Amendment Literary and Art Journal 2024

AMENDMENT Literary

SOCIAL PROGRESSION THROUGH ARTISTIC EXPRESSION

and Art Journal

ABOUT THE COVER

Girl with a Pearl Hoop

Amuri Morris

My painting “Girl With a Pearl Hoop” is a reimagining of “Girl Wiith a Pearl Earring” by Johannes Vermeer. I am greatly inspired by afro-futurism and its recontextualization of the future through an afro-centric lens. My work does this but instead looks reflectively at the past. The juxtaposition of the Dutch Golden Age painting and this black woman in a headwrap creates a reimagined space where a black woman can be elevated to this level of aristocratic representation. This is an alternative history that also thinks reflectively about displacement and the biases of actual history. I also think there is something powerful in recreating an image as iconic as Vermeer’s. It makes the context for reimagining this accessible to people beyond art connoisseurs (an everyday audience). I also think there’s a humorous component to shifting the attire to clothing featured in black culture such as the headwrap and hoop earrings.

In my work I aim to show how western cultures tend to negate and undermine the place of black figures. I want to explore this displacement by bringing visibility to these figures and acknowledging the presence these usurped figures had in western backdrops. I often superimpose an alternative reality that often delves into the realms of fantasy.

Overall, the intersectionality between the often overlapping trauma of blackness, womanhood, and class becomes readily apparent in my work. This plane of intersectionality is conceived from hegemonic powers that narrate our invisibility or roles as Jezebels, Mammies, Sapphires, or deviants. To combat this I aim to depict black beauty and excellence. My pieces break free from this imposed identity and explore new ranges. It’s important to see the black protagonist, the black leader, and the black achiever, while still consciously alluding to and rectifying the imposed otherness of black figures.

My paintings create this fantastical fruitfulness that gratifies my inner child but also often acknowledges the “making do” in the past and the sometimes unconventional charm these memories have. Although these adversities were present there is a nostalgic lens I look back on my childhood memories with that points towards resilience.

AMENDMENT STAFF

Editor-in-Chief

Rachel Poulter-Martinez

Literary Editor

Jesse Anderson

Art Editors

Harley Salmen

Lauren Hall

Social Media Manager

Jordan Kalafut

Staff

Fatima Arevalo Zambrano

Abby Bressette

Ranger Balleisen

Khue Dao

Sawyer Davis

Apollo Hurley

Ella Milton-Benoit

Foster Mardigan

Sara Omer

Sithmi Rajaguru

Designer Olivia McCabe

Student Media Center Director

Jessica Clary

Creative Media Manager

Mark Jeffries

Business Manager

Owen Martin

MISSION

1. An annual publication of radical student-made visual and literary storytelling. We foreground works of hope, joy, healing, resistance, hard truths, imagination, lived experience, and ideas about how we change this world for the better.

2. A student-run creative collective fighting for change at the intersection of art, writing, and accessible knowlege.

3. What you’re holding in your hands.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume would not have been possible without the support, skill, and reliability of multiple individuals.

To the Amendment Staff: Your input during discussion and production is immensely appreciated. Your lived experience has left its mark on this journal; each and every one of Your unique perspectives are imbued in this book.

To Rachel Poulter-Martinez, Jesse Anderson, Harley Salmen, and Lauren Hall: It has been an absolute delight to work with You. Phenomenal teamwork has been exhibited this year, and Your readiness to lead and face challenges head-on is worthy of immeasurable respect.

To Jessica Clary, Mark Jeffries, and Owen Martin: Your guidance as Student Media Center Staff has been invaluable in the creation of this volume. The culture You have cultivated at the SMC is one of incredible creativity and collaboration.

To Olivia McCabe: Your design ability and willingness to work with us in fleshing out this journal has allowed for its full potential to flourish.

To our Contributors: Amendment would not exist without Your work. The brilliance of Your artistry shines through in every syllable, brushstroke, and angle of view.

To the Reader: Thank You for picking up this book, and for Your interest in progressive student work. We put this book together in hopes that You will find something that resonates, something that challenges, and something that inspires.

Jordan Kalafut Social Media Manager

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

I want to start this letter by acknowledging that anything we do is happening in the context that we are witnessing a genocide in Palestine and we need a ceasefire now.

There is a vibrant grassroots movement in Richmond engaging with and educating the public on Palestine; I urge anyone who is unaware of the settler colonial history affecting Palestine—or anyone who cares about their fellow humans—to engage with VCU’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and Richmond’s chapter of American Muslims for Palestine.

As an overtly political publication, Amendment is privileged in its ability to directly draw attention to oft-controversial topics important to our staff. This ability is what originally drew me here, as we live in a time when corporate and government overreach into university and student spaces results in increasing numbers of students and organizations censoring themselves. Joining Amendment, I wanted to push against this censorship.

Unlike a lot of Amendment’s staff, I entered the community late in my degree. I graduate this May, and I am grateful to have spent my final three semesters as an undergraduate student surrounded by student media. I am grateful to Rachel, Harley, and Jordan for welcoming me with such open arms. I am also grateful for Reese Cilley, Pwatem’s editorin-chief, who helped us get this publication off the ground this spring.

Digging through the Amendment archives, I realized only one letter from over a decade ago described how we as a publication make decisions on the pieces you see in this anthology. As editors, we do not determine who gets published within these pages. Instead, we lead conversations on what we’re looking for, why we’re looking for it, and what pieces fit those needs. All decision-making is done democratically, as our organization strives to be as non-hierarchical as possible.

