The Round Issue XXI, Fall 2021 by The Round

The Round

Volume XXI

The Round Volume XXI Fall 2021

Cover Illustration: Kelp Forest by Alexander Benjamin

The Round Managing Editors Jane Freiman

Stina Trollbäck

Associate Editors Julian Ansorge

Aurelia Cowan Christina Miles Eleanor Peters

Design Editors Izzy Roth-Dishy

Samantha Sinensky

Staff

Charlinda Banks Angel Benjamin Kate Cobey Lucy Cooper-Silvis Caterina Dong Isabella Levine Benjamin Nelson Adrian Oteiza Laura Romig Haley Sandlow Alissa Simon Alex Valenti Izellah Zhang vii

of Co e l nt ab e

O Mosh Pits of Mary Drive

nts 1

Nickolas Duarte

Above

Rebecca Share

Escrita en un Mercado de Agricultures Local

Kaitlyn Cui

Anatomy of a Childhood Home

Eleanor Peters

Familiar Composition

Joshua Koolik

I Would Carry You

Emily Eddins

Pleasure/Pain

Joshua Koolik

Scientific American

Charles Elin

On Not Having a Designated Seat at the Table

Susan Flynn

What I Was Doing

Kelly Houle viii

Making Sense of Things

Livia Weiner

Art Theft

Eleanor Peters

Ghost

Alex Hogue

Impressions

Savannah Voth

Vanity

Livia Weiner

Dick and Jane and Frank and Luella Sonja Anderson

Aftermath

18 22

Alexander Benjamin

The Beginning Is Now

Evalyn Lee

Desert Dunes

Emily Eddins

Remains to Be Seen

Jon Ward

Tainted Woods

Alexander Benjamin

Tree Rings

Eleanor Peters

Indiana

Howard Algeo

Stretch on the Ocean

Naya Lee Chang

Mud Memory

Savannah Voth

Croton River

Livia Weiner

Serene Scenes

Emma Chen

A Vietnamese Field of Rice

Hyunseo Allison Lee

Kelp Forest

Alexander Benjamin

The Paper Birch

Kelly Houle

The Smashing Pumpkins

Ricardo Moran

Spring to Life

Ally Chen

Under Guadalupe Peak In Early Morning J.R. Forman

Signals

39 40

Savannah Voth

A Front Row Seat

Julia Chiapella

Opposite Page: Melancholia Shape by Joshua Koolik

O Mosh Pits of Mary Drive

Nickolas Duarte

y daughter dances—

—leaps in the air

B’hold, a goose! BOLD, . . . a goose

the new feral punk rock scene

Above

Rebecca Share

Escrita en un Mercado de Agricultores Local

Kaitlyn Cui

he first time I tried to read Esperanza Rising Was at seis and I couldn’t get past the first chapter Even though I pushed and pushed and pushed Hard against the words stacked in my way. Now I am seventeen and standing at the convergence of blood-soaked rituals, a blurred horizon Between reality and fiction, my stomach feeling queasy With intestines squirming like tianguis fish flopping. Who is there but me to shave off their fins? Walking to the agua fresca stand, each word Caught along the way tickles my tongue, Perches on top of tents, prances in the presence of laughter. I see fuchsia and cantaloupe vines intertwined In the congregations of talaveras and textiles singing litanies, Their firm bodies dusted with fingerprints that have rubbed In circles words plastered on green card applications, And wiped away the tears of apricot children Nestled in rebozos against an uncertain cerulean sky. Did you know that monarchs migrate three thousand miles To safety during the winter? I’m sure your heart empathizes

For your legs have trekked over the same deserts. I want to dump jugs of jugo onto a history textbook Until its pages are sopping wet, slit open the facade Of soggy consecrated glyphs held up by the weight Of a white man who used providence to write incarcerated stories. Do not think that a rifle who has splintered your bloodline Will ruminate over an olive branch just because it was fertilized With your pleas. So I bebo gulp and guzzle until my lips Are stained crimson. Hand you a pen. This Story, Of Reclamation, begins with you and I.

