Dreary is No More than a Vignette

Photograph by: Fin Boots || Photograph name: Kool

Written By: Kiana Fatahiyar

Quiet daggers aim for my heart and soul.

Bellows of wind and wrestles of loud life

Taunt my stillness, an inevitable hole.

Mind numbed, cloistered by internal strife;

The gloom of raindrops never ceases to pour,

And sunshine seems everlastingly set

Until the ending of the tempest hour,

Where dreary is no more than a vignette.

Sunshine glows brighter, stronger than darkness.

Black and white is replenished with color.

Time leaves with much haste to fuss over stress,

So provoke your light and let it glimmer.

Now if you cherish any words from me,

Find beauty in the “irrelevant” trees.

When Freedom Fell from the Sky

Photograph by: Brooks Prestidge || Photograph name: Beyond the Bay

Written By: Jo Liethen

In 1942, at the age of six and a half, my grandmother and her family were kidnapped. They were held in their house for a week, what Oma describes as “the longest week of her life.”

Oma, a Dutch Indonesian, lived on the island of Sumatra in Padang. Her family was abruptly told to gather their things and get on a truck. They were taken from their home to a train station, where the Japanese soldiers stripped my family of every ounce of their dignity. They ripped the earrings from the ears of my shaky and horrified great aunt, Tante. They took every valuable family heirloom while taking their freedom as well. After several days on a train with no water or food, they arrived at a church, where a man took note of every single person and wrote it in a book, which he hid in the rafters and was found years after the war. From the church, they were herded to the camp in trucks, now known as “Bankinang.”

Oma didn't know the location of the camp; she only knew the men were separated from the children and women, the endless trees that fought against the beating heat, and the waterfall outside. Oma’s sister, Yesse, was just three years old, and when you’re three, you don't understand the magnitude of the situation. Yesse would cry at night and during meals, agitating the soldiers, because who wants to hear a crying and whining three-year-old? Oma would take Yesse to the waterfall and dunk her head in the water to calm her down at least four times a day.

A year later, at seven years old, Oma’s average meal consisted of bugs and banana peels left by soldiers. Hungry and desperate, she bartered with a soldier, who could have shot her right then and there, and tried to trade him a silk for a chicken. The soldier agreed, but only on the terms that she would take off her shirt and give it to him. The fearless child gladly agreed to the new terms in exchange for a real meal. Oma lived there for three years, so until she was nine years old, she scavenged for the biggest beetles and the least rotten peels. When her camp was liberated in 1945, she was a week away from extermination. Oma always tells us she remembers the exact moment the American military dropped down packs to her camp, notifying the inhabitants it was over and they were free.

Growing up in a multigenerational household, I was told to be grateful for what I had and to never take a single possession or food for granted. I lived with Oma my whole life, and she taught me everything about life, from lost Indonesian weaving techniques to her native language, Dutch, all the way to never taking an ounce of my freedom or privilege for granted. Today, Oma is eighty-nine years old, still just as bright and witty as she was at age seven, still weaving for tailors and cooking traditional Dutch Indonesian foods, and she’s still my best friend, living in the room across the hall from me.

To the Girl They Ignored

Pencil and Mixed Media by: Sophie Slotnik || Pencil and Mixed Media name: Eye on the Ball

Written By: Trinity Musco

This skin is not me saying I’m sorry.

I am not a plea or mythology.

I’m not a doll to play with like Barbie.

Instead, it’s a symbol of simply being free,

A smile never truly awoken,

Their speech always similar to a slogan,

A look that’s known to the one’s heartbroken.

Dear soul, our hearts always remained open.

Do you remember that time when?

Perhaps it's time we decide to review

That sentiment you carry deep within,

The times your troubled heart felt oh so blue.

Our skin is birthright, beauty, and power,

A story shown like a blooming flower.

Civilizations Light, Civilizations Bright

Photograph by: Madison Stiles || Photograph name: Lincoln and the Violet Sky

Written By: Chloe Tabesh

The day you plant the seed is not the day you plant the fruit.

