Issue #62 by Submissions Magazine

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CONTENTS 2

Chelsea Harkin Untitled

Kristen Geracitano Asselflage

Khalif Thompson Jairo

Riley Dixon Paying Rent

Phil Gibson Unitled

Elise Assenza Action

Qadir El-Amin Depths

10 Max Mauro Lindsay

18 Sarah Yalaju Untitled

19 Keara Martin Beauty Shot in Beauty Pants 20 Brittany Petronella Untitled 22 Kirsten Geracitano A Self 23 Brandon Sillaro Coney Street 4

26 Feature

49 Kara Lynn Cox Untitled

Vanessa Nguyen Early Web Punk and Destijl 1

32 Jillian DiBari Untitled

Chris Sommerfeldt Christmas Day Eve

46 Danielle Foti Pistol

48 Jen Sinski Do You

16 Skyler Maggiore Untitled

44 Ally Caple Untitled

25 Noah Lee Snow

30 Kendra Conroy Untitled

15 Kathryn McCurdy 8/14/15

43 Mikayla Amaral Maternal Grasps

47 Kahlif Thompson Celine Balance in Orange and Yellow

Sophia Panayotou Tascosa 1 & Tascosa 2

14 Taylor Pineiro The City that Never Sleeps

42 Daniel Bracken Shore

24 Nicholas Hasko Narragansett Collage II

13 Sarah Buckser A Letter for Medea, to Say Goodbye.

41 Keara Martin Baphomet

33 Madeline C. Sepulveda This is Just to Say So Please Forgive Me

50 Vera Kuznetsova To A “Writer” 51 David Weber Her Dysphoria 52 Skyler Maggiore Soldier

34 William Pineda Rooster

54 Carlyn Beaver A Lifetime

35 Kara Lynn Cox Split

55 Max Mauro First Day

36 Sarah Buckser Thoughts on Fathers, My Personal Life, and Cats

56 Matthew Capers Great Extinction Event

40 Taylor Pineiro Voyage

57 Maria Battaglia Untitled

FRONT & BACK William Pineda

Letter From the Editor, Thank you for picking up the latest issue of Submissions Magazine, the only art and literary magazine on campus curated, designed, and run entirely by an interdisciplinary group of students. Graphic designers, literature majors, new media kids, and art history enthusiasts have all lent a hand in putting out this magazine. And if you think that’s interdisciplinary, I remember back in ’13 when I started interning for Submissions as a biology major! Anyway, all students are welcome, so long as they are prepared to engage with and discuss every single artwork and written piece submitted, a total of 228 for this issue alone. Which can take some time.

With each issue comes new challenges. We are constantly asking ourselves how we can choose the work that best represents the talent and creativity at Purchase College. This isn’t always clear, and often we are unable to publish all of the art and writing that we would like to. However, being a publication open to students of any major certainly helps in terms of representing the campus community. We’re also always looking for feedback, so if you would like to get involved or just voice your opinion about the magazine, please do join us Monday nights at 10:00.

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On a typical selection night, the team assembles at 9 o’clock pm. The work is first looked over generally for any patterns or themes and pieces that work well together are noted. Then we delve into each submission individually, discussing formal elements and conceptual ideas. The art and literature is then selected in a democratic way over cookies and Martinelli’s sparkling apple cider.

On a very important side note, we are happy to announce that Submissions Magazine has made the switch to eco-friendly printing practices. The magazine that you are currently holding has been printed on chlorine free, 100% post-consumer waste paper made using biogas energy and has been printed with nontoxic inks produced with wind power. In an age of digital publication, we must remember that print is a luxury. We print for permanence. We print to create things for us to hold and enjoy, to keep and look at when we like. Please keep these intentions in mind, and if you decide that you would not like to keep this magazine, please place it back in the magazine rack or dispose of it responsibly in the recycling bin. All the best,

Lindsey Sieber Editor-in-Chief

CHELSEA HARKIN Untitled

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KRISTEN GERACITANO Asselflage

