The Folio: Winter 2022

THE FOLIO

A LITERARY AND ART MAGAZINE

VOLUME LV ISSUE I CONESTOGA HIGH SCHOOL BERWYN, PENNSYLVANIA

Cover photo © Chiho Jing

Inside cover © Emily Zou

Copyright © 2022 Conestoga Literary Magazine Staff

Internal Design © 2022 Hannah Gupta, Jordan Jacoel, Chiho Jing, Casey Kovarick, Emily Zou

Copyright © of each work belongs to the respective author or artist

First edition 2022

All rights reserved. All works are copyright of their respective creators as indicated herein and are reproduced here with permission. The Folio is a public forum for student expression produced by the students of Conestoga High School.

Published and printed in the United States of America

www.stogafolio.weebly.com

Find us on Instagram and Twitter @stogafolio

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the 2022 winter issue of the Folio! We have worked hard to produce an issue that showcases the creations of our community this year. For the most part, we reached the sense of normalcy we have been craving. The lunch tables are back, our desks are no longer separated. It is hard to believe that two years ago, we were unable to see each other, hiding behind screens and muted microphones. But let’s not focus on the past. The present is much more interesting.

Creating has always been a constant for the members of the Folio. After all the change we experienced in recent years, an outlet for our emotions is essential. Without art, it would be impossible to describe the experiences that define us. And without our experiences, we could not create art. We may not all be the same, but we can connect to the simple fact of art, one way or another. We are all storytellers, songwriters, and poets. We are all painters, graphic designers, and ceramists. Without diversity of thought and design, how could we call ourselves artists?

The theme of this issue is Alice in Wonderland because what could be better for a magazine full of life? From love to war, witches and dinosaurs, even a shoe! Jump down the rabbit hole, and you will find yourself in the minds of our wonderful staff and contributors. Art is the escape into a world of imagination and vibrant expression. We introduce you to an array of works that will drop you into a wonderland of creativity.

A final note: We would like to give gratitude to our staff who created the work in this issue and put everything together. Another big thank you goes to our advisors: Mr. Smith, Mrs. Gately, and Mrs. Wilson, who foster a warm, welcoming environment for us to share in. Creating art is one thing, having others see it is something else entirely. We thank the people who make these magazines amazing and the community a family.

And finally, we thank you, the reader. Without your support, we would not be able to create this true wonder of a collection. Now go off on your own great adventure.

anatomy of a pomegranate

Vivian Dong

Content warning: abusive relationships

Some days, all I can do is stare out the window, watching the people pass by. I break apart a pomegranate while I sit, digging my nails into the hard, unforgiving rind, until the pressure peels apart my nails from the skin underneath. The juice spills over my lap, dying my white pillows and cushions, stinging my fingertips. My hands are dripping in red, leaving bloody marks wherever they go. Your hand still strikes me. Your words still sting. You’re not here anymore, but somehow, you’ll always be in the next room. I remember everything about you, what you did, who you were. I remember the angle of your wrist and the color of the sting; the twist of your lips and the wine drink; The shade of my lipstick, sharp and red, smeared across your knuckles. I left it behind when I fled, I don’t wear lipstick anymore.

I pluck out the pomegranate seeds one by one, the tips of my fingers growing slick with juice. The fleshy layer outside the seed is called the aril; you told me that. I watch it catch the light of the sun in its clear pink skin, reflecting a rosy flush in my palm. We used to eat pomegranates together, in spring, sitting on the fire escape, drinking beer. You loved everything about them, breaking them apart, digging for the seed, and staining your hands. You said the reward was in the pain, and how those jewels were that much sweeter when you had plucked them so bitterly from their shell. I sat there with you, pretending I understood what you were saying, trying to figure out the greater metaphor that lay beneath. I never did, you’ve always been older than me, always been wiser too.

I chewed pomegranate seeds and popped open the aril and bursted the juice out, mirroring you. The flesh was soft and sweet, but when I bit down on the seed hidden inside, it was hard and bitter. My tongue curled around the acrid taste that coated my teeth and throat, and I squirmed, trying to untwist the frown on my lips. But then you break open another and I’m reaching for more. It’s the same every time; it never gets better. But something about the way the flesh glittered and glistened that tempted me to keep eating. Something about the way you laughed and smiled kept me staying. Sometimes when I’m alone at night I still wish I had. It’s wrong, I know it is. But I loved you, is it wrong to miss someone you love?

I lay curled on my crimson stained pillows, burning in the sun that splays into my windows. I lie there and picture that I’m with you, my body softly nestled into yours, molding until we fit into one. I imagine that we’re sitting on the fire escape, warmth dancing on my fingers as I watch you, fiddling with your grandfather’s old army knife, running your calloused fingers across the wrong edge of the blade, drawing a red line on your pale skin. I scold, why would you do that? You smile, the reward is in the pain. You use the knife to cut a hole in the top of the pomegranate, crimson spilling in my lap like blood, staining my white dress.

You broke the fruit with my hands and dug through the bloody rind, peeling back the broken membranes, and shaking out a few seeds to give to me. The red juice ran all down your arms and wrists until your fingers were stuck together and your lips, arms, skin are stained. I joke that you’ve stepped out of a crime scene. You laugh and say that you’re my partner in crime. I dropped a few pomegranate seeds into your outstretched palms like precious jewels falling from a collapsed mine. My hands were streaked like yours. I took the fallen few from my lap and popped them into my mouth. They were sweet enough to forget the bitterness. I keep on reaching for more.

A Recollection

Annie Martin

Content warning: themes of suicide

Yousat outside that night, nursing a lemonade in a glass so dense with condensation that it left your hands cold and clammy. You sat out there long past the sunset, after the hazy clouds of sedate insects had dispersed, the sky an inky shade of darkness that used to make you uncomfortable. You stayed out later than you should have, all things considered, and you knew that, but you didn’t care. It was easier at night, mostly. Except for when it was harder. At any rate, it was slower.

Once the rest of the world went to sleep, you strained your ears so that maybe, maybe, maybe, you could hear the silence over all the noise. You couldn’t, after all. So it goes. You went back inside and went to bed.

When morning came, you remembered that you left the dog outside. He was lying on the porch just outside the door, and it flooded back to you that he’d been sniffing around the yard last night, and you left him there. I don’t blame you for forgetting. You did, but I don’t. He was quiet, and you were distracted. But you’re angry. You’re hot with shame and guilt, and all those thoughts you manage to keep at bay most of the time come bobbing up to the surface, buoyed by your mistake, because you’re stupid and selfish and irredeemable and how could anyone ever love somebody like you? How could you be worthy of love when you know yourself, so deeply and grotesquely, so you hear those thoughts and you think they’re true, they’re true, you are stupid and you are selfish and the bottom line is your heart is shrunken and shriveled and bruised and bitter and maybe it’s not even there at all, maybe you’re wrong in every way a person can be wrong. You’re not, by the way. But you never believed me when I told you.

You thought about the dog all day. The guilt followed you around, warping and shaping into that hideous, snarling hate with which you’d become so familiar. It burrowed into your skin, crawled through your hair, clung to your bones. It was within and without you; you were steeped in it, drowning in it, imbibing it with each shallow, stunted breath. You avoided mirrors and skipped lunch. You couldn’t shake the image of that poor, stupid dog, waiting patiently, faithfully, at the door for you, knowing you would come, because you always did—you hear me? You always, always did. You held him during thunderstorms, and you kept his fur brushed. And so you messed up once, because you’re human, but you didn’t see it that

way. You never did. You had to be infallible, always. That was the deal. You got to walk and talk and pretend to be like everybody else so long as you never misstepped. It wasn’t something you recognized, but simply something you understood, lodged in your subconscious like a stone. You knew it the way you knew anything. The way a child is born knowing he wants milk. The sky is blue and the grass is green and you have to be perfect, because perfection is goodness, isn’t it? Aren’t they synonyms? They are, in the sense that rectangle and square are synonyms. But you had a bad habit of conflating the two.

You wanted to tell the dog you weren’t worth it, and you did, but he didn’t understand. He just sat there, lolling his pink tongue, and he continued to love you. You couldn’t figure out why. I know why.

That night was one of the hard ones. You sat perched on the edge of your bed, knees pulled up to your chest, chin resting on your knees, the fan circling lazily above you. That familiar emptiness had crept into your stomach without you noticing, and now it was expanding, hollowing out your insides until you were sure there must be nothing left beneath your skin but bones and dust; and the quiet was deafening, a swirling cesspool of your own thoughts, I can’t and I won’t and maybe I’m just a dream I’m having I can’t was the loudest, because it was true. You can’t, but you do, because what else is there? You wondered if today was the day. It wasn’t. The day was precisely two weeks into the future. But you didn’t know that, so you wondered if today was the day.

Those two weeks passed with the monotony you’d come to expect from day-to-day life, the days blurring together in a way they weren’t supposed to, the hours melting away into nothingness, pouring into that great gaping void, untouched by wonder. And then, suddenly, without warning, without fanfare, the day arrived—and left, just as quickly, with a similar indifference. Somehow, the world continued to spin.

I don’t care to dwell on the day itself; there’s no point. And I won’t say anything as trite as I just want to know why, because I do know why. I understand, and your friends understood, to the extent that anyone who’s not you can ever understand, which I know might not be much.

I guess this is all for me, anyways, since you’ll never see it, and even if you did, you wouldn’t believe it. How little must you think of me? To think that I would lie about all of this? It hurts, you know. But I don’t want you to feel bad. That’s not the point of this. You’ve had enough of that already. I just want to get this all out, because there’s so much of it, and it’s so heavy, and it can’t keep taking up space.

Do you remember a few months ago? You were talking to your mother. She understood probably less than most everyone else, though not for lack of trying, on either her part or yours. You told her, and she listened, she really did, but it was as if there was cotton in her ears. It never quite made it to the place it was trying to go. But you tried, because it meant a lot to her that you would try, and it meant a lot to you that she would let you.

That day, you were trying. You said, It might be easier. If I didn’t have to be around myself all the time.

She didn’t understand, but was afraid you’d clam up, frustrated, if she admitted this, so she stayed silent. Her brows knit together in telltale confusion, though, which you caught, so you tried to clarify.

You said, There is something wrong with me.

She said, There’s nothing wrong with you. (She was relieved to be able to give an easy answer for once, though of course it wasn’t that simple.)

You said, There is. A missing cell. A backwards organ. There is something wrong with me because there has to be. Because if there is something wrong, then there is something that could conceivably be fixed.

You paused for a moment to gather your thoughts.

There has to be, you said. It can’t just be me.

I guess part of the reason for all this was to somehow assuage your fears on that point, but now that I’m here I’m not sure what to say. And since you’re not here, and you’ll never see this, I suppose I’ll just try to tell you the truth in the only way that makes sense to me, which is this: just because there is something wrong, doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you. I hope if you could hear that, it’d make sense to you, too.

It’s late and I’m tired. You’d be tired too. You would yawn and crack your knuckles and say something old-timey like I think it’s about time I turn in. It’s a funny word, would. No, funny’s not right. (I’m sorry. I’m being stupid on purpose. I’m no good at talking about these things.) I mean terrible. It’s a terrible word. You look at it, and at first glance, it seems okay, but there’s that silent if there, looming just out of sight. You would do such-and-such, if… But I like to pretend that as long as I don’t say the if part out loud, it can’t hurt me.

Let me ask you this: do you think it would have been okay—not okay; tolerable—if you had just known that the emptiness would (there it is again!) be gone someday? Not even soon, necessarily. Just the firm fact, solid enough to plant your feet on, that there was some fixed point in your life when you’d be all right. Because I have this theory that it might have been. Tolerable, I mean. It’s the not knowing, isn’t it? That’s the worst of it. The voice in your head saying, This is your life. This is your whole entire life. So get used to it.

What if it got better tomorrow? What if everything that had been piling on top of you, suffocating you, suddenly evaporated, the way a dream slips from your memory like water through your fingers the moment you wake up? What if the world gave you one big apology and told you not to worry, those last ten years didn’t count, we’ll do it right from now on, except you weren’t there to see it? And what if God just looked at you sadly and said, Well, tough luck, kid, but them’s the breaks; you should’ve stuck it out another day, and who are you to say when it’s supposed to get good, anyway?

Sorry. I don’t mean to make you keep thinking about it. I’m sure you don’t want to. That’s why you did it, right? So you could stop thinking about it, all of it, everything. Privately,

in my bitterest moments, I think it was a selfish thing to do. But really, I know that’s not right. It was just self-preservation, in a strange, paradoxical way, and that’s not selfish. I just get angry a lot more than I used to—I don’t want to be angry, but I am, because how could you think that nothing would change? Didn’t you know I can’t do this? I can’t survive this. I hate you. I hate you.

