Writers Magazine 2024: Dinner Party

WRITERS

Senior Editors

Alyssa Repetti

Valencya Valdez

Editors

Murphy McDonald Bradshaw

Camille Kuroiwa-Lewis

Lilly Grey Rudge

Lauren Rees Savas

Clara Smith

Branna Sundy

Advisor

Prof. John McDonald

Cover Design

Camille Kuroiwa-Lewis

Valencya Valdez

Cover Image

Alex Kanalakis

Writers Logo

Designed by Reece Smith

Writers Photo

Natalie Gordon

Spring 2024

University of Portland

Table

Letter from the Editors

Collected Works

fruit or vegetable

Sa’lad Ma’ker

Reading for Sustenance

God’s Favorite

The willow and the wind

Frog (A Scene from The Year Without A Summer)

Contour Farming

A May in Mexico

After the Dance

little gods and empty sacrifices

Seeds of Resistance Procession

Butch

Not me // Not me

Medium-Rare

LITTLE RED

Kiss of the Purple Fruit

Reaping what you’ve sown

Observation of a Housewife

Notes on Societal Collapse

An Ode to the Spider in My Shower

waking up to the thoughts about the mortifying things I did last night

The Mountains Feast In Turn

Midnight wandering, getting home soon

At the Lip of the Ridge, the Peeler and the Potato Skins

Ashley Marheineke

Emma Callanan

Hannah Pompeii

Francy Wentker

Sean Murray

Zora Richardson

Camille Kuroiwa-Lewis

Kimberly Cortez

Scott Winkenweder

Soleia Yemaya Quinn

Faith Scheenstra

Lilly Grey Rudge

Leonidas Grimshaw

Valencya Valdez

Claire Beaumont

Branna Sundy

Lizzy VanLengen

Branna Sundy

Clara Smith

Ricardo Guevara

Katherine Johnson

Valencya Valdez

Letter from the Editors

Dearest friends of Writers,

We invite you to once again join us in communion to feast upon the creative endeavors of our talented student body. Art and literature, through and through, stimulate our senses and awaken us to new perspectives, ideas, values, and tastes. The arts are essential to our humanity, just as food and community are. Our theme for this edition, "Dinner Party," is an ode to the culinary gatherings that bring people together and the global tastes that help shape our identities. Much like a perfectly crafted dish, it's a symphony of tastes that beckons us to rediscover the roots of our culinary heritage and nourish not only our bodies but our minds.

Drawing inspiration from the rich well of global culinary traditions, we explore the idea of a communal gathering. The dinner table, in all its gastronomic splendor, is the stage for neat portraits of communal bliss, a sanctuary where we indulge in the pleasures of the palate and share in the universal language of food. Though let us not forget either, the unglamorous gore of animal eating, the chaos of a kitchen, and the bellies of those that go hungry, missing the most essential of human needs. Just as the body craves sustenance to thrive, the soul yearns for the nourishment of shared connection.

We aim to amuse the senses, induce pangs of hunger, and cause saliva to pool under your tongue through the work of our student contributors. Though unconfined to the theme, there are stir scents in these works that remind us of diverse gastronomic and nostalgic landscapes, and we only hope that you savor the flavors. Our Editors’ Choice prose piece “Her Love”, by Nandita Kumar, unravels familial traditions and our relationship with the desire for not only physical satiation but cravings for love. Alex Kanalakis’ “Our Life”, featured as the other Editors’ Choice, is a visual treat, a beautiful still-life portrait of bountiful foods. Each of our contributors has created works that speak to identity, desire, and intention. We ask that you not only consume their art but allow it to consume you as well.

This Spring edition encourages you to reflect on who you are and perhaps not what, but how you eat. We urge you to take time to savor every bite, cherish the moments of culinary bliss, hearken back to the cultural identity that seasons your life, and cultivate new creations, tastes, and flavors. Above all, we extend our heartfelt appreciation to the community of writers and artists who continuously and generously trust their work with us.

Graciously,

Alyssa Repetti & Valencya Valdez Senior Editors 2024

“So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it...and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied...and it is all one.”

-M.F.K. Fisher, “The Gastronomical Me”

Our Life

ALEX KANALAKIS

Her Love NANDITA

KUMAR

I remember all the stories you’re about to read but this one. This one was told to me and takes on the fuzzy texture of those memories that aren’t exactly your own. I was sitting in my highchair in the center of the kitchen beating my fists wildly. My feet kicked up and down in fraught circles as tears streamed down my chubby baby cheeks. Nanu wants something, but what? My grandma filled up two glasses and held them up to my tiny face, lifting first, “water,” and second, “milk.” Then she stared at me, patiently waiting. My face softened and I pointed my tiny baby fist in the direction of the water,

“Thatho,” I whispered. She chuckled with delight, and, embarrassingly, my first “word” was born.

The first memories that I can recall of my time with her are of our routines, no specific moment in time. I know that every day after preschool she would have a snack of some sort prepared for my sister Divya and myself. Sometimes it would be shankarpali and cocoa, sweet fritters in the shape of diamonds flavored with cardamom and sugar. Often, it would be chivda, puffed rice cooked with peanuts, turmeric, and green chilis. Instead of putting the ingredients in a bowl, she would extract some old newspapers from a basket that lived with the unwanted paper bags in the pantry and put us to work. She would roll the first cone with expert nimble fingers, creating a sharp point at the end and seamlessly integrating the flaps of the paper into the package. We produced shoddy recreations of her work, too busy fighting over who would get to eat with her pristine parcel to pay much mind to the task. She would then deposit the freshly cooked snack into the paper and hand them off to us. As we ate, she would tell us stories of growing up in Kerala, of the stalls she would go to after school to collect the exact same treat we loved so much. Divya and I would dance around the house with our cones, trading them back and forth, taking turns being grandma and the chivda man, the chivda man and grandma. We would gobble up the snack and beg for seconds and thirds and I could taste her love in the mustard seeds that popped between my teeth.

After snack time came studies, “che not these ‘American studies,’” she would loathingly spit, “you must be the smartest girls in your class.” Ever since my birth she was as disarmingly patient as she was focused on our success. She would produce workbooks from India for us to slog through together. They were filled with times tables 1-14, arithmetic,

cursive, and language practice. She coached us on the curvature of our “r’s” and the speed of our calculations, and everything she believed we would need to be ready for the world. We would get tired or frustrated or both, but her eager focus would never falter. I could smell her love in the spines of the notebooks, like earth and India.

There was nothing that I wanted to do that she couldn’t make happen. In third grade, it was science projects after school. We would mix milk, dish soap and food dye to make swirling simmering tie-dye patterns in a bowl. We would cover eggs in vinegar and watch their shells slowly dissolve. If we didn’t have the ingredients necessary for my recent passion project, she would find creative substitutes, encouraging me to use what we had available to make as many interesting things as possible. One of the most memorable experiments I recall was our attempt at making doughnuts. Unwilling to use anything in excess, we attempted to fry all of them with the amount of oil anyone else would use to sunny side up an egg. Each “doughnut,” horrified by our performance, glommed onto the next one until a dozen doughnut holes became one crunchy pancake. When finally, we had exhausted all other materials, she let me microwave Elmer’s glue just to see what would happen (black smoke, angry parents. The scent of her love in glue splattered across a dying microwave will never quite escape me).

I remember watching her drop thick globs of pure coconut oil into a cup, then methodically stirring it over hot water until it became a shiny clear liquid. She would walk to the bathroom and sit me on the ledge of the bathtub, pushing the oil through my hair and massaging it into my scalp. Then, she would plait my hair into two thick braids and begin on her own. After, she would scrub my head with soap, while whispering about the way her mother used to do this for her. “This was my favorite bit,” she would grin, as she vigorously dried my hair in a thin cotton towel, pushing my soft waves side to side, up and down, scratching my head every so often. Occasionally during this practice, she would touch my skin and mutter, “Nanu, you’re getting darker and darker.” Then, a list of everything I must do to avoid this tragedy. Lemon on the skin, apple cider vinegar, turmeric and honey. Such applications were attempted several times. All left me, to her disappointment, a decidedly nutty brown. The oil staining her blouse, the pads of her fingers on my scalp, her palms grazing my neck, they shook with a love that squeezed me tighter and tighter.

One warm August afternoon, my grandma caught my sister basking in the sun reading a book on the lawn. I remember her pupils constricting into tiny pinpricks, so tiny that they almost disappeared. Her tone was frighteningly icy, “Come inside. Now.” Always braver than me, Divya laughed her off, but a few minutes later she meekly skulked back into the

house. She hated that we climbed the trees in the neighborhood. “Look at your arms, so dark, so large; what man will make you his wife, Nanu?” One day when I was around 6, I watched my sister break one of my favorite toys, a kaleidoscope that shimmered and shined, the toy-apple of my eye. I began to yell, “How could you, how could you?” My grandma who up until now had been preparing idlis flung a towel over her left shoulder and turned to me; her pupils once again microscopic. “Young ladies never get angry; look how your face fattens when you yell. Stop it.” Her tone was sharp and metallic, like she was slapping a ruler against my desk. From then on, we would save the fights for after she went to sleep. I would sit outside her door sometimes, waiting to hear her feet stop moving about the room, her body settling on the mattress. I could hear her love in the click of the light, in the clink of her glasses against the nightstand. It dropped like a stone into my stomach and sat watching, waiting for me to step out of line.

This past summer I visited my dad’s family in Kuching, Malaysia. As I roamed through the streets of the city with my sister, I noticed a hawker stall piled high with papaya, mangosteen, bananas, and durian. Dazzled by the array of textures and colors, I wandered over and was immediately struck by the jackfruit hanging precariously off the side of the stand, ready to be cut and served whenever they were requested. I was transported to my summers growing up. July was when the jackfruit would be freshest at the market. My mom would bring the bulging fruit home and order us to lay newspapers down on the porch. My grandma would fish out the cleaver and hack at the rough exterior for several minutes until finally, finally, the skin would split, and the ornate overlapping chambers of fruit would be revealed. We would gorge ourselves on the flesh, and watch her use it to make ada, a steamed rice pancake filled with coconut, jaggery, and freshly cut jackfruit. She would collect the smooth rounded seeds and turn them into a thick flavorful curry at dinner. She was magic; her love was fragrant and melodious and reminded me of summer.

