TEA
FOREWORD
Tea 26 was designed, produced, and edited solely by the University of Florida undergraduate students. The opinions expressed are those of our contributors and do not necessarily represent those of Tea editors and staff or University of Florida staff, faculty, administrators, or trustees.
Copyright 2024 by the University of Florida’s Tea Literary & Arts Magazine. Tea, and by extension the University of Florida, has received permission from the contributing students to reproduce the content of this magazine for use in physical and digital publishing, social media, and any other reasonable academic uses. Submissions are welcome from all University of Florida undergraduate students.
More information can be found at tealitmag.com.
Editor in Chief:
Preslie Price
CABINET & STAFF
Art Editor:
Ayla Santos
Art Staff:
Ella Kunzke
Mary Hanson
Noie Prouty
Maggie Kiley
Roxie Faye
Prose Editor:
Chloe Grant
Prose Staff:
Isa Bairnsfather
Isabella Motola
Jessica Braatz
Lacey Buchwald
Megan Martinez
Sam Douglas
Sam Waterston
Samuel Bullard
Victoria Kevers
Alexandra Fanaro
Bryce MacKay
Eluney Gonzalez
Ruby Freeman
Gabriel Vazquez
Photography Editor:
Daniela Bendo
Photography Staff:
Anna McFarland
Julianne Mooney
Kaylie Johnson
Presley Lomel
Sydney Hinton
Poetry Editors:
Ansley Burtch
Sofia Bringas-Correa
Poetry Staff:
Kayla Conde
Sarah Ellis
Isa Flores
Sofia Galvan
Noah Hamer
Hanley Renney
Jude Singleton
Madelyn Walker
Owen Ward
Design Editors:
Campbell Johnson
Sarah Garfield
Design Staff:
Laura Newman
Jenna Bartkovsky
Hiral Shukla
Turner Toliuszis
Lauren Shee
Marketing
Director :
Campbell Johnson
Webmaster:
Mary Hanson
Historians:
Laura Newman
Jenna Bartkovsky
Anna McFarland
President:
Ian Jackson
Vice Presidents:
Alexandra Del Canal
Chloe Grant
Treasurer: Jupiter Jones
External Events
Coordinator:
Fabiola Vindas
Events Staffers:
Julia Hubbell
Britnee Lynch
Aliya Zarrouk
PRIZE WINNERS
The Blackbird Prize for Poetry: “Armageddon à la Rockwell” by Olivia Maynard
“I have mixed feelings about poetry prizes. The real reward, I think, is to be chosen for publication alongside other fabulous poets. To be in good company; to feel that their good poems make your poems look good; to catch the resonances between and among them; this is gratifying enough without a ranking system.
“That said, I was asked to single out a poem for special praise, and I chose ‘Armageddon à la Rockwell’ because it takes on a difficult subject with a surprising angle of attack. Told in the third person, using terse, sometimes even flat language, it juggles an abundance of vivid, telling details in a short space. It notices everything, and editorializes very little. It is subtly satirical—how ironic that the (maybe dying?) mother must celebrate her and her country’s birthday on the same evening (is there an implication that the country is also approaching its termination?); how droll that the host is British, with a fridge full of Peroni; how quaint that the grandparents are bickering over their Hiroshima trip while the sky is ‘burning’ with fireworks. The banality of the all-American family cook-out cuts against the dread induced by the sick mother and her lack of appetite, her nosebleeds. Without undue poeticizing, the poet conveys a true sense of despair.
“At the end of the poem, I circled back to reassess the title, the epigraph from Nietzsche. The word ‘loving’ leaps out. Since nothing in the poem seems loving at first, it starts to dawn on me that all the emotional weight of the language rests on the turn from ‘the mother’ at the start of the poem to the more personal ‘Mom’ in the last stanza. A chink in the poet’s stoic armor. And yet the flat, formally casual tone (that devastatingly deceptive ‘on occasion’ in the last line) keeps the horror at bay. The control and balance in the poet’s tone—the suppressed fury at the ‘chittering’ in the face of inevitable loss—is magnificent and true.”
—Author and Distinguished Professor of Poetry Ange Mlinko
PRIZE WINNERS
The Palmetto Prize for Prose: “A Winter Sickness” by Eluney Gonzalez
“A whole marriage is telegraphed in these few pages, which are mysterious and moving. Stories this short must pack a punch, and in the last paragraph, this one packs a wallop of a punch.”
—Author and Distinguished Professor of English David Leavitt
The Autumn Blossom Prize for Art: “Who #3” by Maggie E. Kiley
“I am choosing ‘Who #3’ for the Almond Blossom Prize for Art. Who #3 is a print of an series of eight bust figures against at textured background. One of the most interesting things about this piece is how it hovers between abstraction and representational imagery. The profile of each bust is composed of strips of subtracted color and texture from the background giving us the shape of a figure. Glimpses of realized facial features float in and out view. This gives the work a sense of movement and progression as your eyes travel from one figure to the next. This piece’s use of repetition and color is a cause for more looking. Four figures use contrast with a warm red and maroon and stacked on four with a cooler blue and green on the bottom. There is a vibrant yellow and white in all figures that create a sense of harmony. Conceptually this piece makes me think of one’s identities as they shift throughout time and what is that relationship with our humanity and how we relate to one another.”
—Distinguished Professor of Assistant Professor of Drawing in the Expanded Field Antoine Williams
Through Time
by Makena Vargo
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Dear Reader,
With inexpressible excitement and gratitude, I welcome you to Tea 26! As more components of our beautiful magazine came together, I recognized my voice would have to croak out some form of an introduction. I was stricken and mortified by the thought of you believing this letter to be pompous, skippable, or at its very worst— plain.
Softly and gently, after pouring through submissions and past editions, I am reminded that you are here for the same reason I am: we find the very best love in the midst of art.
This love letter is postmarked, stamped, and addressed to you. Inside is the heart of our artists, editors, and staffers; we kindly place it in your hands. It is a blessing to have found so much joy in the creation of this book.
Here it is, my friend. This issue is a gift for you and because of you. It has always been yours, anyway.
With an abundance of love,
Preslie Price Editor in Chief
by Sureily Marestein
Blooming Citrus
Acrylic on Canvas
West of Immokalee
by Ansley Burtch
Mercurial sounds, the rookery full of blue darkness, sweet smell of softened wood, the small birds chiming, not yet culled from the nest—
what Spanish cockleshell boats must be sunken here, and their coins and cannons with them, hidden under habitual floods, silky amphiumas, cypress lining the ferned way.
We eat mouse melons from the vine, going through the thicker brush, seed pods hanging from our clothes—little freeloaders— and we listen for the minute silences, those pauses that suspend us.
Much has been lost here, and you search for what no one else cares to find— I am here to keep watch.
We come to a deer’s nest, a fallen-in wall, the oldest human thing in this country. The dark faces of trees watch as we stand still, for a moment only—you are about to let me in on something— and a crashing animal—lapsus linguae of the forest— interrupts us, and we inhale, listen; we move on.
Bruciare all'inferno
by Cec Wood-Barron
With my aching heels clacking through the cragged cobblestone of St. Peter’s Square, I could only remark on two things:
One, the streetlights were warm here, and two, the red wine had stained your bottom lip like egg tempera.
Today, we had walked two feet apart, trailing each other’s step through the Sistine Chapel, looking down.
Tonight, you’ll let me twirl you to the sounds of a busker’s chitarra, as they try to pluck our wallets, and I will only lean in when the church bells glance away.
by Ava Johnson
Weeping Willow Ballpoint Pen
Sanctify
by Sydney Hinton
Continuity by Kaylie Johnson
ojos de lisboa
by Anna Oswald
Nunca he escrito algo en español. Bueno, nada en otro idioma que no sea inglés. Pero quizás lo puedo intentar, ser poética en español. Vamos a empezar con algo fácil, medio básico. Me gusta ver sus ojos. Para mi, los ojos marrones son bellos. Para mí tienen tanta vida y expresión. Cuando veo los ojos suyos, veo una ciudad bañada en luz de atardecer. [Old brick roofs flooded in late afternoon’s Sun, glowing a rosy brown. In an old European city, maybe Lisbon. The light also flushes old town buildings, specifically those rugged white ones with brown crevices. The ones that look like they’re made of large molded shells. You know the ones. The light that also brushes over olive trees and kisses stone floors—kissing every crack and spout of plant bud that grows within them. The light that sprints across blue doors and peeks at you while hiding under church arches or in between cobblestones. The light that takes a dip in glimmering waters and scurries across diamond lakes hundreds of golden fireflies bolting across a sky made of calm ripples. The light that makes you swear the people in paintings move, as if every color had pressed their lips softly in the brushstrokes between the golden or wooden frame. The light that makes the sounds of the violins swell and spiral tenfold, as if their bows scratch their strings so hard you can almost see a fire hatching from its bridge. A light so liberated and timeless and...]