I don’t. I’m sorry. I hope you know that.

There’s nothing else for me to say here, nothing meaningful at least, if any of this was meaningful. (Can it be, if you’re not here to hear it?) I’m scared to finish because I know I won’t talk to you after this. But I have to stop some time. I know I do. Anyways, I hope it’s nice there, where you are. I hope it’s quiet. I hope you’re still dreaming. Give me a call when you get a chance, would you? I’ve got this great joke to tell you. You’ll love it. I swear you will.

sea and solitude

Rebirth

Eden Liu

Pencil, colored pencil

playground buddies

Audrey Nguyen

i’m eating strawberry cheerios, even though it's 10 pm and the coldest part of october. i have a science test tomorrow and a breakup to attend to around noon, but i’ll sit here for however much longer, swirling the pink into leftover milk and the minutes into delirium. all this to say i’m thinking of you. i can’t quite explain why, at least not in a way that’s profound. if you want some metaphorical shit, i guess we’re like breakfast food in the middle of the night, a dynamic that surprisingly hits the spot. considering you’re a white baseball boy and i’m an asian theatre girl and those social circles typically don’t mix in suburbia, i don’t know. let’s just say i never would’ve expected us to get along the way we do.

anyway, the simpler reason for you popping up in my brain was that the cereal binge reminded me of our facetime yesterday. as per usual, you called me at some random, extremely inconvenient time just to say that you discovered rice krispies and ice cream are the perfect combination and that i will have no choice but to try it the next time i’m at your house. it was so incredibly stupid, but in a world dying from party politics and the climate crisis, i think i needed something stupid. like how you send pics of your dino poop from the museum or play me songs you’ve been listening to lately when i don’t seem like myself. or how you turn to me for girl advice and we take 30 minutes deciding how you’ll ask for her number.

don’t get me wrong. i still very much need friends who i can get down into the nitty-gritty with and spend hours on the phone trauma dumping to. it’s therapeutic to surround yourself with people who understand your problems at the deepest level. but sometimes i’m tired of having to care about things adults are supposed to handle. we’re only 15, after all. it’s a recipe for burnout, always keeping up with cancel culture and turning every lunch break into a diplomatic debate.

but you know what we remind me of? those kids who are suddenly best friends because they have the same sparkly sneakers. those kids who, for those few hours during mom’s tennis lesson, got their feet dangling from rusty swings and make believe pirates on jungle gyms. and maybe they’ll forget each other in a day or two, like we might in a couple years once i graduate, but i’m okay with the now and only now friendship. so i guess i just wanted to say thanks for hanging out with me on the playground and bonding over cereal.

poison heart

Ashley Vadner

i collect hearts like special edition coins. sugar cookie dough hearts, warm and sweet all the way through, soft enough to sink my teeth into. peach hearts, honeyed and pliable until the eventual core, a jaw-breaking pit, ridged with failed bite marks. coconut hearts, impenetrable and tough until they’re fractured, leaking sweet water, liquid to slide down my throat. i tear apart the hearts i don’t care for, digest them until they’re gone. i pocket the good ones, hold them close until they rot against my skin. i haven’t met one that doesn’t spoil in my grasp. i wonder what my own heart is made of. if i need to, i’ll keep picking, ripping, tearing,

My Response to Emily Dickinson

Peyton Harrill

“Hope” is the thing with feathersThat preys upon my fearsAnd strips away my composureUntil there are just tears-

And cruelest in my life’s twilightIt circles over meMy soul like a rotting carcassThe bird’s afternoon tea-

I know now not to trust my joyThe vulture taught me soIt preys on the dead and dying, A scavenger of woe.

Today,in thegard e n

Leyla Yilmaz

the apple colored leaves have found their ways to brown soil, and grass strands look up at me in contempt, for their sunny green color now matches the mud of the earth.

The plums have grown rotten on rugged branches. Sweet flesh drips into mother earth as raindrops insisting to melt into entropy. Sugar housed in its purple bounds having lost its patience to find its new home.

I watch the purple skin blending into the earthy brown, cursing me for letting them fall. But your skin is next to mine. Love, if they had eyes and tongue, if they knew you, they would rather fall than ask me to leave your side.

I draw the curve of your eyelashes in memory, one by one. I decide I will water the garden later. I will make it up to the earth. Leaving the work of today for an impossible later –later, next day, next year, next life–whenever time grows weary of being spent on you.

When I’m not erased within your lines, I note myself a poem I must write about your eyes. There is this stench and there is a muse who requires such a careful study that it leaves the artist

paralyzed, apprehended by the mere idea of missing how your eyes catch the sun in glorious emerald, or the raise of your eyebrows when you look at me.

Today, there is a garden, falling, rotting, angry and there is me with the heat of your presence–only seeing what is mine to see & kissing the pink berries off your cheeks and hungry mouth.

Hollow Strawberry Shravani Bankar Ceramic

Gentlemen’s Choice

Peyton Harrill

Mixed media, collage

Forms

Feeli

They say there are an infinite amount of numbers between 0 and 1. As far as decimals go, they will never reach 1. It’s comforting to know that there are endless possibilities. It’s even more agonizing to know I’ll never be close to reaching you.

I feel sympathy for pi. Never ending. Commonly known but never truly known. So many have tried to figure it out. No one has.

3.14 barely scratches the surface. Labeled irrational. Just because no one is capable of deciphering who you are.

0 holds the secrets of the universe. An invisible password. A silent key. By itself it’s nothing. Absolutely no value. But with anything else, any insignificant number, It’ll be the one to take you to the stars. You never truly see placeholders. Until they combine with something else and make it disappear.

The Rosary

Deirdre Cunniffe

Hail Mary, full of grace

You were always far more of a poet than me. Maybe now I am catching up to you, scrawling across some separate page. Your lovely penmanship, my barely legible hand. Poetic in and of itself, no?

The Lord is with thee

We were younger, with little to make metaphors about. Yet, you insisted if we had existed in some other time, one further back, I would have been a constellation. You showed me, taking my hand and pointing it towards the night. A few pieces of Cassiopeia, parts of Ursa Minor, some of Cepheus, and Polaris. A songbird, you said. I asked where the constellations which were already there came from (I knew). You laughed in response,

“Some sort of wild storyteller.”

I wonder what you have to say about the songbird, storyteller?

Blessed art thou among women

We were products of the church choir. Your mother adored me. I was a lovely catholic girl with a kind smile, talking at a mile a minute, bowing my head for grace at the table, waking up early on Sundays. I could sing through the hymnals of a service, sit still for the sermon where some holy man would tell me, tell us, we were evil. That there was some part of us weaker than the rest, that we had to renounce it to find the heaven they made us sing about. When we got older, you would let the church guide you, let your family lead you. I would stop talking about this part of my life, palms up against my thighs in a pew. My family leaned away from the harm that the altar can cause, and I am grateful for that. The hymnals still sit heavy in my chest.

Holy Mary, mother of God

We were connected by many things and nothing at all. You were quieter and gentle and enchanting. You drew people into you with your slender fingers,bell-like laughter, and kind eyes. There was a sternness with which you loved,

a product of your Polish-American upbringing. “Don’t do that, it’s dangerous,” “Be gentle, don’t hurt yourself, don’t be ridiculous.”

I was a firecracker, loud and bright and out of control. All wild blonde hair, bright green eyes, hips too wide for my body, strong legs, echoing laugh. I loved with my whole body, the same way I had been taught. “Have you eaten today?” “How is your ma?” “I missed you.”

Pray for us sinners

Perhaps in some other lifetime, we were both able to stay. There was no frigid January after spending the holidays apart, me with my family in the mountains, you with yours in a church pew. After you tore things apart, I was gentle with you, and your love revealed itself. “You’re being too kind to me,” “If an outsider were to look at this, I’d look evil.” You would have. We both knew that. I wouldn’t let you be the bad guy, though. I wouldn’t let you remember our love with a bitter end. It was the only lifeline I could give you then.

“Yell at me. Tell me I’m awful, please.”

I wouldn’t.

The Bible in your nightstand is still there. A heady presence, a reminder. I wish I could make you forget. All I could do was make you remember.

Now, and at the hour of our death.

Perhaps one day we’ll run into each other once more. Maybe we won’t even recognize one another.

I doubt it, though. You have burned something into my skin, fingertips, and handprints seared against a freckled chest and shoulders. Like a sinner in church, I’m sure I’m some sort of devil in the front of your mind. Such a tragedy you loved me, isn’t it?

I know I was your greatest sin. I’d do it again.

Amen.

Red wasn’t always Blood.

Red was Blush.

It’s toddling steps bubbly yet daring, Ready to feel and comfort and kiss the hurting world. The dawn it was born into wore its rosy tiara of sky with dignity. Then, Red was cherry.

It’s still-learning voice alive and pleasant, Cadence like the playful dance of a berry’s tart and sweet. Selfless, kind, equal parts curiosity and peacemaker. It had the mirth of the child it was, yet the quiet and understanding of an older soul. Then, Red was ruby.

It was brilliant, sharp, perpetually radiant.

Delicately fierce, its honed, smoothed composure effortlessly fascinating those around it. Too selfless to ever state what it wanted, but still magnificently beautiful in reservation. Then, Red was true rose.

Had a crimson ardor for the world and the things it held It learned sorrow, it learned jealousy, it learned love. But most deeply, love.

No one wanted to believe it, though. They did not want the outcast they were going to make, to be capable of feeling.

No one wanted to represent violence, the frontman for an institution of immorality. The one whose eyes might pool with abundant, plump tears that Reflected everything wrong and vile in their fluid windowpanes. It was far too much work.

Too costly.

So,

BREA OF COL

KING A OR

Zion Brown

Blue claimed the face of Water.

Green claimed that of Spring, Orange and yellow fought for Stars.

Purple settled proudly into Royalty, While White delicately took on Snow

And Black embraced Night.

So, by default, someone had to be the one to suffer.

The exiled.

The one who’d only ever grow to know carnage as a lullaby.

Red.

Then, Red was Brick.

Hands roughened by war’s jagged edges, by the plight of sufferers

Heart hardened by the infinite mantle it took up, tyrannical towards its older, virtuous being Forced to abandon its quiet, rich reveries of things pleasant and sweet to the mind.

Then, Red was Rust.

Decaying and degrading and devolving.

A product of too much time and even more plentiful neglect. Its touch scarring, coldly and unashamedly lethal.

Then, Red was Lava.

Searing and unbounded, its only goal self-satisfaction.

Illuminated its own destruction with a captivating, undiluted fury. Plowed over the ruins it made, all to eagerly and hungrily do it again.

Then, Only then, Red was Blood.

Multicolored

Katie White

Photography

Sunny Ajitabh

I met the girl of my dreams once.

She didn’t belong in my reality, that much I could tell. She had the consistency of a memory, with her skin only a blur of moonlight, her eyes mere blinks of ocean blue, her hair just strokes of blazing fire. In my unconscious state, her smile was the only thing in focus; her lips were a stark red, brilliant against the haze, and each glance pierced my heart in a way that sent me into bliss. I could have bled out and wouldn’t even have noticed. I could stare at her smile forever.

I wish I could have. I wish I could stay for eternity, with nothing but her striking smile melting my fears and her laughter tickling my ears. I wish I could hold her heart in my hand; I wish she could hold mine in hers.

But she was intangible to me. I want to believe I really held her fingers between mine and felt her hair against my cheek and felt her soul under her skin. But I know better.

I was real. She was just a dream.

aubade as the morning ghosts sing

Leyla Yilmaz

“home is about the earth. whether the earth opens up to you. whether it pulls you so close the space between you and it melts and it beats like your heart.”

—- jesmyn ward, sing, unburied, sing

in the plains, beings with mouths, or without, unable to tell what it is they are searching for, watch as the morning sun rises.

stuck in between time and big oaks, blood-red with the season, there is a burning hope-attached to a whisper of the memory of home, now gone cold.

home is where the water is. the water tends to the oaks—to hope, for the waves know of tragedy & cold bodies washing up to their shores.

cold water rises and washes the land anew. yet the crimson red and the burning flesh is remembered by those in hiding.

hiding under & above bird nests, hoping to catch a whisper of freedom from the winds the black birds leave behind by shaking their bodies, waking their wings, flying.

to those in hiding, in watching, home is nowhere and within every breeze.

it is every warm conversation lighting their ghostly, cold bodies up with a gentle fire, in kind remembrance.

there is this haunting & this yearning of a past that could’ve been free.

there is this memory of home— what it could have been, and all that it wasn’t.

in the smoky billowing of the dawn, within the creaks of a house, there is written history and a fate foretold for those who dare to see, to listen, and set themselves free.

