"how strange it is to be anything at all": Vol. 1

In October/November 2021, Second Street Gallery
invited community members of all ages to

participate in a call for writing submissions inspired by
the artwork in Josh Dorman’s recent exhibition, how
strange it is to be anything at all (October 1 -
November 19, 2021).

Artist Josh Dorman sources collage elements for his
mixed-media paintings from antique diagrams,

engravings, maps, textbooks and documents that
were published prior to the widespread use of
photography. Using a variety of mediums and

techniques, he recontextualizes antique imagery to
create multi-layered and fantastical visual narratives

that explore mythical landscapes and notions of
collapsed time and dream states. 

Curated by artist Josh Dorman, SSG’s first exhibition
zine features select writing submissions from the
open call.

Table of contents

(2) Patience by Jess Walters

(4) The Abomination by Peter Barlow
(6) Vessels, an Ekphrasis by Danielle

Buynak Horner
(7-8) Essevls chea by Oscar Gonzalez-Molina
(9-10) Reflection on “Vessels” by Zaharra

Colla

(12) The Earth looks better from a star by

Jess Walters
(13-16) Wait for the Flash by Elizabeth Mayer
(18-20) The dance recital by Anonymous
(22) In response to “Brink” by Aurora Ortega
(23) SITOMANIA by Melanie Waleski

Josh Dorman
Patience, 2017
Ink acrylic, antique paper, and resin on wood panel
24 x 20 inches

1

Patience
Jess Walters

Ligaments make mountains
and we’re brought to our knees
along this journey
together.
(like riding a bike)
we do not forget how to find
the way
(wet from the stuff)
under
the surface
of the Primordial Soup.

We swim.
We swim and we strip away
what’s unwanted.

Tadpoles become full-bodied sharks.

2

Josh Dorman
The Abomination, 2019
Ink, acrylic, antique paper, and resin on wood panel

30 x 30 inches

3

The Abomination
Peter Barlow
From merchants to mercenaries,
All pontiffs and pundits,
Feign ambition gives rise to our fall.
Sword slices sinew,
Beloved beast becomes burden,
Civilized haste slows to a crawl.
Faceless beasts lumber the shadows,
Ribs hunger for life,
And all the piles of our musings, reveal nothing but
strife.

4

Josh Dorman
Vessels, 2021
Ink, acrylic, antique paper, and resin on wood panel
24 x 24 inches

5

Vessels, an Ekphrasis
Danielle Buynak Horner

Inside the new vet’s office, a bluetick coonhound
bays. She hears a puppy on the other side of the door
and is determined, we think, that any puppy must be
hers.

The vet guessed she’d been kept in a cage and used
to breed dogs sold to run raccoons up trees.
Everyone you meet’s been someone else before. Zora
was a mom. Her mammary vessels, proof of a past life.

At the new vet’s office, a woman poses a desperate
question through a cracked door. “It’ll be like he’s
going to sleep, right?” she asks. Her dog looks straight
ahead as the door closes.

They knocked down the old vet’s office to build a
Sheetz, who chose the location to stick it to the new
Wawa across the street. They’ll be making
Schmagels and Schmeltz where dogs died. Filling gas
tasks where puppies got their first shots. Buying lot-
tery tickets where new adoptees took on
mythologies.

Everywhere you’ve been has been somewhere else
before.

Next to the old vet’s office used to be an ancient
vacuum repair shop. But folks just buy new vacuums
these days.

6

Essevls chea
Oscar Gonzalez-Molina

I wake up, I get out of bed, I go to the
bathroom, I shower, I wash my hair and my body and
feel the water and shampoo going down my body
then I dry myself, I get out of the tub, I brush my
teeth and then I look in the mirror I feel empty. I don’t
see a face. I look around my surroundings. Nothing
feels real, I feel like I’m dreaming like none of this
really exists. Like I’m not in my own body, like I’m just
in autopilot mode and I’m not making my own
decisions.

I can’t take it. I need to know why I feel like
this. I need an answer and a solution. I need to dig
deep inside I think. I keep thinking what could cause
this at all.

I lay in my bed. I stare at the white ceiling. I
slowly fall asleep being comforted by the softness of
my bed. I wake up again and head to my kitchen to
get something to eat and to drink. I’m pretty sure my
mom made some Spaghetti so I’ll just heat some up.

I put powdered cheese on the Spaghetti. It
makes it taste way better. I start drinking my water
but something weird happens. I’m drinking the water
out of the bottle but it still has the cap on. Suddenly
someone or something flips the chair I’m on and I fall
on the ground.

I woke up in my bed again and felt so confused.
What is causing all this? I go outside and I fall for

7

what felt like an eternity. I wake inside a pool of water
and I can feel myself drowning. I start swimming up
and I see an exit.
I don’t wanna go all the way in because I’m
scared that there might be something that will try to
hurt me there. But what if it’s the thing that will save
me. So I only peeped a bit of my body out of it. I look
around and see foods from my fridge without
anything filling them. Like the foods are completely
hollow with nothing inside.
I see other household items turned into weird
creatures without anything inside them. I see black
birds flying all over the place. And I also see geckos. I
feel my face and I reach inside myself. We all had one
thing in common.
We are all vessels. Waiting for something to fill
us. As soon as I made that realization I woke up again.
This time I pinch myself as hard as I can and I feel
the pain. I’m awake but I still feel like I’m in a dream
and that nothing is real.

