Tea Volume 21 by Tea Literary and Arts Magazine

Cover Image: Bargaining by Shannon Sutherland

Editor in Chief Mirjam Frosth Art Editor Hannah Kline Design Editor Veronica Vintilla Photography Editor Jessie White

Art Staff Finnian Shannon-Covey Catherine Munn Megan Horan Design Staff Victor Ospina

Operations Manager Laura Torlaschi Social Media Manager Emily Margolis

Photography Staff Andres Colmenares

Poetry Editor Leah Brand

Poetry Staff Brianna Steidle Andrea Mendoza

Prose Editor Darby Webb

Prose Staff Marissa Delamarter

Tea Volume 21 was designed, produced, and edited solely by the students at the University of Florida. This magazine is funded by Student Government and by the University of Florida English Department. The opinions expressed are those of our contributors and do not necessarily represent those of the editors, staďŹ&#x20AC;, faculty, administrators, or trustees of the University of Florida. Copyright 2019 by University of Floridaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Tea Literary and Arts Magazine. Tea, and by extension, the University of Florida, has been given permission from the contributing students to reproduce the content of this magazine for use in physical and digital publishing, social media, and the other reasonable academic uses which may pertain. Submissions are welcome from all University of Florida undergraduate students. More information can be found at tealitmag.com.

Blackbird Prize for Poetry

Honors students published in Tea are all eligible for the Blackbird Prize for Poetry. The prize is provided by the Wentworth Scholarship Fund and is sponsored by the UF Honors Program. It was originally advocated for by Dr. Kevin Knudson, Professor of Mathematics and former Director of the UF Honors Program. In 2012, Dr. Knudson named the prize after one of his favorite poems, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens. “Buried Alive” by Martha Paz-Soldan has been selected by our Poetry Editor, Leah Brand, to be this year’s winner. Here is what she had to say about it: “Martha Paz-Soldan’s writing style is cinematic and kinetic. Her poem, ‘Buried Alive,’ pulls its reader through scenery, history, and the emotions that are tied to a physical place. In this poem Paz-Soldan is nostalgic, but not uncritical. She tells an emotionally dense story in a compact form.”

Palmetto Prize for Prose

All prose submissions published in Tea are eligible to receive the Palmetto Prize for Prose. One student each year is selected by Professor Jill Ciment, the award-winning writer of Small Claims, The Law of Falling Bodies, Teeth of the Dog, and other works. Each student awarded the Palmetto Prize has their name etched onto the plaque displayed in the UF English Department. There is no prose being published in this year’s volume, so Jill Ciment has guided us to Ange Mlinko, who has selected a poem to collect the title. A renowned poet and critic, Mlinko is the poetry editor of Subtropics, has edited for The Nation, was named a Guggenheim Fellow, and has published five award-winning books of poetry. She has selected “Leander and Hero” by Danilo Marin as this year’s winner: “[The poem] is exemplary in the way that it grounds a mythical couple in a sensory world we can recognize—olive oil, gulls, soft bed sheets, and irrational passion. I especially liked the ending, where Hero cannot “harbor” her body’s weight before throwing herself oﬀ the tower: the word “harbor” which has associations of “safe harbor,” is deployed ironically to give a sense of her tragic wit as well as her despair.”

Produced with special thanks to: Jillian Browning, John Cech, Jill Ciment, Andrew Cushen, Matthew Deville, Sid Dobrin, John Finnerty, Marjetta Geerling, Dave Hendryx, Lisa Iglesias, Mark Law, David Leavitt, William Logan, Peggy McBride, Ange Mlinko, Dana Myers, Layne Thue-Bludworth, Donna Tuckey, Eric Segal, Michael Sirois, UF Student Government, UF’s Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research, Dragonfly Graphics, Darby’s Mom, and Darby’s dog, Bear.