A Wine Bottle, Flowers, and Fruit

laika

Sarah Hegg

It was a cool June morning in the little town of Greenwood, the burnt red bricks on the buildings seeming to come to life in the sun’s soft rays. Max was struck by a feeling of deja vu, as if he had seen this quiet little street with the yellow haze before. Of course, he had seen it, he had spent 18 years of his life here. But the buildings were different, taller, stronger, and newly painted. New restaurants painted the street, new graffiti lined the alleyways.

It made Max uncomfortable. Things changing without him had always been a problem of his. It wasn’t that the world necessarily revolved around him, it was more that he felt like he was a reader in others’ stories, so when he came back to a book he’d put down for some time and the plot completely changed, it irked him.

But Max wasn’t done with the change for the day. In fact, the biggest change was yet to come, eating breakfast with an old friend at Minnie’s Diner. The sight of the yellow door and overhang calmed Max a bit, familiarity within the new. He rooted himself with the building, taking a deep breath. He wasn’t anxious, more overwhelmed. But he knew this meeting wasn’t for him. It was for her.

He stepped into the diner, sneakers slightly squeaking on the tan linoleum floor. He was hit with the scent of maple syrup and the air conditioner’s cool air. Before he could collect his bearings, a sweet voice called out to him.

“Max!” A young woman in a booth seat squealed. She had shoulder length, curly brown hair and big circular glasses. She was wearing a bright pink pullover hoodie which Max immediately recognized. He looked back into her face, realizing who it was.

“Laika!” Max beamed, her presence putting him at ease. There were differences, sure, a lot of them. But she still had the same dimples and soft face. Max slid into the seat across from her.

“I was worried you wouldn’t recognize me.” Laika smirked, making Max’s ears twinge red.

“I’ve never seen you with long hair.” He responded sheepishly.

“Well, it’s not super long. But yes, I know what you mean. It’s okay, you don’t have to pretend it’s not surprising to see me post-transition. I was just giving you a hard time,” Laika smiled. Max felt the twist in his stomach relax.

“You look beautiful.” Max said earnestly, earning a soft blush from Laika.

“Of course I do love, picked everything out myself.” And they laughed, because even though Max could never understand what she went through, the humor was all the same. Whenever the words weren’t there, they could just laugh. They had always been like that.

“I wish I didn’t go to school so far away. I missed you.” Max muttered, locking his eyes on the menu to ease the embarrassment of the confession. But before Laika could respond, a waitress came over to take their order. Max got the french toast and Laika got the waffles. The same they always get. Got, that is.

Hegg

“Well, you’re here now. No point in missing me now.” She quipped, giggling a bit to lighten the tension. That noise was different to max. The inflections were the same, but the pitch was drastically different. It didn’t unsettle him, though. In a way it felt right.

“I don’t mean this in an offensive way–”

“Well, now it sounds like you’re going to say something offensive.”

“I’m not!”

“Then don’t start like that!”

“Fine!” Max feigned annoyance, but he had a bright smile on his face. Laika returned it letting out a small laugh.

“Why Laika?”

“Why what?”

“No–like why did you pick that name?”

“Oh.” She stopped and looked out the window for a moment, surprised. Max felt the anxiety return to his stomach, assuming the question was in fact offensive, and he had just ruined their friendship. Before he could apologize for his stupidity, though, Laika quickly said, “That’s not offensive at all, Max. It’s just…”

“Just?”

“It’s just no one’s ever asked me that before.”

“Oh.” Now Max’s anxiety was alleviated, but in its place was guilt. He knew Laika didn’t have many people to talk to about everything, and he hadn’t exactly been the best at keeping in touch.

“Well, you know Laika the space dog right?”

“The space dog?”

“Okay, you don’t then,” she laughed. “Laika was a stray from the streets of Moscow during the Cold War. The Soviet Union was trying to build a spacecraft that supported life, but obviously they didn’t want to test people first. So, instead, they found Laika, raised her, took care of her, then sent her into space.”

“That’s sweet.” Max smiled, before he was met with a sad expression.

“It would be, but it’s not. They only cared if the craft could support life, not if it could bring it back.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. The saddest part though is that she was supposed to live at least a few days floating there taking in her last moments until her oxygen ran out. But she died within hours of overheating.”

“Oh my god.”

“Yeah.” They sat in silence for a moment, Max digesting the story and Laika planning what to say next.

“So, what does that have to do with your name?” Max asked tentatively.

“Well, I don’t really know. I guess there’s something about that I relate to? Thinking you finally found a home before you discover the real world and realize, really, no one cares that much if you live or die.”

They looked deep into each other’s eyes for a moment before suddenly, the waitress was back with the food. They laughed again to ease the tension, which gave Max the courage to respond.

laika

Sarah Hegg

“I would care.”

“But would you?”

Max felt his stomach drop. Did she really have that little faith in him?

“Of course I would!”

“Then why was I left behind?”

Max tried to find the words, but none came. He looked at her, pleading for some kind of understanding. She gave him a soft look.

“I know you had to get out. Hell, I would’ve if I could. But everyone did. And I was stuck with parents I couldn’t please and no one to help me.”

“I’m sorry–”

“I’m not finished,” The soft look was gone as she continued, “I know you’re sorry. Everyone’s sorry. But sometimes I wish some astronauts came and took care of me. Even for a little while, before I got sent away. It would be nice to not be a part of the world that didn’t want me when I died.”

Laika looked at Max again with a far off look, like he wasn’t even there. He opened his mouth to speak but closed it when he found he had nothing to say. A few beats passed while they sat in silence. Then Laika’s mouth twitched into a soft smile.

“I also love dogs, so I guess that’s why I picked the name.” Laika laughed, a real full laugh, and Max couldn’t help but laugh with her. They could talk about it all later, but now he needed to show her that he was here. That he was going to stay.

When they finally stopped laughing, they ate their meal, reminisced on the past and updated each other on the present. It was like they were 10 again, swinging on the playground, telling the other what they were going to be when they grew up. Only, they had done all those things. But they hadn’t grown up really, not fully. They were still together, so how could they?

When they stepped out into the early afternoon heat, Max remembered the reason they had met up in the first place.

“I actually have something to tell you.” Max said. Laika stopped walking and turned on her heel to meet his gaze, smiling.

“Well, go ahead and say it. Don’t have all day.” Max beamed, despite himself, nervously rubbing his hands together wondering how she would react.

“I’m staying,” He blurted out breathlessly, searching her face for emotion.

“What?”

“New job. I’m moving back home.” Laika looked at him confused for a second before her face lit up. Before he could react there was a flash of pink and tight warmth around his waist.

“Take me to the moon, Max,” Laika joked, burying her face into his chest. Gently, Max wrapped his arms around her neck and held her tight. As much as she was a force in his life, she had yet to realize it. And he would never truly understand it.

“I will. And I’ll bring you right back home.” Max whispered, so only she could hear, because in this moment there was only them, alone in a spaceship headed for the light.

what killed the dinosaurs

Anika Kotapally

week one:

it is nighttime and through the telescope, a spot in the sky is just a bit bigger than it was yesterday, still small and barely noticeable. i go inside and when i crawl into bed, later than i should, like always, you are already there, reaching for me even in sleep.

week two:

it is nighttime and this time i don’t need the telescope to see the spot in the sky, still small, still just another twinkling pinprick, still bigger than it was yesterday. i go inside to the kitchen where you are waiting for me, and there are cups of tea, and the cat winds between the stool legs as its tail brushes my leg.

week three:

it is twilight and still the spot is visible, shining and starlike, somehow even bigger than it was yesterday, pricking at something in my subconscious. i go inside and the person on the news mentions some new discovery, but you ask me to switch the channel, your favorite show is on at eleven.

week four:

it is twilight and i can see the spot, except it’s not quite a spot, it’s not quite beautiful, it’s not quite starlike. i go inside and when i check my phone there are a million news stories, proclaiming the end of the world. you hold my hand as we read them, faces twisted and afraid, cat purring in my lap.

week five:

it is daytime and the spot is not a spot because it is a weapon, a bullet, and we are the only thing in its path, defenseless and waiting. i go inside because i don’t want to see it and i don’t want to know and your face is a moon, pale and shiny with tears, and when i see it the pit in my stomach somehow, impossibly, lessens .

week six:

it is daytime and i am already inside because the spot is bigger than the moon now and all that’s left to do is wait. we have called everyone whose voices we wanted to hear and now we curl into the bed and each other, and the cat sits by your head and the birds chirp outside and i don’t close my eyes because i only want to see you as we go.

Lily Jiang

Cork popping

Watch the man

Bowl dropping

Stare at the wood

Breath stopping

Run to the puddle

My socks sopping

Grab the cleaner

Start mopping

Work faster!

Faster

Faster

Faster Before the fish quits flopping

Portal Playing Cards Aren Framil Digital

little shreds of hope

Eden Liu

// yes, I am a starving artist, but I am left bloated.

It was like the crest of the Fourth Degree had finally fell out, and a starving artist studied the patterns of the holy ground, painted their faces a bright bold shade of blue, held balloons, big old shoes too. The clown role was surprising; it’s all surprising.

I set out to sea, object of the beasts’ desire, short breed matched as starving artist. I search for a painter’s brush; the wind catches under the smoke billowing from a bloke, tunes of howling as I pluck the bow of the other artist who is quite fed, such an unsullied harpist. The back of the neck crawls under while the brain is left floating. Yes, I am a starving artist, but I am left bloated.

// this is what I was trying to explain.

Driving this thin layer of forgotten nothing, placed softly out of the world. I haven’t a clue how it got there. My brain is sore, trying to explain this.

How this gentle fabrication pulls my poetic hands into the air; This summit of narrow minds coming together with the grasp of a mighty fist.

Candles lit by the hair of their matches, the night, easily breathing down our necks, compels these dreams, as if I slept in the way you slurred my name.

This twig of Indifference is ruthless; it’s all ruthless. Twiddling my thumbs on the bottom of my pink lips, every beat of nature’s forest Conducting me, all of this trying to explain how poets write.

// it’s all ironic.

Bedsores coat my body; I’ve lain in this casket for so long, but it’s Monday, and the garbage truck will soon collect me. Just enough time to put on my knee socks and relax, until, hunched over, I feel the dirt rumble over me. Time passes. January, February, skip a few. August, year-round, I tear up only to return to that spot like a holiday. Deep in the ground, I feel like potting soil. Grow a tree over me and breathe the fresh air of life. How ironic. It’s all ironic.

// redressing: it’s all intent.

Woven halos appeal to me. I grew up on the truth and struck it with an invitation. If only I’d seen, long ago, how you stripped me of all my leaves.

But trust grows. Rust upon metal. Dirt beneath nails. Magic among children.

Everything floods back; I fall into a blank stare, as the rain starts, and I continue to dig into myself, searching for ancestry, with intent; it’s all intent.

little shreds of hope

// it’s all grapes and oranges.

Do you cry gold?

Cheeks left metallic and the taste rich. I read over the bulletin board, the fault is on me, I can’t decide between grapes and oranges. Why should I decide whether I take the hanger or not?

My skin should fare well; age will give it the boot. It will take wrinkles in time too seriously, redness fade, paleness overtake it. If I walk into that office, the protestors outside will hold signs and shout at my stomach.

I can’t wait to get this out of me, Too young to take care of myself, It’s just grapes and oranges, All oranges and grapes.

// pass out hope like gum.

Tatters of ambition, that’s all this is. Give a sliver of light, but don’t pass out hope like gum. Before you know it, you’ll have none left for yourself.

Neighbors will cry for help. You’ll give all you’ve got and forget you have a casserole cooking. You won’t walk home that night; you won’t have a home that night. Give a sliver of light, but don’t pass out hope like gum.

Your mother will tear herself apart for you, bleed for you, give every last shred to you. It’ll be an investment, with hope, it’s all hope. She does it for your good, and you won’t understand why. Give a sliver of light, but don’t pass out hope like gum.

// you’ve got me all wrong.