Found Poem from Real Housewives of New York City Season 3
by Sadie Giddis
Let’s make a nice toast to my grand marshal; she’s lost the run of herself, eloped in jeans. You can hear her like a horn, the messenger delivering a yard sale of body parts, a bleeding playground. I might forget that scary island of hers but I will never forgive its unveiling: she, a psychic, an idiot in a skating dress, her mouth full of honey, her dress a ribcage.
Funereal by
Sydney Hinton
Junk Drawer
by Stephanie Seraphin
SECOND PLACE IN THE DADE COUNTY SCIENCE FAIR written on a trophy; the red golf ball painted to be Mars rolls around. There is a tangled ball— a symbol of friendships that have come and gone. So much colorful thread remains, connecting the dots loose pushpins couldn’t bear the weight of anymore. A broken watch with a forgotten favorite character’s face goes off—the second time it’s right today.
Taj ahal R sta rant M nu with missing letters that can now be found glued to last year’s vision board. It is mismatched with clippings of models from magazines too outdated to have any faces like the bug-eyed one caught in the smudged magnifying glass. An unreturned invitation, wedged between journals full of half-written poems, to-do lists, and documented interactions with the universe.
The Best Recipe for Soup Joumou with testimonies from all the mothers in the family, months of phone calls and generations of blood bound between a few pages.
A VCR from your childhood library’s farewell event, business cards of a therapist and the psychic, a napkin with the bleeding address of the cemetery your dad left a voicemail saying someone he was once close with, would be buried at.
Birth Certificate, social security card, the only photo ever hung up on these walls, now in a cracked frame with the same fading faces. A pocket knife. Pepper spray. Back-up jewelry in case beauty was forgotten until on the way out the door.
Receipts that have been kept as grudges, unspoken debts to be paid back before it is too late.
PERFORMANCE TUNING the Female Body
by Leia Ciociola
Europa
by Olivia Maynard
I spent Spring Break mornings chain-smoking on the beach, masking the taste of tequila before my girlfriends started the night again.
On Friday, we began early, chasing the apricot surf in neon string bikinis, allotting pills under the tumbling sun.
I wonder which drug went to my head first. A white bull down the shore roamed our way, and I wanted him to move faster.
His body was like a huge, milk-stained glowworm, hide spun from star matter.
Is this what they mean when they talk about God?
His horns were pearls and fit inside my hands as though they were mine, too. He sucked on my fingers like a baby and licked like a dog with an elastic Jell-O tongue. I climbed on his back, and he carried me into the water; I hoped my friends would be jealous.
My bathing suit loosened against his wet skin, and I wished I had tied the thing tighter. I remember how he put himself inside me, how I was too dizzy to swim away, all tangled in his bright, wild bones.
Postcard #154
Mixed Media Collage
by Ian Jackson
A Summer of Invisible Birds
by Eluney Gonzalez
Even with the yard at its hottest that summer afternoon, I again found the old man sitting in the grass by the fence line, scattering handfuls of seeds from inside his shirt. He had done so every day since the winter I arrived at the Southwest Prison Camp for pickpocketing a plainclothes officer. Today, however, was the first time I sat by him and asked what he was doing.
“Fee’ing the birds.” He responded. The old man gestured to the pile of black and brown seeds on the ground. The wind stirred them about, making leaves flutter, with no birds in sight.
“The guards threatened to take my seeds,” he told me, shaking his head and frowning. He leaned toward me, unfurled his shirt, and exposed a hidden pocket sewn into the orange fabric of his prison uniform. A few sunflower seeds spilled onto his pallid stomach.
“Keep ‘em nice and hidden. Can’t steal my seeds.”
I nodded. Of course.
I spent most of my time that summer conversing with him in the yard. Most inmates kept me bereft of good conversation to not stir up trouble—not that I could blame them. After two weeks of little more than a nod, though, I felt desperate.
In the mornings, we discussed the people we once were, in the afternoons, the people we
wanted to become. He told me his name was Carlos, and I shared mine. I shared more about myself with him than any person I would call a friend. Throughout our conversations, I always wanted to talk about the birds. I never did, though I did wonder where the seeds went; at evening, they were there, and by night, they vanished.
One afternoon that summer, I arrived in the yard at our usual time and found someone else had already joined him: lanky and bone-thin, his arms tattoo-covered. They stood some three paces apart, each with their arms crossed just under their chests, gesturing pointedly with their hands. I slowed as I came into earshot.
“That doesn’t change anything – you still owe.” The other man said.
“I din’ buy nothing from you, Flaquito.”
“Sure, you did, can’t you remember?”
Flaquito drew closer, a hand patting Carlos’ shoulder. “Those seeds, they weren’t cheap. I got half, but you still owe me the rest, huh?”
“No... but...” Carlos scrunched his face in thought. I thought he was looking past me, but his eyes were cloudy. He swallowed a lump and continued: “You’re right. Sure, I do. ‘Course.”
He reached into the other side of his shirt and pulled out a sheet of stamps. Flaquito grabbed it, counted its contents, then patted Carlos’ shoulder again and left.
“Who’s he?” I asked after Carlos sat down. Carlos shook his head, looked past the fence and his strewn seeds, his hands tucked between his knees.
“Seed guy. Just my seed guy.” He muttered eventually. Carlos didn’t say more than that.
We spent the afternoon in silence.
That evening, I saw Flaquito standing at the corner of the yard, looking at us, waiting. I excused myself from our conversation early and hid by the door that led to the cafeteria. After Carlos retired to his cell, Flaquito crept by and swept the seeds on the ground into a cloth bag.
Our conversations continued the next day as if nothing had happened, though I now accompanied Carlos throughout the prison. Either by his side or watching across the room, I was always close, waiting for the right moment. It came after a week, on a rainy morning before morning dismissal for lunch. I saw Flaquito approach Carlos from across the yard. No one with him. I neared and listened to their conversation unfold.
“Oye Carlos,” Flaquito began, “I’m missing the other half.”
Carlos creased his forehead and frowned. “I’ve already paid you, din’ I?”
Flaquito snickered, looked around, and back at him. “Yeah, half. Need the rest.”
Carlos mimed words but said nothing, his hands absently reaching for his hidden pockets. Empty. He looked at Flaquito, arms wide. “Please, I can get you back—”
Before Carlos could utter another word, Flaquito’s fist connected with his jaw. Carlos staggered, grabbed the fence with one arm and swung blindly with the other.
Flaquito stepped aside and pushed him, Carlos’ leg falling out from under him. He hit the ground with a crack, his arm pointed stiffly to the sky.
Just as Flaquito positioned himself to land another blow, I ran up behind him and kicked the back of his right knee. It buckled, but the other held him. He whirled, striking me in the nose and sending blood flying.
Enraged, I grit my teeth and charged him, pinning him against the fence, then slammed my forehead into his jaw once, twice, pulled back, and watched him collapse to the ground right next to Carlos, whose chest was sunken, unmoving. Blood ran from his forehead into his dead, open eye, turning it red and glassy.
I turned to Flaquito and kicked his chest, face, and ribs until both my legs were sore and his blood turned the puddles around us the color of Carlos’ bloody eye. A guard tackled and cuffed me before dragging me away, my skin peeling against the concrete, my screams echoing along the cavernous halls.
They extended my sentence. Transferred me someplace else, too. Upstate. No matter: my heart was in the right place. I take things easy now, talk to no one. Even in the hottest summers, I sit in the yard, near a spot by the fence Carlos would have loved, casting out food for invisible birds from a hidden bag of seeds.