At night in Kuching, we would sit around big tables and have cold drinks as we watched the city begin to settle into the night. Dipping into a trance, I would observe the aunties and uncles squawk about this and that, gossiping about their friends from high school and college. Occasionally, the conversation would shift to the children, and one evening my cousin Prashanth, absentmindedly tapping his flip flop against a rickety plastic chair leg at the tables 6 o’clock became the selected game. They hunted and howled at his lifestyle, his scandalously late bedtime, his love life, his weight. In not-so-hushed tones they discussed ways to fix him. His eyes grew soft and sad, he looked down and away, he looked up and off, but a winning smile remained plastered

on his face. As we got up to leave, I watched the smile falter for just a second and I felt something crawling up my spine, inching through my stomach, burrowing itself deep in my brain. It was a voice that I couldn't shake. It prodded at my skin, poked at my belly, questioned my worth, my ability to be successful, to find love and happiness. It was icy cold, and it loved me so much.

fruit or

Ashley Marheineke

Sa’lad Ma’ker

EMMA CALLANAN

Green gems lie just below the crust of the earth

Too cold now to notice how strong

The meal of the poor is

Cabbage you fiend!

Unbreakable beast

Resisting the coldest winter storm

The heat of summer

The bugs of spring

The gentle air of autumn

What is it that you want?

Your universal tongue translating easy

From borscht to kimchi

To the meager salad on my plate

Your heads I shall off from soil any time of year

My patch of cabbage I’ll cannibalize year round

Oh dexterous fruit

Shall you always be reaped and never praised ?

Reading for Sustenance

Hannah Pompeii

God’s Favorite

Francy Wentker

I only love Portland through the eyes of my friends

The City of Roses through rose colored glasses, Holy ground perched over a serpentine, toxic river

The beaches here are muddy and small connected to rivers or rocky off the coast if you’re so lucky to make it that far But wherever you go they’re still cold and marshy, surrounded by spruce trees

Their woodsy landscape feels alien; it’s all too green Either way, at least I can wash myself clean in the sea, christen my body in the salty waves until my limbs go numb and I’m left shrieking and stumbling through the sea foam in nothing but my undies laughing with my friends

There’s remnants of a dilapidated diner behind a cyclone fence on Germantown Road and a small white Bible Church adjacent from a red farmhouse if you take the scenic route home from the coast

Everything here feels like leftovers from if the world ended in the 1950s or entering an Edward Hopper painting

Sometimes I think I’m afraid of God when really I’m afraid of men Still, I think I found God in a pharmacy playing John Denver I’ve been smoking on the porch and listening to the rain in the early evenings the ash sits on the table long after dusk and the street lights come on

I want to live so many lives and be so many people and do so many things This chapter is the first of many, hopefully, since my world didn’t end when I was 17

I read that God was dead inside a tunnel on i5 by the Washington border and it scared me

But a bumper sticker told me Heaven wasn’t real, so maybe it doesn’t matter

I spill my drinks and I stumble over my words I could be anywhere, I’m on your block, don’t hate me if I take a lap

Your words were like daffodils and they painted me golden

your lips like red dahlias, cracked in the cold and stained with my lipstick

I don’t think you’re a devil but I do think you were sent to test me I could have stayed down at your altar forever if you’d let me

I’m such a fool for sacrifice

And if that’s the case I wonder what omnipotent being holds me captive in the dark thinking about you

You’ve got a young god complex and I bet you thought I would worship you forever

Did my devotion frighten you?

It’s a shame I’ve become what you’re bored of now that the thrill is gone, and my hands are shaky and cold, but my heart is still warm

My house is haunted and I’m not sure if it started before or after you left the creaks and whines of the floors and the walls tell me it’s time to move on

I’ve found love in the small things and I think I’ve become reborn the way my friends know my coffee order and my favorite cigarettes and what makes me tick

speeding with the windows down and the heat high, no matter how cold it is outside commemorating small moments from pen to paper, pictures and jumbled prose club lights and dirty Shirleys on Friday nights freshly done roots and blood red fingernails calling my father the morning after meltdowns screaming my voice hoarse at concerts morning rural drives to sift through secondhand clothes

I wonder who I’ll be when I leave Portland

Is it true that you can take the girl out of the city, but never the city out of the girl?

I’m so glad I ended up where I did, maybe I am God’s favorite

The willow and the wind

SEAN MURRAY

there once in these hills lived a man like a willow dipped his head to the pillow of a watery fen drank deep of the land and grew tall, grew tall his roots over years they spread wide and fell long

the years brought a woman like a westerly wind from the west she alit 'pon his watery fen and his branches awoke to the dance, the dance he swayed in her time, with her whisper entranced

and too soon it was that the east called her forth she lifted her feet from the watery fen in love's frenzy, he ripped up his roots and was borne by her wind, and his fen lost in fog far below

in time they set down in a grassy dry heath his limbs bent again, swayed soft in her breeze but his roots could not break through the earth, the earth their sweet love now drowned out by crackling thirst

his leaves fell to ground, she saw then her mistake and she desperately tugged at his brittle brown frame but his arms could not bend to embrace, embrace with an almighty crack her gusts laid him to waste

willow, learn well from his osier skeleton while branches sway prettily, court not the wind and hide your deep roots from young love, young love for though born craving light, trees must not chase the sun.

Frog

(A Scene from The Year Without A Summer)

Zora Richardson

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

George Gordon, Lord Byron

Percy Shelley

SETTING: A makeshift laboratory in the basement of the lakeside villa. Geneva, Switzerland, June 1816.

Enter PERCY from the field. He is carrying a dead frog. He lays the frog out on a table or workbench, then sets about carefully dissecting the frog, pinning it open, taking notes, making sketches. Enter GEORGE.

GEORGE (jokingly)

That had better not be one of mine.

PERCY

It was dead when I found it.

GEORGE Ah.

PERCY …

GEORGE

Did you have a pleasant walk?

PERCY

I needed some air.

The rain is hammering down. A crack of thunder shakes the house. A flash of lightning.

GEORGE Ah, well, can’t blame a man for that.

Beat. Silence as PERCY works intently, feverishly.

GEORGE

What’s on your mind?

PERCY

Do you believe in the soul?

GEORGE I - Of course.

PERCY

Do you believe that animals have souls, too?

GEORGE I can’t say.

PERCY Nor can I. Beat.

GEORGE Percy, what’s the matter?

PERCY

I cannot find the soul in this frog. I have dissected many frogs in my lifetime, and never yet have I found a soul. (Beat) Where is the soul of a man? In his brain? His heart? Somewhere else entirely?

GEORGE

The Stoics believed that the soul is breath itself – the frog does not breathe, it has no soul.

PERCY

Are you saying that life begins and ends with breath?

GEORGE

I am not saying, I am referring to Marcus Aurelius.

PERCY

And what if I am not satisfied with the Romans? And I swear, if you start with Voltaire –

GEORGE

Well, Voltaire proposed quite a bit of skepticism over the existence of a soul at all. Aren’t you all for atheism?

PERCY

Just because I don’t believe in God doesn’t mean – that is, I can still –believe in – I can still try to find some meaning in –

GEORGE

It is only a frog.

PERCY

When it breathed, do you suppose it was conscious? I mean, in the way we are? Does it feel the loss of its own life?

PERCY continues his work in a ritualistic manner – he has done this many times before. GEORGE leans against a workbench, in a failed attempt to appear at home in the lab.

PERCY (with a sigh)

Why are you here?

GEORGE

I saw Claire earlier. She had been in the nursery with Mary.

PERCY

How charming.

GEORGE

We had a – well – a rather lively conversation. She had some surprising news to share. I cannot say I am proud of how I responded, but that’s all one.

PERCY

That sounds like a private matter.

GEORGE

And when have our private matters not intertwined?

PERCY

Surely there must come a time.

GEORGE

For the love of God, man, stop mangling that poor beast!

PERCY

This weather is abnormal for a Swiss summer. The wildlife aren’t used to it. The cold, the lack of sun, it’s not natural, none of it is – something is wrong, dreadfully wrong, I can’t figure it out – I don’t understand – I don’t –

GEORGE

You don’t –

PERCY

Is there something wrong with me, George? Why can I only manage to find dead frogs? It was like this before Mary, too, and… I just don’t know.

GEORGE (catching on)

Sometimes that’s the way of things.

From here on out, the metaphor can begin to fall apart. We all know we’re not really talking about frogs.

PERCY

You make it sound so random. You seem to have no problem finding and keeping live frogs. Quite the contrary, in fact.

GEORGE

It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Sometimes you have a nice little frog in a nice little terrarium in your nice little town house in London. Sometimes, however, the frog jumps through your open window while you are sleeping and sticks its slimy foot in your mouth before wreaking absolute havoc among your belongings.

GEORGE

And you can’t get the frog out no matter how hard you try, and it’s the dead of night, and you know you shouldn’t have left the window open but it’s too late and you don’t want to wake anyone, and suddenly it’s down your nightgown and you’re trying not to scream and –

GEORGE

PERCY

MAYBE I’M LOOKING FOR A LIVING FROG! MAYBE I WANT TO WATCH IT HOP AROUND AND CATCH FLIES AND GROW OLD! MAYBE THERE’S MORE TO LIFE THAN FROLICKING THROUGH THE FIELDS OF WHICHEVER FAIR MAIDEN IS UNFORTUNATE ENOUGH TO HAVE YOU! HAVE YOU EVER CONSIDERED THAT?

That’s all well and good but I don’t want the frog in my room.

PERCY

You left your damned window open! That is a risk you take! And now the frog is yours and you have to take some responsibility for it!

GEORGE Responsibility?

PERCY

We are men now.

GEORGE

And what happened to us? To our youth? The joy in those days was not in the frogs, but in the fields we frolicked through and the windows we left open on the way. We may have assumed we might stumble upon a frog at some point but I didn’t think it was ever a serious possibility –

PERCY

I have hunted fruitlessly for frogs my whole life. And, yes, sometimes you just go hunting to hunt. And galloping through the fields is fun. Really, it is. I’ve even been field-galloping and marsh-tromping where I know there aren’t any frogs, just for the hell of it. But then, I started searching in earnest. In a field I am actually quite fond of. And I found a dead frog. And another one. And another one. And I started to wonder what was wrong with me. Why I couldn’t find a single live frog when there are so many in the world. And then I found one, a living one, and I brought it inside and you know what it did, George? It died.

GEORGE

Surely one more dead frog doesn’t mean so much, after all the others.

PERCY

Do not say that again. Ever.

GEORGE

Percy, darling –

PERCY

Don’t darling me. You make me sick.

GEORGE

I didn’t mean it like that.

PERCY

You should leave while I’m still responsible for my actions.

GEORGE

Percy. I am sorry about your… frogs. I – I cannot imagine. How hard that is.

PERCY

There is one still alive. In a terrarium upstairs. He is sickly, but he may yet live.

GEORGE I hope he does.

PERCY

We’re doing our best.

GEORGE I know you are.

