Daybreak | Nueva LitMag | 2023-2024

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

In our letter about LitMag last year, we spoke of LitMag’s rebirth from laying dormant during the pandemic. If last year was a rebirth, this year’s issue is a resurgency.

LitMag has always been created by the community, for the community. The purpose is to highlight all the incredible work produced by Nueva students. If we did our job well, the editorial team created the pedestal on which to present this art.

However, creating this pedestal is no easy task. It took hard work from the whole team to promote, read, give feedback on so many fantastic pieces. It took work to secure funding to provide all contributors a free copy. It took work and revision to design the spreads you are seeing here.

They say to put your best foot forward. I hope in reading this issue, you see the best our creative community has to offer. I saw it. From the outpouring of incredible submissions to the passionate and caring team, I hope the art galvanizes you to create more, to read more, to feel more. I hope the passion infused in this issue rubs off on you. I know it did for me.

daybreak

Best,

Milo K.

EDITORIAL TEAM

Milo K., Senna H., Vickie H., Eloisa L., Grace C.,

Jaden C., Sebastian J., Alice T.

Castel Sant’ Angelo

Rachel Y.

June

Lachlan C.

This summer, I ask you if anyone in the next millennium will know who I am. Was, you tell me, correcting this error of tense. A human hand could run through the history of this world and emerge empty, which is to say that a life is relatively nothing. That a season, like this one, is not nearly as brief as a person. I think now about the sky and its unwilling composition. The horizontal slabs of light, still red from the forge. What a beautiful sunset, you tell me, not aware that this beauty can only be graced for the span of a human lifetime. That the summer itself demands, from nothing but blank air, something like this—hot, womb-sick, beautiful. Representative, maybe, of how I cannot press my face against the sky and expect to see its colors. How distance is used in nature the same way we use it in language: imagine. Imagine how quickly this will all be surrendered, you tell me, examining and pinching a perfect leaf in your fingers. I am breathing into the delirious night and wishing for steam. I am wishing that, on my walk home after leaving you, there will be no avenue with buildings on either side, pulling the wind in a tunnel upon me. Because we want, you and I, to be the warmest things in the city, want to be embers dispersing steam people run their hands through. Who knows. Maybe they will remember you. Paint a mural in your image, make a new season in your name. You tell me this, knowing the month is almost over. Our beauty almost gone. You pick up a thin cigarette, promise you won’t use it, align its tip with the peeking edge of the sun. See, not everything needs to be so distant, you tell me. And I believe you, here, on Earth, smiling at the verge of summer, you going South, and me, I am thinking about nothing, about two fistfuls of smoke.

Grace Chan as Apple Pie

Grace C.

Translation Errors

Anonymous

I wonder why she pushes.

How could you ask that?

It’s not that I’m not grateful, or that I don’t love her regardless of it. Regardless?

I just want to know why.

Was it somewhere in the mix of 大难不死,必有后福? If you don’t die in a big disaster, afterwards you’ll find good fortune?

Perhaps.

How much of the your 福 is pure 努力工作？Work harder, work harder, be better?

All of it—but don’t you understand that’s what I tried to protect you from?

And how much of that becomes my 责任, responsibility? Don’t translate that for me. You really want to talk about responsibility?

Responsibility, that pesky thing that doesn’t translate, because in one language

Because maybe it’s a privilege another word for 责任 in the other, a burden. is 宝宝. Baby.

Replicating Rembrandt

Sylvia L.

Ode to Dead Places

Jay C.

Liminal spaces

linoleum tiles fluorescent lights cheap plastic seating. Squeaky clean with chipping paint,

someone loved this floor enough to mop it. in, out. hold it one two three

A red plastic flower was left on a toilet paper holder here. Tag still on, bright enough to make a baby fuss, dull enough to lose. four

Acrid aluminum gates are kissing cold padlocks here, lifeless lips cracking bones and tendons, blood rushing. five six

The lights are buzzing and screaming here, primary colors, matted carpets, stickers on the wall, fingerprints on plastic. seven

The air is heavy here, heavy with letting go and holding on heavy with breathing.

We are all breath here, me and the walls and the sagging benches beating hearts and broken windows and eight nine ten it’s done

SF Skyline from Angel Island

Morgan S.

fishing for meaning; finding chaos

Morgan S.