Scrapbooking Martha Paz-Soldan

20 Garden Snake

Buried Alive Martha Paz-Soldan

10 Lived-In

Martha Paz-Soldan

Danilo Marin Al chocoyo desde mi hamaca Danilo Marin

22 Fixation III

Claire Elise

Memorabilia Martha Paz-Soldan

23 Fixation I

Group 1 Kyla Jenkins

24 Bodyspace II

Group 5 Kyla Jenkins

25 Bodyspace V

Cookout After Moving Kyla Jenkins

26 Angels

Florida Assemblage 3 Callisa Lawn

27 3 Hands

Florida Assemblage 9 Callisa Lawn

28 He Hurts

Reprise Danilo Marin

29 Nina

Leander and Hero Danilo Marin

30 Guinea Fowl

Claire Elise

Royce Abela

Emily Ruth Hill

CONTENTS

Marl Emily Ruth Hill

32 White Ibis

Emily Ruth Hill

33 Zebu

Emily Ruth Hill

34 In the Backyard

Montana Grace Wilson

43 Mother’s Mornings

Alexandra Lampner

44 Dismantle 3

Brett Taylor

45 Exterior 3

Brett Taylor

46 Burden Pile

Ryan Haddix

35 At the Dining Table

48 Electric

36 Meewee and Peewee

49 Anorexic

37 The Male Graze

50 The Cattleman’s Herding Plan . . .

38 Persistence / Invasion . . .

40 Yellow Painting

52 Woe: Guilt

Montana Grace Wilson

Kylee Jo Skidmore Kylee Jo Skidmore

Kylee Jo Skidmore

Madeline Boyd

Planes Micah Lomel

42 Send Me to the Brook

Patrick Dinmore

Maetavee Genevieve Shubeck

Early in the Morning My Father Maetavee Genevieve Shubeck

Shannon Sutherland

53 Abstracted Grief: Guilt

Shannon Sutherland

TEA is the oﬃcial hardcore java jivin’ subterranean ‘little pieces are stupid,’ nerve-wracking, sunshine-spewing, bloodletting, shin-diggin’, shirtless platito de pollo, spry leather whips, bondage fetish (?) and otherwise general poetry/ficción zine of the University of Florida. I can’t take claim for writing that. The above message is written in the masthead of the second issue of Tea, published in 1996. It’s interesting to see how far we have come, from a coﬀeehouse zine made on a borrowed Xerox machine to the historic magazine of the University of Florida. Our goal for this academic year has been to prove ourselves as a powerful and respected publication, to give platform to the UF undergraduate artists and writers who so need and deserve it, and to above all, give voices and opportunites to those who would not otherwise have them. I’m proud to present to you the result of running our magazine with emphasis on upholding social change, on equity and intersectionality, and on listening to the voices in the back of the room. Mirjam Frosth Editor in Chief

Left: Detail from Maslow’s Pile, Ryan Haddix

Scrapbooking If you could take your shoes oﬀ before you walk in, brush the dust oﬀ your coat, and breathe the good Florida air when I kiss your cheek, the color might return to your face in runny blots of amber. You’d look like a photograph yellowed by sunlight. You’d look like you could use a drink. I was afraid of you as a child—the wheelchair you, the slack-jawed you. If you asked about school, it was in whimpers, garbled interference. In this world, you talk like Sam Elliott, and I can make pisco sour like a true Peruvian. Here is my city; there is so much sky. So you’ve worn down the soles of your shoes. We could get in my neighbor’s Mustang, careen west with the hood down, into the scorched frontier where everything is alive or dead. We become cowboys in big sunglasses, snapping pictures with Googie motels, not smiling, old-Hollywood-style. For now, you sit in the living room and I have your hand in the crook of my arm. I teach you a few words in English like little souvenirs. In the gardens of what you can’t answer, I pick flowers and line them along your flat cap. When you leave, it’s like I’m tucking you away for safekeeping.

Martha Paz-SoldaN

Buried Alive The papaya man would make his rounds at dawn and wake me and my sister with his hawking. How ripe could they be? I’d complain to my mom later as we’d stroll about the block, me and Abuela, arm in arm. She’d stop to give change to girls selling candy, missing teeth, missing shoes. I’m missing something, I’d think as they ate the gifted candy, I’ve got to be. When we return, I know all the ways. The country is ten years older but the landlines and clotheslines still crisscross atop the houses that bump elbows. The fruit is still cheap. I pick up on the swear words, but they sound older in my great aunt’s mouth. My grandma’s shushing her, but she’s already pointing at the kitchen where it happened. He hitand-ran. When she hears, my mom’s all spitfire, spitfire, and I guess I don’t know all the ways. She says there’s no need for balaclavas here. And there I was, on the streets, pocketing my earrings. There, I want to tell the papaya man, the whole block, pointing to the crosshair clotheslines, there’s your ultraviolence.

Lived-In You can move through the walls of your home. Dance in the hall and the floors will stretch too. They reach to hold you with limbs of their own. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a soft understanding for you alone, the house having been built around you: you can move through the walls of your home. Standing on the ceiling, you dust as you roam, pressing hands to places that pieces fall through. They reach to hold you with limbs of their own. The sunlight presses through the windows over the cordgrass to your rendezvous. You can move through the walls of your home into the roots of the banana tree, grown deep. The clotheslines, the shed, the morning dewâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; they reach to hold you with limbs of their own. You pretend not to hear the crack of bones or see trinkets fall from the shelves in slews. You can move through the walls of your home; they reach to hold you with limbs of their own.

