Sink Hollow Issue 15

Letter from the Editor

As I write this letter, I am reminded of the seemingly eternal winter we have endured here in Logan, Utah. For nearly six months, storm clouds obscured the sun, heavy, wet snow accumulated, and the temperatures plummeted well below-freezing. During these dark, isolating months, I often found myself questioning who I am and what my future holds. But as we compiled our spring issue of Sink Hollow, I took comfort in how our submitters were grappling with these same questions.

Issue XV’s featured writers and artists have confronted the complexities of the human experience with exceptional courage, compassion, and hard work. Through words and images, some have tackled questions of identity, grief, fear, wonder, and introspection—while others simply observe how their thoughts shatter onto the page.

I now invite you to experience the perspectives offered by each of these literary and visual artists. As you turn this issue’s pages, I hope you feel the warm sun now shining overhead and see the buds growing on the trees because with each word, photograph, and stroke of the paintbrush, these pieces bring insights into the warmth of spring.

Jay Paine Editor in Chief

Ribs

Geneva Laur

Ribs

Geneva Laur

Letter from the Editor

9.

10.

2. 8. 7. 6. 3. 11.

12. 13.

14.

Do you think the sun has Favorites?

Reece Ludwig

Cerulean Eventualities

Alexa Scotto

CharredandChet

Alexa Scotto

I-20

Aldona Casey

Waiting_the_Void

Geneva Laur

We used to split walnuts and walk to the library

Amber Buckles

Dear_Lover_Let_Us_Do_it_Again

Osho Jeremiah

Portrait_of_Mother_as_a_Bird

Osho Jeremiah

Hokkaido Trench

Avery Mckinnon

Falling_in_Love_Like_Falling_Snow

Katherine Terrell

lightatmo__17

Aldona Casey

Cluttered_Thoughts

Katherine Terrell

Spinning_Out_of_Control

Katherine Terrell

Bukowski on Speed

Brendan Rowland

Target

Geneva Laur

Good Morning

Alicia Charron

untitled_1

Geneva Laur

Bios

1-4

Staff 29. self_portraiture

Do you think the sun has Favorites?

Reece Ludwig

I think she does and I can’t tell if I am one of them

Maybe she picks the people who make Her seem to shine brighter Freckles blossoming on their faces Hidden colors lighting up in their eyes

I have freckles too And sometimes slightly yellow eyes She knows how to make me beautiful Make everyone look to her in thanks

But that doesn’t hide the lines across my back And the flakes falling off my arms

Every day without fail I wait to burn I wait for her to decide if I am worth the attention

I don’t know why she chooses to scorch my skin

But that doesn’t change the fact that I kind of like The way the water beads after I put on sunscreen

I want to call it love

The way she shines on me Strong and unwavering

But my skin is hot And my stomach feels sick

Cerulean Eventualities

Alexa Scotto

I-20

Aldona Casey

Alexa Scotto

We used to split walnuts and walk to the library

Amber Buckles

Besitos, besitos, one for each cheek Greeting her two sons and four nietas, Nana collected cartoons on blank VCRs, ham and cheese sandwiches by the pool

Turquoise glimmer, little stone fishes splash the cool water, the peak of summer The little girls dive to retrieve the fish, plus a broken fin to be buried in the garden. My Dad wanted to have sons while Nana dreamed of granddaughters.

I like to imagine a tiny hand reaching for mine without the burden of any expectations. Not every pinecone will stem roots; losing scales under the shade of the looming vessels that procured them Indistinguishable generations

Imagine if every father’s daughter decided if he could enter into heaven?

“Whisper to me,” God would say, The fruit of the womb a reward

Gold plated rose petals scattered

I swing my hips in the kitchen Red nail polish, fresh afternoon fruit Twirling her best sevillana dress,

pondering the aquamarine house on Juarez Street in Tucson, Arizona, and the planted Christmas trees neighboring the Saguaro in the yard.

I shop for saffron and softest bread, grease the cast iron skillet and blast the punchiest guitars on Spotify “Besitos, besitos, Nana,” together we dance. Previous Page

Geneva Laur

Portrait_of_Mother_as_a_Bird

Osho Jeremiah

Hokkaido Trench

Avery Mckinnon

I had crossed the bridge with the red railings and mounted the crest past the eggs in rusty cages when I found Mr. Koyanagi staring out at the lake.

