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Tea
Literary Magazine VOL. XX
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Selection Process Tea bases its content on impartial votes by the reviewers of our editorial staff. The magazine is entirely student-produced and any undergraduate attending UF can participate in the selection process. All submissions are emailed directly to the Editor in Chief of Tea. The staff meets weekly and reviews the submitted works, which are displayed with their creator’s names redacted. Since the Editor in Chief is the only person who knows the identities of the artists, they do not vote, except in the instance of a tie. In this way, each work is selected anonymously. The reviewers discuss the integrity, mechanics, and technique of each submission before voting on whether each piece moves on for further review. If a majority agrees that a work deserves more deliberation, it will return for the final round of selection.
Due to the anonymity we afford our submitters, staff members are permitted to submit to the magazine. We do not, in any form, give preferential treatment to any poetry, prose, or visual art submitted by staff members. Tea has spent more than a decade perfecting our review process and we take it very seriously. The result is a magazine that represents the best work produced by our student body. Those interested in being featured in Tea 21 should submit their work to Mirjam Frosth, the succeeding Editor in Chief, at editoroftea@yahoo.com. We look forward to your submission.
During the final round, reviewers rate each piece with a numerical value and the highest averaging works are slated for publication. Only after the total selection is determined are the identities of their creators revealed.
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Staff Editor in Chief
Andrew Cushen
Co-Editor
Bailey Underill
Executive Poetry Editor
Claudia Conger
Executive Prose Editor
Brett Hymel
Executive Art Editor
Mirjam Frosth
Graphic Designer
Shreya Labh
Editors
Levi Cooper Jeremy David Haas Sydney Hayes Karen Libby Danilo Martin Brianna Steidle
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Blackbird Prize for Poetry As of Fall 2014, Dr. Mark Law has been the Director of the UF Honors Program and has, in good spirit, agreed to the continuation of the Blackbird Poetry Prize. The Blackbird Poetry Prize is awarded each year to an Honors Student whose poem will be featured in Tea. This prize is sponsored by the UF Honors program with funds provided by the Wentworth Scholarship Fund, originally advocated for by Dr. Kevin Knudson, Professor of Mathematics and former Director of the UF Honors Program. Dr. Knudson is an “occasional” poet—a professor of mathematics with a confessed “lifelong interest in writing and reading poetry.”
In 2012, the prize’s inaugural year, Dr. Knudson named it for one of his own favorite poems, Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” This year’s winner is Katharine Angelopoulos for her poem “What Goes on in Silence,” an aphoristic, leaping piece that subverts the present progressive. The poem controls a careful economy of scale, synthesizing innocence with the haunting imagery of “forked tongues.” Here Angelopoulos chisels beauty out of experience—her voice razor-sharp as the talons of any bird.
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Palmetto Prize for Prose Seven years ago, an anonymous donor endowed Tea with the means to reward one undergraduate writer a year with commendations, and the Palmetto Prize for Prose was born. On the fourth foor of Turlington, a plaque honors these yearly winners. Jill Ciment is the author of Small Claims, a collection of short stories and novellas; The Law of Falling Bodies, Teeth of the Dog, The Tattoo Artists, Heroic Measures, and most recently An Act of God, novels; and Half a Life, a memoir. She has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Art, received a NEA Japan Fellowship Prize, two New York State Fellowships for the Arts, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
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Among these prizes and accomplishments you might find her kindness, willing as she was to choose this year’s winner. The winner of the Palmetto Prize for 2018 is Brett Hymel for his story “Some People.” In Jill’s words, “The writing is taut, the situation unique, and [he] stuck the landing, as they say in gymnastics. The last line had punch and resonance.” She extends her congratulations to Brett. Brett’s name will join those of past winners John Moran, Danny Ennis, Lindsey Skillen, Ciara Lepanto, Jordan Dong, and Andrew Cushen in an etching that will embellish the fourth foor of Turlington for years to come.