PERCY

Don’t you have a frog to get out of your room? Leave me in peace.

GEORGE (ok, the metaphor is falling apart, let’s switch tracks) Have you been writing?

PERCY A bit.

GEORGE Poetry?

PERCY Yes. Some.

GEORGE Does it help?

PERCY

A bit. I wrote about a frog.

GEORGE And did it help?

PERCY

I think so. I burned it. I didn’t want Mary to find it.

GEORGE

Let’s go upstairs. You must be freezing from the rain, and there’s a fire going in the library. Come on.

GEORGE crosses to PERCY, helps him clean up the workbench, setting the frog aside to be returned to later. GEORGE helps PERCY out of his bloody apron.

GEORGE

Dear God, you’re a mess. How did the creature produce this much blood?

PERCY

You’d be surprised.

GEORGE

It’s just – it’s so small, and –

PERCY

Were you there when Ada was born?

GEORGE …no.

PERCY

Well. It’s more blood than the frog.

GEORGE

Ugh, some of it’s missed the apron entirely. Here, allow me.

PERCY lifts his arms and GEORGE helps him out of his shirt, tossing it atop the discarded apron. GEORGE removes his own coat and wraps it around PERCY’s shoulders. They share a moment. Perhaps GEORGE reaches out to hold PERCY’s face. PERCY leans into the moment, perhaps he cries as GEORGE holds him. Eventually:

GEORGE

To the library?

PERCY

How very like you. Fleeing the lab for the library. Nothing a book won’t fix.

GEORGE Come on.

PERCY I don’t want to leave it.

GEORGE Percy. It is gone.

PERCY I know.

GEORGE

The library. Do I have to carry you?

PERCY

Don’t tempt me.

GEORGE

Up we go. There’s a good lad.

PERCY

I can walk.

GEORGE Too late!

GEORGE unsuccessfully attempts to throw PERCY over his shoulder.

PERCY George!

GEORGE

I may not be able to keep your frog alive, but I will haul your ass out of the cold, gloomy, damp laboratory full of frog corpses.

PERCY

Fair enough. But I’m walking myself, thank you.

GEORGE Atta boy.

EXEUNT, together.

Contour Farming

CAMILLE KUROIWA-LEWIS

A May in Mexico

kimberly cortez

A Mexican summer doesn’t feel like any kind of summer.

It was a hot summer day in May. I had been washed of my identity for ten months, lost parts of myself and discovered new ones. I guess that’s what college was about. But I broke up with my boyfriend, left my friends messages on read and wanted to shake things up by telling my dad I wanted to find myself in Mexico. That’s what white people say when they travel abroad, they want to “find themselves.” Maybe I had adopted the same sort of mannerism because I left Portland only to find myself a stranger to my parents.

After my grandma got a travel visa, my dad rarely ever went back to Mexico. Maybe it was because it was expensive, but I often thought it was because it didn’t seem like home anymore. That maybe he too had been washed of his identity. The kind that makes you realize that you can go anywhere, just not home. He was excited to take me though. It was just me, him and Mexico. Time to bond, he told me. So, we drove down to a Californian boarder city, crossed a bridge and got on a flight to spend two weeks in the Mexican sun in San Jerónimo Ocotitlán, Puebla. I walked off the plane into the Hermanos Serdán International Airport and I saw people that reminded me of my dad. Parents who had left Mexico to the US, now they stepped back onto land that meant something to them. I could recognize these kinds of people everywhere I went, maybe it’s because I grew up studying my parents' misery and their anguish. I wondered, in that moment in the airport, if time could erase the pain of leaving your family, your home.

Two days after we arrived in Puebla my grandmother’s house, I had gotten sick with food poisoning. I was bedridden, weak and vomiting every couple hour. I was miserable from the agonizing pain in my stomach, nauseous from the heat that had been permeating through the cement walls of my grandmother’s house. It felt like I was being burned

alive while also suffering through a really bad hangover. “Que te sientes mejor, mija,” my dad told me as he bent down next to my head to grab my water bottle to refill it with groundwater. It was kind of ironic. I had gone all this way to visit my dad’s hometown and reconnect with the part of myself I felt I had lost. In turn, the universe played a sick joke on me. It was almost as if she wanted me to realize that this place wasn’t meant for me to play-pretend Mexican. I am my father’s daughter, but this place was strange to me. I didn’t like the food, I couldn’t wear the things I wanted my teal shorts, red tank top or paisley patterned dress out of fear of being harassed in the streets, I couldn’t speak the language as well as I wanted my mind and body were in Mexico but they belonged somewhere else. I felt so desperate to be someone I wasn’t. How else do I keep this part of me when it can be so easily forgotten? It gets erased when professors mix my name up with the only other Latina in class, I see myself represented more in the cleaning staff because they actually look like me and my friends say things they aren’t supposed to but my mom taught me to pick my battles. I asked myself something different that night how do I keep this part of me before it’s completely gone? That night when my symptoms were fading and I was starting to feel a little healthier, my aunt broke me a piece of bread and handed it to me as I lay in bed. I took it as a sign to let my body become one with my suffering.

A couple days later, I had fully recovered and my ego only felt slightly bruised. My dad gave me a big bear hug and told me he knew I would feel better. I felt annoyed by his comment because I hadn’t really been feeling better. Physically, I didn’t feel the need to throw up every five minutes. But mentally, I felt something confusing turning inside of me. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but I had started counting the days until I left this place maybe the urgency to run and leave Puebla behind was where my confusion was coming from. How did I go from wishing to be away from Portland only to wanting to go back? My dad told me he wanted to take me to the city and see the Basilica Cathedral, a 70 meter Renaissance-style structure built in 1649 at the center of El Carmen, Puebla. So, instead of spending my day wallowing in my confusion, I put on my Doc Marten boots, a sure sign that I was a westerner, slung my backpack over my shoulder and walked with my dad to the bus stop.

The transportation in Mexico is not subsidized by the federal government, so every bus and taxi is bought by everyday Mexicans to drive people around in. It means that each vehicle has its own set of quirks; jerky transmissions or broken seats are just two examples. I didn’t mind this though. What bothered me was my dad’s incompetence. We got off at the right bus station, asked a stranger for help, got on the wrong bus, asked a stranger for help, got on the right bus. We did this about three times before I told my dad I was going to pull up Google Maps and see how long it would take to walk to the cathedral. My dad sighed, took his hat off for a second to wipe the sweat off his forehead, and gave me a hesitant okay. “I thought you knew how to get around here,” I said pointedly, with an annoyed tone to my voice. “Pues en un punto de mi vida, sí sabía. Pienso que ahora no,” he said, slightly defeated as we walked against broken pavement. I instantly felt guilty. I realized that this place was also no longer familiar to my dad. His home no longer belonged to him in the way that it used to. His Mexicanness, too, had been stolen, erased and artificially made new by an American way of life. He had been working two jobs for the past twenty-five years, so his anger had now reduced to only a simmer of pain. He didn’t yell at my sisters and I anymore for being ungrateful for the life we had. We had a mother, a father, a home to live in, food always on the table things he never had as a child. Now, he found life here a novelty, like the tourist we brushed up against. Had my dad felt the same sort of dissonance I had felt when I couldn’t find beauty in the land of my ancestors? I had pondered about this as we walked in silence for the reminder of the way.

In our last couple days in Mexico, I had discovered three things about myself: I missed having access to Wi-Fi, I enjoyed the strawberry jam from the grocer on the corner of the block and I hated the way the sun burned me. My naivete the thought that one trip across the border would make me fully Mexican again had outgrown itself and it left me curious for the better. I had spent those last days free of mental dilemmas, learning how to feed my grandmother’s pig, whom I called Roberto, gossiping with my aunt about people I had never met before a cousin once removed who went to jail for breaking into a car, a lady down the road who had gotten somebody a mattress for a wedding gift, the man at the chicken shop who had been wanting to start a business in

the town square and eating fresh fruit under the walnut tree behind my grandmother’s house. On my second to last day when I was writing in bed, my dad whistled loudly from the courtyard to get my attention. I slipped on some leather sandals I had bought at the artisan market a couple days beforehand and ran out to see him. When he saw me, he tossed me an orange and said, “Vamos. ”

I followed him to the back of the house to find two turquoise-colored chairs sitting under the walnut tree I had made a little sanctuary out of. My dad told me he was feeling hot and that there was a nice breeze under the tree that he wanted me to feel. I sat down and started peeling the orange he got me. My dad was never taught how to be in tune with his emotions nor how to express them. Beyond machismo, I think he was just never showed the kind of love he showed me growing up. Small gestures, like getting my sisters and me our favorite fruit, were tokens of love that went unspoken. When I was a kid, I couldn’t understand his anger and he couldn’t understand my depression either, but we could meet in the middle over some fruit an intersection of gratitude and hope.“Cuando era niño, me gustaba subir este árbol, ” he told me while pointing up at the large walnut tree covering us from the burning sun. I giggled. It was sweet to think of my dad as a kid. Still innocent from poverty and adult things, just climbing a tree just having fun like a kid should. I asked him if he thinks Puebla has changed since he was kid; this time, he giggled. He told me to feel the sun, “Climate change, ” he said in his broken English. We looked around and he began listing the things that felt different to him. How the river he used to once swim in is now polluted with plastic and trash, how a summer in Puebla is usually rainy but now it’s as hot as a desert, how the roads are now filled with cars, how he doesn’t see children play in the streets anymore.

“Do you think you’ll ever come back?” I asked him hesitantly. He took a bite of his orange, looked around taking in the corn fields behind us then looked me in the eyes. “Pienso que sí, ” he said. I had wondered, if in that moment of silence before answering, if he had thought Mexico was no longer calling his name like it used to. But in the end, this was his home.

As I boarded the plane back to the US, I found something permanent in calling myself Mexican. My identity would always change as the seasons of my life pass, but I was created to make my Mexicanness unique to me. I was never going to be as Mexican as my dad, but I could make my Mexicanness into something beautiful, something meaningful. A label I can wrap, proudly, my heart and mind around.