MARTHA PAZ-SOLDAN

Memorabilia I can’t seem to pull you out of the clutter, just the high-top sneakers I wore back then. Maybe there’s a photo of you loitering beachside in pajamas, the tide around your ankles, but I don’t have it. I’d remember more than your jokes if we hadn’t lied so much as kids. When you grow up landlocked by suburbs and grasslands, there’s plenty of room to make believe. After you moved, a townscape settled in your place. My mom’s papaya tree took shape. I can still see you in Super 8 film, nodding off in the background of that New Year’s party, mid-conversation. Your email says you’d like to visit before you get worse. You’d sit across from me, home from the sea, listening to your MP3 player. We’ll be here after you’re gone, not grown up, not nostalgic, not yet spectral.

Kyla Jenkins

Group 1 (Left) & Group 5 Mixed media collage and drawing on paper 13

Cookout After Moving Mixed media and found image on watercolor paper

Kyla Jenkins

Florida Assemblage 3 Film photography

Callisa Lawn

Florida Assemblage 9 Film photography

Reprise The world losing its every rhyme is nothing new to us as he kneels on the prie-dieu, my stance erect as an idolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s before him, our flesh and bone seeking some rush of immortality without speech or revelation. The deserted church looms over us, rooted to its design while we soar away on denim wings. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll return upon the murmuring urge for poetry to course through us again, bodies anew, our treasured palimpsests.

Danilo Marin

Leander and Hero I. It wasn’t dark when I swam out to Sestos, my back a red tide beneath the twilight. Gulls chorused the miles ahead of me as if heralding my coming to you, but they worked in vain. You’ve already lit your spark against the blackening sky. I follow the current in favor of love (as it’s always been), never wavering, and picture you stripping oﬀ your peplos, softening your skin with olive oil after hurrying a hymn to Venus, readying for––the gulls shriek, the wave pulls, and your flame burns out with a single blow. The strait tucks me deep, soft as our bed sheets.

II. I stayed awake for you as your keeper. The storm has left its stain on my eyelids but nowhere else, except for crabs washed up, glittering dead now in their sandy tombs. Perhaps passion ebbed. Prudence returned you to Abydos, and we’ll thank Minerva between garbled moans, our bodies rippling the waters to reclaim our yesterday. But the fishers cast their nets––I see you in a huddle, death’s bycatch, captured bare. “Leander,” I call out. You don’t look. I don’t jump oﬀ the tower instantly. I sit on the window sill, watching gulls until I can’t harbor my body’s weight.

garden snake his agile body slides gut-first through coriander, a confession running-on past the breath that fueled it before closing around my heel in an anklet of malachite, tightening the grip on our unblessed union until I shake

Danilo Marin

Al chocoyo desde mi hamaca Unlike the guardabarranco that swishes its neon-blue train and puďŹ&#x20AC;s its proud little chest to bellow out an aria, you, my dear, harmonize to the melody of the country, a peasant bird with wings like foliage. Shame is molted plumage as you lend your good ear to what you hear and make song of it all, from the stillness of a lake to the murmur of volcanoes, without a quiver in your chirp. You know artâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in the practice so you stop, listen, and sing again. I close my eyes, give in to the sway. The wind never sounded so clear as in your voice right here.

Fixation III Digital and chalk pastel on paper

Claire Elise

Fixation I Digital and chalk pastel on paper

Bodyspace II Chalk pastel on paper

Claire Elise

Bodyspace V Chalk pastel on paper

Guinea Fowl The shrubs thrummed with sundown bugs, and without street lights, the lane’s only glow came from unshuttered kitchen windows. When the wind blew or a dog barked, a frantic flapping of wings and bellowing uproar ruptured the quiet and shook insects from the hedges. The tenant flung open the door, throwing light and curses over the shuﬄing houndstooth backs of his cluster of guinea fowl. No amount of shouting or lamenting the wrecked magnolia petals, pale and concave, like cracked eggshells littering the sidewalk, could silence them. What’s one to do with his unquiet flocks?

Emily Ruth Hill

Marl In the homeownerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s park I practiced drowning. There the conditions were perfect: a layer of marl floated on top of the water, disguising it as solid ground. Other things contributed to the illusion: sticks, algae, small crustaceans. I was young enough to be undisgusted by the muck and determined to impress some skinny boy I liked, so I would make a show out of plunging into the scummy water. Every time I did it I would stay under for longer, motionless, trying to force him to feel some kind of loss as if I had actually drowned, but I always surfaced, sputtering and filthy.