He stood in the middle of the empty road, jean cuffs rolled and scuffed, a piece of grain drooping from his pursed lips. The clouds were a blanket of snow over the small, white sun and the whistling breeze of early May swept up dust from the unpainted pavement. I walked up to him, craning my neck to meet his gaze like a serpent around a branch when I noticed that it hadn’t been a strand of grain in his mouth, but a golden ribbon, flapping and fraying in the wind. His eyes remained fixed on a spot smooth as stone in the water ahead. I thought he might’ve seen a water snake, but I was wrong, and there was nothing there. I jimmied the watch on my wrist. 5:03. Home being another 25 minutes up the road, I’d already be late.

“Hello, Mr. Koyanagi,” I said, without reply. “I missed Sozen at school. Is he well?”

His spotted face was well-worn for 47, and expressionless. I began to wonder at what age you usually started to go deaf.

“I hope he’s well,” I continued. “There’s a new issue of The Fireman out and I’d hoped to borrow it from him once he’s finished with it. Has he mentioned picking it up yet?”

I watched the haze in his dark eyes blur and pulse like a kaleidoscope. His lips trembled in a wordless mumble. I leaned in to hear him.

“Pardon me, sir. I didn’t understand.”

Like a bucket hoisted from a well, the man coiled the golden ribbon up into his mouth. He chewed it like a wad of sticky cake left out to moisten and swallowed in a whale’s great gulp. I blinked.

“Mr. Koyanagi?”

The man gagged on the threads, sun beaten face going green as the plastic fibers slithered down his throat. He pounded his chest with a gloved fist, tears pricking his eyes, and I’d thought for half a moment that he may up it onto the road. The half moment turned to a quarter moment, and the quarter soon passed. I imagined the wad of ribbon hitting the acid in his stomach like hunks of itching ice to a burning lake.

Mr. Koyanagi straightened up and, without second thought to myself or the enchanted lake he had entranced himself with, stuffed his hands in loose pockets and made off over the bounds of the road and into the gravelly marshes that gave way to the forest beyond. OOO

OOO OOO

Dinner was hot on the table when I got home, though my grandmother insisted I had been so late it might as well have been cold. She arranged the table the way she wanted to, chopsticks on the inside of the spoon rather than the outside, rice to the right of her radish soup rather than the left, and side dishes all gathered on her side of the table.

I have shorter arms than the two of you, surely you won’t mind the reach, she’d say. When my grandfather would respond in comment about how her short arms couldn’t explain her contrarian choices in table setting, she’d shake her head, call him a fool, and urge me not to take after him. Grandmother was a firm believer in stupid questions, though there was a warm twinkle in her eye each time he or I asked her one.

I reached over the fish at the center of the table to her side, nabbing a piece of green onion kimchi from the plate closest to her. She clucked her tongue at me.

“Won’t you ask if I’d care for some first?” She swirled her spoon around her soup. “Who raised you, Teru?”

“I believe the woman who hoards all the side dishes every meal,” my grandfather said, dabbing his lips with a tissue.

“And a foolish, foolish man.” She turned to me expectantly.

“Would you like some, halmeoni?” I asked.

“No, I can get my own, thank you.” She smiled to herself and plucked her own piece of onion. “Fresh from this morning, you know?”

“I know,” my grandfather said, “I’m the one who harvested them.”

“And I’m the one who cooked them up.”

“I wouldn’t deny it, my love.”

My grandmother made a gagging motion and winked at me after catching sight of my smile. She always said my cheeks dimpled like chips in stone.

“Now, let’s have my grandson tell me why he was so late home again.”

“Our grandson,” my grandfather said with a warm nod.

“My grandson better not be stopping and missing the bus for a girl.”

“Your grandson has no interest in girls,” I said.

“I was the same way when I was your age, only opposite–” my grandfather started.

“That means you weren’t the same,” my grandmother said.

“I was interested in girls, but no girls were interested in me–”

“Wonder why that was.”