After the Dance scott winkenweder

little gods and empty sacrifices

(after Nikki Giovanni and Rudy Francisco)

SOLEIA YEMAYA QUINN

we fish for fun this time jutting our alien heads over the dock we look down on the prehistoric pufferfish dangling and jesting bait they nibble and skibble off but return to it in our sport we hardly notice the cruelty of it all remarking on their ancient beauty on the water’s clearness on the fineness of the day a bite!

we reel her up through the gelatinous water here it is the truth in her fear she’s swallowed it. bait and hook what does she know of grass and sky and air? of human dangers, of our clever cruelty? she flips and flops and panics on the line we try to free her but she chokes the hook deeper into her gullet it is a certain evil to entrap a being while appreciating their beauty and what a frivolous human brutality to extinguish a life while dinner waits on steaming plates what a thing to sentence death for the crime of falling for our trick it is not a fair battle I’ve brought a gun to a fist fight and the fish would agree if it were reversed instead I in her domain I would be made dumb and confused slow and easy to maim but as it is the pufferfish is dead

and I’ve wasted her life on a whim later, we wonder how long these fish live for it must be a selection of years maybe two, or even better just one year to assuage our guilt but no the checkered pufferfish has the potential to live to my great age imagine that 22 winters and summers in the gulf sea all wasted on a clear sky day when a lure dangles and some unlucky beauty is left to rot for the stupidity of hunger

Seeds Of Resistance

Faith Scheenstra

Procession

Lilly grey rudge

The men have been disassembled. Pieces settle in his hair, charred flakes that crumble between his fingertips. It surprises him how crisp his service jacket remains. Sweat pools in the cavity of his chest, the stink of it hanging heavily among the ash. It was meant to be bloodier than this, to spatter against his skin, his eyes growing heavy with the sting of salt. But those were the sensations of the operating theater, the pulsing warmth of life. This is smoke and steel. What once stood ceases, without the chance to fall. Big pieces torn to little pieces. The limber quakes beneath him, crates of ammunition shifting precariously as he rolls to the ground. Two hundred yards but he can hear their moaning, echoing off the shrapnel embedded deep within the seared meat of a stallion.

A slight ringing is all that announces the second shell. He is on his knees. Only now is he reminded of the theater, the comforting gore of it. The gentle fade from red to rust to fine stitches. All remains red here. They would shout in the theater. Here they tremble, flinching away from the dance of his fingers. Some pray, eyes straining desperately towards a sky dusted over in smog. This God of theirs sends him gifts from above, shattering two ribs on contact. He remains whole, piecing and patching the flesh below him. His fingernails will need to be scrubbed. Water will fill the basin, running pink around its rim. Soap will coat his body, softening the rough patch just below his right ear. Snake skin. He is hovering, the men are dressed. Their eyes pin him eagerly, desperate for the mirage of safety his presence offers. He will piece them back together again. Rows of neat sutures pull tightly against their flesh, casting into shadow the fractures of the mind.

✴ ✴ ✴

He’s sorry, the chauffeur tells him, the car has backfired. Too much fuel in the engine. Nothing to worry over. Comforts which are wasted on William and fitter for the crowd that has formed outside the Mulberry’s shop window. Necks crane, taking in the hulking importance of the motorcar. Wonder flits from face to face, an interest fattened by mystery. A woman is the first to see his face, features drawn back in dull recognition. Her eyes roll around their sockets in violent resistance to their discovery. She leans into the man beside her, mouth puckered in dismay.

The dove-grey blind serves its purpose, safeguarding their presumptions. Such fascination should delight him. Rumors would tumble around the

barracks, inevitably landing in the laps of the men at their center. William was rarely one of them. His name was referenced with solemnity. He was not a killer, had discharged a weapon only twice. He was, if anything, the preventer of death. A hero, in the eyes of the crown. That is what they called him, when the notice came that he would receive the cross. For ‘conspicuous bravery in the presence of the enemy’. So what did he become when, inevitably, his efforts were fruitless? For a hero to fall, they must do so completely. Or so it seemed on those solitary nights in the operating theater, mounds of cold flesh heaped before him. There his honor was deserted. So to be seen now as, what? The Prince of Whales? The Prime Minister? Her Majesty the Queen? Laughter threatens to consume him. How utterly miserable everything is. Captain William Godfrey is off to receive the Victoria Cross, and they demand the Queen. The motorcar growls beneath him, sympathetic to his plight.

They are idling. The chauffeur grumbles over the standstill, oblivious to their centrality. His anonymity seems to have aggravated the already inflamed mass of onlookers. A sense of glee has settled over them, goading them into further speculation. The sharp smell of gasoline settles in his nose, and he is unfolding his handkerchief when he catches sight of them: Two figures teetering on the edge of the approaching intersection. She is a little woman with a sharp face and small white teeth. Italian, if he was forced to wager on it. The man is a good deal older, or carries himself as such. Brushing a hand against his motheaten overcoat, she whispers something in his ear. His face remains slack as he nods and the smile she offers in return contorts her features into a manic display of optimism.

The man wants to die; William is sure of it. Not kill himself. Not suicide, where doctors love to linger. Luxuriate on its crests, roll each vowel flat under their tongues before sticking it to the backs of their teeth. Method holds little weight. Gun, window, motorcar. Tools to finish a job halfway done. He had felt angry, that first time. Supplies and resources wasted, hours frittered away on a man who would use his renewed motor control to place a bullet in his brain. He had never been one for the psychological. Weaknesses of the body were to be mended, wounds sealed if not fully remedied. Puckered scars easily hidden behind starched finery. William has one of his own: A viscous slash disfiguring the skin stretching across his ribs. Dull illusions of pain accompany the thought and the wool of his jacket scratches unpleasantly as he unclasps the top button. It became easier to discern the survivors. They would ask questions. About friends, family, the newest Chaplin film. Anything outside of the purgatory of the ward. There were screams, barren plains of the front conjured as thick jungles. Evil creatures with kind eyes.

Fathers, husbands, sons. Their clamor was ceaseless, one giving out in exhaustion just when another began again. Personal hells pouring over and out until William was choking on them. It was only a matter of time before they slithered down his throat. But it is the silence, he learned, that is acute. Empty eyes and slack jaws. Soft reassurances and empty beds. Silent men have an appointment to keep.

The motorcar resumes its procession towards Piccadilly with a shuddering sigh. Faces, faded by the soft grey of the blind, slide in and out of view. It is an odd sort of voyeurism. Their chests rise and fall, quick breaths fading into wisps of vapor. Is this what he should have expected, when he folded himself carefully into his seat on this morning in June? Veneration of the people? People who must notice; people who must see. He is a blur now, a moment shrouded among other moments, a square of welcome ambiguity. Even now their attention is contingent, reliant on something larger than himself. There is a grove of trees embroidered on the blind, and through their bows a shock of pink. Carnations, a spark of color amongst a much larger bouquet. Buried beneath them, a bijou of a woman. Spine like a steel rod, she too stops to stare. Where wonder had immersed others, certitude falls like a veil over her fine features: He is someone of consequence, in equivalence with herself. Where is she headed with such a heavy burden? William could follow. Direct the chauffeur to accompany this bright little woman. Offer the expanse of his arms to ferry her colorful bundle. Or to disassemble it, stem by stem, and apportion each piece between them. Her grip loosens, anticipating his assistance, and the handle is sliding against his palm when she slips out of view. He imagines the flowers tumbling to the pavement, quick to vanish in the press of bodies, the tumult of London.

They have turned onto St. James Street, the climax of their procession. The gates of Buckingham Palace are shrouded by a wall of bodies, pressed flush despite the summer's heat. Another button is undone. The numbing cold of the front was a welcome respite from the boiling humidity of rot and fever. He would toil for long hours in the muck, tearing away the stitching of his uniform when wounds demanded more than the allotted surgical suture. It wasn’t long before the enemy discovered the merit of targeting those in his uniform. Copper and lead began to rain down on him, hurtling towards the earth in a comforting display of finality. They would blame the voices, later. Little men who laid claim to his mind; the ghosts of soldiers who died beneath his knife, memories of mottled men too raw to be dragged from the front, fractured reflections of a fragmented self. There was no interest taken in the evidence. In the self-assured inner dialogue. In the measured contemplation of consequences and rewards. In the well-laid plan, academic in its design. It would have been cowardly, the men say, for a

soldier of his abilities, of his station. He is not a cowardly man, he has shown ‘conspicuous bravery in the presence of the enemy’. The cross will banish it, muffling the voices until they are shallow breaths. It will sit on his mantle piece, collecting the filth of years gone by in a city of strangers. He will neglect it, allowing the fingers of decay to creep closer until, wondering after its former luster, he will reach out his hand and be met, once again, with silence.

The iron gates swing open, beckoning the motorcar deep within. His pulse leaps in time with those of the eager onlookers. A man raises his hat in salute, a group of women huddling around him, arms linked and bodies trembling with fevered enthusiasm. They remind William of a chain of paper dolls, each painted with a stroke of imperial red (their lips) and blue (a hint of a scarf, tucked securely around each pale neck). How completely British it all is, bronze statues beckoning him down the varnished gullet of the beast. All of this to receive the cross, their meal’s meal. He isn’t through yet, could step out among the crowds, gulp down their wonder until he too is drunk with it. Shake their hands, or slip in among them. A sudden rumble of thunder startles him forward, forehead almost brushing against the fine, silver hairs sprouting from the chauffeur’s neck. The crowd appears similarly thrown, the sound redirecting their awe upwards. White smoke floats softly past his eyeline as the sound continues to bore down on the Mall. Necks crane eagerly, desperate to catch sight of this new subject. Whispers grow to sure exclamations. An aeroplane, soaring, looping, curving over Buckingham Palace. All eyes are pinned to the sky, not a glance spared for their former fascination. Pinning the blind back, he presses his face flush to the window, hot breath streaking the glass. He stares for a long moment, straining to catch sight of the words being painted in smoke on the clear blue sky. Or to finally meet the eye of a single passerby, to bear the brunt of their brief adoration. Just for a moment. The car passes through the gates. Soon the plane vanishes behind the full-bodied clouds. Returning to the ground, the crowd’s attention is captured once again by the pleasant grandeur of the present. They search the street hungrily, tracing the high gates with reverence, before dispersing with sighs of finality. The moment has gone.

