Montage | Issue #16

montage ar ts journal spring 2022

2021-2022

Editor-in-Chief Madeline Blair

Graphic Design Team Madeline Blair Sana Khadilkar Maggie Katsoudas Abby Masucol

Editorial Assistants

Autumn Bolte Gabriel Costello Daniella Braun Camila Garcia Maggie Katsoudas Sana Khadilkar Maria Kozar

Victoria Ligas Abby Masucol Eline Morakotkarn Vidhi Patel Akira Ritos Eryka Such Eman Zwawi

Cover art by Veronica Kozak

Published by the students of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ©2022 Montage Arts Journal

Editor’s Note The work you’re about to see in this issue is an amalgam of beauty, grief, empowerment, nostaglia, yearning, strength, and absence. We have collectively experienced more than two years now of consuming horror after horror—both within our own country and abroad—and many of us are weary, many perservering nonetheless.

I am so proud of this collection of works that we have received to act as a little glimmer of artistic hope to get us through these times. There are few things less powerful than the collective nature of written and visual art, connecting us no matter who or where we are. It is exciting and wonderful knowing that people at this university of a wide breadth of majors and colleges enjoy participating in Montage Arts Journal.

The submissions we received this past year have been astounding, and it makes me truly proud to put forth this publication. My first year running this journal has been a joy, and our team has worked diligently to cobble this together and broaden the presence of Montage here on campus. I give my endless thanks to both my fellow editors and all of our writers and artists campuswide who have submitted and contributed to this journal, without whom a publication does not exist. I would also like to thank the faculty members of the Department of English who have guided me and imparted me with great knowledge of this process, whose support I am very grateful for.

I would finally like to thank you, dear reader, for your continued support of our journal and for your interest in student literary and visual arts. It means everything to be able to share this publication, and I highly recommend sharing it with your friends and your family, and submitting your own work or becoming an editor on our team if you’re a student of the university. There is no limit to what we can accomplish, and I’m excited for a beautiful future with Montage growing even further.

With love,

Madeline Blair

(Udelhofen)

Contents GRACE ADDUCI | unconfined page 4 NATALIE SARRIS | Botticelli in the Afterbirth page 5 NILA NARAIN | in which i resurrect a radium girl page 6 OLIVIA WELSHANS | Clown 1 page 7 MEGHAN LYONS | blue loser, shoegazer page 8 MAYA RAVIV | How to Small Talk with a Six Year Old in an Elevator After a Strip-Dancing Shift page 9 CRISTINA LIGON | Echo page 11 FILDAUS UMUTONIWASE | Untitled page 12 CINDY MU | Rest Sweetly in Chinatown page 13 WILLIAM HOHE | Dressing Up for Divorce page 14 ARIEON WHITTSEY | My Mother Is a Mother page 16 ELIZABETH SHELUGA | Pink page 17 JOHN PRINCE | CherryBee page 19

BOBBY MATZUKA | With page 20 SYDNEY WRIGHT | (an illegitimate descent) standing over byron’s grave page 21 UDOCHUKWU ANIDOBU | Space Through Time page 22 JULIA SAN MIGUEL | (Things Are) Looking Up page 23 TAMAR DALLAL | Sleeping with Strangers page 24 EMMY SMITH | Time Again and Time page 25 JOHN PRINCE | HeadAche page 27 CINDY MU | Living in Fire page 28 CLAIRE VAN DER LAAN | drain cleaner, aisle 9 page 29 VERONICA KOZAK | Of You and Me page 30 VERONICA KOZAK | Pieces page 31 LOU ZEH | wound, or wound page 32 ALEXANDRA CHMIEL | The Artist page 33

WILLIAM HOHE | Clusterfuck Cunt Caren page 35 MORRISON O’GALLAGHER | You May Opt Out of the Dissection page 36 LOU ZEH | Snow in April page 37 TAMAR DALLAL | green page 38 TAMAR DALLAL | red wood page 39 WILLIAM HOHE | Self Portrait, 1948 (America’s Favorite Past Time) page 40 SYDNEY WRIGHT | the year after you graduated page 41 JULIA SAN MIGUEL | Greek Hero page 42 MADDISON DORSEY | daphne page 43 LOU ZEH | Life in the end of the endtimes page 44 SYDNEY WRIGHT | Awaiting the Renaissance page 45 GRACE ADDUCI | Love is Blind page 47 CLAIRE VAN DER LAAN | YOU CAN’T PIN JOY LIKE A MOTH page 48

unconfined

Grace Adduci

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Botticelli in the Afterbirth Natalie Sarris

Water like absinthe, she rises already drunk, thighs slick with myth. Salted at birth, whitecaps breaking—her father: his genitals meteoric, falling to foam and Aphrodite rising from aphros, foam— the daughter. Nude, hair roped golden in ungodly modesty, a scallion underfoot.