“Until I met your dear, sweet grandmother here.”

“Bah!” She chewed a piece of sticky beef from her soup. “Anyone would’ve been dear and sweet to you. Stitching you up in your delirium–it’s a wonder I brought you back to Korea with me after the war. Have I ever told you what a wonderful first impression this one made on me?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

She jabbed her spoon at my grandfather, who raised his palms in a preemptive surrender. “This one called me Itsuka. Itsuka. As if that isn’t the name of your grandaunt!”

“In my defense, in the haze of a gunshot wound you could’ve been Hirohito for all I knew.”

“It was hardly a shot, more like a skim.”

They bickered on for what felt like the turn of a moon, and I drifted off into a space in which my mind was solely occupied by the existence of dust bunnies when a question popped into my mind.

“Did your sisters go back to Korea after the war too, halmeoni? Or did they stay here?”

My grandfather slid his hand across the table to rest it atop hers, and a moment like a crying wind passed between the three of us. The dim dining lights flickered, shivering as though caught in the draft of the open window airing out the kitchen. Tonight was one of the odd nights my grandmother did not push his hand away, and it almost made me regret asking the question.

“Miyeon came with us back to Korea, and Yewon stayed here.”

“Was she pleased in staying?”

“I’d like to think so.”

“Didn’t she miss the family?”

“I’d like to think so.”

“In school they taught us that many Koreans were allowed to become Japanese citizens if they renounced their Korean citizenship. Did Yewon?”

“Yewon and the family didn’t communicate much after they were drafted to come here by the army. All your grandmother and I knew was that when she took me to meet her family in Daegu, Yewon wasn’t there.” My grandfather’s thumb stroked the back of my grandmother’s hand, who pressed two fingers to her temple as though fighting an oncoming headache.

Somewhere outside, a bird chirped in the night. I reached out to touch my grandmother’s hand.

“I’m sorry if my questions upset you, halmeoni.”

She drew a deep breath and sighed, before swatting both of our hands away.

“Nonsense,” she said. “Although in exchange for one of my stories I do implore you to tell me one of yours. If it wasn’t a girl, which I know it must not have been, then it must’ve been some childish frolicking that had held you up. Come on, come now.” She leaned in, shading her ear as though I was about to let her in on a great secret. There was part of me, remembering Mr. Koyanagi’s golden ribbon, that wanted to.

I conceited instead that my last class of the day had let out later than usual, and so I’d missed the bus despite cutting my 30 minute walk to the terminal to a 17 minute run. She told me I ought to work on my cardio, and that my grandfather ought to as well with all the beer she claimed he’d been enjoying in the twilight, and sent us both on our way after refusing any help with the dishes.

You boys haven’t even the slightest idea where any of this should go, she’d said, and after I’d helped my grandfather finish the sudoku he’d been left stumped on since the morning, and after I’d finished my

math homework, and after I’d drank the tall glass of water my grandmother demanded I down before retiring to bed, I rounded the corner to my room and came upon the small, maple oaked kamidana that had sat against the wall across from my room for as long as I could remember. Polished and engraved in now flaking gold letters read:

마수다유나

Yuna Masuda

Atop the shelves of the small shrine sat smiling photos of the woman who had left this world so I might join it. My mother’s face was round and soft, and my grandmother always made a point to insist how much we looked alike, though the bridge of my nose was higher, and my hair was less straight and shined, and my face was longer, and my chin and my jaw were more harsh, and my eyes only brown enough to touch the surface of the depth of the color that hers, I’m sure, had reached. It’s all in the eyes, she’d say. Not so much the color, but the look. That’s what I mean. The eyes make up the soul.

When I look at you, I see her, is what she’d always left unsaid. There were photos of her laughing as she held me, only minutes old, photos of her and her friends at karaoke in Seoul, a halved photo of her in Itaewon flashing a finger heart with a man’s white arm around her waist which I was sure belonged to my father. In each of the photos she wore a ribbon tied in pretty, looping strands around a ponytail. A ribbon of sparkling champagne was normally the centerpiece of the shrine, arranged in the shape of what my grandmother had claimed to be a dove, though that night it was missing, and I missed it like a severed toe, like a fallen star missed the sky, like I missed the latest Fireman issue.