Butch

LEONIDAS GRIMSHAW

i am my brother's big sister and my father's oldest son

i am someone's boyfriend, and one day i want someone to say "that's my wife, he proposed 6 years ago on a day that meant something, under the sky, who loved us still"

i find joy in working with dirty hands and wood shavings and bread flour, and i want someone to braid wildflowers into my hair

i am a man in the way that the sun is (in that we are not at all, but we are warm and sharp and seemingly timeless)

i am a woman in the way of punks and dykes and harley davidson motorcycles (in the way that even our curves are sharpened)

i am the ashy end of a burnt up cigarette that is left crumpled in the tray on the railing of porch by the creaking swing

and when the wind brushes through the grass and caresses my throat i will tilt my head back to give it more room to feel and trace the bloody human shape of me

i am of the same steady reach and wisdom of the trees, and of the rage of the fruit they bear.

i am of the same grit and unshakeable nature of sand, of the same rush of the rivers, of the same calm as the breeze.

my nature is ephemeral, my body is flesh. bloody and raw and terrified, but terribly horribly lovingly gentle (because i choose to make it so)

i want to trace constellations on the shoulders of a lover in the moonlight with the same hands that i want to dig deep into the soil with.

i want to carve out more space within myself every day for more ways to love. more things to hold dear, more beauty to take into my human shape.

i settle into my bones, such dense, fragile things, as time passes.

words begin to not be enough.

my keys rattle on my belt. my cologne smells of spice and wood and my hair is braided like a river down my spine. my nails are chipped where they twist clover daisies into chains.

the sun, my brother, my mother, warms my cheeks and shoulders.

how lucky am i, to breathe more life into myself with everything i choose to love. how lucky am i, to be bloody and raw and achingly human

to take hurts and grow around them like trees around old rope swings and to feel cold air sting the inside of my lungs in the dead of night

how very very lucky i am to be made of art, and of desire, and of nature, and of love (even the bits of it that hurt the most)

Not me // Not me

Valencya Valdez

You’re telling me you want to move to Maine or Finland, about dreams of three kids and a chicken farm. I’m describing the pink church in my hometown where I danced with unwashed feet, and where my faith peaked.

You’re singing along to the lyrics of songs I’ve never heard. I’m reminding you of the letters that make my middle name.

You’re washing silver platters and cutlery, and I’m picking the tomatoes out of my salad with my fingers.

You’re drinking light beers at man-made lakes in July. I’m counting my teeth in the morning and recounting them in the night.

You’re half-laughing at your own stories and I’m reading aloud the journal entries from when I was 16 and afraid I’d never be free.

You’re learning French while I’m chewing on the resolutions I made with my father that are still tender and raw.

You’re shopping for groceries and I’m sweeping dried mud from my shoe bottoms with my hands.

You’re doing things you’ve never done and I am still sick – and isn’t that lame? In the late afternoon, I’m doing three loads of laundry: lights, darks, and towels. I am forcing my last quarters into the machines.

You are eating crepes, swimming in pools, rolling tobacco, staining your best-collared shirt; and I am tracing the lines of the linoleum laundromat floor with my eyes; I am coupling mismatched socks; I am pulling hard at the permanent wrinkles, the indents, in my mother’s blouse.

Here are the things you’ve yet to find and they are what I am trying to rid of. Tell me everything you’ve ever known. Tell me how it goes, but not how it ends. Tell me, is it liberating? To choose what you could be. Everyone else is changing, but not me. Not me.

Medium-Rare

Claire Beaumont

A man took me out to dinner, ordered for himself, then put his hand on top of mine. “She’ll have the fennel trout,” he said, displayed his teeth like rows of mayonnaise jars before I could say I’ll have my steak medium-rare, please. He lifted his palm, it singed the fine hairs on the back of my hand like a furnace charring a hunk of clay into a ceramic vase; a river going extinct in a drought. A river, being dried out, gets bedded, and what was done to it that it didn’t choose becomes part of its name.

LITTLE RED

Branna Sundy

I was born screaming, doused in blood.

Dimension 20: Neverafter

“I have been there, hungry and waiting, at the end of every story.”

hunger growls

Nights of panicked blindness, days of blazing fire. She was thrown into the wild, a mewling cub with crooked claws and a gummy mouth. The dark cold leeched her strength, weakened her mind and muscles. All the pups attacked out there, ripping at each other’s throats, bruising and scarring the others’ bodies. Their coats were soft and silky, their snouts small and snuffling, and so they toughened their hides, built up a weaponry, blades in their paws and knives in their mouths. Hunger growls up from her stomach, splitting her gums, gnawing at the inside of her cheek, wakes her in a rage. She cuts down the others, carves them apart and tears into their skin, ravenously hunting for sustenance. She wants to curl up and rest in a safe, dry shelter, protected by her mother’s warm body, But death has little mercy for gentle things.

“Your grandmother, your mother, all of them make a pact with me, in a way somehow older and more profound even than the gift I gave to you. They brought life into this world. They began a story. There is no story you can begin without making the promise of its ending, and only very strange and dangerous things try to make a story that never ends.”

were-girl

once a month

the moon seeps into my veins and wakes the beast beneath my flesh a growling, hungering creature, clawing me from the inside out

she’s a bloody, fanged monster ravenous and brutal and I want her to leave me ALONE I don’t want to make a monstrosity like me

“Live your life without apology, little girl. It is never wrong to tell the truth about what you are.”

stargazing in spite of the horrors Which is worse? To know why you are being hurt & agree that you deserve it, or to be hurt without knowing why?

I am the two-headed calf, I am queer & curious & starry-eyed, but the difference between us is that I think I deserve to be slaughtered & he doesn’t even know this is his last night with his mother.

being held

Don’t you want to be bundled up like you used to? Don’t you crave a hot meal to fill your wolfish belly? Don’t you miss being a little pup, when your mother would hold you tight and warm and kiss your soft forehead?

butcher girl her stomach growls a wolfish appetite she hunts for imperfections and finds them with a grotesque delight the flaws give her flavor

skin splits, seams ripping she tears at meat with fangs of steel quarters it in little sections lays out the strips of flesh with her tender hands

she breaks her femurs like stale bread little crumbles scattering down her front dips them in blood and crunches into her body devouring wholly licking her lips

sucking the marrow from her bones she savors the meat of herself wipes her dripping chin with the back of her hand smiles, teeth soaked in crimson, and offers you a bite.

plea

I eat myself I have consumed myself a thousand times and I will again I will eat I will eat I will take my body and my blood and I will devour my faith and I will devour my love and I will eat I will eat myself inside out and gag and choke and spit it out but I will scoop myself up and I will swallow and I will feel it slide down my throat and I will shudder with disgust and I will puke my guts out across the floor and I will ask you to get down on the floor and look at my guts, touch my guts, lick my guts off your fingers, and I will ask if I am enough am I filling am I tasty am I made of anything am I something worth trying? am I raw am I rotting am I alive enough for you or me to swallow am I big enough to eat am I part of it all? or am I empty? did I ever have enough guts to puke up? or is it all spit and bile, nothing in my stomach, nothing in my mouth but a sour taste that stretches too far back? am I full of nothing? would you ever want to try me? would you ever want a bite of me?

“Do you not think in some way your grandmother devoured a little girl that used to walk through that forest as well?” what big ears all the better to hear you with, my deer the beast and the child swallow each other my grandma waits with fork and knife for me to come in for dinner for a meal between the two of us, bread and soup laid out in simple dishes on a wooden table the door kept unlocked for friends she fawns over her little granddaughter and feeds me a broth that tastes meatier, fleshier than usual something that smells a lot like mom

what big eyes

all the better to see you with, my hart my grandma waits with fork and knife for me to come in for dinner but no longer my grandma the wolf is back those jaws stretch open to clamp down around my body and swallow me down down down the tunnel opens wider and wider as I tumble and time stretches around me

what big teeth

all the better to hunt you with, my lamb my grandma waits with fork and knife for me to come in for dinner while she watches the clock, I sneak in, disguising my wolf, and swallow her whole.

“To invite someone into the world is inviting them into a world of shadows…Your first breath signs the deed to one day have your last.” surviving breathe in hold, hold, hold then breathe out and again think of something good breathe in a pencil in my hand breathe out the smooth wooden floor breathe in the warmth of a cat on my knee

breathe out hugs

breathe in your voices

i wipe tears from my red cheeks

breathe out

clean away the snot tuck my hair behind my ears

breathe in

soak my face with water wrap my hands around a cold glass of milk call you at 5am and you pick up.

“Sometimes things are too late to be rewritten or undone. But there are more blank pages ahead of us, Little Red.”

BLOODSOAKED

Icy wind whips across my cheeks, tiny daggers plunging into my skin. A gust knocks back the hood of my scarlet cloak.

“This is for Granny, not you!” Mother howls over the wailing storm. She yanks the hood back over my coal-black curls, the same hood Granny used to yank over her curls. She shoves a basket of goodies into my arms and pushes me down the path. “And make sure you stay on the path, otherwise the wolves will eat you!” The door slams behind me. A flickering glow of buttery light pours from the window. Oh, to be wrapped in a toasty blanket by the fire, sipping cider and reading stories…

“Bring the food to Granny. That’s all I’ve got to do.” I step down the dirt path, shivering in the cold. The tunnel of trees looms before me, much darker than it should be in daylight. The wind whistles through my bones. I trudge forward.

Time ticks on and on. A crow shrieks at me from the shadows, startling me into nearly knocking the bottle of wine from the basket.

I glare into the trees. “Don’t do that!” The crow shrieks again, this time with a touch of amusement. I snarl at the forest and keep walking.

My feet ache. I struggle to keep my eyes open in the stinging wind. Why does Granny live so deep in the woods? My stomach whines, hunger

baring her fangs. I peer into the basket and lift the napkin tucked around the food. “Surely one bite wouldn’t hurt? Granny’s got plenty of dinner here.” I pounce on my guilt and pluck a puffed morsel from the napkin, sinking my teeth into the flaky crust. With a crackle and a crunch, chicken soup pours into my mouth. Steaming liquid drips down my chin, flavors dancing on my tongue. I drop to my knees and tear at the rest of the food, ravenous.

“That’s not for you, little girl.”

I whip around, gravy dripping onto my lacy shirt. Something slinks through the shadows off the path. “Who’s there?”

“That’s for your grandmother.”

“I’m hungry.”

“So is she.”

“Well, she doesn’t have to walk through the woods in winter.” I lick the crumbs from my lips. “Why do you care, anyway?”

“I like my meat tough.” Paws pad behind me.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s no fun when you’re soft and heavy and easy to catch.”

“As if I’d let you catch me!”

I race to Granny’s house and burst through the door as the daylight leaks away. Granny mumbles awake to sip the sweet wine I brought for her. She dozes in and out of sleep as I sharpen her kitchen knives and set her soup a-bubbling on the fire. The wine spills onto her white sheets, a bloodstain stretching out across snow. She’s got no other bedsheets and night is drawing close, so I set the glass at her bedside table and let the wine dry on the cotton. The wolf is coming. I must be ready.

I lie in wait, breath caught in my throat. The door swings open with a creak, blown wide in a blast of snow. A shadowy figure stalks through the doorway in a crimson cloak. The hood lowers I lunge from behind the door and sink a knife into its back. Deep, deep down. Through flesh and muscle till the blade tickles bone. I growl viciously in its ear. “Not so easy to catch, huh?”

But the hair tickling my cheek isn’t gray fur. And the whimpers of pain are much higher pitched than the wolf’s guttural growl. I push the wolf onto its back. Writhing in pain, blood bubbling from a toothy mouth, it’s…me. No. It’s Mother. Dark curls splay out. Rosy cheeks drain of color. A scarlet stain blooms across white lace.