8

Reflection on “Vessels”
Zaharra Colla

How strange it is to be anything at all?
The moment in my principal’s office,
I hear the words, then I freeze.
Told that I cannot support my own history and culture
By dressing up as a Black Panther during spirit week.
My heart, my soul, my body
Has been chipped away at,
By the people that don’t want me to succeed.
I repair what is lost,
What is broken
By being better, proving them wrong
Like I do every time.
Their words hit me like slashing knives
Ravenous for their kill.
Which victim is next?
Not even a question,
it is always the black girl.
My heart spills out
As tears fall onto the sidewalk.
A threat to kill me,
He chases after my
Wheels spinning faster than ever
I pedal harder.
I lost him.
No one stopped to help me
As he screamed after me.
Am I alone?
A plague of racism and microaggressions always

follows me

9

Is that why people are afraid of us?
Or are they afraid of the strength I have
that I show every time
I Overcome.

10

Josh Dorman
The earth looks better from a star, 2021
Acrylic, ink, antique paper, and resin on cardboard

7 x 8 inches framed

11

The Earth looks better from a star
Jess Walters

The Earth looks better from a star
where we’re far enough to blur the scars
of mortal life, which happens in the span
of a second--split
between the BANG of everything
and the being of it.

There’s a light (like the sun)
casting shadows upon shapes
we’ve made and been before

but I’ve brought with me the red shred of
wool I spun
to remember our way through the blaze.

12

Wait for the Flash
Elizabeth Mayer

Doctor Sanchez called it prosopagnosia. Face
blindness. It was caused by damage to the fusiform
gyrus on the surface of the occipital lobe. A football
injury. A pickup game. Casual, no pads. They weren’t
supposed to tackle, but Scott had tackled, and when
Jeffrey awoke, he didn’t know the person leaning over
him—until she said his name. Jeffrey. Jeffrey. You’re
awake. It was his mother.

Those first few weeks felt like a recurring
dream—in his socks atop a slick geodesic dome,
trying to get his footing, inevitably slipping, and
waking to the abrupt wallop of gravity. His mother
wanted him to rest, but it was hard. He tried to watch
TV, but he confused the characters. Couldn’t follow
the plot. He turned it off. Each person was a puzzle.
Uncle Dave was clomping feet and armpit smell. Ms.
Robison, next door, was cinnamon over cigarettes and
cat-in-arms meowing. He knew his grandmother by
the clutch of her thin fingers, the skin paper-dry.

Face blindness? Is it real? His grandmother
had lost her sight years ago. For decades she had
worked in the toy factory at the edge of town, pouring
molten plastic into molds of triceratops heads.
Another woman formed the ridged torsos, another the
tails, and still another the legs. After the parts cooled
and set, a team on the floor assembled the limbs. Long
ago his grandmother dreamt of sculpting the plaster
models from which the molds were cast—scoring the

13

line of fur into the back of a woolly mammoth or
etching the gills of a megalodon. But clouds
developed across her eyes, and it was discovered that
gases from the hot plastic slowly ate away the
cornea—causing blindness. She had signed against
her right to sue when she was hired and was left with
only a meager severance. She had lived with Jeffrey
and his mother ever since, and Jeffrey was glad. His
grandmother didn’t believe in being sad, and it helped.
She whittled little animals from bits of wood, the
blade carving out strange creatures from the bright
cavern of her memory. Nothing ever looked quite
right, but you could close your eyes and feel a dove’s
wing or a calf’s flank, sometimes on the same piece of
wood.

Jeffrey knew his mother by her scent. When he
was small, he would rest his nose against the skin of
her arm. He loved the way she smelled. He told her
once that her smell was the most wonderful thing in
the world. An infant can smell their mother from
20 feet away, she said. His mother knew things like
that.

Jeffrey was an only child, but he was hardly a
child anymore. He had long ago stopped luxuriating in
the scent of his mother’s skin. He no longer felt him-
self an extension of her. There had been moments
when he felt so eager to assert his independence
that he had wanted to sever the bond. Anger bubbled
up in him and he shouted. He said things he knew he
shouldn’t. He looked her in the eye and told her it was
her fault his father left.

14

It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t anyone’s.

Jeffrey had learned at a young age that nothing
stayed the same.

In his last memory of his father, they are at
Disney World winding through Spaceship Earth. At
first, Jeffrey is afraid because the ride is dark, and
when the seat tilts back and they begin to move, he
squeezes his father’s hand. But then the stars emerge,
and Jeffrey is entranced as they roll upward past the
jerky mechanic movements of cavemen and
Michaelangelo and a monk making a book and a
computer the size of a room printing out pages and
pages of paper, green—he remembered that part as
green—and there was a newsboy and a movie
theater, and maybe there were astronauts, and maybe
there was a war room, at least that’s what he thought
it was, and something happened at the end, did they
take your picture? or project your face on a screen?
It would have been his face and his father’s face too.
And the whole history of humankind was put
together so neatly that there was the feeling of
progress, of inevitable progress, and hope—you
couldn’t help but feel hopeful. Even if it wasn’t real.

