SILHOUETTE LITERARY VOL. 41
AND
ART
MAGAZINE
SPRING 2017
SILHOUETTE LITERARY VOL. 41
AND
ART
MAGAZINE
SPRING 2017
Silhouette is a literary and arts publication focused on fostering and encouraging creative expression 344 Squires Student Center Blacksburg, Virginia 24061 www.silhouette.collegemedia.com
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Dear Readers, Welcome to our Spring 2017 edition of Silhouette Literary and Art Magazine! I am so excited that you decided to pick up a copy of our magazine. We have been working so hard on the magazine this past semester and hope that you enjoy this amazing compilation of beautiful art, moving prose and thoughtful poetry. Silhouette is striving to create a magazine that showcases some of the unique creative work that our students are doing throughout their time here at Virginia Tech. This magazine has meant so much to me and to our stafff and so we are glad that you picked up our labor of love. We cannot wait to grow and evolve with the students on this campus and are so honored to be able to publish so many amazing artists and writers. Thank you again for taking a peek at our magazine! Best, Layne Mandros Editor-in-Chief
LINES OF LIFE BY MICHAEL CRADDOCK
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THE SKY SOCIALIST BY KIRA JERSILD Here’s a thought; the clouds are all of ours in the sense that we deserve them the minute we open our eyes in the hospital room and see white light, whitest light compared to a dark embryo sack inside we see white—that belongs to us. It belonged to me and I knew behind even closed eyelids that I belonged in this world. Here’s a thought. The machine that keeps us alive ticking and trickling away in the corner of a tan beige room with white ceilings, it shoots salt water into my vein, I think, for us all— she has cancer and it has spread, and we are entitled to that life like the day that she saw light. Here’s more thoughts, the book I was forced to read over and over, Kira, read a book, Kira, why don’t you read like your sister, Kira, don’t you like school, I was forced, but what if I wasn’t even allowed. The clouds are mine are yours are ours are us are theirs. See white walls white ceilings white clouds white sky behind black eyelids and know it’s all mine.
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RAIN CHECK BY HH HSUEH
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“MY! PEOPLE COME AND GO SO QUICKLY HERE.” BY JILLIAN MOUTON Tonight the room is a deep berry ether technicolor pulsing yellow from the television. My dad is telling me that when the Wicked Witch of the West vanishes lightning quick into merry flames Hamilton’s face paint actually catches fire. A first-degree face-flambé. The corduroy couch etches grooves into my cheeks. He tells me that the first Tin Man nearly died from the inhalation of powdered aluminum. Ebsen awoke in the pitch to find himself curling up – fingers and toes and elbows and knees twisting into himself without asking himself like striped stockings under a Kansas cottage. My body is a sideways question mark on the couch my father’s upright as clock hands at midnight. When MGM cast a new Tin Man they used aluminum paste for the complexion which sealed off his pores and his tear ducts but left Haley’s lungs clean enough to scoff at the reporter: “Fun? Like hell it was fun.
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It was a lot of hard work. It was no fun at all. There was nothing funny about it.� I fall asleep with my contacts in and wake up with burning eyes to a sepia-soaked room. Dorothy is home.
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STILL FOR ME BY JASON HALL
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GASLIGHT BY LAURA WOLINSKY I had always been good at math. 2+2 had always equaled 4, until he told me it equaled 6. At first, I thought nothing of it. “He’s just looking out for me.” “He’s right, I was being a bitch.” “He’s helping me realize my true potential as a human being.” Everything ends, even illusions. Boys will be boys, abusers will abuse. Was it my fault? The question rolls through my head like dice in a casino. My odds of winning are slimmer here. He takes it all, and walks free. I had always been good at math, but he was better. While he added 2 and 2, I was his calculator. I said “4”. He said “6”. I said “no”. He said “liar”.
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THREE POEMS BY PAUL VERACKA Dynamics My friend and I lie on sand, eyes tracking clouds in deep azure sky. She remembers her home, and I hear it all in her vibrant key. She ruminates on images of her backyard where she rolled in the mud growing up. Her wonder is some cozy remedy. Her song— I listen to the leaves crack. I listen to her laughter’s echoes. Then she drifts away from fervent melodies and asks, how about you? I never heard the wind-washed leaves call for me. I had my music in my pocket. I played videogames growing up, I was satisfied with my TV. Disinterested in the things that my parents thought I would love. At the zoo, the panda—no I didn’t like that. Its movements were slow, otherworldly. The birds singing in my backyard—“do you hear that?” my mother would say. —“Hear what?” And the trees, cold and foreign. On a hike one day, I felt strangely harmed – I didn’t like the trees and the ways they made me feel. They took years and years and years to live and die, I knew. I wasn’t enthralled with sunsets, either. Grandiose lavas, overpowering.
