Paperfinger
May 2014
The City Issue
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Paperfinger
May 2014
The City Issue
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Get Featured! Think you’ve got what it takes? We’re always looking for more artists to feature and more writers. Email us at jessicafrickdesigns@gmail.com to submit your poem, short story or to tell us about an artist you think deserves to be featured. Like us on facebook and follow us on twitter for updates and to be alerted the first friday of every month so you don’t miss an issue! Looking for advertising space? Email us at jessicafrickdesigns@gmail.com for pricing information.
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26 Poetry 10 Feature Stephanie Erdman
Feature
Megan Kovak
28 Audrey Bernhardt Kristiane Weeks by Kristiane Weeks
30 34 Lois Goh Short 20 Creative Michelle Clark 36Writing stories
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22 Vanished by Kristiane Weeks Chasing Storms
Stephanie Erdman
24 Poetry
26 Stephanie Erdman 34 Kristiane Weeks 36 Samantha Hunberger
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FEATURE
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Written by Kristiane Weeks
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Written by Kristiane Weeks
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o far, our range of featured artists has incorporated many perspectives on reality and the world we live in. However, Audrey Bernhardt does more than this, especially in her mandala collection. Her work portrays an aspect of nature that people in congested lifestyles don’t see: a medium connecting the natural world around us to “what’s within” as Audrey describes it. If you’ve been lucky enough to experience deserts of the United States,
you’ve experienced a sense of nature at one of its most unadulterated, pure forms. There are no words to describe the full sensation of coexisting with nature. Audrey brings the sensations of the infinite universe to the South. Audrey seems to have a clear grasp of the connections we share with the living world. Growing up in Jonathan Dickinson State Park near Hobe Sound, Florida, Audrey has obtained an eye and sensitivity to the pastoral. She noted how she “was always very interested and
inspired by nature” and has grown up with nature and art since she “could hold a pencil, seeking out any way to lean and study more about art any way I could.” The concept of mandala itself is very in-tune with nature and the inner self— originating from ancient India, the term was the title of a collection of mantras and hymns that formed the universe, the sacred sounds contained genetic patterns of beings and objects. Mandala derives from the root 13
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“manda,” which means essence and the suffix “la” means “container.” As an image, a mandala may symbolize both the mind and the body, and even Audrey’s process of creating art involves this. Now, Audrey admits she’s inspired by “Surrealistic work and work centered around geometry and sacred geometry” but she uses these as tools for a deeper purpose: “My mandala series has been inspired by my interest and study in art therapy and the use of mandalas as a therapeutic form of meditation.”
real and natural about Audrey’s more organic pieces is the essence and unity created in the pieces.
All of her work displays a particle of the universe and the ways connections are made, whether it’s her photography, sketches, or paintings. She’s delved in all mediums, and even does commission murals, a job which for Audrey has been “a really eye opening experience in how to communicate about visuals and portray the visions of those that have hired me.” View samples of all of her gorgeous creations at www.audreymae.us I know what you’re and if you’re in Northeast thinking, where is the Florida, check out a new nature in these pieces? collection on display Beyond the gorgeous for three months at 57 forms and lines that Treasury beginning in July weave through each other, in St. Augustine! creating a sensation of unity and wholeness is the natural geographic forms and the essence of reality. These pieces speak to the fundamentals Audrey encountered as an artist. Her journey through art began with “mostly realistic drawing, especially portraits. I didn’t venture into the world of color and paint until I was eighteen and started exploring more imaginative and abstract form of creating.” What’s 19
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Vanished Kristiane Weeks
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ne minute I’m sitting on the veranda, in my favorite rocking chair, watching the rather large wasp try again and again to go through the screen instead of using the door it probably came in through, the screen on that door has never been attached correctly, wasps and water beetles find the way in so easily, the next minute, Emily has collapsed. Well, first, Emily is falling backward, a warped piece of plywood, restricted, without arms to catch itself, it’s falling flat to the ground, and that’s what Emily is doing, eyes and mouth wide, voice saying nothing, then she’s lying flat on the veranda, looking up into the cosmos, seeing things none of us are seeing. It’s haunting how things got this way, five girls, none of them bring Emily to reality. She doesn’t recognize worried looks, dangling hair, her own mixing with pollen and dirt blown in by westerly Florida winds. “Can you sit up?” Sit? Up? No. I find Holly, and she’s at her phone, debating to call the police. There’s primitive fear in her eyes. Wasn’t it her idea to give Emily what she wanted? I feel vanished. No one is calling the police to this house. They say it doesn’t take more than five minutes to get back to ground. Once the sizzling and the face-numbing have stopped, it’s like being dropped back into the here and now. Only after these points on the map have been established does the world find you again. 23
