Sink Hollow
Letter From Our Editor
It has been a joy to be part of Sink Hollow the last three years—a journal that truly gives place to the strange and unexpected. The many things that Sink Hollow staff, advisors, and contributors have taught me through this experience will always maintain an important place in my life.
In the busy, detached world we live in, our complex emotional lives are so often sequestered away—even from our closest friends and family. Sharing our true selves is pure vulnerability, but confession is cathartic, necessary; it will find its way out of you in one way or another. Our contributors in this issue of Sink Hollow have chosen to share their truth with you, to tell you about their desires, their fears—to reveal their truest selves.
Although connection and understanding between one another has always been essential, it is especially important in the divided, alarming climate that we find ourselves in today. Instability and anxiety are abounding. In response, we must lean on and listen to each other—fostering true understanding and embracing vulnerability. I urge you to read this issue carefully and look for the emotional truth held in spiderwebs, fish, and birthmarks—to see the underlying, extensive connections that run between all of us and the awe-inspiring world we inhabit.
Noelani Hadfield Editor-in-Chief
Wym Greene
The Goddess of Pearls and Seafoam
Beatrice Austin La Lune
Beatrice Austin La Soleil
Escapism
Caroline Lord
A new liar holds my hand, tracing my poison ivy gilded wrists, and I pretend I could believe.
He smiles like the crooked horizon linecruel and indigo spritzed with tangerine. Dusk holds me, but I can’t be stilled
because I’m flirting with the edge, rooftop parkour though I know twenty is far too young to fly high on some melatonin, sugar rush, never
enough to take off this razors edgethe Lord knows I’ve tried, front row, roller coasting, burying my head in TV static,
cheap magic like glitter coursing through emerald veins after six glasses of sparkling peach moscato
too many prayers like gravel in my throat, driving blurry eyed south through midtown
on I-75, and I know 90 is far too fast, but Lord, it’s never fast enough.
Fact Or Fiction
Amanda Noel Coburn
Sara Caoile Life After
A New Shrine Is Built Everyday
Bay Sandefur
Have you ever watched a spider spin her web? I mean sit and watch until the end. Have you ever wished to be a spider’s web? To have her build you, strand by strand, then wait for you to feed her.
I have. I stood, barefoot, in a bed of rocks, letting the pain from the sharp edges find a home in me. I watched her legs bend and extend in an unwavering pattern.
I imagined myself naked and stretched out with each limb clasping the spikes of hair on the flowers’ stems. Offering her the blood that comes from this act and hoping that she’ll suck it dry.
Have you ever wished to be a spider’s web? I have. I watched her pull the tears out of my ducts and turn them into silk. Tonight, I’ll offer her my blood. Tomorrow, I’ll ask for her forgiveness.
Walking
Haley J King
Burning rubber clings to my lungs and I couldn’t be bothered to care about the carcinogens slowly killing me. The worst picture I had ever seen of you stared at me in the pews, your green eyes looked brown. A puff, a drag, whatever I can grip to feel less. You told me to knock my bad habits and I did just to never hear you beg. Everyone felt the need to hug me, and I didn’t understand why they thought it was helping. I need the bottle to my lips, or the tobacco filled paper between them, because how could this? I’ve used every tool, screw, and nail to hold your pieces together, but it never mattered; you never mattered. They released those birds at your funeral, I told everyone you hated them. And anyone saying you are in a better place is wrong, I’d talk to the devil if it meant he’d listen, what I would give for anyone to just fucking listen.
Bianca Gutierrez
Who Feeds America
Don’t Look
Yazmin Ratzlaff
My Ribbed, Strawberry Confession
Ellery Liverseed
Just a little bit more we say, circling the drain. Hives on my chest and a new toothbrush.
I have to confess. I did bury that used condom. It wasn’t mine
but it was left in my favorite corner of the woods next to the big/upside down/ horizontal tree.
I couldn’t bear looking at the pouch of disgusting fluids. The toe of my shoe dug. Shoved it underneath piles of black dirt.