I’m sorry if you’ve let me in already. I’ve buried myself in you, Burned my way through your head. I’ve lied and created a part for myself. You thought I was a kindred soul. You’ve got me all wrong, It’s all wrong,

I’m a sheer dress, A pirate with legs longer than my lifespan, Eyes that are slimmer than the books I’ve read. I am the voyage to Salem’s lot, The only one to make you doubt your next lover, A sadist who took your trust, And the lover that made you crawl.

// manifesto

Your empty eyes scan the morning; You still can’t believe it’s the end, The nightshade blesses you.

This love is over. Nothing remains but slivers of hope, It’s all surprising, It’s all ruthless, It’s all ironic, It’s all intent, It’s all grapes and oranges, It’s all hope, It’s all wrong, That’s all it is.

Recounting how it fell apart is easier than trying to stitch it back together. I drafted your heart away with me; it wasn’t ready for war. It’s going to be hard to miss us when we were only little shreds of hope.

I love you, so please forgive me

Jordan Jacoel

“‘I love you,’ they say. ‘I love you more than anyone in this entire world.’

I love you, even when you cry yourself to sleep because of the promises I broke. Even when I left you to spiral on your own. Even when I haven’t called in the past few weeks. Even when I let you down.

What can I do to make you see that I love you? Are the coffee dates not enough?

The hidden smiles in public settings? The gentle touches of reassurance?

I’ll respond to the voicemails when I’m available. I’m trying my best, I promise. Why are you being so defensive? Just trust me, I’m going to make things right.

I never meant to hurt you, because I love you.

I love you, so what I did to you is ok. I love you, so stop overreacting. I love you, and this is what someone who loves you does.

Don’t worry, I’ll fix everything. I care for you, I’m here for you, I’ll be there.”

Marionette Shreyas Pant

Oil on acrylic

howl’s moving castle

Siena Nguyen

Ceramic

standing still

Navami Muglurmath

as soon as I think of you you disappear, silently. I trace you, trace my steps. the sweet taste of summer, the impending autumn. time gets cold and the icicles in my room grow until they brush past the tip of my nose. goosebumps shiver over my skin, I rub my palms frantically together, as I used to do to your hands.

a curled eyelash stranded on your cheek, make a wish. smoky breaths blown into the icy air, the soft smell of our perfumes

as soon as the weather warms you disappear, silently. as soon as I snap my fingers, a kindred spirit disappears a woosh of a cold breath sweeps through me, I can’t feel myself, can’t feel my fingers, can’t feel you anymore, out of my reach.

I let out a silent breath exhaling the words I miss you. full stop.

It’s Snowing

Teagan Posey

Content warning: depressive tendencies, sickness

Little white flecks litter the withering grass in your lawn. A creeping temperature bleeds through your colonial window and makes you shiver under a pile of covers. You want to flip through something on your phone, but you can’t even open your eyes, much less move your arm around to find it. There’s a building pressure in your skull. It’s too heavy, even as it lies on the pillow beneath it. You hope that you move in your sleep to a more comfortable position; heaven knows you can’t fix it now.

Your mattress is soaked in tears and sweat. Your hair, once soft and down to your thighs, is one giant mat behind your head. It’s been two weeks since it was combed. It’s been a month since you took a real shower, settling for the occasional rag wash instead. The last time someone came into your room, they started gagging. You would too if you had the energy.

They still haunt your dreams, giggling from across a picnic table. They’re the only person who ever laughed at your stupid jokes. You’d been losing them slowly, saw it coming from a mile away, but you hoped and prayed and begged that you were wrong. You weren’t. You never are with these things. The world’s worst gift, all for your taking.

It hurts to think. Takes too much effort. A ghost of a memory glances against the side of your subconscious. It feels like summer, too hot, burning through whatever tender flesh your mind has built up to block the outside world from reaching inside. It leaves a cavern. Thousands of different voices charge through the breach, screaming all around you. You can’t make out any of the words, but you know that they all say the same thing, one way or another. You grit your teeth. Maybe they’re right.

Someone calls from the kitchen. Whose voice is that again? You can’t make it out through the fog. Maybe it was your mother. If so, you better listen. You tell yourself to sit up. It doesn’t work. You try again, afraid of the voice as it grows louder. Why is it yelling? You can’t remember what you did wrong.

“It hurts to think. Takes too much effort.”

You tumble out of bed. It’s the first time you’ve put weight on your feet today, evident in the way you crash into your opposite wall before you can catch yourself. You didn’t intend it, but the pain helps clear your head, and you make your way down the stairs.

She beckons you out your back door with a smile on her face. It’s snowing. You don’t understand what she’s saying. You take two steps out into the world. It’s too bright, wind harsh and cold in the winter sun. It’s snowing, it’s snowing. Your body shudders, and you feel your feet getting damp as water soaks through your fuzzy socks. It’s snowing. It’s snowing. It’s snowing. A little white fleck flitters down from the sky, stinging the tip of your nose. You wrinkle it in annoyance. Why is it so cold? Why are your feet so wet? It’ssnowingit’ssno wingit’ssnowingit’ssnowing.

It’s snowing.

You fall to your knees in the white fluff, chest puffed up into the sky. You twitch and whine with the tremors that rake across your body, sending nausea from your forehead to your toes. Collapsed forwards into a lump, you feel bile rising up against your will. It tastes like all the Nothing that you’ve been eating. It pushes and pushes, coming out as a sob, yet it tears up your lungs and throat all the same. Everything stings like winter. Everything burns like summer. It’s been so long since you last felt spring.

You flip over on your back, staring up at the sky as you try to catch your breath. It’s snowing, isn’t it? What a beautiful day.

“Why is it so cold? Why are your feet so wet?”

Vivian Dong

The air leaves our fingers sticky and sweet and blades of thin grass cut our legs like a million little knives, leaving green bloodstains on the backs of our thighs. The sky is candy melting over our heads, dripping pink and orange syrup like glazed sugar over the dying sun. Somewhere in the distance, a car starts, and a voice calls your name, but we ignore it because over the years we’ve mastered the art of avoidance. Instead, we sit in silence and listen to the sound of our heartbeats against the stillness, timing the inhale and exhale of our breath until it all whistles out as one. It's probably my most favorite thing about you, you know, that we can sit like this, in this silence. When I'm with you, I don't need to talk. You always know, and I never have to say a word.

We grew up together, you and I. You know me like only a twin would know her sister, like a body staring at a mirror. I don’t have to tell you I’m scared, scared of that car that is starting and the voice that is calling your name. Scared of the plane I’ll catch tomorrow and the person I’ll be if I return. We never say anything. we always know. But in case this is it, in case you don’t, here it is, before we go: when we are nothing but sagging skin and fragile bone, when the world collapses and we are all taking our last breath, you will still be the first person I call. If today is our last day together, or if we see each other again and again and again, you need to know you’ll always have me. In a thousand years, when time has turned us into collections of crinkled memories, when I forget my keys, my glasses, myself, I’ll remember you. One day, when I look back on these years, I’ll remember them with a smile. I have you to thank for that. So here it is, my ode to you, before we go.

one day bily went to the grocery store.

Animals Playing Instruments

Jewel Wallace Pen

Deirdre Cunniffe

When things reach their threshold, like roses without blooms, using my ribcage like a lattice. When my chest is a vice until it falls apart, when everything is loud and too quiet to hear. When everything becomes too much, I cross state lines.

It’s a strange coping mechanism, even stranger to some who grew up in the center of wide open states that encompass plains, or those who didn’t grow up in the states at all. I am a child of the east coast, tied to the Atlantic like a ‘forget-me-not’ ribbon. Born in New York and bouncing from state to state, eventually landing in Pennsylvania, right outside of Philadelphia, right on the edges of one of the larger states I’ve lived in. I’ve always lived on edges. The edges of cities, the edges of states, the edges of continents when the land meets the ocean. It’s what brought me to my particular method of escapism. I’m about an hour’s drive from New Jersey, a little further north to New York, and a bit longer in the opposite direction to DC, Maryland, or Virginia.

When my body is tense and I feel like I want to scream and cry and curse, but can’t seem to do anything at all, I get in the car and do what I know I can. I drive.

It’s a semblance of control, I think. When everything seems to spiral, when I feel like I can’t control anything, not even my own feelings, I turn to the things I can control: the GPS, the exits I take, the aux, the volume. The speedometer and where I stop for gas and how far I go and when I come back. I don’t drive to cities and dream of when I’ll be able to move closer to their centers, to be further from outskirts and edges. Instead, I drive to those edges. It’s a reassuring thing, getting lost. I’m getting lost of my own accord. There is no fear in simply going, only fear of not being able to return from where you came. That is, only if you want to return. And in the moments when I leave, I am never so focused on coming back to what I’m running from.

I’ve never liked spring. There’s far too much change going on. It’s not surprising that my wildest excursion to date was an oddly warm day in early February. Normally, I never go too far. This time was different.

I drove for 8 straight hours. 4 there, 4 back. It took a tank and a half of gas, and looking back I feel bad about the environmental impact of my own mind. I drove across Pennsylvania and into Ohio.

I have no idea why I chose Ohio. There is nothing in Ohio that’s particularly enticing to me. Or anyone for that matter. Nothing against the residents of Ohio, but I cannot name anything interesting about your state. Not even the name is interesting. Oh-hi-oh. Boring. But that day in February, I crossed your state line, only to cross it again moments afterword, returning home, feeling much, much better. I did feel “Welcome to Ohio,””, just like your sign had said. I felt genuinely wanted in the fields of nothing that stretched out in front of me. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

A Witch’s To-Do List

Sarah Weng

1. Pick apple blossoms for a brew.

2. Feed the foxes that dance around your feet whenever you prepare chicken carcasses.

3. Hatch the salamanders in the hearth.

4. When night falls, steal a girl from the village and make her your apprentice, just as your old mentor had done to you.

5. After calming her hysteria, teach her how to make a sleeping draught and then put her to sleep with it.

Tuesday:

1. Wake the girl up before sunrise and set her to work on the herb garden.

2. Wash clothes alongside your new apprentice.

3. Take her to the meadow to pick flowers; tell her to pick the deadliest ones.

4. Teach the apprentice to care for newborn salamanders.

5. Serve her dinner and put her to bed; when she starts crying herself to sleep, calm her down.

6. When she whimpers for her family, tell her you are her new family.

Wednesday:

1. Make breakfast out of crow eggs and a slain pig, for you have fed all your hens to the creatures of the forest.

2. Invite in the stray cat that keeps mewling at your doorstep every morning.

3. Have a conversation with said cat. Listen to its warnings about the bad fortune coming your way.

4. Extract the poison from yesterday’s flowers, which were left hanging from a windowsill in the moonlight.

5. Dust off some spellbooks for your apprentice. Your old mentor didn’t start teaching you spells so quickly, but your apprentice has taken a shine to witchcraft early on.

6. Tuck your apprentice into bed when she falls asleep reading about forest cryptids. In her sleep, she says something about the townspeople coming to burn down the cottage.

7. Leave out some leftovers for said cryptids.

Thursday:

1. Leave out some scraps of meat for the cat, who is now a welcome visitor.

2. Make porridge for your apprentice; ask her about the church and the town.

3. Inspired by the cat, teach your apprentice to communicate with animals.

4. Make lunch out of chicken broth and vegetables the size of overfed house cats.

5. Feed the foxes again; you have more chicken for them.

6. Go into the forest to harvest mushrooms.

7. All mushrooms are edible; some just kill you afterwards. Sauté the ones that don’t kill you and put the ones that do in a draught.

8. After your apprentice has gone to bed, research protection spells.

Friday:

1. Wake up to a black cloud of foreboding covering your vision. When it finally parts, wake your apprentice and go about your day.

2. While your apprentice studies, sprinkle ground chicken bones around the perimeter of the cottage.

3. Notice the cat is back, standing outside the perimeter of chicken bone dust. It tells you that something terrible is about to happen.

4. When night falls and they come for you with their crosses, torches, pitchforks, and blades, pray that the chicken bones keep them away.

5. When they don’t, take your pouches and vials and meet them outside your porch.

6. When your apprentice appears in the cottage doorway and one man accuses you of snatching children to cook and eat, scatter a handful of powder upon his coat and set him alight with blue fire.

7. Unleash death on the rest of the self-righteous mob with the help of your trusty draughts and spells.

8. As you collapse to your knees after a boning knife from your own kitchen is driven through your heart with dainty yet strong hands, tell your apprentice that you have so much more to teach her, but she has done well.