I hope within these pages you find something that makes you feel seen, inspired, or excited. I hope you find something that makes you think critically about the world around you. Most of all, I hope that what you see will encourage you—in some capacity—to join our community.

Jesse Anderson Literary Editor

palomas y perros callejeros mayra figueroa

to give birth alone to leave all you have known mami, i’m sorry. for me to throw it all away, turn it into nothing you had wished for mami, perdóname. in chile the pigeons are everywhere, the stray dogs on your tail as you walk back home in a bakery with my grandmother she saw me, my face cupped in her hands the way the baker knew the dough, moldable and raw, she would always know me.

i had missed this i had forgotten to miss it when i was in class at my american private school uniform shirt tucked into my uniform skirt. when i think of those rusted swing sets, i cry. i wonder how it felt to cry for your mother, for those cries to go unheard. todo lo que lloraste y lo poco que te di all i have to give is a love letter to the pigeons and stray dogs of our country.

Amendment Literature Award Winner

Author’s note

I have found solace in consuming literature since childhood, and in more recent years I have found that feeling in writing. When reading, I feel myself step into the media, becoming someone with a different perspective and experience to mine, and feeling recurring feelings as though for the first time. I am currently in my first year of studying English at VCU, and I look forward to expanding my abilities in creating literature that feels like pockets of experience. In my poetry, I focus on themes of love, guilt, and religion (independently, as well as how they are all interwoven). So much of my work is based on personal experience and is deeply vulnerable, because of this, having my work published is something that I have not pursued until now. However, I have recently developed a different outlook on sharing my work, as I have realized that my vulnerability is a treasure that I get to share on my own terms.

What drives me to write is the hope that my work will push the reader into the emotional part of themselves and allow them to find the value in vulnerability. “Palomas y Perros Callejeros” is an ode to Chile, the immigrant experience, and my mother, who has showered me with writing supplies and books for as long as I can remember.

Intricate Rituals (Genesis 32:22 - 31)

Kade McGrail

Author’s note

Jacob Wrestles With God

24 So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. 25 When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. 26 Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”

But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

27 The man asked him, “What is your name?”

“Jacob,” he answered.

28 Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”

“Intricate Rituals (Genesis 32:22-31)” is my reinterpretation of the Biblical story of Jacob wrestling God (or “the Angel,” depending on the translation) through a queer lens. It is based on the imagery of Leon Bonnat’s “Jacob Wrestling the Angel” and the text is a direct reference to “Untitled (You Construct Intricate Rituals)” by Barbara Kruger. Ultimately, my work is an exploration of Kruger’s “constructed rituals;” as a means to indulge in and explore homoeroticism rather than repress and degrade through toxic masculinity.

Depicting Jacob and God wrestling in BDSM gear connotes Christianity and queer eroticism as compatible, despite the traditional understanding that encourages one to feel shame in relation to sexual desire (particularly queer desire). This turns their story into the positive manifestation of the power dynamic between mortal and immortal, in which Jacob is choosing to trust in and submit to God’s guidance.

As a queer transgender man, it is easy to find myself in a character who was renamed from his given name, Jacob, to Israel after overcoming a great challenge; I colored the piece blue, pink, and white because those are the colors of the transgender flag. Reframing his story within a queer context is healing for me as someone who’s had a difficult relationship with religion because of my gender and sexuality. I still wish to have a positive relationship with God—in spite of my past negative experiences—and Jacob is a useful allegory for wrestling with both faith and sexuality. Interpreting Christianity as queer and queerness as sacred rectifies the dissonance I’ve built up between the two.

How Sweet the Sound Abby Reese Asimos

After bouts of insistent and most likely annoying asking, my Mum finally allowed me to download the object of all my desires- “Pinterest.” The app, though fictitious and indulgent in my obsessive compulsions, made me feel like I was at the cusp of adulthood. After days and days of excessive scrolling, I stumbled upon a humorous quote of sorts that tickled every fancy in me.

“The reason why grandparents and grandkids get along so well is because they share the same enemy.”

Reading it to my Granny, I scanned her face for grinning wrinkles or a hum of joy in her throat. Instead, an escaped gasp, then a dismissal.

“That is not very kind at all, my dear.”

I blinked at her, speechless.

“What about, ‘because they share the same friend?’”

I forced out an awkward chuckle.

“Sounds good, Gran.”

I never knew how different our views of my Mother were until this moment, standing in the dusty living room, picking up my crushed spirit from the beige carpeted floor.

Many years pass. Things somehow got worse. I don’t remember what I did to spur on the yelling in this instance, but like many other times, I felt I did not deserve it. My Mother screams and I stand still, attempting to garner a facade of unaffectedness. A lie. I repetitively whisper out my pet name for her, a plea begging her to slow, to stop, or at least pause and look at me. Little battered exhausted me- her mirror, her reflection she claims to think is beautiful. Yet the way she treats me is not how you treat beautiful things. In my personal thesaurus, “Mum” is a synonym with “I love you. Don’t you love me?” I don’t think she sees it that way. I open my mouth to speak but my Grandma’s voice spills out instead. I glance at the short-haired woman suddenly standing to my right, holding herself up with a cane, angry tears in her tired eyes. Mother to give me a break, to give it a rest, to try to be happy and let me be happy because we are all together and togetherness is fleeting.

When I sleep, my Granny can walk on her own again, and still has a boy’s haircut thecolor the box calls “Raven Black.” I don’t remember when exactly she stopped dying it, just thatmy Mother noted this decision made her look older.

Truth, truth can be ugly.