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The ocean—a dynamic monster, an opera singer. It asked too much. Undulating, a linguistic mystery. Give me your soul, sit down, it seemed to demand. It forced my butt onto the sand. What was this burning I felt when I watched those waves reaching for me? We sit and don’t speak, engaging deeply in our coded conversation. In deep hold of each other, we walk out on the sand. The outdoors are a great place to sing, where the mountains fall away into the sea and the body feels the notes like grains. Brown, wet sand over my body, buried willingly. Buried in a soft tune.
Most beautiful I am here in the closing coffee shop thinking of the people of Earth. I see many confused people, the sight turning my lips blue. Lives. Divisions and rifts turning our eyes red and leaving us fighting in our groups. I think of the one true path at the end of life, the path to the one huge sea. The path down the black sand on a person’s final night, down to the water. At the magnificent, deep, deep ocean I gaze in and see the truly amazing people I have known.
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They walk the streets with people I never have known. I see the cities and countries where I have never known a-one. All peoples, spires, and bushes looking alike under the crystal surface. The sight tricks my eyes, I see a face I once loved. I hear a song that everyone in the wide world has heard. It’s like ringing bells and melodic life-affirming, fist-raising, music and color as one. That’s how I hear it. Other lives might hear it different. Beneath the waters, people are dancing in churning waves. Moving slowly to a faraway drum-beat? Or to a watery trumpet in a mariachi groove? Oh, I just don’t know… Oh how I wanna know what they hear. There’s a face, grinning amongst towers, banks, 7/11s, saloons, wedding chapels. Oh, I’m dipping my toes into the blackest water that’s ever lapped my skin. My arms are outstretched and I am lolling into a hazy warm water. My blood’s aching for the warmest tones of music which bleed out from beneath the warm water. “My country, ‘tis of thee sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing;” Hands by the waterside stretching out to all the lives I’ve never known. Reaching for the most beautiful face, but my arms can’t enter that place, and the barista tells me it’s time to leave.
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History Project Call me Mori, there’s more room to breathe that way. I refuse to keep my bones caged in some weird contortion. I won’t allow them to be pressurized and turned to dust by someone who hasn’t yet met my red, beating heart. My jagged elbows and spiny interior, the squashed letters of a name. The sharp letters of a name. A name calls me! It calls from deep within the Cambrian hollows, to inquire on my identity, asking how I side with the climate in the Middle East. What’s in a name? Look at my history before you shuck me, ask for my memories. Memories like hot gas, never solid but forever mine. Interrogate me on my memories. Ask about how my grandmother prepared her stews, my mother’s maiden name, or my father’s favorite band. A tough one: my brother’s Thursday night plans. Ask about his greatest memories from High School, or where he stashes his Ramen, how he feels about his Judaism. The history is preserved in a cool chamber Where I slow dance under electric neon lights With a picture of my brother and I kissing on Our curb as toddlers. I used to be embarrassed by the memory, and it’s just a testament to my character that it’s now gilded with fine cut
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gem as a perfect intimacy between my brother and me. Fog at my legs, I think of how he hated synagogue; he was struck by a deep fear of God that I too felt. I sat in the synagogue under emotional, transient purples, stained glass. I heard Hebrew as a challenge, read it as squiggles I couldn’t imagine writing. My sibling cried so much every Sunday morning he got out of going. I cried too, but not hard enough. I work and work so these memories can lift me and verify me when I find myself crowded in amongst others. I am in a culture I know nothing about. I am named Paul, and it’s my mom’s second cousin’s name. He was killed by gas in Germany. Boxed in, you still have a name. You are thrown into your own body, shamed and smeared, wiped away or shot down on your walk home. But you have a name, and from it you can never be severed.