9. Die knowing there is still another witch in the forest to continue your legacy.

Saturday:

1. Leave your mentor’s body for the ravens to lift off into the sky by her cloak.

2. Pick apple blossoms for a brew.

Ichor

Eden Liu

Mixed media

something about Vermillion

Ada Lavelle

after a day at the beach with you at the end of the summer one time we decided to go for a drive in your gorgeous vintage car a deep pure metallic red 1966 ford mustang convertible When i was little i always wanted a convertible riding in one was like a childhood dream come true as we drove, our wet hair flowed behind us whipping around in the soft wind the smell of salt in the air was nostalgic it made me remember i was not going to get any younger my naivete was quickly fading away the older i got i knew i needed to cherish these insignificant simple times before they would fade away like early morning fog in the afternoon the sun was rapidly going down as we drove on into the night i could see a faint crescent moon the sky looked extremely surreal it was hard to explain but i will do my best a blend of red, orange, and yellow’s the red dominated over the week orange and yellow shades i had never seen a sight like that sky ever before as the sun got lower and lower the sky became dark red i had felt like i had seen that color once before but i could not place where we drove until the sun was all the way down when we pulled back up to the beach house it was late into the night and it hit me

the sky matched the color of the car when i asked you what color you thought it was you said Vermilion

after that day

Vermilion became our special color

my wedding bouquet had Vermilion roses as the center piece my forever home had Vermilion shutters placed upon the dusty windows

that i once used to look out at you long after the life of that car and long after you

it still was our secret thing that only we knew about part of me hopes you never forgot about it signs of you popped up everywhere in the form of Vermilion

i still thought of our Vermilion night

sometimes i missed you in the morning when i looked out at the sun out the dusty windows with the gorgeous Vermilion shutters

i wish i could say i chose those shutters for you but they were there when i moved in when i drove off to work

i wish i was in your slick vintage Vermilion car

i wished to go back to that special night

i never saw a sky that color ever again after that the Vermilion sky

our Vermilion sky

Tangled Mess Angie Chen Digital

Areopagus

Jordan Jacoel

Photography

Reaching

Jordan Jacoel Photography

Your Stained Palm

You look grounded here, with the stars bursting in your eyes and the grass tickling your face and the streetlight illuminating the smile on yourlips as you look at me. You look happy, too happy, like there’s nothing more you want to do than lie here with me, with the lie that I am.

I wish I could feel as grounded as you. I thought you would be enough to make me whole, to make me feel like I have something to live for. But when I sneak secret glances at you, at the stars in your eyes and the grass in your face and the smile on your lips, my heart doesn’t skip a beat and my breath doesn’t hitch and your presence makes me feel

Your fingers whisper against my hand, asking if you can hold it, if you can hold me, and I let you, even though I know that you’re only cradling my hollow shell. Do you feel the Emptiness in my palm? Do you feel the static in my fingers? Do you feel the lies on my skin?

You close your eyes. I can’t tell what you feel. My empty hand grips yours, and for a second - a blissful, heavenly second - I can almost believe I fit in it. But my essence is too unstable to be solid, too insubstantial to be held, and within seconds I’m leaking through the cracks between your fingers and leaving the stain of my soul in your

You aren’t enough to keep me here. I was hoping

Sunny Ajitabh

Choices

Jordan Jacoel

We didn’t enter the house together. Even though Sam said we could go in together. The image of him throwing his keys and slamming the car door was blurry from the unwashed car windows and my glassy eyes.

If it were my car, I wouldn’t be at the receiving end. If it were my car, I could drive away, leaving Sam to be driven by his boyfriend. If it were my car, I would have a choice. Every decision that led to this argument was never my choice.

I look at the key wedged between my fingers, I shove it in my pocket. Glancing at the road and back at the loud house, I step out of the car and walk on my own. Maybe fate has different plans.

I am dancing.

I haven’t danced since New Year’s, 2008. Long limbs awkwardly flailing, People nodding like bobbleheads while stomping the floor. This one girl gets in my space no matter how many times I try to get her off. She has glossy brown eyes, just like Mom.

Mom said Dad used to take her to fancy night clubs. She said she danced until her feet were blistered and bleeding. When the clubs closed, they would continue to dance, spiraling down the streets of the quiet city, hands intertwined. Their laughter served as the music.

Dad told me that those dances were the greatest nights of his life. Mom would then comment on the events after their wedding ceremony, and Dad’s stoic face would uplift into a small smile, his ears flaking red shades. Stories like these were told when we had sit-down dinners on Friday nights.

There are so many bodies. The smell of booze and sweat is a tight vice around my neck. The haze is too euphoric to break free from. I bump into someone, one of Conner’s friends, and I am doused with cheap, ugly beer from 7-eleven. He pushes me to the floor, and two other people go down with me.

I try crawling, but my vision sways. Someone says something but it’s all unclear, muffled. I can only hear snippets of my surroundings as I try not to vomit all over the floor.

The DJ increases the blare of the musicand the sound of Sam’s cruel words somehow mixes with the world of “who actually gives a shit?” -while I stumble along to the rhythm of the song.

I am in the hallway, no longer under throbbing lights. The hallways are closing in on me. They are wider than what I expected. I end up on a tightrope, the floor grabbing onto my legs with each step.

I forget about Sam, with his boy band t-shirts, the black eyeliner, the curly dark hair, and the way he’d put an arm around me while laughing softly at my jokes.

I remember his boyfriend just when I throw up in the front yard.

I thought that I was clear for driving. I thought after I woke up laying on the grass, my name clear in my head, with no triple vison, I could get behind the wheel.

It wasn’t your car, Jason.

It. Wasn’t. Your. Car.

The warnings didn’t register until I slammed into a gray Mercedes. Mom’s tears, Dad’s silence, Conner’s jeers, Sam’s ignorance muddled the pain. I guess Friday nights are different when you get older.

The hospital beds are scratchy. No one visits until day two under white sheets.

Mom doesn’t say anything, and Dad just berates me.

This was not the plan. This was not how I planned my choices the night before.

Mr. Drake was entirely wrong about his self-absorbed lecture during third period. I’ve been holding onto the idea that I can control these incidents, steer clear from these spirals. But the choices I’ve made the past year have me walking in circles. Fate just has me crashing at full speed.

Yaldut Israelit

Ayala Snir

Israeli girl wakes up in the morning, washes the nightmares off her face. She eats a small breakfast of Telma cornflakes, then heads to the bathroom and brushes her teeth.

Israeli girl gets dressed in uniform, a t-shirt printed with her school’s logo. She brushes her hair into a tight, high ponytail so the sand and dirt of the day stay out of her golden brown locks. Israeli girl slips on her brown boots that every Israeli owns. She kisses Israeli mom goodbye, and leaves the apartment, locking the door.

Israeli girl walks to school with Israeli dad and Israeli dog, the trio embarking on the daily journey. She crosses the street holding Israeli dad’s hand tightly, and he protects her from the dangers of the street. Israeli girl reaches the locked metal gate of Israeli school. She greets Israeli security guard, catching up about her latest jump-roping skills.

Israeli girl walks to class, slightly rushing because she “runs on Israeli time”. She makes it to her seat right as the bell rings, indicating that the time for Israeli education has begun.

Israeli children hear the siren. They yell “Az’aká!,” an alarm of danger.

Israeli children cry for Israeli mothers that are at work or at home and not with them during this time of crisis.

They run to the computer lab, Israeli school’s makeshift underground shelter. Israeli teachers mask their fear.

They prioritize their students’ safety, even though the rockets are equally targeting them. Israeli teachers take attendance to make sure no Israeli student was left behind. They quickly wipe away the tears of their heavy eyes, to invoke Israeli children’s confidence in Israeli survival.

Israeli girl gets dressed in uniform, fully olive green. She brushes her hair into a tight, high ponytail so the smoke and debris of the day stay out of her dark brown locks. Israeli girl laces her black boots that every Israeli soldier wears. She is kissed by Israeli mom goodbye, and leaves the apartment, locking the door.

Israeli girl walks to the bus stop with Israeli dad, the duo embarking on the weekly journey. She crosses the street holding Israeli dad’s hand tightly, and as he lets go, she understands, he could never protect her from the dangers beyond the street.

Late-summer evenings

Ayala Snir

Late summer evenings when the thick air holds the dimmed, yellow hue of sunsets awaiting to occur. The golden glow before puffed clouds combust into the colors of rose fields and apple orchards.

Light breezes sway the hairs on my arm and cool off the humidity that lays on my skin.

I stretch my body in the grass, amongst ladybugs and ants and crickets that will soon commence in their night-time symphonies.

Leaves of the approaching autumn shed from their branches, slowly cascading.

Descending, like the shadows of streetlamps on the sidewalk as the sun sets.

To the House with the Christmas Light Display

Peyton Harrill

It’s that time of year. The long slog of winter enters its final month. All the vitamin D supplements in the world cannot shake my sadness. Even the trees look sad— their emaciated branches are like an army of skeletons against the backdrop of the sooty sky. Overhead and underfoot, the world is in grayscale. Apollo turned down the saturation and is still sleeping. But up on a hill lies a house that lights up nightly in technicolor splendor. All shades of reds, yellows, and greens illuminate the twilight like rainbow sprinkles on a white buttercream-frosted cake. Thousands of lights outline the house like a jewel-encrusted chest. Strobing projections flash scenes of falling snowflakes, as a giant inflatable Santa Claus sways in the wind, offering presents with a friendly wave. The joys of Christmas are well past their prime. The mystery of why the light display still glows has left me perplexed. To the house with its Christmas light display still up in March, is everything okay? Have your owners deserted you? Perhaps, they are just seasonally affected like me and the lights bring them joy. You have become a nightly light box to awaken my mind like sunbeams piercing through the darkness before dawn. Can you keep the lights up a little bit longer until Apollo awakens? They are perfect for this time of year.

I’ve been thinking lately contemplating what’s the meaning behind the stars?

When the astronauts go up what do they really find?

Is there a better place than here on earth where the kids get addicted and the minds get twisted is there a place to roam with no responsibilities like we have back home?

A tundra garden icy flowers

A melted river full of tall brick towers somewhere else to go for some peace of mind or hope

I don’t wanna grow up my imagination is about to erupt

I don’t want these adult tasks they’re a bore to me

I don’t wanna grow up too fast slow down we’ve got time let’s make it last there’s no rush no rush

I’ve been thinking lately contemplating what’s the point of really caring all these people you see everyday they’re gonna go away someday real soon

So just do what you want don’t worry what they think I’m like a faucet running running in the basement sink

I wanna flow I wanna grow I wanna go somewhere new

I wanna take myself out to dinner see what I have to say I should listen to her more often than I do today

I don’t wanna grow up my imagination is about to erupt

I don’t want these adult tasks they’re a bore to me

I don’t wanna grow up too fast slow down we’ve got time let’s make it last there’s no rush no rush.

I don’t want to grow up

Jamie Sharkey

Bouquet of Sorrows

Ava Bruni

I carry sorrows with me like a bouquet of flowers. They live in my head, tied neatly together with a ribbon. I tend to them habitually, trimming their roots as they try to attach themselves to my brain. I water them routinely, letting their pain flourish relentlessly. Every morning, I look in the mirror to make sure flowers aren’t blooming in my eyes. No one else gets to know about my bouquet; it’s my burden to remember and care for.

On days when it’s not enough to simply trim and water them, I can hear the sorrows whispering in my ears and crawling under my skin, begging to see the sun and feel fully nourished. Their roots burrow into my brain, reclaiming their rightful place as an extension of myself. They break through my skull and start spreading across my body. Before people have the chance to notice the leaves forming at the back of my throat, I cut off the roots and tie the flowers together again.

One day, I’m sure, my bouquet of sorrows will break free from their neat stature for good and evolve into a garden of weeds. As I try to pull them out and tie them back together, they will continue to sprout through the cracks in my skull. Flowers will blossom out of my eyes and ears and mouth. My lungs will be vines and my heart will be petals. At every attempt to uproot the sorrows and put my shattered skull back together again, I will fail and the roots will grow stronger than ever. The years will go on and my flowers will continue to fester until I am my sorrows and my sorrows are me.

Be Yourself!

Mia Hamilton

Colored pencil, water color

Seni Sevmek//Loving You Seni Sevmek//Loving You

Leyla Yilmaz

Seni sevmek bir görev, Tanrı tarafından verilen

Güneşle birlikte doğmak

Ve ellerin için su ısıtmak, ve de bir ak kuş, gökyüzünün beyazlarında yükselen

after Nazım Hikmet

Loving you is a duty, delight given to me by God. It is rising with the sun, and heating water so you can wash before prayer, it is purity, written in the white of the skies.