At this point in the parley, Granny is talking so immensely you can see the tooth gem on her favorite canine, a privilege and gift usually reserved for when you make her laugh with that great Ukrainian cackle of hers. My Mother is the one laughing now, in the fake, factitious, “I can’t believe you just said that” kind of way. My Mother bites back at her Mother.

“You never showed me grace. Why should I show her grace?”

Our alikeness dawned on me violently. Though created from an air of selfishness that exists within every human, I suddenly saw in my Mother the same attraction towards fairness riddled within my own body. I fear the truth, the truth that I would possibly say the same thing in reference to my own future daughter. We are both a little bit bad, and maybe that is okay. Maybe I shouldn’t be so angry anymore. This catalyst created an escape of sorts. Fairness does not mean better. I don’t care as much for fairness anymore. I think I would rather be understood.

Despite every bone in my body warning against this action, I lightly rest my perspiring forehead on my Mother’s sun-kissed thighs. We’re watching a glassblowing documentary with the rest of the family in the hoarder’s house. She rubs my back on the tattered and worn fake suede couch and I don’t flinch. I never did this as a child. She never let me. Or maybe I never let myself. To do so would be an exhibition of forgiveness, and this forgiveness is new. Sparkling. Expensive. But worth it.

That uncharacteristically sticky summer, leaving my Mother’s country, I cried in my Granny’s arms saying goodbye. Though right in front of my longdistance friends, I felt almost no embarrassment. “I’m not mad at you anymore,” I wanted to say. “I’m not mad at your daughter anymore either.” But I was crying too hard, all I could do was let myself be hugged and squeezed, letting the foreign love wash over me as if I was a child again, running through the sprinkler wearing just my underwear, unabashedly. Unashamed. She kisses my forehead and wipes my tears and I missed her already.

People, friends, therapists, anyone from the small number of people I’ve confided in about my tumultuous adolescence- they all say something similar. Your

childhood was a lesson. Now you know what not to do. If I skip birth control one month and choose to partake in the same risk all my ancestors did before me and have sex with a man I hopefully love and hopefully loves me back, and nine months later push out a baby, both of us screaming and both of us scared, I can treat her well. She will know she is adored and wanted and will never question why she is here. And yet, I do believe that will never be enough for me, fixing the future when I know the past is in shambles, like a porcelain chalice dropped during pretend teatime, the shards scattering into a tiled floor’s every nook and cranny. I wish I could give birth to my Mother and raise her the way she deserved to be, the way I deserved to be. I wish I could do the same to my Granny and my Great Granny and my Great Great Granny and on and on and on. I’m not even sure I want to be a Mother, but if I knew I could be a Mother to them I would not hesitate. I can see it in my mind like a watercolor painting, each stroke of paint diluted with the salty sea. I’m in an antique rocking chair, smiling genuinely, my hands intertwined on top of my Mum’s head, french braiding her dirty blonde locks which I would never call mousey. The rest of the girls circle around me, and we are all singing hymns in harmony so perfect it has to be heavenly ordained.

The Lord has promised good to me His word my hope secures; He will my shield and portion be, As long as life endures.

Each awaits their turn to be touched- gently, lovingly, maternally. I brush their hair in away that leaves their souls and sensitive scalps unscathed, never making them wonder, never making them cry.

Pride and Joy Apollo Hurley

Red, White, and Burn

Ashley Davis

What does it mean for a Black person who speaks well ?

shawn

Writes well?

Articulates well?

Navigates white spaces well?

The dark well, or pit I should say, in which Black students find themselves in is long and cold and dirty. Damp, and lonely. The source of water, of life, for some, a chance to succeed and advance in this cruel world, is only meant to drown us

Why is our worth determined by how “smart” we are, how much work we do, or how much profit we can bring? Not even Chuck E. Cheese tokens get abused and used like we do

But my opinion may prevail here, please bear with me, because I believe a certain student faces an interesting dilemma and that is the plight of the Black english major

W.E.B Du Bois said it best, “One feels his two-ness... two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.’

A colonizer tongue is where we find our voice, create stories, and speak our truth. Those on the outside say our study is useless and we are told our discipline has no place in the workforce

That we may be doomed to become

The “smartest” unemployed person in the room

While inside we are told our critiques are too separated from the writer. That our writing is powerful and “eye-opening” yet not worthy of a perfect score. That our books and teachings are only good for the diversity credit and not valuable for further study

That we are not the default and therefore must conform to the Shakespeare’s, Milton’s, Chaucer’s, and Poe’s of the world

My mind has value

I am not a token

I love this discipline but sometimes I feel isolated and neglected

I feel my two-ness

This discipline is pretentious, full of jargon, and very very very very white

It is ENGLISH after all

How brutal is it of people to use this language to snuff out our identity

To promote bigotry

My identity is mine

My identity is valuable

My identity belongs in the classroom

Thus, to my foes I say, you cannot be unbiased in a field driven by bias

You sure as hell can have a Queer reading of Shakespeare

Or

See how Chaucer seeks to humanize a feminine subject

I am biased

Yet, is there always an agenda?

“You’re overanalyzing”

“You’re doing too much”

“You’re reaching”

“It’s not that deep”

The biggest lie we were told is that literature and language are separate from “divisive” topics

That they are separate from

We train ourselves to be critical and empathetic

For a Black person to have media literacy, hell, any type of literacy, is both a blessing and a curse

We are constantly aware of the ways unequal power dynamics infiltrate the shows we watch, the music we listen to, and the texts we read

We are not disillusioned by the face value and are able to distinguish and even destroy propaganda

But that doesn’t mean we cannot find joy and wonder in what we see and read

Listen, to the rhythms of an oral tradition embedded on our tongues waiting to rejoice and tell our stories

I will take the lessons of Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Zora Neale Hurston, Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, Octavia Butler, Phillis Wheatley-Peters, Nikki Giovani, Jamaica Kincaid.

