa at the “90 Miles To Cuba”concrete missile that sits on the island’s western shore just off Mallory Square where every night they hold a festival celebrating the sunset and a man seduces Hemingway’s six-toed cats into jumping through hoops. Every narrow-street block claustrophobically cluttered in teal-lettered storefronts and beach-themed canvas art street carts selling Key lime pie dipped in dark chocolate and stuck on a stick. They say in thirty years Florida will be underwater but I suppose it doesn’t matter when those who made you eat minestrone soup at a tiki bar and ride a bicycle carriage down the humid roads at 10 p.m. in late July are too old to travel. 11 | Montage
farewell to his box fan SYDNEY WRIGHT
muggy lunar hours on the ground floor of our residence hall spent in a yard-sale couch, upon its exhausted blue upholstery. i feign a laugh with your owner, as the clock’s digital numbers seeped into the morning silence of midnight. i should have never come. for Thursday marked the third time this week. we both know that when he reached for me, like a boat tethered to a dock, the touch should’ve propelled me to bob away. the silhouette of your square frame, in a room as dim as a sealed crate, consumed the image of panic when saying no
no thanks i’m not okay with this became a dry reservoir. grit began to drape itself over you, as your owner draped himself over me. Monday’s final breath greets Tuesday with the same solemn news: of us again on your owners granulated tile floor, composed of standard issue, chewed green-gum colored squares. never conjoined with an outlet, your daisy-petal blades were sedentary. i’ll miss how still, how calm you were, like the stagnant air of September. 12 | Montage
Gateway to Urbana LOU ZEH
On late summer nights I melt into the dark, humid air, and become alive. I wander deserted streets like the ghost I’m still trying to become; I fill my empty lungs with warm summer air. Asphalt is cracked and faded under my feet, But the stars above me sparkle like glass, Like the beads of water on the lid of my styrofoam takeout container after I put it in the microwave, Tiny dots wavering, throwing out pinpricks of light. The buildings around me are dark, stark shadows thrown up across the sky, And I think about the tall glass buildings a few streets behind me. They must glimmer even this late at night. They’re beautiful, I’m sure, Man-made canyons of glass and steel, But I like this more: Brick buildings Parking lots in the dark Water trickling over concrete The stars. I follow the water, Wander along riverbanks coated with dried out weeds Until I reach the border And I stop. I want to cross the line, follow boneyard creek into darkness and alleys, 13 | Montage
But I remember my body is small and female shaped and I’ve gotten six massmails about muggings in the past week. So I veer to the light, Stand in the spotlight cast by the double circle k’s while I long for the darkness running underneath the bridge across the street.
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untitled
HALEE PRATCHER
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have you ever tried to spend the stars CLAIRE VANDERLAAN
i. i do not allow myself to think too much of the fact that she is the moon, sitting here with me. regardless of her celestial existence, she is a lady first and foremost, so i allow her to swill red wine and recline on the white linen couch. she is not the kind to make a mess, although she does always leave a fine glitter behind. it coats my palms when i try to swipe it away. i cannot afford cleaners. the glitter stays. ii. she is always cold. it makes her miss the sun, her torrid affair, but that was when she was young and still lovely, fresh, unspeckled. her marriage to the sea is so new that it stings at my skin when she talks about it. i am not here to make any judgments. i would regret it severely if i did. she makes sure that i know this. iii. the sea is an alcoholic, no longer as beautiful as the moon remembers. she wonders why her wife cannot remain as pristine as she does, how she allows acid and humanity into the bite of her waves. i am paid to keep my mouth shut, so i do not tell her what is coming for her. she will know soon enough. iv. she pays me in the stars, the most splendid and useless currency. i devote an entire desk drawer to their light, whisper that i am sorry when i have to shut them in. they have so much faith in her. they do not know what she does when she plucks them from the sky. they think that she will take them to a better place. i do my best to remember which is the drawer where i store the stars and which is the drawer where i store the staples. i am not perfect. v. the moon is perfect. she spouts about the claustrophobia of grocery stores 16 | Montage
and elevators and saturn’s rings. she wants me to relate to her. she wants me to feel that she is enough. she believes that i do. it’s what makes me so good at my job. vi. she notices that i am extra humane to the water in my glass. she tells me i don’t have to be, that it is the dead kind, that i do not know the true insides of the clouds or the depths of the ocean, that i do not want to. i still sip at it carefully. vii. the moon is not perfect. sometimes, flecks of spit leave her mouth, forming silvery insects that crawl along the walls of my office. if i had any other patients, they would be concerned. she makes sure i don’t have any other patients. viii. she hates the scratching of my pen, tells me that i might as well get her words tattooed on my arm. i flinch to think about the way the ink would poison me if i did that, the way she would laugh at me in the next session. ix. by the end of each appointment, i am greasy, slicked with the nasty guts of the sky. she tells me that by the time she is done with me, the night will eat from the palm of my hand. i believe her. i do not tell her that i am not certain that she is in charge of something like that. x. i cross my fingers behind my back at every appointment. she does not notice, the narcissist, the moon. she flakes red lipstick on the edges of the wine glass, tells me the stories as if i do not create them. i do not tell her that she is not in charge.