Contents POETRY
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“Sunday” Jeremy David Haas
“Afternoon Tea” Ruth Chavez
“Serenity” (acrylic, paper craft) Estefania Torres
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“After Atlantic” Claudia Conger
“Haikus” Mirjam Frosth
“Cowboy” (ballpoint) Estefania Torres
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“Of Death and the Water Bottle” Danilo Marin
“Davie, FL” Jeremy Haas
“Eruption” (acrylic) Estefania Torres
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“Fetal” (digital) Heather Hart
VISUAL ART
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“Little Havana, Miami” Rhiana Suarez
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“Eavesdrop” Mirjam Frosth
“Seven” (photograph) Mirjam Frosth
“Life Ain’t Easy” (linocut print) Ros Fiol
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“Red Mist” Pedro Tirado
“The Busker” (acrylic) Jess Kian
“Chimney” (photograph) Giovanna Landicini
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“What Goes On in Silence” Katharine Angelopoulos
“Two Women” (graphite) Ros Fiol
“Cesar” (mixed media-pen, photo, digital) Ros Fiol
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“The Postpartum Season” Giovanna Lancini
“Nine” (photograph) Mirjam Frosth
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“The Sea” (mixed media-pen, photo, digital) Brett Hymel
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“Happy Land” Claudia Conger
“My Mother’s Flowers” (etching print) Heather Hart
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“Saint Peter Visits His Hometown, Pequeña Havana” Danilo Marin
“One” (photograph) Mirjam Frosth
“Some People” Brett Hymel
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“Koi Fish” (watercolor) Estefania Torres
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“Curb Appeal” Taylor Mott-Smith
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“Hava Nagilah” Brianna Steidle
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“Riptide” (acrylic) Estefania Torres
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“You Know?” Jeremy Haas
PROSE
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Welcome to Tea 20, If you’re reading this magazine, congratulations! You’ve made it to college-level reading, and that’s a privilege, isn’t it, considering the scope and tenor of history. Ain’t history a drag? Ain’t God a drag? You know what has a small history and no God? Tea!
Yet, it can be so tiring, sorting out what in the whole widening world deserves time and attention. Everyone has something to say. Everyone thinks they’re a comedian, or thinks they’re not their parents; life is work. I understand. I get tired too.
I’ve been doing Tea for a long time, and for a long time it’s been pretty damn good. You might not know it, but we’re older than you; we’ve been publishing at the University since ‘95, back then as some punky ‘zine. If you wanna see what that looked like, check out the Grand Reading Room in Smathers. Ask for Tea, and if they give you trouble, well damn, clarify, be more exact when asking again. We’re respectful here!
So read a story, a poem. Don’t settle; make art. Because you’re not like the other [clever way to deconstruct gender and the sentences]. You’re doing it—sorting through the miasma, getting a degree, falling in and out of love, and yet you’re still here. Life for you will not be tedious and brief.
Though don’t misinterpret our kindness, we don’t tolerate just anything that comes before us. We’re like you—there are boundaries to our hearts, rules to our beliefs. I don’t wake up in the morning and start from scratch, figuring out as I go what I stand for, and neither do you. If this magazine fell into your hands, you’re probably the exacting type; you know how to punctuate your life’s sentences. You know what you want and what it rhymes with. You get it.
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[get some personality!] [wax ~poetic~] [Call to action?] Fuck it up,
Editor-in-Chief Tea 20
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Sunday was plucking rusty strings. stinking, flea covered and singeing his beard. humming– dirt in my sleeve, once humus beneath. the talk of dull cull life lulled me to sleep, alley in Mumbai chemical sky, same as Jackson summer asphalt burning and I, pulsing and sweating and standing street side with a limp lump of cardboard, in black magic marker marked when I was beautiful, I wasn’t holding brown bags soaked by cold cans: high gravity eight point one percent.
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“tastes like motor oil” she said, covered in sand at the sticky white beach. her sand stuck to me. she was beautiful when she walked down the pier, then sat by her absent-minded lover slowly slugging brown beer. lie on a mattress, starchy cloth, writhing, with my stagnant legs, my cauterized smile, and my breath. Jeremy David Haas
Of Death and the Water Bottle Centered on my mahogany table it stands, a solitary pillar. Life’s like this water bottle— no, that’s not quite right. The simile can’t contain its subject very well. It will overflow. What fits then? What will I make fit, then? I don’t have the right words to dress life’s big, fat circumference in metaphor. Perhaps on my deathbed they’ll unspool before me in a final revelation,
the horror laying me out flat like a shadow on the pavement. Life will continue being life, as the water bottle will continue being a water bottle, both unaware that, for just a moment on this page, they were star-crossed lovers. Danilo Marin
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After Atlantic The closest beach knows nothing of parking garages or days as blue as lips after swimming. Our gentleness drives us into the ground, disappearing & coming back as something greener, something different. We’ve mistaken the sun on the Atlantic for the end of the world. Claudia Conger
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Some People Edgar swears that he can be used as a flotation device. “I have lesser bone density,” he says. “Doctors tell me that I can keep up to eighty pounds afloat on my stomach.” We tell Edgar that he’s been drinking too much of the punch. “It’s true,” he insists. “Harrison’s seen me do it.” We look over to Harrison, who shrugs. He doesn’t want to be involved. The punch is good, but not as good as the box wine. The beer is good, but flavorless. There are many lights on the porch, hanging from wooden beams that run from one part of the roof to the other, similar to trusses. The soft yellow bulbs look like shiny grapes on a vine. There’s lots of noise, but it’s ambient, meaningless, party noise. I know a kid, Rubin, who walks around events like this and pretends to slip roofies into peoples’ drinks. He dances through crowds of people with the little white pill in his hand, fakes tossing it into this or that cup. “Go away Rubin,” people say, and when he’s had his fun, he drops the pill into his own cup, lets it sit for a minute, and then drinks it himself. I don’t think there’s any menace in him. Some people are just like that.