The Object
by Makena Vargo
Untitled
by Sydney Hinton
Acrylic with Watercolor
by Zoe Chu
a hole into my skull: biology
God Told Me His Name Is Brad
by Chloe Grant
Cross-legged with shit-faced strangers in a dimly lit room, I clinked cheap glasses over unfamiliar music belted from clearance-rack speakers. Clouds of smoke settled above the shag carpet. Through my bleary gaze: a vision delivered, not from Dante, but from myself— a doobie-driven Delphic oracle. The rug sprouted grass, the frat house faded, and the strangers and I sprawled across His greenest pasture. From a great hill in the carpet, descended God. He greeted His disciples with divine fist bumps and performed holy miracles. Turning water into tequila sours, He asked me to stay in His paradise. When I hesitated, the vision collapsed. I was resurrected by the thrumming bass, my head swimming with revelations best drowned. I then only wished to kegstand the Kool-Aid.
Who #3
Linoleum Prints and Acrylic Gouache
by Maggie Kiley
Me and My Dog
Mixed Media Collage
by Rita Hippe
On the Bus
by Aya Chouaibi
A small roach crawled along the wall of the bus, its antennas circling quickly and efficiently. Nadine was too tired to lift her head off of the window, and she knew she wasn’t going to cause a scene in front of all the passengers or even indicate there was an issue, so she resorted to following the roach’s movement with her eyes. It gave her something new to do, as she was quickly growing frustrated with switching between songs that she couldn’t listen to all the way through and audiobooks she couldn’t focus on over the roaring engine.
She often worried about her attention span, particularly in times like these when it felt almost painful to listen to a three-minute song in its entirety. She increasingly found herself needing more media to consume, and more at one time. She needed to be reading a book and listening to music and scrolling through Twitter and catching up on a podcast at the same time to be satisfied. Sometimes she was surprised (and a little disappointed) when she would start a video on her phone and the music would stop playing, as if she expected both the phone to play the two audios simultaneously and herself to be able to process them at the same time.
She watched the roach zig-zag across the wall aimlessly, wondered what it was thinking, if it knew where it was or what it was doing. If it was
alone or had other roach friends hiding in other cracks and crevices no one bothered to look at let alone clean. She wondered if it was abandoned, the lone roach on the bus, with no idea what it was doing. Tears began to well in her eyes then. She knew it was a lot to project onto a roach and was very aware she was being ridiculous. This had happened once before, with an old man. He boarded with a bald head and a handheld binder, proudly presenting his card and greeting the driver with a smile, a courtesy that college students (including herself) were less inclined to do. He rode the whole way with the ghost of that smile on his face, looking out the window. Nadine wanted so badly to know what he was doing there, did he go to the university? Was he a professor? Late-age graduate student? Did he have a family? Girlfriend? Has he ever had sex? When the bus pulled into her apartment complex, he got off at the first stop. As he alighted, he yelled out to the driver, “Thank you very much! God bless you!” and walked off alone, a kind of jerky walk that is particular in old men, so that it’s more waddle than walk. Nadine had to physically fight the urge to break into tears right then. She turned her head to follow the man as the bus drove by, and felt her throat tighten so badly she couldn’t breathe for a second or two. She was sure it was the “God bless you” that had gotten to her. The elderly had a
way of making religion look so endearing. Sometimes.
The roach had crawled into a tiny space in between a pole and the seat in front of Nadine so that she couldn’t see it anymore. She was very aware of the man sitting next to her because his thighs kept touching hers. She wasn’t sure if this was on purpose, though it almost never was. Nadine thought she might be clinically delusional, as she was always trying to create some sort of sexual tension in extremely mundane settings. The bus happened to be her favorite. Every time it would approach a stop, she would peer out the windows, looking for attractive men. She would sit up straighter, put on her best pout, and try to look immensely uninterested. She scolded herself for this a lot, and wondered if it bordered on some sort of sexual harassment at times. They never paid her a second glance, but she never gave up. She just waited for the next stop to start her performance all over again.
The bus lurched forward and stopped abruptly. Nadine’s head was jolted out of place, and she sat upright to see what had caused the sudden stop. It was just a red light. She shared a glance and a smiley grimace with the man next to her, one that said “bus drivers, right?” He smiled back. She felt a rush of approval, like she had done the appropriate thing, made the right face, and got the right reaction. The feeling was accompanied,
however, by a gnawing sense of regret. She liked the bus drivers and often felt bad for them. Not in a pretentious pitying way, she liked to clarify to herself, but in the sense that she wished they were treated better by everyone: passengers, general society, the government. They were mostly old, and there was something about seeing old people working instead of sitting in a rocking chair that made Nadine so depressed, and even angry on their behalf. She sometimes wished she could fill in for the drivers so they wouldn’t have to eat their lunch while they drove. She probably couldn’t though, because she had an awful sense of depth perception, and many times had thought the bus was going to hit the curb or the cars next to it, only for the bus to glide right by, almost magically. Nadine grabbed her lower lip between her index finger and thumb, wondering if the driver had seen the face she made. She looked at the mirrors at the front of the bus to test whether she could identify herself. She couldn’t really. Still, she didn’t want to appear ungrateful. She decided to make up for it by adding a “so much” at the end of her usual “thank you” when she got off at her stop.
Happy with her solution, and a little less plagued by guilt for having expressed patronizing annoyance with the man who was so graciously giving her a practical joyride, Nadine fixed her eyes on the woman sitting across from her, but five seats to the left. She looked away quickly. She had
been trying not to look at all. She knew this girl. They had gone to middle school together. Actually, they had been friends. Nadine remembered going to The Cheesecake Factory with her when she was thirteen for a mutual friend’s birthday. Nadine thought it was the most grown-up thing in the world, to get dressed up and wear heels and put on eyeliner and walk into a restaurant and say you had a reservation, to follow the host, to say “I’ll have a water, thanks” even though she may have wanted a lemonade. She got her period for the first time there, and the girl instructed her on how to insert a tampon from the other side of the bathroom stall. She wondered if the girl remembered this. Sometimes Nadine was sure she remembered more things than the average person, like what someone’s favorite song was or whose mother was an alcoholic. She didn’t think anyone remembered anything about her. At the same time though, she always worried when she told people personal information about herself, like they were secretly recording her and would expose her to the world at any given moment. Every so often she would make herself absolutely sick over this, and vow to never reveal anything about herself to other people. Then she would yearn for meaningful connection again, graciously giving her a practical joyride, and the cycle would start over.
Nadine had already reached the conclusion that the girl from middle school who was her friend
was doing better than she was. She, of course, knew it was wrong to compare and was totally aware that she actually knew nothing about the girl anymore. It didn’t really matter, though, because Nadine felt as though everyone else on the bus, at school, in the entire world, knew what they were doing. She didn’t know why, but she felt like the entire universe was playing one huge trick on her. Laughing right in her face, she thought, and she could hear it at times when the wind passed through the trees. Why was she the only one who couldn’t make up her mind? Why did she miss her mom so much? Why did she feel as though her entire adulthood she had been trying to catch up to a life that had already outrun her?
Nadine rolled her eyes, painfully conscious of how dramatic she was being. And anyway, it didn’t matter who might have been doing better than her because she knew she wasn’t going to be there much longer. Where “there” actually was, she didn’t know – in town, at school, or in her current state of mind? Maybe all three. She just had a hunch that something big was going to happen. Maybe not directly to her, but at least something in her vicinity. Something that would fundamentally change the way she was living her life, perhaps even the way she viewed life in general. She felt as though she was in a state of perpetual waiting for this occurrence. She couldn’t describe what it was, naturally, but it
reassured her in times like these when she began to obsess over what she was doing, what she was going to do, or what she wanted to do.
While she waited for whatever big thing was supposed to happen, she sat quietly, on the bus, and thought about what she was going to eat for dinner.
cosmic giraffe
by Kaylie Johnson
Wire, Lights, & Log by Noie Prouty
Mark Twain, Two Fathoms
by Kayla Conde
He was America’s prodigal son, a boy on his uncle’s farm, open-mouthed in autumn to catch the falling frosted walnuts before the pigs could, and again in summer, anticipating the crack of prize watermelon on the kitchen table, two halves of a giant heart sacrificed, revealing the rich-red meat no dye could imitate. Eyes closed, his cheeks reddened with the red of the melon, the Mississippi dripping from each bite.
