Winter 2023 Issue

T he N or T hwes T P assage

Winter 2023

T he N or T hwes T P assage

Western Oregon University’s Student-Run Art and Literature Magazine

Winter 2023 Issue

Editor in Chief

Quinlan Wedge

Editorial Board

Jude Bokovoy

Mikayla Coleman

Ian Kincaid

Abby Schrunk

Mnemosyne McKay

Website

wou.edu/northwestpassage

© 2023 Northwest Passage. All rights reserved. All materials and content within this publication are property of the Northwest Passage, for the duration of first publishing rights, a six month period, after which time all content submitted by the individual contributor reverts back to the author. All materials and content printed here may not be copied, reproduced, or distributed. Any other usage must follow the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Winter 2023 Edition of Northwest Passage!

I am so excited to share this edition with you. The Winter 2023 edition is my second edition so far, and I am proud to say that I’m figuring out what I’m doing! For this edition, we received eighty-eight submissions, and the Editorial Board and I had a very tough job of voting which pieces to accept because there were so many amazing submissions. To everyone who had pieces accepted, congratulations! Celebrate your accomplishments and share this magazine with your people! To those who didn’t make it into this edition, please continue your practices,and submit more pieces for consideration in future editions. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to send in art, and thank you to everyone who picks up a copy of this edition! I hope you all find something that speaks to you and inspires you. Winter term can be incredibly stressful, so I hope that this issue provides you with a little joy. Please keep creating, for yourself and for others.

ubmissio N g uide L i N es

1. Submit work as an attachment via email to northwestpassage@mail.wou.edu.

2. All WOU students, faculty, and alumni over the age of 18 are invited to submit their work.

3. We accept: art of any medium, photography, poetry, short stories, scripts, screenplays, creative essays, spoken-word, lyrics, music compositions, and recordings.

4. Submissions should include a title and be submitted without a name; this helps our editorial board maintain impartialty during the voting process.

5. A maximum of five submissions per creator will be published per issue, but additional submissions may be considered for future issues.

6. Due to space constraints, all written work has a word limit of approximately 1,700 words.

7. Art must be in digital format; please take high quality photos of artwork for best printing result.

8. Music and spoken-word is published in our digital album once a year, during spring term.

Spring 2023 deadline: May 12th

-Quinlan Wedge

A Good Day’s Sleep

Sienna Painter

The Night My Girlfriend Bit Me

She got me gummy frogs as a peace offering for her rebukes in the bitter cold.

I already forgot, tearing through squeaking plastic, thrilled to be munching marshmallow-bellied frogs. She smiled, so I pulled a Lady and the Tramp, half a frog between my lips. She giggled and obliged, pressing hers on mine but I had to be clever and hide it in my cheek. With her eyes closed, she bit down hard.

Seconds later we cried, she because she hurt me and had a long day, I because she cried first and because she bit me! Over her shoulder I checked the mirror: chuckling through swollen lips at my face slick with tear-snot and the taste of two small dots of blood grinning back. How stupid, how beautifully stupid, two sobbing kids now close enough to kiss and hurt each other.

Jasper Beck

Washing Away

Fragments of Childhood

Aleta Debolt

I remember the linoleum cool and worn thin by my longing and the hands of the clock too slow to keep up with the waiting I remember boots on the deck Jingling keys and his calloused hands scooping me up to where waiting ended and love smelled like sawdust

Aspen Petersen

The Many Intricacies of Fairy Tales and Fire

Kaylin (a lover, loved)

The clock strikes twelve, and the fairy tale turns to ashes.

Its burning ablaze, perhaps a nasty metaphor for something you could likely imagine on your own — that they’re just that. Tales, fiction, fake. A fallacy for someone else’s mind, rather than your own.

But is it really just as simple as that? Or is that how we make it to be, our own frankenstein?

A good question. One we fail to always answer — and when we do, to answer truthfully.

Funny how that works, isn’t it? A conundrum, entirely dull in prosaic prose suited for pretty ears and even prettier mouths. As if we paint them an ugly shade every time we lie.

As if it’s something vile, or downright dreadful, a violent wish to know.

But fairy tales do not tell the truth, yet they’re unfailingly beautiful every time, aren’t they?

Even the ones that speak of murder, of failure, of loss and regret.

Even the ones that speak of an unhappy ending, long forgotten as long as there are ones with ‘better’ stories, ‘better’ endings.

And fire is cleansing, powerful with the ability to rewrite. We say ‘rewrite’ as if it does anything more than turn the words to ashes, the same as the fairy tale itself. But this isn’t the truth, is it?

Fairy tales are more than that.