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KHALIF THOMPSON Jairo

Paying Rent Riley Dixon

I was once your faceless creature and you take this new nameless arachnid to restaurant booths and probably say, “this is my favorite place,” negating the ever present but past tense “our” and you piss all over the seat, marking it again and again like a senile dog peeing always in the same spot in the living room corner, cowering at the hand of your mother — (she is watching over your shoulder, mostly in mirrors)

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PHIL GIBSON Untitled

ELISE ASSENZA Action

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QADIR EL-AMIN Depths

MAX MAURO Lindsay

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SOPHIA PANATOTOU Tascosa 1 & 2

VANESSA NGUYEN Early Web Punk and Destijl 1 12

A Letter for Medea, to Say Goodbye.

This is a letter for Medea, To say goodbye. I wanted to let you know That I left my hat on the doorknob and There’s an empty cup of coffee on the counter that I forgot To put in the sink. I didn’t vacuum under my bed And this whole train ride I’ve been trying To remember whether or not I returned the five dollars you lent me to buy A box of steamed rice yesterday. I’m sorry Medea, That I didn’t put the cup in the sink That I forgot my hat That I didn’t pay you back And that there are crumbs under my mattress From a cake I baked for your birthday But ate before I could give it to you. I’m going to tell you I’m coming home soon To vacuum and clean and pack But we both know, I think, That sending paper boats into a storm Brings you pulp when puddles appear And that pulling fish out of the sea because they’re ill Only makes them die on the wooden docks. This is a letter for Medea, to say goodbye, Because I left before I could kiss you.

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Sarah Buckser

TAYLOR PINEIRO The City That Never Sleeps

8/14/15

Kathryn McCurdy

remind me of the way it tastes on your lips of the way the smoke is coy with you, holds itself around your mouth for a lackadaisical second, the way you appear in shades under the moonlight; is patient; is occurring slowly to my eyes

now it is gravel; it is jarring; it is the way you hesitate like cigarette smoke; caught between leaving too quick or never leaving at all.

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the smoke holds, breathes on its own accord the lapse of lilac scent far removed from last summer in the northern woods, teeming with a softness even in the throating chirp of birds nestled on birch

SKYLER MAGGIORE Untitled

Christmas Day Eve

Two families make up one with pets, one without. An understatement – to say the least. Like a language spoken exclusively in dialect. You, on the other hand, speak in riddles: an understatement. A Christmas with hammer in hand. Nailing macadam to cold-battered lies on the radio. Reading crusts about advice on what to do. It’s not that surprising. Always that tingling sensation of something about to go extremely wrong. A million ways that they can; a billion more that they won’t. A spilled beer can wreck global havoc even if it doesn’t. Two lies can make one truth with constant pop-up ads. Steam and curry trends the tiara. This just in: news. Always that tingling sensation of spilled beer and Ronald Reagan. A billion chaoses within fluttering understatements. (What isn’t an understatement?)

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Chris Sommerfeldt

All tickets, please. No fucking way. Can you please sit down, sir. I politely ask you to reconsider the tingling sensations 17

SARAH YALAJU Untitled

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KEARA MARTIN Beauty Shot in Beauty Pants

BRITTANY PETRONELLA Untitled

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KRISTEN GERACITANO A Self

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BRANDON SILLARO Coney Street 4

NICHOLAS HASKO Narragansett Collage ll

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NOAH LEE Snow

ELIZABETH GUFFEY

Written by Alana Braschowitz Interview by Lindsey Sieber Photograph by Jason Mandel

LS: Has design always been an area of interest to you? What drew you to design, particularly the art historical/critical side of it? EG: My dissertation was on the French artist Pierre-Paul Prud’hon. He was a great draftsman. But the more I studied him, the

more interested I got in his designs for Napoleon. LS: You write about the presence of print in the post-digital age in your book Posters: A Global History. Can you tell us a little about this? EG: It’s an interesting moment in publishing and print culture. Just as we’re learning to use e-books, Kindles, iPads, and the rest, some people are trying to revitalize the printed word with innovative design. Beginning about ten years ago, I kept hearing that “posters are dead.” I decided to turn that upside down. Posters—like all of print culture—are not disappearing. But to find vitality, you have to know where to look. I argue that some of the most dynamic posters today are being made in places like Lebanon and West Africa. But in the US and Europe, posters belong to a group of objects that are becoming rarer, and seem exotic. Like newspaper headlines or magazine covers, they still scream for our attention.