“I

find this place terribly inconvenient”

Amalia V.

“I find this place terribly inconvenient.”

This air that hangs heavy, holding back winds that try to ward away the heat, this table of people I’m told I should know, this food I should like, these gestures I should reciprocate. After all, they’re family. After all, this dinner is supposed to help.

I know I cannot leave, even after walking around this unfamiliar block in this unfamiliar city in this unfamiliar country. Those few minutes are all I would have away from everyone. So I sit at the furthest edge of the bench, keeping my eyes away from the eyes of shrimp and the eyes of relatives, clutching my sketchbook and pencil.

The one she gave me.

I realize, after a second and a small breeze and the rustling of leaves and flowers in the trees above me that she is all around me. I haven’t been looking. She is the deep indigo of the hydrangeas, the soft blue of the lilies, the sage green of the rosemary. She is the clouds, gray on blue, that just barely block out the sun, the moment of peace as I realize just how easily I can stop hearing their chatter. She is the flip of a new page in my sketchbook. She is the click of that pencil, the one she gave me.

And I smile at her, wave through the lines on the paper as I draw what she will never see. I find I can take just the smallest bit of solace in knowing that she is.

I think she would find this place terribly inconvenient, too.

Gold Mines of Antiquity

Anonymous

porcelain flowers

Miah K.

porcelain flowers linger in corners, like she did in a before spun of caramel and lukewarm champagne. fever flushed, a fool’s blush, delicate and wild as an angel’s well-worn boots beneath the bed we shared.

she was sideshow lights and blue velvet, salt and smoke and a sun-warmed windowpane, and in the end, she went out with grace her death as soft as dandelion down. a picture-perfect watercolor tragedy.

Victoria Harbor

Tin K.

‘Tis

Better

Brie K.

Emily and I always spent our anniversary together, combing the beach for keepsakes. It was cathartic, in a way, to gaze upon the sand, losing ourselves in the search for discarded fragments of spiculated shell. I stumbled on a buried rock, but she steadied me before I could fall. She always did. I wanted to keep walking, but she told me to sit, not wanting to disturb the light cut on my foot. I opened my mouth in feeble protest, but she gently shushed me and pulled my head into her lap. We sat in a peaceful silence, her fingers gently threading themselves through my hair, caressing my scalp. The sun was setting when she told me. Three months, the doctors had said. The waves cried out in grief.

---

I think we had both known, deep down, that today would be her last. We just didn’t want to admit it. She was on her back, weak, and I was standing by her. She held a viridescent blue shell that I had gifted her before she’d broken the news. She turned it over and over and over in her frail, shaking hands. It was harder for me to breathe than it was for her. She buried herself in the shell, giving it her last exhale, her memory, her essence, her crackling laugh—before it was interspersed with coughs—, her unconditional love, her late-night post-sex kisses. And then she was gone.

---

I was back at the beach again. Only one set of footprints stretched out behind me. I sat, but the oceans refused to still. The water lapped up to my toes, sometimes further. I sank in the wet sand. One hand traced lines in the earth, lines that were quickly swept away. The other held a turquoise compendium of loss, of love, of family, of Emily. I dropped the shell, and the waves took her away.

self portrait as a blue jay in four parts

Jay C.

I: songbird

do you hear the birdsong? they call me the blue chatterer, with my crackling gas-main chuckle, my strange melody.

II: whispers they’ll say i fight anything i see— with my sheck sheck sheck and craaaaaaaw, less of a song and more of a screech, the devil’s bird, the rattler, the chatterer, i peck and kick and scream and flap and shake until my wings are clipped. i’ll eat you if you’re not careful, little one, little freak of nature, with my jingling tailfeathers and my snake’s eyes, more of a reptile than a bird, the beheader; the little demon; the bird-killer.

careful, i’ll glean you like a mite, little one, pluck you right out of your bud and swallow you whole —that’s what they’ll say.