I apologized to the Earth as I did it, ashamed about pushing plastic and semen into her body.
Guilt gushes out from strange canals. All this. And all the piles and piles of dirt.
Self-Portrait: Identity Joust
Christopher Tran
Christopher Tran
Creative Struggle
Dam Conversation
Anna Tourney
I can drive to the dam, see dead fish litter the rocks: mostly Gar. Some little ones. Toothy things. Reflective scraps of body floating downstream.
All that I’ve loved. Known I loved. Or hated. Their disinterest refracts, the river’s edema.
The reservoir is a body, this must be lymphatic. When the river brushes its teeth, this is the spit in the basin.
This is a place of constant rejection. The waterline drops. It coughs up only excess, the rest get picked off.
That’s where it dies, then. Right where the water pours through. But I don’t say that. Just listen.
Wym Greene
Tapestry Lovers
Yazmin Ratzlaff
Screaming
A Good Poem
Isabelle Lee
I go to church on Fridays now. On the walk over I spray perfume on my wrists and rehearse my lines, When I bow my head there are no bells to distract me. The pastor’s wife scolds me for my makeup, my perfume, tells me to give my mother a call. You’ve become (“foreigner”), she says, you worry too much about the world, and you forget God and your mother. For a moment I think she might be right, but then the worship team plays an old hymn from when I was five, maybe, or fifteen, and I am reminded that I have never forgotten anything. I smoke a cigarette on the walk back.
In class I argue in my second language about what it means to be a good person. I will never win this argument, I can use esoteric words, quote Ovid and Augustine in Latin, but they are not forgetting that I am an Asian girl who goes to church on Sundays Fridays. Some arguments can only be won by the right people. The white girls look surprised when I say fuck, I want them to see me smoke a cigarette.
My life in America sums up to this: a continuous attempt to justify my presence. A man told me I do not understand beauty, so now I write poetry to prove him wrong. I have proven nothing thus far, I do not know what makes a good poem, just like I do not know what makes a good person, or a good daughter. I came to this country believing in a monstrous world, and it is very big indeed. To be a person big enough for it one must forget some things, or become more persons.
A man told me I love you
but he was looking past me, at the writing on the wall, or at the me in the other room. A man told me it was finished, and I relearned what my father taught me ages ago: there is no graceful way to become unloved. I have tried so hard to grow up I have started growing sideways.
But this is what they don’t tell us: the world is as big and small as you choose. You can have your small world, you can have many worlds, if you want it. You have to really, really want it.
I call my mother and tell her, that I have had my heart broken in the land of opportunity, that I am learning how to mold my grievances into something a little more human, that I am realizing how to be many things all at once without splitting into a million pieces. How American, she replies, Richard’s sister got into Yale.
These days I make the air lighter to breathe. I practice growing. I practice losing. I practice knowing some things. I still do not know what makes a good poem, and maybe I never will. I write one anyway.
Wym Greene Russian Doll
Bianca Gutierrez Second Class
The name“Newsha”translates to“listener”in the Persian language.
Newsha Firouzkouhi
I have a birthmark, a splash of red covers most of my armthat made other girls sick.
It looks harsh one would say, like the nibbles of a wild dog that hates your guts, like you’ve never been loved or been in love and your mother slaps you its patterns thawed, and I worry if I touch it I will bleed, the curse surging within you abusing me.
My grandmother said, You’re a canvas made from God his dripping fingertips are inked on your arm, and you’re a quiet lullaby I hum,
You were named Listener to better hear songs, and when vou die your arm is a sunlight against the dark.
A wild dog, a canvas, a lullaby, a curse.
Maybe I am here to highlight all of our curses and listen to our animals bursting on the canvas, Maybe if I look better through the darkness - hollow and wild. maybe then, my birthmark radiates.