Anatomy of a Childhood Home

Eleanor Peters

o we grew up here, Or they tell us In houses cracked from the same mold Shuttered windows and faces melting With passing years Corners we stubbed toes on Nails purpled, were discarded into memory Among crumbling flakes of plaster, Nice almost, because it never snows here Anymore, but we remember Broken-collarbone sledding, slipping Across black-ice pavement and months of Sniffling, sneezing while summers we scraped knees, Smeared blood on chairs, then flicked scabs Beneath the sagging couch, left there With dust and early morning secrets Runny noses and the stinging numbness of bitten tongues We grew up here The strewn detritus of ourselves A talisman of hair and teeth and years, sticking and stinking Like a clogged drain; bruises across knuckles, elbows, necks Shampoo-burnt eyes, and mouths Allergic to peanuts and the truth

Here are sprained ankles, fractured wrists, A collection of splinters pulled from the palms of our hands Hangnails and blisters and pus that bubbled up From somewhere beneath acne-stippled cheekbones We grew up here, or they tell us Where the heart is Bodies, wheezing lungs, and sweat We grew up here and left Left, so much of us here Still they tell us We grew up here

Familiar Composition Joshua Koolik

I Would Carry You

Emily Eddins

would carry you barefoot Across a scalding desert My feet weeping my heart wrung out I would bear any extreme For you Like when I carried you By myself For nine months—a weight My only job to guard your beating heart A thousand minnows darting Across my jellied belly I limped across the finish line And now my only job, again To guard your beating heart I call to you At the bottom of the crevasse I am here A pinprick of light A voice sliding down ice For days—silence And then The harsh hack of a Pick in the wall You are digging yourself out

Pleasure/Pain Joshua Koolik

Scientific American Charles Elin

s a toddler, he didn’t talk. Playing, too, was a mystery. Things on the floor looked like his mind. An army of green, with hard-to-see weapons. When older, he studied cellular identity and bought a home. His wife wanted her own room. He understood.

On Not Having a Designated Seat at the Table

Susan Flynn

here are advantages you aren’t expected to stay and wash the dishes no one begs you bring your trademark casserole to share but you may be asked to sit on the broken wicker chair dragged in from the guest bedroom and you know you won’t be invited if too many real family members fly in for the occasion you are allowed, in fact, expected, a fast getaway there’s an art to getting invited with no expectation you’ll stay that light touch above your host’s right elbow a gentle squeeze with perfect pressure your hand removed, adagio HIRAETH a Welsh word grief for lost places that never were an unfettered soul never knowing designated seat at the table

the warmth and fit

of a

What I Was Doing

Kelly Houle

arly one morning at the age of four, awake as early as the June sun, I stepped outside alone to listen to the sounds of dawn— cricket, dove, mockingbird, breeze of the far-off freeway. For a good five minutes, I stood barefoot, dressed in a light blue nightgown, unbrushed and glowing on the glistening front lawn. Or could it have been twenty minutes or more before I heard the screen door slam, my mother’s scream as she ran right up to me and landed on her knees—What in the world was I doing? Only half laughing, she scooped me up and carried me back inside.

Making Sense of Things

Livia Weiner

Ghost

Alex Hogue

Art Theft

Eleanor Peters

ow easy is it to steal a work of art? At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, it was Rembrandt in the seventies, Degas in the nineties. Vanished away to moulder in darkness and missed easily, a tinge of fascination blending with regret. Still gone, lost, remembered in a museumgoer’s glance before hurrying on. And yet, the thought snags like a thread on a rusted nail. Lingers into fascination. The nighttime disappearance harkens toward some quality of life: It is escapable, maybe, because a masterpiece can yield to a blank wall. Paint is paint, in the end, or perhaps not. Desire is a strange thing. Unwieldy. Arms stretched wide to grasp the edges of a canvas. Purpose resembles cobweb, appearing in corners that have just been cleaned. An empty frame can be both discomfiting and somehow comforting. You too can vanish, it says, given the opportunity.