If I named every Black writer, I would simply run out of space

So, I ask, to the little Black child, who would run to the library, eager to get their nose in a book

Have you ever felt joy, looking at a cover, opening a book, and for a moment thinking

That’s me

My Music

Lauryn Baynes

Artist’s statement

When I was younger, I thought of myself as the black sheep, specifically when it came to music. I rarely listened to rap, old school, or R&B on my own time, even now it’s not a frequent choice. The songs I do know, in these genres, I learned from my family. I’d hear these songs during car rides, movies, or whenever they chose to play their music out loud with me in the room. Though I enjoyed them I never dove further into these genres, my choice made me feel isolated in my family. They would go on about well-known artists I could never picture, leaving me to silently sit or leave. I began to question myself, seeing these music genres to be deeply rooted in my culture, a form Black people used to speak about their experiences. I worried I wasn’t accepting my whole culture for not actively listening to the new and older songs, regardless of if I liked them.

As I dove into Afrobeat I found amazing artists that I actively follow, listening to whatever new release as soon as possible. As I listened the insecurities began to fade once again, my worries became less of a problem that needed to be solved and just a testament that I could relate in my own way whenever I wanted, when I was willing instead of out of necessity.

The End Bella LoBue

The grass is growing over the pavement–Now, your steps torment the thorny fingers that outstretch from dirt, reclaiming rock and concrete. And your strut taunts the man, yelling on the corner.

Is the end now so close that it blurs in your focus, like a lover’s eyes into one, into yours?

Are you now so consumed by the heat of your fate and fire that the skin dripping off your neck cools your back?

You make actors of advocates, players of protesters And you gnaw on burnt kernels And you flap bone hands together, at the finale you smirk at the kiss of death.

Pray // Prey Apollo Hurley

Adam’s Creation

Supine against grandmas bark, shovel or hoe-like he laid, garden-sprawled supplicant to the backyard church of our childhood—

While the gushing bite of something not quite ripe, breezed through his cannibalistic lips, lunging— with the sweaty sins of our forbidden desires.

Plump in its protest, an apple raises its fist— with a click!

And like a burning tire, it tumbles finds its rogue way to him, an odyssey, an anarchy that ends with my eyes, collecting like fruit in the green bowls of his downturned soles.

A quick flicker, shoulders shrugging, a scoop— and it’s up.

There was a sickening crunch, a first bite taken— teeth rending apart the gleaming curvature, of a drop of blood.

Was it against nature, to split an embodiment, where fire first tasted the formation of air?

The half-eaten testament— he passes into my palms,

whispering, your turn, and so I took the second bite, and so I tasted summer, a second Adam, savoring the sanctified space where he conjured sunbeams— with just the curves of his cavity-ridden lips.

This was where the universe began—

Between the sunspots on its surface, I tongued the sweet remnants of what his molars had created—

A masterpiece of corrupt light, dripping down my chin. It fell suddenly, splashed into a strike of lightning, of white lines thundering themselves into pieces— into flat dots, into orbs, into rain a flood of destruction, becoming— of an ordinary garden.

The first one, but it’s ok, no one told them that two boys aren’t allowed to leave teeth marks in each other’s skin, even after light ripens it.

But it was too late, and thus, they had met their end— right when the sun had been born again.

How terrible it must’ve been, shut out from that glorious communion of light.

That proof to being, to breathing— just because you were in the right place, before realizing, it was the wrong time—

You were too early, and it looks like you might always be, too early.

I think I was a girl, and now I am Nothing Reese Cilley

Sitting of the floor of a garage somewhere in new england, we huddle.

Quiet whispers, on the phone as we call 911. No emergency.

Sitting downstairs in my living room in a house far to large, I strip.

My naked body, the boy does the same, we are not the same

A room in florida, I am with a girl she kisses down my neck, my breast.

She undoes my bra, pulling it of in a rush I run

An apartment by the beach, I dive into a pool, half naked.

I, not alone, but I could, as I sink.

Somewhere in my mind, my body does, not exist.

Made of particles that are swept away as I look in the mirror.

Somewhere in florida I do not exist, I am erased.

In your mind, I am

nothing but a girl. no emergency.

Doll Time

Amuri Morris

Gila River

Pre-Evacuation

First, they came for the guns.

M Yamamoto

Three years before, back in ‘39, Choichi Yamamoto opened a fishing and sporting goods store. He had a master’s degree in agriculture, he’d brought his family to the States to manage a farm for an American corporation. He worked there still, overseeing a three-hundred-person operation where they were developing new breeds of tomato. The little shop was something he did in his limited free time—his way of engaging with a hobby. Like many such shops in San Francisco at the time, his business carried several firearms.

It started when two men from the government came to the store and told Choichi that they would be returning in a few days to confiscate the weapons. Choichi sold a few of the firearms at discounts, gave away others, and when the men returned with soldiers they took the rest—but they didn’t stop there. They took radios, flashlights, even lanterns, and when they finished with the store, they started going through the Yamamoto family’s private residence.

The soldiers explained that the family had been reported; several of their neighbors had signed a petition. “We’ve lived here for almost ten years,” Choichi kept repeating to himself in shocked disbelief. They had been active members of their community and some of the neighbors even worked for him on the farm when he wasn’t puttering about in his shop.

Afterwards, the family was instructed to pack up and label everything they owned. The soldiers said that it would all be going into storage. That they’d only be able to bring what they could carry. The soldiers couldn’t say where the family was being taken—Choichi wasn’t sure if they even knew.