I turned from the shrine and slid my bedroom door closed. That night I watched through dusty curtains as the moon leaked milk like honey onto the lips of stars.

OOO OOO OOO

Junko Yamazaki had a crush on Sozen since junior high, when he showed her how to fold pretty papers into shapes like sakura blossoms. I wasn’t surprised to see her stick a pink and white paper cherry blossom littered with her swirling scribbles onto his square locker with tears staining her cheeks as I left school.

This was the third time I’d seen her cry for him.

The first had been when he’d respectfully declined her offer to allow him to invite her to the summer festival when we were 14. The second had been when Hokkaido Ishikari Shoyo High School allowed us to place special notes and pictures on his locker or atop his homeroom desk three days after they had told us he wouldn’t be occupying them anymore. The third was today. She wore a gilded ribbon around her wrist over the cuff of her uniform sleeve and wiped her eyes of the tears streaking her powdered face. I couldn’t help but think about the fact that he’d promised to lend me his copy of the new Fireman chapter, and that as I pushed the school doors open, that very manga was being boxed up and stored under the stairs by Mr. Koyanagi.

As my journey home entered its final stages, I crossed the bridge with the red railings and mounted the crest past the eggs in rusty cages when I found what he had been staring at in the lake just the day before.

A great swan bobbed limp as an apple in the water, a powerline twisted and loose overhead. The yellow on the crest of its bill was splotched red, and red dripped like Junko’s tears from its eyes, and red pooled below like milk from the moon in a bloated basin, and red powdered the tracks of the imprints of the soles of the places Mr. Koyanagi’s feet had fallen on the road.

paper. He chuckled at a manga panel at the bottom of the page, and my grandmother tossed one of her balled-up tissues at him. I watched it bounce off his head and onto the heated floor.

“Studying agricultural research at Hokkaido University would be a great idea, wouldn’t it, Keima?”

“It would be a great idea, Ari,” my grandfather replied, lowering the paper like a delicate leaf. “It would be a great idea for someone who’d be interested in agricultural studies.”

“What’s there not to be interested in?” she said. “It’s a prestigious university. Very good school.”

“A very good school indeed for someone who wants to stay in Hokkaido.”

I sucked my lips in, dimpling my cheeks and feeling a heat beneath my skin that was hardly from the warmth of the crackling, flaming logs. I turned to see my grandmother press her fingers to her temple again.

“Teru, please tell your grandfather that you’re no longer looking into those American schools.”

“I’m not sure how I could tell him that without telling a lie,” I said.

“The boy should go where he wants, Ari, What is best for his life, not ours.” My grandfather’s voice was even and calm, though never cold, as a well-measured bath to her iron burning-chasmed stove. Somehow, the bathroom and kitchen analogy was a perfect fit for them, and in this equation I considered myself

the empty chicken coop in our backyard.

“‘If a crowtit walks like a stork, he will break his legs,’” she said, dipping her pen into her ink dish. Dots like black cherry blood dripped onto her fresh page. “He is Japanese. Let him stay here.”

“Is he not also Korean, my lady Han Ari?”

“Of course he is.”

“Then is he not also American?”

“None of that nonsense.” My grandmother took a few angry strikes at the character she was drawing in a boiling silence, before tapping the pen on the edge of the ink dish and carefully setting it down with her paper. She folded her hands before responding. “His father had left the country before Yuna even knew she was pregnant, and seemed to have misplaced her number somewhere in Yongsan with his dignity. He is Korean and he is Japanese because we rose him to be so. He is not American simply for the blood he shares with a man who doesn’t even know of his existence in this world.”

“But he is interested, are you not, Teru?” my grandfather said, not waiting for my response. “The places in this world where his mind wanders lie beyond the fence of this farm, beyond Hokkaido, beyond the space on this earth that you have carved out for him. If the boy wishes to go to Seoul, to Seattle, to the Moon for godsake, let him. Heavens know there’s a shortage of ambition in today’s youth.”

“Americans spend their whole lives in debt from their university ventures. My reservations aside, think of the practicalities.”