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Home
MONA ALRAZZAQ
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I’m Flattered, as in flat JASON BRICKMAN
I’m Flattered, as in flat, subordinate to corrugated, my gut is excised, castrated aborted vomit stillness I’m flatisized, My rectum, viscera stomped Thinner than Óleos al pastel on a saltine, Flatter than my asscheecks, than my affect, Flat Stanley, the moon, than the six-month old Rite-Aid which I pour down my feeding tube and no one acts surprised when it passes straight through me, no reaction at all. I love my viscera, I want them back! Click-clack anxiety attack, What will I do without my pancreas? My mother shoves the stubborn gurney into the trunk of the Prius and slams the door. I consider fucking a whore: love me, trust me, what for? I don’t have a spleen any more A witch hunt is brewing: Who has my kidney? My liver? My spine? My cecum, my colon, my testes, my stomach, my spine? You can call me heartless, but it’s true; they took that one too. Check out my foolproof recipe for flaticization: 19 | Montage
exiled purple emotional insides turning butterfly wings Venetians Intel potato chips dried intestines uncooked paper oceanic crust cheap purple moon lenses refried winter leaves A colonoscopy revealed flatation, my tracts are more dense (and lonely) than slate, an industrial press would not affect me, the flatness is (abrupt) complete
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Loosey Goosey Meets Week 13 ARI KELO
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Love Letters From Lake Geneva SYDNEY WRIGHT
It was when a scattering of ivy clasped my ankle behind the rotting willows that I was reminded of the loon’s shrill echoing across Lake Geneva. Remember Shelley, when that poor girl you loved mopped her corset through the lake after chloroform cough syrup visions of stillborn blueberry lipped babes as motionless as the overbaked, sodden July breeze. You said to me Byron, quit writing stories of hollow haunted love. For Mary is enamored by rotting organs and resurrection, blood stained carnations, and cancer. Cancer, sweet cancer crawls beneath Capricorn with her elongated death. Mary, Mary, and her morbid magpie tune. Snippety snap the shredded strand of the pearl necklace you gave her slipped into a froth of moss and insects lost to the breeze. We laughed and called her “Ophelia” as chestnut curls churned over the laminated lake surface. 22 | Montage
You shattered her mason jar, lit not with the beating batter of fireflies fluttering, but with fallen follicles plucked from human corpse heads. Bottled blonde wiry wisps that would have darkened with age, like the dusk skies when you reach further from the last traces of city light. Babies bodies that would not be baptized in bolted lightning to breath and bawl into their mother’s bosom at last. Shelley, I must say, Mary was too good for you and we know those poems weren’t yours. Now I stare at the dusted glass cylinder with smudged thumbprints and a lip print? Yes, a stamp of stale lipstick embedded into the grime on the glass. Through the hazy film I see the knotted fibers and graying tissue still, as water logged as the boat you sailed. Mary was always a better swimmer. I’ll never forget her bony fingers scooping your petrified muscle that once bled deep beneath your chest bone - now solidified 23 | Montage
in the sea’s grating salt. Every last fluid filled your lungs like the heavy satchel bags we used to carry. Mary, Mary, and her macabre memories asked me where poets go when they die, and if the cobblestone roads were more stunning than the infatuation of their lie. One day you rowed the wooden dingy, and left just Mary and me. She wept into a leather-bound journal, watering the ink that screamed, Byron, I love you more
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Peek-a-boo
BHAVYA PARDASANI
this is the story of my play date, a millennium long date it had been a starry void (only you know if it was day/night) when i heard the final call “it. moon you’re the keplerfully play date of it. earth.” i wanted to whine, deliver a few centuries short rant about our cosmic ancestors playing cupid with a second-old but your greenish blues had me captured from first sight my world’s been revolving around yours since my embryo days. anyway i swirl anyway i twirl, my craterous eyes only have you in my north-southeast-west sight. your children use me to serenade their lovers, and here i revolve elliptically in-and-out, in and out of your penumbra’s hindsight i have seen you wax, seen you wane, sometimes gibbous,