Kinzo Yamamoto was the middle child, a boy of 11 at the time. He remembers feeling like his whole world was being put away, stuffed in a box. His mother helped him pack, picking out a small collection of essential possessions, then adding a few other things from around the house until the bag was heavy enough that the young child could only just heft it. When they were finished, she started sewing pockets into the linings of Kinzo’s clothes. She filled each of these up with vegetable seeds and sealed them shut with a bit of thread.

Evacuation

It turned out nobody knew where they were going yet.

For a long time, they simply festered in the overcrowded Turlock Assembly Center. The “assembly center” had been hastily constructed on the Stanislaus County Fairgrounds and had quickly become overrun with prisoners. So, when Choichi and his family arrived and the barracks were all already full, the Yamamotos were housed in the stables along with so many others. The seven of them and all their worldly possessions were crammed into a single horse stall that they shared with several strangers.

When night came there was a chill. They huddled close to one another. Sleep was not coming for anyone there in the stables, and the combination of strangeness and sudden proximity meant that there was a lot of uncovered ground to talk about. Timidly, they began to tell each other a little bit about themselves. Perhaps it was the acrid taste of panic that seemed to inundate the former fairground, or the hushed tones of speakers conscious of silent children and hoping they are not being heard, but the scene had the air of a campfire gathering that had reached its terminal stage of telling scary stories.

One woman spoke about her garbage man. He had been shot while out doing his route. The person who did it claimed that he had suspected the young man might have been a spy. It had taken place just a few days before she’d been brought to Turlock. “He was nisei,” she kept insisting dumbfoundedly. She wasn’t the only one shocked to learn that the mythical notion of citizenship granted to one’s babies by being born on America’s soil—that slight difference that marked the issei from the nisei—was not the shield they thought it was. It didn’t matter how long you had lived in their country; it didn’t matter if you’d never been anywhere else. They could be citizens of this country, but they were not “American.”

When finally they did leave Turlock to venture on to the next unknown, the process of getting on the train took some time. Soldiers with guns had patted people down and gone through bags entering the station. Kinzo had brought a pocketknife with a picture of the popular movie cowboy, “Hopalong Cassidy” on the handle. Gripping the little knife and holding it tight in his pocket had been the only thing he’d figured out thus far to try and assemble a resemblance of safety or control. So when the soldier patting him down held out his hand for the thing Kinzo was trying to conceal in his palm, he nearly panicked. There was a brief and

pitiful struggle, but Choichi silenced his son with a short, hushed syllable. He wrenched the pocketknife out from Kinzo’s fingers and handed it over to the uniformed man. Apologizing profusely, he tried to rationalize to the soldier that they had been teaching Kinzo a passion for American culture.

The man opened the knife’s blade, looked dismissively at its diminutive stature, shrugged, and closed it back up before kneeling to hand it back to Kinzo. Looking into the soldier’s eyes through the blurry haze of tears, Kinzo wished at that moment that he could reach out and hug the man for letting him keep the little knife. Something about the rifle slung on the man’s shoulder made Kinzo hold back. That naked expression of an expectation of violence, or perhaps merely an acceptance of it as a probable outcome to be ready for, promoted a feeling of dread that permeated through the station so clearly that even a child understood.

From there the line to board the train was long and grueling. They had all been told to bring only what they could carry, so everyone was hauling as much as they physically were capable of lifting. There was an elderly woman whose leg was in a cast. Moving along using only a single crutch, she was dragging behind her with some effort a bag containing what little physical evidence was left of her life.

Kinzo did not ask or wonder, “why doesn’t anyone help her?” He understood everyone was doing as much as they could; there was no one left with the strength to help her without first having to abandon some of what little they had been able to save. Before he could think about the soldier who had let him keep the knife and before he had the time to wonder to himself, what if maybe there are good soldiers too, or that maybe, someone might help her—one of the uniformed men stepped in line behind the elderly woman and prodding her in the back with the muzzle of his rifle demanded that she pick up her pace or leave the bag behind.

The Camp

The first thing they saw when they stepped into the camp were the haunted faces of wounded veterans; service was no more protection than citizenship.

Issei and nisei soldiers returning from the fronts, and some who had been on their way out, had been intercepted and placed instead into internment camps. Many of them had families on the outside. Without any means of learning when, or if, their loved ones would join them; many of the former soldiers would gather

new arrivals. Not long after arriving, Kinzo would witness one of the veterans, who he later learned had been suffering from something they were calling shellshock, preform harakiri after weeks of not receiving any help.

The Yamamoto family had been sent to the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona; a mass of short-term constructions huddled in a bramble of barbed wire. The sun bared down on them, its heat like an active pressure against their skin. It was 120 degrees when you were in the shade, the earth was craggy and dry, and there wasn’t actually a river there. They would never get the chance to use the seeds they’d brought.

Before long, Choichi was sent away. He’d volunteered for it hoping that it would help his family’s situation. Having received a master’s degree in agriculture, and successfully managing a farm in San Francisco for nearly a decade since immigrating, he figured he would be of more use than most of the other men who had volunteered to do farm labor for the War Relocation Authority (WRA). They first sent him to a position in Delaware that had been vetted by the WRA, but the man there had refused to pay Choichi, so he left to find work on his own. Choichi found a position working for a man in New Jersey, but the situation there hadn’t been vetted by the WRA and his presence there sparked up local controversy.