A cackle rips through the air behind me. I turn to see Granny, howling with laughter. She rises from her bed, tosses her wine-stained blanket aside, and begins to grow. A hulking mass looms over me, casting her shadow across the tiny room. So much bigger than I thought she was.

“Granny…”

“Dinner’s ready, my sweet.”

“What’s going on, Granny?” But that’s not Granny. She looks too much like me. If I had lived much, much longer.

“You came to feed me, didn’t you?” Her wheeze blends into a raspy growl that thunders in my ears like Mother’s hardened voice.

I stare at her. Bristled ears rip through her bonnet. Tired eyes widen into a wild animal’s. Enormous fangs sprout from her gums.

“This is how it ends, Little Red.” I scrabble backwards as she prowls towards me, her wrinkled hands curling over into muscled paws. A sudden pain shoots through me. I’m on the floor, gargling blood with a knife in my back. I’m clawing across wooden panels, crimson fabric caught on the rough edges. I’m stalking towards a terrified girl I know too well.

“This is how it began.” She pounces, jaws rushing toward me. I claw my way across the floor as her fangs rip into my body. Distant screams echo through me. Footsteps pound the earth, fading into the night.

“We eat everyone in time, dearie.” Her snout snuffles my ear. Teeth bear down on me. Everything goes red.

Kiss of the Purple Fruit

Lizzy VanLengen

Reaping what you’ve sown

Branna Sundy

you were small in springtime with fresh strawberries smeared on the apples of your cheeks and crunchy baby carrot sticks cracking in the back of your eardrums, mashed blueberry fingers and green grape marble mouthfuls, soccer half-time orange slice smiles with the stringy rind bits stuck between your teeth and the sticky juice that won’t wipe from your chin no matter how hard Mom rubs with her spit-dipped thumb

when did you start rotting? in your plum-stuck silences lemon-sour teenage rage crumbling raspberry fragile brain oozing cherry-picked skin and that dried apricot-squish in your lungs, making it hard to breathe the sunlight too warm and syrupy, itchy drips of water trickling down your peeling pear skin maybe you were rotten from the beginning infected from the dawn of the garden licking up the putrefying juice from the slit in that moldy peach behind your eyes digging your nails through a flimsy plastic ribcage and into the bruised nectarine guts rotting in the pit of your stomach how did it all turn so sour? tell me, spoiled fruit, what do I have to do to rip you all out and start over?

Observation of a Housewife

Clara Smith

The table is set for disaster

A spread of beartooth & jawbones

Meat-eating and dying words, mumbling, “Blessed is the fruit of thy womb.”

Before biting off a piece of lamb with Her canine teeth. Then she’s washing dishes, Thinking, There’s something about Motherhood

Coupled with the waste he leaves in the fridge

Rotting next to the boysenberry syrup

Sticky and sickly sweet

She tries to recreate the body

In the nosh, and the blood

In every sip of wine.

Crab legs twitch alive on the table

He probes at them with a fork

Their only daughter sits with a napkin bib,

Mushing an overripe banana

Between the pads of her fingers

The vanishing man in the dining room

Complains that there is not enough to eat

Notes on Societal Collapse

Ricardo guevara

She’s in constant freefall, waiting for the moment she’ll hit the ground. It’s fuzzy. The droning sounds of traffic are drowned out by ultraviolence on her platinum screen. The youth have consumed one too many ounces of Videodrome. One too many doses of Arrebato. She’s numb to it all. She’s losing grasp of her bedsheets. She’s slipping into the abyss.

BELOW IS A FINAL SCENE.

A crash. The innards of his skull mesh with the windshield of the car. His eyes glitch backwards and forwards like a needle skipping through a record. All he sees are snippets of his surroundings. Details of an apocalypse. Torn petals from a bouquet on the ground. Blurry faces in the distance. A haze of smoke. It’s too late. His vertebrae have spliced together, like a soda can crushed against pavement.

CUT TO COMMERCIAL BREAK.

She wakes up. She caught herself dreaming dreaming of a technicolor utopia, one where trees line the horizon and she can breathe deeply. A vision without neon, without smog, and without the void. She can feel the dirt under her feet. It’s rough, it’s damp, but it’s real.

PROPAGANDA. PROPAGANDA. PROPAGANDA.

That utopia has faded away. She’s back in her room. She’s melting into the gaps and orifices in her bed, her floor. No one is coming to save her. Her friends have blown with the wind. Her family has washed away. Her husband has sunk underground. All she’s waiting for now is the moment she hits the floor. When she feels dirt. When she has finished collapsing.

An Ode to the Spider in My Shower

Katherine johnson

I only hope When I– unaware And disbelieving–Find another being, One much bigger than me It shows me more mercy Than I deserve, more kindness Than I’ve granted.

The scream was mine, I’ll admit–

Shattering the water white noise

Sizzling in the air

The dry towel’s grasp Saved me little, calmed me less. As if the peaceful tiny thing Posed much of a threat at all. Not even the size of a dime, It had likely wandered In from the garden–

For water, food, or shelter: divine. I panic, of course, I panic; Another being in my shower –wet and vulnerable, naked and afraid. My meager splashes do nothing; The poor thing doesn’t even realize my intent–It gets only a second to learn Its fate before I squish it under the conditioner Rinse off the bottle & restart the water.

The spider in my shower

The centipede in my bed

The beetle in my salad

waking up to the thoughts about the mortifying things I did last night

Valencya valdez

can you faint from embarrassment?

turn hotter than the stovetop you forgot to turn off and when you returned home hours later your housemates cursed your naive aplomb

erected like a sore thumb a flash photo in the night club the drunk white girl who slipped in kitten heels from the bar-top like spiked milk from a crystal cup

how you wish to cut off the tit that spilled out from your spaghetti strap lace top tuck your head into the loose space you covered up that peeking nip and OH GOD!

do you feel that steam? seeping in heat and teasing your blood is steeped tea simultaneously boiling and freezing and squeamishly screaming at the prongs tweezing

can you pass the fuck out from embarrassment? is this what dying is like?

like an emergency IV flush like a bloodshot eye

a confused contusion shiner green and purple and maroon on a face drained pale white topped with a broken pressed powder compact blush

blood spat in the face from the baby bottle top you copped at the spot your mom scolded you for tracking in mud onto the floor she just mopped

knees buckled and you dropped in the dairy aisle of the grocer’s shop tapped out before you got up ‘cus you heard something snap or a now out-of-place bone pop

embarrassment burns like hot coals they pressured you to walk across and when you tripped and ate shit your peers just watched on while you screamed HOT! HOT! STOP! until you went out cold cooked like a bagel topped with lox

can you faint from embarrassment? how much is ‘till you’ve had too much? ‘cus i personally can’t take an awful lot

The Mountains Feast In Turn

Tallin Rivers

The year was 1837, sometime around November, I think. I say so since we left Tennessee somewhere about August and it were already January of ‘38 when we made it to Astoria, so November sounds about right. I wish I could tell you where we was, I truly do. All I know is that the last faces we saw that weren’t our own were some Lakota folk, so draw your conclusions as you will.

When we struck out for Oregon there was well over fifty of us total. There were no women nor children in our merry band, we weren’t going anywhere to settle. To be frank we had nearly every reason under the sun for travel save for settling. Most of us, like myself, were fur traders, hoping to set up shop trading up and down the river up there. A good number of others were miners and lumbermen hoping to snag some lucrative hairs off the head of Mother Nature and make their ways back eastwards all rich-like. There were a few unsavory folks running from the law, and a few even more unsavory ones chasing them folks who were running. Most of their names and stories don’t matter too much save for two. Said two being old Jeffer, and my mule, Oats.

The night before we departed Nashville the more privileged amongst our number set us all up with a grand old feast, nearly bought out a saloon’s entire inventory in the process. Not a drop of whiskey nor strip of pork was left untasted, save for that which sat on old Jeffer’s plate and in old Jeffer’s cup. That I watched him stare at for near over an hour, before he stood up to throw the whole lot into the hearthfire without second thought, mumbling up something fierce when he did so. I didn’t catch much of it through all his spitting and such. Me and the other boys wrote it off as the old man having a fit: he’d gone the trail three times already by then and probably had seen some real hell out there… I didn’t understand the look in that old crow’s eye back then, but I sure damn wish I did. If I’d only known, then maybe I’d have thrown my bacon into the fire too.

Fifty we started with: three months, two flooded rivers, five bandit attacks and one drunken knife fight later and there were only about seven and a half left by the time we reached her. I say seven and a half as one of the lumber boys had since lost both his feet to snake bites and were only really still alive on account of the stubborn love of his brothers. It was quickly turning winter by that point; nature’s cruel blessings had seen us spared from snow but still it was ill-boding to cross a mountain in the winter. And indeed it was a mountain that stood before us. We hadn’t gotten much good look at the land until we reached a bluff above this pretty lake valley, grass around the water still full and green even at that time of year. So large she was we mistook her for a cloud at first until the sun rose and we saw her proper. A true tower of Babel she was, a single finger thrust up from the cradle of the earth as if she had nothing nice to say to the Lord above and wanted him to know it. There was no snow up on her gaunt face, as if she had taken her sweet time brushing it off each morning.

We camped beside that lake the night before our ascent, discussing how to get around her. We had no marked paths on our maps, hell she weren’t even on the map. But we figured, with the way the wind was blowing, going around the northern face would spare us the worst of the weather, so that's what we said we’d do. Most of us at least; there was a whole lotta protest from the legless logger boy and his brothers saying we oughta wait until spring and all but the rest of us were tired and hungry and not at all lacking in impatience so we shut them up right quick. We weren’t too worried about wolves or bears up there neither. Forty-two of our number had either died or fallen out, sure, but we left nothing useless behind save for the crosses around their necks. By that point my belt was well adorned with three pistols and a nice stone cudgel I borrowed off them Lakota I mentioned earlier. That was another reason for our intent to keep moving, beyond our impatience.

I would say that first night was as pleasant as the feast back in Nashville, but that’d be a damn lie. We ate together one last time that evening, all around the fire together swapping stories and making us look almost like a merry band of brothers. That was until of course old Jeffer started his mumbling about feeding mountains and throwing his

stew into the flames. The logger boy’s brothers took none too kindly to that, what with our rations being low enough as they were, and they started beating on the poor man. Now Jeffer was a kook for certain but he knew his herbs and medicines better than anyone and we weren’t about to let that knowledge get all bruised before we started to climb so me and the boys jumped in to help him. I don’t remember who pulled the trigger but when the first brother went down the others were too hysterical to calm. Oh we did try but, by the end of it we truly did have to put them in that lake. Whole lotta stew got spilled in that fight but there was enough whiskey left to at least toast to the departed afterwards.