Impressions Savannah Voth

riftwood obelisk Watercress flows over stone changes as the light shifts. Mist floats from ocean, falls from hills, thought spills into memory Crowds have left footprints in the sand linger briefly, disperse

Vanity

Livia Weiner

Dick and Jane and Frank and Luella Sonja Anderson

hubarb is a perennial vegetable. It grows crimson, ridged stalks under wide, green leaves. The stalks are edible and commonly used in sweets, but the leaves are poisonous, containing high concentrations of oxalic acid—deadly in bulk. They never ate the leaves, of course. Slow, steady age was enough to do it. When rhubarb is harvested, in the spring, one should brace for a wave of strawberry-rhubarb pies on Midwestern tables. I would’ve preferred just-strawberry, not needing the sourness that rhubarb adds. Still, a sweet tooth was a sweet tooth, and I ate what they gave me. Filling and sugar and crust, and a stomach ache that reached my heart. On warm, late afternoons, the sun not yet sunk, we would run from our back deck and through the yard to theirs. Sometimes we would have to knock on the sliding glass door, but most days, Mr. and Mrs. Delaney were already sitting on the porch, watching us approach. Her hair in big, white curls, and her smile an unfailing curve of maroon lipstick. Him wearing a plaid shirt tucked into jeans, suspenders, and a grey soldier’s haircut. In the evenings, we would take turns creeping down the stairs after bedtime to listen to our parents hate each other. We used to perform evening antics to put off sleeping and make them laugh—like trading pajamas and appearing in the kitchen, him in a Swan Lake nightgown and 18

me in a Power Rangers set. There are pictures of us like that. Or forcing our parents to commit to a game in which we got to tuck them in and stay up drinking (water) at the table. At least when they were fighting us, they were on the same side. The pie was Mrs. Delaney’s doing, but her husband gathered the rhubarb. Once, when I asked where he got it, he pointed to his neighbor’s yard and winked. Blue eyes framed by wide, thick glasses. He took us to the next-door garden and showed us the red-stalked, red-veined plants. Their house was small and usually dim. Old, mothy smells interrupted by baking scents. There was a table in the living room, but it was always covered with a chess board. He once removed it and taught me to play solitaire. She put the pie in the microwave for us, and sometimes, added a dollop of white ice cream, all piled on a flimsy paper plate that I focused on not dropping on their pink, shaggy carpeting. Over different ice cream, covered in coat-of-many-colors sprinkles, we were informed that dad would start sleeping on the futon in the guest room. I was six when he retreated across the hall with some clothes and books, and made his new bed with a quiet, suburban, fifty-percent-of-American-marriages-end-in grace. The Delaneys had children, too, but they were grown and gone away. One died of brain cancer in his early twenties. The other lived in the area: a nurse, like her mother had been, with long, mousy-brown hair. I don’t think they had grandchildren of their own. We had grandparents, at the time, but they were far flung and only seen once or twice a year. The four of us adopted each other. Bedtimes changed; our parents split us, so that sometimes, we went to the guest room for a storybook, and other times, we were in the bedroom with my mother. One night, when my dad was reading aloud, I accidentally pulled a cord, and a lamp fell from the shelf onto my head. There was blood, because the lamp was square and I was hit by a corner, and I cried, because I always cried. At the sound of my sobs, my mother burst in. They checked the wound together, parting my hair with their fingertips like orangutans. Sometimes I wonder if she was already standing on the other side of the door, listening.

him.