Newborn, but aged and virgin-mother to passion. This is how Love exits the womb-myth: chaste but salted, a green-water orphan.

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in which i resurrect a radium girl Nila Narain

[a Golden Shovel poem after the last line of the play These Shining Lives] i guess i’d define radiance as expansion. the swelling of pulse & hurt & invisible rot & for what? we were living dead women—that’s what the papers said. i undoubtedly know that they knew what they were doing to us. dip, lick, paint for hours on end, every moment a hammer to our hourglass. slivers of silver dotted the cracks in our lips while many a man profited from our poisoning. there’s something so cruel about time staining your teeth. tasting it as it thins, never being able to forget it turned living woman to living dead woman to dead woman. my friends, their bones, its prey. we took time in our brittle fingers & curled them into a fist, put on a face for the courts & each other & our families & the other girls & the other girls. we knew our bodies were an exercise in how long they could get away with it & we were so damn scared. people always thought we wanted pity or sympathy or fame or all the money we could milk, but it wasn’t like that at all. we knew there was a time before we had to be sisters, before the slow-creeping ache & company doctors giving us aspirin & company doctors faking test results & we wanted it back. as many times as we painted between little time-hands, though, we were never able to reverse them. so, we fought. & we shrunk. but we held our own, shining.

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Clown 1

Olivia Welshans

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blue loser, shoegazer Meghan Lyons sometimes: curled up in bed, i’ll watch the popcorn ceiling above churn into a fury of fuzz, only to roll on my side, wrapping myself in night’s heavy silk. soon: in the lingering dark air, their synths will weave me into their violet world, welcoming me as a thread in their compressing quilt, the one that asphyxiates the dread lurking within, flooding the dull tresses of a buried & idle heart. & I think: to here knows when this empty void will host the heat of another.

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How to Small Talk with a Six Year Old in an Elevator After a Strip-Dancing Shift Maya Raviv When you walk into the elevator, there’s a kid inside. He’s as tall as your hips and wears a red Spiderman t-shirt that looks a couple sizes too big. He has saucer brown eyes and his arms look skinny and breakable, the way graham crackers are if you don’t hold them quite right. The lobby button is already lit up on the elevator panel. Your six-inch heels press into your toes and the balls of your feet in a way that reminds you you’ve been wearing them for too damn long.

The little kid is looking at you. Kids do that sometimes, you remind yourself.

They’re curious like that. Gotta learn about the world and shit. He’s not watching your mascara streaks or messed up lipstick. He probably doesn’t even know what makeup is. You reach into your left bra pad to pull out your phone camera and lick your other hand’s thumb, then watch your reflection rub saliva under your eyes to clean the black smears. It does more smudging than cleaning. There’s a bite mark on your collarbone, and you bring some of your hair over your shoulder to cover it. The clock on the top right of the screen says it’s 2:12 am. You tuck the phone back into your bra.

The elevator rattles. Elevators shouldn’t rattle, even in cheap, beat-down motels in the middle of nowhere. There’s a creaking sound, like when a door grinds open in a horror movie. There’s no handle, no safety bar, nothing to clutch for balance. You try your best to bend your knees and plant your heels into the ground, and then the shaking stops. In fact, the elevator stops moving entirely. “What the fuck.”

The kid’s saucer eyes grow to dinner plate size. His fat little fingers grasp the bottom of his shirt, and he shifts his gaze to the brown carpet. “...Ten minutes.” He mumbles something, and you think he sounds like a little mouse.

“Eh?” “It’s just for ten minutes.” The boy’s eyes meet yours for a moment, then they travel back down. “Then it will be unstuck.” His fingers tighten around his shirt, and he starts to twist it like he’s wringing a damp towel. His shoes look like they used to be red, but now they’re this maroon-brown color and a little frayed.

You cross your arms and tap your right index finger on your left elbow. The floor carpet is a shade of brown that should be dark enough to hide most stains but still shows the remnants of some puddle between your right foot and the kid’s left. The lighting is too bright to be appropriate for the middle of the night. It smells like dusty carpet.