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UNTITLED BY MASON PETERSON
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LOSING MYSELF BY LINDSEY MCCANN
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FOGGY TREE BY AUSTIN SCHERBARTH
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SPECIAL COLLECTIONS FOLDER FROM NOVEMBER 27, 1978 BY ALEC MASELLA
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[Start item 1: journal entry] 27 November 1978 The plan is to meet in Grand Central Station. Right in the middle where all of the travelers cross paths and brush up against one another. Some, too, are brushing up against me as I stand here waiting for Jeramie. He and I have five years to catch up on, and I want to see him. So I stand here in Grand Central Station with all these blurring people around me. And I’m staring. At some point I’ve become very interested in people besides myself. Every time somebody brushes up against me, I’m heavily influenced by them, and I want them to stay longer. When I met my hallmate, Elise, she said I had very beautiful eyes, and ever since then I’ve stayed closely by her side, wanting to know more about myself, what was beautiful and what was not. How girls bond. And perhaps that’s why I stare. I want to see more in others, and I want to use what Elise told me was pretty. I left D.C. earlier, around 6:45 this morning. So I’ve been tired for nearly five hours. The train ride was stagnant and lulling, and I was kept barely awake by Shirley Jackson. Reading her was more of a hallucination, as my body was numb and unmoving—my mind fixated on murder and flowers and devils probably. But it was more of a way to prepare myself for another New York City. I’ve only ever come once, when I was 16, and I saw Lady Liberty and the Empire State Building. They were high in the air, and for only $20 a ticket, my parents took me to the top of each. When I got off the train I was underground. I was beneath the city, and its low brackish air intoxicates me. Waiting for Jeramie is turning into a new experience sensorial. The
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echoes, scent, taste, and slipperiness all remind me of this time I swam in a hotel pool, warm and awash with chlorine. Where I would go under the water, not opening my eyes, and feel the water forced clean. Then flounder onto the abrasive concrete before slipping into a hot tub. The rapid increase in temperature would make me lightheaded, especially in the presence of other people, damp leaves of bulletin board paper, and cheap alcohol. And so this station gives me that same adolescent high, though I now have the freedom to relish in it more. Someone in a hurry had dropped all their change below the seat next to me on the train from D.C., but it must have been before I boarded. There were three nickels, a quarter, and two pennies. Each penny was turned over, but the two silver coins were heads-up. I didn’t take them because collecting them would have drawn unnecessary attention. Another girl my age was across the aisle, and I’d already seen her glimpse at me three times before I noticed somebody else’s change. But now that I think about it, it wasn’t anybody’s change. It was everybody’s change, I just chose not to take it for myself. I’ve become very interested in people besides myself. Today I feel as though the salt, chlorine, and ethyl alcohol from several years ago have finally hit my bloodstream, and I’ve lost the ability to remove myself from my surroundings. God, but this place vividly reminds me of that hotel, and its pool, and its hot tub. I was with friends who played the flute, clarinet, and trombone. And one night, after midnight, I left our room and went downstairs to the dark pool, closed in by concrete walls. There were three other people there with me, and nobody talked. But somehow there was an intimacy with being in the same body of water with them. When I was
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underwater, I could still hear the echoing splashes and bubbly submersions. There was a handsome man, maybe in his 40’s or 50’s; he was physically fit. Lounging in a white plastic chair to the side of the pool was an older lady. She may have been 65 or so, and she was drinking wine. And the third person was a girl my age. She looked exactly like the girl on the train. She looked awake, happy, and interested. Nobody in the pool chamber (that’s what it felt like) spoke, but the girl who resembled me laughed a few times, even underwater. Once I got used to the water, I swam in circular motions, leaving ribbons of turbulence around me and my and my new two-piece. I was making marks that lasted only a second. When I got out and found my way to the hot tub, I remember lowering myself in, sustaining eye contact with the man. I remember he was so handsome. He had a tattoo beneath his left collarbone, and it was a simple triangle. Or maybe an arrow turned down. The hair on his chest obscured it, but it was still legible. If legible is the right word. Thinking back, I wanted to touch his chest. I wanted a glass of that woman’s wine. And I wanted to speak with that girl. Even if for only a minute. Her lips were a pale pink like mine, her hair fair, and our skin tones were about the same tent, too. But I could do nothing. I felt like I could do nothing. I have been standing here for over two hours, and I know that Jeramie will not come retrieve me. But I am here now, and I am in a state of weightlessness. My mind feels cluttered with Jackson’s Mr. Harris, salt, wine, loose change, the sound of loose change, and that one girl. Things I will never fully understand. And God damn this station, I just want to walk. [End item 1: journal entry]
