to the reader: I hope you are doing well. I hope you are feeling okay. I hope you can still wake up and think “I am alright.” I wonder where you are. I wonder about you, sometimes. There’s a pretty clear sky out tonight. I was just outside; the moon is yellow and you can see Venus. Take a walk around, and then come in. Come in here. There’s art inside. Come in: here, we can touch one another. I’d like to shake your hand and give you a hug. Via the art. Yours forever, the monitor
meet the monitor lizard. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
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They cannot regenerate their tails. They used to be bigger, but the big ones went extinct. Their scientific name, Veranus, means “dragon” or “lizard beast.” They are usually carnivorous. They’re pretty fkin cute!!!
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May 8, 2020 General Guidelines Email submissions as attachments (any file type) to trumanmonitor@gmail.com!
Words We encourage submissions of original articles, essays, prose, and opinion. Due to space limitations, please limit pieces to 2,000 words. If you would like to publish something longer, please submit it and we’ll try to accommodate your piece. Please include a short one or two sentence bio.
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contributors eric leimer shaybet jay nguyen maria e. padron josh brumfield meredith harrach duke nightboy ryan burch olli sure joseph christian banez eli salazar J.L.W larry iles rowen conry lesley hauck anonymous
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The Rite
by Eric Leimer The night is dark There is no moon, only stars It is cold, water cover by ice The dark eyes of the hunter peer into the black He wears nothing and shivers The skin shakes, but the muscles stand firm In his hand is a knife The knife is a tooth The tooth squirms He jumps Ice cracks He slips below
Lift the worm’s head to his The rite is performed
From below the ice is clear The stars are red He dives And dives And dives The water swallows light Like his eyes Diving will take him no further He exorcises the dive reflex The water fills his lungs And carries him down
The worm’s throes cease The water is still The hunter removes the knife Docile and filled with blood He kicks And rises
The plain of the abyss rises to meet him His feet sinking into the primordial ooze He senses his prey though he cannot see it The worm, fat and putrid Covered in bone and spike One great inward turned eye The knife flies It pierces The barbed tooth pushes itself deeper Seeking lifeblood The worm thrashes White glowing blood lights the stygian black The hunter walks 4
The Rite That must be below the waves The Rite That only the drowned may see The Rite The tearing of secrets like so much meat
He rises Like a demon He rises Like the soul He rises Like heat Below the ice he sees the sun It is black With a halo of gold He breaches And crawls up on top of the ice It the east there is light In his mind echoes one word
Void Void <)^(>
Has Sherbert Always Been Spelled Sherbet? by Shaybet I don’t really know where I belong.
I miss her, I miss him, I miss them.
I like playing funky songs, I cry a lot, and I don’t have any friends.
No wonder I don’t have friends.
Acquaintances maybe, but no friends. Nobody that I can learn those cool K-Pop dances with. Nobody with whom I can go walking at 3 A.M. where we are ultimately attempting to protect each other from being mugged and laughing about *god* knows what as the cool summer breeze paired with the awful Missouri humidity persuades us to go back inside 30 minutes later. I have no friends to cry with me because we both get unfathomably emotional on rainy days and make ourselves feel better by watching cheesy romance movies or watching our favorite gut-wrenching episodes of Grey’s Anatomy.
No wonder I dance to cheesy K-Pop alone. No wonder my 3 A.M. walks are isolated; I blast loud, aggressive music and sometimes hope someone will mug me just so I can feel the presence of another human being—their attention being solely on me. No wonder I cry alone on rainy days, hiding my sniffles between fake coughs that lead my roommate to ask me if I need another Halls™ cough drop.
If I had known my life would turn out so foggy and unsure—that I would be on a canoe in the middle of the Pacific Ocean surrounded by sharks ready to attack at any sudden movement—maybe I would have spoken up sooner.
And that’s all I really need. Friends. Lovers always leave me in a bind as I face rejection after rejection. The world goes on and yet, each time, my heart convinces me I cannot. Therefore, I knot that rope, I take a deep dive inside, and my mind erodes, filling me with temporary adrenaline and, for a split second, relief.
Defended myself from bullies, siblings, friends-that-aren't-really-friends. I’d let little me know that it is always going to be like this, so I can come up with a solution or seek solace sooner rather than 10 years too late. Either way, I am just a piece of shit that has been sitting on the pavement for days, accidentally stepped on and cursed by passersby and urinated on by Mrs. Lorenz’s many dogs that she has yet to train after 7 years of ownership.
