It is our complete and utter honor to present this volume of Ambrosia: A Feminist Narratives Zine, the fourth volume of The Feminist Narratives Zine! Ambrosia embodies a wider feminist outlook infused with divine and earthly energy. Our goal in this publication is to elevate all voices in the community, and we hope you feel as inspired by these creators as we do! We believe that this year’s theme, “Becoming,” captures the visionary futures that were born from the tragedies and hardships of this past year. Thank you to all the contributors and folks who helped us at every stage in this process. With love, Baylee Basila (‘22), Mikah Sánchez (‘23), and Jocelyn Wilmore (‘23) 2020-2021 Feminist Narratives Team Stanford Women’s Community Center Melissa Rivera (they/she) Alicia Lewis (she/her) Kamilah Arteaga Baylee Basila (any/all) Benny Siam (they/them) Mary Mitchell (she/her) Isabel Peralta (she/they) Sarah Crable (she/her) Isa Calero Forero (they/them) Kiara Dunbar (they/she) Angie Lopez (they/them) Cathy Yang Tyra Blackwater (she/they) Julia Di (she/her) Sierra Edwards (she/they) Maryann Benny Fernandes (she/her) Elaine Park (she/her) Kory Gaines (he/they) Jennifer Xiong (she/her) Chaidie Petris (they/them) Joaquin Garcia Peraza (he/him) Nancy Jordan Hamilton (she/her) Jaymee Zhenmu Sheng (she/her) Kaitlyn Gina Choe (she/her) Isabelle Edgar (she/her) Sophie Boyd-Fliegel (she/her)
Ode to myself baylee basila Blessed be the brown feet grounded in the brown earth Flesh of this world and the next, godmother to those future loved ones Hearts are not made of gold these days but this one is filled With a bouquet of wildflowers picked fresh this morning. Tender soul your tears fall as holy water Caught between breath and the endings of things If to love and to be loved is the measure of a full life Your cup runneth over. Each morning is a new beginning and you are not one to let things go To waste. Everything in the shadow will come to light just as the sun rises Something enchanting in the way each day feels fuller than the last I am so grateful you are still alive. You deserve symphonies written in your honor A poem a day and also a love reminiscent of the Divine You deserve sugar cookies filled with rose petals and To be kissed breathless and forever, even after death do us part.
“the smell of my skin after being in the sun for too long is the same feeling as waking up trans in the morning and say i love myself” Benny Siam
Mary Mitchell
I Kiara Dunbar i know a strong thing when i see one, so i looked into the mirror for the first time. this skin is thicker than honey sharper than your tongue and when heaven calls, it’s because i died of natural causes. if i think i can still see stars in my hair sometimes what does that mean? i don’t know. so i shake them out for other girls picking up happiness off the sidewalk. my love will make its way to you too, not a soul gone unloved if i can help it. if.
The First Weekend Back From College I Am Sitting on the second-floor balcony of my girlfriend’s house. It is midnight. Time is thick and clinging to the jasmine tree. My best friend drops her honeycomb pipe and it shatters into snow settles in the pool glistening in the Floridian winter. It is December. We are loud enough to startle the dogs. I think about my wedding. Everyone is already here. I draw in a sharp heat through my lips. I toss time into the ashtray. I cloud the present in smoke. Miami’s mosquitoes bite into me, festering like the Pacific’s waiting for my body to wash up on shore. I gift my girlfriend’s sister a pack of pink rolling papers. She offers me her lighter. It is lonely, being fifteen. I try not to remember.
Angie Lopez
When Sierra Edwards
When I was younger I used to cry myself to sleep. The passage of time has always terrified me, stayed stuck in my head. Only love has kept the loneliness from consuming me. It can take me months to finish the last episode of a series. I want to change. We weep every time I leave home, and home isn’t just a place. There is so much more they need to understand. I am still learning when it’s my place and when it isn’t. I’ve never sobbed harder than the day my grandfather died—eyes so swollen and sore. One day I would like to bring a life into this world.
ON WRITING Kiara Dunbar you write poetry to keep them here and forget how to hold a pen when they decide to leave you anyway. reteach a tongue to sing tragedy, beating lavender from your heart because a world painted purple is nothing but a hidden blue. another fable aesop will write about fooling girls. i’m afraid of becoming nothing but a bookend
Kory Gaines 2020-21 saffron sun I woke up today to the sun Uncrusted eyes find the sun is your shining saffron hair products stained our pillow cases we talk between the world and our pillows our pillows are trusted advisors Summer is beautiful as you are in a sun hat as you are in your winter warm hat your eternal summer shall not fade Shall I compare you to the vastest star I’ll ever know? Affectionate muse calm like the moon The Sun is yours too. Let us not limit ourselves to the conditions of current cosmos We can be nebula many futures countless suns and endless moon You are and will be more luminous and more tranquil We been driving past each other We sideswipe We celestial events change the same cosmos Yet bypass the other glad we found each other.