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sometimes crescent. but when you are new your beauty astounds me. (you might have donned the invisibility cloak but your children meander around like mechanised fireflies that crave my attention) then why must i be known as that white orb full of craters, and a thief that shines brightly on your crush’s borrowed light? despite my existence you have been having play dates with it.sun (who is an eight-timing bastard with no shade). i have been your loyal revolver since millenniums, then why is it.sun the center of your universe? why do i feel like the third ball in gravity’s elliptical love triangle? am i even good enough to be a hindrance in your play dates with your crush? Maybe i am meant to be that pasty white weirdo with big dark zits (i’m in my teenage, what did you expect?) who comes out at night 26 | Montage
to pervertedly say Peek-a-boo.
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Pacified ARI KELO
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Wednesday Nights, Years Apart CASEY DALY
grape juice primordial soup kitchens with islands do not warrant complaining school night mom nylon splattering
the hurt of cherry syrup
medicated I always skip over the knees when I shave lukewarm bath headache laughter makes cadaver lab
a grape shooting star
dreams are naps and baths
from nostril
class trip to
my new medicine is not intended for coughs, but for dullness i puked the science teacher saw me do it Casimir Pulaski Day alarm on the nightstand and then she saw me cry would absolutely soak my polynomials in the sink if they were not due tomorrow i hate being in the choir the choir is dumb dullness should not warrant sadness i could not take up space
lite FM lite yogurt dark at noon
i could take up golf
the medication is not for colds,
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the medication is for dullness white tile microwaves smell microwaves make
me cry following
learning all the things
seeing
working through all the shit
identifying
counting
the brain = undercooked microwave dinner “Why don’t you come on over, Valerie” run it under hot water running coping stretching
breathing painting
{gerunds are good for you, like peas} treating
hoping
freeing bathing
and then slowly life became lite like yogurt and the radio sun bled through the car windows 30 | Montage
identifying
with faith in the morning the nights are dark but that is the nature of them
and it could not be stopped with the pile of tissues by the bedside (the headaches persisted)
finally bought a silverware organizer
“think of it like a bee buzzing around the room” (with wood paneling)
you have remained sweet even in the dull
difference between cough syrup and fresh fruit
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it starts with a dream AUDREY PRIDE
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The Beat-Up Yellow Colander MEGI MECOLLI
My story is told in a beat-up yellow colander Nestled in the cupboard by the stove And it reads like the notes on my Sister’s favorite bottle of wine: Long aged, begun before I was born, Strengthened by the herbal scents From foreign lands whose breezes Once graced her olive skin. A beat-up yellow colander is not The only key to my favorite foods, To the dreams I ate up with rancor Each day growing up, But to an apartment by the train tracks Half obscured by mighty oaks Made up of two bedrooms, a bath, And me. My mother tells my story, Weaving the tale and threading it together, A warm knitted sweater to wear On my first day of school. And like an epic of old, Alexander on the march, A family of three crossed a familiar sea To stand in a foreign threshold One bag between them, But they would not balk from the duty before them,
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The beat-up yellow colander, A gift from a kind heart To a new family struck with need, Has its uses: It is pen and sword It is tool and treasure It is the first stepping stone On the road I call life. The beat-up yellow colander, Like my mother’s faded photographs, And my grandfather’s late laugh Are reminders of days that may be behind us, True, but are never really gone. Like the all-seeing-eye pendant I have worn since middle school, After losing it in the locker room in gym class, It is something I bring with me, And wear proudly.