“He’s a bright boy, he’ll get a good scholarship, and he has his savings, and the money his mother has left for him.”

“I will not have our daughter’s life insurance spent on the United States.”

“It’s not our decision to make.”

“I have lost my only daughter, my only child, to an American.” My grandmother’s voice broke like raging waves against a stony shore. “And I will not lose all that is left of her to America.”

“And you have lost your sisters to Japan,” my grandfather said, “yet that had not stopped you from returning here.” He folded the newspaper into quarters on his lap as the rolling anger tumbled from my grandmother’s slumping shoulders like the last rattles of an earthquake. “Let him decide for himself what the land of his father shall be for him. He knows that there is always a home for him in Hokkaido, isn’t that right Teru?”

My eyes had filled with water, flooding from the heat of the flame I’d kept myself staring into, out of shame or obligation or denial or some mix of the three. I would never forget the fall of my grandparent’s faces that night when I announced that I would retire, after having noted that their daughter’s life hadn’t been lost to an American.

It had been lost to me.

That night I was visited by a small, fluffy bird with legs shorter and thinner than snapped toothpicks who announced his arrival by cracking a nut against my windowsill. I slid the door open and welcomed him inside, scratching him with a grimy finger behind what I had imagined would be his ear. He chirped in midnight melodies contentedly, and from his feathers I pulled a tiny piece of parchment, folded into creased and crinkly corners:

Meet me where the river runs like wartime trenches.

The next morning I slipped on my rainboots and made for the forest beyond the lake, following in Sozen’s father’s footsteps. Before I left the house, I’d noticed that just outside my sliding bedroom door my

grandmother had left a rice cake on a plate at its foot, icing sugar sprinkled along the top in the shape of a heart. In the kitchen she had stopped me with a hug.

Feeling the squelch of the mud beneath my feet, I thought of grandaunt Yewon, taken by the war, of my mother, taken nine days after childbirth, and of Sozen, taken by the smoke and flame of a restaurant meltdown in Sapporo. I realized then that my grandmother wasn’t afraid of me leaving the farm, nor leaving Hokkaido, nor Japan, nor Asia. She was afraid of me leaving earth.

OOO OOO OOO

I wasn’t sure how or where or why, but somewhere along the way I’d lost my rainboots. The wet mud suctioned the soles of my feet, clumping between my toes. I followed the low stream, trickling like tears over stone, where the riverbanks slipped down into their beds like army trenches, white sun hanging cold through the forest canopy. Its light was too far to warm the water, and so my bloated feet trekked over smooth rocks and grainy sands, cold as though they’d been dunked in a pool of liquid moonlight. The labyrinth of winds in the stream’s course wove like threads, and I followed its fibers until I came upon the dying man.

He sat slumped against a tree, blood spotting his chin and lips. Somewhere in the distance, a red fox raised from its crouch and stood on its hind legs to welcome me. I crouched beside the man, studying his face as though I’d seen him before, if only in a dream.

At first, I’d thought he was Mr. Koyanagi. I thought I saw the sun-blotted skin, the hazy, welling eyes, the jeans rolled with the dirty cuffs. As I got closer, his skin began to cool, growing pale, though not sickly. The eyes I had thought a deep brown had gone the color of murky water, a muddled, grainy brown. His hair was not straight and smooth, but sticking out at odd ends and curls, a newspaper crinkled–messy, as my own. The man smiled at me then, despite the scarlet dribbling from his cracked lips, dripping onto the army badge of a faraway land.

His freckled cheeks were dotted like indents on riverstones.

In a great sputter of coughs, wailing like burning engines, he choked up a coiled snake the shade of a sunrise into his open palms, before placing the golden ribbon in my hands and closing my fingers around it. It was damp with spit and blood and stringy, growing hot against my skin, though I clutched it as though it were a rope and I dangling from a mountainside. The fox darted back behind the trees, and the run of the stream and crinkling grip of mud drying on my feet faded as I watched the blood on the man’s teeth and lips and chin and badge turn silver, then gold, then vanish entirely.

The next blink I took, I was left only with my mother’s hair ribbon in my hand, dry and champagne-tinted, silky as though my grandmother had ironed it on low just the day before, and a tree that was not a tree, but only a stump, and a man that had disappeared, likely back off to his faraway land.