III: feathers

but my feathers, my fragile feathers. you can see my battle scars from here, those brittle cobalt diamonds carefully crushed in your fingers. look there, how that wingfeather dulls against the light, no matter how many stitches, no matter how many whispered apologies or darklit sighs or fare-thee-wells.

because bluejay feathers aren’t blue they’re brown, because when the fragile barbs that refract the light break, break, break the light stops scattering the music stops playing the choir stops singing the light stops shining we stop

breathing my heart stops beating my hair stands on end my teeth ache my eyelids close ourhands grip each other man falls to his knees birds scream the words catch fire spreads our wings are broken forever and ever and ever and ever

because the oil from your fingers seeped into my skin and left marks, because you can see the brown feathers on my cheeks from where you held me, because i can still feel it.

IV: rebirth oh, oh, to be a passerine creature, feathered and self-righteous, stubbornly majestic, fighting some impossible fight, barraging some strange goliath, and oh, oh, to fight until you fall, singing, from the highest branches of the tree you called home, and oh, oh, to hit the ground, for your imprint to make angels in the thick mattress of winter, and oh, oh, to drag yourself up, your precious color bleeding through your feathers into the pristinesnow, and oh, what a dream to fly again, to soar, to feel the thick air on your skin, to see the trees shrinking, to let out a ca-CAW! to chatter to rumble to scream into the wind to laugh at the sand to smile at the sea, for your bones to finally, finally become hollow, to be light and stiff as the clouds and free, free, free, to finally become a mote of dust

Lazuli Bunting

Hayes S.

Heron on the Rocks

Hayes S.

Breaking Jay C.

i rip a receipt into a million tiny pieces

folding ripping folding ripping

until they cover the blanket like city snow dots in the cracks of the duvet cover

i once saw a man do a magic trick he took a receipt and ripped it up and crumpled it in his hand when he opened it the receipt was whole again

we are radio chatter our eyes filled with static i am the bent antenna, you are the fraying cable stuffed behind the cabinet

we are toddlers sitting on a rug shaped like the world snot and vomit hiding snug between the woven tufts the wefts and the warps

criss-cross-apple-sauce

we are politicians practiced paced fake smiles and dead eyes firm handshakes podiums and lights and camera flashes

we are a walgreens receipt 1.99 for chapstick i want more than anything to find the man at the lakeside cafe and ask him to crumple us in his hand

i’m sorry, i’m sorry, i’m sorry, i’m sorry

morning on the maine coast

Hayes S.

Gypsophila

Sylvia L.

Lorenzo Zurzolo

Sylvia L.

BART Poem

Hunter S.

sandstone

it’s cold, cold enough to draw a smiley face in misty glass but I’m in my shorts and the black tee that you said you liked.

the sun has melted behind the sequoias, I imagine seeing Japan from here, just a little further I whisper, if you make it past the whitecaps.

I gather up sand gently in my palm, fishing through with a finger searching for nothing in particular, the saltwater stings my scrapes but I don’t flinch. I have felt this pain before.

I think I am only flesh and bone now, just the shoreline swishing back and forth, back and forth, and back again.

this sand will be crushed, I think, a hundred thousand more times than there are stars in the sky but will always return to under my feet. someday, it will become rock.

the last of the sand drains from my fingertips, pebbles gently stick in the crevices that make me human. for you, I will swallow the sea whole.

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present He is blessed over all mortals who lose no moment of the passing life in remembering the past Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty, and antique in our employments and habits of thought His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament, the gospel according to this moment He has not fallen astern; he has got up early, and kept up early, and to be where he is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time It is an expression of the health and so undness of Nature, a brag for all the world, healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed Who has not betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note?

The merit of this bird’s strain is in its freedom from all plaintiveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy ? When, in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, "There is one of us well, at any rate," and with a sudden gush return to my senses

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last just before setting, after a cold gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon, and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again but that it would happen forever and ever an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.

Memories with the Cypress and the Sea

Hayes S.

Renewal and Resurrection

Rachel Y.

George Floyd Square

Christine Z.

Am I...

Jay C.

... the softness with which she calls my name?

Says the boy named “darling.” When she calls for him she tells him that he is precious, a Pearl in a clamshell or a Penny on the sidewalk. She tells him that he is a sun-shine Poppy and April rain and a Willow tree in the wind.

His name is ordinary, but when her soft mouth forms the word, it becomes a prayer, a blessing, a shout of joy.

... divine?

Says the boy named “god-given.” He shares his name, Devadatta, with a damselfly, and he wonders if

he will die in two weeks. He flits across the surface of the water and laughs at his reflection.