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[Start item 2: journal entry] 11/27/78 4:00 P.M. When I got here yesterday there were kids and dads all around the lake, about to do their swimming tests. Everyone has to pass the swimming test before they can participate in free swim every day at 7:00, about two hours after dinner. I passed, but I know several people who didn’t, which is embarrassing because the lifeguards make people do the tests in front of everybody. So I have that off my chest, and now I don’t have any obligations until Vespers. That’s at 9:00 tonight. So as for now I’ve found a pavilion to rest in. All the wood is green because of the bright leaves everywhere. It reminds me of the inside of a Chinese lantern, if a.) the paper were green, and b.) I could fit in one. But I imagine it’s the same. And there are surprisingly not many bugs around either. I’ve been to R. Mount. before and the humidity brought tons of mosquitoes, but since this is a fall session I don’t have to worry about the burdens of a hot Georgia summer. It hasn’t really hit me until now, but many of the people who are here right now are reserved. Not like the type of reserved where you sit inside and knit or read, but the type where you’ve taken years to construct a world around yourself. And you’re constantly at one with yourself and your surroundings. Never afraid to go off on your own. Which is what I’m doing right now I suppose, but when I go to the flag ceremonies and the bonfires I’ll shake out of it a bit. It’s not normally like this; we’re all a little more active. But since this is fall break it may be because we’re all just tired. Besides, Thanksgiving was just a few days ago. And my grandparents cooked the best turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie. I feel like I’m still full.
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At my grandparent’s house, I found a record called Sounds of Silence by Simon and Garfunkle, and I played it while I was alone on the scratchy rug in the living room. It was very pretty, but I can’t remember how it goes now. Anyways, that’s how I feel right now. And I’m sure people will open up as the week goes on, but until then I feel at fault for not being the one to start conversation. If you think about it, it takes A LOT to start a conversation—especially when you barely know the person you’re talking to. I’m new to my troop, so I hardly even talk to those boys. Besides, they talk about strange things like funk music parodies and vulgar images of women, like mothers and sisters. I like them well enough, but I have to find quieter spaces every so often. I need more sounds of silence. Our badge classes start in the morning. I signed up for Reptiles and Amphibians, Archery, Indian Lore, and Communications. Obviously, I’m the most nervous about Communications. Apparently, we have to give a long presentation at the end of the week, and I’m not really that smart about anything anybody here would like to hear about (but I’m sure I’m not the worst off). Actually I met a guy at the trading post after registration this morning. That was around 9:00, and now it’s around 4:00. The past seven hours have put me in a haze. It’s autumn, but it could be summer the way I feel bogged down. Not in a bad way either. It’s the sort of heat that makes me dizzy when I walk too much. It’s the sort of brightness that makes people’s faces look white and their eyes crystal blue. It’s hypnotized me almost. This guy’s name was Ray. I think he’s a little older, but we have the exact same sense of humor it seemed. I know this because (well, it sounds stupid) but we were in the post
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killing time and looking at handbooks. And on the Personal Fitness handbook there was a picture of two boys our age, and it was the cheesiest setup. They were tugging a piece of rope together, and they were smiling wide— had the whole “We’re doing this together!” thing going on. Ray turned to me with a sly smile and said “Hey that could be us” in a sarcastic tone. I laughed. After waiting in line we walked around the trading post porch for a few minutes, exchanging basic information. He’s from Athens, and he’s in the eleventh grade. Older than I thought. Most of what I know about him isn’t from what he said though. I remember him now from his dark curly hair, hard facial structure, and his eyes. The color of his eyes were somewhere between a green and a gray, with flecks of brown in them. When he looked into the sun they beamed. I couldn’t help but compare myself to him. He was much more developed it seemed. He even had face hair, or he would have if he hadn’t shaved recently. What’s funny is that he resembled one of the boys on the handbook. He looked like the one who was straining, with the muscles in his legs coming out under his shorts. But Ray was nowhere near as cheesy. He was serious, and I think that’s why I already feel comfortable around him. He’s like me. The next time I see him will be tonight at Vespers. From what I gathered, he’s religious. A golden chain hangs around his neck, and my best bet is that a golden cross hangs on his chest underneath his white t-shirt. He will be at Vespers. 11:00 P.M. I went to Vespers, and the campfire was enormous. From the top of the ampitheater I could still feel the heat from the fire pit as it was blazing up in the air—it really could