Spoken tales exist too, without the power of being written down. Are they not fairy tales nonetheless?

Let’s try it again — grab a lighter, set it aflame, and see what happens. Did it burst into flames, then dissolve into nothing more than dust and long-lived love? If not, then what happened?

I guarantee that you already know the answer.

Stephanie Herrera

Mushroom

Artist and the Fossil

Lucas Montpart

From the light brown soil

We exposed an ancient figure, Marble like in its look, The perception of an older age

As its surfaced from the dirt Hollow eye sockets, Teeth that could still cut, A expression that could Make even security guards

At the museum quiver. Yet a beauty could be seen In awe, a size beyond our heads, Admired like passing ferries

Or planes with messages on them.

Even in its state of death, This fossil is a supermodel In its face and stance.

Jaden Perez

Hiking With Your Best Friend

Jaden Perez

Winter in the Valley

Natalie Blakley

Play

Mikayla Coleman

Waking Life

Witchen

Mikayla Coleman

Delaina Soboloski

Oregon Coast

Jaden Perez

A Quick Snack

I am a performance piece

Bree Trickel

do i have to live and breathe as a dying piece of art? to think my thoughts in lines of poetry when you move away from your friends who tell you that you’re the brightest light they’ve ever seen and you have to choke down the words because stars burn the brightest right before they explode lift my chin to focus my eyes on the sky ignore the blade that is tilting it up and simply convince myself the ground is not getting any closer

Jaden Perez

The Feeling of Loud

Lillian Axelson

Music so loud you feel a disconnect from your body, that’s the only way I could describe it. ‘Loud’ feels like the wrong word to use though; loud usually feels out of place in a moment, loud shocks your system and calls you to attention, but this is the best version of loud. I can feel in the air, in the ground, in the sea of people screaming along. It’s not loud, it’s a shake-you-to your-very-core kind of perfect.

People shout the lyrics at the top of their lungs. Forcing words into the air only for them to be swept up in the madness. My throat hoarse despite not being able to hear myself. I flail my arms in a haphazard attempt to punch the air with the beat, and I shift from foot to foot in some semblance of dancing.

Nothing feels like mine anymore. The band has captured me. Bass takes the lead for my heart, beat takes hold of my hands, and lyrics twist my tongue. Nothing more than a marionette and yet I’m not sure anything has ever felt more freeing.

Contradicting feelings fight for my attention at every turn. It’s too freeing, it’s not freeing enough; like I’m on just on the cusp of truely flying. There’s someone vaping, I can tell by the puff of smoke that curls its way into the haze of the center; it’s bad for your body, it’s bodily autonomy. People are banging their heads and dancing in the stands, just as wild as if they were on the floor; someone’s gonna get hurt, maybe they’re feeling this too? Lights flash and lasers chase each other across the stadium; it hurts my eyes, it’s magic that I couldn’t possibly look away from. Observation is the only part of me that’s still online. There’s just so… so much to look at. Not in the way that’s overwhelming, this could never be too much. I found my place, one I’ve never had before. With everything feeling so right I want it all at once, I want to feel the screams, see the lights, hear the songs I love. I want everything.

The lights start flickering from red to white, the hidden crowd being given their own spot light for just a moment at a time. In the back, in a little bubble just outside of the sea there’s a flip of fabric. Two bodies rotate in the strobe, a jump and a lift the culprit behind the eye catching movement. Person one is wearing a dress, a shorter one that flows almost in sync with their long hair. Person two is wearing pants but with the same long hair, silhouette spinning as they duck under One’s arm. In barely a moment’s notice, they’re clinging to one another. They spin in a way that’s too calm for the surging rapids around them. One’s arm is around Two’s waist, hand gripping shirt. Two’s hand carefully cupping their cheek, leading a dance far too raw for the experience. They’re flying. I would love to have something like that.

I’ve been where they’ve been. A room full of nothing but energy, a slow intimate dance, holding someone. I sincerely doubt I felt whatever they’re feeling now, but I wish to hell and back I had been able too. A movie moment, one that would feel so important to look back on, because even as a stranger looking in, only able to see their outlines in brief flashes, that’s how the moment felt, important.

Important is the word people often use to describe our relationships with one another. Important to have a relationship with your child. ‘My friendships are important to me’ people commonly say. Romantic love being important goes without saying. Who would the action hero fight for if not for their lover? Why did Orpheus look back? Who wouldn’t want to find their other half?