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The Lovers
CHRISTEL THOMPSON
When she switches off the light, her frame hangs in the air—the white shadow of her body shimmering for just an instant before it dissolves into the quiet blackness of the bedroom. Outside, the air is thick with cold and the newly-naked trees reach their brittle limbs to the sky. They are practiced in these twilit movements, the art of sleeping with another tender body: his mouth pressed against the softness of her exposed shoulder, her hair splashed like hot iron across the pillows. It is freezing now, and soon it will be dawn. But inside, it is warm. He traces her face with his fingers, stroking the smooth conch of her ear. When they finally wake and step out into the daylight, their noses will go numb— their fingers and their lips as well.
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The Museum JC CHOI
There is a picture of my father in a shoebox. He holds a drooling baby in his lap, his mouth an open cavern in the land of his cracked and wrinkled face. His teeth shine like sun-bleached stones at the bottom of a river. I don’t remember when the cavern walls collapsed in on themselves, hiding the stones, stemming the water flow, until someone digs for the smile hidden underneath the dirt.
The smile sits in a museum now.
The museum often has its lights turned off and no visitors inside, but the door will be open I jiggle the doorknob turn it just so push with all my might and— open sesame I saw my father smile today.
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Dining Room Lights CHAEYEON PARK
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The Watercolor Rainbow MEAGAN VICENS
I. When I was 5 I had a heart full of watercolor. When I retrieved the white piece of construction paper from my favorite art closet in the kindergarten classroom, I’d splatter my sticky little kid hands across the empty canvas while the paint sprouted from my fingertips like a newly budding flower. I always ended up with a rainbow. I liked watercolor because there were only two ingredients to the recipewater and paint. You didn’t have to stay inside the lines or obey any rules. You didn’t have to understand anything at the age of 5. II. When I was 10 I always wondered, Who painted the rainbows in the sky? Maybe it was God, 38 | Montage
or maybe it was a giant multi-color sky dog that pushed together the fluffy clouds to create a bridge that led him to a pot of treats. I didn’t want it to be God, so I flooded my imagination with the hopes of one day crossing that bridge and finding my own pot of treats at the end of it. My religion teachers always told me that bridge would lead straight to hell. III. When I was 15 I felt insoluble. Instead of an empty canvas, I’d walk the beige hallways of my catholic high school putting up a facade of faith. Faith in myself. Faith in my teachers. Faith in my friends. Faith in my family. Faith in God. But I acted soluble. I’d kiss the boys and gossip to my friends 39 | Montage
about the baseball player I thought was cute. I stayed inside of the lines in fear of being the grain of sand in a cup of saltwater. I hid myself so deep in the rotting old kindergarten art closet that I lost all of my paint and forgot what it was like to feel the watercolor surging through my veins. I wanted to learn how to be translucent like when the sun reflects rain droplets to create the colorful sky bridge. IV. Now, at 20 years old, I feel 5 again.