Fifty years later, he’d come back to where the farm was, recognizing Jim Wolf and Laura Wright by where they should have been, Jim reaching for the yowling tomcats on the ice-slicked roof, Laura standing silent, smiling, on the boiler-deck of a steamboat with farmhands for a crew, the scent of wheatgrass loosened from her pigtails. He laid them in the notebook from his breast pocket, its riffling whiff like the crisp mornings of Hannibal.
Ophelia Sir John Everett Millais
by Olivia Maynard
Embraced by the painter’s viridian, you sing for Death, arms outstretched as though Heaven had already seeped through your belly and nested in your blood.
A poppy washed cadmium red stares out, and raw umber swaddles your starry dress.
You sink into Nature’s wide mouth, eyes parted in the cool, static water.
Teach me how to die. Did you know the willow branches were like soap bubbles, too ticklish to support your touch? Did you count, like blessings, the beads on your gown as they tugged you below the ugly muck?
by evening light
by Kaylie Johnson
Watercolor, paper, & collage
by Mary Bella Durham
Mother Nature Buried Me
A Winter Sickness
by Eluney Gonzalez
You stop the car and linger before stepping onto the frosted-over grass. The house, which you used to call ours and now only hers, sits across a garden choking with weeds and Camelias withering in the cold. The first week of winter—which always comes in October before retreating until December—and she hadn’t covered them in time. She must be sick. You cluck your tongue, wondering whether that’s the truth—not knowing whether you prefer the truth—then exit the car with the bag trailing the CVS receipt.
You remember she always hated the doorbell. Since you’d left, she had placed what looked like an entire roll of duct tape over it. You consider tearing it away and ringing the bell anyway. Then you knock three raps. A delay. A fourth.
She opens the door and regards you carefully. She’s never looked worse; she’s wrapped herself in a clean and fluffy bathrobe, her skin pale, eyes drooping, lips cracked. You hold out the bag with the words CVS tattooed on the side, and she brightens.
“Oh, you’re the best, Amor. I know it’s a lot to ask, the way things have been—”
As she reaches for the handle, brushing your hand, you drop the bag. It hits the ground and a pouch of cough drops and a bottle of cold medicine tumble out. You wince and ask yourself why you did
that but regain composure. She looks at you, disappointed.
“When I say we’re finished,” you say, “I mean it.”
She stares at the mess on the floor and then up at you. “Why did you even come?”
You shrug. Her face, now alone, is worth the drive.
“I mean, is that all you came here to do?”
Why did you come? It’s not her asking this, it’s you, and no answer satisfies you.
“Your plants.”
“What about them?”
“Want me to cover them?”
She squints at the shriveled stems. “They’re dead. What would covering them do?”
“So you do understand,” you say. She picks up the bag from the floor and retreats behind the door, starts to close it, and looks at you one last time. Whether in anger, longing, or confusion, you do not know. What you do know is that she will call again. She closes the door, then you sit in the car and wait, and when your phone doesn’t ring, you leave.
by Campbell Johnson
Hold Me Back
Acrylic paint & Fabric
Marta Allens’ Resignation Speech-
Full Transcript
by Andrea Matos Devesa
Dr. Marta Allens’ resignation speech from St. Ignatius University following queer sexual scandal (September 15, 2011)
Marta Allens: “Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. As I am sure you all are aware, I am Dr. Marta Allens. I have been an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics department here at St. Ignatius University for almost nine years. It has come to my attention that I have recently become a topic of much conversation and controversy on and off campus. I feel it is only appropriate for me to address these rumors head on, as many of my morals have been unfairly questioned.
To begin, I have been a devout Catholic all my life. I pray every night before bed, attend mass on Sunday mornings, and on Wednesdays, I often go to confession. To question my devotion to God is to question my very personhood. However, I believe that each person’s journey with Christ is an individual one, and that each person must find their own path for themselves. As a result, I do not necessarily agree with all of the beliefs upheld by the Catholic Church, and it is because of this fact as well as the following series of events that my faith has fallen into concern.
On Tuesday September 8th, a series of images were released. These images had been taken over the course of several months and depict me meeting privately once a week with a young woman. The images show the woman and I in private, albeit compromising situations, such as kissing. There have been debates about whether these images are real. I am here to assert that they have not been tampered with. These are real images of real events that transpired.
During my separation from my now ex-husband, I grew more social with my professional peers and began to connect with others in my field. It was in one of these connections last March that I first felt an internal struggle regarding my sexuality. This, of course, cemented my divorce. Following this interaction, I spoke to Father Michaels and turned to the Scripture for the Lord’s guidance in the troubling times that I was experiencing. These two resources gave me conflicting answers. Father Michaels advised that I beg for forgiveness for my wandering thoughts. The Bible told me to prioritize love over all else, as Jesus would have done. At the time, I chose not to explore my sexuality further as I needed to focus on my work instead. I was recognized by the University later that year for my outstanding accomplishments.
While attending a mathematics conference on the weekend of June 13th, I connected with Ms. Agnes Robinson who was, at the time, working as a teaching assistant for Dr. Adam Milburn at the University of Wyoming. She is the woman
that you see with me in the photographs from last week. We met occasionally, whenever she was in town until she was transferred to St. Ignatius’ pure mathematics program last month, at which point we began meeting more regularly. We strategically chose to meet at a diner about an hour away from campus to limit the risk of either of us being seen by our superiors or peers. We have been in a consensual monogamous romantic relationship for three months. The photographs leaked were taken by one of Ms. Robinson’s classmates, who shall remain anonymous as per the University’s wishes. This student attempted to blackmail me for higher marks in his classes using these images and I am ashamed to say that I initially accepted. The student then proceeded to share the photos with a peer, expecting that no one would find out and our deal would remain intact. It was this peer who provided local newspapers and student organizations with access to the dossier. Both students are currently under investigation by the Board of Conduct, but it is unlikely that either will face any long-term repercussions given the nature of the situation. I ask you to please refrain from speculation regarding these students’ identities, for their privacy as well as for my own.
I would like to formally apologize to the University for not reporting this relationship once Ms. Robinson transferred here. I understand how inappropriate it is for me to engage in a relationship like this with a student, especially one within my department, and I have nothing but regret for this unfortunate situation. I also deeply apologize to my students for accepting
the deal and therefore hindering your academic experience. I hope that you understand that was truly never my intention. It is because of these facts that I hereby resign from my position at St. Ignatius effective immediately. In addition to my resignation, Ms. Robinson will return to her position at the University of Wyoming under Dr. Milburn’s guidance. In waiting for a permanent replacement to be appointed, Dr. Brian Stevens will step in to teach my classes for the rest of the semester and Mr. Andrew Jameson will take my place on Dr. Stevens’ research team. St. Ignatius University also requested that I apologize for violating the moral code of conduct by engaging publicly in a same-sex relationship. This, however, I will not do.
As I reflect on my initial conversation with Father Michaels, I realize that the conflictions I found between the Scripture and his advice are rooted in opposing ideas of Christianity, and not in any fault of my own as I was once led to believe. My belief system, while very closely related to God, clearly does not align with the views of this school. Aside from my own actions, which have led many community members to call for my removal, I would feel uncomfortable continuing my work at this institution while perpetuating a set of beliefs that does not match my own. It has become quite clear that this institution and I have differing interpretations of the Lord’s unconditional love for His followers, differences that have made me incompatible with my position here.
Additionally, I would like to address the hypocrisy that has been shown time and time again within this institution. As a woman working in mathematics, I
have been told repeatedly by my coworkers as well as by members of the Church that I am not intelligent enough to further my field and that I would better spend my time taking care of children. However, some of the most lauded published works of this institution have been my own, published under the pseudonym of Franklin Bowery. As I leave, I take with me Franklin Bowery and the work that I have done to raise this University’s prestige to the level that it currently upholds, as well as any further works that I will publish under my own name.
Whether or not you subscribe to the belief that two women cannot be in love, the Lord makes it clear through His scripture that He intends for us to be loving towards one another. I hope that you can all extend some love and kindness towards myself and Ms. Robinson as we both prepare to leave St. Ignatius. Any further professional questions should be addressed towards Dr. Stevens or Mr. Jameson. I will not be answering any personal questions at this time. Thank you.”