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Over the last few weeks we’ve been discussing an incredibly broad, yet relevant question — why print, and what does it mean to be a print publication in the digital age? As a student run and funded magazine, we’ve asked ourselves to question our own unique qualities, and how we can represent the culture of Purchase College through print. Despite the environmentally conscious printing techniques we’ve moved towards, we are still forced to wonder how we can validate a physical edition of the magazine, rather than a digital alternative. Art and design critic Elizabeth Guffey, and professor here at Purchase College, has explored similar questions across her career. In her latest novel, Posters: A Global History, Guffey studies the relationship between the medium of posters and their influence in both past and contemporary culture. The introduction to the novel poses the question, “what relevance do they (posters) have today, in our age saturated with images, social media, and electronic devices?” Although the content of her questioning is different, the argument remains the same: what does it mean to create physical copies of any form of art?

LS: Can you speak more to the proliferation of posters in countries outside the U.S.? Why West Africa and Lebanon in particular? EG: I chose to study each because they had developed interesting new poster forms based on new needs, including visual literacy. In Lebanon, I noticed how posters demarcate territories between various sectarian groups, for example in the proliferation of martyr posters.

LS: Does the appreciation of posters as art reflect sentiments toward other types of print material? EG: Posters were collected very early. They were considered an art form (the “gallery of the streets”). They were seen as “art” even when they were first being hung as advertising. It might be like video games today being called art. LS: Lately as a magazine we have been discussing the philosophy of printing. In your opinion, where does print material stand in an era of electronic publishing?

An example of the West African posters Guffey discusses.

EG: It’s another format. In some ways, it’s more luxurious and not as necessary. But both have benefits and limits. Much has been made of the range of digital communications; we take what electronic media can do as the best thing possible. There’s a reason why Amazon is spending so much trying to perfect the Kindle. But print is uniquely able to do certain things. And there’s a reason that ink on paper has lasted so long. It has unique qualities. The non-reflective surface, the smell of ink, paper and glue—in part we’re talking about a sensory experience. But also, the physical presence of the codex format is intriguing. Think of the way it encourages happenstance findings, how it falls open to pages that are dog eared. . . so many of these things are difficult to replicate digitally. LS: The sensory experience of the physical publication is something as a team we have all felt passionately about, which makes sense as a volunteer-based print publication. But, outside our office, I feel like the appreciation of a physical magazine is something that people can relate to; while others are indifferent or opposed to print material altogether. This opposition is something that I understand, especially considering the continued environmental impact of printing. With this in mind, Submissions Magazine has decided to switch to a sustainable printer that uses recycled paper, non-toxic inks, and wind power. Do you feel eco-friendly printing alleviates a growing public’s anxiety about environmentalism? Or is it a futile effort? I guess that sounds cynical. If there was an affordable way to print that also (in theory)

EG: I think that’s only one issue. Digital media is light based and allows for a level of animation, sound, interactivity, and immersiveness that print simply doesn’t allow. Print allows other things. At the same time, it’s important to remember that all this digital technology has its own environmental costs. At least print media can be recycled. LS: As the founding editor of the journal Design and Culture, how have you been impacted by shrinking demand for print? EG: We never expected a large print run. The money is in digital subscriptions to libraries. Authors want print copies, but academic publishers want to build databases of articles that they can sell by subscription. I have to admit, though, that my perspective is highly limited; this is the nature of scholarly publishing, not print culture in general. LS: While print may be in decline, it seems like it will never fully disappear. In fact its rarity has earned it a sort of revered status. Does the fact that a publication is going to be physically printed impact what goes into it? Is this something that you keep in mind while editing a magazine for print versus one for online publication? EG: Print is good for certain situations, and it privileges certain things. I’m interested