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not have been ignored. And yet the service carried on. I only remember things about wilderness and family and making our own paths and respecting the paths of others. But the entire time I was drawn into the reflection of the fire on the lake. It was a storm in the middle of the black water. The way it clashed with the moon’s white light made something of a golden eye right behind the grass platform where the service took place. So naturally I went, and I just got back from the water. We had dinner, then we went to Vespers, then we went to bed. Wide awake I left the campsite to go to the water, when the air was much cooler and the lake was unoccupied. Its surface was still, cold, and thin. When I began walking into it, I felt the chilly water rise up by torso bit by bit—up to my bellybutton, and then my nipples, and finally my neck. At that point my feet were barely planted in the sand below. I moved my arms around and watched the blackness swarm me. But as I swam out the only light came from the moon and the vast amount of white stars, under which I sank below and moved back to shore. Ray read the final prayer at Vespers. [End item 2: journal entry] [Start item 3: newspaper clipping] MOSCONE, MILK SLAIN-DAN WHITE IS HELD San Francisco Chronicle Mayor Was Hit 4 Times [End item 3: newspaper clipping]
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A W O R L D / A S TA G E B Y J O H N B AT T I S TO N
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CRAFTSMAN BY SHAWN DE LOPEZ
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I PASSED A MAN BY STEPHEN MOXLEY I passed a man I noticed him because of the leather jacket he was wearing that’s just like my leather jacket that I’m wearing and I kept making right turns so I wouldn’t have to cross the street and I noticed the vapour the smoke coming out of his mouth just like the vapour the smoke coming out of my mouth I passed a man I noticed him because of his eyes the way they stared at nothing and everything and the way his head seemed to be cracking under the weight of everything it imagined and I kept making right turns so I wouldn’t have to cross the street and I noticed the steam
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the vapour the smoke billowing from the buildings their rooftops creating pillars of this cloud substance rising all around like skyscrapers I passed a man I noticed him because of the way his arms remained pressed against his body like he is trying to keep himself from exploding from letting every part of him spill onto the pavement and I kept making right turns so I wouldn’t have to cross the street and I noticed the exhaust the steam the vapour the smoke ejected from the rear ends of cars and thrown vertically from trucks just like the buildings and just like the people I passed a man I noticed him because of the way he kept spitting into the street as if he was trying to rid his lips of some foul taste of
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some foul words and I kept making right turns so I wouldn’t have to cross the street and I noticed the fog the exhaust the steam the vapour the smoke hanging low in the field as if it had no better place to be and it obstructed my vision it filled my lungs and I walked into it to become of the substance that was so indecipherable I passed a man I noticed him because he was me and he kept making left turns so he wouldn’t have to cross the street and he looked at me he looked into me and I kept making right turns so I wouldn’t have to cross the street
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I N T E R P R E TAT I O N S O F V I B R AT I O N S BY PETER VALPONE VOL. 41
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PACKAGING P O TATO E S B Y K AT H E R I N E FA I R B A N K S
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FIVE POEMS BY ANDREW KULAK An ontology of spring in a coffeeshop window out from a misty fog overcoats and umbrellas coalesce into faceless apparitions vague blurs across a camera lens erased smudges of a careless line they linger for a moment then together disperse into soft folds of falling rain
The people here weren’t born The people here weren’t born, they froze out of cold wind whipping off great lakes like pillars of salt with nothing to do but chew gum and look out darkened windows at headlights shooting down the bypass, so they squinted to make them their stars. Here we trudged through frost-crunchy brambles in dusky woods deep purple-black like bruises, places where silver ghosts hung over huddled heads in winters when no one could buy whisky. The boys took to smoking cigarettes before they took to talking and burned piecing holes orange like prayers shouted for wristwatches they couldn’t read, tripping and falling over bootlaces, begging for salvation from a history written in their bodies. 44 SILHOUETTE
What would you do if you just spent your last nickel for a street-corner shoeshine but the only thing strapped to your feet is a bundle of duct tape and rags held together with nothing but the sweat of your grandfather’s brow oilstained even still in death when you stood over his open coffin and held out your hands like your father told you to do because your tiny palms turned upward to heaven ---that was peace? You genuflect before anything you find that’s somehow more whole than you are now. Feel dirt and grass and warm blood pool around your knees. Clench your fists and grit your teeth like so many dull blades and know that no matter what, something’s coming for you quick and true but softly like a doe weaving between trees at sunrise. If I could go back, I would tell you that nothing gets better, but when the wind blows snow like sand and shards of bone that cut to a place in your chest that you remember once held a stubbornly beating heart: know that no one made you any promises.