This was Allens’ last public appearance before she was found hanged outside of her home. Her death was eventually ruled as an unfortunately public suicide after a brief police investigation but is widely believed to have been the result of a hate crime committed by a group of St. Ignatius University. Ms. Robinson soon after filed a lawsuit in an attempt to remove Franklin Bowery’s research from St. Ignatius’ library. Following advice from her lawyers, she accepted a $10,000 settlement two years later in 2014. Bowery’s many theses have yet to be removed from the St. Ignatius library or republished
under Allens’ name, despite recent online petitions calling for current Headmaster Jonah Dirst to do so.
Viewed
Acrylic paint on wood panel by Campbell Johnson
Armageddon à la Rockwell
by Olivia Maynard
“We love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
It was Sunday, the mother’s worst since starting chemo, the eve of her birthday, and the Fourth of July, celebrated at the home of her date, Butterwood, a British expat. He microwaved beans and greased up raw pork in between visits to his Peroni fridge,
looking for an out to smoke a secret joint with the eldest daughter’s boyfriend. The youngest girl shucked corn over the trash. Solar panels made the pool too hot for swimming, and the outdoor chairs were calcified in bird-shit. The children took turns checking their blood pressure with their mom’s monitor while setting the table. They watched her shovel Publix potato-salad from one side of her Dixie plate to the next. Vanilla ice-cream melted, forgotten on the counter. The meat was tough. Their grandparents chittered about their recent trip to Hiroshima, bickering over the expenses, while Mom had her second nosebleed of the night. No one remembered to buy fireworks for the biannual pissing contest with the neighbors. The dogs played with a dead cardinal like a rubber chicken, pausing, on occasion, to bark at the burning sky.
a time to reflect by Kaylie Johnson
First Night Abroad
by Charles Russell
Cascading rows of black English doors, twentyfour-hour SPARs, unassuming chippies, and windows with drawn curtains embellished the beige blocks. I noticed your smile wither into a frown as we exchanged the verdant flora bordering the airport for Tesco storefronts and cellphone plan advertisements. From our seats inside the Bus Àtha Cliath, we watched as the sky dissolved from a sheet of pale gray into blue. The weather wasn’t anywhere as gloomy as James Joyce and John Huston had led us to believe, but the sun still seemed to evade us.
We hadn’t felt lucid since our layover in Newark. Even in the stillness of the early morning, everything appeared to be moving at a faster speed than we could comprehend. The sluggish exhaustion that comes with traversing across time zones had not set in, but twelve hours of nonstop travel had pushed us into a headspace halfway between elation and delirium. I clung to my overstuffed hiker’s backpack as I took the form of a specter, phasing in and out of a rapidly progressing world that I was not a part of.
Commuters, tourists, and schoolchildren had begun to emerge from the sea of brick and mortar all around us, bringing an end to the tranquil haze we had been dropped into. The bus driver called out the name of our stop with proud inflection, first in Gaelic, then in the tongue of the Sassenach. Our neutral timbre of English speaking that came from two decades in the U.S. of A was alien in comparison. Thanks to the globalized ubiquity of Adidas and H&M, we received no unwant-
ed attention, but when I had asked the bus driver which of the upcoming stops was ours, I noticed a subtle shift in his initially warm disposition. Despite the shared lingo, our accents and word choices brought forth a host of assumptions that would take more time to disprove than we could spare. I didn’t blame him, of course. My fellow countrymen have a deservedly bad reputation in their approach to bodies and lifestyles unlike their own, which we had seen in full force at the airport. Stepping off the bus, I took a breath of air and marveled at how crisp it felt. This is Evian Water, you said, and back home is Dasani.
After a short hike from the station, and a brief pause for coffee, we arrived at the hostel. At the front desk we were greeted by a portly Danish woman who guided us to the maintenance closet that served as a communal luggage storage. You asked me to carry your pack so you could rest your shoulders. I cheerfully obliged. I wanted to do everything in my power to keep our mutual despair from catching up with us across the Atlantic. Walking through the halls of the hostel I was immediately struck by the spray-painted murals lining the walls, depicting headless figures in black suits, with the flags of various nations on their lapels, and clocks set according to different time zones where their heads once stood. The figures trekked through psychedelic abstract landscapes and stylized depictions of the city’s most iconic landmarks. Within the confines of this repurposed abbey, time didn’t exist the same way that it did out
on the streets or at home. The hostel served as a respite between home and the great beyond, which operated on different schedules.
Our beds were located within a section of the compound that retained more of the building’s original architecture. The multicolored wall art had not spread down to the lower levels, giving way to an arrangement of weathered red bricks and narrow stain-glass windows, each depicting a different saint deep in prayer. I paused to stare at the likeness of a saint whose name I had forgotten and recalled my younger self tuning out a sermon at the church on Lafayette Street.
Organized religion had not played a part in my life for many years, save for mandatory Christmas mass with my parents when I returned home for the holidays. For reasons known only to God, I found myself imbued with nostalgia staring into the beady black eyes of the fourteenth-century monk standing before me. I weighed the consequences of emailing my parents about where I was staying. I would have to tell them that I’d used the chapel for prayer, rather than a meditation on youthful ignorance. On the edge of spiral, before my terminal Catholic guilt set in, you nudged my shoulder and I fell backward into reality.
We spent the remainder of the day braving torrential downpours and loitering around every public point of access to Trinity College. Our avidity to see the library, where so many of the West’s greatest writers had studied, compelled us to brave the afternoon storm. Tinted by the sheen of the rainfall, the stone bricks of the campus’ main building reflected the sky’s empty expanse. After a mad dash through the rain, we arrived at the green in front of the library. On the glass door, a sign informed us that access was limited to students and faculty. The
librarians were holding a special talk on Bram Stoker and how his time at Trinity had influenced his work. You rolled your eyes when I sighed and said, This sucks. We agreed to look at the big picture and labeled this incident as a minor setback. In a dry reprieve underneath the entranceway to the Campanile, you remarked to me how comforting it was to be around so many people our age. They were doing the same daily tasks and suffering from the same academic anxieties that we had 6600 kilometers across the Atlantic. I concurred, but in the back of my mind I remained a specter.
Darkness had encroached upon us at a much later hour than we were used to. We had just eaten a late supper at a Pakistani-owned Chinese restaurant. Two old men had been seated adjacent to our booth and came over to ask in broken English if I was Russian. I had felt oddly embarrassed when I told them I wasn’t and scarfed down my Lo Mein to get away from them faster. Now we were in a rush to return to our hostel and share a few drinks with some fellow young travelers before calling it a night. We ducked inside as we heard chanting from the pub around the corner. You left your umbrella in the foyer. One of the clocks on the mural labeled for Berlin time, had stopped. In the lobby, a different Danish woman than we had met earlier welcomed us back. She told us that most of the guests were out in the courtyard drinking and smoking. Excited to finally connect with others, we scurried outside and sat ourselves at a large, but somewhat tightly packed, octagonal table. To show our tablemates we could hang, I retrieved two tall cans from my sports bag. Each contained a concoc-
tion of hops and tequila that would cause a public health crisis if ever brought stateside. While you poured drinks into cups from the kitchen downstairs, I tried striking up a rapport with our tablemates. I quickly discovered that most of our fellow guests were French high schoolers, whose English was limited to Hello and I’m sorry. I attempted some of the French phrases I had studied on Duolingo during the plane ride to try and meet them halfway, but their attention had already shifted back to the simulcast of One Piece they were watching on one girl’s tablet.
I was attempting to drink the aforementioned tequila-beer hybrid without letting it touch my taste buds when a Turkish guy in a leather jacket, probably a few years older than me, told me that there were Americans sitting at the table to our left. Reinvigorated, I got up and strolled over to their table in a desperate attempt to befriend another adventurer, since this seemed to have happened in all the stories I had heard of other’s trips to Europe and the British Isles. I greeted the young couple and introduced myself. You’re a little young to be doing a backpacking trip like this, the male, who was from Chicago, said to me. I told him I wanted to see the world, and that backpacking was a cost-cutting measure. He asked me where I had come from, and I told him I was an English major at the University of Florida. That place is a real shithole, you know that? he responded. I stared at him blankly, probably longer than I remember, given my drink of choice for the evening. I was going to ask if he was referencing the state or the university, but he broke eye contact and whispered something to his lady friend. The couple got up and announced to nobody in particular that they were going to bed. So much
for patriotism.