White Ibis Occasionally, we meet here at dusk to walk our dogs. I try to stay a few steps away to avoid riling your irate hound, but I drift too near. He snaps at my pupâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ears, and an awful quarrel erupts overwhelming our shy conversation. Now a flock of white ibis rises above the treeline. One croons softly as it glides overhead. Their airborne bodies seem close enough to touch with palms outstretched, and for a few moments there is no sound except for the white rush and thrum of wings. Even the dogs fall silent, side by side. I wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t remember how long we stood here.

Emily ruth HILL

Zebu Above the tall grass, only the pale backs of the calves are visible like sandbars in a green strait. Slowly they raise their heads, fine and deerlike, with drooping leaf-shaped ears and dark watching eyes. The boldest form a throng at the edge of the field. They look at me and I at them. I stroke their long faces and their dewlaps like velvet stage-curtains and the strange lines of their humped shoulders, and I observe our mammalian sameness. The milk I was fattened on could have come from their mothers or their mothersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; mothers, and the brewerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s grains that fatten them now could have fermented my glass of stout.

In the Backyard Mixed media

Montana Grace Wilson

At the Dining Table Mixed media

Meewee and Peewee Oil on wood

Kylee Jo Skidmore

The Male Graze Fabric, carpet, mixed media on wood

Kylee Jo Skidmore

Persistence/Invasion/Times Square/Pick up the Phone Your Alien-Bitch Half Is Abducting the Pervs With Her Army of Space Lobsters (As a Metaphor 4 the Consumed) (Detail) Fabric, acrylic, ink, paper pulp, candy wrappers, cotton stuďŹ&#x192;ng, pink mints, and dated knitting magazines

Madeline Boyd

Yellow Painting Oil on canvas

Micah Lomel

Planes Acrylic and spray paint

Patrick DInmore

Send Me to the Brook It’s cold here. Limbs are taut and veins are stiﬀ. Loud cracks from rifles and sickening thuds plague the ear. Vernal pools now covered in ice are marked with holes from disfigured eights. A man sentenced to his porch sits frozen in his rocker. “Send me to the brook,” he pleads through puﬀs, tobacco dimming the air: “at least the water moves there.”

Alexandra Lampner

Motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Mornings Sipping sorry coďŹ&#x20AC;ee she operates a butter knife like a trowel. Swollen fingers tend to apricot marmalade. She spreads the same to-do list on a slice of dense brown loaf. She has lived this morning a few hundred times now. She scrapes the remains of marmalade from the lid, savoring energy. This is the only promised sweetness of the day. The sun is in position; my mother clears her plate.

Dismantle 3 Multimedia screen print in gum arabic

Brett Taylor

Exterior 3 Digital print

Burden Pile (Detail) Acrylic, charcoal, chalk pastel, and ink on masonite

Ryan Haddix

Electric E takes the L train late one night to the disquieting glow of the Lower East Side, gets oďŹ&#x20AC; at Avenue C. She buys an orange from the girl in the deli, whose name she thinks begins with T, or R? she wonders, as in Are we in love? Am I meant to be with her? or, Would it be weird to see her again? but instead just takes the train back home and eats her orange in the electric light.

Maetavee genevieve SHubeck

Anorexic Thirty, when her illness took her, the middle sister, Emily. Emily, who, after her death, lay buried in a coﬃn sixteen inches wide. She loved her brother, mourned him, lay by his grave and slept. Her last week she spent drifting listlessly through the halls, an ascetic ghost, feverishly hungry. She denied anything she could— just for the game of it. Refused food. Refused water. The trees outside wept, and Charlotte, who had always known she would live the longest, grieved for a body still alive. Emily, dizzy, and drunk on power, screamed, fought, kicked as hard as her body could manage. She showed no remorse the next day when Charlotte, as she had always done, resigned herself to bringing her sister breakfast in bed, only to find Emily awake and in the kitchen, carrying on her domestic duties, baking bread she wouldn’t touch. She called this living. We call this wasting time. She grew sick. Her body begged her to die. So she took oﬀ her shoes. She climbed right into bed.

The Cattleman’s Herding Plan For His Lover Don’t flush red, just bring the milk to the door. Bring the milk to the door, and don’t flush bright red. Just bring the milk to the door and let his fingers graze yours. Hand him the milk and knock on the door. No, knock on the door and let his fingers graze yours. Yes, don’t flush, don’t flush bright red. Hand him the milk and let his fingers graze yours. Just hand him the milk and linger in the door. Linger in the door, and don’t flush bright red. Don’t drop the milk as his fingers graze yours. Just hand him the milk and don’t blush flight red. Bring the milk to the door and let his fingers graze yours. Don’t flush, don’t flush bright red.