These meds aren’t working. 5
Cyber Stockholm Syndrome by Jay Nguyen
“Stubborn” by Maria E. Padron It doesn’t matter how many times we are let down we wipe off the pain from our hearts and walk again It doesn’t matter how many times they shatter our hearts like glass we carefully pick up the pieces and gift our love blindly again It doesn’t matter how many times we are abandoned we all come together, bumping with each other’s company again It doesn’t matter how many times we lose faith in the future we continue to carry on trying to find something that restores it It doesn’t matter how many How many times we Get locked up, pushed around, feeling the chill of lead against our necks feeling the heaviness pushing our bodies down to the bed feeling uninvited guests FORCING their way uninvited, INSIDE us with our unbreakable s o u l s golden, ethereal we keep on pushing through life until when the body can’t no more.
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A Poem by Josh Brumfield I walked around through the Claire Gempp-Davidson Memorial Conservation Area where we used to drink beer by the pond They have a security camera now by the restrooms You can still hear the cars My soul contains these things â&#x20AC;&#x201D; A kid and her bike A house in the woods
No Secrets Here By Meredith Harrach Sand? oh, this sand? do you like it? i can tell by your hands you've been digging it. and by the look in your face, you found a few FROGS, a few of my fears, maybe some words of love. your biggest tell is your ears! it's fine, i'm a snoop too, and i trust you but the way you've been listening lately tells it all whisper back if you really hear me i'm just saying, i'm tellin' ya: it's fine
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Diapumentithol II by Duke Nightboy i bet if i squeezed hard enough i could crack one of my fingernails in half, want me to try? i told carla that we should both cut off our feet, ferment the feet, and mix the fermented feet into some water or something so we could get drunk off of our own feet. sound good to you? you in? how about this: you rip one of your teeth out, we grind it into a powder and snort it. we'll get high off of one of your teeth, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll spit cosmic into each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mouths. want to go dig someone up and eat them? man, i'd do anything.
Give Me Your Sultry Eyes At The Lake By Meredith Harrach we were just talking about you were a kid and you saw turtles fucking and how that was kinda scarring, the turtles were indifferent then (two) bugs land on you, fuck on your legs, we're all here on the shore you are a bug-sex god entity, a lakeside Eros your thigh is their honeymoon suite, they found you in the perfect spot and the perfect time to get dirty? it's right now. they go at it and the world slows down for them (what percentage of their life goes into this good shag?) she flies away and he dies, rip
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by Ryan Burch
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transition poem 6â&#x20AC;? [march 9 2020] by olli sure she slipped not wearing a bra (slut) and the pill bottle slipped down the drain
n every pill is gone now she lives in the drain now her shirts button on the wrong side not doing it right using the using the wrong hair me i mean she isnt thinking isnt thinking abt isnt glamorizing who she was
she's not using that name
â&#x20AC;&#x153;oh no poemâ&#x20AC;? [mar 6 2020] by olli sure this is a new new feel my head and tell me if im hot im going 2 ur play im covid19 made me realize the ppl who live say im too anxious im not anxious enough im commentin yaaassss on ur pic im tryna im tryna not b that bitch who hides her face w her phone in selfies
doesnt matter if my under shirts r wrinkled or fuck it does 11
â&#x20AC;&#x153;bad coffee asmrâ&#x20AC;? by olli sure short film someone wakes up, makes coffee all intentional with purpose but tired n sloppy spilling everywhere cleaning up w/ sound effects way up after they sit down a poem starts " i dont even remember how i used to wake up im the baby queer baby queen i should put on some music and uh overstimulate
Just the Way I Am by Joseph Christian Banez
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Conversations with Mom (and God) by Joseph Christian Banez
Blues Boy by Joseph Christian Banez
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Squirm by Joseph Christian Banez
Confessions of a Cold-Blooded Mathematician Who Would Much Rather Be A Poet by Eli Salazar
I knew I wanted to be a mathematician the first time I was in calculus We were discussing the nature of limits and what it meant to be infinitely close to something My professor told me about a man reaching out his hand towards what he most wanted in life But he could only walk in segments of half the distance to his aspiration Meaning if he walked half the distance to his goal and half the distance of half the distance continuously His hand would fail to reach his love but be infinitely close
The next time I seriously considered myself in mathematics was in an applied statistics class We were looking at spreadsheets of data learning about a test called permutation To me the mounds of data looked like blocks of stone made of tiny grains and opaque throughout My professor encouraged us to be like Michelangelo explaining if there was no significance in the data We would rearrange each grain any way and still be left with only blankness But if the numbers revealed themselves in a meaningful way it was more like we were discovering art