I sulked back to the table, where you were nose-deep in a Wikipedia article about the cliffside trail we were planning on visiting in the morning. The chanting from the pub and industrial noises from the streets had dissolved into silence. The Turkish gentleman with whom I had been sitting before my embarrassing encounter introduced himself as Wylef. He offered us a hit of the spliff he and his fellow contractors had rolled, which I happily accepted. He told me they were staying at the hostel for a month to paint a new housing development owned by a German expat, but the food and hashish were so bad here that they were considering rushing the rest of the job so that they could get home sooner. He confessed that he dreamed of becoming a chef who specialized in gourmet Turkish food and had accepted overseas construction work to pay for culinary school. I showed him pictures of the simit and labneh I had made in my dorm room to improve my baking skills. He smiled and told me that a glob of harissa in the center was his go-to strategy for making the breakfast staple more exciting. We chatted with him for a few more minutes, then said goodnight and walked back down the cobblestone steps, through the stained-glass hallway to our rooms.
The moonlight trickled through the stained-glass arrangement at the back corner of the room where my assigned bunk was located. I tiptoed to the bathroom and changed into my sweatpants next to a toilet that looked more like a petrified relic from before the Anglo-Saxon conquest than a functioning piece of plumbing. Opting to leave the challenge of finding running water
to bed. I waved to you before tucking myself under the quickdry towel I was using as a blanket substitute. As I began to drift off, I felt the bunk’s frame vibrating from the snores of the fully nude Peruvian man who had laid claim to the bunk before we arrived. To avoid the possibility of the snores keeping me up all night and trapping my brain in American Eastern time, I plugged in my headphones and put on Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out, the only album I had downloaded for offline access. Corrin Tucker’s fiery vibrato negated the vibrations, and I fell asleep.
I dreamed of us eating champ with Dracula and Sean Hannity.
November by Sydney Hinton
The Pines of Rome
by Cec Wood-Barron
Kyrie ad libitum, Clemens Rector; I.
A sharp swallow of the day dwindled between the inverts of calloused branches. The walls of a catacomb, a barren bark, cried for a warmer, melodic passage, while the beyond calls for the order of an overlap, a fall choreographed into silent movement.
II. The nocturne has welcomed us, come un sogno, drifting, like whisked air passing through Roman Pine leaves; a hymn resolving to a single note, no longer afraid of the dark. Nightingales orchestrate a ballad, for the sun is set, and it is cool once again. While the fly, in solitude, flutters its quiet wings, and soars.
Cold Metal Sky Things
by Anthony Calbough
Son of Abraham
by Elijah Pitt
I.
I have watched you die in many places: on the white-sheeted hospital bed where they last found your pulse; beneath a thin crust of chalk and formaldehyde; in the frayed, leftover clothes too vibrant to wear or throw away; in the single empty seat in a children’s theater; trapped inside the walls of Rose Hall; in the widened pupils of too-curious strangers; etched into the margins of Plath’s Ariel; next to a sitcom family’s smug smiles; lying beside an unfamiliar corpse; in the intimate shapes of my eyes and nose; nailed to a gold chain’s dangling crucifix...
II.
...Yet you are resurrected by the pen. Each iamb pumps blood to your heart; I break bread by recitation. In verse, I linger in your hospital room instead of rushing home. You show me the picture in your wallet: we lay on your old wooden bed; swaddled in your arms, I did my best two-toothed attempt at a grin. We’ve both missed that little boy’s smile, but in this moment you have faith it can be revived. I climb onto your hospital bed and place my ear on your chest. Your heart beats faintly; your breath slows.
I Killed Antoine
by Paola Villacís
#559
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once crashed his aircraft into the Libyan desert, where he and his mechanic-navigator André Prévot remained stranded with very little water left after miraculously surviving the wreck. Together, they hallucinated and saw mirages in the sweltering heat of the sands. Four days later, on the 3rd of January, 1936, a Bedu man on a camel found them almost dead of dehydration. The unlikely rescue saved the lives of Antoine and André. After this voyage, Antoine was inspired to write a children’s novel, The Little Prince.
However, only eight years later, SaintExupéry was presumed dead after his fighter plane disappeared. Telegrapher Hermann Korth hypothesized that Saint-Exupéry’s P-38 Lightning fighter plane was shot out of the Marseille sky, many miles away from his original flight path to Cannes, by a German aircraft.
In 1972, reconnaissance pilot Robert Heichele declared to have been the one who gunned down Saint-Exupéry’s P-38. His confession was ultimately disregarded on the basis that the aircraft he claimed to have flown in 1944 was not yet in service for the Nazis that year.
A second confession came 31 years later. A fan of Saint-Exupéry’s work, Horst Rippert, feared he had been the one that shot down the writer’s plane, his claim coming 64 years after the fact in 2003. Not many people believed him, for the
simple fact that there were no surviving evidence logs after World War II, so there was little to corroborate Rippert’s claim.
I know that they were both lying because the truth is this: I shot Antoine Saint-Exupéry out of the sky.
Now, this is hard to believe, of course. But I know I did it. I remember the details as vividly as I remember taking a piss this morning. I killed Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry, the French writer and aviator. I have every memory at my disposal to prove it. I know I did it, yet I am trapped in a nuthouse, so anything I say is rendered moot.
We’ll start with the basics, obviously.
My name is Lars Kolb, and I served in the Luftwaffe of the Wehrmacht during World War II. I’m writing—
Sorry, I had to stop writing. Someone came in, and he was looking at me funny.
I know that this might be confusing. In layman’s terms, I was a Nazi fighter pilot. I worked for the ones people called “die falsche Seite”— “the bad side” in 1944. The French had finally gotten rid of the Nazis—or so they thought. I was still there. I was, of course, disguised as a local. I went by the name Jacques Delon and rarely had to introduce myself, given that I was on a desolate French coast with only a singular town miles and miles away from our pseudo-base.
I was preparing to fly my Messerschmitt Bf 109—my fighter plane—around the Gulf of Lion and perhaps try my luck further into the arms of the Mediterranean Sea, hopeful that I could find some enemy planes to shoot at. My fighter was hidden in a shed, where infiltrated Germans had built a sort of safe house for us. It was far enough from civilization that we could fly the fighters as often as we wanted without a single local spotting the planes.
By us, I meant me and two other pilots. They rarely did anything but laze about and listen to the French radio or read the newspapers. Somehow, they had taught themselves French. I never stopped suspecting that they were French spies infiltrating the German forces, but I didn’t pull on that thread for a lack of interest. I only ever cared about flying.
So, one day, I left the cramped room we were tucked into and breathed in the fresh air. The three of us had gathered enough of a smell that one’s eyes would water if they were not used to living in the room or had forgotten it for too long. I’d worry about the smell later.
I got to fly for about thirty minutes before the real story started.
It was a clear day, not too windy, and not very cloudy. I had high hopes for a nice, relaxing flight. I had been given the usual orders to “patrol” and “kill on sight” if I spotted any other enemy aircrafts. Apparently, I was one of the few incognito pilots left. The other two liked to ignore their order letters. I can’t even remember their names, but they were never very chatty. I took off on my usual flight path, but near the thirty-firstminute mark, a plane whizzed below my fighter.
I almost removed my goggles to rub at my eyes.
Ach, du Scheiße. A P-38, right there in range for a neat, clean kill.
I began the tactical sort of flying that I used to do in earlier years when the Germans had a firm grip over the world and got to really fuck shit up.
Verflixt und zugenäht, it’s moving out of range. If I was going to shoot that bitch, it had to be now. I took a deep breath and glanced at my displays, showing the P-38 in delicious range.
My thumb didn’t have to do much more than a quick flutter of a press to sprinkle a series of machine-gun bullets into the enemy bird’s main engine. The violent chatter of the machinegun vibrated under my feet, my entire body shaking with the force of it, my teeth clicking hard. I licked my lips and watched.
Quickly, and without too much of a fight, the P-38 smoked below. Almost elegantly, it began to nosedive into the Mediterranean. Success! A pleased warmth spread fast through my body.
However, my joy was ceased when I noticed the pilot’s seat had ejected from the dead bird. I remember how fast my body broke into a sweat. He couldn’t survive. If he survived, he’d blow our cover. We weren’t far enough from the coast that he couldn’t swim back to safety. Someone with enough of a will to live could make it, which I just couldn’t allow.