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Soon, I will be twenty-two Originally published in The Bell Tower, 2004 Romance over lines, voices fade, interest lost and telephones like stair-steps to nowhere, when stars stare while wind slides the straps of my tank top over rounded shoulders to keep secrets while the city slides away to left and right in tentacles of fireworks all the passengers know there is an engine somewhere, pulls a smooth 100, there is an engine somewhere pumping blood through the city like people press together hum of unison breath wetted to shout, to cry, to dash between cars and rake between brick fingers into the night sky, Chicago is alive below Chicago, too, where our world pressed shoulder to shoulder in echoes down where the only breeze made by the city: raised hands sung hymns and hymns sound like shouts and murmurs of men when the city lifts its eyes to vaulted tiles to know what it’s like to smell lakeshore and hot asphalt on the same breath. 27
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A Dollhouse (after Ibsen) Originally published in The Bell Tower, 2004 a lemon twist. Off switches swatting flies buzzing neon ever-light. Moon-scented matchstick stove singing ramen noodle soup. Paste-poor poetry when someone lies. My brilliant starlings and zenith pomegranates— “Despite carefulness out-of-season fireflies only sleep.” —into the nautilus shell with broken pencil pinstriped spilled desperation tea. There is always sex and always cigarettes. There is always swearing and mine mysteries pillowcases pressed close. Dark rusted rooms in cubicle maps. 29
Remember golden eye over the city, small, resounding of church bells echoes; river dividing the world northbound& the desperate flavor of gunmetal when I said, “I need to be swallowed by a city with a stomach. I want sour layers of people pressed close, unspeaking.” Art burns in the 24-hour paths of sirens to be suffocated by skyscrapers to be stolen by the tracks of trains— we might have talked of cornfields wistfully to remember sun on the lake fondly nomads in words only. I buy flowers for my own funeral hands around my wrist, the humid smell of mown hay. Stirred earth paved over in rural highways, dark, my eyes headlights— I stammer like rumble strips as I remember extended hands. 30
Driving Home in the Dark, Cheating the Speed Limit I regard this gypsy curse laid deep on me like this sad season regarding the disapproval of the traffic lights (their lidded and uninterested gaze) the words that are inherent in this far-cry city dark intent I suppose Frank O’Hara would throw a fig against the judgment of that golden eye high above this self- same self-made uninspected place unknowing what it knows and uncaring the night we mixed whiskey sours with good scotch in old bottles (lacking glasses) how that girl slanted her gaze at my lit cigarette her thick hair and copper cynicism how her mouth unexpectedly tasted sticky and reminded me of well bourbon over ice when she sighed don’t ask me to leave this impossible thing herculean don’t tell me about what I cannot have 31
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[Potential Energy] There are cities inside me made of sounds; words or music settled deep in sunset furniture. Sounds only I can hear at night or when it’s too quiet to think clearly the paths cut by roots of sound growing deep leafing out to find water when my face isn’t just my face. When my voice is
before singing, a horsehair bow rosin and wet skin, coiled strings or wetted brass. There beneath me and waiting to begin again. apologetic but my resolve before we said goodbye (Who am I?) and the walk home drinking from the bottle it was good scotch reached furtively from my bag uncaring who saw regarding lazily this monument built to science the building of things over ruin I would talk about the moon but to what end?
the strange whisper of migratory starlings in gray morning and the potential laid in the seated coils I can trace with my fingertips isn’t my pulse. The thrumming of what could be poetry (but probably isn’t). When I am prostrated and paralyzed by the sounds that present what I could should might be doing instead and the languorous depths, where space was once, now turbulent wailing potential sound the breath 33
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Kristiane Weeks
There’s nothing like a good poem about a good old “Fuck you” so, Fuck you and fuck every time I kept myself from unraveling there, I finally made it solid matter nothing is like unraveling skin, intestines, blue veins turn to octopi, roots faces all of my worried faces transform eyes koi hummingbirds and hands only shells bones coagulate keep me in now 35
Samantha Hunsberger 36
Homecoming I’m sorry dear, but lately I can’t fight this insatiable need to use my hands for something to do something anything at all, really like reach into the back of my mind & remember what it was like to hold you before we became strangers before we became two people chasing shadows of what our lives used to be like before. before. before. 37
Snapped I’ve seen pictures that I wasn’t supposed to see taken near the edge of a burning poppy field men dressed in white jaws hanging open bullet holes exiting the left or right sides of their heads brown skin blendingin with the ground and you kneeling down next to them like it’s the first day of shotgun season and you just bagged a ten pointer but it’s not even November and this is not like the stuff they show in the movies this looks real maybe because it is or maybe because you’re real to me 38
even though this isn’t you in some sense this is another universe and we don’t even know each other and I don’t even have to love the man in this picture but I do need to ask what was said before this was taken Just one more, I wasn’t smiling in that last one?
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Thank you to all our incredible writers! Think you’ve got what it takes to write something for us? Submit your stories and poetry to jessicafrickdesigns@gmail
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