Across the hall became across town. One of the dogs went with

If it wasn’t strawberry-rhubarb pie at the Delaneys’, it was candy orange slices. Gummy, syrupy things, coated in sugar. They told us stories until fireflies appeared. Mr. Delaney worked as a delivery boy for the milk company when he was young. He said he always opened the milk bottles and drank the top layer of foam, before leaving them on strangers’ doorsteps. Nostalgia glazed his eyes as he spoke. A significant sugar rush usually propelled us back to our house, which felt bigger now, and was slowly crushing my mother in solitary debt. We would see her through the kitchen window, washing dishes or just standing at the sink, her eyes focused on empty space. She spent her days with her students and her evenings withdrawn. She tucked me into bed, alone, and I accidentally asked her a question she couldn’t answer without starting to cry. In my dad’s little rental, we learned how to cook spaghettios in the microwave and chase away babysitters. One was particularly bad. She taped my brother to a chair and force-fed him Kraft macaroni, and another time, passed gas in his face. We frequently threw her shoes and belongings down the laundry shoot. We hadn’t spent an evening on the porch in a long time. I was nine when I attended Mr. Delaney’s funeral with my dad and brother, in a cavernous, wooden church. I learned from his obituary that he fought in the second world war, and that his first name was Frank, though everyone called him Mike. Mrs. Delaney, Luella in the paper, was taken to a nursing home against her will. A new family moved into the house Mr. Delaney died in. Their young son became the playmate of my new stepbrother, who had taken up residence in the old guest room. My new stepfather was kind, but the new couple didn’t like to see traces of my dad in their house. Lots of things were broken or painted over or discarded.

Lou became a character at her nursing home. In high school, I wrote a column about her for the paper. Somebody brought it to her, and she xeroxed it, giving copies to everyone she knew. She wore fuzzy green slippers, enormous earrings, and carefully curated pastels. Her shower became an additional closet. And her walker was decorated with an extensive collection of rubber ducks, each in themed, painted-on apparel, secured with rubber bands to the bars. We visited her—irregularly, and not without guilt—for eleven years. There, I struggled to meet her sharp, icy blue eyes, which, over time, seemed to gaze less at me and more through me. Her hand gripped mine with loving force, but it was missing the warm plumpness of previous years, and showed purple veins through translucent skin. I don’t know who lives in the Delaneys’ old house now. I don’t know who lives in ours, either. Lou died last year, before spring. There were times when we would dip the rhubarb in sugar and eat it raw.

Aftermath

Alexander Benjamin

The Beginning is Now

for Nick Dentes

Evalyn Lee

he wild parakeets are screaming in this the time of greening fruit: pears, apples, plums, all visible, will seed the path ahead. Wild cherries hang off bright stems— collared doves, ever greedy, bend back white globes of clover, knowing the fruit will fall, profusion end and the day lie open between us. You, the ripening seed, a down-to-the-roots tree-stump-tough gardener touch the jasmine and walk on.

Desert Dunes

Emily Eddins

illions of footprints in the sand Kicked to cresting waves in an ancient sea The sun the sweat your hand it slips You evaporate so suddenly Strike out toward the crescent dunes That beckon you enticingly The golden parabolic mounds A siren’s call for a young boy’s dreams Panic rising like the heat Each second you move out of sight You’re growing smaller with each step A speck of dust in speckled light Another mother unfurls her flag But I have no alarm to sound Just the croak of my throat my dumb dry lips Choking your name into soundproof sand I think of all I should have done Feet rooted near snake tracks on the ground The lines of the mother circle those of her brood Her coil tightly round them wound Squinting I scour a cloudless sky Mirages emerge and then I see Through steams of salt pricking sunburned eyes My beetle scurrying back to me 24

Remains to Be Seen

Jon Ward

ater flows uphill a small stream beautiful in its way petals without flowers appear in the fields two suns perhaps three what is left of what is left (trick or consolation?) fills the visual field I know I have gone I know you have not between us a wave forms moonwave of great weight and little distance and the slow tolling of a single word heard but not spoken this is how it felt the cut the crossing the gray ribbon and what we did 25

Tainted Woods Alexander Benjamin

Tree Rings

Eleanor Peters

e sat in trees, the pair of us, feet braced on branches bare with soles calloused to leather and stained dark from stepping shoeless across the warm dirt below stricken, a stillness poised between fear and thrill and her above, braver, close enough to clasp hands with, or pass the penknife unsteady grasp to whittle twigs to a point or, no point at all besides seeing the curls of wood float down to settle, summer sediment or a prologue to fall and with them our own blood sacrifice at the unwitting slip, scabbed fingers and stained shirts with holes along the hem where bark had grasped stitches loose and our legs burned red like sparrows startle at the wind, the shivering leaf’s spasm; below, the pillbugs, feasting, the richness of the dead decomposition as worms curling around roots remind the earth: it is still alive and us, shouting toward the sky as if words could take flight, birds witnessing bodies grounded, youth bound like pinky-promises and friendship-bracelet knots, reaching up to something, up up high in the trees—us 27

Indiana

Howard Alego

he terrier slept on my lap From Eastport to Elkhart During a mini-blizzard The last week of the year The snow stopped near Gary When I realized Illinois rhymes with annoy And heaven is the perch of understanding The rest stops on the toll road were tidy And the roads of Indiana Form an orderly grid Because the land is flat And rivers rare

Stretch on the Green

Naya Lee Chang

Mud Memory Savannah Voth

etrichor and sludgy puddles Toy pterodactyl and I sploshed in This mud remembers Jurassic rains and now the hand of the girl in galoshes Found fossils and left a few To unearth: Paintbrush or pen gently Sensitive letters, Instruments mold mud in shape of the mud 30

Croton River

Livia Weiner

Serene Scenes

Emma Chen

A Vietnamese Field of Rice Hyunseo Lee

here are no scarecrows above a field of rice, where bird-shaped kites swerve and swoop instead, flutter, scare away with shadow heron, snipe, and sparrow, keep ducks afar and scarce. Among and around and within the waving, stiff and bending, windswept stalks of rice, ghostly oxen toil, drag plough past slowly wading also ghostly water buffalo. But bridges of bamboo still criss-cross fields, where women wear pragmatic pants with pant legs hemmed just high enough. They stoop, squat beneath wide and brimmed conical hats, cackle and chirp about bits of village viands, sing ancient, magical songs, songs to keep the mice at bay. They shuffle homeward, as the day dwindles down, away from an exhausted, still fiery, cantaloupe-colored sun sagging below the slow, below the lazy spin of silhouettes. And they know what remains. The same, grainy meal consumed with a dash of regret: fish with fish sauce, with leftover rice once sticky, rice picked and chaffed, but, perhaps, not chosen. 33

The Paper Birch

Kelly Houle

ranslucent and disfigured by its own dumb persistence the ground littered with errors, scant shade, and false starts a monument to the way silence can grow malignant over time how it appears to have struggled all spring to find the words.

The Smashing Pumpkins Ricardo Moran

n the summer of 1992, he hauled crates, plastic crates of vinyl deities, when flyers were tweets, when girlfriends were mandatory, and a plague was devouring boys in the closet. Outside of town, off the old highway, he played records on public radio. Alternative music, they called it. And it danced in a desert heat that just would not quit. Holding my head in my hands, sitting next to dandelions that didn’t know any better, I mouthed the lyrics into the darkness, while the pungent odor of the onion fields insisted I was still alive. And so, at 2 a.m., he spun these records, old records, new records, wondering if anyone was even listening. And I, heartbroken, melancholy over a boy, learned to love the Smashing Pumpkins.

Spring to Life

Ally Chen

Under Guadalupe Peak in Early Morning J.R. Forman

nce this was the sea now the peak too wears away

each year you said it was a bit duller like a well-rubbed coin the agave took a hundred— no five centuries to bloom and now they are dry and freckled like the arms of old men I am like the moon always returning but you are a comet that the ancients reckoned in their books— that these stargazers will not live long enough to see they chart your long elliptic and map the empty shoreline but they themselves are mere interstices

Signals

Savannah Voth

irds telegraph across electric blue metallic chirp wired from branch a sweet urgency to be understood I blink the sky kaleidoscopic trees like ink stream up in spectral bands of afterimage green cones bubble from pines needles etched and kinetic swayed by currents in vitreous air restless molecules nudge resonance from wind chimes I am the orbiting rods optic nerve humming with a signal

A Front Row Seat

Julia Chiapella

hen the rain didn’t come until March and the iciness stuck around until May. When

monarchs folded wing to wing and dropped in kaleidoscopes to the ground. When temperate changed hands with tropical and trees, pressed close to equatorial middle, bartered oxygen for carbon, we all knew, didn’t we, the grab-and-go couldn’t last, no matter we thought it could. No matter the quagga, the Steller’s sea cow, the Tasmanian tiger. Our dear little hands, so busy fiddling, wringing, driving, flying, loving it all and helpless to stop: a feedback loop pulled tight—desire versus dread—though we know— We Know!—the holy writ’s been turned on end, and here we are: glacier melt, monsoons, Greenland crumbling, conflagrations, a Texas-sized eddy of plastic. Look! Grab my hand. We’ll dig our toes into the sand, sip our non-GMO ginger beer. We do love a show. Let’s cuddle up by the shore, beach chairs poised for the final wave.

Colophon

he Round is a literary and visual arts magazine based at Brown University.

Our name is adopted from the musical “round,” a composition in which multiple voices form an overlapping conversation. It is our mission to extend and enrich the dialogue surrounding literary and visual arts at Brown by creating a community of artists across the country and around the globe. We are excited to work on a magazine which brings together contributors with a wide variety of backgrounds, ages, and places they call home. We welcome submissions in any genre or medium and publish both students and professionals. Send your work, comments, or questions to theroundmagazine@gmail.com. View submission guidelines and learn more about us by visiting http://students.brown.edu/theroundmagazine. Check out past issues at https://issuu.com/theroundmagazine. Sincerely, The Editors

a ors

e Auth h t t u bo

nd A r ti st

Howard Algeo has been published in the online editions

of Crack the Spine, Paper Darts, and Streetlight Magazine. He is a home health care executive, currently serving as Director of Business Development and Training for Seniors Helping Seniors. Howard holds a BA from Temple University and an MBA from the University of Michigan. Also a stand-up comedian, Howard feels writing comedy and writing poetry are very similar: It’s not what you put in, it’s what you leave out.

Sonja Anderson recently graduated from Loyola University Chicago, where she studied English, journalism, and global studies. She spends her time reading, listening to music and public radio, and being with her friends. Alexander Benjamin is a senior at Brown studying

mathematics and focusing on cybersecurity and cryptography. He is interested in biking, food, hot sauce, and origami.

Naya Lee Chang is a twenty-year-old multimedia artist and dual degree student at Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design. Her work spans many artistic disciplines and often incorporates extensive research.

Ally Chen is an ambitious sophomore student at a high school in Northern Virginia. She has long been interested in art, and has been actively creating pieces since she was around 5 years old. Her most preferred style currently is realism. Her passion for art grew throughout the years, especially during the quarantine period of 2020, where she found herself with an abundance of time. During that period of quarantine, she used art as a way to entertain herself and relieve mental stress. She found creating art highly beneficial and now uses art to help children in healthcare centers through her youth-led nonprofit organization. Aside from art, Ally and her twin sister also enjoy running and travelling. Emma Chen is a sophomore in high school whose passion for

art stemmed at a young age on a trip back to her parents' hometown, Shanghai, China. After examining and admiring her grandfather's oil painting remakes of Van Gogh, Emma developed a deep interest for painting. Since then, she has incorporated art into many aspects of her life, and continues to draw in a realistic style. In her free time, she enjoys drawing digitally, volunteering at art non-profits, and running with her twin sister.

Julia Chiapella’s poetry has appeared in Avatar Review, Edison Literary Review, I-70 Review, The MacGuffin, Midwest Quarterly, OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters, The Opiate Magazine, Pirene’s Fountain, and The Wax Paper among others. She co-founded Santa Cruz Writes to enhance literary opportunities for Santa Cruz County, California, residents. The retired director of the Young Writers Program, which she established in 2012, Julia received the Gail Rich Award for creative contributions to Santa Cruz County. Kaitlyn Cui is a student from Southern California and a daughter of immigrant parents. Her work has been recognized by The New York Times and published in Just Poetry!!! the National Poetry Quarterly, Teen Ink, World Journal, and more. Born to a culture that does not believe in the importance of art in modern society, Kaitlyn writes in hopes of spreading the beauty of poetry to more people and destigmatizing the acts of creating and appreciating art.

Nickolas Duarte is a filmmaker based in Tucson, AZ. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, NALIP, Sony Pictures Television, Warner Bros, the Ryan Murphy HALF Initiative, the Webby Awards and online platforms Vimeo Staff Picks, Omeleto, and Short of the Week. His poetry has previously been published in The Avalon Literary Review, The Ignatian, and The Evening Street Review. Emily Eddins’ poetry, creative nonfiction, and short fiction

have appeared in publications such as After the Pause, The Willow Review, The Louisville Review, Perceptions Magazine, The Toad Suck Review, Forge, Front Porch, The Cape Rock, Visitant Lit, Voices de la Luna, Edison Literary Review, Third Wednesday, and others. Her humorous essay collection, Altitude Adjustment, reached the Top Five in the Amazon Kindle Hot New Releases section for 90-minute short biographies. Emily’s career includes time spent as a speechwriter, a journalist, and an editor. She holds a BA from Vanderbilt University, an MA from Georgetown University, and has studied creative writing at both Georgetown University and Stanford University. She lives in Northern California with her husband and three children. You can learn more about Emily at eddinswrites.com.

Charles Elin worked with the late writer/editor, Larry Fagin, from January 2012 until Fagin's death in 2017. Fagin published a chapbook of Charles' poems and stories in 2014, and added two later stories to his 2016 magazine, The Delineator. Charles' flash fiction pieces have been published by Columbia Journal, Corium Magazine and Midway. His poems have appeared in over a dozen journals, including Rosebud, Forge, Mantis. Byprofession, he is a psychiatric social worker in private practice.

Susan Flynn has been published in Voices de la Luna; Late Peaches, An Anthology of Sacramento Poets; No Achilles, An Anthology of War Poetry; Tule Review; East Jasmine Review; Oberon Poetry Magazine; WomenArts Quarterly; Adirondack Review; SLAB; and Cosumnes River Journal. Her poem “Ode to My Mistakes” has been nominated for the 2018 Sundress Best of the Net award. She has also attended several writing workshops and studied with Mark Doty, Fenton Johnson, Marie Howe, Ellen Bass, Carl Phillips, Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Kate Asche, and Pat Schneider. Susan has her BA in American Literature and her PhD in Clinical Psychology, and currently works as a private practice clinical psychologist, a university professor, and a training and supervising psychoanalyst. She lives in Sacramento and enjoys fly fishing, writing, photography, and playing the piano.

J. R. Forman’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Apricity Magazine, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Glint Literary Journal, Literature of the Americas, Contemporary Studies in Modernism, Matter: A Journal of Political Poetry and Comment, Ramify, Streetlight Magazine, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Make It New, and anthologies by Clemson University Press. He was a 2019 finalist for the Julia Darling Memorial Poetry Prize. He received a PhD in Philology at the University of Salamanca and a PhD in Literature and MA in English at the University of Dallas, along with a BA at St. John’s College, Santa Fe. Forman has presented at such conferences as the Association of Literary Critics, Scholars and Writers; the Spanish Association for American Studies; and the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture. He is a lecturer in Literature and Philosophy at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas. drjrforman.com Alex Hogue is a first year student in the Brown|RISD

Dual-Degree Program, and she is planning on studying Computer Science at Brown and Illustration at RISD. She is from North Carolina and enjoys ice skating, drawing, photographing, reading, and watching horror movies. Her art and photography have been recognized in the 2020 National YoungArts Competition as well as the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for the past several years, including several regional awards and a national gold medal in 2021.

