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UNROOTED ISSUE TWO // AWAKEN // JANUARY 2014

UNROOTED ISSUE TWO / AWAKEN / JANUARY 2014

STAFF

EDITOR IN CHIEF Erin Borzak CREATIVE DIRECTOR Mary Coggins LITERARY EDITOR Emilie Bills FEATURES EDITOR Courtney O’Connor SOCIAL MEDIA Christine Hillman CO - LAYOUT EDITOR Natalie Ng WEB DESIGNER Patrick Cason

STAFF WRITERS Olivia Rafferty Allie Horick Emily Hunerwadel Ramna Safeer Patrick Cason ILLUSTRATION/PHOTOGRAPHY Lex Scott Liv Yuen Shelby Wall Caroline D’Andrea Nikita Jackson Allie Horick

COVER PHOTO: MARGARET FISHER INSIDE COVER COLLAGE: BECKY SMITH BACK COVER PHOTO: MARGARET FISHER

Contributors Becky Smith Hodges st. Clair Jordan Schieber leslie boroczk Faith Christine Shiva Mirzahaidar Tara Abrahams Laetitia Duler Annie stokes

Amina Blyden Erin Grimson Shelby cohen Gabi Bruce Lauren Turner Haley Butler Jude K Margaret fisher Lesley Anne Lara

Image Credits PAGEs 4-5 Emilie Bills Pages 6-7 Emilie Bills Page 22 Liv Yuen Page 38 lex scott page 47 erin borzak

page 48-49 emilie bills Page 66 Caroline Dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Andrea page 69 Amina Blyden Page 78 Allie Horick Page 90 Lauren Turner

Dear Readers, We get this crazy idea in our heads that a new year will bring a moment reminiscent of a key change. Same life, same words, an entirely different feeling. Perhaps it’s the holiday itself, tempting in its faulty logic, like a stiff drink or an enabling friend, looking to watch you have a good time if only for a night and if only that emotion could last forever. The giddy recklessness, the suspense, the ball rises and sparkles and oh, just for a moment, this second is infinite and enduring. We all know of that moment. The rise, the static electricity (like the shock between your hand and the one you want to be holding) of time passing in a tangible way that we only seem to notice when one number clicks to another and suddenly it’s a New Year. Even though nothing really changes between that moment and the next, at least not any more than it changes between 2:30 a.m. and 2:31 a.m. on your average Saturday night, The New Year gives us a special sort of insight. It’s as if many parts of our lives, from one year or another, are pressing up against each other even though they perhaps never should have touched. It’s strange how this one minute, this countdown, brings to light the similarities of every moment we have existed. It’s a time for reflection. Partly because we want it to be so, and partly because that’s just the way things are. It’s just how that minute feels. New Years is a strange VHS tape of moments. Rewinds and fast forwards, the fuzz of a gray screen and moments passing in lines and blurs that can’t quite be caught and come out seeming a little more beautiful and significant than they were when they actually occurred. Every New Year’s we remember that moment, as impossible as it is to coax it to the surface at any minute of the year other than December 31, 11:59 a.m. It’s the moment of impossible chance. The moment of futures and pasts that sit comfortably next to one another and shake hands. Heads fall onto shoulders and soft words are exchanged between old friends.This is not a change. This is not a shift in reality or unreality. This is waking up. Love Always, Erin

letter from the editor 7

UNREALITY BECKY SMITH

Stained Glass The sunlight passed through the stained-glass window and fell, transformed, onto my floor. I watched lazily. The movement of the trees outside caused the small patches of light to move and shimmer, making the blue-colored beams look like water and the lighter yellow ones take on a more celestial mood. My floor was being transformed into a tableau of water and starlight. I leaned back against the white wall, letting my fingers gently pet the white blanket underneath me. The sunlight shimmered and I watched it, not moving much and not thinking much more. My eyes lingered on the windowpane. The sunlight on the outside was almost colorless, I mused, though as it travelled through the glass it became something entirely different. It gained color and wonder; it became distinctly starry. My eyelids drifted shut and I sighed. I had a small lake covering my floorboards, filled with stars. My bed rocked softly on the water. I breathed in, and the air was clear and cool. I breathed out, and I could feel the breeze drifting gently toward me. There were stars everywhere- even through my closed eyelids I could see them in the sky above me, moving ever so slightly to fit their respective constellations. It was midnight on the lake, and I drifted on, serene and sleepy. My eyes opened once more. The sunlight had drifted on and my room no longer moved with patterns of blue and gold light. The floor was dry; the stars were gone. Everything was gray. I smiled and pulled the white blankets up around me. Soon, I knew, the moonlight would come streaming through the window, turning into blue sky and yellow sunshine as it came.

by Hodges St. Clair

Jordan Schieber

ghosts

leslie boroczk

Home is not a place by faith christine there are 50 states in the USA and 12000 miles between this plane and the ground beneath us, an infinite more between where i am and where you are above. i miss you every invisible border i cross i would like to believe you would not have liked Bhutan anyway, Hong Kong is sometimes cold and angry and Taiwan will not be very different at least you got to see Switzerland is it just my imagination when i believe that winters are colder now without you to remind me to wrap up warm? i am still looking for answers in my layers and layers of woollen underwear. 39

Sleepy Sisters Shiva Mirzahaidar

listen for the creek steps by tara abrahams

the river runs like sand in mud in diamond-coal; the minerals, spinning in the eyes of those watching, looking like so many gold-diggers in the California heat. repent, said the creek, repent for wraithing me of my beauty; mud-thick and ugly, hands deep and touching, no voice except the bubbling, no movement sans the flowing, what I wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t give for hands to strangle with, for hands to bruise with, for eyes to see the blueness, for lips to taste the redness, listen for the water and wash your sins there, wash the diamond-flecks out of your iphone body, dump the trash of your hellish body, keep the costume jewelry on only to impress your eyeless lover, listen for the creek-steps, coming slowly towards you, wet with drowned voices.