Staff
Editor-in-Chief
Noelani Hadfield
Managing Editor
Zack Baker ex Ponto
Woodrow Laing in Patriam
Poetry Genre Co-Editors
Indigo Aves
Brook Haight
Poetry Readers
Linn Eggett
Ellie Fallows
Henry Hallock
Addie Hemsley
Meg Jeppson
Sid Lefevre
Eva Nelson
Brady Parsons
Eliza Saunders
Abbi Zaugg
Fiction Genre Co-Editors
Bee Pickering
Chloe Scheve
Fiction Readers
Jake Casper
Tayn Dy
Brooklyn Hibshman
Jessica Lindhardt
Ava Rees
Izzy Telford
Jonathan Walker
Lily Webb
Nonfiction Genre Co-Editors
Woodrow Laing
Eli Moss
Nonfiction Readers
Kayleigh Kearsley
Eliza Oscarson
Abby Smith
Ella Unguren
Alejandra Vitela
Magazine Layout and Design
Cade Taylor
Faculty Advisors
Russ Beck
Robb Kunz
Charles Waugh
Ashley Wells
Amanda Noel Coburn
Bianca Gutierrez The Yellow Wallpaper
Contributor Bios
Beatrice Austin is an undergraduate art student studying at Idaho State University, working towards her BFA. She works in a variety of mediums, prioritizing painting, digital media, and metalworking.
Sara Caoile is an undergraduate senior at the University of Tennessee Knoxville majoring in Painting and drawing with a minor of Human Development and Family Science. She explores the topics of domestic neglect and violence in intuitive and psychological artworks. She uses malleable mediums like oil and gouache to create bright, saturated colors that evoke both rest and unrest. These works invite the viewer to step into a new world, like walking through a door or gazing through a window.
Amanda Noel Coburn (she/her/hers) is a TRIO McNair Scholar working towards her Honors Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art with minors in art history and history from Idaho State University. Her artwork explores the liminality of rural spaces as well as the politics of intersectional feminism and witchcraft. www.amandanoelcoburn.com
Newsha Firouzkouhi is an undergraduate student in Michigan State University, majoring in English with a creative writing concentration and a minor in screenwriting. She uses art as a survival tool everyday to create hope, pride, perseverance and purpose - attempting to make art in all formats such as poetry, fiction, screenplays and movies. She also plays the piano and is hoping to learn more about making music in the future.
Wym Greene is an undergraduate illustrator at California State Long Beach University. They geek out over dragons and roller derby, and their true calling is dressing up as a pirate.
Bianca Gutierrez is an undergraduate illustrator at East Carolina University. Her work focuses on historical and current events that cover topics such as greed and exploitation. She mostly works digitally but she also indulges in printmaking techniques such as relief and intaglio.
Haley King is a Salisbury University student majoring in Environmental Biology and Creative Writing. Her poetry is featured or forthcoming in The Inflectionist, Hawai’i Pacific Review, and Poetry South. Inspired by nature, she blends her scientific curiosity with artistic expression; crafting pieces that reflect her connection to the natural world and human experience.
Isabelle Lee is an undergraduate at the University of Chicago studying classics and law. She is not a poet, but she believes in having hobbies. Follow her on instagram @hey.isabellelee
Ellery Liverseed is a writer and artist currently studying at Madison College. She spends her spare time outside and with as many animals as she can find.
Caroline Lord was born and raised in rural South Georgia. She attends Berry College and is working on a bachelor’s degree in both studio art and creative writing. She serves as the online editor for Ramifications, Berry College’s student lead literary and arts magazine, and has been published in The Delta Poetry Review, Violet Margins, and Pegasus.
Yazmin Ratzlaff is an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska Omaha. She loves drawing, painting, art history, and spending time with her family.
Bay Sandefur is an undergraduate student at Rocky Mountain College. If she isn’t writing, she’s reading, and if she isn’t doing that, she’s avoiding an existential crisis by walking barefoot in her mother’s garden.
Anna Tourney is an Environmental Biology student at Washington University in St. Louis. When she’s not writing, Anna works in a lab, studying the powdery mildew that grows on common garden weeds.
Christopher Tran is an undergraduate student at The University of New Mexico. He loves creating art, learning history, and mixing the past with the present