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When someone asks about where I grew up I. The summers were hot and humid, and our clothes hung from our sunburned bodies. We ran outside to throw rocks at the sky and see where they would land. They streaked between branches, little scythes chewing through leaves and landing in the next yard. Sunlight poured through red-orange where our young hands left fresh wounds. II. Your dress was the color of the city when the streetlights blinked on. We snuck through the yards and smoked Marlboro lights on a footbridge over a dry creekbed. What do you think we’d all be doing in ten years? That was the last thing I remember you saying to me then. I didn’t say much, but watched the pink tinged horizon while we sobered up in waning twilight. III. Who would write an elegy for the cookie cutter eyesores, the strip malls spreading like fungus, the unrelenting streets and schools named for the trees they replaced? Who would give any thought to these places? Who would lament a grassy lot, or some old park? IV. This afternoon, a thunderstorm rolled in out of nowhere. I turned off the old box fan, lit some candles, and listened helpless to the rain fall in thick sheets. I left the window cracked and smelled the ozone and the loamy smell of the warm, wet earth, grasping at the vague outline of some retreating memory.
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Toward a theology of the everyday I’ve been waking earlier lately to grind the small handful of roasted beans, rinse out of habit two red mugs and boil the water gently, mindful of the predawn stillness. The house is empty, dull and dark, where without need of some shrine or even spoken word, I pray meaning into senseless bruiseblue silence.
Requiem for my next-door neighbor There’s an image still left in my mind. It’s the three of us in the bed of that old truck with our beat-up blue plastic cooler full of gas station ice and Coors Banquets. It never quite felt like summer until that cooler came out and our clothes and hair smelled like charcoal smoke. Were buzzed now waiting for the fireworks to start, but looking back I guess you had been waiting for something else. I haven’t seen you in a while and don’t have much reason to believe we’ll meet again, but I think I might understand.
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MY DOUBLE MY BROTHER BY TOBIN WEISEMAN
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FUTBOL NELLA PIAZZA B Y J O H N B AT T I S TO N
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THE MASTERPIECE BY ALISON MILLER The painting that once hung in our foyer now hangs in a gallery; it is called The Ways We Learn to Say Goodbye but when you first painted it you named it after me. You changed its name the same way you changed what we had together; first you called it love, but when you tired of it you called it nothing at all. The best actors provide us with a sense of when their characters will change and so I knew when you began – you have always been an artist in every sense of the word. When you first kissed me you would not address me directly; you smiled coyly and said nothing, and three days later showed me a painting. You named it after me and I thought it was a romantic gesture. Now I know that it was only so you could remember my name. I watched an interview with you, the other day, on late night television and you looked so good. You look so good. In the interview you talked about a lot of things, like what makes you happy – does painting make you happy? It never seemed to – and you talked about the painting. I want to remember everything you said in the interview. I wasn’t focused on the bags purpling under your eyes, the artful taste of your five-o-clock shadow, the way you haven’t really changed at all, outside.
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These are the things you would have wanted me to remember, but I cared more to hear what you had to say. Were we always that way? An artist and a writer, to the core. When the interviewer asked you how you named the painting, you didn’t break character as you lied. If I were there, this is what I would tell the interviewer: You named that painting after me because the love affair of a starving artist with their muse is the cornerstone of a masterpiece. You loved me for as long as you needed me and not a minute more, but I am still immortalized in the flecks of color on canvas that drew you into the spotlight. You will never be able to escape me, because you made me a part of you – you wanted a muse. Right now, you are probably rewriting your origin story and writing me out of it but I am standing in a gallery looking at the painting that used to bear my name, and in this world there will always be exactly two people that know the truth. I am one of those people. This is what you didn’t tell the interviewer: The painting has been renamed The Ways We Learn to Say Goodbye, and it is not because you learned to say goodbye, but because I said goodbye to you.