Feeling love is a different sort of disconnect for me. Not a disconnect from my body, but something that feels like a disconnect from society that feels out of place, wrong. Society as a whole is captured by love, so much pressure to have someone. Growing up with phrases of ‘You’ll understand when you’re older’ or ‘You’ll find someone eventually’. Both of these being phrases related to some sort of undiscussed cultural normality. It’s ‘normal’ to date, it’s ‘normal’ to get married, it’s ‘normal’ to fall in love. Of course that means it’s not ‘normal’ to never do or want these things,

that’s the disconnect for me, and it’s anything but perfect. I love my friends. I love my parents, my siblings, my pets. But I don’t love, never have and chances are I never will. The concept of never for something so important to society, something required to be ‘normal’ is scary. It’s scary in the way that people are going to look at me with a lack of understanding. It’s scary in the way that expectations exist that I have no hope of ever meeting. It’s terrifying in the way that I want it, badly. I’ve tried to reach out with sweat-slick hands and grip it tight, only for it to slide between my fingers. A kiss that was nothing more than the press of lips. Holding a hand where all I could think about was the way our arm lengths didn’t quite match up and made it uncomfortable.

One and Two were lucky in the sense that they chose to have what it felt like everyone else also got the chance to have. They had a tangible love here at this moment. Tangled in each other, skirting the sea, letting the music control them in a way completely alien to the way it controlled me. They had them, and I had me. We all belonged here in different ways, so they could have theirs, and I could have mine.

A familiar chorus reignites my attention like a siren’s song, beckoning me to join in. A scream along with renewed purpose. Rocking my body and shifting my feet I move in some semblance of a dance. I may not have another hand in mine, but my puppet strings are in my grasp and the beat is my lead. I have what I need.

The flashing halted abruptly, the crowd now hidden from view, like a flock of birds ready to soar. One and two are hidden right along with them. The ear splitting screech of an electric guitar fills air and the audience erupts in applause.

Old Dogs

Quinlan Wedge

My dog’s nose, speckled and peeling, pops up over the top of my book, and the pages crinkle under her wet snout.

She sneezes in my face, droplets sprinkling over the words I’ve been reading.

My partner’s dog pants close, her breath hot and fishy, and I wince and almost turn away.

But I hold their stinky, patchy, whitewhiskered faces and kiss their foreheads and hope someone will still kiss me when I am old and gross.

Kiss Print

Quinlan Wedge

Sampling Rihanna

Jasper Beck

Eternal Garden

Aleta Debolt

How deceitful it is

This vast expanse of emerald illusion

Reaching lushly across the earth, Strangely without bud or blossom.

How vacant it is

A great castle in the dampness

Fashioned out of Desolation’s soil, A home to the rotting and the silent.

How adorned it is

With its hearth of twisted irony

The pretentious blossoms of the living, Left to wither among the dead.

And it is peculiar

This garden of endless harvest

Sown with the decaying seeds of grief, Plentiful in the absence it creates.

shuttered dorm dark looseleaf and stapled paper strewn on carpet crumbs and desk where i stay up dead eyed clutching caffeine, watching halftime under my elbow, a sticky note says pump out 3 papers and a poem instead take a love song suck tinney macbook treble into garageband through a greasy ipad slow it down until her voice drops to a robot’s birth agonies drown it in process echo, chorus, reverb then slap a beat on it and ride out the vibe until 3 in the morning.

Fallen Tale

Elizabeth MacMurray

“I believe that Icarus was not failing as he fell, but Just coming to the end of his triumph.”

- Jack Gilbert

Icarus was first burned when the golden and red hues of the solar flares of the sun reached out and burned his finger tips.

The flames trailing down his arms to the wax covered feathers on his back. Incinerating them into the dust of the earth, engulfing all Icaurs had known. For a second there was no pain in having everything ripped from him as he watched out into the world

a purple and pink screen fell onto the earth. Until the moment he realized he was falling he looked back at the solar flares that had gotten him. The searing pain wandered to his mind Something never wished on a worse enemy

Icarus smiled for the first time. He smiled at the world that had destroyed him, he laughed for the world he was in. It was bound to get burned in the way he did. Engulfed in the golden and red hues of their beloved sun.

Comfort Food

Nolan Cramer

Two slices of bread from the freezer. Ice crystals burrowed like boll weevils in the brown bread’s pores.

Two slabs of giraffe cheese, yellow and white, melting like Dali clocks.

The butter’s musical sizzle, DJing on turntables of heat, Flip flopping like a flimsy politician.

First bite, divine. Last bite, sad because it’s gone. Governments and gods, never providing enough.

But I know where the freezer is, and there’s still planty of cheese.

Betta Fish

Emily Rosson

A Flicker of Good Luck

Sienna Painter

Winter 2023