You pull out your phone, and the time is 2:13 am. Ten minutes might be longer than you thought. The white noise from the elevator machinery churns in your ears. The kid’s eyes are still directed at the ground, but every couple of seconds Montage | 9

he steals a glance in your direction. His big eyes remind you of a Disney cartoon.

Soft brown eyes, just like Bambi’s.

“Does this happen a lot?” You say, because silence can suffocate.

Bambi’s eyes snap in your direction. “Yeah,” tiny mouse voice, “like, every day, I think.” He does this kid thing where he replaces the th-sound with an f.

You tell him he should consider filing a complaint to management. He blinks at you. His face is probably the size of your hand. He looks down at the carpet.

The white noise presses its hands around your throat in a way that’s both nostalgic and painful. “Do you like, live here, or anything?” The kid lifts his head again, and his eyelashes are long. You try to focus your gaze at the space between his eyebrows. He nods slowly. “Seems like a solid place. Uh, when the elevator isn’t breaking down.”

“It’s all right. There’s snacks downstairs.” His hands are loose around his shirt. With your heels on, the kid is probably half your height.

“Oh. Like, for free? That’s sick.”

“No, no, no. You gotta put the coins in.”

You jam your right finger between your right heel and shoe and slowly widen the gap until your shoe falls off. “Oh, so like a vending machine?” You do the same with the right shoe.

“Yeah. They got Cheetos, and Cheetos are my favorite. Sometimes the Cheetos run out, and there’s Doritos, but Doritos are my second favorite, so it’s okay.” He lets go of his shirt and turns to face you. Now that your heels are off, his head is about as tall as your waist. “But only the red Doritos. The blue ones are yucky.”

“That’s the cheesy one, right?”

“No, blue’s ranch. Red is cheese. Brown is spicy cheese, but I don’t like spicy foods, so I never buy it.”

“Damn, you sure like your snacks cheesy. A man of fine taste.”

“Yeah.”

He brings his left hand to his mouth and bites the nail of his thumb. There’s a bruise wrapped around his twig of a wrist, green fading to yellow fading into his skin.

“Well, uhh, where are you heading? Isn’t it, like, past your bedtime or something?”

“Bedtime?” He tilts his head. “I’m getting Cheetos.”

“This late? Your Mom won’t be mad?”

His hands wrap around the bottom of his shirt and roll it like a cinnamon roll. He shrugs. Then he twists his hands and starts wringing.

Your dress keeps riding up your ass, so you grasp its end with both hands in an attempt to hold it down. You watch as the kid wrings his shirt, over and over again, like a wet towel that won’t dry. When you close your eyes, you can hear the water. It hits the floor with a drip-drop, again and again, painting a widening puddle on the dirty, stained, brown, dusty elevator carpet.

The last five minutes are spent in silence.

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Echo

Cristina Ligon

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Untitled

Fildaus Umutoniwase The old lady next door told me no one could really see me with a black hijab on One sunny afternoon when momma sent me to buy some charcoal my skin was just as dark.

Slightly lighter than 200 Rwandan Francs worth of charcoal but still darker than her skin “There’s no light reflecting on your face,” the old lady said I listened and for 10 years I have not worn a black hijab

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Rest Sweetly in Chinatown Cindy Mu

Let us dine on sugar-spun moonlight: an exquisite treat that fills our bellies and sticks to our teeth, the nostalgic taste of White Rabbit candy, creamily sweet, wrapped in rice paper.

We shall be weightless, infinite, childish for once.

Regret not, my friend, for the breeze is soft tonight as the universe exhales sweetly. It is a blissful world, yet it has been unkind to you.

But you were meant to sweep dried rice across the tiled floor, to wear red shoes that crimp your toes, to lose a lover in spite of your brilliance, because of your brilliance— for your lean eyes and dark hair, chopped bean curd and chicken feet, are an otherness all combined: too pungent to be delicate, yet too commonplace to be desired.

You were meant to curse yourself, blame yourself, crushed by guilt so that every breath, every dream becomes half the splendor it was before.

Regret not those dark days, for you’ve traveled far, each mistake casting a warm glow over the untrodden path your mother failed to see as she crossed the ocean.

They have strengthened you, weakened you to the right consistency.

You can stretch without cracking and harden with fire, a regal teapot born of humble zisha sand and water.

Relax, my dear, for I know you are tired.

Let us pause before daybreak, for we were meant to stop here to catch our breath, under the wise willow tree, and watch the nightingale glide by.

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Dressing Up for Divorce William Hohe

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My Mother Is a Mother Arieon Whittsey

Her face scrunches over the solemn leaves of a plant she’s keeping alive as a gift for me, now she condemns the thing to a life in my hands.