Melting Bidden by Laetitia Duler

Speak to me until the moon dies and then kiss me at her funeral, lips locked under a sea of dark, veiled mourners. We touch so endlessly we begin to believe that the night will never end. We are both bidden to each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s skin. Under your hands I am the softening watches, I am the persistence of memory and you are dissipating every notion of time I ever had. Your eyes, the rocky headlands I never seem to reach, your fingers washing up my spine like the waves fusing onto a faded beach. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a place inside the body that speaks every single language and pronunciation comes naturally to you. I am yours I am yours I am yours. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nothing more to be done. You have made the bed into the universe, made the universe into home. Later, we sleep in a hushed lull, time slipping under the bridge of our waists, tucked into a world where everything has happened and the world has given everything there ever was.

Wild Blue by Annie Stokes

I never felt like I had to explain myself when I was with you, and that was new. That felt newer to me than the night that took my virginity. That felt stranger to me than holding a freshly born cousin. When we were together, we spoke the same language And the prototype was rooted deep in our souls. In the daylight you would hardly shake my hand I wish you could be the person you were with the lights off I hope I haven’t read your final chapter I pray that you are still a mystery, that you have a hidden room inside of you Because I’ve seen who you are with the lights off And with him I’d leap, open-eyed, into the wild and uncharted blue. I’ll always have a candle lit for the deepest part of you.

HYPNOG HYPNOG

GOGIA GOGIA

MARGARET FISHER

The Fate of an Awe-Inspiring Maiden Lesley Anne Lara

She gently sat down on the chair of truth. She opened the heart of her very desire that has been locked up from an unimaginable Pandora’s box. She stared at the black and white life that she wants to escape from. She humbly asked the breezing wind to help her climb the walls and surpass the debris that are about to fall. Then, she silently waited for that moment. It happened. The swirling wind and darkness softly touched the downside of the earth. Slowly, cautiously, she molds the heavens and brings life to the dead. Slowly, and nervously, she touches the leaves of assurance and slaps the tears that are about to fall to its suffering broken knees. Alas, she has trumpeted the words with bravery yet with a whimpering voice. She has shot the blankness of the eyes of the blind. She spilled the music of closure and ended the game of trick and foolishness. These were the doings of her wrath-affected heart. It happened. The soft murmurs of the crickets are about to stop. The rain, too, shall stop in any minute now. The train has arrived and the tickets were torn into two. The birds migrated to their new lands and the stars came out of their sheds. The caterpillars evolved into beautifully created butterflies. The wind has stopped talking recklessly. The waves in the seas have been calmed down by the mermaids who have sang. The moon has shone its light and the town is peacefully asleep. It happened. She ended the music with a loud smash to the hammers of the piano. Her eyes were dry for tears never flowed. She’s the pianist who longed to let go of the past. She was the pianist who by her music, mastered how to hid her pain. For the last time, she said, “It will never happen again.”

Branches by Amina Blyden

Grown

Erin Grimson 71

Coat Pockets

by Shelby Cohen

Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve stopped pretending that someone is holding your hand as you walk down the streets at dusk, instead you put your hands in your pockets. The outdoor cat you meet everyday is a reflection of the things you love but cannot have. Everyday you cross paths, pet it on the cheeks, hold it close to your chest, silently even selfishly hoping to yourself that it may be a stray. It begins to squirm asking as politely as it can to be set down. So you do, yet it follows you under the streetlamps a little way, but turns back much sooner than you would like. Your thoughts carry it long after it has returned to the start.

EXPOSURE 80

GABI BRUCE

Talking with Tennyson on the Thames By Lauren Turner

“A pence for your thoughts,” she says Hence the brain clots, dear miss For thinking of thoughts is all I’ve got when the player piano churns without need of human thought and yet by humans wrought and the player piano is all I’ve got. The world wasn’t made, you say? Yet on and on it turns We didn’t start the fire and yet it burns Who started this business anyway? And isn’t the market flooded by now? I hear you can get milk without a single cow And yet I believe in the utter. The birth. The thinking, though it does bitterly hurt To admit that the player made the piano, The thought created think. A pence for my thoughts, she says? With that I couldn’t even buy a drink. “Well, I’ll drink to that,” you say As long as I know how! As long as breath pursues my lungs As long as the piano is still able to sound “Then strike up the band and play,” I say Find a fiddler and find the Muse She may not show her face straight away But the ruach will see her through. And the player piano might be the cog That tinkers inside your very brain The thought that created think Might be the ruach causing lungs to inflate So like a balloon, be filled with breath And hence become more fully known And on the ladder of clouds which you float up You may meet Beauty as it climbs down.

1,000 FACES By Haley Butler Hairs on your head stood tall Waiting for lightning to strike. Hiding behind obscene flowers, I felt too big for my chair. The day lingered for an extra 1.440 seconds and there were exactly 4 glances in your direction, just then, I wanted to be a pair of wire frame glasses. Then Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll read your poem because I want to climb inside your mind. mushy brain with pulses of you I hope I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get shocked or maybe I do.

Facing page: Awaken Your Senses by Jude K.

UNROOTED ISSUE two January 2014 FOR MORE VISIT US AT UNROOTEDMAG.COM