What is god-given about a boy named Devadatta? He wonders if he was gingerly fashioned from the light and darkness inside the gods, if he was brought in a golden basket down from the heavens and set lightly on a doorstep for his mother to find.

He wonders if Brahma is watching him and if he is smiling.

... my father’s son?

Says the boy named Ivanovich. His father taught him to be strong, to protect. In this moment he is alone as he skips through golden fields of rye. He chases a bird with red wings and wonders if it has a name.

He decides its name is not Ivanovich—he calls her Александра. He will return home and smile for his father, all the while thinking of his red bird and how her name is her own.

... responsible for holding my name gently?

Says the boy with tears in his eyes.

I say, with tears in my eyes.

If I choose my name, must I craft it from the light and shadow inside myself and deliver it in a golden basket?

What is in my name, the one I created from clay in the riverbed, from the feathers of birds, from dewdrops on the tallgrass?

This name was never mine. Like the Romans did, I took the name of kings and called myself holy. My kings were birds and damselflies, but they wore crowns of blue and green all the same.

“Discuss the idea of “passing” in our two texts. Your essay should have a clear claim in which you define how you are interpreting the concept of “passing” and how it relates to the two works you are comparing. You can define “passing” in terms of race, class, the American Dream, sexuality, the role of the narrator, geography, etc. Be sure that the comparison between the two texts is justified and makes sense.”

The idea of “passing.”

Passing is not an idea.

Passing is not written in quotation marks.

Passing is in my blood.

Passing is in the hemoglobin in my blood and it flows through my veins like the ink flows out of the maobi as I struggle to make the heng or shu or whatever it is called straight as I move my brush, because I never went to chinese school straight and was never taught calligraphy properly.

Passing is in my partially-defective iodopsin proteins in my colorblind eyes as they try to analyze the different shades of red, try to choose the right one to smear on my lips and where, where because my maternal grandparent will prefer a lighter smoothed out red, but my paternal grandmother a dark, and because I’m not even sure which one I prefer.

Passing is in the tyrosinase enzymes in my melanocytes inside my melanosomes that control the pigment of my skin, the ones that I second guess and curse and thank when I am moved into a group during the diversity leadership conference, the only part of my face that remains constant as I mentally slice it up, trying to sort and differentiate and weight the features that made them put me in the pile of asian kids as opposed to white kids

. Passing is in the myofibrils that slide back and forth to make my neck move up and down, my back bend, and my body bow and nod and do the weird combination of both when I’m talking to a cashier and can’t remember which of the cultural norms makes sense in this context so I do both and then cringe because the both is always worse than one or the other, it’s worse than none.

Passing is in my overworked transcortin proteins, which transport glucocorticoids in my bloodstream as I panic about rudeness and work myself into a fit about the need to apologize, only to be more embarrassed after I do so because apparently in this culture that wasn’t rude and “you’re overthinking it” and here, children are allowed to just say things even if they’re a little strange and it was weirder that I brought it up and I need to just stop worrying.

Passing is not a verb to be defined by a noun you can pick out of a hat, or a critical lens that you can evaluate a piece of literature with. Passing is not written in air quotations. Passing is embedded in every part of my body; it’s in my blood. And if you’re going to pretend it’s a lens you can put over your eyes to view the world, just know that it is a lens coated with my blood.

Sitting Duck, Baby, and Buddha

Kayla L.

Shores

Chopstick Marshmallows

Christine Z.

If your friends jumped off a bridge...

Christine Z.

A Portrait of the West Side Fountian

Soren S.

A night sky without stars, a city of artificial galaxies, stolen from the expanse of inky dark. The lovers, arm in arm, silhouettes in the darkness.

Air: bright, sparking with romance,

Silent fools, perched along the fountain. We sit on a barrier almost as thick as the one between us, smiles forsaken, breaths forming, ephemeral clouds in the air, suspended droplets, crystalline, displaced. The children, running through the fountain, flung them to glitter alone, gems caught in a spider’s web. Our thoughts, water, one and the same.

Fluid and suspended and trapped. In the air between us, we see them.

When you speak,

Daylight. A captured moment murmurs with you. mourning, doves sing in solitude along with you.

“-you actually believed that?”