The months become undone, a future delicately strung.

It is a dark winter and I’m blinded by Black sunshine, the deep skin of her face blossoming into ultra-light.

Does this pass through the bloodline?

My mother’s hands are calloused.

She used them to mold my head, ushering the skin around my skull. Now she holds me in her lap, scraping my scalp, and tells me, “One day you’ll do the same.”

My hands are so soft, unreliable sculptors.

My face so dull, nothing like a mother’s.

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Pink

Elizabeth Sheluga END Mama died a few weeks before my twenty-eighth birthday when one of her piles of stuff collapsed on her.

The funeral was on a Wednesday morning. It rained.

I took off work on Thursday and Friday to clean out her house.

STUFF Mama never learned how to let go.

She clung to everything—newspapers, clothing, candy wrappers, soup cans, junk mail, receipts, boxes—and piled it all into mountains that reached the ceilings.

Growing up, I spent every Sunday clearing a path through Mama’s things so we could move through the house. By the following Saturday, there was always new stuff in the way.

DAD He left us when I was eight.

He couldn’t understand why Mama loved the stuff more than she loved him.

I couldn’t understand why he hated the stuff more than he loved me.

FEAR Mama got more scared of losing things after Dad left.

She said she never wanted to lose any part of me, so she started collecting my hair from the shower drain after each time I washed it.

WE NEVER HAD A CAT “You’re all I have left,” Mama said to me tearfully one time while cutting coupons for cat food out of the Sunday paper.

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PAINT Sixth grade was when everyone began having sleepover birthday parties, and I learned the way Mama and I lived wasn’t normal.

When my birthday came around, Mama asked why I didn’t want to have a sleepover party at the house.

“I’m embarrassed of the stuff,” I said.

Mama cried and asked why. I told her I didn’t think the stuff was beautiful in the way that she did, and she asked what I thought was beautiful, and I said the color pink. She came back to the house the next day with a roller and a can of pink paint.

“We’re going to paint the walls pink,” she said. “I want the house to be beautiful for both of us.”

But when we tried to paint the walls, we couldn’t reach them. The stuff was in the way. And Mama cried again.

POTENTIAL Mama began collecting cans of paint in different shades of pink: French Rose, Peony Pink, Pink Rapture, Cherry Glow.

She left an unopened can of paint in each room of the house.

ESCAPE Now I live in an apartment in Toronto. I can see the floors and sit on the furniture.

I’ve learned how to take out the trash.

PENANCE I was supposed to meet the junk removers at Mama’s house at 9 o’clock the morning after her funeral.

I hadn’t been back in nearly a decade. As I pulled into the driveway, I saw what Mama had done.

Behind the overgrown grass, framed by the sunken porch and curled shingles, the front door of the house was painted pink.

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CherryBee John Prince

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With

Bobby Matzuka With its pristine hardwood floor, cool and pearlescent marble countertops, windows with a ten-stories-up view that spans the whole city and makes the lit windows out there turn the night into a sea of distant ships, state of the art appliances (the oven has a “convection bake” setting), in-unit laundry, HDTV with cable included, and more cabinets than you could dream to fill, you wonder how it isn’t better.

Better than the familiar, crooked house with the charcoal roof in the middle of your block. With the driveway of broken gravel that will scrape someone’s bumper if they aren’t driving a minivan. With the screen door that once closed itself, but now swings open unless you pull it shut (and, even then, is yanked loose by the occasional unsympathetic wind). With the L-shaped couch of fabric in two colors: grey and darker grey, in spots where you or your siblings dropped a slice of pizza, its grease marking your mistake evermore. With the carpet that your dog puked on once, that your mother insists she cleaned well enough (you swear sometimes that the smell still remains). With the lightning crack on the stairway wall, from the time you stumbled when you were younger than you ever again will be.

Your little brother is the same age now as you were then.

And he says “I love you” with a language you maybe once knew, but are now too old to fluently speak. He stops what he’s doing to tap your forehead with his palm. To pull lightly at your hair with miniature fingers. To wrap up your head with his arm, only able to reach halfway around.

You lay on the carpet, the one that vaguely smells, and you look up at the ceiling with the yellow stain. You try to fill your head with nothing. When your brother sits with you, legs crossed by your side, you close your eyes.

You feel your leg begin to bounce as he plays with it. With all of his strength, he pulls it off the floor and lets it slam lazily against the soft carpet, and he does it again and again and again. He does this without any reason, but it lets you know that he’s happy to be with you.