That night, I returned the ribbon to my mother’s shrine. I lit the tealight in front of the picture that had been torn in half and arranged it in what I’d intended to be one of my grandmother’s doves, though it looked more like a face I’ve seen formed in the craters of the moon.

The next day, when I crossed the bridge with the red railings and mounted the crest past the eggs in rusty cages, I stopped at the post office and dropped off half a dozen sealed application packets. The worker at the desk gave me a wink as I left, and having made it home before 5. I considered it a day well-spent.

On Page 15

Falling_in_Love_Like_Falling_Snow

Katherine Terrell

On Page 18

lightatmo__17

Aldona Casey

Art on Following

On Page 22

Cluttered_Thoughts

Katherine Terrell

On Page 23

Spinning_Out_of_Control

Katherine Terrell

Bukowski on Speed

Brendan Rowland

She’s so strung out she’s mowing the living room carpet – I kick up my feet as if she’s vacuuming. She doesn’t like the taste of bread or veal, so she doesn’t eat. Springsteen caterwauls “cover me” and I howl along; the American Dream is staving off the flatline, so I mounted a TV on the dashboard of my Firebird. I’ll never be bored again. Burning with fever but not consumed, I stand on the driveway and watch the garage door go up and down. I pour a red wine oblation onto the tarmac, watch it tidepool into kneeskin hollows. She wanders outside, yanks the tail of my hair: her means of affection. The sun careening off the clearcoat reminds me of the middleschool gallows where they hung our only daughter, but we’re here where sex coalesces like bacon grease in the drain, like my fingers in her hairtie. The carpet is worn where we roll, and I can’t be ashamed, for we are hooks trawling to snag, hookers selling souls and saliva, hawkers swapping hamartia. There is nothing outside the text of her body.

Geneva Laur

Good Morning

Alicia Charron

I.

“Wake up”— wake up I hear you; echo “Wake up”— I’m trying Begin with eyes

Please, —”wake up”

II.

Begin by opening your eyes.

Feel the skin of your eyelids peel apart at the seams to break through the barrier between the world within and the world without; Assaulted by light— at first a sting, adjust to see there is no light, just grey; Grey, stale air landing empty on your face as you rise, slowly. Slowly.

First, up on your elbows, rub the heels of your hands into your eyes to bring the light back because although it hurt, it was alive— better than grey, better than nothing; Wait for the resulting swirls to dissipate before sliding your legs off the side of the bed; You will fall or you will stand, either way, you will be out of bed; Slowly. Stay there, wait for the grey, stale air to do something other than break with your every move; Make it move with you, so maybe it’ll bend, it’ll flow, instead of shatter and hold you still; Slowly. Walk; Slowly.

III.

Make yourself a part of the world. Start by cleansing your body of waste, Existence is not a choice.

washing clean the hands that hold onto yesterday, You are not an intrusion. scrubbing out the night’s poor taste for a clean slate.

You are not who you were yesterday. You are just beginning. She is a stranger. Let yourself begin.

Infinite checklist to keep yourself from falling back asleep into yesterday, into her, into who you used to be and everything that happened to her. That’s not you, but if you allow yourself to think for even a moment, isn’t it?

Wake up

Her father is still my father, so her memories must be mine. She felt unwanted hands on skin she didn’t mean to show, skin their hands exposed.

Wake up

But I’ve done all the steps and all that’s left is the grey, stale air that doesn’t change, so why should I? How can I? When the bruises still linger, coloring my flesh deeper the harder I try to rub it away. When there is no “first” other than the “first” that makes the second, the third, the tenth, the fiftieth, attempts to fix the memory of the first.

Wake up

And what about the times without numbers, the times memorialized by scars? The times that stole my time away, reduced it into sleep and remembering. Remembering is pain. That is why I forget when I

Wake up

When I sleep, I am her, and to be me, I must

Wake up

“Wake up”

Wake up

Wake up.

“Where’d you go?”