A laugh, once woven with joy Now bitter in the air.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t just walk off-”. A pause, thick with sorrow, settles between the two.

“Why can’t you trust me?”

Oh, such a fool, perched on the wall, a bird about to burst into flight

Untethered, unbound, unwilling to move.

“What do you really want?”

Blue sky seeps into the spaces between your curls, Flying away, your mind a sparrow, far in the azure emptiness.

Hopeful,

we stand in stolen moments, honeyed summer afternoons, Saccharine seconds, your promises overripe and bittered.

Oranges on rooftops, peels like curls of flame, discarded. Sidelined, spectators to arguments Just as fiery, roaring, as our campfire.

Orange, like the light reflected In puddles below our scuffed shoes. Caresses from concrete and dust Have made them as worn as us.

We spoke, only in April, A cruel month indeed.

Violets, shriveled, flooded by sweet promises of rain. They waste away under the eaves. Now desiccated memories of life, The rain they sought pools in the pavement. You trace patterns in the water below.

“I’m sorry.”

“Goodbye.”

Crepuscular Vibrancy

Anonymous

I Just Wished I Had Closed the Curtains

Jaden C.

Then I wouldn’t be in this black whirlwind, where I don’t know where my body ends and the darkness begins. *

I’m sitting on my bed, staring blankly out of my window at the setting sun as it inches downwards. When it finally reaches the horizon, the alarm sounds, a high-pitched beeping noise that rises in a crescendo. It sounds for two minutes until it suddenly stops, leaving in its absence a persistent buzzing in my ears. On cue, I rise to stand by my window, and watch the pale poker faces in the many windows of the tall, concrete houses across the street. They simultaneously pull their curtains shut in a robotic, uniform motion; they are all shut off from the outside.

I hesitantly fiddle with my own silk drapes, patterned with daisies, the flowers’ yellow centers the only splash of color in the stark whiteness of my room—If they are going to control the curtains, I might as well have fun with it. For once, I decide not to close them.

Over my ears buzzing, I can hear my heart beating in anticipation. I peer out as the wave of darkness overtakes the city— slivers of fluorescent light flicker out in the gaps in the curtains of each of the windows along my street until the darkness reaches my room and engulfs me in its stillness.

I’m about to turn back towards my bed when I hear insistent tapping at my window. Without thinking, I push it open, and perched on the windowsill is a sparrow. It has ruffled pink feathers, with a mysterious sheen where the moonlight hits them, and its beak is poised where the glass had been a moment before. The small bird eyes me warily, and slowly reaches its orange-tipped wing out to me.

I take it in my hand, and instantly, a shock runs along my fingers, up my arm, and courses entirely through me—in a split second, I find myself separated from myself, pulled into a ruthless battle

between space and matter and then just as quickly I am back in my body but feel my insides pushing and bulging against the constraints of my flesh like it’s too tight of a fit for my bones which feel altogether too light.

And I am now craning my neck to look up at the bird, and when I lose my balance and lurch and tumble backwards, my foot almost slips into the inch-wide crack on my windowsill. I feel as if I’m in a hazy dream, and the bird once again reaches out its wing, slopes it down to the floor as if it wants me to climb up it. I do, and the bird lifts me onto its back; I hook my legs over it, clinging onto a fistful of feathers. Then, all of a sudden, we are flying up, up towards the low-hanging stars. We stagger up and down with rhythmically beating wings and the cool nighttime air rushes past my ears. I look down at the city, an entanglement of streets and buildings. It’s so familiar to me, yet I have never seen it at night, or at this angle, and it’s beautiful. But when I look closer, my blood runs cold.

Black, shadow-like creatures stalk along the streets. At first, I can only make out a few, but I soon realize that they are everywhere, crowding the city like an infestation. They are massive, with jagged, spindly arachnidian legs, and don’t appear to have faces aside from glowing, white eyes. They seem to wax and wane and melt into the darkness, crawling up the sides of homes and digging into them with their pointed claws. Some are massive, almost as large as buildings, while others are the size of cars. Their bulging stomachs pulsate in unison, sending a disgusted shiver down my spine. The buzzing in my ears has long disappeared, replaced by their nauseating symphony of hissing and low grumbling which makes my stomach churn and bile rise in my throat.