Your closed eyes fill with tears when you realize that this is why that other place isn’t better. It takes you such little effort to fill the crooked house with life.

With that electric, intoxicating feeling that never feels as electric or intoxicating as it does after you leave it. With the soft morning voices from the couch. With the click-clack of the dog’s claws against the kitchen tile. With the sighing creaks of floorboards upstairs.

You wonder if you could fill that other place with any of that. You’ll have to fill it with something.

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(an illegitimate descent) standing over lord byron’s grave Sydney Wright beneath me, the rotting sinner with words to seduce the shackled obedience of a saint buried in a family plot placed in an average coffin, covering up decades of delirium. your daughter never knew you. her mother said writing makes us mad. it makes us desire things that will never exist, eras our bodies will never have. an artist at a near tombstone sets up an easel in her smock. she paints porcelain lines portraying your tombstone, a timid gray against the English skies. my feet rest six feet above a poet’s skeleton. i step gently on the hardened earth but byron wouldn’t care if i weren’t so delicate. your descendants are in the Americas, a land you must’ve scoffed at. not enough colosseums or French women to fleetingly fornicate, too many laws against unmarried sex, too many taxes on the estate. whether we sin or saint or write or paint we choose our cemetery plots with no guarantee our home city will let us be buried there.

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Space Through Time Udochukwu Anidobu

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(Things Are) Looking Up Julia San Miguel

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Sleeping with Strangers Tamar Dallal

late night. bus chuffs up the lonely road, rolls gently to a stop. sky and street lit only by orange lamps, tall shadows laying down, tired from a long day. open door, up the steps. card handed to the yawning driver, scanned, pocketed. stumble to the middle of the bus, half full. drowsy eyes follow for a moment, return to the frosty windows. the bus moves on. starting forward, rocking slightly, side to side, side to side, steel boat adrift on a paved river, lulling, soothing. the seat hugs warmly, welcoming. harsh lights off, blink spots away; neon blues flick on. minutes pass. someone stumbles to the door; oh. it’s their stop. driver, driver! and the door patiently opens again. the bus moves on. heavy air, weighted with sleep and soft breathing. heads nodding in a doze, lifting, bleary, at their stops. beds waiting in the distance, waiting, waiting. head bumps the window, time to look up. nearly home, mouth thick with exhaustion. a wave to the driver. bus fills with night coolness, night darkness. step down, step out. it’s a late night. watch the bus fade: quieting, quiet, silence.

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Time Again and Time Emmy Smith I When I tell you I am running out of time I am not an hourglass In the hands of a grinning toddler Flecks of golden sand hitting the antique rug I mean to say When the ceramic kettle whistles Hot water bubbling and singing on the kitchen stove I am the tea bag waiting on the tile countertop II You tell me I have so much time left My goals are not bound to a minute hand I can tell you they are bound to the clock on the family car’s dashboard Going 60 down the highway to bring me home from school When my mother says my sister is seeing a therapist And I should get tested for her depression Or going 25 to the grocery store at 13 Trying to find the words to say I don’t know why I move in slow motion And my mother says we’ll talk about therapy after Christmas We never do I say that I am running out of time because 25 miles per hour Lasted 9 years And 60 miles down the highway Was an ache

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III Nestled between the coarse hairs of an antique rug Or at the bottom of a china teacup I still hear the seconds I am not in between a rock and a hard place I am in between dying now and dying every day for the rest of my life IV When the runtime of the movie ends And the hero walks into the sunset Do they stop before it gets dark?

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HeadAche John Prince

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Living in Fire Cindy Mu

The night air was starched dry as I dragged my parents from the fire.

It was quite breezy that season, perfect for rolling flames.

I had to be careful not to breathe in the smoke that pulled them under and below and away.

The thick, bruised firelight had cast soft shadows on my mother’s thin frame as I birthed her through the fireman’s arms.

A strong girl, with my nose and eyes.

She had fallen into a restful sleep while I cradled her in my arms under the hospital blankets.

I had felt worn raw with exhaustion as I pushed to find the other face I knew in the fire, for he had my mouth and ears.

The fire had sparkled as I pushed my father out —away from the burning embers and into the world.

A healthy boy, I had thought as he grasped the pinky of my hand and tugged.

You saved us, they cried as they coughed up the filmy ash in their throats.

Their graying hair seems to shine particularly bright as they pause to wipe the black phlegm away.

The night is still so terribly dry, and I can only watch this time as their minds and bodies glow and crumble like embers through time.