Choichi had worked out a share cropping deal with a local farmer in Warren County New Jersey, just outside the town of Great Meadows. Things were going great at first and Choichi informed the WRA of his new situation, telling them they could send more laborers from the camps to the farm he was working on. That was when things took a turn. The small local community, roughly three hundred people, came together and held a town meeting to discuss the “Japanese problem.” Reportedly, other than a single dissenting voice, the people of Warren were unanimous when they decided to write their state legislature informing them that if they did not remove the single Japanese laborer from their town, the people were more than willing to do it for them. When instead, more workers showed up, the situation escalated.

The farmer who had made the sharecropping agreement with Choichi became a pariah in his community. One day his tractor broke down and nobody for miles around would agree to tow it, much less repair it. It all fell apart, and the story caught on as headline news from coast to coast when one of the farmer’s sheds was set on fire causing significant damage to his property. The farmer was forced to pull up stakes and leave the town he’d been raised in, Choichi and the

others were sent back to the camp.

When Choichi returned, he was surprised to discover that his son was dying. Kinzo had cut off part of his middle finger and the infection was killing him. The children had been participating in the camp’s educational program when it happened. One day in their shop class, Kinzo was made to use a tool called a joint plane without proper assistance or instruction. The teacher was known for this, he had a habit of referring to the imprisoned children as “monkeys” and refusing to teach them anything he felt should have been obvious or self-evident.

Kinzo’s wound quickly became infected. The prisoners didn’t have any access to medical assistance within the camp, so poorly fed and roasting in the Arizona heat, the fever was sure to kill him. Somone in the camp must have said something though, because somehow the Red Cross got wind of it. They made an attempt to send humanitarian aid to the prisoners at Gila River, but they were turned away at the gate. The Red Cross was told anyone trespassing on the camp attempting to bring aid to the prisoners would be shot on site.

Late one night when a red bag full of medical supplies was thrown through the open door of the barracks housing the Yamamoto family, there were in fact shots fired. Some unknown volunteer saved Kinzo’s life.

Sometime later, the belongings that had been confiscated from their home were sent to them at the camp. Of all the worldly possessions that they had not been able to carry with them when they were taken away, only a single box ever made it back to them.

Back at home, the box had been packed with nine bamboo fishing poles. Seven that Choichi had hand-made for his family, and two that his father had made. The lonely box that came to them at Gila River had only two poles, and they were broken. The only thing Kinzo remembers thinking when they opened the box was that there wasn’t even a river anyway.

FEATURED CONTRIBUTER LIGHTPAINTERR

My name is Isaiah Mamo, aka LIGHTPAINTERR. I’m a lens-based artist and in my work I focus on queering the photographic process utilizing alternative processing and capturing techniques to add visual layers to photos, especially light painting. Through the visual lens of alternative photographing techniques, my work explores queer storytelling and documentation, showcasing through images the beauty of Queerness. Growing up as a Queer, Ethiopian-American, I’ve always navigated to other Queer people, and with that, have photographed my community as a way to represent & hone my craft. Entering physical queer spaces in my adulthood, I have been able to photograph the Queer community in Richmond as an extension of this work. My work acts as a celebration of the Queer community, challenges narratives, and Idolizes queer bodies. I weave elements of ritual, religion, and mysticism into the visual aesthetic of my work, as well as alternative subcultures. Aesthetically utilizing elements of fantasy, horror, and worldbuilding.

I was a political science and philosophy student at VCU. Beyond visual art, I engage in Queer policy research and HIV education.

“IN THE LIGHT OF GOD”

These photos are arranged in the traditional style of a diptych, two pieces side-by-side for the purpose of being an altarpiece for devotion. On the left, In the light, God saves, and loves everyone. The lighting alluding to the positive connotation of the church, the beauty in christian aesetheics and sunday mornings. And with the photo on the right thinking about how Christianity behind closed doors can be very exclusive and harmful. Specifically thinking of the rejection of Queer people that the church can harbor. On the left, everyone is saved, and on the right, the photo is cold and desolate, and people are left in the dark/ told they will go to hell.

“SUNDAY SERVICE”

These photos are of Artemis Lazuli performing at a show at Fallout called ‘Inovocation’. I put them in succession to highlight the dip she did in her performance. Conceptually thinking about how drag shows can act as a time for Queer people to congregate and celebrate, very similar to worship spaces. Drag as an artform constantly being demonized and perceived as being overtlysexualized to fit exclusive religious narratives, when in reality it’s an art form that’s had a positive impact on many Queer peoples’ lives and the community at large in terms of deconstructing gender.

“SAINTS OF DRAG”

These are portraits of alternative drag artists at Fallout in Richmond, VA. Dahli and Hoso Terra Toma, pictured on page 44-45 both performers who appeared on Dragula. Nova Kayne and Sweet Pickles, pictured on page 42-43, are both Richmond drag artists. I compiled these photos of drag artists to illustrate the importance of alternative drag as it pushes the boundaries of the art form as well as the gender binary within and outside of drag. The quarter-body framing of these portraits mimics the quarter-body Christian saints paintings.