“But to find vitality (in print), you have to know where to look.” in the “thingness” of magazines and the paperback books. Paper clearly has its advantages. Let’s revisit this question when, some day, they’ve invented digital paper. LS: The “thingness” of print is especially interesting, I think we were talking about this the other day, in terms of archiving. SubMag has maintained a digital archive online that is publicly accessible (https://issuu.com/ submissionsmagazine), but we have also decided to keep a physical archive. As a physical publication, we feel that the physical object produced, and the way it changes over time, is important to document. What do you think? Is a digital archive enough?

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left no carbon footprint, would print still be unpopular? Are there other factors at play (trends in collecting, for example) ?

EG: I always find it interesting to wander through the Metropolitan Museum and wonder, how did this thing manage to survive all this time. It wasn’t made to be shown in the Met. Archiving is a commendable activity. But we don’t know what’s going to happen to archives. LS: What advice can you lend to young artists and writers attempting to generate acknowledgement to their individual art? EG: It really doesn’t change. No matter what, it still comes down to work and patience.

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KENDRA CONROY Untitled 30

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JILLIAN DIBARI Untitled

This is Just to Say So Please Forgive Me Madeline C. Sepulveda

(Inspired by William Carlos Williamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s This is Just to Say Poem)

I have consumed The pizza

Sorry. It was exquisite. So cheesy and hot. It even had more pepperonis Than my first slice. Maybe now you realize to never turn your back on a friend.

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In which you Were likely Going to eat.

WILLIAM PINEDA

34Rooster

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KARA LYNN COX Split 35

Thoughts on Fathers, My Personal Life, and Cats Sarah Buckser

You live in a place where everyone has 23 fathers. The Maury Povich show is much more hectic. You are the father. And so are you. And you. And you and you and you—And Hollywood has a shortage of chairs. *** You live in a world where men are only allowed, through a twist in evolution, to cry once a year on May the 22nd. Every boy knows this, every man knows this—every ancient old vet that sits outside with a bottle of whiskey and a glass of ice knows this. But no women know this. You are a woman. Your mother dies when you are eleven and your father remains smiling and cheerful as the snow alights on her coffin. You blame him your whole life for this because he goes away on business in May so that you do not hear him cry through the night. *** You live in a world where fathers are classified as plants. You must refer to a boy’s arms as arms, but as soon as he has a child they become limbs and his fingers twigs. This gets confusing and some at the academy of science have suggested introducing a new protocol that classifies all men as animals. But the botanists claim there are already enough plant species dying at the hands of humans—there is no need for yet another casualty. *** This is a world where all men are clones. Society spends all of their time trying to figure out how to diversify the gene pool

You live under the surface of a planet and you are a father of sixteen. Three hundred years ago all exits to the surface collapsed and you are trapped in the caves. Your daughter is 14 and wants sunlight for her 18th birthday so you have been carving away at your ceiling for ten years. You have lost your job and you are running out of food. Just as all appears lost, a light unlike anything you’ve ever known begins to fall onto your hands.

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because we know that there will be an inevitable crisis that wipes out all of mankind unless there is variation in their DNA. We work so hard on this that we forget about oil and cars and natural gas, and live in a peaceful state for hundreds of years until someone uses radiation to mutate the CA627 codon and the problem is solved. The world then erupts in war. But the hundreds of peaceful years kind of make up for it. ***