Let it grow from the root ‘til it's ripe for the taking,

The birth of a civilization stemming from its making.

-

I was born a babe in a cradle like the rest.

A dozen lay beside me in rest, wailing cries from the fluorescent lights

As nurses scurry around,

A generation soon to be crowned.

-

I perch in a chair made from tired-hands labor,

The kids around me, my neighbors.

We think knowledge will coronate us the deliverer of change.

What for? It all seems to end the same.

In cluttered desks and hurried feet, we rush to an exit so we can all meet

The ones who gave birth to our ever-loving form.

It’s waxy yet taut, but ours from when we are born.

-

Wisteria skies hold secrets only the moon will tell,

Yet thousands seem to decipher its translations far too well

To discover a life beyond our own sphere.

They are part of this civilization we cheer.

-

Between God and men, and the trinity we hold high,

Through the prophets we take from nigh,

From the gods that those among others stagger their hands too,

There are those who proclaim these messages for our minds,

To drink like the elixir of the unknown and life.

They are part of this civilization we cheer,

Their institutions of promise they keep.

Acceptance, and love, and unity, and peace,

The messages that those around us choke,

They are too part of this civilization; help them to swallow not croak.

-

The swish of a skirt, the hoop of a ball, and the siren singing on stage,

We all line up to throw our praise.

Like red rose bouquets bunched with intimacy, only an idolization laced with endearment can hold.

They, too, are part of this civilization, as we cradle them in our calloused palms.

-

I sit again in my seat, my own hands tired of blasphemy.

There stands a perfectionist who wishes to share in the same wonders of the world around me.

They hold up an Expo marker as they share their marksmanship with me.

Only now and then–because of them, can I become useful in this civilization–they cry.

-

The world holds wonder, which can not be foretold.

There is no telling what our ending could behold.

But with no ending in sight, we strive for what is right.

Through rain and shine, the music brings us in tight

In a circle of civilizations bright and through civilizations light.

Do not read the music simply on this page,

But can you hear the music that I strum without vain?

Do you hear the music of civilizations past,

As they return to dust and the stars return to gas?

Minnows

Sculpture by: Abby Stacy || Sculpture name: Stained and Stack

Written By: Gracie Nealon

The creek offers refuge to many a minnow. They dart beneath the smooth trickle of the current. The afternoon sun drenches the water in pools of amber light, and the minnows’ iridescent bodies are illuminated against the black-pebbled bottom. I reach out to skim my fingertips over the water. Their paper-thin fins tremble slightly, and their silver scales shimmer beneath my palms. For a short moment, one tentatively circles my hand, observing me with its yellow eye. I wonder how it sees me; does it study my face the way I study it? Does it know it is the subject of my writings, my muse of sorts? The thoughts in its minuscule brain are as distant and unreachable as the edge of the universe. Part of me wants to scoop up the minnow, let it swim in the water held in my palms. But I don’t, out of fear. Life, in such a small form, is too fragile for tampering. Incredibly, we share the same life force breathed into all living beings. But honestly, the minnow exudes life more powerfully than my blurred face in the creek’s reflection. Its scales are a map, a map of the world and all its wonder, its irreplaceable beauty, its frontiers and familiarities. The minnow reflects the intricacy of life itself, of a world that existed long before we did, a world we half-know and understand even less. Looking at this minnow, I wonder, why humans see themselves as special. Our sanctity was tainted by the lure of the machine. But the minnow is life in its purest form. When we destroy the world with our ambition, the fish will struggle through water saturated with pollutants, the map on its back a reminder of the beauty and mystery that used to be. Unknowing fish! It will carry the weight of human actions that cannot be undone.

