March 2022 by the monitor

Dear Reader, Hello again, or perhaps, hello for the very first time. Thank you for reading. If you

are anything like me, you find solace in these pages, get lost in the political commentary, meditate on the significance of the black parts of black out poems. We love each and every submission, keep them coming. The deadline for the next issue is March 29, 2022.

Staff Bios:

Lee 8^D you may find me arm deep in some clay in the ceramics room or wandering aimlessly around Kirksville in search of some deeper meaning. alternatively, i could be loose on the rugby field pretending to know the rules of the game. I may be the one to respond to your emails, but we all know the monitor is run by some higher force than just you or i. (senior ceramics student, pre-MAE) Alex :) Hello there reader. I am unfortunately a senior and a BFA student, so the job prospects in the coming years are looking pretty slim. If anyone wants to hire a 21 year old, average almost graduated college student hmu. Other than that, you may find me at my home (please don’t. I don’t want to see you.) or when I make the walk to campus (once a day). Passionately thinking about the colors swatches on the sims. Open invitation. Celia @-@ Rootin’ tootin’ Creative Writing major who has no idea what they’re doing at any point in time (including right now). Vessel for the worms in my brain. claire a. >:)) just hopped into this mess (freshman) hoping to write a thing or two (creative writing major) maybe learn a thing or two (hopeful). Affectionate haunter of OP chronic doodler, oversleeper, iso bolo tie. in the words of an esteemed starbucks employee, a regular. Hannah 0_0 Attic-dwelling senior who loves strange little creatures and even stranger stories. My ideal situation after graduation is to live at least three days away from civilization in mountainous wilderness with my cats and my sheep. Thanks for asking! “Haley” ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ hi monitor readers i am a senior sociology major and disability studies minor. you will find me wandering aimlessly around Barnett or on the various stages of Ophelia Parrish trying on other personalities. i love to discuss my bearded dragon, pop culture, and the desserts i made last weekend. scratch and sniff here to find out →

Submit: Words We encourage submissions of original articles, essays, prose, and opinion. Due to space limitations, please limit pieces to 2,400 words. If you would like to publish something longer, please submit it and we’ll try to accommodate your piece. For formatting reasons, please submit all text as an email attachment. Please include a short one or two sentence bio with your submission. Poems Let us know if you have any specific printing or formatting requests. For formatting reasons, please submit all text as an email attachment. Please include your name (real, pseudonym, or anonymous). Visuals We encourage submissions of original art, comics, and photography. Due to publication limitations, our art and photography is printed relatively small and in black-and-white (except in the online version). Keep this in mind when submitting your piece. If we like your piece enough, it may end up on the cover! Let us know if you don’t want that. *Our contributors retain all rights to their works. Submissions may be published online. If you would like your work not to be published online or would like us to remove previously published material, send us an email.* Contact us: email: trumanmonitor@gmail.com Webcite: https://issuu.com/trumanmonitor/docs facebook: the monitor twitter: @trumanmonitor Ads:

As members of the Kirksville community we love to promote local businesses and organizations. If you’re interested in having an ad in our next issue please email us! Rates: Quarter Page $10 Half Page $20 Full Page $40 30% discount for student organizations!

the horror of reliability by go worms!

“Sweet Dreams, Andrew” Jared Goudsmit

a love of exceptional ruin by go worms!

Collected poems by Jared Goudsmit paraphrases pa ra phrases pack rat panty raid park ranger i think that’s it ode to Linda through day and dark through kingdom’s arc Linda marches on the blackened skies proclaim the rise of Linda’s lightning-dawn with sunken brow the kingpins bow to Linda’s mental brawn

what food am i am i a barbecue pork steak kinda am i a soup a soup is a very comforting food it’s high praise to be considered a soup but i got to thinking and i thought this is worthy of going out into my, uh into my meditation garden if there is, if there is one meal i associate with, um. late-night contemplation if there’s one food i think of it would be this

so hide, or flee or take a knee proclaim the one true Don

oho the big reveal yeah, there it is we are talking about Cap’n Crunch

shortcut on the lake

suburban hypnosis

she raises her stick thwap! the thin ice shudders you must follow

she grins, steely-eyed offereing you her finest American cheese

Themeless Crossword

ACROSS 1. Karate cousin 5. Genie's offering 9. British bloke 13. "Your Movie Sucks" writer Roger 15. State that's 75% vowels 16. Prize on "The Bachelor" 17. Legal reach, metaphorically 20. Back muscle, in brief 21. Jumped 22. Emulates a dog 23. Quotable bit on a movie poster 25. Small whirlpool 26. Bird associated with craziness 27. Days of ___ 29. What dogs' tails do 32. Lindsay of "Freaky Friday" 34. State that's 75% vowels 35. Pepsi, for one 36. Cornell or Columbia 39. Zigs and ___ 40. Title for Voldemort 41. Log flumes and such 42. "Aladdin" prince 43. Truth's counterpart 44. Rummikub piece 45. Musk of SpaceX 47. Furnace's job 50. More stable 52. Mecca resident 53. Mountain ___ 55. Self-employed lawyer's business 58. Otherwise 59. Brand for Sparky 60. Descends, as a coin in a fountain 61. Heap affection (on) 62. Blue birds 63. Achievement for Mel Brooks, in brief DOWN 1. Set, as mousse 2. WWII menace

Jared Goudsmit 1

25 27

43 45

21 23

44 47

57 60 63

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 14. 18. 19. 24. 25. 28. 30.

One with an oral fixation? www.wikipedia.___ Aviatrix, for one "Thanks a lot, jerk!" Sort (through) Sexy "Assassin's ___" (video game) Simplistically happy outcome "Chop-chop!" Sunday seating Brewski Curb, with "in" Jekyll's bad side Aims Baroque and Romantic, for two Was in the red Soothing succulent

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 37. 38. 43. 44. 46. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 54. 56. 57.

Some square dancers Minnelli of Broadway ___ Office Dr. Frankenstein's aide Some like it hot! Actor Alda Rotten Tomatoes contributors Nick Jr. explorer "I did it!" Surge protector? Continental currency Tropical lizard Put the pedal to the metal Folk singer Guthrie Emmy-winning Ward The opposite of this side of the puzzle ___ Mahal Word after black or bow

Friday, February 11, 2022 (SUBMISSION BY LARRY ILES, THE MONITOR’S OLDEST, AT SIXTY-EIGHT, KIRKSVILLE AND INTERNATIONAL CONTRIBUTOR, A UK/EU HISTORIAN CURRENTLY WRITING HIS SECOND BOOK ON UK’S FIRST EVER JEWISH WOMEN SOCIALIST UTOPIAN MPs LAST CENTURY) “Wake-up! Our freedoms are going now. In spite of an eighty-one and quarter million real voters rejection of himself, last presidential election, Trump is resurgent in 2022 in fascist greater strength with a one hundred and twenty-one million dollar funded war chest. Where’s Joe Biden’s Attorney General in any counter-attack?” It is kind of weird, is it not? Last month, the revived 2022 Monitor came out with an almost ceramic artistic pristine familiarity of calming appearance. Yet, unlike its 2021 preceding summer issue, we all face a far more discomforting Trumpian reality buttressed by KTVO and KYOU TV propaganda that is impacting already on all your civil liberty. It’s as if you criminally sentenced eighty-one and a quarter million people in real voters last presidential election who had helped send him into what we thought would be a deserved Florida mansion retirement to be simply not counted. Put another way, the times are disjointed. It is as if the 1960s unusually dystopian TV serial Land of the Giants has come back in all its ugly white male giant postulated recreation of 1950s to 1930s retrospective nostalgia for pure fascist masculinity. In several ways, all our freedoms are being abridged or curtailed, note well before the 2022 Fall congressional and local elections, in their own preparation for this time in 2024, the return legally of the great German-American would-be fuhrer in the presidential 2024 contest. Why, well, it’s because Trump made sure his boys got the Supreme Court to legalize such abridgements of freedom by the GOP state legislatures which one-sidedly FOX and Sinclair TV outlets celebrate day-in night-out. If you are a woman, don’t try and control your fertility in the rural states anymore by vital abortion right. But, if you can afford it, get to either the New England or Californian coastal urban belts, because only there, so far, the state legislatures are free of the GOP. If you are any gender or LGBT Queer of any pride and want to try and vote against this tyranny, you might as well pause in Georgia or Alabama or any rural state like ours before you try and do so. Because now it’s not legal to be voter-enrolled if you get even one step wrong in failure to produce an expensive ID, even if you are postal voting, and don’t you dare try to ask for some water relief if you’re in a hot state queue to vote in the one voting center for over half a hundred miles you might be allowed to vote within! Oh, and do not expect your high school teacher or even a university like TSU in future to be permitted to teach about race relations, tragic history or so-called deviant LGBTQ such history. As we, folks, will lose our jobs if the state legislator pays a so-called Christian parent or fellow student to snoop on your classroom!

Wait a moment, Larry, you shout! It ain’t that bad yet, surely? Archangel President Biden will order his Attorney-General, M. Garland to overrule these erosions of freedom in all their full claptrap about states rights. Did not JFK so order his Attorney General brother RFK in the 1960s to stop the Donald Trump of that time, Alabama governor and segregationist George Wallace, when he tried to bar African-American young men and young women from public colleges? Well, that’s what Joe should be doing, for all his sleepiness. But the trouble is, Joe thinks that Republican voters and state legislators are like Eisenhower was in the 1950s: still reasonable consensus types! He ignores one hundred and twenty-like million plus dollar funds behind today’s far different Trumpians. Such upright citizens as Congressman Jordan and Congresswoman Greene, et al. All bestirred by love of power and racism and sexism and homophobia as their means for a restoration of their fanatical fascist world. Oh, but you will still say, “this is too alarmist, as we artistic bohemian types will be left alone by the Trumpians, especially as we know, led by the great man himself, privately at least, they too like a bit of naughtiness, sex and picture-wise. And we are not harming anybody, are we, in The Monitor? Well, folks, the experience of Sophie Scholl and Catholic student resistors when they leafleted their Nazi-controlled public universities in southern Bavaria in the early 1940s with such Monitor type literature led instead to her execution. Because fascist “family values” certainly do not embrace Weimar republican-democratic style, lizardry degenerate productions. In conclusion, it’s high time, Monitor reader that you not only voted come next November but wrote to, perhaps in your local press, too, Mr. Garland and Mr. Biden to be prosecutors of a fascist cultural and political retaking of America before it is all too late. Oh, and I wonder whether we will even see a February 2023 Monitor by an administration in TSU or a Kirksville City Council ordinance if you are unacceptable to a Trumpian state legislature in its patriotic definition of what is “normal” or “vibrant” behaviour?

Ana Sofia Ragouzis-Roman SPAN 353: Apuntes Los ojos del artista strokes symbolizing thought the narrator’s voice is not the author, but regardless through detail the eye of the writer phases through lines on pages.

“Our Undoing” by Celia Battson PAGE 1 PANEL 1 A room with metal walls and a metal floor, bathed in a dim, green light. We do not see the source of the light. We do see a doorway, behind it is shadow. NARRATOR: There was no snake in the grass, no devil in the grove. That indescribable itch within our hearts, that knitting needle clicking, unwinding our very fibers. PANEL 2 Same shot, but a pair of reflective eyes appear, high up enough in the doorway that we do not immediately think it’s an animal. NARRATOR: The devil lays in a metal box, dreaming of a world with its seams ripped out. All spread out, all spread out. PANEL 3 Through the doorway steps a giant wolf, gray, with markings around its face. The wolf is old, scarred. Its markings stand out. PANEL 4 Side profile of the wolf approaching the light, we can see that it’s been bitten on the neck, still bleeding. It looks like a bad wound.

PAGE 2 PANEL 5 Other wolves, just as large as the first, begin to come through the door and bunch up around the wolf with the markings. There are eight of them total. NARRATOR: Slowly, we come unwound. PANEL 6 We finally see what the wolves are looking at: an elephant’s foot, a giant mass of radiation. Bubbles of burning metal glowing a pale green. Buried in the mass, a respirator, the faceplate too cracked to see within. NARRATOR: Slowly, we bring about our undoing.

“Minor” Incursion People treat this as something that is just beginning, some obsession newly born inside the brain of a man far away. I walk home and tiny flecks of snow are barely visible in the fluorescents of the street lights. I think of the snowy trenches they show on tv; like World War I but shiny and new with no blood spilled or rats feeding on bodies. The embassy in Kyiv released a taunt. I hesitate to say “our embassy” because I do not wish to be associated with people who mock war. When a being’s own country mocks suffering, what is left? We have lost millions and yet we have not lost enough. The stage screams and demands more blood; it is tired of seeing people go on ventilators or with defibrillators to their chests. It craves the theatrics of bullets. Shells ricocheting off cold ground and the heat of projectiles. My feet smell sweet and putrid with sweat when I remove my boots in the doorway. I close my eyes and imagine the bodies. Written by Hannah Senay

Images provided by Melody Brown

Top: agnostic disorder by go worms! Bottom: Part of this Nutritious Breakfast by Jared Goudsmit

Contributors: Lee Gardunia…….front and back cover go worms! (they/them) - Creative Writing, Philosophy & Religion Ana Sofia Ragouzis-Roman Jared GoudsmitJared Goudsmit is a playwright and freelance crossword constructor. His stage work is published by Samuel French and YouthPLAYS. His puzzles have run in the LA Times, Universal, and Newsday, with an upcoming publication in the New York Times. He is a 2020 YoungArts Winner and Finalist in Film. Instagram: @jared.goudsmit Melody Brown (she/her)Just a cool cat who loves artsy things. Social and art instas: @melonisbatman + @melonartista Celia BattsonCelia Battson is on The Monitor’s editorial staff. She is getting her BFA in Creative Writing at Truman State University, and has been a Kirksville resident for…long enough. Celia likes to write weird prose, that’s why she loves The Monitor or whatever… Hannah SenayHannah Senay is on The Monitor’s editorial staff. Larry IlesProfessor of French Coordonnatrice des étudiants de Truman à Laval Conseillère du chapitre de Truman State Iota Tau de la Société française honoraire Department of Classical and Modern Languages School of Arts & Letters