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drain cleaner, aisle 9 Claire Van Der Laan

it amazes me that i’m allowed to make tea anymore, especially for you. i make it too sweet, the sugar doesn’t quite dissolve, you can feel it clogging your arteries, but you never say no. i think it is because you know where i have been— the gross yellow light of my dad’s kitchen, white linoleum tiles, filthy grout, the leaking refrigerator. i am tempted to drink the water, you laugh, you think i’m joking, but i wish that it was battery acid. we’d sip it out of chipped mugs and cut our lips. i’d wipe the blood from your mouth, too afraid to ask whose it was. you’ll wipe my tears and tell me you were too high to remember it the next day. propose marriage but get too drunk and forget the ring, accidentally dropped down the bathroom sink. i’ll claw through the pipes for hours. you’ll find it in your back pocket and never say a word. i have too many questions, black and corrosive, welling up on the inside of my throat and i count the minutes until they burn through. if you see me on my dad’s kitchen floor, do me a favor and turn the light out, would you?

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Of You and Me Veronica Kozak

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Pieces

Veronica Kozak

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wound, or wound Lou Zeh

the first night you wound your body around mine, intertwined our hands, told me my fingers were so small that yours had trouble fitting through the cracks, you wrapped your fingers around my entire hand instead. i am small, you like to say, but size is relative—maybe it is you who is large, who presses around my edges until i’m nearly absorbed, who coaxes my fingers open and winds them back together. they told me in grade school that my heart was the size of a single fist, and if that’s true, my entire heart could sit, a bloodied mess, in your palm, and you could let it. wrap your hands around something warm for a change. my body is always so cold, shivering into your arms the night you left the window open, two space heaters burning our way through the mattress. any excuse to get closer, wind tighter. unravel at the seams. wake in the middle of the night and start all over again. let myself forget silly things like hearts and blood and get lost in skin, and breath, and hands that drag along my skin, slowly unwinding, like an old ball of string, smaller and smaller in the dark.

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The Artist

Alexandra Chmiel The painting sat upright against the wall of the man’s apartment. Every finished painting required at least one day to set to make sure the colors bled together nicely and the canvas was dry to the touch. It would take at least a few more days until he would be able to get rid of it.

The man surveyed his artwork, leaning back in his dilapidated armchair.

The afternoon sunlight soaked through the blinds, casting shadows across the apartment. He didn’t mind; he liked the dark.

Puffing his cigar, he said to himself, “Not bad.” His paintings improved through the years, as practice lent to skill, but he thought this one was his best so far. The woman on the canvas was angelic. The half of her body shown in the painting was steeped in gold, her hair dark chocolate curls. A crimson line followed along her throat like a necklace, and red roses marked the canvas in bursts. If the man was one thing, he was accurate.

He puffed his cigar once more, running a hand through his graying hair.

Nobody cared about you once your hair started turning gray, he knew that much.

He knew that mothers abandoned and fathers died and girlfriends broke hearts and boys would have to raise themselves. He couldn’t count on any of them; it was only him and his paintings. The world he built out of acrylics and watercolors.

The man put out the cigar and stood up, dragging his right foot along the carpet.

The last one put up a bit of a fight, and his foot bore the brunt of it. He huffed.

At least she tried. Most often, they gave up early, and the chase was no longer as fun as he wished it would be.

Turning the corner of his hallway, he found himself in his second spare room. It wasn’t empty like it used to be, and not as horrifying as the other spare, but filled with canvas upon canvas lining the wooden bedroom floor. Each painting told a different story, marked a different life. Sometimes, he would sell them anonymously to whichever rich person desired it for the aesthetic, too stupid to understand its purpose. He hated them for it, for the underappreciation of his true talent, but he needed the money.

Sometimes, he sent one to the distraught parents, still hopeful that their little girls would come back. Sometimes, he sent one to the police, as a marker that he couldn’t be touched. That they would never find him. And so far, they hadn’t.

Sometimes, he wasn’t careful enough. An ungloved touch of the canvas to keep his brush steady would ruin the entire painting, and he would have to burn it in what little backyard he had under the guise of a bonfire, watching the scorching paint color the flames.

When he left the house he closed the blinds, locked the doors, and zipped up his outside persona. The kind, naive, helpful neighbor. Why would he, the one who helped Mrs. Delgado with her zucchinis, the one who helped Mr. Andrews set Montage | 33

up his new fence, be involved in anything other than a standard suburban life? He understood the key to innocence.