My eyelids split, not to assaulting light, but to warmth, a smile that invokes my own

“It doesn’t matter; I am here now.”

self_portraiture

Geneva Laur

Amber Buckles is an undergraduate student at Utah Valley University, who loves spending time in the Ponderosa Pines of Arizona. She enjoys strong iced coffee, pastel sunsets, and creating mood playlists on Spotify.

Aldona Casey is a student at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. She is double majoring in English and Studio Art and hopes to pursue her masters.

Alicia Charron is a Creative Writing undergraduate student at Bowling Green State University. While her poetry has made its way into journals, her novel, “Ripples” is her first look into the world of being a published author. Alicia enjoys brief walks in the woods followed by a hefty meal in front of the television screen with her responsibilities leering in the corner behind her. General Fiction and Fantasy are the broadest forms of the genres she writes in. No matter what she puts on the page, the heart of her work is hope, hope of self-discovery and social understanding. You can find out more about her and her works at her website aliciacharron.com

Geneva Laur is an undergraduate student majoring in Art at the University of Delaware. She enjoys painting and drawing, both for artistic expression and simple fun. Outside of her art hobbies, she also likes running, reading, and spending time with her family.

Reece Ludwig is an undergraduate student studying creative writing at The Ohio State University. She loves reading, writing, and spending time with friends.

Osho Olaìítan Jeremiah, Word Commander III, a budding business educator, is a young Nigerian poet and a phone photographer. He is an undergraduate of Lagos State University. He has works published in NRB, Ngiga Review, Nanty greens, Communicator’s league, arts lounge, mywovenpoetry, Kalahari review, Salamander Ink, Icreatives review, SprinNG and elsewhere. His work was featured in the Boys are not stones anthology (poemify 2022) as well as the “How a poet loves a poem” (BBPC 2022). Though he is disciplined in economy management, he believes more in the power of art. When he’s not writing poems, you can find him taking photographs of nature & people, drawing, learning to write shorthand or listening to the beautiful songs of Brymo & thinking of his beautiful lover while gazing at the stars.

A. N. McKinnon is an undergraduate student at Ringling College of Art and Design studying creative writing. Her writing is often a blend of horror, magical realism, historical, and speculative fiction often drawing from passed-down family stories of Communist Hungary and her own experiences with grief and healing. Canadian-born and Florida-based, she is interested in anything to do with publishing and the editorial world, online gaming, and soapmaking.

Brendan Rowland, currently an undergraduate student at Cedarville University, lives in Westford, Massachusetts, several lots down from Edgar Allan Poe’s brief residence. He drives a Honda Odyssey. While writing, he sports black denim, cream-colored cat hair, and Sennheiser headphones blasting rock ‘n’ roll. He will begin a master’s in modern literature at the University of Glasgow in Fall, 2023.

Alexa Scotto is an undergraduate student at University of Delaware. They love drawing, painting, and printmaking. They intend to work in the illustration field, exploring the complexities of the human existence through their work.

Katie Terrell, an undergraduate junior at Stanford University majoring in Art History, creates art as a form of stress relief. Each artwork reflects her inner world, giving viewers a glimpse into her thoughts, emotions, and experiences.

1-4

Aldona Casey

Staff

Editor in Chief

Jay Paine

Managing Editor

Karissa Benson

Design Managing Editor

Katie Thomas

Poetry Co-Editors

Preston Waddoups

McKinlee Armstrong

Poetry Staff

KJ Anderson

Gregory Dille

Emmalynn Erard

Paige Fetzer

Noelani Hadfield

Eliza Oscarson

Jay Paine

Brady Parsons

Zada Stephens

Nonfiction Editor

Kyler Tolman

Nonfiction Staff

Karissa Benson

Danielle Bucio

Will Clark

Amber McCuen

Eli Moss

Adelaide Wilkinson

Fiction Co-Editors

Deren Bott

Paul Burdiss

Fiction Staff

Melissa Cook

Katie Moon

Chase Peterson

Ashleigh Sabin

Katie Thomas

Jonathan Walker

Faculty Advisors

Fiction

Charles Waugh

Nonfiction

Russ Beck

Poetry

Millie Tullis

Art and Design

Robb Kunz

Cover Design and Layout by Katie Thomas

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