I began to angle the nose of my 109, its wobbling arms preventing me from getting a clean, quick shot. The winds had picked up, and my arms wrangling the controls could feel it. The pilot had a red scarf, which was the kind
of hazardous attire typical of the French. They always dressed pompously, even aboard killer flying machines. Had he been less lucky, the scarf would’ve asphyxiated him when he’d ejected. However, this pilot seemed to be as lucky as they came. He’d survived my bullets, he’d survived the P-38’s engine exploding below him, and he’d survived strangulation by his red scarf. I was the only variable left, and I would make his luck run out.
I had always been a thorough person, so I began by unloading as much of the machinegun’s lead in the general direction of the ejected pilot. It would not do to damage his parachute, as the fall from this height would most likely not be fatal and I’d lose the chance to execute a clean, quick kill. The wind proved a mighty opponent, as it seemed to protect the French pilot while my arms wrestled to maintain a steady aim with the steering stick. My muscles burned with fatigue and overuse, but I willed the adrenaline to boost me on.
The machine-gun bullets did not help. I could try to catch him with the fighter’s propeller and probably have to eject myself after it got damaged, or I could eject right now and shoot that French prick like a real Deutsch. A German. I’d done little to cement my name during the war. Currently, Lars Kolb was merely spelled in the sand, one among a sea of millions; a faceless soldier. However, if I succeeded at this task, I could become Lars Kolb, one of the Luftwaffe’s last few standing fighter pilots. I would be the soldier who revitalized the Third Reich.
I grit my teeth tight into my skull and pressed the eject button.
Ejecting out of the plane was a cold slap of reality. The wind bit at my face, and my throat almost closed up from the force of the wind around me. I somehow managed to avoid being killed by my now-falling fighter jet, nosediving almost as quickly as the P-38 into the water. I could feel the pressure of my pistol holstered to my left leg, so I did a series of twists around my parachute to remove it from its clip. Armed and slowly descending to the Mediterranean, I could see the French shore of Marseilles, which was a lot closer than I’d expected.
The other pilot and his red scarf were many meters below, his descent even slower than mine. With as steady a hand as I could manage, I pointed my gun. Guided by the sun’s firm beat, I tracked the pilot’s head under the white parachute billowing over him. I closed one eye and aimed, squeezing the trigger and listening for the sound of my bullet exploding outward and onward. A second shot, then a third, and a final fourth to be safe.
The pilot’s parachute went first, sad and limp. The pilot went last, his body a rag doll, as it dove into the calm waters below.
The little prince landed soundlessly and gently on the sands of that desert when he left the earth. Antoine’s body, in contrast, landed with a deafening splash, his red scarf blending into the blood pooling around him. No migratory birds gathered Antoine like they had the little prince. No glass dome protected Antoine from the gales or the beasts like it had the rose in his book. The sun kept moving across the sky as Antoine’s body moved with the water’s current.
I began to scream, a deafening scream, a scream so loud my ears rang from the volume, scratching my throat in protest. I screamed until my voice was raw. Then I laughed. I laughed a mighty laugh that was barely a sound. The last sound I ever made was this wheeze, swept away by the wind. I let myself remain static in the slow descent of my parachute as I watched the pilot’s body bob lifelessly in the water. The red scarf of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry cast a striking contrast with the dark blue sea embracing him. I will look as if I was dead, but I won’t be.
Except Antoine was dead, and I had killed him. So, I directed my parachute toward the shore.
I never knew then why that death, why that kill, had rendered me mute. Why, that day, I lost my voice forever. Why I refused to utter another word ever again. I didn’t know. I was sent to the nuthouse when no one came—I had no one.
I only realized that I’d killed Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in 1996 when a nurse reminded me by handing me a book titled The Little Prince. By the time I’d finished the book, I was quietly pleased with the story, and when I finished reading the autobiography, I realized that even though I had rid the world of an artist, I wasn’t very sorry about it. My voice had been the price for that.
I never killed again after Antoine de SaintExupéry.
It’s been four days. I have to hide this letter. The nurses search my room, and they shred letter #558. It won’t be long before this one is found, too.
If the world knew the truth, they would give me more of those Scheißpillen—the medication. The truth is too much for many. The truth invokes fear. The truth is the most powerful human tool. What a waste! I’ll live my days in this nuthouse, hiding the truth from a weak humanity.
“Okay, Lars, it’s time for your medication.” They speak with sweet voices, like I’m a child. “Don’t get upset, Lars. Look, that’s a documentary. Do you like that documentary, Lars?” They ask like I’m stupid. They show me the VHS tape cover of Saint-Exupéry: Another Perspective, and they think I’ve made everything up, that I’ve been hallucinating again. But I’m the one who lived through it. I’m the one who knows what the truth is. That’s why no matter how terrified or sad it makes them, I’ll keep writing this letter. I’ll keep telling my story until someone finds it, believes it, and lets the truth out!
#560
by Adrian Al-Bahou
Oil on Collaged Drawings
by Sarah Stander
Me and Her #6
Miss You. Want to Go Spider-Hunting with You.
by Sarah Henry
After Gabrielle Calvocoressi
10th street. Empty moon. Don’t meet me downtown this time. Meet at mine. Want to go spider hunting with you. Late, till dawn. Bring snacks, a flask. Maybe cheese (don’t tell). You never knew me like I wanted. Miss you anyways. Miss you crushing contacts on the nightstand. Wish you—wish you would. Spring dandelions.
Pile-up car crash. Wish I could look away. Don’t know you—jinx! Want to. Miss you morning mascara smudge, miss you big band birdsong. Empty moon. 10th street.
Me and Her #8
Watercolor, Acrylic, & Embroidery
by Sarah A. Stander
Hermana by Dylan Santana
Wet warmth traced the line of my shoulder, the arrivals strip of the Miami International Airport barely registering in my senses. I was in the arms of a young woman whom I had never met before: my older sister, Camila. She held me, sobbing a torrent of pain I could not know and with a truth I did not believe. Her rush of emotions washed against my blank expression as I puzzled together what to say. I didn’t want her to feel alone in this revelation. I attempted to lift my arms around her, an effort to offer pity, a comforting squeeze or pat on the back—anything. I pulled out nothing from myself and stood there, limp in her arms, petrified by indecision.
When she finally pulled away, I realized that she had the same nose as my father—our father, my nose. I have a photo of my father in military uniform from his youth but no photos of Camila. She said something to me in Spanish, and I felt a sudden sharp frustration—a painful reminder that I couldn’t speak my family’s language. There were the stabs of about a dozen hooks in my sides, pulled by the hands of my Cuban lineage, tugging me away from myself and into a past heritage I could only dream about. I don’t understand my dreams, my heritage, or Spanish. I wish I could; it isn’t my fault that my friends speak English.
Our Aunt Rosa drove us into town, switching between English and Spanish to the point she gan speaking the wrong languages to
the wrong passengers. I stared and stared into the rear-view mirror, studying the reflection of my sister’s face, trying to convince myself she wasn’t a mirage. Passing above us, the gray Florida skies whispered with soft storms that shook the slouched palmetto trees to a shiver. I fought to remain steady, feeling the shake of the skies, the palms, the engine, and my mind.
Fifteen years ago, when my memory only consisted of dots and color, Rosa fled our island home for the same reason everyone left Cuba: on the desperate hope that Bob Dylan’s promise was true. The answer was blowin’ in the wind, and it was blowin’ to America. Due to a confusion of bureaucracy and emotion, the whole of my family was left behind in Havana. Rosa could only bring along an infant, and so my American fate was sealed. Today, through a miracle of paperwork and wait-lists, Camila would begin life anew in Miami.
Camila watched out the humidity-fogged window, nodding with dismissive agreement to the slew of Spanish. It was obvious that Camila found herself in a waking dream. Her Americaabsorbed eyes widened at the sight of golden arches.
“MacDonel!”
“Oh, do you want McDonald’s?” Rosa asked.