The man turned from his paintings to the wall in the spare room plastered with polaroids. In the top right corner was his most recent picture, his golden girl in her golden dress and her hair curled from whatever party she was attending.

And, along her throat, the crimson line of blood carved by his steady fingers. Blood spattered in the corners of the image, but he thought they looked better on his canvas as roses. Art was up to interpretation, anyway.

The doorbell rang, echoing through the house that still lacked a majority of furniture—he didn’t need a bed, only his father’s armchair and his paintings—and he started. The man rarely took on visitors. His heart pounded. He heard sirens not too long ago, but surely the events were unrelated?

With a rattling breath, he grabbed the key from the top of the door frame and locked the spare room door behind him. He would take no chances. The man made his way to the front door and looked into the peephole. The tension in his body eased like a deflated balloon. It was a girl. A teenager, no doubt. He thought she might’ve moved in a few houses down with her mother. Her hair was blonde and straight, long enough to reach her waist. She was holding a catalog in her hands.

The man had been lacking inspiration recently, but the sparkle in her hazel eyes, the youthful glow of her summer-glazed skin, awoke something in him. He restrained his excitement in fear that he would frighten her off.

He took a deep breath before opening the door, schooling his features into a placating mask. The girl gave a hesitant smile. “Hi,” she said. “I’m, uh, selling candles for my school fundraiser.” She pushed her hair back with anxious fingers.

Her knuckles were white where they clutched the catalog. Where was her mother?

Girls like her should know better than to walk alone in unfamiliar neighborhoods.

“Hello,” the man responded with a Cheshire grin. He leaned against the doorframe, his fingers twitching for a brush. “You would make a wonderful painting.”

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Clusterfuck Cunt Caren William Hohe

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You May Opt Out of the Dissection (by Completing the Alternative Online Simulation) Morrison O’Gallagher Something yawning.

Something flesh or fruit. Does something breathe?

Sensually?

Are hot towels or cold pillows preferred?

Can a movement be reversed?

Or is it a snapshot?

A sharp flash, electric charged with variegated flecks that last under the eyelids under all other skin in a technicolor twitch?

A cotton swab lingers, a dirty dish lingers on the fingertips.

Under there, your nerves freeze a picture. Under there, moving insulin may or may not be producing and the reuptake may or may not be working, uninserting.

Still biting down.

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Snow in April Lou Zeh

I think I have reverse seasonal depression and I think the weather does too.

My best friend would remind me, if she was here, one storm isn’t climate. It’s weather.

But each April gets colder and colder.

I can’t remember a single April snowstorm from before I was ten, and now I think I am covered in them, so cold and wet I can hardly breathe.

I think I am dying in the snow, in April, without a jacket, because who carries a jacket in April, but at least this means it isn’t summer.

Last year, I spent my summer nights walking to nowhere.

It was that or stay indoors, suicidal thoughts drifting gently through my window on the warm summer breeze, or sit in stale greenhouse heat with windows closed.

Better to walk the streets without watching for cars. Spotlit, exposed, hypnotized by their shining eyes.

Pinned against the sky while the leaves whispered about me like children on a playground.

I remember, years ago, choking on dust during recess playing hide and seek in the leaves, but no one ever came to look.

I crouched on the pavement alone, telling myself it was because I was so good at hiding.

If I didn’t move, I could stay there forever, melting into the asphalt for weeks, until the sky turned cold and my body was covered in snow and ice, because children don’t worry about things like wet clothes or hypothermia.

Those are things that only adults nag about.

And I could rise from my hiding spot, all leaves and icicles for hair and scare all the other children, make them run away and have my icy blacktop kingdom all to myself.

None of it happened this way.

I staggered to my feet, swore I wouldn’t die in the snow, and I threw a chunk of ice at a girl on the playground,got snowballs banned for 6 weeks, and I faked my mom’s signature on my warning slip and no one ever found out.

And I still don’t feel bad.

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green

Tamar Dallal

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red woods

Tamar Dallal

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Self Portrait, 1948 (America’s Favorite Past Time) William Hohe

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the year after you graduated Sydney Wright

we plunged our fingers in irish soda bread singing ancient hymns i wore laurel around my head and you confessed your sins we brewed hibiscus tea dancing by the fire you tore a button from my shirt and threw it on the pyre you called me sappho and licked my lyrical lines liquor-soaked oatmeal and parking ticket fines july boiled into august and dove bones scattered around the park it’s lonely in the dorms without your presence in the dark when the leaves wilted and i returned to campus the tassel on your cap had already been titled you roved the world degree in hand i miss my first night as an adult and i miss my first man

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Greek Hero

Julia San Miguel I watch the cherubim skitter around the air sometimes and can’t help but to consider them glorified vultures.