There are many pretty girls here, but they drape themselves around sofas and sit on counters like cats, which makes me nervous. A girl puts a cracker in my mouth. “Try this,” she says, and although I don’t see any harm in trying it, I accidentally bite her finger as she slips it out of my mouth, and she drifts away, angry. I get the impression that other people are watching, and I wander out of the room, dejected, not because the girl is gone, but because other people saw her go as well. We find Rubin in the upstairs bathroom. He has a bath drawn and is sitting in the tub, completely nude, his arms and legs spread as far as they’ll go against its edges. “Why are you in the tub?” we ask. “I feel as if I’m dying,” he says, “And I don’t want it to be messy.” “I’ll save you,” Edgar says, takes off his shirt, and climbs into the tub. On the porch the lights swing from the wooden beams. It’s a cold night, and windy, and the stars, for the most part, are obscured by the same thin gray clouds that drift across the moon. The music from the speaker buzzes softly in our ears and in the bases of our skulls as we tell each other how much
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we like the song that’s on. In the song, a man sings the highest falsetto I’ve ever heard. Just as he hits the peak of his wail, we hear a deafening crash. A bird has flown into the glass door. We all crowd around. Nobody can think straight, and we’re not sure what to do. A man picks the bird up. “Return home,” he shouts, and flings it into the air. It twists through the sky and falls into the pool with a heavy splash. “I’ll save you,” Edgar says, takes off his pants, and climbs into the pool. Edgar gets on his back and floats out into the middle of the pool, but the bird is at the bottom, so Edgar shuts his eyes and sticks his arms out and just drifts across the surface, smiling. “How sad,” everyone says, and we decide to give the bird a proper funeral. We take flowers from the flower bed and toss them into the pool; everyone gets to throw something. When we run out of flowers, people begin to pull up tufts of grass and throw that into the pool, then cans of beer, bottles of wine, decorations from the living room, streamers, confetti, ornaments, snacks from the kitchen, picture frames, paintings, and small appliances. Edgar lets the flowers cover him, even on his face, and now he is laughing, as flowers tickle his cheeks a
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and his nose. “I feel as if a part of me is missing,” Rubin says as he drops a bowl of fruit into the pool, and some of us even believe him. Brett Hymel
Little Havana, Miami To the children of Operation Pedro Pan They did not sail above sandy shores dripping salt. Their banners and flags grappled onto simmered clothes like bodies scrambling for spines. It was January of 1962. Fourteen-thousand slept on wings that sliced through orange clouds. Swollen eyes like mangos, nostalgic for abuela’s kiss. Around here, we remember the dawns of our people. Wet-footed and clumsy in the quivering current, we remember how easily bodies of flesh resemble horizons. Breaching the elbowed air with splintered breaths, limbs, like cornered colours, inch to bear weight against the sky. We remember life as seekers. Seekers of substance, with stubborn shadows outlined in plumes of cigar smoke beady and unashamed;
Seekers of praise, With a work ethic that even Castro cannot cage. Our people pace Calle Ocho as though stamped Into the colonial walls of El Caiman. Our people, they continue to search for their homes within these walls. And yet, it seems not this shoreline that draws our aching limbs in, scratching for mercy and chartered air, but those slanted voices curling calmly above your quick tongues, Saying, “Here. Take my hand.” Rhiana Suarez
Seekers of pleasure, With croqueta-stained teeth and merengue-swayed hips; Seekers of faith, With gritty rosaries and copy-paper saints splayed across our dashboards;
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Eavesdrop my dad, fifty-five years old, on the phone with his girlfriend, speaks softly, excited as he hurries to put on his shoes and go see her Mirjam Frosth
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Red Mist I learned how to ride a muddy, tin-can bike, and cycling was more interesting than Napoleon Dynamite. Going up was difficult. All those lizards and dirt in my New Balances. Cruising down was better than baby-back ribs. The hill grew like it was made of magic beans that, if swallowed, would blow my sinewy stomach into a puddle of pink Vienna sausages. Going down was like a Technicolor short film. Styrofoam helmets are like parents— they’re there to protect you, but it’s way more fun when they’re not! My bike fell down the hill. It split into a thousand metal pieces, sparkling mist in the sun. Bicycle destroyed, I realized why they packed them in Styrofoam. “Handle with care. Fragile package. DO NOT DROP.” Red rover, cherry wheels, once two, now two thousand. The bike wasn’t red before it went down the hill. Pedro Tirado