Seni sevmek bir hediye, bir ibadet Seni beslediği için toprağı öpeceğim. ve altında seni hissettikleri için ellerimi.

Gözlerini öpen güneş ışığını kıskanmaktır seni sevmek. O ki, onu gördüğün için, burada olduğun için, sana teşekkür eder.

Loving you is a gift, a worship. I’ll kiss the earth for feeding you. and my hand for feeling you under it. It is being jealous of the sunlight who kisses your eyes, thanks you for seeing her, for being here.

Seni sevmek sabahın erken saatleri, yanaklarının gülüne adanmış kanarya şarkıları, ortadan ikiye bölünmüş ekmek, tuza batırılmış sarımsak, fırında pişirilen aş, bir sıcaklık. Tanıdığım tek vatan.

Loving you is early mornings, canary songs dedicated to the rose of your cheeks, bread broken in half, garlic dipped in salt, an oven baking. It is warmth. It is the only home I’ve ever known.

Seni sevmek kadere bir özür. Onun sana sahip olduğunu bilmeden, boynundaki benin üzerinde kaderin ve kutsallığın izi olduğunu bilmeden, ona zalim dediğimden.

Bir özür.

Çünkü seni yazan her kalem kutsal, her sayfa da kutsanmıştır.

Loving you is an apology to fate for cursing it before knowing it had written you, given you a seal of divinity, right on the mole on the side of your neck. For any pen that has written your name is holy. Any page is blessed.

Seni sevmek–

sonsuza dek saklanacak kadar kutsal bir amaç. Ölümsüz olmak ve sonsuzluk

sadece Tanrıya mahsustur ve belki de denizlere Ama adını mezarımın başında söyle*, Denizim. Yükselişimi, toprağın beni sınırlarından kaldırmasını izle.

Loving you is a purpose that is reserved for eternity. Being deathless, endless is only reserved for God, and perhaps the sea But speak your name on top of my grave, My Sea and watch the soil lift me off of its bounds.

*from Mahmoud Darwish

Seni sevmek sonsuzluktur, ve sonsuzluğu arzularım.

Frogs in a Chinese Restaurant

Asha Ganesan

Oil pastel, colored pencil

The Jordan Shoe

Xintong Han

No one knew why a blue Jordan shoe was hanging on the utility wire above the Chinatown parking lot, not even the oldest trap on the street, not even Michael Jordan himself.

A man with orange hair sat near the exit of the parking lot. He held a cigarette in his hand and was ready to catch anyone who was about to leave without paying the parking fee. He didn’t know why there was a Jordan shoe hanging on the utility wire.

The waiter across the street, who had been serving grilled fish since the restaurant opened at 11 a.m., was concerned about how much tips this woman would leave. After many years of serving, he has developed a keen instinct. He could tell whether the customers were the generous or the stingy type as soon as they stepped through the door. Sometimes he wondered whether there is a difference between the way they walk or the way they push the door. He failed to figure out a pattern, but he just somehow knew it. He walked to the front desk and opened the holder, and as expected, the woman only left five percent. He took a sign and walked back to the kitchen. He didn’t know why there was a Jordan shoe hanging on the utility wire across the street.

In the Indian Ocean, which was on the exact opposite side of the planet, a fish swam by. At the same moment, a signal was sent through Earth’s core and was detected by the Jordan shoe. Two droplets of tears trickled down the side of the Nike logo; the Jordan shoe started crying.

The tears dropped onto the head of a bald man.He yelled to his wife, “Ai-ya, I told you it’s going to rain today!”

The Jordan shoe kept crying. His loneliness burst out into a stream of tears and poured onto the man’s head.

The bald man looked up and saw the Jordan shoe. Five minutes later, all the people in Chinatown gathered in the parking lot, silently watching the crying Jordan shoe. A tear suddenly dropped from a little girl that stood in the crowd, and then the whole crowd burst into tears. The loud bawling was noticed by the Central Philadelphia Police. They drove to the parking lot and saw the crying Jordan shoe, and they also burst into tears.

The traffic completely jammed in Central Philadelphia. The big press companies sent journalists to the Chinatown parking lot. The crying Jordan shoe soon appeared on all the front pages of newspapers in America, and every American started crying. Then it spread to the rest of the world, and every human, every dog, every tree, and every mosquito all started crying.

The tears of the Jordan shoe slowly dried up, the crowd suddenly awakened and confused at why they were covered with their own tears and standing with police, journalists, waiters, and a man with orange hair in the middle of a shabby Chinatown parking lot. They looked at each other oddly and haltingly dispersed back to their life.

Hate Looks a Lot Like You

Anouk Freudenberg

Hate has two hands and my name at the top of his wish list, but he’ll never admit that. Hate is 5-foot-ten, filled with lies and repression, his curls still wet from his morning shower as I pass him in the car on the way to school. Hate is pale and skinny. He only has one pair of shoes, beat up white Reeboks that don’t suit him. His voice is a deep murmur, soft and low and irritating. His eyes are the only honest part about him.

Every time I laugh, Hate asks me why, like laughing is something shameful and freakish and wrong. His friends only ever laugh when it’s at someone, especially me. Hate doesn’t listen when I talk about music, and he doesn’t look at me when he says that my favorite artist is boring, and her next album will be a pile of dogshit. He says it like it’s a joke so he’ll be off the hook. He doesn’t look at me when I go quiet, staring at my shoes, disappointment etched in every feature of my face. Hate yells at me when I call him, crying.

Hate thinks he’s a good guy because he says “I love you” sometimes, as if that means anything. As if I don’t notice that it’s only at home, only when we’re alone and he’s halfway asleep and silent. But then, that was a long time ago.

Hate is two syllables, 5 letters long. Hate is a name I’ll never speak out loud again, Hate looks a lot like you. He listens to r&b as he lays in his bed with the lights off. Hate needs to buy a lamp. He can’t shake off the lingering scent of my memory, can’t escape from the gnawing feeling inside him that looks a little too much like regret. Because hate misses me.

And that’s pathetic of him. Hate wasn’t supposed to care this much about me. Hate was supposed to move on like it was easy, but Hate’s no longer Hate now that I’m not his scapegoat. Hate is floundering, looking for a place to put his burning, for something to set on fire, for a pretty mouth to inhale his smoke. And I’m sad for him.

Because hate isn’t an absence of love. It’s taking love in your hands and dragging it out to the garden behind the back shed, shooting it 24 times in the head and leaving it there to rot, before realizing that love really served you better off alive.

Eden Liu

Watercolor

Pontiac Le Manz

Samantha Meaney Pen

Stinky

Mia Hamilton Pen

Paranoia

Iris Zhang

Acrylic

Ava Bruni

an abstract understanding of anxiety

i fall for you like snow in spring. you promise to keep me safe and warm. you tell me not to talk, keep to myself, then i can be okay. no more embarrassment, no more regrets, no more anything. just us, barely existing, barely visible.

i know you like a vague memory. you tug on my heart and mind, begging to be remembered, to be heard. you suck away at my life, thriving on fear and depleting emotions. i am your puppet, your muse, and you are mWy dying breath, my failing heart.

i feel you like an itch inside my bones. you’ve always been there, at the back of my mind, whispering in my ears, stealing air out of my lungs. you want me all for yourself, no love no life no happiness only you.

i need you like life needs a heartbeat. you are my mind and you are my spirit, you break me down into nothing, you turn my face into fire and my mind into regret. you are narcissistic you are empathetic you are brave you are weak you are everything i’m not you are everything i am. you. are. everything.

Content warning: gore, violence, allusions to sexual assault

right; a crude gloved hand on your shoulder; a cold hunting knife raised to your jugular; a sadistic chuckle under a grimy Fun World mask; and the unforgiving realization that you are not the final girl.

You knew you should’ve booked out the back door when you had the chance instead of running upstairs into the killer’s predictable death trap. And you sure as hell thought you weren’t intoxicated enough to trip over the beer bottle rolling on the kitchen floor, costing you a few seconds to get back up, which was a few seconds more for the killer to catch up to you. At least you had more survival instinct than Hunter Lawrence, the jock-turned-bully who was the first to be killed immediately after the electricity went out, and hey, you were still in the process of deducing who the killer was while Britney Mares, local teen stoner, was being brutally shredded to bone and tendon like paper mache and of course, you outlasted Trevor Jones who was destined to meet an early death because he happened to be black so there was just you, Frank Clemmons (who was the killer), and new-girl Delilah Jackson left. Obviously, you would’ve preferred having fewer dead meat-shields before figuring out who the murderer was, but if everything boiled down to a last-man standing kind of thing, you had pretty good odds of making it out alive—that is, if you weren’t a slutty, sleazy, good-for-nothing teenage whorebag.

So as you await your last breath—your heart palpitating as fast as that of a bunny rabbit’s in the jaws of a wolf and your saliva clotting into sanguine metal—you couldn’t help but question what had led you to this fate.

Just what had made you such an unforgivable whore?

Was it because you had sex in the backseat of Ron Murray’s car? Or was it because you lost your virginity—dubiously too—at the age of fourteen to your next-door neighbor who was five years older than you? No, it must’ve begun way earlier when your mother submitted you to those pre-pubescent beauty pageants as a trophy to be won, with you dressed in those ruffled bikini bottoms in the pattern of the American flag and caked in four pounds of sparkly makeup because your eyelashes weren’t “long enough” and your smiles lines were “ugly.” And those subsequent years when you finally brought a boy home for the first time and your father called you a “slut”, and you listened to him, letting yourself be degraded by the various men in your life for the rest of your short-lived childhood.

Even now, as your blood splatters like a macabre fountain, you’re wearing that disgustingly short skirt

Emily Zou

and skin-tight top masquerading as a cheerleader in your “cheerleading uniform”—the one specifically designed by the male principal. There really was no one else to blame for your own death except for you: the epitome of a whore that deserved no humanity. Yet, that conclusion doesn’t leave you satisfied. You can’t die yet, not without knowing the reason that sweet, innocent Delilah Jackson was to be spared instead of you.

No one’s completely good or bad, you reason, unable to grasp her alleged moral superiority. After all, Delilah had her moments, even if she never intended to be mean: unknowingly perpetuating the rumor that Scarlett Walker had an abortion when she was a freshman, sabotaging Molly Reinhardt’s chances of getting with her long-term crush by telling him that she smoked in her free time, or rejecting Frank’s confession with a simple, yet cruel “you know, you’re like a brother to me.” And who could prove that she really was a “good girl” after all? Sure, she prided herself on avoiding casual hook-ups, which led her to earn the name “Maple Grove’s Holy Virgin,” but didn’t you also see her passionately making out with Trevor the other day? And she was far more vocal than you too, delving head-first into conflict rather than backing away. Yet, it was you that drama constantly wagged its tail around, and it was you who was pegged as the antithesis of Delilah’s very own existence: “Maple Grove’s Ultimate Whore.”

And that made you angrier than anything else. Even as you shielded yourself from your attacker who wanted nothing more but to gut you like a fish, you proceeded to reason that you were better than her and thus, deserved to live. It wasn’t Delilah’s fault anyway that Frank was a crazy fucker, and to be fair, you were the one who invited her to this party that she reluctantly agreed to, but why the hell did you have to be sacrificed so that she could live? She was probably hiding in some closet with a spare pistol she oh-so “conveniently” found in the garage while you were being stabbed in the lungs, unable to do much more than drown in your own blood. Delilah Jackson didn’t have to experience the agony of broken, bruised ribs that forced you to decide when to breathe and fight for another chance at life. Delilah Jackson didn’t have to experience the atonement of your hypersexuality, which you used as a coping mechanism after getting raped. Delilah Jackson didn’t have to experience the devastating betrayal of a lifetime from your childhood best friend, as he finally found an opening to your heart within your pathetic attempts to defend yourself .

Your field of vision receding; your chest being carved inside-out; your face melting off of your skull; and somehow, you still aren’t dead. You plead to be mercifully slaughtered; it’s the least that you deserve. But you forget one key component: the horny, teenage boys in the audience aren’t going to watch your demise if there isn’t any sex appeal. So, you put on a show.