Far above you or me, with wings of steel and hearts of glass, they overstay their welcome in cotton candy skies in the name of glory.

It was Orpheus who first told me on the ashy, mutilated banks of the River Styx one glazed-over night in November, or whenever it was, that there’s nothing like eternal exile to give you time to think.

He is left burdened and cold, sleeping in between nightmares rotting on black soot.

Perhaps it is the soot and not exile that has made him mad.

Maybe those who had it all a lifetime ago were always meant to rot in the crypts of their kingdoms.

Orpheus asks me to stay with him in his den of bad decisions.

I decline.

It is the downfall of great poets, this thing called love.

It’ll chew them up and spit them out when lover becomes muse.

It takes more than lilac petals and sweet lemongrass pressed into the pages of a scrapbook to heal scars.

If Mark Antony could pluck the stars from the skies to give to Cleopatra would that suffice?

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daphne

Maddison Dorsey

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Life in the End of the Endtimes Lou Zeh

My arm aches after the needle slides in, a quiet twinge that grows until I wake in the middle of the night, my shoulder a tender mass that hurts whenever I move, swelling until it fits perfectly inside of last year. I’ve missed two birthdays now.

A summer. Three semesters. Spent sitting on my dorm room floor, alone, drinking ramen from plastic takeout containers. My arm is unbearable; it can hardly fit inside my college dorm room. How can I sleep when this room is so small? So quiet? There are people outside yelling, as if it’s a year ago or six months from now. As if nothing is wrong. As if a chunk of my life has not been carved out, sitting in a useless lump in my lap at 3 AM like an amputated limb. Like a child who won’t sit still for a vaccination, who doesn’t understand what’s good for them, that your arm is supposed to ache. It’s supposed to hurt. It’s not supposed to be fun, you’re not supposed to be shouting at 3 AM when the rest of us are in our rooms, trying to sleep, ice melting down useless, swollen limbs. I hear the voices of people I used to know outside in the crowd. If I ever see them again, I’ll ask if it was worth it, if the nights they spent in crowds made up for the nights I spent alone, watching the moon, swollen and yellow, shrink in the sky.

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Awaiting the Renaissance Sydney Wright

they say after each pandemic a renaissance happens i am waiting for fields to be bursting with painters poets popping poppyseed pastries onto their tongues typewriters re-emerging it is the era when hipsters and vintage fashion have won i am waiting for ballets to bustle in theaters puppeteers to prance around street vendors stocked with artisan butter dyed with wildflowers and dripped in honeysuckle for elegant ball gowns and face paint to be the new attire for our hustle i am waiting for fireworks to ignite the weekday syzygy serenading the sea sides with their arsenic epiphany religious revivals resurrecting their tents for tarot-reading travelers to report your birth chart after you repent i am waiting for flappers to make their return fringe tassels and tap dancers who pitter by the fireside’s slow evening burn Montage | 45

for jazz music to jar the radio radicalizing pop music’s ratio i long for the renaissance the era where we make the greedy government officials our peasants they say after each pandemic a renaissance happens this is our chance for revival we are long from the days of nine-to-five survival

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Love is Blind Grace Adduci

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YOU CAN’T PIN JOY LIKE A MOTH Claire Van Der Laan

pin sinking into cardboard / soft devastating crunch / glitter dusting your fingerprints like the ashes of your intentions / burning on notebook paper in the bathroom sink each new moon / candles mourning / the moth you have killed the moth that you have grabbed a little too hard / souring in your palms / tissues dissolving in the bottom of the tub bomb ticking on your shoulder / there is only so much time / before it bursts you name it joy / wash dishes and ignore the papery wings / floating amongst the suds / sleep lines pressed into the delicate / underside of your neck / in the shape of the body sometimes you pretend / that it was a butterfly / all along

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Fe a t u r i n g Wo r k B y Grace Adduci Udochukwu Anidobu Alexandra Chmiel Tamar Dallal Maddison Dorsey William Hohe Veronica Kozak Cristina Ligon Meghan Lyons Bobby Matzuka Julia San Miguel Cindy Mu Nila Narain

Morrison O’Gallagher John Prince Maya Raviv Natalie Sarris Elizabeth Sheluga Emmy Smith Fildaus Umutoniwase Claire Van Der Laan Olivia Welshans Arieon Whittsey Sydney Wright Lou Zeh

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