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Madame Fancy-Toes Poses For Her Morning Portrait ARI KELO
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This is a Classroom MACKSIMILLIAN TOPINKA
Here, where I sit, in sweatpants and a tank top, an outfit I would never wear in any other situation, is a Classroom like no other. This Classroom has boxes. Big, green U-Haul logos and cardboard marked “Fragile,” as if it matters, as if they plan on going anywhere. This Classroom is littered with toy swords and tiny blue sneakers, reminders of my nephew and his running smile of excitement as his Deux has come home. This Classroom has a bed and a table and big, red leather armchairs. It is filled with soft spots to rest, as if I weren’t here to do work. This Classroom has temptation. The acoustic guitar in the corner that I can’t even play calls to me because at least it isn’t the dreaded Italian “synchronous meeting.” The red plastic drawer in my closet screams for me to take its pliers, 42 | Montage
its rings, its tutorials, and to craft yet another useless keychain that I can’t even sell without having a postman’s welfare on my conscience. The bed is a block of memory foam on the floor that has become my safe haven, the cure for my depression and the answer to the ever-present question of how to pass the time. The room itself is an organized mess that I’ve taken care to reassemble five times already and probably will at least five times more, just to avoid the inevitability that is my schoolwork. My straight As have been reduced to Bs and Cs because the people in charge are too stubborn to recognize my needs. They insist on continuing classes despite the desperation of my pleas. So where does that leave me? Struggling and failing to survive in this pandemic world order where so many Die and not enough Thrive. I am grasping at coattails and trying my best but Surprise, Surprise, my best is not good enough. Not up against the news and the lies. 43 | Montage
This is a Classroom of ill intentions and microaggressions. Of busted webcams and a place that was once home and is now hate, misery, contempt. This is a Classroom full of sheer lies, where I pretend to get on just fine but deep down I am drowning, my corpse covered in flies as I suffocate in this childhood paradise that has become a Hell unrealized. This is not a Classroom.
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Suffocating Room CHAEYEON PARK
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My Father’s Bar DYLAN GALASSINI
Admittedly, it was my first night sober in a week, and while I laid in bed, blindly. All I could think of was the bar cart back home, that my dad kept neatly stocked. I remember the lock that was never locked. It would have been pointless anyways to have it locked. Even if it were locked, the stainless-steel poles, that stretched from the floor to my chest, and assembled the cart, were too far apart. A bottle could easily be fit between. So, I never opened the cart. I didn’t need to. On the left-hand side, was the assorted liquor. My task was to slide the liquor between the assembled rods. I started with the Malibu rum. That my dad, only, kept around for Mr. X’s famous rum punch. Then I’d return downstairs, cocky, presenting the booty like I was Captain Jack Sparrow. We would drink the tropical flavor as the Captain should. Straight. Chased with whatever. In our movie, my name would be Captain Dean Sperro, That’s what I’d say to you. (some stupid joke or dego charm) And Dean Sperro trades in his slops for a gold chain. Trade in pirate’s booty for real ass. I’d keep the drunk scallywag step Depp swaggered, though. For it was the same subtle rhythm I walked most of the time. Especially when concealing the then, almost, finished bottle of booze back in my father’s bar. Sorry, I digress. Back to the bar. So, it had the poles; the rods, this silver structure. But what really added the depth and subtle beauty of it all, were slabs of green sea glass. Opaque and handsome. Forged in the sea. That’s what the liquor stood tall on. Until, of course, 46 | Montage
I tipped the bottle over, and snuck away with the score. It became routine, breaking the rules, and un-breaking the rules. Hell, maybe I was even writing the rules. You would say I never stopped writing the rules Once the Amareto, Malibu, and Irish cream were through, we worked our way up the bar. We didn’t know how good we had it drinking my father’s Grey Goose and Knob Creek. Now, we skimp for plastic bottles of liquor, and light beers.
On the right of the cart was, the wine-- also suspended upright in the cage of Bauxite Ore Rods. The wine I only drank once. With You I haven’t drunk that well in a long time. The Mediterranean’s first and most successful aphrodisiac. “No wonder, the Greeks were always humping.” The joke went over your head. I wiped the plumpness from your lips. Fuck- back to the bar.
Notes of you seem pointless.
Nights spent at my father’s barwere immature. so, high school, and I’ve just now grown far more mature, in my drinking. So yes, I never drank my father’s wine except that once. I was bold and rebellious, but I was never brave enough to do something so irrevocable, so finite, so staining-as to uncork a cork that wasn’t mine to uncork. I could--handle the heavy burden gallons of booze brought, but that wine, that wine, was far too personal. Also, it would just kind of be gay to drink red wine with a bunch of dudes in my basement while they’d talk of the next girls they’d fuck. I was lying in my college bed, my room littered, with Natural Light cans, and empty bottles of Barefoot. All I could think of was my father’s bar cart. Rules written, made and promised. A bed and 47 | Montage
--my father’s bar, right? All done up, ornate. But--my father’s bar is just a charade, A mirage of grandeur, a bar set, a bar kept. I wondered if, with open eyes, a spoonful of the world’s sweetest wine, could cure the cheapest hangovers, or loneliest mornings. I wondered if with open eyes, My father’s bar could be met.
