This is a zine

LIONHEART THIS IS A ZINE MADE BY A BUNCH OF TEENS FROM BROOKLYN,NY

IN THIS ISSUE:

MUSIC: KEATON HENSON

TRAVEL: INDIA

ART: HANNAH MARSHALL

INTERVIEW: ALEX INCIARDI

FOOD: CORN

THIS IS KEATON HENSON: Keaton Henson is a BriBsh folk rock musican who just wrote a beauBful album called "Birthdays", which is bascially all about one breakup.

Each song is a new love story that makes you want to cry every single Bme you listen to it.

He doesn't do many interviews, and if he does, they arent in tnterview form. He answers each quesBon by drawing a picture that coresponds to the quesBon.

He also writes beauBful poetry. Here is one of my favorites: Grow up with me.

Let's run in fields and fear the dark together.

Fall of swings, and burn special things, and both play outside in bad weather.

Let's eat badly.

Let's watch adults drink wine and laugh at their idiocy.

Let's sit in the back of the car, making eye contact with strangers driving past, making them uncomfortable.

Not caring.

Not swearing.

Don't fuck.

Let's both reclaim our superpowers; the ones we all have and lose with our milk teeth.

The ability not to fear social awkwardness.

To panic when locked in the cellar; sBll sure there's something down there.

And while picking from pillows each feather, let's both stay away from the edge of the bed, forcing us closer together.

Let's sit in public, with ice cream all over both our faces; sBcking our tongues out at passers by.

Let's cry.

Let's swim.

Let's everything.

Let's not find it funny lest someone falls over.

Classical music is boring.

Poetry baffles us both; there's nothing that's said is what's meant.

Plays are long, Bresom, sullend, and filled; with hours that could be spent rolling down hills, and grazing our knees on cement.

Let's hear stories and both lose our inocence.

Learn about parents and forgiveness, death and morality, kindness and art, thus losing both of our innocent hearts, but at least we won't do it apart.

Grow up with me.

THIS IS A PERSONAL ESSAY: Who sees you?

I believe that you can see someone in two different ways: physically and mentally. These two different ways can be split up into two more: people can see, with their eyes, like the way I can see a woman at the post office or the way I see my sister in the morning. Then you can also see someone mentally, understand who they really are, or what they are going through; see a person’s true self.

So I am much too lazy to explain all of the different ways to be seen in real words (alas I just spent 20 minutes on this thing), so here is a flowchart I just created to ease your way through this essay!

So we begin at the quesBon: Who sees you?

Who does see me!? I guess the person reading this essay at the moment can now .

This is my face reader, and here you can see me physically.

When you look at this you see my emoBonless face, but can you see my story?

It is 10:49 PM on May 7th, and I am currently looking at my mother. Let me describe her to you at the moment: she is wearing a black sweatshirt and jeans. She is sikng on the couch in the living room of my house. She has a black eye, and the lel side of her face is all puffed out and red. Her chin looks like it has rope burn all over it.

You have no idea why she is like that, and you might be jumping to conclusions. This is what it is when you see someone physically, but don’t see them mentally, and make up stories. It happens to everyone.Thousands of different things could have happened to her, but why do you chose that one? Why is that one in your mind standing out? I don’t know.

In reality she tripped on a curb onto her face, and now she looks like she was beaten or hit by a truck. But she wasn’t!

She just fell! I see her face and I see her story when I look at her. She is my mother, and this moment I can see her mentally.

Lets look at the chart again.

The one bubble that seems to gather a lot of amenBon is the “thinking you understand someone when you really don’t”. A situaBon like this may be like when you see a girl (or guy) with cuts on their arms. Last year, every morning I would walk to school with Maddy and see a girl. We saw her so olen that we named her “Amelia”, even though we had no idea what her actual name was. She changed so much last year. Crazy hair colors, words wrimen over her chest saying “not good enough”, ripped school uniforms etc. Towards the end of the school year I started to noBce her arms. We saw marks and cuts on both of her wrists out on display. If someone is going through so much pain, that you can’t feel, how can you try to feel it? How can you see her, and understand her? I started to feel the pain when I didn’t see her in the morning anymore. I jumped to conclusions, and my mind made up stories. We saw what she was going through, but we couldn’t see what she was thinking.

Reader, please look back at the picture of me. When you look at my face can you accept me? Do you understand me, and my ideas? Now let me just tell you a story of my own.

It was the last night of the India program and we were all in a small hotel. Rey, the world leadership women had just told me that she wanted to show me something that she does every night.

“Okay so now take one to five ”, she said, as she gestured to the limle cards in her lel hand. I sat next to her on the floor. Next to us was a large wooden bed, holding Ms. Fogarty, Emma Bessire, and Michelle. I took 3 out of the box, and read them aloud to her: “WISDOM, JOY, and, ACCEPTANCE”. I wrote them down in my limle journal [diary] Btled “Confessions of a Teenage Mental Case”. The words are in a 3D font, and have limle drawings of pills and flowers scamered around. I drew each card that Rey had given me, and examine the limle angels on each one. All three of them were different, Wisdom had an angel with a light coming from it, Joy had mulBple angels singing with tons of hearts floaBng around, and finally we saw an acceptance ange,l looking at a door that had the word “welcome” above it. For the next 10 minutes I asked Ms. Fogarty, Emma Bessire, Michelle, and Rey, what these words meant to them, and here are some of their responses: “Wisdom, when you respond to a situaBon that you hadn’t responded like before”.

“Joy: A spontaneous smile”. These answers were everyone’s decision, a group choice. Once we came to “acceptance”, Ms. Fogarty, Michelle, and Emma Bessire, weren’t really paying amenBon anymore. I asked Rey what she thought, and she kept quiet for a second. She turned to me, and really looked at me. She said acceptance was “seeing someone as a complete being”, and aler a few seconds of silence she looked at me again and said “and loving them”. At that exact second, that’s when I realized she accepted me, and saw me, as an actual person.

She accepted me as being Anastasia Inciardi, a listener, who likes art and music. The girl who dyes her hair red and has a curved spine. She accepted that I had to take 3 ADHD pills in the morning and can do 8 chin ups without anyones help.

By the Bme of the end of the trip we had grown close to each other, and to know that she saw me as a complete person meant so much to me.I think that since she has seen so much, traveled to so many places, and met so many different people,she had the ability to really understand me. I honestly don’t think that even my best friend truly understands me, or really sees me the way she did.

We all strive to be in the “truly understanding someone” heart on my chart, but this is extremely hard to do. I don’t really think I truly understand one person in parBcular. I think that we’re all in this long process of seeing people and collecBng knowledge. Somewhere along the way we find someone that is similar to ourselves and see themt

THIS IS HANNAH MARSHALL: Hannah Marshall is a photographer and fashion designer. She has a tumblr which is her black and white diary. She is dating the leading lady in the band The xx, Romy Madley Croft.

These are her photos: