Noon is a time that anticipates shadow, a time when light falls straight on necks and sundials. The light at noon offers analytical clarity; it also begins a heat through which the afternoon radiates. Noon is a dense, spare border that looks into the heart without abandoning the mind. We attempt to do the same by gathering cross-sections of prose, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art.
a note from the editors issue no. 4
Belonging What does it mean to belong? The desire to experience community and acceptance, to feel close to others, is a driving force for many. The pieces in this issue explore the complexities and intersections of belonging as they impact families, couples, and individuals. In many ways, belonging is asymptotic: it remains partial and aspirational as intimacies and alliances shift and develop. Our poetry in this issue explores the idea that to belong is to long and to be longed. In this asymmetric game, as they seek for belonging, these poets reach out of the corner, presenting their most vulnerable selves, powerless to the touch of another, then deterred, delineate belonging’s incompleteness, its elusiveness. These poets illuminate topologies of grief and vulnerability as symptoms of attempts to connect with another longing soul. The fiction in this issue explores how relationships can both alienate us and give us the comfort of belonging. In “Whichever Bright Frontier,” belonging is closely tied to objects: a kitschy bear is both the holder of emotional squatter’s
rights, and symbolic of a mother’s abandonment. Her daughter tries to figure out how to belong in the new form her family has taken, despite her being “plain as an empty box on a mantle.” And in “Orange,” the attention paid to the spoken word helps us to see how someone can belong simply within a sentence structure, becoming someone’s answer through the constructions of language. The nonfiction writing in this magazine explores the way in which our relationships support or hinder our experiences of belonging. In “Unsaid,” Sarai Jaramillo explores the ways in which identity can be reduced and projected through microagressions. Shira Buchsbaum’s “The Phonics of Grief ” grapples with the narrative dissonance of loss. Both pieces interrogate family dynamics as sites of simultaneous belonging and dissonance. We invite you to join our explorations of belonging as a site of both joy and grief, as a common pursuit whose mixed satisfactions create good stories.
The Editors, Thin Noon May 6, 2017
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Editor-in-Chief Hadley Sorsby-Jones Managing Editor Raphaela Posner Poetry Editors Noah Fields, Hadley Sorsby-Jones & Roy Zhang Fiction Editors NaĂŻma Msechu, Lilith Todd & Georgia Wright Nonfiction Editors Lucie Fleming & Raphaela Posner Arts Editors Sara Dunn & Rachel Hahn Illustrator Sara Dunn Graphic Designer Maria Ji & Laura Lin
for more please visit
thinnoon.com
contents 6
shiva Mika Kligler
8
everything hides Roy Zhang
11
orange Tabitha Payne
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slish and other poems Kirsten Ihns
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Isolation I Neeti Banerji
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Whichever Bright Frontier Sorrel Westbrook
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Unsaid Sarai Jaramillo
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Subway Catherine Cawley
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Wall and other poems Omotara James
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Phonics of Grief Shira Buchsbaum
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Untitled Rachel Hahn
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BLUE Briana Lynn
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Benefit St. and other drawings Natasha Sharpe
shiva
by mika kligler
over cream sauce this summer she handed me a copy of the deed to her own grave for dad’s records I rode the subway home with it she is bringing herself to pieces clearing out her attic so we won’t have to every time I see her she drapes a thick gold chain over me a jewish tome she is un building herself bit by bit absence is not empty to be clearer more and more of what she sees is obscured by a darkness at the center of her field of vision retinas to bits dad tells me she asked him recently about the right way to do yourself in what to swallow how much of it
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to be clearer I’ve never lost someone grief is a place I’ve never been and from here I can’t make out its topology how the dunes rise and how they fall and what they’re even made of I try to resist eulogizing before she’s gone but she is making it difficult I find myself wondering how I’ll see her when she’s not around to see rim pink thin wet eyes she tears down 73rd st armed with ski-poles their vicious tips see the earth feelingly I will see her feelingly I will lay my eyes upon her here have mine have mine until I looked it up I thought the word ‘remember’ came from the latin ‘membrum:’ limb to make embodied again
in an email she tells me she wants me to write her memoir when she’s gone I think how heavy to have to write a body into being again she is asking to leave but she knows better than anyone how leaving sows seeds and bodies make for fertile ground absence is not empty there’s a place I’ve never I and she can see less and less how they rise the dunes and how they fall and what is even growing there
Mika Kligler grew up in Brooklyn, NY and now studies Literary Translation at Brown University. She is also a member of SPACE (Space in Prisons for Art and Creative Expression) and is interested in the intersection of creative art and transformative justice.
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everything hides
by roy zhang
I. we are the birds chirping at 4 a.m. trying to wake up the dreamers who shall never listen to our stories
a song of dawn
II.
at dawn when the sun glows all songs hold their breath
that's why mornings are so quiet even when it snows
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everything hides by sara dunn
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III.
when snowflakes are dancing ferociously amongst the wind like white flames burning under the camouflage of rain they have no shadows
everything hides under daylight
:: :: :: :: ::
the universe takes ten to the twenty-two hundredth years to cool down
she once told me she envies the universe for having so much time
Roy Zhang studies philosophy and mathematics at Brown University.
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orange
a short story
by tabitha payne
The month was October, and everything was orange and black. The air froze crisp and impatient. It was fall. The world held its breath. The leaves, quivering in the trees, waited anxiously for a sigh – for everything to drop. Her name was Facie, and she didn’t want to be like other girls. She really, really didn’t want to be like other girls. And so she liked her name, Facie, because she had never met anyone else named Facie, and so she wasn’t like other girls, and that was good. The happiest moment of her life was when a boy said that to her. He looked at her, deep, right in her black-lidded eyes, and said, without blinking, that she was not like other girls. And she looked deep in his eyes too, his black eyes which he always said were brown but were definitely totally black, and she wasn’t sure, but she thought that maybe, just for a moment, she saw the faintest glimmer of orange, somewhere, deep in his eyes. But then she realized she actually didn’t, and that she was really just seeing the reflection of her orange Smiths T-Shirt in his eyes, and that she was just being silly. And even though she knew all that, she marveled at the memory anyways. Because for that tiny little second, it was like she was in covenant with all the universe; her breath skipped and she was caught in a hiccup of the infinite, stretching its orange arms out endlessly into time and space, tickling her heart strings with the promise of magic. But that was all a big lie. She didn’t like that the happiest moment of her life was also a disappointing one. She also
didn’t like that the happiest moment of her life had to do with a boy. Facie liked to write slam poetry and wear lots of dark makeup and not wear bras or shave her armpits because it made her feel powerful. And doing that made all the right women want to be friends with her and all the wrong men want to avoid her. She loved to wear these big chunky black boots, too, because it made her feel like she was stomping on men’s hearts, and she felt like hot shit when she wore them, and so she wore them most of the time. Facie was a cool girl. Or at least, she really, really wanted to be. — His name was Seb, and he wanted to kill himself. He thought about it. He thought about it a lot. He thought about in the shower, when he washed his hair. He thought about in in the kitchen, when he had his coffee. He thought about it in the car, when he drove to work, where he thought about it even more. He wanted to kill himself. He really wanted to kill himself, but he wouldn’t, because he didn’t want to be like other dentists, and dentists, he learned once, have the highest rate of suicide amongst all medical professionals. He even knew a couple friends in dentist school who had. And so he wouldn’t kill himself — he wouldn’t — because then, he’d be like other
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dentists and he just couldn’t have that. It was a matter of principle. That didn’t mean he didn’t feel sad, of course. Sometimes he felt like the only thing that was real in the world was how sad he felt. It was like he had been given a pair of glasses tinted blue, so everywhere he looked was blue. Even the color white turned blue, which he thought was odd, but there it was: blue as sea, a big, bluish lie. He felt the sadness everywhere. He felt in it the trees, and in the wind, and in the crowd. He felt the sadness in all parts of his body, a heavy bone-tired that dragged his limbs slow, like he was living in molasses. But mostly, mostly he felt the sadness anchored right in his chest, an infinite, hopeless, deadweight kind of sadness that sat on his soul and beached him on his bed every morning. And every morning he tried to think of every reason he shouldn’t get out of bed that day, and yet every morning, somehow, and he couldn’t explain it for the life of him, he managed to get out of bed. And he didn’t know how he did it, because he swore it got harder every time – every day when he got out of bed, it was the hardest thing he had ever done – but because he could, because every day from somewhere he could find the strength, he thought that maybe he could keep going on. So this was his life: Seb would drive to work, and everything was blue. And he’d clean people’s teeth, which he liked, but somehow those teeth looked blue too. And then he’d drive home, and, just for a moment, the sky would turn a bright, fiery orange. But then, very quickly, it’d change back to blue, and then the world would be blue, too. And all that time he’d look forward at the road and think about maybe killing himself, but then he remem-
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bered that he wasn’t like other dentists, that he was his own person, his own dentist, and that he didn’t want to become a statistic — he wouldn’t let himself become a statistic — and hey, if it had worked for him thus far — It was a matter of principle.
Tabitha Payne is an artist, writer, comedian and feminist who was born and raised in Phnom Penh, Cambodia to Filipino and American parents. She loves writing plays, Southeast Asian history, learning new languages, Lindy Hop swing dancing, and reading the New York Times everyday.
slish and other poems by kirsten ihns
slish go & do your lonely in the corner. do it all over the wall. baby yr a timeless dishes, you don’t mean to be pernicious. you’ve got such a good heart. baby you hurt so good for me. out the window it’s october.
fair making the appeal of birds in description being one thing available as multiple animated bodies, small and vulnerable a mist, lightly extended. something something else may become, suddenly. proverb: if you promise someone something you should keep it: the last leaves are clinging like dry stars. wild dogs wear their old gentleness like a dirty garment they drag it along: let me take the world in my sharp teeth let me shake it til it dies.
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slish and other poems by sara dunn
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rose opulent//those moments//when you forget you can be seen//theatre plush// velvetine//metastatic voluble// daisy-cut//internecine//what the one i say i love dreams//is a poor future i. whose ruddy calculus imagines it with inorganic forms
all peopled
o the lioness approaches on her circuit she approaches orange vertical seal
i say
take a sudden thing, make it slow so you can look at it nicely and for every eyelash i wish would heal—
i wish body
know not the thing, know rather what it angles towards: seeks to i am making myself a rosy arc fickle hollow full knowing like a tool knows as process shape the shape someone gave it told it to wait fragile magic animal takes out its din goes to sleep for a while. ii. i have been charged with the care of the horses, numerous, & vehicle if you want it to go it must be made insufficient unto itself or otherwise afraid
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iii. let it to say just its confrères their future rooms
i am a behaving body may choose
let me be introduced as a realized device free source of poor advice i just wanted to do a job as no rule not arising from a system necessity can stay i believe yes this i believe and very little else
Kirsten Ihns is a Teaching-Writing Fellow and MFA candidate in poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Winner of the 2016 Black Warrior Review poetry prize, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Bennington Review, BOAAT, Black Warrior Review, The Offing, New Delta Review, POOL, and elsewhere. She is from Atlanta, Georgia.
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Isolation I
by neeti banerji
Artist Statement The Isolation series chronicles emptiness — small things in large spaces and large things in nothingness. Part one of a series of three.
Isolation I by neeti banerji
Neeti Banerji is currently a senior majoring in illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design with a particular focus on the natural world. She's also committed to art conservation and currently works at the RISD Museum helping preserve some of the collection's works. She likes mushrooms, milkshakes and mangoes (not together, never together).
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whichever bright frontier
by sorrel westbrook
My father, one morning, forgot how to get dressed. He left the house with his tie knotted around his eyes, like a blindfold. I was sitting at the kitchen table, pretending not to see him out the window, where he stood in the yard. He tapped on the dull windowpane and moved his head back and forth like the blind man we had seen on television the night before, trying to get my attention. “Willy! Come on out and shoot me,” he said. The tie was dark blue with yellow ducks printed on it. I had given it to him years earlier, when I was in middle school, and I regretted the inevitable childishness of my taste. He was holding a green apple. “Like Old William Tell! You remember!” He lifted the blindfold and his eyes looked bright and shocking there in the center of his face. I spooned through my cereal, dredging for marshmallows. There were none left. The milk was green and grey and left a film of grease on the back of my spoon. “That’s not how that story goes. You shoot me, not the other way around,” I shouted at the window. “Too smart for your old man,” he said. “Boys don’t like a know-it-all. A busy bee doesn’t know the taste of honey, you understand.” My father’s wisdom was always like that- aphoristic, incomprehensible, charming, often shouted through a windowpane. My name is Wilhelmina, but my father used to call me Willy as a joke. The joke was that he hadn’t wanted a daughter. Especially a plain daughter. My mother, like many women who find that the man they have married is merely an impossible child, a madman with strong arms and a weak mind and an obscure sense of always being logically correct, went to Alaska three years earlier with a quiet man she met
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in a parking lot on Easter Sunday. She offered to take me with her, but I can’t stand the cold. Nor am I someone who takes pleasure in beautiful sights, far away places, mountains, strange birds, and the sound of the sea. I like where I am. After she left, a box came filled with touristy trash like salt and pepper shakers in the shape of jumping salmon and a jar of juniper berry jam and some caps and shirts that made puns on the word “grizzly.” My father suggested that we burn these offerings, out of a sense of duty more than anything, but the little leaping salmon still leap on our kitchen table, and there’s a carved bear on our front step holding a piece of wood that has the words welcome to our frontier burned into it. My father used to call him Chuck. As in, we should have chucked him when we had the chance. I would remind him that we still had the chance. Every day is a new opportunity to throw Chuck away. But for my father, Chuck had been around long enough that trashing him was out of the question. He had, as my father might say, emotional squatter’s rights. The same winter that my father decided we would eat no more meat (The screams, Willy! Imagine that chicken nugget as it once was-- a baby chicken, possibly a genius, possibly an artistic chick, perhaps a great lover of chicken feed or its sisters and brothers--and we will never know), he rented a helicopter for a day. We did not have a lot of money. My father and I lived in my uncle’s guesthouse, on the back of his property in the orange tree belt of Southern California. My uncle Tweedy is not my father’s brother-- he is my mother’s brother. Tweedy and my father always liked one another, though. And no one was using the guesthouse. When I left the house for school that day, my father was still at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper. He had a yolky smear in his moustache from breakfast, and he was
humming that song about love and distant beaches. When I came home that afternoon, there was a note on the table that read: Gone to Tijuana--Direct all messages to secretary Chuck. Wish me luck, my serious Willy. My father was a very handsome man, with deep-set eyes and a quiet way of shrugging his large shoulders and a long raised scar that ran across his chest and showed at the collar of his shirt. My mother is beautiful as well, with lovely white teeth that click when she speaks in her clipped accent. Nobody knows where all that potential washed away to, because I am as plain as an empty box on a mantle, and nearly as charismatic. For this reason, I always felt sheepish around my father, apologetic and indulgent, as if I had slighted him when we first met, and I was forever making amends. When he came home the next morning, I poured him a bowl of cereal and made coffee and asked him how he felt. He told me that he had gone to Tijuana to make our fortune. Actually, he said my fortune. And that he had succeeded, against grand odds. He drank the green and grey milk from the cereal bowl and swished coffee in his cheeks like mouthwash and then pulled a key ring from his pocket. On it swung a small silver key that looked cheap, like the key to a girl’s diary. He held my hand open in his. His fingers looked elegant, like he could play piano or write sonnets. In his hand, mine looked like the stubbed paw of an animal, short and square fingered. He placed the key in my hand and closed my fingers over it. We had seen, three nights before, a television advertisement in which a very tanned husband did the same thing to his wife, only with a diamond necklace. I tried to well up with joy and smile winningly with my very white teeth. A year after he gave me the key, my father planted a vegetable garden. He wanted to grow heirloom tomatoes. The tomatoes didn’t come, and my father lay down on the sofa
beneath a Denali-themed quilt, and stopped speaking to me. My uncle Tweedy came down to the guest house and asked that my father clean up the mulch and wheelbarrow and small shovels he had left across the lawn between their house and ours. My father called him faggot and environmental terrorist and reminded him that fat dogs have no chance at flight, not even shallow flight. My uncle is a very good man, but sometimes he gets angry enough to shut off the power and the water. I was surprised by my father’s death. I had always assumed he would outlive me. He had written an elegy for me when I was born, and he would read it out to me occasionally, line-editing with a purple pencil. Curious and cautious--does that still sound like you? Do you think of yourself more as a dove or a swan, Willy? He died of blood clots, apparently, although he had always seemed too quicksilver for that. I wrote a very poor elegy for him, all my metaphors dry and straight down the long road of greeting- card sentiment. My mother came for the funeral, the first time she had visited in eight years. She stayed with me in the guesthouse for three days. She had a new tattoo of purple blossoms across her back (forget me not, she said when she saw me staring, and I said that I hadn’t) and took fish oil every morning along with saltines. I would not have recognized her if it weren’t for her teeth that clicked prettily when she told me that it was time, finally time to start your own life. My own life, I had always assumed, would be constructed to fit alongside my father’s life, like a landscape painted hastily to give the impression of life and wilderness behind taxidermied animals in natural history museums. Always visible on the periphery, essential in its small drab way, but nothing you might notice, or, having your attention called to it, nothing you might be able to comment on beyond, yes,
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that is there as well. And now, in the empty hustling time after his death, when the sun seemed to move across the sky with a sinister ease and the nights were loud with traffic and crickets and other men’s voices passing in the street, I found that my mother was right, and my life was sadly, emptily, my own. I found the key in the early morning after a night spent searching for it and other small treasures like it in a long pang of nostalgia and terror. I missed my father dreadfully, and was worried that I had hurt him many times, like when I had once screamed that he was an evil, reeking man for instance. And perhaps when I had tried to run away the second time, because that time I had gotten all the way to the airport. He had given the key to me a few years before he died, but it still looked new and slick in my hand. I searched the guesthouse for locks, but found none. My father was the kind of man to pull all of the papers out a file cabinet, all of the canned food out of the pantry, all the toilet paper off the roll. He was not one for confinement, for secrets. I took the key to my uncle, who identified it as belonging to a safety deposit box. His lips stitched themselves up in suspicion, and I reminded myself that I would have to add find a new place to live to my list, below grieve and research heirloom tomatoes. I took a blue bus with beige plastic seats into town, and then walked up the long hill towards the bank. The day was beautiful, with bright cherry blossoms softening the black bark of the trees and a breeze that blew white and yellow plastic bags down past my ankles. There was a truck selling ice cream next to a truck selling newspapers next to a truck selling meat wrapped in paper cones. A young boy in a tiger suit and soccer cleats broke free of his mother’s hand and ran screaming into the park, and his bright shrieks echoed dully in my mind as I entered the bank. Inside the bank, it smelled of wrapping paper
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and wood polish and my steps clicked cleanly on the floor as if I was someone important, someone there to solve the mystery of a late father’s hidden treasure. A woman with brown hair that clung to the shape of her skull took me to the safety deposit box room. At first she didn’t want to, because there are laws, privacy laws, she said as if I might be unaware of the concept. I wondered if I have always been unpleasant to look at, to talk to. If I am the woman that people hope will not sit next to them on the bus, or stop to ask directions of on the street. But then we found that my name was on the paper, that I own the box, and there was no problem. In the small room, the walls were all colonized by small boxes with small locks on the fronts of them. It was close and comforting with no windows, and the soft light came from somewhere I couldn’t see--there were no shadows. When she unlocked the box that was my father’s and brought it to the table, it looked like it was covered in black velvet and my mind swelled with the nauseous possibilities, picking at them ravenously like a birds thrashing above the sea. There were loops and loops of poison-green beads strung on cotton thread. All of them are tangled together and they looked endless and dense, as if you could have pushed your hand into them all the way up to your elbow and felt the cool glass rounds of them on your skin. I lifted one up and its fellows slide slid back into the box with a small sound. There were also purple beads, I saw, and red beads and shimmering gold beads. They were glass. I pulled out another strand, and then a handful. One of them had a tin amulet strung on it. Then they were all on the short table in front of us, and the box was empty. I realized that the light was coming from the corners of the room, and that it always had been. Five years before he died, in the summer, I left the kitchen to play William Tell with my
father in the front yard. But when I stood beside him outside, in the sweet morning air, he had forgotten how, and he looked at me questioningly. I took the green apple from his lovely hand and bit into it. It tasted dull and muddy after the cereal I had eaten. I bit it again, fiercely, and filled my mouth with the tough core of it. I coughed and spit the rough fruit into my hand, and my father plucked a glistening brown seed from my palm. “Johnny Appleseed was the last American man,” he said. “Remember that.” I wanted to kiss him at the base of his throat, where his compulsive swallowing had left a high ridge of strange muscle. I did. He smelled stale, like long sleep and quick sweat. Johnny Appleseed died drunk, beneath a tree somewhere. The people stupid enough to take a bite from one of his apples would hack them up--too sour. They called them spitters. I try to think if it means anything, and I can’t be sure. Then I think, also, about my father’s fortune. Perhaps he thought the beads were precious stones, but probably he knew they were trash and still locked them safely away. He might have known something about the way time passes, and how it can work on ugly materials to make them shimmer and sparkle. Most of the time, though, I am sure that he was a liar. I put the beads back into the safety deposit box and then I threw the key away in the park outside the bank. I wanted to know, at least, that they were not anywhere else in the world. I like to imagine my father walking down the strange, dusty streets of a new city. And I like to think of them there in that small dark room, within their own small dark box, those unfathomable jewels.
Sorrel Westbrook is from the high desert of Bishop, California. She is working on her first novel, and has been published in Bartleby Snopes, Covered with Fur, The Masters Review and The Harvard Review. Her work is forthcoming at The Bennington Review.
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whichever bright frontier by sara dunn
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Unsaid
by sarai jaramillo
She boards the train arguing with herself, clutching black plastic bags that bump against her knees. Her voice balloons around her, filling the train with her presence. I observe her for an instant, my interest piqued. She is a classic “shopping bag lady,” the kind that Kurt Vonnegut wrote about: a large woman in larger clothing, the kind of woman whose misfortune can be easily pitied and just as easily ignored. I turn my head towards the window and tune her out. It’s a hot day in East L.A., but the Metro Gold Line is an icebox. I hug my cardigan closer to myself and watch the colors spread underneath the window, focusing on nothing in particular. The woman’s voice is closer now, and I sense without conscious thought that she has sat across from me. Her voice is just as loud, just as argumentative as it was when she stepped onto the train, but I don’t hear it. I continue staring out the window, lost in my thoughts, until something rattles me out of my reverie. Instinctively, I look around. Sure enough, she is sitting just where I sensed she’d be, and is staring straight at me. I’m startled, and abruptly I realize that she has been trying to argue with me for the past few minutes. What has she been saying? Why didn’t I notice earlier? I look at her, bewildered, and she asks bluntly, “Are you black?” No, I tell her, confused. I’m from Venezuela. Her tone is as aggressive as mine is confused,
her next questions demanding. “Are your parents black? Is anyone in your family black?” No, I say to the first question. I don’t know, I say to the second. She glares at me distrustfully. “You have nigger hair,” she tells me. I wasn’t born into racial consciousness. In Latin America, a region packed with so many distinct cultures and heritages, your most important identity as a Latino is your nationality. It’s the one identity that defines you; the one word that allows for clarity in an otherwise fluid place. I am privileged to be able to say that, of course. Racism runs rampant in Venezuela and Latin America just like it does anywhere else in the world. But I grew up in an overwhelmingly Mexican community in East L.A., where I had to justify my accent, my food, and my customs more than the color of my skin. In a such a homogenous group, my individuality was often overlooked in favor of building a sense of community—a community that was welcoming and friendly, but not my own. Asserting my cultural identity was paramount; issues of race were perpetually on the back burner. [1] I did not lie to the woman on the Metro. I am not black. But I don’t know enough about my ancestry to claim that I don’t have black family members. My mom’s side of the family is descended from some Venezuela-born criollos, according to family legend. [2] There is more to the story, I’m sure, some hidden indigenous relative lost to the whims of memory, but with a last name like Zambrano, it’s impossible to not be related to a Spaniard, no matter how distantly. My mom’s family is, I suppose, white, but I’ve never thought of them in that context, nor have they ever identified as such, as far as I know. Retroactively labeling them with a
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skin they’ve never lived in feels like a forced reduction of their identity. My dad’s family is another story. Where my mom’s features reflect the angles of her European ancestry, my dad’s are swarthier, rounded out. He is the lightest of his Colombian family, his skin color the same yellow-beige as my own, but the rest of his family is considerably darker, a full shade of brown. They, like most other Latin Americans, have a combination of white, native, and black ancestry. I inherited my dad’s ambiguous features, and with it, the hair that’s sparked so much commentary.
I’m standing with my mom in the checkout line at the grocery store, loitering by her side as she makes small talk with the cashier. I am young, perhaps seven or eight years old. I am impatient to leave, but she’s enjoying her conversation too much to notice my fidgeting. Still in the midst of conversation, my mom begins to reach her hand out towards me. I glare up at it, knowing what’s next and hating this routine. Her hand lands on my hair; she closes her fingers around my curls and squeezes. “Her hair is naturally like this,” she brags to the cashier. “Mija,” she prods me, “Show the girl your nice curls.” I jerk my head out of my mom’s grasp and bend forward, gathering my hair to my face. My mom plucks at the exposed baby curls at the nape of my neck, pulling them long then letting them spring back into shape. This is my mom’s favorite pastime. Like any good circus act, there are variations to her routine. Sometimes, she’ll rake her fingers
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through my hair as far as it’ll let her, then lift her hand and relax her fingers, letting each curl slip and fall back into place. Sometimes, she’ll grab my hair from the ends and squeeze up, fluffing my hair up and out like a pillow. Sometimes, she’ll flip my hair to one side and follow the pattern of my remolinos with her finger. Sometimes, she registers my resulting annoyance, and asks me what’s my problem. Sometimes, I tell her. At eight years old, I don’t have the vocabulary to express my irritation. I have the same dead-end conversation with my mom again and again, expressing nothing and getting nowhere. Mamá, no me gusta cuando la gente me toca el pelo. Y, ¿porque no? Porque no. [3] My half-formed feelings of resentment remained frustratingly un-articulated. But where my childhood self couldn’t find the words, many others have. Many researchers, scholars, and ethnographers have explored the kind of cultural and racial preoccupation that often surrounds women of color. It’s no surprise that hair is often conflated with feminine beauty, but it has to conform to a specific standard in order for it to actually be considered beautiful. This standard has Old World roots that cater to white, European bodies. People of color, and particularly black women, are conditioned to believe that everything that does not adhere to a European standard of beauty is glaringly abnormal. At best, non-white-conforming appearances are quirky; at worst, ugly. Black women are often excluded from the dominant dialogue of beauty, forcing them to inhabit a
unsaid by sara dunn
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space that “others” them and undermines their humanity. I can’t speak to a black woman’s experience. But the feeling of being excluded from beauty resonated with me. Though I wouldn’t have been able to properly understand it then, that is what it felt like to me—that I was somehow different. That I was groomed to be these strangers’ window to the “Other;” some kind of novelty to be admired only for its whimsy. I am more than social capital, I should’ve told my mom, but of course I didn’t. I didn’t have the words. My mom, the orchestrator and primary beneficiary of this skewed relationship to my hair, never realized, I think, the implications of her exhibitionism. She was, and remains, simply proud of her daughter’s unique hair. But her pride becomes warped through me. After years of internalizing all of the fluffing and the petting, I begin to wear my hair like a mask. I am thirteen years old, sitting on a bench outside of my middle school’s gym. My little girl annoyance at having my hair touched has disappeared; in fact, I have grown to secretly enjoy others’ attention. It provides self-esteem through validation I can’t yet generate on my own. My hair is tied in a ponytail, but the sweat on my scalp peels my curls up and away from my head, creating a halo of frizz. I chat with my friend, waiting for our P.E. teacher to arrive, when the conversation inevitably turns to my hair. “It’s so curly!” my friend says. My response is automatic. Do you want to touch it? Throughout my adolescence, I invited count-
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less people to touch my hair. Someone must have said no, but no matter how hard I try to recall it, I can’t conjure that memory. Instead, I’m reminded of all of the times people have touched my hair, of all of the comments it has inspired. Like an old film reel, the memories rattle in my head, projecting themselves onto the walls of my skull. Don’t you brush your hair? It’s just like my poodle’s! How long does it take to straighten it? It’s so big! You’d be so pretty with straight hair. Of all the comments I’ve received, the last one proved to be the most harmful. It was also, somewhat counterintuitively, my favorite. I preened every time someone told me that. They were saying that my hair was ugly, sure, but they saw something in me that was worth the label of “pretty.” That recognition alone more than justified the tiny sting of the insult. I misinterpreted those people’s ignorance as honesty—was implying that my hair was ugly an insult if it was true?—and I developed an increased awareness of my appearance that fueled a growing hatred of my hair. I resented my hair for unfairly keeping me ugly when, according to everyone else, I could so easily be beautiful. I begged my mom to let me straighten it but she flatly refused. ¡Pero es que tu pelo es hermoso! she would say, aghast. ¿Porque te lo quieres cambiar? [4] Porque ya me cansé, I wanted to scream. Porque ya no puede más con este pelo. [5] She never really understood, and I never had the courage to explain.
The Metro has just passed the East L.A. Civic Center and I’m staring at the woman, wide-
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eyed and completely at a loss. People have told me a million different things about my hair, but no one has ever told me that. Shocked and unprepared, I continue staring, cheeks burning, too humiliated to look away. Now that she has my full attention, the woman launches into a tirade. She says it is disgraceful that so many black girls like me deny their blackness so they can seem white. She says that I shouldn’t have to hide being black to fit in. She says that I am an insult to her, and to all black women like her who don’t have the luxury of forgetting their ancestors.
I didn’t know what to say the woman, and now I don’t know what to say to myself. Any answers I could give to the questions knocking at my conscience would be speculative and baseless, unable to reveal any truth. I don’t know what to say. I don’t have the words. The Metro slows to a stop on Soto Street, and she’s gone. + [1]
I’m not Mexican, I remind him. I’m from Venezuela. He shrugs. “Same thing.” [2]
I can feel my eyes getting hot, and I look away. This is not an argument that requires my participation. This is a release of pain that this woman has clearly been carrying with her for longer than I can imagine. I am angry and embarrassed for being the target of this woman’s frustration, but the emotion fueling the tears welling in my eyes is confusion. Does the woman have a point?
“I don’t think I could be with a girl who wasn’t Mexican,”
my first boyfriend confides in me.
From Merriam-Webster: A person of pure Spanish
descent born in Spanish America. [3]
Mom, I don’t like it when people touch my hair.
" Why not?" Because I don’t. [4]
"But your hair is beautiful! Why would you want to change
it?" [5]
Because I’m tired of it. Because I can’t deal with this hair
anymore.
I am not black, but my hair is usually associated with blackness. Is it misleading to wear my hair naturally? Am I unconsciously claiming black culture if I don’t conform to European standards of beauty? That’s ridiculous, of course. Black and white aren’t opposites. But it’s clear that my hair has been more important in guiding this woman’s perception of me than any other aspect of my appearance, including my skin color. If I had straight hair, would the woman have said anything to me? If I had straight hair, would I have been mistaken for a race other than my own? If I had straight hair, would my appearance, my identity, be more readily acceptable?
Sarai Jaramillo is a student of Comparative Literature at Brown University. She is an immigrant from Venezuela and has a keen interest in the intersection of language and culture in Latinx communities in the U.S. and abroad.
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Subway by catherine cawley 28
Subway
by catherine cawley
Artist Statement In my studio practice I investigate how pattern can be used to describe the volume and surface of a subject as well as the emotional tone of the piece. My portraits and landscapes use specific patterns to illustrate the story, setting, and feeling I want to evoke in the viewer. Through a series of polymer plate etchings, I am exploring the complexity of female relationships, ranging from sisters to strangers. In my most recent print, inspired by an interaction I witnessed on a train, two girls are sleeping on one anothers’ shoulders in a subway. The scene is peaceful despite the crowded train, and the trust and vulnerability between the women is evident in their body language. I want to capture quiet moments and the tangled emotions that come with human interaction and I am committed to representing women as multi-faceted. Using complex patterns and textures in my work, I describe the shapes of forms, the atmosphere, and the nature of the subject’s relationship.
Catherine Cawley is a senior in the Illustration Department at the Rhode Island School of Design. She is a printmaker, illustrator, designer, and book artist. She is from Massachusetts and loves to read.
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wall
by omotara james
Wall Every evening I remind the boy to shut the door to the closet, because the kitten already knows a door is a wall you cannot climb you must walk through. Yesterday
think we're lesbians. Sometimes around 4 AM my full stomach growls like the kitten paws at the door she can't claw through— in every house a room for the unknown.
I promised Jennifer I was over you, then logged into your Instagram, counted backwards to the last photo of us trying on dresses like I used to with my mother who promised to tell the truth especially when it wasn’t pretty. One day, I remember leaving the mall with a bag full of bras and grabbing her hand on the escalator resting my head on her shoulder. I was ten when she recoiled saying people will
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Omotara James is the recipient of Slice Literary’s 2016 Bridging the Gap Award for Emerging Poets, as well as the Nancy P. Schnader Academy of American Poets Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Winter Tangerine, Crab Fat Magazine, Cosmonaut’s Avenue and elsewhere. She has received scholarships from Cave Canem and the Home School. Currently, she is working on a children’s book. For contact information, please visit her website: www.omotarajames.com.
Phonics of Grief
by shira buchsbaum
“Children shouldn’t die. But sometimes they do.” ~ When things explode on television shows and the sound goes dead and all that’s left is that ringing — that swelling buzz sitting just far enough inside your ear that you can’t shake it out no matter how hard you try — I wonder who in the sound mixing room experienced a real explosion to ensure that what they’ve rendered is actually grounded in some reality. The closest I’ve been to an explosion is a car crash in Megan Alhuwalia’s big gray van on my way home from school. I was 10 years old. I was reading Janet’s Planet, a book about teenagehood and drugs and sex and other things I had wispy ideas of but wouldn’t know how to picture beyond stale dialogue and stiff imagery until years later. A lady in a red car rammed into the side of the van as we sped along one of those busy strips of pseudo-highway lined with big office buildings and ramps to real highways, crunching the van’s heavy sliding door (which never opened the same way thereafter) and launching us into a screeching arc that echoed inside my head for hours. The other closest I’ve been to an explosion was when we visited a volcano in Hawaii when I was five. That was the trip where ants crawled on my leg in the hotel pool area and I screamed so loudly everyone on the blazing hot white pavement turned and stared at me. That was the first time I remember feeling embarrassed. I don’t remember the island or the name of the volcano, but I do remember watching my mother pluck two pieces of basaltic rock from the ground, shushing me as
I asked if that were allowed. (It was not). The rocks became paperweights in her home office and I decided to take a geology class in college because I love the way running lava breaks through its own shell as it cools and spreads. On our way home, our plane flew by a volcano so high it pierced the clouds. I wondered if you can hear explosions over the roar of plane engines, but just missed my chance to find out. It erupted the next day. ~ I am a camp counselor, and this past summer I had 89 kids – 44 girls and 45 boys aged 15 and 16 – and every day I woke them up and ate with them and laughed with them and solved their problems and yelled at them not to go down the giant waterslide on the hill in the middle of a raging thunderstorm but secretly was proud that they recognized moments that make perfect summer memories and refused to let go. They did the same thing with me at the end of the summer as we all sobbed because who knows how much longer we can all come back to camp and be kids and run around in space leggings and tutus and big yellow rain boots and to be fair, we all are still kids – I was a child in charge of other children, most of whom are now taller than me – but they’re more kid than I was. And they’ve got more time. ~ College. This semester I enroll in Rocks for Jocks (and there are indeed a lot of jocks in the class). I have to go to the open office hours of a dean whom I have never met, and I am nervous because I don’t like walking in unannounced but she’s warm and has a good handshake and a really, really wide smile. She can’t help me with what I need, but we chat anyways for a long time about her kids (“twins and a spare”) and I don’t even think to mention that I have 89 kids of my own. Nor do I mention that I’m at this weird point in my
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life where I can remember (clearly and fondly) the pubescent fierceness that doesn’t die when you go to bed, but wracks your dreams with sweeping hypotheses about why the world is the way it is, and every day you spout flames until your mom asks you to stop badgering her with messy questions and to quit searing the dinner table with so much insipid angst. But I haven’t quite outgrown my questions or the vivid dreams or the dinner table racket. I tell her (the dean, not my mom) that I want to work with children, because I love children, because children are these as-of-yet un-cracked orbs of potentiality that remind me of the good things in life, and looping conversation leads her to suggest that I pursue a joint ~~Masters in Social Work and Judicial Degree~~ after graduation. Her smile is still wide when I shake her hand goodbye but hours later all the positivity about my potential future slips into the ether upon 1) receiving a four-word text message that shatters my understanding of invincibility and 2) realizing how I could pursue sound engineering if I could just figure out how to splice the eerie vacuum of post-explosion silence from my throbbing head into a computer program. ~ The chain of communication reflected the convoluted procession of information characteristic of camp — I heard from one of my campers who heard from another of my campers who heard from her sister who was in a bunk with the sister of the boy, who was also my camper, and now I’m telling my best friend who calls Owen, the assistant director of the camp, who replies “I’m going through Customs right now, but I think I know what you’re going to say and yes, it’s true.” ~ Among the “moments I grew up,” a written list of evolving adulthood I keep in the notebook my mother gifted to me at the beginning of
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the year of college I took Rocks for Jocks and tried to figure out my life, are - Adding “doing laundry” to my regular schedule - Being able to resist eating a second cookie - Watching Local Hero - Josh calling me to tell me he’s not coming back to camp - Looking at Grandma and wondering when she got so old - Learning to put myself back to sleep - The first time Dad didn’t know the answer to my question ~ “What does woebegone mean?” Really, really sad. “Is heaven real?” Mm, not in the way you’re thinking. People don’t live in the sky when they die. But people still live in your heart. “There’s someone in your heart?” No, that’s a saying. “How big is the Universe?” Imagine an empty white space. Now imagine a black dot in that space. The black dot spreads and expands and almost fills the white space, but then the white space expands too. And that keeps happening. “Forever?” Forever. “What happens when stars die?” Well, some of them just give out and become really small, cool balls of gas. And others expand and eat up their Solar System and then they contract and become really small, hot balls of gas. And others explode and leave lots of gas and dust and colors in big clouds. “Dad, why do children die?” ~ The staff know, and the kids know, and I know that this isn’t something I was trained for. Because camp orientation teaches you how to deal with homesickness and bullying and sexuality and is a 10-day pre-camper party
where we all bond and make posters and get pumped for the greatest itty bitties in the world to populate that expanse of hilly green fields for seven weeks. We don’t talk about death at camp because kids don’t die. The only time it’s mentioned is the day before the kids show up, when all 150 staff members gather in the Rec Hall and collectively sweat in the stifling wooden room (because even though there are windows, there is NO air circulation in that building). Paul, the director of the camp, stands up and tells us about the only time any kid has ever died on camp grounds. 2004. Hannah Lee. Heart condition. Nothing we could have done. ~ Sound can only travel through matter, but because outer space is mostly an empty void of black dotted with little happenstances of condensed plasma and lucky rocks and gas balls whizzing around said plasma, if you had a front row seat to the death of a star1, all you’d hear is the same inaudible heartbreak emitting from my father’s mouth that moment I grew up. I guess in the grand scheme of experiencing devastation, cutting the sound makes sense. Even though light travels faster than sound (so when you’re watching your world come crumbling down, the image kicks in sooner than the audio), some things are so loud that they just knock your hearing right out of your head. Suddenly the world is silent and all that’s left is the relentless hum of your regularly muted thoughts, now unmarred by the whirring cacophony of everyday life. I wonder if suspending myself in a vacuum would numb the pain, so I hole up in a library for hours but the social expectation of remaining quiet doesn’t silence the sound of my wracking sobs so when my boyfriend asks if I’m okay I lie because how do I verbalize 1
that my ability to process auditory waves dove after I stood too close to that blast and now I’m surrounded by wisps of what I once held to be true in an otherwise empty black dot that keeps expanding while I stay nowhere? ~ Somewhere (out in space or in my own head? When did they become distinct?), I’ve been left with my thoughts, and I think it’s the not knowing that really scares me. The not knowing if he was riding home on his bike or if he pushed someone out of the way from a car or if he popped too many pills or if he had a preexisting condition that none of us knew about. But his mom said they didn’t know how it happened either, which could be sad parent speak for “we don’t want to tell you.” Here’s what I do know: he was a history buff, and he loved singing, and he always had a book in his hand. He was 16. He was quiet and goofy. When my costaff and I made handshakes with every single kid, theirs was the coolest. He deserves more than clichés and metaphors. My parents told me to write all of that down in a letter for his parents, but I wrote this instead. And something tells me that meditations on grief and childhood and lost opportunities aren’t what mourning parents need right now. Here’s what I also know: when I was 16, I wanted to go to Julliard because I loved singing (I did not apply to Julliard). I was dating a boy who was not good to me (I have since defriended him on Facebook). Before I finally trudged through them, I cried about the SATs on a somewhat regular basis (I took it only once and it never again crossed my mind). I scorched the dinner table every night, I was a supernova threatening to explode, I was untouchable fire, uncrackable brimstone, weak metaphors and pubescent wonder and extraterrestrial fear. Invincible, lucky, funny
You might get charred in the process. Bring sunglasses. Better yet, do not actually place yourself in the vicinity of an exploding star.
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little happenstance of a being. And I thought I would get all the time in the world to do all I needed to do: To cool down, to spread, and to break out of my shell. To realize that throwing myself into a vacuum doesn’t ease me of the chill-inducing sound tragedy makes when it reverberates into the ether, its energy rippling silently across space. To learn how to live with questions that leave only the crackling microwave of transmission over the phone line as you gape. To accept that we’re all recyclable and when our Sun expands and consumes our dust, this is grief no one will hear. In Memoriam – M. DeMarco
Shira Buchsbaum studies Anthropology and Creative Nonfiction at Brown University. She is both intrigued by and apprehensive of the prospect of growing up.
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untitled by rachel hahn
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untitled
by rachel hahn
Artist Statement Works by Mary Oliver, Eileen Myles and Sharon Olds informed a series of prints that explore the powers of femininity. This particular print served as the final ode to my favorite monstrous ladies.
Rachel Hahn studies Illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design.
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blue
a love story
by briana lynn
Missing you got a texture; a mass; and its own moon.
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It don't hurt but it's dense— sunk down at
the
bottom of warm;
me
curling; and cramped up between soft  tissue. It don't hurt but I feel it there, pressing.
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I remember Blooming. Your hands between my legs felt like Blues.
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I liked to make love when I was speechless so that you could reach in and wrap around the mute thing. I felt like pepper when you were through with me; or like glitter, and as ground up as static noise.
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We were folded and tucked into one another like braids or love letters or newborn fists Too sweaty and too curious to mind that we had to hold our breath sometimes to fit right, and that our teeth banged a little when we kissed.
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Then there was the time you tasted different; and the time I saw you and thought, my how you've grown; and the night I woke up hot and you woke up tugging at your waist because the thing we were wearing was too small.
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Doubt
Shows up quietly and unannounced and uninvited and foreboding and permanent 43
as gray hair.
Doubt
grows humid and soft
In the wood floor.
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I learned making love would not fix it. I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would no fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making love would not fix it I learned making lo
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We were pressed against incongruence
like
window
glass,
shopping
and clawing at one another.
Exhausted,
beacuse
were each
we not
other's
first
language.
Can't nothing be done to Our
a
sunset. mouths
were bulldozers by then.
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So we faced dus k, hand in hand, daydrea mi n g at the edge of a clif f, with something new and slim y be tween ou r p a l m s about, "I Love Yo u" when it so un d e d like a pate n t and a tradem ar k.
Briana Lynn is currently an MFA candidate in Cross-Disciplinary Literary Arts at Brown University. She works at the intersection of a literary and visual practice. She's worked as a contributing writer for Okayplayer and exhibited at Bronzeville Art Lofts, The Silver Room and the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts.
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Benefit Street
and other drawings
by natasha sharpe
Artist Statement Everything is drawn from a combination of observation and playful stream-of-consciousness interpretation. Sharpie markers escort the drawings out of the brain and onto the paper.
Benefit street
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Couch cousins
Grandma lee
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Cape cod what everyone wants
Natasha Sharpe is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area and is currently in her last year of a BFA program in Film/Animation/Video at the Rhode Island School of Design. In her work, she likes to invent stories that explore spaces where real life and imagination intersect. If she was a pen she would be a Sharpie marker.
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spring 2017 thin noon / journal