One last dreadfully slow panorama of your exposed, underage ass, and you’re finally left for dead.

g o o d i e

g o o d i e b a

g b

GOODIE BAG

Katelyn Wang Oil Pastel

fruit? is tomato a fruit? is toma

Is A Tomato A Fruit? Yuting Pu Digital

is tomato a fruit? is tomato a to a fruit? is tomato a fruit? is tomato a fruit? is tomato a fruit ? is tomato a fruit? is tomato fruit is tomato a fruit? is tomato a fruit? is tomato a fruit? is tom ato a fruit? is tomato a fruit? tomato a fruit? is tomato a fru it is tomato a fruit? is tomato fruit is tomato a fruit? is tomato a fruit? is tomato a fruit? is tom ato a fruit? is tomato a fruit? tomato a fruit? is tomato a fruit t? is tomato a fruit? is tomato

Dated Dresses

Ashley Vadner

Most of the closets in my Grammy’s house are dusty and full of relics from somewhere around thirty to ninety years ago. The dress closet in my mom’s childhood bedroom is a clash of wedding gowns, 80s prom dresses, and stale-smelling fragments of old Halloween costumes. I had never even known it existed until the day my mom, aunt, cousin Lydia, and I were helping to clean out the house, preparing it to sell. My Grammy is moving in with my parents and me since it’s getting harder for her to live alone.

Lydia and I modeled the old dresses, with our mothers and grandmother exclaiming over their memories. We posed in our moms’ prom dresses– dark, metallic blue and obnoxious pink, with full skirts and fake bows. We carefully buttoned up wedding gowns– my aunt’s, my grandmother’s, a great aunt’s–that had belonged to generations of women who had lived in that house. We pinned veils in our hair and laughed over what didn’t fit and gushed over what did.

By the end, the bed was overflowing with plastic dress bags, crumbling foam hangers, and pooled skirts. We hadn’t done much of the promised cleaning. Our camera rolls were twenty pictures fuller. But we had given new life to once-treasured garments that had been shoved, bagged, and sequestered into one dusty little closet in a hardly-used bedroom.

Most of the cleaning process of that house has been slow. For one thing, pack-rat hood is a family business. We’re not hoarders, but we like our stuff. There are boxes of old Christmas cards from random families sixty years ago, and I doubt the receivers even knew them particularly well. For another thing, some of the junk has memories or stories attached, and what doesn’t is old enough to be interesting. Three old-fashioned steamer trunks, an early microscope, sepia photographs of ancestors, crumbling journals with family secrets hidden in loopy cursive.

And then there’s the fact that each bag or box carried out of the house is one step closer to the day when it will be empty. Strangers will move in and take a sledgehammer to the kitchen, knock out walls for an “open floor plan,” and exchange old furniture for soulless Ikea builds. I despise open floor plans. What’s next, a doorless bathroom?

I’ve never lived there, but I’ve eaten meals around the long dining room table, built a fort inside a bush by the backyard creek, and convinced myself I saw a ghost climbing the stairs. I’ve slept in four of five little bedrooms, baked in the kitchen, and spent hours doing yard work and playing tag outside. But I never understood it until we began to peel back its layers. I’d never considered the importance of dusty, forgotten photographs until I held them in my hands.

The day I tried on the dresses was the day I began to appreciate the house for what it is. A place where my relatives have grown up and died, leaving their belongings like a trail of crumbs. A legacy that is about to end. Soon it will belong to a new family. I imagine them with young children. They’ll put a pool or trampoline in the quaint backyard. I won’t know. Anything could happen to that house; it could be flattened for the sake of a new mini-mansion. After all, it’s just wood and paint and plaster, right?

I’m losing a sliver of my life, a tether to the past. Things change and time goes on and of course this will happen: this house will change hands, shift itself to new people and a new time. But I think I’ll keep the dresses. For as long as I can, anyway. Maybe one day, a great-granddaughter will try them on and wonder over each tired crease.

ACT N°1: Blue Tulle

Katelyn Wang

Marker, pen

On Mothers, and the Ghosts They Leave Behind

Anika Kotapally

I grew up with ghosts, or at least that’s what my mother told me. I remember her placing crystals in my room to protect me from them: jet for curses, tourmaline for strength, amethyst to soothe. She was terrified of ghosts, always looking in cupboards and around corners for strays, fears she hadn’t quite gathered in yet. I think the ghost she feared the most was my father. I had barely known him, even when he was alive. She never talked about him, but the look she got in her eyes when we asked was enough: distant, an animal remembering the feeling of being chased, of fear in the back of their neck. Her ghosts were always running around the house, sneaking through the walls, crawling in the vents, until there were more of them than us.

Before Abby, they were my friends. I would ask their names, play games with them, draw them into existence as second, third, fourth family members. After Abby, though, I forgot all about my mother’s ghosts, my only childhood friends. As soon as she was born, she became my first thought. I would watch her sleep, blow raspberries to make her laugh, play peekaboo to see her gummy smile. I was fascinated by her, her fingernails, her tiny eyelashes, the shadows they drew on her blushing cheeks. But my mother never forgot her ghosts. They always haunted her, I think. Always just a step behind, always something she had to look over her shoulder for. I was sixteen years old when she left, old enough for it to stick to me, old enough to remember. When I came home from school, the car was already packed. She was inside, looking for something she had forgotten. A tchotchke maybe, a crystal, something to save her from her ghosts, the fears she had tried to tuck safely away. Later, I wondered if she had left

something back to protect us, or if she’d managed to fit all her love in the car too. I wondered if the dust she kicked up in her wake would suffocate us, make us into another two phantoms she couldn’t shake. I wondered if the ghosts she was so afraid of were just the other people she had left, all screaming, crying, begging her to love them again. If she hadn’t forgotten, I wouldn’t have even known she was going before she was gone. This is as familiar as the flutter of my pulse, the way resignation feels, settled into the base of my spine.

When I got inside, I saw her rummaging through the drawers. No child sees a packed car and thinks their mother is leaving them; how could I have known? When I asked if we were going somewhere— why would we go somewhere on a Tuesday?—she didn’t respond, only clutched whatever it was she had needed and got in the car. She was my mother; I trusted her implicitly. Like some instinct in every child’s genes, one that doesn’t go away until you kill it out of them. When I was six, I had broken my arm falling off a tree, and she was there, clucking over me, kissing my forehead. The pain sketched dark spots over my eyes, and I cried and cried. She shushed me, called me sweetheart, darling, said over and over, I’m here, I’m not going anywhere. And I believed her.

By the time the sun set that day, she was gone. I was sixteen years old. Abby was eight. We were her daughters. She had birthed us, raw and screaming and ugly, held our slimy newborn selves. Her children, her body in another form. My sister didn’t even see her go.

Abby doesn’t remember her like I do. And sometimes, I don’t even think I remember her right. My memories of her are damaged film reel, only flashes of reality coming through, the rest corrupted

black. I remember her laugh, harsh and braying. I remember her face when I got pneumonia at eight, like something had been ripped from her, like she was hurting the same way I was. I remember her stories, the ghosts she shared with me, how she looked as she taught me what her crystals meant, how to protect myself from my own ghosts, the ones I wouldn’t be able to outrun either. Red jade for creativity, rose quartz for love, tiger eye for confidence. I remember her, the way she lived, like concrete blocks were tied to her feet, like there was always something she needed to protect herself from. I remember she loved us. And I remember it wasn’t enough.

Maybe it was the money. Or the jobs she couldn’t keep. Or maybe it was us. Maybe it was Abby coming home, perpetually scraped and bruised, the bills for two children she didn’t ask for, the fear of everything catching up to her, the demand on her time, her love, her. Maybe it wasn’t anything I could ever know about. Maybe it was everything.

I didn’t tell anyone for a month. On the first day, I woke up, fed Abby the line I had decided on the night before—Mom’s on a trip right now, but she’ll be home soon, promise promise—got her dressed and both of us to school. When I came home, I figured out how to cook off the internet, how to lie to an eight year old, how to hold myself together in a house that could come down around me at any time. When I could hear Abby snuffling in her bed, warm and asleep, I cried for an hour. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the shadow of the amethyst she had put there years ago, to protect against her ghosts. With her gone, I could feel them creeping in, the ghosts who were my friends, ones I had never seen before. Abby kept snoring. I could almost hear a pale voice in my head, one that sounded like her, telling me what the crystals meant, how to save myself when the ghosts inevitably came for me too. Anger swirled and eddied deep in my stomach, and my fists clenched. She had left, hadn’t even said anything to me, just went out the front door and our lives. I hadn’t even known it wasn’t just for a little while until I found her room stripped clean, the cabinets half empty. I didn’t sleep that night, couldn’t sleep, grappling with the ghost of my mother in my head, my ghost mother who I wished still loved me.

When I finally called the social workers, it was because I knew she wasn’t coming back. I could feel her all around the house: a pale snore coming from her bedroom, imagined headlights up the condo driveway, a phantom creaking open the bedroom door the way she used to when she wanted to watch us sleep. But it had been a month and the closest we had gotten to her was her staticky voicemail—Abby giggling in the background, her voice, bright and happy—telling us she wasn’t currently available so we should call back later. I didn’t know where she was, didn’t want to. Her face was my ghost, the way I thought we must have become hers, and the idea of seeing it in front of me, real and alive and breathing, made something sharp poke into my throat, the feeling you get right before you choke.

They took us to a foster home, loud and cramped and warmer than I had expected. The first night, Abby crawled into my bed. In the dark of a new moon night, we were a tangle of limbs, crushed together under a blanket I had taken from home, the only thing I had brought, along with a bracelet she had given me when I was ten. Abby curled into me, skinny knees poking into the soft of my stomach. Abby, my sister. I knew her eyes, had held her as a baby. I knew how she sounded when she was crying, her smile when she was trying to hide something from me. Once, when we had been alone in the house, before the car stopped coming back, Abby had been playing in the street with her friends. She fell, knees a shredded tapestry of blood and dirt. Her face was blotchy with tears, and I could feel my heart fissure, the stirrings of an earthquake in my chest. I got the first aid kit and wiped her clean with antiseptic, making faces to try to get her to laugh. She picked out her favorite Mickey Mouse band aids, and after, we got mint chocolate chip ice cream from the freezer. Green smeared around her mouth, and, as her feet swung under the counter chairs, I could almost see the baby she had been, shadowed in her smile, in the way her forehead crinkled with her laugh. My mother must have done the same thing for her, enough times for it to become a sort of muscle memory, something you learn until it’s innate. The same way staying with us, loving us, should have been. And still she left.

When I left the foster home for college, Abby cried, the sort of tears that means breaking hearts, that remakes you into someone new on the other side, the sort I knew, the sort I had cried, two years back, in a dark room with only amethyst and snuffling snores for comfort. And all of a sudden, I was her, running through the bedroom I slept in, looking for the bracelet she had given me. I was her; it was her phantom hands shoving a bag into the backseat of my junky, third-hand car. I was her, leaving my sister, never coming home. She was superimposed over everything I did, the ghost I could never outrun, and I was her pale imitation. Her first child, the one who remembered.

A cold feeling splintered through my chest. “I won’t go if you don’t want me to.”

Abby sniffed, running the back of her hand under her nose, and said, “You already sent in your deposit. I don’t think you can back out now.”

I needed her to understand I wasn’t going to leave her. I needed her to promise me I wouldn’t become the person I least loved, the one I could never quite manage to hate, never quite manage to forgive. I needed her to tell me I wasn’t something that would haunt her, that I wasn’t just the ghost of my mother, the pieces of her I just couldn’t pick out. Any words I could think of died somewhere behind my throat. I opened my arms, willed my tears to stay in their ducts until Abby was in my rearview. She came, smiling like sunlight through water, wavering but bright. My t-shirt caught her quiet I’ll miss you, and I hooked my head over hers, flew a kiss onto her hair. She hadn’t done that for me when she left.

As I got onto the highway, the ghost of my mother still haunting my passenger seat, still in my hands on the wheel, I called the foster home, asking for Abby. She picked up the phone and, before she could say anything, I was talking. “You know I’ll be back for every break and I’ll call you every single day and I’ll miss you all the time, right?”

She laughed, and something warm filled all the cracks forming in my chest at the thought of Abby, lonely and without anyone to hug her when she was

sad, without anyone to protect her from all the family ghosts. “I know. Do you know that I’ll be completely fine without you?” I did know. I had always known, since Abby, all bloody knees and half-falling tears, came home and smiled at me over her ice cream. “I’m going to go now. Call us when you get there. I love you, okay?”

“I will. I love you.” I looked down the highway, long and light. The sun was still low in the sky, draping the road and the fields beside it in its blue-pink gauze, soft and radiant. Something dangled on the rearview mirror: a chain, green gem hanging from its base. I thought our foster mother might have put it there; it looked like the ones she gave out to all the kids who grew out of her home. Malachite, my head supplied, pulled from one of the lessons my mother had taught me when I was young, when ghosts were friends and cars came home every day, for transformation, new beginnings. My mind was clear, and my mother’s ghost had faded as sunlight crept in. The day was new. I thought maybe I was, too.