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What Goes On in Silence Sarah is teaching me to play hopscotch, one bare heel burning against blacktop. Her father is in the backyard smoking cigarettes, leaving ash marks like roman numerals against the door. Sarah is teaching me to draw rattlesnakes with white scales and pink tongues that curl over the asphalt. Her father is twisting rosary beads  around his knuckles, shutting his fists over a prayer. Katharine Angelopoulos
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The Postpartum Season Lights on houses at Christmastime, birds looking at you (always at you), a small boy not knowing any better, a grown boy still not knowing any better, cars moving faster than necessary, dressing up, especially when you’ve no place to go, coughs like chimes, growing deeper each time, your hands shaking— wishing he would stop shouting out the syllables of your name. Giavanna Landicini
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Serenity Estefania Torres
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Whenever an art teacher would be like “Oh, you need to paint this,” I would like find a way to do it like completely differently… I’m very stubborn. I’m not a fan of people telling me exactly how to do something, especially if I can make it my own. My friends in New York were like, “Yo, you really look like you fit in there.”
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Happy Land Their bodies, too, ended up on the sidewalk, dragged out by police and firemen. “The fire could have happened at McDonald’s,” The New York Times quoted the landlord’s actress wife. Happy Land, a club that posed as a not-for-profit, served liquor to minors, and had only one exit. In 1990, one dollar could buy Julio González just enough gasoline to kill eighty-seven people. In the five minutes it took to extinguish the flames, six survived. Among the few was the disc jockey’s orange dog, third-degree burns marking its melted skin. Claudia Conger
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Curb Appeal Imagine my surprise when I walked out of my front door this morning and saw that someone had defaced my entire garage door. Thank God I’d gone outside to check the mailbox, otherwise who knows when I would have discovered it? Somebody had written the words PHYSCO BITCH in bright blue spray paint, in letters as big as my forearm. The paint was still wet, dripping around the edges like an ice cube.
I decided I would just have to paint over it. I couldn’t quite remember the name of the paint color on the garage door. I checked the filing cabinet in the office, and then I searched the safe and the computer files, but I couldn’t find the sample card or any documents with the right information. My ex-husband must have taken them with him, anticipating that one day I’d need to repaint the garage door. He did things like that.
My first inclination was to survey the property for any evidence that might have been left behind. Surely a perp who was careless enough to misspell half of his taunt would leave behind some sort of clue. A well-formed footprint in the soft soil by my begonias? The cigarette butt of an uncommon brand? I hadn’t found anything when I realized that the paint would soon be dry. I had to act fast.
I took a very good close-up picture of the garage door and drove to the hardware store. After deliberating among the swatches, I took home samples of True White, Ultra White, Driven Snow, Delicate White, White Lace, Ice Floe, and Moonbeam, in both flat and satin finishes. I tried each swatch on the bottom right corner of the garage, inconspicuous behind the tendrils of my Bleeding Heart plant. None of the paint samples were right— either too cool, or too warm, or too dark, or not dark enough. I hadn’t bought enough paint to repaint the whole garage door.
I assembled a team of household cleaners: bar soaps, dish soaps, disinfecting sprays from the Big Three (Clorox, Lysol, Pledge), lemon Pinesol, white vinegar, bleach, baking soda, whitening toothpaste, and this industrial-strength stuff that was bright green and could only be legally sold in eight-ounce bottles. I used different combinations of these solutions with sponges, brushes, scouring pads, and steel wool, but the spray-painted message would not budge.