It's Scary Growing Up

Acrylic by: Josephine Bank || Acrylic name: West End Ave

Written By: Wendy Chen

It’s scary growing up
Watching you lose pieces of yourself along the way
As your spunk and color slowly fades to match with beige school desks and muted uniform skirts
And maybe somewhere along the fading colors your laughter smudged out too

It’s alarming forgetting your mother tongue
As you outgrow the warmth of your mom’s lap
And you both stare into the mirror
Seeing sets of eyes that sag deeper into your face
Insatiable holes to remind you of the girlhood you lost
When you moved your dolls from mansions to lifeless attics

And now your grandpa looks so much older
Sagging into the armchair with the years upon him
You wonder if your toddler mischief added to his wrinkles
If in the past you’ve been too harsh

It’s hard forgetting your childhood home
And the food that didn’t taste like calories
The girl inside me hasn’t been whole for so long
I wonder if she’s forgotten the taste of Chinese food

And finally you realize you’re not a kid
As you blow out dripping wax candles
And drive yourself to places
Alongside people who’ve lost their colors too

and now you have to leave home, the last place you have left
And your mom will now eat dinner alone
You pack your childhood memories into paper boxes
Throwing away more of yourself into trash bags of toys and old books
And move into a dorm you’re forced to call home

The moment kicks now sitting in your room
with the walls stripped and the clothes taken out
Realizing coming home are only temporary visits
I realize I never wanted to grow up

Feather's Legacy

Acrylic by: Josephine Banks || Acrylic name: Beach Haven

Written By: Layna Girata

Feathers of a bird long passed float in the swirling green waters, drifting in delicate spirals like thoughts lost to time. The memory of the bird, dark and gray, is part of a vast chasm of forgotten memories and untold lives. This small, weightless fragment of nature represents an entire lifetime, yet is all that remains. 

Is it not curious, then, to examine the impact of our own lives? Even if they are cut short, our flame burns out before its expected time. Can we honestly say we have fulfilled our destiny on this Earth? Each breath we take is but a moment, passing on into the next, repeating in an endless cycle of forgotten memory, one overshadowed by the generations that have come before, and those that follow after. Will your story be told, or will you, like the dark feather, fade away into the waters of time?

Your legacy is simply a feather left behind after your death.

Your life is as fleeting as a bird passing by overhead, momentarily disrupting the sun’s rays.

No bird pressures itself to be perfect. No bird expects more of itself than it can give. No bird wastes its life on trivial, meaningless things.

How are we, as humans, any more important than this bird, whose only impact is a single feather? Perhaps we are not. And in that realization, there is freedom – the freedom to soar without fear, to die without regret. Like the bird, we only need to live, accepting our place in a much larger story, stretching before and beyond us.

Closure

Photograph taken by: Fin Boots || Photograph name: Föst

Written by: Xander Monteiro

For it is

an end

to end with

a say.

A very little combination

of sy-lla-bles

forming simplistic words

and phrases that leave

a tethered heart

hinged.

A fire for a frayed rope,

a burn necessary

for it to stay

together,

Instead of each strand disappearing with the smoke.

How such an action that

is driven from nothing, but,

the worst news imaginable

can heal so much!

How a little stitch can prevent

numerous stitches from being needed.

At many times this

carrier of

information

is heaven for

someone bound

to drift into

hell!

Such a little

thought can

drive a near senseless

action

into a supportive

air bag.

For it is this

little thing

that can keep

a soul roped in place.

For it is

a minute consideration

that

prevents long endured

consternation.

that severely

saves so many

happy souls

drenched in deep sorrow and deprivation.

It's keeping their eyes wide

enough, to see the

light of present day.

Barefoot

Written by Erin Keller

I found your shoes in the back of the closet.

The blue ones with the missing laces that

You always left by the door.

The ones I’d always trip over.

They still have mud on them from the last time you wore them

To check the mail, in the rain.

They’re still here, waiting for you

To walk through the door,

Barefoot.

Summation

Written by Cren Boyd

 When I was 7
I learned how to multiply.
Burying 2x2 in a melting mud pile,
Digging out a way to count my life,
I let the math
Consume me and
Teach me that
By multiplying the shattered glass on my kitchen floor, By the inches in which my evergreens grew,
You could get the weight of my childhood.
I let its burden embed itself into me,
Pry its way into my milestones and
Cling on to the idea that
3x2 is when you read
4x4 is when you drive and
6x3 is when you descend from the stars.