Behind our curtains, safe in our rooms, we could never see the reason that the city closes down every nightfall. The reason that we are forced to shut off the outside, deafened by the buzzing filling our ears until sunrise, invading our dreams.

Now, I understand.

You humans are too curious, comes an unfamiliar voice from within my head. You cannot deal with the unknown.

transaction: july twenty seventh

Sophie D.

not greedy, but something sicklier i haven’t figured out yet.

wheat curls, clumps, larvae clinging to each other like they’re lost. tangled up in your freckles, too busy watching the sun kiss the bridge of your nose like you were something holy.

someone would surely pay money for them.

i don’t know how much would be enough, i doubt anything would, but they’d pay it. pay a lot.

i don’t care about the clumps. i can only look at them when you’re not looking back at me, and this is one of those times.

(when you look at me i’m sick) (sicker)

i don’t know what polypropylene is but you’re scratching at it absentmindedly, your small fingers dancing, you told me you could do a flip and i believed you.

(october. you’ll never talk to me again.) (sick)

your purple cotton shorts were riding up on the backs of your legs slender, brittle, BandAid on the side of your knee, scrappy, trembling when you stood, your arms wobbled and you almost made it all the way around but the polypropylene must have clawed at your socks on the way up (greedy) because you landed flat on your back.

i was worried but you laughed, thickly, the sound catching in your nose like it had to shove its way out and your hair stood at attention on every side against the groaning plastic fibers,

golden straw on mussel shell and i wondered how much i would pay, (pay a lot) to hear you laugh again.

Big Reputation

Chistine Z.

Devil’s Bunker

Christine Z.

Serenity in Boston Public Garden

Christine Z.

neonemobius eurynotus and I

Jay C.

California ground cricket. Neonemobius eurynotus. Omnivore. Identified by its large size and short ovipositor.

My mouth is dry with the prospect of falling asleep. I’m sweating under my blanket—I would take itoff, but I always feel naked without it. I have never trusted myself enough to lie there exposed. The blanket is like a shield, stopping the crickets from getting in. Still, they cackle on, the sound cascading and crashing through my ears and into the back of my face. My eyes feel too big in my head—if I try to close my eyelids they scratch and shiver.

The crickets are a clock, a metronome, ticking and ringing inside my ears. The sound bounces around my empty skull, crushing my neurons and flooding my synapses. I am supposed to fall asleep but how can I, when the light of the moon shines through my curtains and the fan barely lowers the temperature of the room and my whole body is slightly damp, sticky and sinewy as I roll around in my prison of sheets and pillows and echoing chirps.

when my skin folds against itself the millions of tiny hairs that keep the chill from touching my bones brush against each other, each one sending electric signals to my brain, and i feel the signals traveling up my neurons banging and clanking, and the spaces between my toes and the crux of my elbow and my armpits are swollen and dry and filled with twitching bug carcasses

I am no longer human. I am nocturnal, a bug-eyed big-footed sweat-soaked nightmare whose skin crawls. I grow huge, my neck creaking as I contort myself into a cubic shape to fit within the plastered walls.

This space, this space between the hottest brightest giddiest days and the windy dark textured nights is where I live. My huge shambling form is stifling, soaking and warm and slimy, pushing against my bones and down my throat.

I imagine that the crickets swarm into my room through the window. They crawl into my eyes andmpry open my pupils. I can feel them in the space behind my eyeballs, somewhere between my stringy optic nerve and my cheekbones. I feel the itching sensation of their feet behind my temples as they crawl into the slime-covered folds of my brain and nest there, laying a swarming mass of white eggs between the cotton-dry-spiderweb-stuff of my meninges and the pulsing-hot-smoothstuff of my gray matter—a perfect environment, dark and moist and safe. These eggs will hatch in October when the wind grows colder and the crickets begin to shelter for the coming chill and the world dies and we call it beautiful. They will crawl out of my ears and burrow into the ground, waiting for summer.

As the crickets nest I forget that my inner thighs are sticking together from the heat and my body shrinks, deflating, a forgotten balloon tied to a park bench. I lay there, imagining crickets crawling through my eyes, and become a millimeter thick. I wait for fall to come.

Losing Opacity

Blue N.