When I reached out my hand I felt the warmth of everyone I had failed and broken I looked at what it was I wanted most in life and then behind me at the distance I had traveled I felt the temperature rise from their hot faces and their forgiveness from the sweat that blessed me Looking the direction opposite of my outstretched hand I saw my path was filled with blocks of stone Instantly I walked towards the marble and granite trying to see any signs significance When just then I realized my hand was no longer outstretched but reshaping the grain to discover art
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Dear Prudence, by Eli Salazar Above all else I miss your sense of wonder Like how you saw me more than just the human who Filled your empty bowl with food Somedays it feels like I’ve forgotten how to breathe Like my lungs still go through the motions But when I exhale I’m left fruitless of oxygen I take complete responsibility in my selfishness I still want you here and I promise to never marry But I think about your happiness and how it deserves to be reflected in my own Still it feels like I’m a barren tree being stripped of its last orange Torn and ripped apart for the center And afterwards only pulp It worries me to see my parents aging in a way it never did before Suddenly like a reverse claustrophobia I suffocate in open spaces But still constantly go for walks in the backyard I can’t help but to reenact your last hours over and over again in my mind Getting the phone call from my brother Singing to you as you died My greatest hope is that you heard me and recognized my voice Please know you were so much more than an animal to me It is a curse to be made in gods image and have only a human voice I’ve found that what I want more than love is companionship I think about burying your collar with this poem In hopes you may unbury and find it
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poems by J.L.W
Actionable Things Still! by Larry Iles Congrats to Rioyl and Alec, in particular, on getting a much needed issue out last March. This column will give a potted digest of some of the things that we missed by not having the vital Monitor out and yet which are still actionable matters for the remainder of this semester and start of the new academic year, as hopes springs eternal. First thing is to acknowledge two home-produced one-act plays accomplished last semester Fall 2019 in which Yours Truly managed to interview the two principal actors Kenyatta and Lobert after their exhaustive performances in the Baldwin Hall Little Theater complex. Kenyatta sought to encompass the life of the radical Communist Party affiliated Paul Robeson, singer, athlete and actor. He successfully showed that in many ways this man was the forerunner of both Martin Luther King and President Barack Obama with a direct link in that the actor Sidney Poitier and friends who were Robeson's confidants set up a scholarship fund that ultimately benefitted and mentored both MLK and BO alike. Robeson's father was a black minister who stood out against lynching and made sure that his children got the best possible opportunities in the otherwise restricted world racially of white America. The young Robeson, Kenyatta showed, was a delightful egotist taking advantage of his athlete's scholarship to broaden his talents into both the worlds of civil rights advancement and thespian skills acquiring. At times, perhaps to suit his affluent audience, Kenyatta kind of modified or
dampened Robeson's outspoken radicalism against American and British imperialism, so that the audience must have wondered why on earth Cold War President Truman stripped him of his travel passport or why Robeson needed such succor from the likes of British theater. Well, the real reason was that Robeson never hid his communism nor his pride in what his French counterpart Aime Cesaire called "Negritude" or what we would call "Black Power." Pat Lobert, a retired French professor, followed later in the semester with another virtuoso performance, this time bringing to life our very own area's Andrew Still. Once again, perhaps because of the audience's composition-too elderly and too non-student, some things that are surprisingly radical about Still besides his foundation of unorthodox medicine were somewhat palliated and will have to be reawakened, expanded, should either play go further. For example, it is impossible not to feel that Still lessened his radicalism after World War I, badly, at a time when herbal and other medicine were actually being blacklisted by the ultraconservative American and British Medical Associations, despite today's well-known usefulness in bone-setting and holistic herbal well-being improvements of general and economically poorer communities world-wide. What the rasping aimable Lobert, bearded only slightly, did bring out, was rather enlightening. Yet again, this man had a radical preacher father who was an early anti-slavery abolitionist, it was the Civil 19
War and earlier Indian conflicts that inspired Still to want to heal literally tornapart humanity and finally Still showmanship skills enlisted the anti-imperialist exconfederate Mark Twain to expose upperclass hypocrisy and opposition to what was wrongly called his "quack" medicine. My, what pioneering examples both actors and their lady backers in particular brought before the hundred strong audience in each case and how deplorable that both the Index and KDE largely ignored both innovative productions. The other event is still ongoing, that both these newspapers and the new conservative campus newspaper The Broadside ignored in all alike, thinking unfit for your reflective minds, is the film, largely British produced "Harriet," even though it was American Oscar-nominated early 2020 and is now on Pay for TV outlets worldwide as well as DVD released. In one sense, the film is not original in that defenders of the great American actress C. Tyson point out that in "A Woman called Moses," US TV long told us about the pioneer founder of the Underground Railway Escape Network that got slaves into British Canada in refuge after US politics took a bad turn in the 1850s when the South threw its hold on the American Democratic Party, presidentially, passed the Fugitive Slave Law that recriminalized abolition throughout virtually the entire North and West again. This British version, however, adds significant detail, illustratively, in showing how the Quakers and other white sympathizers were vital to hiding, in the so -called 'free' states, the escapees, and it brings out how the so-called illiterate "Harriet" had a gift for friendship. This enabled her to win the support of white radical abolitionists like the violent John Brown in deterring white racist mobs and Lincoln's Number Two in the burgeoning 20