Broken Music Box

My body turns to flesh again. Skin pale but not as pale as it could be, a miracle to say the least. The music starts and sunlight kisses my skin, warm like the homemade hot cocoa that my mother used to make for me on a chilly winter night.

Without a moment’s notice, I feel my feet begin to move, returning to the point in which I left off last time, returning to my everlasting dance. My body falls into a rhythm, one that comes just as effortlessly to me as breathing is to mankind. One. Two. Three. Four. One. Two. Three. Four.

My pointe shoes gently rub against the marble floor, in time with the soft music. Up, down, up, down. I extend my arm, as if I’m trying to grab something just out of reach. Maybe freedom, maybe a past life. A cold, smooth hand seizes me at my waist, stopping me from running any further, reminding me that this was my fate.

I prance like an antsy fawn, spinning in a pirouette, around and around, willing myself to flee from his grasp, to keep on going, to spin away and never come back. Yet somehow, I find myself back in his possession, his cold hands grazing my back, sending shivers down my spine.

I no longer resent him like I used to. The muffled words and screams of encasement, of a pain called betrayal have long disappeared. Time has worn on me, molded me into an old, tired soul in a young body.

He turns me around to face him, forcing us to meet eyes. Mine are sad and tattered, his stony and dead. He dips me. My skin is freakishly pale, yet still warm against his. In that moment, I wish my skin could turn white, my eyes dead, and my soul freed.

Amy Li

He guides me towards the spotlight, taunting me, so graceful, so flawless, yet so artificial. He kneels, reaching for my hand to plant a kiss. I pull away, resisting the torture that’s imprisoned me.

How can you love a stone man? A thief without a hint of warmth left in his heart. One that has never loved you back and stripped you away of everything you had until you’re nothing but an empty, incomplete mess.

I desperately hold on to the last strands of my dignity, refusing to accept the stone man who trapped me here. Two lovers’ souls confined in a music box, one that turned cold. Another yearning for him to love her again. A promise I hold close to myself, a promise long broken: My love, you will never receive, even if you’ve taken everything away.

A kiss, my love, I gave.

A heart, my love, you took.

A life, my love, you stole.

And I, my love, endured. He wraps his arms around me in something resembling love, yet I know he doesn’t feel it in his heart. His eyes flicker for just a moment, and I swear I can see the last spark of life in that deep cerulean. Both terrified fear and a glimmer of hope cross my heart at once. And then it’s gone, faster than the flap of a hummingbird’s wing. It’s these moments that stop my heart from turning into stone. That keeps my soul tied to this box, forever in this beautiful pas de deux on the edge of death.

I see the daylight start to wane, slowly shrinking into a sliver of light. Sadness becomes my smile, and I fade away into the darkness, turning back into stone, until sunlight may bless

Everything is Amplified at Night

Casey Kovarick Digital

thoughts on some white boy

Audrey Nguyen

one day you’ll find yourself absent-mindedly staring at that boy from french class and notice how his eyes aren’t really green but a mixture of olive and gold. you’ll realize that you have a novel’s worth of coincidental happenings, moments that fell into place like sand settling at the bottom of a glass. like that stifling june day you got lost on the school field trip and went on every roller coaster together. like that one sunday you decided to join marching band, where it just so happened that you would have spots next to each other. like the fact that he got your number just to help you win over drummer boy’s heart and every single text chain was finished off with a oui, oui madame in horribly butchered french. and you have to wonder, after what feels like a lifetime of chasing lovers to no avail, is there a reason? or does suburbia just expect love to be the next step? he doesn’t give you butterflies nor require a sappy playlist for car ride pondering. but after so many boys dressed in those damn violet wings and vacant eyes, should he have to tug for that to be love? he’s wool-lined sweatshirts and sandcastles and stupid ramblings about parking lots and he makes you smile in a way few people can. but is there a spark, if such a thing exists? why would you risk losing him as a friend for feelings you might not have? is chemistry a learned collision, or is it strung in your blood like gasoline, bound to ignite the second you lay eyes on them?

so many questions and certain uncertainties for someone who’s never been in a relationship. and while you’re aware that your quote unquote “first love” doesn’t have to be a perfect kiss on a starlit evening, the unknown pulses to a throbbing headache. it’s hard for you to accept that young love may be nothing more than a label-less in-between of platonic and romantic. maybe it’s simply appreciating each other’s existence. and whether moon eyes collide or fade to friendly smiles or burn to ashes, right now you’re just two fragile humans who need someone to hold onto.

if I could, if I would

Anouk Freudenberg

my face isn’t a face

it’s a place for your eyes a safe place to rest when you’re weary and tired and my smile’s not a smile and my words aren’t words and I’m not a person and I’m not a bird

I’m worthless, I’m vile I’m a lie made of glass I’m a willing accomplice if you’d ever ask I’m a fresh slab of clay for each person to mold to whatever they see I’m a hand you can hold when you’re broken and battered on the side of the road

I’ll be your best friend and I’ll be your ride home and I’ll sit by your deathbed and watch you and cry as you climb and you crumble and reach for the sky

I’ll catch you I’ll lift you I’ll stand on the side and I’ll never resent you I’ll forever abide

I’ll wait on the wayside rejoice your return wave bye when you leave and I’ll never learn I’ll never complain or tell you that you’re wrong and I’ll spin you a story and write you a song and if you wanted, I’d kiss you and if you didn’t, I’d cry but you’d never see it and you’d never try and I won’t ever hurt you I’m your secret to tell I’m a star in the sky and a coin in the well and I’m not a person I’m only a smile who will leave if you ask me or sit for a while to hop on a train and to never look back if I could, if I would but I never attack my weapons aren’t drawn my bird never flies my face isn’t a face and my eyes aren’t eyes.

The Hills

Asha Ganesan Acrylic

A day to start everything anew

Ava Bruni

We meet each other every day at dusk, Surrounded by indigos and violets. My gaze falls on you As you give your smile to the distance. And every day, When I see you in the dying sunlight, I fall in love with you.

I would exchange my dusk For midnight blues Or dawn yellows, But I don’t understand love Or the games it plays. So, I’ll learn to be okay with what I have.

Still, I wait patiently for the sun to rise On a day that offers change. Our purples will turn into pinks, And you’ll see me in a new light. Instead of looking toward the horizon, Your eyes will meet mine And everything will start anew.

Found Object Abstract Print

Samantha Meaney

Tempera paint print

Flowering Roots

Renkai Luo

Maryjane looked into the normally-dim-to-save-battery computer screen, currently a bright ghostly rectangle of light that clashed jarringly with the yellow lamp on her desk. Waiting had grown past an expectation, already forming into something resembling a habit. As the seconds trickled by, she absentmindedly stared at the laptop that would have been replaced twice over had the university cared, as the creaky little thing somehow took a whole night to recharge but still died within the hour. Her desk was not much better, but the corner of the apartment with the best connection could only fit so much. For such things, the only flicker of agency lay in how she arranged what she had. Her appearance was a different story. Though her clothes may have been bargain bin purchases, she had free reign over everything but the price: they were freshly washed, free of wrinkles, and expertly paired. It was all she could do, and she did all of it. The same was true with her makeup, which she had mastered when she and Indy moved out for college, subtle and magnificent just like the one housewife they used to see every market morning that Indy so admired. Marie worked hard so that everything she could control was perfect for these brief moments.

They only had one call a week, as any other time one of them was busy with something. Something, such a simple word, held so much weight now, so many layers, like a thick sludge that froze them in place and barely allowed them to breathe. Maryjane balanced work with her studies, while Indy balanced work with her two children. How was it that they had ended up on two different roads, their paths growing farther and farther apart? True, it had taken some effort to convince Indy, but they had left town holding hands on that lonely bus, falling asleep together as the rolling fields turned into flat lawns and then into weeds in the sidewalk.

Somewhere, some time since then, things went wrong. Every time Maryjane wanted to blame it on Indy’s husband, she remembered how much Indy had dreamed of falling in love as a girl, how she longingly looked at the housewife every market day. Every time she wanted to blame it on the folks back home with all of their endless letters clamoring that they settle down and have kids, she remembered that Indy had always wished to be a mother too. Even when Maryjane felt like there was only herself to blame, all the extra practice and late night studying and no-I-can’t-talk-today-maybe-next-week that pushed the two of them apart, she remembered that she was the only one who had ever really been interested in moving beyond that little town. Indy–Indigo was just like her name, content to thrive in the countryside amidst the ever-growing fields of purple flowers, alive without grand ambitions. That last thought was what really troubled Maryjane. Maybe this would have happened sooner or later with Indy, no matter what she did or where she went. The only thing that was in her control was how she prepared between these calls.

Master Copy of Helen McCullagh’s Flowers

Pankaj Jalluri

Oil Pastel

From the Ground Up

Jewel Wallace

The magnolia blossoms are the harbingers of a spring they will never see. The dandelions’ bright yellow will take the Sun’s place until its light floods the evenings, Slowly disappearing, changing, until the warm breeze blows their seeds away.

Violets take root in a ground still solid from the dark’s frost, And emerge as an augur of a long day and mild night. But they too become different from what they were, green as the grass, lost in the dirt.

Oh, but there are no predictions that can be made and none that should. The fear of change is the fear of nature.

Flowers know nothing about the fruits they will bear nor the seeds that will be their legacy.

Meet the staff

Managing Editor:

Anika Kotapally

Art Editors:

Hannah Gupta

Jordan Jacoel

Chiho Jing

Casey Kovarick

Emily Zou

Lit Editors:

Sarah Hegg

Leyla Yilmaz

Business Managers:

Ava Bruni

Vivian Dong

Audrey Nguyen

Sarah Weng

Copy Editors:

Anouk Freudenberg

Peyton Harrill

Lily Jiang

Ashley Vadner

Staff Advisors:

Karen Gately

Ben Smith

Caitlin Wilson

Staff: Sunny Ajitabh

Caden Aldridge

Shravani Bankar

Isha Borkar

Zion Brown

Deirdre Cunniffe

Abby Dobson

Jessica Joseph

Sowmya Krishna

Ada Lavelle

Amy Li

Eden Liu

Ethan Loi

Renkai Luo

Navami Muglurmath

Teagan Posey

Gigi Prothero

Guinevere Reaume

Tashikaa Senthilkumar

Ayala Snir

Maira Usmani

Vaibbhawi Vidiyala

Jewel Wallace

Katelyn Wang

Katie White

About the Folio

About the Folio

About the Folio

We are a student-run literary and art magazine from Conestoga High School in Berwyn, Pennsylvania. Although we’ve only been The Folio since 2007, we have collected, compiled, designed, and published student-produced art and literature since 1967. Our staff members are dedicated to furthering their own artistic and literary talents and promoting an interest in the humanities school-wide. The Folio welcomes submissions from all ‘Stoga students. Applications to join The Folio open during course selection in February. More information can be found on our website: stogafolio.weebly.com. You can also find us on Instagram @stogafolio.

We are a student-run literary and art magazine from Conestoga High School in Berwyn, Pennsylvania. Although we’ve only been The Folio since 2007, we have collected, compiled, designed, and published student-produced art and literature since 1967. Our staff members are dedicated to furthering their own artistic and literary talents and promoting an interest in the humanities school-wide. The Folio welcomes submissions from all ‘Stoga students. Applications to join The Folio open during course selection in February. More information can be found on our website: stogafolio.weebly.com. You can also find us on Instagram @stogafolio.

We are a student-run literary and art magazine from Conestoga High School in Berwyn, Pennsylvania. Although we’ve only been The Folio since 2007, we have collected, compiled, designed, and published student-produced art and literature since 1967. Our staff members are dedicated to furthering their own artistic and literary talents and promoting an interest in the humanities school-wide. The Folio welcomes submissions from all ‘Stoga students. Applications to join The Folio open during course selection in February. More information can be found on our website: stogafolio.weebly.com. You can also find us on Instagram @stogafolio.

The National Scholastic Press Association has rated our publication All American.

The National Scholastic Press Association has rated our publication All American.

The National Scholastic Press Association has rated our publication All American.

The National Council of Teachers has ranked us as a Superior magazine.

The National Council of Teachers has ranked us as a Superior magazine.

The National Council of Teachers has ranked us as a Superior magazine.

The Pennsylvania School Press Association has awarded us their Gold Rating

The Pennsylvania School Press Association has awarded us their Gold Rating.

The Pennsylvania School Press Association has awarded us their Gold Rating.

About the Folio