For, my father never drinks. And he’s never punched a TV because the Bears didn’t cover. And he’s never been hit by a friend, or cheated on a woman who loves him. And, for me, that was just this week.
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etymological suicide ERICA SUCH
nostalgia is an eidetic sensation manifested by the spirit when it desperately seeks shelter inside an ego shattered by an asylum never found. elaborating secularly, nostalgia derives from the greek nostos, homecoming, and algos, pain. the pain of returning home. eventually settled on this definition, i voyaged deep into the eldritch scenery of the living dead, the place where i inherited my eidolism, a belief in ghosts. eidos being greek for resemblance, the entity’s species, or the image of an ideal. how devastating it is to return home, a once safe equilibrium slowly unwinding itself ever so violently into apparitions, built in an image where the ideal is to die. a teenage rebel with an ebrious susceptibility to displacement in the form of domestic pillaging made an oasis out of my elegiac septennial year. the latin ebrietatem, drunkenness. intoxication of a mind destined to fail. i raveled myself inside that house, prayed for your apology ex silentio, evident from your silence. your pathetic, excruciating stillness. that nauseating quiet, persistent among the years long after we both condemned that evil shelter, eroded at my eviscerated sanctity, grief-stricken and ruined beyond love’s demanded virginity. odi et amo. i hate and i love. you are my family. my misery. about your forgiveness, etiam si omnes, ego non. even if all others, i will never. i will never. despite this, in this estranged sorrow i dive into, the pain of home was always your absence. stockholm syndrome or exasperated spite, e causa ignota. it is unknown. excessive sentiment is nostalgia for a dream that never happened. 49 | Montage
am i to unravel suddenly in the wake of this existential sacrilege, bludgeoned into that sad and empty satisfaction of feeling sorry for myself, tell my lovers to savor the incestuous epithet scorning the aftermath of my own damned episodic salacity brought on by that seventh year cerebral complex i could never pray away. my chastity is long gone. i am your elated servant.
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Reading Room CHAEYEON PARK
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a Delay, and a Disaster in Munich DYLAN GALASSINI
Abroad, the old lovers do as young lovers do, or at least should; passion to them is what it was yesterday, and the day before, or the day before that. It’s all the same as a wedding night—passion, that is. Their arms touch, flirting, and I watch unapologetically. And he is so ugly, and dressed so poorly, dressed like an American. His hair is uncombed and ugly, and he looks bored. Or at least ready to go. I can confirm anxious is the wrong word. His eyes are posted forward, and there is no dreaminess.Yet, there is no bitterness. But his wife, her hair is done. Not dyed, like in America, but neatly styled. Still, by no means is she beautiful. She has no need, wondering what goes on behind his eyes. Her look is modest, but her yellow blouse turns to loose lace above her chest, and the shirt shows off what used to be a beautiful body. Now, the massive roll of her gut juts further than her breasts. Gut is also the wrong word because in America, a gut is so round and firm hiding under clothes. The American gut: made from angry beers and laziness. I promise you, the shape is different here. She is not hiding her rolls as she snuggles against her lover’s shoulder, her happy fat matching his happy fat. They have eaten happy meals to build such happy guts, and she looks at him the way she did in her twenty-somethings: happy, when he said just the right number of nice things at the bar. She, still, has the sexual look of waiting and waiting for the ugly man and his ugly shirt and his ugly mustache to take her! Maybe they’d go to the bathroom; is it too late to join the mile-high club? Fuck, in their youth, they probably had. And their love exists between their bodies—so much so, that I can’t stop noticing, and the passerby notice,and we wonder about the two. We wonder if they have children who grew up watching such subtle love, 52 | Montage
or maybe grandkids who run with glee into their fat guts. How I hope my love is an airport kind of love. Makes my temper quiet, and my focus singular.