Kelly Houle is a writer and artist whose poetry has been published in Crab Orchard Review, Red Rock Review, Sequestrum, and Written Here and There: Community of Writers Poetry Review 2020 Anthology. She was a semifinalist for the Emily Dickinson Award (2003) as well as the Red Rock Poetry Award (2004). She has an MFA in creative writing from Arizona State University, where she also received a Virginia G. Piper Summer Creative Writing Fellowship. Kelly is the founder of Books of Kell’s Press, where she creates limited editions of handmade miniature books and illuminated manuscripts. She has been an academic tutor for the past twenty years. Kelly also worked at the National Weather Service in Phoenix and Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. She enjoys watching the sky. Joshua Koolik is a sophomore at Brown University concentrating in Visual Art and Mathematics.

Evalyn Lee is a former CBS News producer currently living in London. Over the years, she has produced television segments for 60 Minutes in New York and then for the BBC in London. Her broadcast work has received an Emmy and numerous Writers Guild Awards. She is currently at work on her first poetry collection. Hyunseo Allison Lee is a product of an interesting

phenomenon. She has yet to attend high school in an Englishspeaking country. But, she has been attending an international school in Korea and the almost required after-school-English programs since before she actually attended school. Needless to say, she has been immersed in English. Her interesting status has not diminished my love of and for English. Her love has become a burgeoning desire to weave words together to create something she humbly refers to as my poetry. And after accumulating a few pieces and throwing away many, she found herself seeking to share her art and self beyond the orbit of her friends, family, and teachers. She seeks the validation which most authors strive for. As such, she has gulped several times and offered her soul(s) up for examination, preferably perusal and charity. Last year, one of her teachers told her she should appreciate her readers, and she does. She thanks you for your time and effort.

Ricardo Moran’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in Beatific Magazine, Cider Press Review, DASH Literary Journal, Evening Street Review, Glint Literary Journal, Midwest Quarterly, Perceptions Magazine, Potomac Review, The Seattle Star, Willa Cather Review, and in the Nebraska Writers Guild, San Diego Writers, Ink, and Wingless Dreamer anthologies. He has attended the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators conference, the Willa Cather Foundation Spring conference, and San Diego Writers, Ink workshops. Ricardo serves on the board at San Diego Writers Ink. Currently a copywriter, Ricardo is the former director of nonprofit education programs and appeared in television interviews for the American Red Cross. In his spare time, he enjoys traveling and learning how to say “good morning” in as many languages as possible. Eleanor Peters was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, and currently studies English and Linguistics at Brown University. She has received a silver medal for her writing portfolio from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, among other honors. Her work has appeared in post- Magazine, The Loom, and elsewhere. Alongside writing, she copyedits for the College Hill Independent, Brown Political Review, and post- Magazine, and serves as a prose reader for The Adroit Journal. 46

Rebecca Share is a rising senior at Garrison Forest in

Baltimore. She has been working with charcoal for less than two years and focuses mostly on realism. The piece included in this issue is a self-portrait of Rebecca participating in her favorite sport, equestrian vaulting.

Savannah Voth is a high school senior from California who loves to create things.

Jon Ward is the author of Write Better English (1982,

Cambridge University Press) and Big Baby, illustrated by Claudio Munoz (1986, Walker Books), and served as the editor for MC24: Bruce Mau’s 24 Principles for Designing Massive Change In Your Life & Work (2020, Phaidon Press). He was born and educated in the UK and migrated to the United States in 1992. Jon holds a degree in English literature from Cambridge University, and has studied with Jeredith Merrin. He has worked as a marketing consultant, serves on the board of Regenerating Sonora, a nonprofit based in the rural mining town of Superior, AZ, and is the founder and CEO of Braincat.

Livia Weiner is a sophomore at Brown University double concentrating in Visual Arts and Environmental Studies. She works in many mediums, with a particular focus on film photography and collage. Her work investigates elements of the grotesque and the human form, accompanied by explorations of the natural world.