Camila nodded, grinning like a child. She knew just enough English for that important question. There was only one McDonald’s on the
island of Cuba, and it was in Guantanamo Bay. Used strictly by the military, the American fastfood empire was legendary among the island’s inhabitants. I hated those greasy burgers, but they were undoubtedly a part of some “American experience” I had taken for granted. I was almost jealous of her excitement; I failed to come up with anything so simple that could make me as happy as my grinning sister. Walking into the restaurant, Camila skipped with delight up to the counter with Rosa. The oily smelling kitchen and fluorescent lighting did nothing to help my appetite, so I settled into a bright red plastic booth, sticky with spilled drinks.
Waiting there, I focused on a small tuft of cotton peeking through a tear in the cheap plastic cushioning. The oily smelling kitchen from before brimmed with working life. The sound of kitchen workers created a wild but rhythmic cacophony. Just listen to that sound, it sang with its own gritty poetry. It was real enough to be more interesting than anything else. Stale air blew the tuft of cotton along this rhythm to a dance. Camila plopped down over the little tuft and snapped me out of my daze. A strange frustration started to rise in me, but it was quickly snuffed out by her wide grin.
“No one forgets their first meal in a new home,” Rosa said to me as she joined the table.
On Camila’s tray rested a Big Mac, fries, and a large Coke. She ate her first meal carefully, as if it was her last. She offered me a soggy fry dunked in ketchup. It felt impossible to say no, so I smiled and took the fry, trying to ignore the headache the salty taste gave me. Camila began crying again and said something to the table in
Spanish.
“I’ve always wanted to share a meal with my little brother,” Rosa translated.
Later that night, I heard a shy knock on my bedroom door. I opened it to find Camila standing there with a wrinkled plastic bag. She handed it to me; her eyes desperately sought to convey a world of meaning. In the bag, I discovered a stack of worn letters adorned with Cuban stamps. All of them addressed to me, all of them returned to sender. Nestled among them was an old, waterlogged Spanish-to-English dictionary.
“Grassyas, bwenah nocheh,” I mumbled, embarrassed at my clumsy Spanish. She nodded and enveloped me in a tight hug, planting a kiss on my cheek. This time I was able to return the embrace. I finally found myself feeling glad she was here. After the welcome home, I was left alone in my room with that wrinkled bag. I started translating the rejected letters Flipping through the dictionary, a black and white photograph edged with torn corners fell out.
There, in a small room, I saw a young happy girl with my father’s nose sitting on a white plastic chair. Paint was peeling off the decrepit walls and battered blinds hung lopsided over a dark window. A group of skinny adults were beaming at the camera, holding repurposed tin cans full of rum. None of their ripped clothes fit, but they didn’t seem to care. A laughing baby in the young girl’s arms clutched at her blouse. Their radiant smiles lit up the monochrome shack that contained them; they glittered like cheap jewelry.
adolescent perceptions and adult reflections (my body)
Monotype Prints
By Gillian Kinder
by Mary Hanson
Galatea
Coffee, Watercolor, & Acrylic
Virginia’s Husband (Inspired by Grace Paley’s An Interest in Life)
by Chloe Grant
The man spun the penny again atop the counter, plucking it back up between two fingers each time the coin clinked to a halt against the wooden grain of the bar. Above him, the overhead lighting had blown two bulbs the previous weekend. Though the thin tendrils of sunlight sneaking in from the wood-barred windows left the bar too dim to reflect even a gleam from the spinning coin, as I handed the man his third glass of gin I could see that his fingertips were worn. It would seem that at nine in the morning, this sad man with weathered hands would be my only company until noon’s expected rush.
Grabbing a glass to wipe from the wall-mounted shelf, I turned to the man and cleared my throat. More meekly than I intended, I asked, “What brings you here in the daylight, sir?”
The man lowered his glass and placed a finger on Lincoln’s head to lay him flat.
“Well,” he started, looking up at me with a smirk, “I’m on my way to join the Army.”
I noticed the two duffel bags stacked next to his stool and nodded my head.
“Kudos to you,” I said, placing the wiped cup face down on the counter. “It takes a great man to fight for a great nation.”
The man snorted. I raised an eyebrow, and he went on.
“Yeah, I’m joining the Army,” the man continued, picking up his glass and shooting back its
contents in one go. “But it’s not for the country, or honor, or any of that shit,” he said, sending the penny spinning once again.
“If not for any…” I trailed off, struggling to find the right words to prod this stranger for my amusement, “of that shit, why head off to the forces, then?”
The penny still spun as the man stared into his empty glass. It was only five past nine.
I had three hours to kill before my lunch break and this dive lacked a working radio to keep me entertained when guests failed to do so. I leaned further against the counter.
“You’ve gotta have family that you’re leaving here, or a job, or something worth sticking around for,” I posited, hoping he’d wax on like most morning patrons and share a good story.
The man chuckled and wiped his brow with his free hand.
“Oh, son,” he said, eyes narrowing slightly. “Those are the best reasons to get away.”
I must have tilted my head in confusion with his argument. He continued as though lecturing a boy hoping to learn manhood from his great experience.
“My wife can’t, for the life of her, stop spreading my business down the block and complaining about every little thing I do.” He flicked the penny in annoyance. “And my children,” he sneered, “you’d think they’d have some other daddy by how close my wife is with that Jersey man.”
“But, then and again,” he said before I could get a word in, flashing his teeth in a smile of wicked satisfaction, “when I am home, I show my wife such a good time she always remembers why she shouldn’t leave. Before I leave home, I give her a gift that won’t let her leave. At least for eighteen years at a time.”
The man pushed his empty glass toward my side of the bar and hopped off his stool. Lugging a duffel onto each shoulder, he started toward the door.
“Some advice for you, kid,” he said with his back facing me, “when you get yourself a wife? Pop a kid in her and buy her a broom for Christmas. She’ll love them. She’ll have to.”
Only looking back once to send me a wink, the man walked out through the chiming door, leaving me and a dizzy Lincoln to brave the rest of the morning alone.
Babies and Electric Shock
Watercolor & Acrylic
by Mary Hanson
& Acrylic Paint
By Didi Elkhayat
Untitled Ceramic by Phoebe A. Rasz
On Reading Hill House in the Armstrong Student Center
by Kayla Conde
No living organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.
—Shirley
Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Places, too, dream.
They dream in apparitions, hallways like ley lines, scuffs on the floorboards the echo of footsteps. I looked up from Jackson’s pages to find a letterman squinting at me in a wooden picture-frame.
His pompadour stiff, he showed off his prize, the 1959 homecoming queen, demure under the puff of his sleeve. His neighbors were the 1961 eponyms of the Armstrong Student Center, Mike and Anne.
“Have you seen the new veranda,” I asked. Their smiles remained stiff under horn-rimmed glasses; Mike and Anne, models of mid-century middle-America drilled to the wall. I returned to Eleanor.
How can these others hear the noise when it is coming from inside my head?
She would have crashed the car in Oxford, Ohio, had she spent a week in this rural college-town.
The novel ends where it begins: whatever walked there, walked alone, not steadily, though, with the heartbeat of the house, not quietly, as if trying to hide beneath the cooing of the wind, but plowing through the winding corridors.
There’s No Place Like Home
Marker Collage
by Mary Bella Durham
SPECIAL THANKS
Special thanks to the entire University of Florida English Department for their continued support and unwavering dedication to the magazine. We would also like to thank the University of Florida’s student government for their steadfast financial support of our organization. Whom without, our university’s artistic endeavors would not be able to find such an unshakeable platform.
Thank you to CLMP, The How Bazar, The Living Poets Society, Alejandro Aguirre, Garry Boulard, Denis Lazo-Torres, Jair Nixon, Elijah Robinson, Gregory Charlestin, Adrian Fernandez, Alanis Gonzalez, Clyde James, Bryan Oliveras, Cody Paddock William Logan, Charles Humes, Gary Jackson, Nayatee Wilson, Felix Cabreja, Darien Octave, Cheeze & Reallyelk, Brian Jackson, Jennifer Jackson, and the zine known as EarlGrey.
Special thanks to our general staffers, Mia Garcia, Mahi Sarker, Nicolette De Value, Madison Diehl, and Sophia Medina. Thank you for being there for every set-up and take-down–your hard work does not go unnoticed.
Lastly, we would like to extend our deepest thanks to our late founder Matthew Deville who without, Tea would not exist. Matthew was a consistent advocate for the arts, as he was one of UF’s greatest talents. We will miss his storytelling and deeply imaginative spirit, especially in regard to the creation of Tea.
In loving memory of Matthew Deville.