Seven and a half we were that first night. The next morning we were but five. Myself, old Jeffer, two mining boys and my mule Oats. We cut loose the other beasts when we started up the mountain but I told them that Oats would manage the trek easy, besides we needed someone to carry old Jeffer when his gout flared up. For three days of hiking we had some peace. Three days of cold gravel and sticking muck and spiny trees that never stopped whispering. And three nights of feasting together. The first night we did try to keep Jeffer from throwing more rations into the fire. The second night we didn’t bother trying. The third night however, the third night I had enough and wanted at least some peace of mind over the whole ordeal. I mean, three boys had done been killed over Jeffer’s rambling and fire-feeding already, so when he started to stick that jerky in the coals I said to him: “Old Jeffer why in the hell do you keep doing that? And what’s that you’re mumbling about?”

If only I had asked that question months ago. To this day, I will never forget the incantation old Jeffer invoked then, his dusty voice letting it ring loud and proud in that mountain air:

“The flesh of man is not all that for other flesh does yearn, Know well upon whose ground you tread: the Mountain feasts in turn. For every step and every breath an offering shall burn, Pay heed and homage to the earth: the Mountain feasts in turn. Thrice you feast, thereon your soul within a stomach churns. Upon new tongues the rhyme shall sit: the Mountain feasts in turn.”

We said nothing to Old Jeffer for the rest of the night. That rhyme had been a bunch of nonsense to our ears then but, well, it was almost like the trees had been chanting along with him. That was the last evening the five of us ate together.

The next day Oats broke his leg. I don’t think I’ve ever cried so hard in my life. He was a stubborn, smelly, dumb thing by all accounts but he had been mine. And what's worse, well, we all knew supplies were real short. Oats might have been smelly, but he would taste well enough alright. I couldn’t bear to watch Old Jeffer throw Oats into the flames that next evening. I snatched the platter out from the old man’s hands. The last time someone did that, the logger boys back by the lake, he had been all up in arms hollering and squealing. But this time around he didn’t even bat an eye. He just looked at me, and smiled.

I wish I could describe the feeling to you. The thoughts that went through my head, the tears on my face and the vows up to God I declared and broke all within those few seconds. But there are no words any human mouth can sound which would do it justice. The trees were already whispering by the time I started to toss slices of Oats into the coals. The mining boys made their own campfire a few yards away after that.

The night afterwards one of the two mining boys got separated. He went away from his own little fire to take a piss. There was no great ruckus: no fall, no wolf howl or cougar scream or gunshot. Just a whisper in the trees, and he just didn’t come back. I didn’t care to ask after it but the remaining boy was real quick to act out, shouting and cursing at Old Jeffer demanding that he see the meat rations we had left over from Oats, convinced there’d be more than mule in the bag. Not that he’d been able to tell the difference, I reckon he just wanted an excuse to see that old man gone. Once again Jeffer said nothing. He didn’t have to: it had rained that day and the powder was all ruined, so my pistols were no use. But that stone cudgel of mine worked right well enough, and one good swing later that boy wasn’t asking after meat no more. We added what we needed of him to our rations, and the next day we began our descent.

I had taken to carrying Jeffer by that point, his gout having gotten so bad. By then I couldn’t much tell who was whispering in my ear any more, him or the trees. But either way I listened, and I learned. Oh lord, did I learn plenty. It is a tragic thing, to hear the word of a prophet. I hated near half of what I was told in those final days down the mountain, but the other half… the other half was what made me listen anyway.

That final evening, on the far side of the mountain, Old Jeffer and I shared a meal. It was a good meal indeed. We spoke the words together, in this tongue and in the proper ones too as best as our mouths could manage, and gave out the offerings as thanks unto the mountain and all her trees had told us. The rules say that thrice you may make the journey, thrice you may feast. This had been Jeffer’s third time around that mountain. He only thanked me when I put that cudgel through his head.

I didn’t take his bone marrow, for what it’s worth. I left that part where it lay, wasn’t mine to claim anyhow. I’ve only returned there once since then, but soon enough I know my third time will come as well. And when that time comes and only one returns on the far side with me I know he’ll leave my bones unmolested just as I left Old Jeffer’s. He will know the rules as well as I do. He will know the mountain feasts in turn.

Midnight wandering, getting home soon

Mollie Klingberg

At the Lip of the Ridge, the Peeler and the Potato Skins

Scott Winkeweder

When the saltwater in the pot roils, rears its head, and starts lecturing, toss in a dry pound of penne or linguine. When the steam diffuses and tries to choke out the kitchen, flick the dial on the exhaust vent and turn on the call. Let the low hum of the fan saunter down through the kitchen. The call is a message to demons, spirits, dispossessed entities of all sorts: Here there is fresh food. With kitchen work I banish you. It grapples with the mumble of the fridge, and then they harmonize: a choir made of metal and plastic. This is the irony–the curse–of the call. You’re cleaning demons… with machines? Can the mass-produced, fastaging fan hanging over my stove really be as holy as trees? As campfires? The call is an admonition to nightmares, despots, nihilists: with rice and stock and spice, I banish you. Even in a dystopian world I banish you. Can the call be magic? I’m no Luddite. Even if I myself am a demon: demon, I banish you.

I need the call now because there is no chatter to hold its place. At my parents’ house, at my grandparents’ house, cooking is communal–and cooking together means cooking with chatter. Not everyone cooks, but the ones who do, do it together. Cooking is a team sport, a vanguard act. When we cook together my mom and I make a chorus of questions, swears, details. There’s something sanctifying about this. In making food together, we share the foundation of our life: our very subsistence. We cook together and ossify the fact of our living-together. In this way we make the space ours. When I cook with him my dad plays Wilco or The Beatles over the speakers. Sausage and oil crackle in the pan; some shreds of garlic fizz and hiss. This is one way to honor the mundane facts of one’s life: turning them into opportunities for community, for joy. As material things, contingent things, we survive (we subsist) together. What else is breaking bread–making bread–good for? So chatter, then, is holy. Language is already a miracle: out of physical conditions we construct social, emotional, intellectual lives. The chatter is what happens when language is part of the sharing-food-ritual,

of the mundane act. Zoom out for a second and that’s pretty stunning, right? Ain’t natural history a gift? A house full of humans, with their human-sounds and the smells of their stoves–in fact a terrible place for demons.

Chop a whole onion into little pieces and fry it with some salt until it sweats, crumples, begins to tan. This is how it starts. When there is no one to cook with–no one to cook for–I turn on the call. The kitchen exhaust vent mutters the tone, which slinks over the counter, down to the floor, over to the table. The call holds down the background, keeps watch. Even when the fan is off, it hangs around. Is it weird to substitute human conversation for a dusty old motor in a rented apartment? Is it sad? No comment. But isn’t this, too, a way to claim the space, holding food and sound together? The call is an announcement for an empty kingdom–spiders, gnats, and me–Hey! Someone’s making tuna cakes! This is a warm place, a savory place! Here’s a better way to say it–and this is what I’m really getting at–the call is a prayer. You ever make a talisman out of white noise?

The call is an analogy. We have to zoom out again for this. Environmental philosopher Eileen Crist writes that humans, “having conceptually and physically constituted the world as natural capital… have nearly lost a living, numinous world”. In other words, our species’ rampant exploitation of nature gravely threatens life on Earth. Well–for example–I can’t hunt, I can’t forage, and I don’t have land to grow my own food on, so without my local grocery store, I would starve. The more I am aware of this, the more I am terrified, because I rely on institutions beyond my control for food and because those institutions are part of the planet’s devastation. Joseph Osmundson, a virologist, describes the nightmare of the human-constructed world and offers a way out: “Human reproduction is not driving global warming, wealth production is. Human wealth will be lytic, killing our host planet and us with it. [Symbiosis] may still be an option… The earth’s well-being is our own well-being.” Of course, there *are* ways to humanely and sustainably feed Earth’s people–but this requires radical political and economic upheaval, which is not (I believe) an immediate possibility. Well, OK, will I sit on my ass and do nothing about it?

Perhaps humans have built a rapacious global society, one which is dangerously sluggish to change course–then the push for a world which is healthy, compassionate, and communal is not only worth it but exigent. Perhaps there isn’t much I can do to change or escape the conditions which doom life–human and otherwise–on the planet, but if this is true, then whatever I can do is monumental. This means acting *within* a cruel set of conditions, which means subversion and cooptation. How can I clean demons with machines, the same brand of monsters which pump plastic into the oceans and suck oil out of the ground? Well–by appropriating them, by turning them into something new, because they’re not going away: not soon, at least. In this way the call is an analogy. The exhaust fan, not-so-distant cousin of many instruments of death, becomes an instrument of prayer. The call is a project of claiming a space–not as a human conqueror, but as a mortal, as one who eats, one who resides. Cooking can be an act of love, of mutuality, of attention to detail: and won’t these things be vital to reclaiming our interdependence with nature? Shouldn’t we take what care we can in the act of consumption, even if some facts of that process–the mass death of insects due to pesticides, the brutal nature of factory farms–are beyond our control… or, beyond our control for now?

In this sense, then, the call is cursed: but the call is a way to ricochet the curse back, to howl into the storm of the future. Those are the only demons which really scare me: the murky, dangerous ghosts lurking in the decades to come. The call is a counter-threat, a counter-promise, aimed at fire, famine, fascists, neoliberals: demon, as long as I stand you will not conquer this place. Demon, if you conquer this place I will keep standing.

hearing muzak at the quaker meeting

Murphy McDonald Bradshaw

I am sitting in a room with blue chairs arranged in a circle. Thirty people are sitting in silence waiting for God to speak through them. To me their measured breathing is God speaking.

There is a high-pitched sound ringing in my left ear which, maybe, is God too. I am finding it hard to breathe. I am revisiting the memory of struggle. I am counting backwards from five. I am watching the white haired woman across from me turn her ear up to the sky.

Time is passing. God is speaking.

I am suddenly in an elevator, walking around a fluorescent department store, and ordering a soft pretzel at the Westfield Mall. I hear a brassy cry from beneath the gray carpet.

I wonder if anybody else can hear it.

This, too, might be God. This listening… this stimulus… This, the indwelling spirit.