Republican Party William Seward who provided finance and legal advocacy, especially in the Civil War. Sometimes, indeed, the new movie takes liberties with historical fact by minimalizing the role of Harriet's brothers in terms of making successes of her initial escapes and the handling of her "Christianity outbursts" is controversial in that they may not have been alone inspirational for her. But in fact the product of severe beatings she had endured as a young slave girl for her refusal to go along with harsh overseer brutality and possible sexual abuse. In conclusion, there were of course other events in the Monitor's much regretted absence which deserve your future attention as they work themselves out during the remainder of this calendar year. For once, the Index editorially got it right on the Professor Barry Poyner affair in which literally worldwide in disrepute a professor was suspended from our university community for alleged systematic sexual abuse, gay style, of Communications students, despite his now stripped ministry disapproving of any such gay or bi indulgence. Problem is, as the Index hinted and as everybody should be concerned who values elderly community teachers and pastors of esteem having at least an initial presumption of innocence, is two-fold in ill nature, for our university's reputation. Indeed, so much so that a judge has had to have been appointed from outside this community because of the prejudice awakened including possibly to "straight" students who might have been the object of unwanted advances. Why? Well, DPS personnel were deployed to pretend to be youngsters on a known sexual site of contacts and probably it would have fairer to the moderate Republican family of the Poyners if he had had a proper hearing for firing with proper witnesses rather than
death by a thousand cuts that has disgracefully occurred. All this done to a man who indisputably revived parliamentary debate for all classes and sexes, including a memorable one on "Hiroshima and its Nuclear Bomb" where Yours Truly was invited as lead debator, thereat saw a rare thing. TSU Japanese and Chinese students abandoning unduly stereotypical "reticence" to educationally debate their kin's experience of World War II. If TSU is ever to get this sort of problem right in the future of alleged "harassment," it must start re-respecting elderly faculty, dealing with student complaints promptly and not
dilatorily inflate them by uncircumspect McCarthyite accusatory means. Of course, the US Democratic Party faces precisely the same problem if it permits those of us who support Bernie Sanders and his Socialist program to be drowned out this November run-up in a sea of MSNBC media McCarthyite abuse and rich men's money, all of which will only favor Donald Trumps' social fascist appeal against socalled "liberal elites."
Yours Affectionately, Larry Iles
King Lear by Rowen Conry Daddi tells me everything I'm sposed to do. In the morning, he tells me to get up, and I open my eyes. Daddi tells me what to eat, and what to wear. He tells me how often in the day I should brush my teeth, and when I need to take a shower. He tells me what to watch on teevee, and when to laugh at the jokes they make on teevee. Daddi tells me when to go number 1, and when to go number 2. He tells me when my bladder's full and when he tells me that I'm hungry he tells me I need to eat. Often he tells me I have dust in my eye and so he tells me to blink, he tells me to breathe because he tells me I have lungs he tells me I have to fill the lungs with air, he describes my form as human, he envisions me verbally as a four limbed thing, little bit tall dark hair, blue eyes thin as a rail. He tells me i exist as an organism among other organisms, that i
take shape in relation to objects around me. Daddi's always telling me about these / laws/. Physical laws of the universe, he calls them. Tells me they govern how the smallest matter interacts which lays the groundwork for the wild and wide movement of the universe. Daddi tells me I have to abide by these laws, so i do. When matter that is part of me is supposed to do something, i make that matter do it. Sometimes it's like each molecule is a little Daddi, telling me what to do. I get tired of it sometimes, but I love Daddi too much to not do what he tells me. -sometimes i do get mad at daddi. when i get mad at daddi i poke on his eye. his eye is real big, and i can only just reach it with my finger. when i poke on his eye i 21
pout.
sometimes i get so mad i spit stars in daddi's face. i take up a big breath and start "augh, fuck!!!" daddi says. "augh fuck fuck spitting stars in daddi's face. i do it as hard fuck ow!!!" as i can, and if i'm real mad i do it even harder than that. when i poke on his eye it's called a tantrum, says daddi, and all kiddies have "would you fucking--- ah!!" says daddi. tantrums sometimes, says daddi. but daddi "get your fucking stars out of my face!" says i should never do that again, but sometimes i do. i only do that when i'm really mad though.
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baby leg, never worn by lesley hauck
an observation of baby leg, never worn by anonymous
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