“indiana jones and the temple of all this skin” Benny Siam
what is america? by Chaidie Petris america’s one of those places where enough is fixed or at least held together with masking tape and bubblegum that you feel a little guilty asking for change my mom didn’t want to move back to america after long successful years spent forgetting what therapy would reteach eventually after some major pillars — a marriage, a child, a botched eye surgery almost a divorce she came back bittersweet to get mental health help for my dad i wonder sometimes if she resents him he was able to see so many doctors here i remember them, when i was four and america was therapist waiting rooms with fish tanks and table toys made with sand and to mom and dad america was bill after bill as they got angrier and angrier at each other america is always hospitals telling you to get better but not how then sending you a big bill dad’s here on a greencard america is testing your americanness but they still give him money because we’re that broke but mom says if she ever starts making a little more money they’ll stop paying dad’s medical bills and then we’ll be fucked america is sort of inhabiting the border of insecurity
unless you’re some combination of rich white cis het male capitalist i guess it’s good that america has so much in terms of scientific progress and awareness but i still remember in high school when this boy kept making ‘schizo’ jokes and it was the second time i wanted to punch someone the first being when everyone treated my friend like shit like she was invisible after a boy in my class raped her america is claiming one thing and practicing another it’s illusions of capitalist grandeur that send you shattered to the hospital in a suicidal crisis or make you clam up inside because america gives and takes so much and you never know what it’ll take next i feel like i’ve given it everything and now like ginsberg i’m nothing because for all its hospitals america’s not a doctor you can trust it’s a greedy lasik surgeon progressive in all the inhuman ways and wanting only your money
The Yellow Pansy after Louise Glück by Angie Lopez The marvel is not needing a binary. A body: I have one, it suits me. I have a savior in my skin called the cosmos, and I worship them, dressing them in the dark matter of my spirit, matter dark like their gravity. What could such glory be if not a being? Oh, my kindred lights, were you like me once, long ago, before you were human? Did you allow yourselves fullness, you who would never be multiple again? I am swallowed by your stasis, shouting the way you won’t. I cry because I kaleidoscope.
Mine Melissa Rivera
Sophie Boyd-Fliegel
Scablands
Summer Sundays we wake up above the coulee. Above us it’s all wind farms and highway. But the space between is our. Weekdays I’m out east pouring aluminum. It’s 1,220 degrees in the kiln and not much cooler on the floor so I wrinkle with sweat. Come home and I can’t say a word until I’m clean. Lu knows to not look at me until I’ve washed off the smelting smell and then I’m me. Mommy. Everywhere, I tell her, used to be just cooled lava, black basalt. But at the end of the last ice age the world was getting hotter. I can usually get the retired neighbors to watch her during summer. But I take it from the looks of her that they watch TV while she spends her days directing the flow of ants and rubbing her knees on the blacktop. By Saturday night we both need a break. There was a dam made of ice, way east in Montana. Behind the dam was so much water it looked like the arctic sea. Miles of water idling for eons behind the glacial wall. We start driving once there’s shadows and the truck’s handles aren’t burning. We grab a cone to split from Tasty Treat and head north for the two-lane. Trucks got no AV and a broken jack so we roll down all the windows and listen to the wind. I ask Lu what colors she sees and she says blue and wheat. They say it was all the sudden. A crack in the wall and one tiny drop of water got into the ice. Busted it open. We drive clear past the orchards, down the coulee, and park at the river’s horseshoe bend under some lonely water birchー so green they pulse against the sand. The two of us take hours collecting kindling and looking for perfect roastling sticks. We’ll do this until her dad pays some layer to mandate her across the mountains every other weekend. Or until she decides she can do better. But for now we’re in the rainshadow and I show her how to tend the embers. We’ll do this until she tires of hot dogs and runny Reese’s. The flood was as big and as strong as all floods ever, but put together. The water was a wall, higher than skyscrapers in Spokane. We kick the fire down and climb the still-warm skree, our chins sticky with preservatives. We head for the narrow cut-out in the upper rock that looks like Lu’s newly missing bottom front tooth. She asks damn good questions. They start with “how come” and end with a look so serious like she can't get answers anywhere else. Not yet. The lake drained in an hour. The water was a bulldozer cutting the ground straight through, mile by mile, state by state, until it reached the ocean.
It’s twilight when we reach our spot. The sky is cooling, purple. Mars is a prick on the horizon. From here we can see the tapestry of farms is rippled. Like we’re ants on the beach, Lu says. Just ants on the beach, I say back. We stack cairns and spin stories into the dusk. She asks, not for the first time, about the scars on my neck and I say something about the melting point of aluminum. She asks, not for the last time, about the colors of the sunset and I say something about our atmosphere and sun. One day I’ll be asking you all the questions, baby girl. She nods with her whole head and squats, tending her tower with her perfect cartilage. I wish on the emerging stars that time could freeze in the desert.
“look at ME strawberry blonde (she’s really good!)” Benny Siam