Deconstructed Mushroom

Alex Kanalakis

mythic cures for every season

Darcy Hays

sugar free venus spotted in the summer air her limbs striped like zebra-wilderness, refuses the nectar of the spring, too many granules of sand sliding between her fingers and stomped through hooves. the water is too cloudy to see the mountain frogs and doe-eyed catfish lurking beneath, covered in mud and gingerbread pudding. stamped onto thin wafers are floral eyes and moss-wreath cures for woodland creatures three-spotted fawn with bony limbs and satyr horns split ends of four-leaf clovers banished to arctic tundras you’re beyond the reach of marble-hewn statues here so drink whatever she gave you ‘til the pulp sticks between your teeth springtime sakura blossoms: gather the petals between your fingertips and wait for siren-song plucked mandolin strings. the rotten bulltoads feasting on packs of fly-rats are not your friends but tempt them with storm algae washed up on the kelp-strewn landshore and they’ll waste into frothy sea-foam and drift beyond the puffer shark buoys. the harvest will come later in the eroded riverbeds withered and coated in tree root sap, they look like stones but taste like apples, chew carefully and spit before the eggs hatch run ants down your gullet in the fall, you must endure the apothecary is closed on weekdays the chemist travels the pea-flowered desert with only a sack of cauliflower and nightingale feathers

as a guide. the water here tastes of sour moth stems that rot beneath maple leaf piles but spill it on the sunset dunes and spindly parasites will outline the path to the roaming hoard of bison. your hooves are tired now but crack the cacao bean beneath them chase the blooming water lilies up arms and shoulders between crags of obsidian to the frosted glacier pond mind the snapping turtles as you wade in and drink what you can but bottle the rest. it’ll last through autumn there is no winter here, but save some just in case

Camille kuroiwa-Lewis

Enoshima’s Cliff

Ursidae

Soleia Yemaya quinn

girl birds are lithe and floatable airy and light filled hollow bones and gossamer bird song easy to pick up and tastefully polite eating their bird girl dinner nuts grubs and droplets of dew the bird girls fall in love with bear boys bear boys become bear fathers who don’t understand how a bear girl is born from a bird mother these girls begin as such small cubs and they wish for flight like their bird mothers they wish for stealth and gleaming feathers where instead black matted fur grows

bear girls are voracious catch a salmon in our yellow teeth blind with hunger bear girls are big we are big enough to crush bird mothers so we must be careful bird mothers are so beautiful and so easy to break bear girls are worried to hug bird mothers our claws harder than beaks stomping feet heavy enough to vanish a bird mother underfoot

bear girls speak with gruff rumbling voices voices like a thundering mountain avalanche voices as loud as gravel river in the snowmelt spring bear girl wishes she could fly up be light sing to the world yet is a growl not a song to the booming alps? are bear girls not strong like a river rock and bear girls are warm in the winter when all else is frigid bear girls are better for holding the pain for to bear means more than the animal state to be a bear girl is to support the sorrow of the forest to bolster bear father and protect bird mother to be taller still, to reach the honeycomb with our bear girl mouth bear girl can try as she may to flitter and flutter to dance quietly but she is made of the quarry stone and the tough tree bark and the whipping rushing wind as it carves its path through the ridges she is tooth and claw and heavy paw

The pots and pans sat on warm-coiled chairs

Their cracked, ceramic lids shaking like a Chatterbox in a confession booth on Reconciliation Day, no whispers.

“Tagal tagal tagal, so slow, Jaedi”

My mother spits, words sizzling madly As globs of meat-rich oil splash about And land on the tile floor, Ah-rai!

Curses spill as gulaman pours, with red Shiny jellies floating like colorful

pearls in the sea. Steaming hot soup filled Every corner, clearing sinuses

And overflowing chests with warmth and okra.

Hot, steaming rice piled into Tita’s

Frosted glass platters on the long Last

Supper table. Peanut butter oxtail

Stew, crispy spheres filled with red bean paste and Sugar glazed plantains and soft yams, sticky

Rice porridge with chicken and ginger slabs, Another Filipino dinnertime.

Kusina

Jaedina Bayking

About the Contributors

Claire Beaumont (she/her), clare bo·mont, proper noun: Phoebe Waller-Bridge worshipper; 2. at war with word limits; 3. will drop her phone down a storm drain one day

1.

Jaedina Bayking (she/her), jay·dee·nuh bay·king , proper noun: too creative for biology, too scientific for writing; 2. Filipina, loud, pineapple head; 3. happy to be here.

1.

Murphy McDonald Bradshaw (she/her), mur·fee brad·shaw, proper noun: gettaway driver; 2. 2014 tumblr survivor; 3. believer of ghosts

1.

1. Emma Callanan (she/her), em·uh kal·uh·nan, proper noun: See definition for 'Editor.' 1.

Kimberly Cortez (she/they), kim·bur·lee core·tez, proper noun: journalist by day, writer by night; 2. cat lover; 3. cincuenta por ciento Mexicana y Chapina

Leonidas Grimshaw (he/xe), lee·oh·nigh·das grim·shaw, proper noun: red leaves after they fall, but before they are crisp; 2. bass that rattles in your chest in the dark; the taste of the ocean when it pulls back with the moon

1.

Ricardo Guevara (he/him), rih·car·doe geh·vaw·ruh, proper noun: fog & mist; 2. walking milk tea recipe book; 3. #1 fan of Prince’s 1988 album “Lovesexy”.

1.

Darcy Hayes (she/her), dar·cy hays, proper noun: . indoor cat; 2. community college survivor; 3. deeply afflicted by senioritis

1. Katherine Johnson (she/her), kath·er·in john·son, proper noun: amateur exterminator; 2. friend of the Ampersand; 3. mug collector 1.

1.

Alex Kanalakis (they/he), al·icks can·uh·la·kiss, proper noun: advocate for dance in a town that bans dancing; 2. accidental time traveler; 3. Goblin King

Mollie Klingberg (they/them), mall·ee cling·burg, proper noun:

1.

cannot live without silly spicy sauces; 2. yarn hoarder; 3. a moist mound of sidewalk moss.

Nandita Kumar (she/her), nan·dee·tuh koo·mar, proper noun: king of the Clark library service desk; 2. will force you on a long walk if you stick around too long; 3. is slithering down the big metal slide in the Columbia Park annex right now if you’re free. Are you free?

1.

Camille Kuroiwa-Lewis (she/her), kuh·meal coo·row·ee·wuh loo·iss, proper noun:

1.

1.

Ashley Marheineke (she/her), ash·lee mar·high·neck·key, proper noun: sophomore nursing major; 2. aspiring doodler; 3. lit mag lover and gastronomic enthusiast

1.

Sean Murray (he/him), sean mur·ray, proper noun: chronic hat wearer; 2. proof that caffeine is placebo; 3. often seen at your mother’s residence

Hannah Pompeii (she/her), hænə, proper noun:

owner of a lava lamp; 2. can be found within 10 feet of a tub of Aquaphor at all times; 3. might have a systemic nickel allergy sensitivity, might be getting salmonella poisoning any day now (see definition for ‘Hypochondriac’). 1.

1. See definition for ‘Editor’

Soleia Yemaya Quinn (she/her) soul·ee·ahh, yey·my·ahh, ka·winn, noun: lover of symmetrical body modifications; 2. pantheist; 3. proud chicagoland transplant

Zora Richardson (she/they), zo·ra rich·ard·son, proper noun: the moment of silence after a confession of love; 2. fabric store gremlin; 3. always has rehearsal (see definition for ‘Theatre Major’).

1.

1.

Tallin Rivers (he/him), tall·in riv·ers, proper noun: more than a little nerdy; 2. purveyor of niche folk music; 3. just happy to be here

Lilly Grey Rudge (she/her), li·lly grey rudge, proper noun: See definition of “Editor” 1.

Faith Scheenstra (she/her), fae·th skeen·stra, proper noun: still a Frankenstein Fanatic; 2. piercing extraordinaire; 3. in pursuit of all things grim and gory

1.

Clara Smith (she/her), clare-uh smith, proper noun: See definition of “Editor” 1.

Branna Sundy (she/her), bran·na sun·dy, proper noun: See definition of “Editor” 1.

Lizzy VanLengen (she/her), li·zee van·ling·in, proper noun: tired multimedia artist; 2.Spokane Scholar of fine arts; 3. bright red wavy hair [see also: used to be blue wavy hair]

1.

Valencya Valdez (she/her), va·len·s·ee·uh val·dez, proper noun: See definition for 'Senior Editor' 1.

Francy Wentker (she/her), (she/her), fran·see went·ker, proper noun: verbose bitch; 2. tumblr enthusiast; 3. deep sea creature 1.

Scott Winkenweder (he/him), scott wink·en·we·der, noun: pile of bones; 2. pile of skin; 3. pile of cards. 1.

About the Editors

Alyssa Repetti (she/her) a·lyss·a rah·peh·tea, proper noun:

1.

if “on the floor” by perfume genius was a person; 2. peppermint tea enthusiast; 3. climber of rocks

Valencya Valdez (she/her), va·len·s·ee·uh val·dez, proper noun: maneater; 2. eavesdropper; 3. looking for her lost lighter 1. twin; 2. friend; 3. creature 1.

Murphy McDonald Bradshaw (she/her), mur·fee brad·shaw, proper noun:

Camille Kuroiwa-Lewis (she/her), kuh·meal koo·row·ee·wuh lew·iss, proper noun:

Lilly Grey Rudge (she/her), li·lly grey rudge, proper noun: resident of the death cafe; 2. sheep in Virginia Woolf’s clothing; 3. muppet of a man 1.

Lauren Rees Savas she/her), lo·ren ree·suh sah·vah·suh, proper noun: aspiring Addison Shepherd; 2. lover of dry lightning, iced chai, and stray cats; 3. The Worst Photographer™ 1.

Clara Smith (she/her), clare-uh smith, proper noun: straying away from martyrdom; 2. dabbling in asceticism; 3. whispering, “I have nothing to fear because God is on my side,” while watching a horror movie 1.

Branna Sundy (she/her), bran·na sun·dy, proper noun: teeth buried in soft bread with that slightly crackly golden crust; 2. always lingering; 3. would love to kiss your forehead if you were okay with that 1. Olympian; 2. 70% coconut water; 3. spy for The Beacon 1.

Acknowledgments

Writers is never a singular effort, and we are immensely grateful for the support of the following people:

Professor John McDonald, our trusty faculty advisor, for giving us constant encouragement while simultaneously allowing us the space to make and fix our own mistakes.

Our contributors, for their amazing poems, writings, and art pieces. Writers simply would not exist without you.

And, most emphatically, the 2024 Writers Editorial Board, for their adaptability, creativity, passion, and patience.

Submission Policy

Writers Magazine accepts submissions of original creative work by current students of the University of Portland. These works include but are not limited to short prose, poetry, short plays, photography, visual arts, and cartoons.

All submissions are evaluated by the editorial board. Submissions are kept anonymous throughout the evaluation process.

University