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Roommate CASEY DALY
I watched as she pressed orchid petals flatly, As they softened the feathering of the damp, white segment of wall above the sink. Her nails flattening the dried guts of the flower like textbook illustrations, My esophagus wilting like the dead and yellowed bamboo stems bunched on the counter with a rubber band. And she lived across the hall but I wondered, What was it about the light spilling through the window that made her bedroom feel so much brighter than mine. Some days there’d be a dullness on her porcelain face, And I wondered if it had to do with the slouching men and women that emerged from her bedroom, I knew the sheets were soaked in sweat and she was held by forearms under her thighs like a band near the tip of a bouquet, nearly snapped
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Doodh-Cereal CYSTIC
Out from the nether-lands (Holy Cow!) pumped by a hand (or two), spurting out in a fountain of a second too late piss. Slow and steady drizzle, dazzling the thirsty eyes. A drop or two from an open tap, dropping in gravity’s lap comes the Doodh from the Holy Buffalo! Respected Mr. Serial See Real, soaking cold and wet and ready for bodily warmth, for the passionate loving only a mouth can rightfully render. That puffy passion of cottony creamy milk, caressingly chewy to cause a hickey disaster. Waiting to pass on to the nether-lands of a Holy Human! What’s for breakfast? “Doodh-Cereal” What is that? Desperation ready to enter and exit your nether-lands Holy Shit! 55 | Montage
The Storyteller SAMANTHA BLANC
What if I made up a boy from college? A fire juggler I met at a bar who bought me a Rum and Coke because I couldn’t yet buy one myself, then fucked me for the first time, slow and soft on a mattress on the floor of his dirty, one-bedroom apartment? What if he offered me a cigarette afterward and I took it, but never used it, just watched him smoke until the flame was at his fingertips and I could see little blisters on his skin? Would I have flinched imagining the pain? Or just laid back, knowing he wasn’t lying to impress me at the bar when he said he wasn’t afraid of fire. What if I made up 10 other boys? Would that be enough? What passes for the throes of youthful passion these days? What if I said I’d tried cocaine? Or MDMA? That on my first trip I saw the ghost of John Lennon and he told me I had great legs and that he was actually still alive, making good money as the manager of a quaint little New England B&B? What if I pretended I hadn’t spent all my life fearing the unknown? I could say I’d been to Portugal and Ethiopia and Japan. I could buy myself a green, silk kimono to prove it—one dotted with little pink cherry blossoms blooming across the chest that must have looked alluring in my youth. And that I married, although he’s long since dead. A boring little man, because, really, is there any other kind? “How else would I have gotten this,” I could say, holding out my hand for people to admire whatever generic pear cut was slid on my ring finger. I would never look at it myself for fear of seeing dull, creped skin puckering around the band. Surely the nurses would ask questions, but I could pretend not to hear them, and no one would think it strange. That’s the upside of a place like that where you are just one in a sea of feeble, breaking bodies that used to be men and women. And even then, there are easy answers. My sons and their families never visit because they’re just too busy with their highpowered jobs in finance. There are no photos because no one—especially not grandchildren—like to have their picture taken. One does not regret shying away from the camera until one no longer remembers what they looked like with full, rosy cheeks. 56 | Montage
What if I spent all my time telling stories? Describing the house with my boys running naked, refusing to put on their adjustable waist pants for church. Recounting the magic of a chiffon cake with almond icing in the crisp breeze of a fall wedding, and tales of girls’ nights out full of laughter and cranberry-vodka-scented vomit, and the month I spent in Venice with a Nigerian poet who spoke only in French-accented Korean. What if in twenty or so years, if I’m still alive, the stories spill from my lips so easily that I can tell them without even noticing my mouth has fallen open? Like rain rolling off a roof. Like my bladder—as the years go on, I lose control of that too. I wonder, sometimes, if it might be possible to tell those stories so many times that even I start to believe them.
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