Once you were at full opacity. You didn’t have to be adjusted. I trusted

When you smiled and told me you were okay.

But it couldn’t last. You walk around at 60% transparency. You say if you want to, you can make yourself disappear. Please don’t.

I will wait for you to render, and shake you by the shoulders until the image seeps into black. Come back.

I will see you whole someday. Just tap me on the shoulder, or say hello as you walk past.

A Guide to Seeing Tule Fog

Amalia V.

1.

As recognizing is the first step to seeing, it is the first step that I ask you to take as well. Recognize that intention is not necessary to create, that creation is an art form, and art is a labor—inequalities of struggle and beauty, such that they mix and overlap, forming a color that is somehow neither here nor there. Recognize that the thing we call “abstraction” is barely a thing at all. It is neither here nor there, and that is where the magic lies.

2.

Recognize the art itself. See the textures on canvas or wood panel or paper, the stitches and sprays, popcorn-ceiling acrylics and wax-leaf watercolors. Consider the colors. Know that while sometimes there is a sun or a stamp or a fractal, there does not have to be, and often there is not. But there is not nothing, either. Take your time, minutes if you like, or longer. Reckon with how much time the artist spent in front of this piece: when they worked on it and when they let it rest, let it grow.

3.

Set aside the time to step into the space of the painting, into the world it creates. You’ll see not just what it looks like but what it reflects in you. It’s easy to believe that you’ve found everything in an image in a matter of minutes, even seconds, but the longer you consider it, the longer you spend with it, the more you’ll discover. Though we have little in language to literally define these works, abstraction creates value in looking as a form of experiencing. be “It isn’t about trying to make some innovative thing. It’s not composition. It’s not my backstory.” That something can be “It’s not about finish but content. The history of a painting’s failures is its content.” That something can be everything, or nothing, but it’s usually somewhere in between, neither here nor there.

4.

Ask it careful questions, or bold and unwieldy ones, if those are the ones that you feel need to be asked. Instead of asking what the painting is, ask “But what does it mean?” and maybe, just maybe, you’ll find a response in the lines and colors, the combined timidness and anger and angst and hope. You’ll rarely find an answer but if you look closely there’s often something. That something can be “It isn’t about trying to make some innovative thing. It’s not composition. It’s not my backstory.” That something can be “It’s not about finish but content. The history of a painting’s failures is its content.” That something can be everything, or nothing, but it’s usually somewhere in between, neither here nor there.

5.

Though I cannot force you, I ask that you refrain from attempting to assign worthiness to abstractions. They are a legacy, a practice of creativity and struggle and objection to all conventions. “The question of value is a joke. It just is. Like flowers.” Know that paintings are like flowers. They are imperfect by nature, but they are natural. Mark making is one of our first instincts, after all, and paintings cultivate that phenomenon.

6.

And after you think you’ve seen the piece, after you leave it be, give yourself time, too. Feel emotions and make connections and maybe create something all your own. Live. And once you’ve done that for a while, if the chance arises, go back to the painting, too. With time comes context, comes feelings that alter perceptions. You’ll have changed, your thoughts and your being, and so will those of the painting, as long as you know how to see them.

Escaping Reality

Alice T.

she says she pities the immortal jellyfish who swims alone. wishing for eternity to live within her, to breathe in & believe in anew forever.

i only want for it to swallow me whole, to know nothing of myself to live in another is to forget all that i know. & act out solitude peace is blissful ignorance, release— far from home.

the baylands

Morgan S.

Half Moon Bay Love

Christine Z.

Special Thanks To

- The LitMag team: everyone who voted, read, ideated, ate snacks. Y’all were amazing.

- Our advisors Amber, Jen and LiAnn. So much of this was so new for us, thanks for your patience. Without your passion this collage of creation never would have happened.

- Grace B. for the impeccible design on such a short notice. It exceeded all expectations.

- Sasha F. for the front and back covers; they turned out so incredible.

- To Brett McCabe, Claire Yeo, and Mark Allen for all your support in printing the magazine. Your expertise and friendliness made it a reality.

- To all our submitters. Wheter you made the final magazine or not, know that I truly loved reading each submission.

- To the Nueva community, who continues to create incredible, inspiring work.

- To you, reading this. I hope you found a poem or painting or short story or photograph or idea that sticks with you.