I sat down cross-legged in my driveway, looking up at the message on the door. I was sweating and my shoulders were all the way up at my ears. This meant I needed to calm down. When I was younger, my late mother would tell me to close my eyes and become a sea turtle on the sand. You have sleepy
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eyes and a big hard shell, she’d say. You’ve been here for years. The sand is never cold and the waves have never sounded any different. I returned to the hardware store and purchased a can of bright blue spray-paint. I’d never used a can of paint before. When I shook it, it felt like I was loading a gun. In the space above the message on the garage door, I sprayed the words RESIDENCE OF and, next to it, my house number, which I’d always thought was a little hard to see from the street. Taylor Mott-Smith
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Saint Peter Revisits his Hometown, Pequeña Habana I. Here the silhouette of an abandoned church droops on the sidewalk, condemned to reflect until sundown. Across the street— women in tank tops saunter past the spray-can fresco plastered on the derrière of a Sedano’s; old men in guayaberas smoke cigs under the shade of a coconut tree, puffing out ancient prophetesses’ dreams; sweaty angel torsos soar over chalked clouds on an asphalted sky, reaching for netted halos, wingless.
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“Tu destino está escrito aquí,” I could almost hear them gurgle. Fuck that. II. I raise the tinted windows, panning my vision to the highway ahead. III. My hunger’s crowing. Danilo Marin
Hava Nagilah Morning unfolds, waking the sheep and the scrolls and the carts on cobbled roads where learned men mingle with goyim.
In three years, anger and buried fear will come to light in the temple, and this couple will flee through the smoke.
A young boy perched on his father’s roof, suspends the shtetl dawn in a pendulous tune,
But tonight the bride circles twice, then five, now seven times, and the world was not the only thing made
while the shul waits for Gombin’s Jews. They come dressed in their Sabbath best for a day of freylech and fiddling.
in seven tries. New love has solidified, smoldering in two pairs of talis-shaded eyes. All that’s left is to dance.
The rebbes hoist the chuppah with smiles; the weight of Halacha, ordinarily stone, today is birdsong
Mazel tov, they chant and cheer and clap as the bridegroom crushes the glass, and scattered, the shards begin to dance.
emerging from the bows and the strings and the wrinkled hands of light-hearted klezmorim.
Brianna Steidle
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Afternoon Tea Side by side, a man plops in a camping chair with more holes than distressed jeans, and a cat tops a stool—an opulent thrown—swaddled in a sweater matching his man’s, muddy green as soccer fields. Relaxed during high-noon, their bald heads glisten like freshly greased pans, while a boombox plays Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The man serenades his cat with a well-tuned air violin; the cat responds like a man at last call, swaying. Does a cat have the capacity to look parched? The man, attentive, fills two tea cups and places one before his pet. In unison, they both begin to sip like royalty, pinkies saluting gods. There’s pure sophistication in men and hairless cats, lounging in mid-December— a sweet, tan raisin meowin’ at your side, heinous matching sweaters, tea, and Vivaldi. Ruth Chavez
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goddamn gold sunset on green valley, beautiful, like some shit from a painting apparently every cobblestone in oslo has a vengeance against my ankles jesus christ gulls, stupid gulls, all clamor and all protest, all for noise, for nothing Mirjam Frosth
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You Know? I was driving home from work today when I noticed this building, this café, you know? I was hungry, you know, because I didn’t have breakfast that day. So I stopped in for lunch. You know those patio seating areas that eateries sometimes have? Well I was sitting outside in one of those and I was eating this tuna sandwich. This was an incredible tuna sandwich, you know, like maybe the best tuna salad sandwich I’ve ever had. And you know I’ve had a lot of tuna salad sandwiches.
You know the dollar I gave him? Well, he rolled it up, and used it to snort a line of the powder. Then he said to me “you know, you can have this other line if you want.” And I’m no square, you know? So I took the rolled up dollar and snorted the other line. But it wasn’t cocaine. You know what it was? It was sugar, like powdered sugar, you know? Jeremy Haas
The patio was completely empty, by the way, which was weird because it was such a beautiful day, you know? But then this guy, this raggedy, you know, vagrant looking guy approached the patio from the parking lot. He sat down at my table and said, “You know I could really use a dollar.” I gave the guy a buck, you know? What else was I supposed to do? But he didn’t leave. He pulled this container from his coat pocket, like a vial someone might keep cocaine in, you know? He poured some powder, you know, from the vial, in two straight lines on the table.
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Davie, FL Mosquito larvae lurk in the tepid canals lining Stirling Road; these steep ponds drain what was once sweet, swampy, green and wet Everglades. Now they’re ditches for drunk drivers to swerve in off the black tar. Oh, I can smell the burnt rubber! I was a well-fed and stoned teenager pacing along the road, trekking up the overpass with a pocket full of dro. My skin was sweaty and sliced by sawgrass. I looked down at the interstate— the headlights, iridescent. I felt lost in their drivers’ lives and I wondered why they were passing by my forgettable edge lands. Jeremy Haas
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