Patience in a Broken Hourglass

Apollo Hurley

gay boy

to be closer to the sun do you understand

first kiss doubled in a windowless room blurred with mowhawk lake and its dark bed sucking at my feet

salmon nights with playset out back dry flatness of a suburban basement rich perfume of cul de sac

i was seen by half forbidden film what else would you expect from me there

is a thickness to this talk we only need to tease open with the tips of our fingers i ask are you you say a misunderstanding

i am what you are i am pumping the same electricity i am yours if only you met me where i am

i stand alone with my flesh arched and tensed and meant for your teeth

salmon skins: crisped salted brined scraped clean

k russel

Girl With a Pearl Hoop

Amuri Morris

lessons: the boy from salem k russel

less flesh to sift through if only you knew how to estrange the bones in you not the model prodigy passion stricken prophecy sent skyward nonetheless an attempt to bless / your hands palms cupped skyward eager to receive reject the bolus from way up above knot furling esophageal calcifying, a chrysalis / maybe if you learned to be sad like a man boybody

neon scrim ten more inches to your gait or maybe collect the pellets to pick through / butterfly boy with wings scraped into his levator scapulae an ode to motion, a youth fountain manifestation glittering with flecks of promise, virility pressing hard against the chill /

compile a woman to see if you made a bad turn somewhere, subservience infused in you even if you clamber out claws clogged with sod escape cycle morphed into that of reentry maybe if you learned how lungs were meant to filter salt air /

YEAR OF THE SNAKE

Jessica Jirapinya Schultz

In the Women’s Center a pamphlet explains how I have been inside my mother since her creation. How she was born with all the eggs she’ll ever have & how she’s carried me in the softness of her body. Stripped down to my own skin & dressed in a paper gown, my own history is buried in the underbelly past the rot of memories & broken ribs from constricting myself thinner. When my two fingers slithered to the back of my throat, blood & bile sang together. Yeah, sang together a hymn of generational grotesque girlhood. I hate my body. Not because I have one but because it’s mine & hers forever. My mother & I are both born in the Year of the Snake. She told me she’s afraid of such things, shrieking at the sight of our shared identity. Of the snake eating itself. And to think, there’s a daughter somewhere within me, hiding from her mother. In the bathroom, I swallow a little pill with just my spit. Not yet, not yet.

Olympia’s Maid Returns

Amuri Morris

The Hourglass Apollo Hurley

I was just shy of 14 when I told you Wrote it in a letter the night before Made sure I was asleep when you read it So I’d have more time to prepare Deep down I knew I’d never get the love I needed But hiding who I was was worse

Sent me a text to meet you at church that night Late August storm pulling through My heart must’ve been thundering loud as the sky With how afraid I was of you

And all my friends told me Give it time

She’ll accept you, in time

A few years down the road and it’ll get better And years came and time went Time and time again

You never could call me your son

But I’m okay now I’ve got a better family They love me more than you ever could And don’t hate me for something you never understood I’m happy now

Time gone and I’ve only gotten better

You still waste away, staring at an empty grave that you made Mourning a daughter you never had

I walked up to that church, hopeful despite the glare You told me you’d always love me and I thought you meant it Till you sat me down in the house of God

And told me things a child should never be told

There’s no hate like Christian love

Love the sinner not the sin

God if God could speak he’d disown you not me

For hurting a child in his home

I was only thirteen

All I wanted was you to say it’s okay

And instead you threw it all in my face

You couldn’t even use my name

And all my friends told me

Give it time

She’ll accept you, in time

A few years down the road and it’ll get better And years came and time went

Time and time again

You never could call me your son

But I’m okay now

I’ve got a better family

They love me more than you ever could

And don’t hate me for something you never understood I’m happy now

Time gone and I’ve only gotten better

You still waste away, staring at an empty grave that you made

Mourning a daughter you never had

I gave up

Trying to help you see

Glasses don’t help someone who refuses to open their eyes

I gave up

Hoping you’d care

Stuck closer to the bible and your mothers wrinkled senile tit Than your child who just wanted a home

And I’m better now

Time made me who I am I raised myself and gave myself a home

But I still wish Time could’ve shared it with you

Jiddu (Home and Missile)

Enter Spring, the Grief-stricken Fate Callum Valentine Amend

The garden begins to wilt as Spring Opens, the sky stretches its mouth and Swallows me whole.

The pills clutter the back of my throat as The seams of my body begin to Fall apart, the boy I loved Has changed his mind. The remnants of a life once lived Now live in my mind, What I used to be Becomes merely A shadow on my wall.

My room is not clean as it once was, Plastic containers and crumpled clothes Form abstract shapes on my floor. My reflection begins to shatter.

I try to pick up the pieces

But my hands shake, Forgetting themselves.

I hope that maybe one day I will be able

To say his name again.

Enter Autumn. Callum Valentine Amend

(A companion piece to “Enter Spring, the Grief-Stricken Fate”)

The sunlight flutters in through my window, Ripples of light form halos on my wall as The sky opens her arms And holds me gently.

The plant on my windowsill, Strikingly green, matches My friend’s eyes as they say, “I’ll see you again soon”. I look through the window Of my past and remember My old self kindly, and I wish her well as I walk towards the door:

The young girl Becoming a man.

The leaves begin to change As the sunlight dapples Your autumn-brown eyes. My room, still jumbled, is now Dotted with friends letters, Old poems, new pens. I look at you and I remember why I survived last spring.

Old House Corpse Jay J

It was an old and sturdy house, much like its owners. Not too comfortable or soft or forgiving, but it was respectable in its own right, for the hurricanes it had weathered and for the people it raised. It used to be worth living in and loving despite the drafty windows and the thin walls with exposed nails and the crack in the stairs you could see the kitchen light from.

The house seemed to decay along with them.

Their bones thinned with the piled-stone foundation; a little bit every year. The electric lighting dimmed with my grandfather’s hearing. We would replace the bulbs but it wasn’t them that were broken. The wiring itself caused the new ones to slowly, achingly blink back to life when we pulled the string. He would stomp around the house, too loud to be a ghost, unable to hear how he made the dishes rattle.

His turns around the house are purposeful, now, and less intimidating than when we were small. The wandering giant had been felled, and in his place was a worried and broken old man. He still grumbled about the neighbors and the long grass and the barn swallows that nested on the porch every spring, but the threat behind his words was even emptier than it was before.