Maetavee genevieve Shubeck

Early in the morning my father mows the lawn before it gets too hot. I can hear the motor from the kitchen, so I drag a chair to the sink and climb on it to fill a cup. When he sees me in the window, he smiles and waves. In his floppy hat and tattered shorts I bring him ice water. He wipes the sweat from his face like tears. My father is a handyman; he pops his knuckles with a symphony of cracks. When he’s done, he drives us to the grocery store, grabs cheddar and apples, lets me pick out the loaf of bread. I say, I’m worried I’ll choose the wrong one. He tells me I’m doing just fine.

Woe: Guilt Film photography

Shannon Sutherland

Abstracted Grief: Guilt Film photography, digital manipulation

Royce Abela Royce’s work consists of both digital and film photography. He aims to create work that alters what is seen objectively by a machine into what he feels and wants to convey.

Emily Ruth Hill Emily is a fourth-year English major and farmhand who has a black lab named Rooster.

Madeline Boyd Using atmospheric elements of lighting, color, and space, Madeline works to convey the eﬀects of substance abuse and the hookup culture that takes place in college towns. Her piece depicts how these interactions often leave one with a feeling of loneliness.

Kyla Jenkins Kyla draws her art from the philosophy of understanding the past and exploration of memory. She has learned that memory has the ability to be repeatedly reassembled each time the mind revisits it, causing distortions and errors. Her process of art-making relies on those fragments and recollection of diﬀerent moments, objects, spaces, colors, patterns and more.

Patrick Dinmore Patrick is a freshman who studies English and French, and this is his first published piece. His favorite part of the writing process centers around creating a poem from a predetermined title. He also loves dogs.

Alexandra Lampner Alexandra was born in Miami, Florida, and is completing her degree in English. A Young Writers Workshop at Bard College at Simon’s Rock started her fervent love for writing. She writes poetry and prose and dabbles in photography.

Claire Elise Gleaning from her experiences with mental illness and eating disorders, Claire creates large-scale paintings and works that focus on compartmentalized thought, conflicting identifications within separate areas of the body, and the ensuing mind/body/spirit connections’ evolution.

Callisa Lawn Callisa enjoys capturing the right moment through film photography. She returns to familiar places to capture the detailed ambience of the scene whether it be in an abandoned house or swampy palm tree farm.

Ryan Haddix Ryan focuses on the habitual American acts of overconsumption, waste, and how these actions enhance or degrade the human identity. He believes humans and trash are inherently linked and strides to persuade viewers to observe the pieces wholey instead

Micah Lomel Micah is a third-year painting student and multidisciplinary artist. She began painting at the age of eight and considers her little sister her muse. She works with themes of family, feminism, and the mundane.

Danilo Marin A two-year veteran Tea contributor, Danilo is a junior majoring in English and Portuguese. He has also participated in the Harn’s Words on Canvas competition. Martha Paz-Soldan Martha is a third-year English and PR major working to further her passion for poetry by taking workshops. She works at the Hippodrome Theatre as a marketing intern and at The Agency at UF as a copywriter. Maetavee Genevieve Shubeck Genevieve is a second-year English major. They live in Gainesville with their partner and their retired greyhound, Nona.

Brett Taylor As a disabled queer individual, Brett utilizes Crip Theory––the relationship between disabilities and queerness and the actualization of the self. His works question how physical and societal heteronormative barriers exacerbate the phenomena of “othering.” Montana Grace Wilson Montana was born and raised in North Carolina and currently resides in Gainesville, pursuing a drawing major. She lives with her cat and is inspired by the outdoors and the people in her life.

Kylee Jo Skidmore Kylee Jo is a senior drawing student who focuses on using humor to address current and historical feminist issues such as the objectification and commodification of female sexuality and the negative male gaze. She fuses ideas and aesthetics associated with comfort and chaos in her work, as well as incorporating sewing and various textures. Shannon Sutherland Shannon’s work consists of film photography where she explores the complexity of grief and how individuals approach it diﬀerently.

Want to be published in Tea? We publish annually and accept submissions from all University of Florida undergraduate students. Find out more at tealitmag.com or find us on social media @tealitmag. Questions can be sent to our team at staﬀ@tealitmag.com.

;-)

TEAXXI

tea is the official espresso-sipping trombone blues on a sunday afternoon zine of the english society