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SMOKE BY JUN YU
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FINDING THE LIGHT BY AUSTIN SCHERBARTH
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FALL’S CROWN BY TOBIN WEISEMAN VOL. 41
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THREE MORNING POEMS BY KAITLYN BRITT I am a Greek Tragedy I am a Greek tragedy painted on a vase. Dark clay stroked black and white, emphasizing contours, a woman racing; right, far from a memory, always a step behind. In painting I am a black and white goddess leaving a trail of life in my wake like Persephone, guardian of the spring ironic prisoner of her escape. Ever since I knew I could run away to a better affection, to blatant honesty, to being anything except a protagonist afraid of flying, I ran faster, dropping memories: seeds. Nature could decide away decisions; will the memories blossom or will white ravens feast? The raven will fly before it fights, leaving the road behind in another time where it can perch a world away pitting seeds for pulp with memories.
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When the vase is turned a raven is painted in white wisps as though a memory to seek beyond what secrets were buried beneath its feet it walks through the blossoms searching for seeds. Each step forward is a step back around Raven to woman, woman to raven, seeds to blossom, seeds to beak, seeds to brain. Only as a critic can the vicious cycle cease, where from the distance I can see a raven waiting in the branches for the woman in the painting to leave.
Ragweed Morning Last night I drifted like a sine wave between R.E.M. and half awake at intervals of pi expressed by the level of the sun on the horizon. This ragweed morning, honey with a mug of Irish tea will soothe the bite of a plant I have never seen. When I was sick as a child, my mother told me that the sun killed germs with radiation. She hung our rugs, my washed bedspread, sheets, and towels over the angular porch rail
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to dry like functions of the breeze, which lifted sickness from the fabric. I begged my mother to slide her slender fingers into my mouth and spread my jaws so that I could feel the sun in my throat. I wanted to swallow light like medicine that absolved me from sick days and runny noses. My mother said, “Did you take your vitamins? Did you swallow the cough syrup?� This morning, I will cut my cantaloupe into hyperbola segments, setting each piece next to the cough syrup cup. While I wait for white steam to whistle from the tea kettle, I chase the feel of an ellipsoid pill, and the taste of dark cherry medicine out of my palate with enough orange juice that I could be swallowing light in waves of vitamin c.
A Walk with Aeolus in the Ardennes A French horn blows from a train carrying French cargo,
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in layers of beautiful fabric. Condensation grows on my window, I open it to watch the train pass. Wind blows through me like a lover who holds on to every kiss. He tells me to dance with him. Dew solidifies to frost on leaves of grass, clouds tint grey in the nearing dawn. I run to catch the train’s music, weaving through the pine trees leaping like Anna Pavlova. Flurries rain down to join me. The wind begins to howl with the horn and sing poetry to me, he remembers Coleridge, Keats, Byron matching the gurgle of the stream, a nightingale singing his sweet melody, the swaying daffodils of the summer, so beautiful I can almost forget the cold that seeps, like fire, up through my fingers, down into my bones. The horn grows softer as the sun begins to peak through the trees. The howl becomes a kiss of whistle again. My feet are numb on the blades of grass and pine needles. The chill of frost seeps up my arms, my legs, leaving the finger prints of winter permanently pressed into my skin.
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I pull bark from a fir tree and lie on the ground kissing every inch as a love note so that the wind can feel my touch from my light oily wisps of red lip stick, ink soaking into the sinewy wooden skin. I offer this small token of my affection to my favorite lover as he leaves me on the shore of a lake, water blue green and reflective under the new light. First frost of winter grows on blue flowers at the edge of the forest in fractals penetrating the soft sapphire skin. I break the delicate frozen stems and weave them behind my ears. This dawn I will skinny dip with the sun black finger tipped and blue lipped only scratching the surface of life.
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CAVA L I E R B Y M I A WAT S O N
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PUSH AND PULL BY PRANAY SHAH
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VENICE BY BRYANNA DERING
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TEA TIME BY AMANDA WALL ACE To hear the Cheers and chips, Chipped glasses Chiming together, Swallows of Tea and Unspoken thoughts, How easy it is To forget that Life Can sometimes Be quiet.
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PIAZZA SAN MARCO BRYANNA DERING
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MEET THE S TA F F Layne Mandros Editor-in-Chief
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