Perhaps the house and the owners are more connected than we thought. Perhaps that is the nature of old things aging together.

Perhaps I seek poignance in the mundane to deal with the grief. Is there poetry in lichen?

Is there poetry in the staircase that seeps in warm light from the kitchen? Is there poetry in rot?

There is when I find it beautiful. There is when I use that light to find my way up to bed, just like I did when I was half the height I am now.

It was an old house. Once, it had been shiny and exciting and new, even when they bought it 50 years ago, back when my dad was young. “An investment,” I can see the twinkle in my grandmothers eye when she talks about “where good money is,” though she stopped knowing where good money actually was sometime long before the economy burned up like everything else. The wooden walls were sunbleached and dull before I was born.

Still, it was all I had known, and I loved it without the shine, totally and immensely, each irregular knot like an arrhythmic beating heart. Even when Grandma complained about water stains and dust and cobwebs. We would poke at the exposed nails and laugh and chase each other into the drying yard before the wood warped so badly the door stopped closing.

The house wears its years like a quilted and patched dress, an old whale-oil lamp from before the electric light was installed sits next to a sign from the aughts stating “no shell phones allowed” on the mantle. There’s a calendar from 1976 still hanging in the kitchen with printed minutemen adorning it. There is rot between the floorboards – how long has that been there?

I used to think that I could see where the shine used to be every time we fixed a broken clock or rubbed the old brass lamps till they (mostly) shone. Maybe if we scrubbed a little harder, planted each nail more carefully, then maybe we could get it back. We kept fighting, we kept toiling, and more shit kept breaking.

There is comfort in things which have stood for so long.

Even when back door rattles and never closes right even after you worked so hard to build it with your dad not 5 years ago. Where we had painted it white (my dad, born in the 60s, still calls it “white-warshing,” one of the few bastions of an accent which few still carry) now there were was bleeding rust.

After his memory darkened, my grandfather takes comfort in the two American flags flying down by the neighbors’. “I see those flags flying, I know everything’s okay” – a reminder that we had won the war his parents fought in.

I wish I had flags, selfishly.

I don’t remember when I stopped finding glory in them.

I am disgusted that I ever did.

There is no glory in the reminders that the thing you grew up in and love so dearly is crumbling and awful and will not last.

That it cannot last.

There is no poetry in a broken, cracking thing. It doesn’t matter, now. There’s more that needs fixing.

Every year it gets a little harder to love.

One of my uncles thinks we should raze it, saying it was never a good investment and its broken beyond repair. Another sees nothing wrong in it, his vision obscured by his rose-tinted memories and his hopeful wish to pass it along to his children. It is noble, but I do not share his naivety. My cousins and I will have no choice but to inherit a dying thing.

I finally started to realize that the little projects we toil endlessly over just can’t fix a corpse. You can’t put a bandaid on death and rot.

At dawn, the windows flood the house with light like the shock of an AED and I wonder how many more sunrises this house will greet.

I do not know which is worse: few, or many, that I am not there to witness.

Like all things, it is a slow and painful death, prolonged by the selfish and inescapable desire to hold onto it until your fingers bleed. Prolonged by naivety. Prolonged by indecision. Prolonged because it’s just too big and complicated to think about.

I weep endlessly for it.

I want to keep it like the memory of it keeping me. It keeps breaking, and I resent it more.

I keep trying to fix things.

Wedding Bells

Amuri Morris

Sunshine is Not for The Faint of Heart Reese Cilley

In response to the Don’t Say Gay Bill, 2022

Your mother will rub your head and coo you to sleep, but there will be no end to your wailing. Florida, you will weep one day.

The hollow mangroves will groan in their shells. The brackish water will shake under your tears.

Your mother will try to rub the sand from your swollen soles, covered in debris and fishnets.

Your coastal dunes will break, washing away trash and vines. Running into the streets entrapting your victims.

It will be called the great Florida garbage pile. An endless spiral, tears and trash, tears and disgust.

Your gators will craw from their mud, a chrysalis of power, their kingdom once again under their scaly claws.

The lucky will watch from their shingled roofs, smiling in distaste from what they have caused.

Florida, you will give one last muted cry; the manatees will moan in harmony. The silence of the sunshine.

begins today

Ode to O’Shae shawn

After Gwendolyn Brooks

September 1, 1994—July 29, 2023

The Butch Queens. Five at the Renaissance Ball.

We real cool. We Old School. We Heed hate. We Always ate. We Dip ’n spin. We Keep kin. We Vogue the tune. We Die too soon.

Too many of us gone Too many of us harmed When will it end When will it cease

Before I lay my brother down Head first on the concrete Doomed to die This body of mine I cannot rest Even if I stop They’ll still be pressed I want to make it past 35 I want to be young, free, happy Alive

And so I shall

No one can stop me now

I won’t run away I refuse to hide

The world deserves to see me shine And to all of you

Who have hate in your hearts

Who get enraged

When the kidz is having fun

I pity you

You’ll meet your maker Soon

HE’LL have HIS way with you

We’ll both be damned to hell

And I’m glad to drag you down with me

R.I.P. O’Shae Sibley

(“Ode to O’Shae” is inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool”)

Greed Aiswarya Anil

Amendment accepts submissions from VCU students during the fall semester. Submit inquiries to amendmentvcu@gmail.com

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Amendment 2024 was produced at the VCU Student Media Center; P.O. Box 842010, Richmond, VA 23284-2010. It was typeset using Garamond Premier Pro and Chaparral Pro.

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