*** You live in a place beyond the terms “world” or “universe” and you don’t know where it is and you don’t care where it is. You are the heavenly father, the hellish father, the father of everything that has been and everything that ever will be. You are loving and craft each detail of this realm with hands that would make Rodin green with envy—and as you sculpt the world around you turns and transforms and becomes more and more unlike the “worlds” and “universes” you look down on. On long nights, when your hands ache from making too many beings, too many creatures, too much beauty, you have a stiff

drink while watching a soap opera beamed in onto a television. It is the only possession you own that has been plucked from the “worlds” you look down upon. It is the only possession that relaxes you. *** You live in a world where no one can speak unless they insult each other. You want to get your father something for father’s day, but all you can say are spiteful things that make people’s eyes water. You end up baking a cake, but cannot write anything caring on the surface. So you sit for an hour and a half with icing in one hand and try to imagine what it would be like to have someone smile when your words hit him or her. *** Grief haunts you. You do not smell liquor in bars now, you smell death—you do not smell flowers in gardens, you smell the fertilizer on the ground. You pick up on ends, no longer on beginnings. Grief haunts you, whispers in your ear, draped around your shoulders like one of Po’s fabled cats—heavy, yet warming. Your back aches; you wish to take it off. But you do not, because without the cat, without the grief, you are alone. Some nights, when it rains, you like to imagine that God is by your side, cradling you against his chest. As your crying grows softer and the rain grows louder, you are left to wonder whether it is you or the universe that weeps. ***

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You love your father. He is not perfect but neither are you. He is different—there are things that don’t match up. Social workers ask you whether or not it bothers you that he doesn’t just speak his mind, instead of stretching his thoughts into metaphors and stammering. You don’t understand this—it would be false. This would be false. He loves you; you know this. The social workers, for all their training, still sometimes don’t know that each individual speaks a singular language, and you have to learn every one. If he spoke without eloquence and metaphors and the strange gaps between words that seem to have no purpose, it would make as much sense as if the president began to speak only in Bosque.

TAYLOR PINEIRO Voyage

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KEARA MARTIN Baphomet

DANIEL BRACKEN Shore

Maternal Grasps Mikayla Amaral

Her veins are a system of protruding pale blue rivers that I would trace as we held hands in church. I would write secret messages along her rivers and she would respond in my palm.

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My motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hands are wrapped in scars from her second year, when she crawled into the porcelain sink that was filled with hot water, causing her yellow pajamas to mold to her small hands and feet.

My momâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fingers curve out at the knuckles, creating a Coke bottle shape. Her nails, bitten down from years of habit are glossed with a clear polish. Her skin is rough; the decades and dozens of roses have left their mark in her palms. But she has her motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hands, and I have mine. My fingers curve like hers, and my streams of blue veins are more visible daily. When we write our secret messages now, sometimes I forget which hand is mine.

ALLY CAPLE Untitled 44

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DANIELLE FOTI Pistol

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KHALIF THOMPSON Celine Balance in Orange and Yellow

JEN SINSKI Do You

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KARA LYNN COX Untitled

To A “Writer” Vera Kuznetsova

I do not wish to throw Loud words Beating my chest Like a screaming cliché I do not think to blame The standard format Of performance And many other things; the stuff of reality No “skin” nor “grit” nor “glass” will “suffocate” “burn” or “break” Instead Resilience; the vacuum of the mundane will do the dirty work. Let the absence of “tides” Become a lack of the remarkable. No pull or “swell” Will sway these hips Any longer Forget the “flames” That licked your “fury” to seduce “bitter” ness; “toxic” Words at their boiling point. I wish for you to squirm in a lukewarm vat of mediocrity. Yours truly.

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DAVID WEBER Her Dysphoria

SKYLER MAGGIORE Soldier 52

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CARLYN BEAVER A Lifetime

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MAX MAURO First Day

MATTHEW CAPERS Great Extinction Event

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MARIA BATTAGLIA Untitled

SUBMIT EDITOR-IN-CHIEF LINDSEY SIEBER ART DIRECTOR TESSA GOODE SENIOR COPY EDITOR ALANA BRASCHOWITZ LAYOUT INTERN ERIKA FULTON PUBLIC RELATIONS COORDINATOR JESSICA DEANGELIS PUBLIC RELATIONS INTERNS JASON MANDEL & KAMAL BASSMA FACULTY SPONSOR STEVE LAMBERT

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