Dr. Sanchez said that the human brain was one
of the great mysteries of the universe—an unmapped
sea, its depths capable of fathomless surprises.
Perhaps, one day, Jeffrey would again recognize his
mother’s face. He fingered the slender neck of a
miniature brontosaurus, each tiny dimple the
imagined recreation of an animal millions of years
extinct. It was funny: everyone (or most people,

15

anyway) had a memory of a dinosaur, but not a single
living person—not one person since the dawn of
humankind—had ever seen one alive.

16

Josh Dorman
Villa of the Mysteries, 2018
Ink, acrylic, antique paper, and resin on wood panel

30 x 30 inches

17

The dance recital
Anonymous

It was just another dance recital for Fred, who
didn’t come out of his own free will, to maybe catch
up on much needed zzz’s or perhaps be spotted by
someone he knew so they would think he was a lot
more cultured and sophisticated than they gave him
credit for. In any case, Fred didn’t look forward to it.

So the lights came down and the show was
underway. The stage was empty and out came a
lone male figure sporting the traditional leotard which
signified the snoozfest was about to begin. ‘Come on
Fred get into it’ Roger chided, but inspiration was not
to be found for someone who just there for moral
support. Roger’s sister was a supporting dancer and,
well to put it frankly, to not see anybody she knew
come to her performance would have been soul
crushing. Whether or not anyone would admit to such
a thing is entirely another matter.

The show carried on as normal when all of the
sudden, the male dancer lunged up into the spotlight,
did a spin and in the brief instant a portion of him was
obstructed from the audience’s view, he grew thirty
feet and a body full of orange hair. The stage
completely disappeared and in its place an enormous
funnel of water appeared underneath the audience
who now found themselves inside the roman
colosseum, as in the actual one. However that was not
the strangest part.

18

What really did their heads in was how they
themselves ended up transforming. A very wealthy
banker became opossum and now found herself
diving head first into the giant funnel-shaped
colosseum filled with water. He thought perhaps
maybe his check to the red-cross bouncing had
something to do with it. Fred wasn’t an exception
and he also transformed, into something which was
somewhat poignant given this philistine’s resistance
to the performance arts. As the giant’s brightly
luminous side kick they would find solace with each
other as they navigated this new world which had an
official name ‘the republic of be careful what you wish
for’. If you don’t believe me, asks Roger’s girlfriend
who was now a barely noticed immigration officer
guarding the gates to the kingdom. Her dreams of
stardom had not panned out the way she imagined, it
could be said.

Roger was really the one responsible for this
whole mess. He wasn’t looking to get into trouble as
is generally the case with people who attend dance
recitals chiefly in order to be in the good graces of
those close to them. However in this actual
physical manifestation of a Damocles sword waiting
to be stumbled upon, how sympathy is granted goes
according to a different set of rules.

The structure of the colosseum was built with
carcasses. But these weren’t just any carcasses.
These carcasses belonged to those who didn’t do
things out of genuine interest, rather to please people.
Roger was such a pretender. Their numbers were so

19

vast that there were more than enough of them to
hold up their fellow brethren who were just as
uncommitted to living their lives.

20

Josh Dorman
Brink, 2019
Ink, acrylic, antique paper, and resin on wood panel
30 x 24 inches

21

In response to “Brink”
Aurora Ortega

The mist floats down around the piss colored map
of locations unknown. Out of the map, a machination
springs forth and dumps a gooey, magenta,
non-Newtonian fluid on the map. Under these
machinations, a lady formed of water leans forwards
and a giraffe covered in red mist drinks the ladies river.
A monkey sits on a rock looking into the depths of
your soul and thinks only of bananas. The rocks sit for
ages too lazy to move. Carl had sat on their brother
rocks for so long yet there was no reason to move, not
even to the changing environment. Their cousin, the
pots, also barely moved except brother Kettle—Kettle
moved every time when they were filled with water
and Kettle was always excited for that water. This
water would excite only brother Kettle though and not
any of the other pots. The watery mass that Kettle sat
on moved frequently but only to the will of the winds.
The bird laughed as Kettle was thinking, the bird of
course knew that Kettle was a ridiculous pot and
would never be able to understand the reality of their
situation. The virus under the bird awoke to the bird’s
rampant cackling and slowly moved towards its
microscope, but was pestered by the blitzkrieg of
birds. A cottage sat in the middle right snuggled
between the red above and orange below. It had
watched this scene repeat for ages on end and no
change, but it always hoped that one day a virus
would find that one thing it had lost when it first
arrived in this strange place.

22

SITOMANIA
Melanie Waleski

SITOMANIA
by definition-a strong
abnormal craving
Food glorious food
everything is a vessel
a scoop to shovel
I open so wide
There is no stopping the tide
empty cavity
Where a brain should be
feathers and gold coins
rattle like an old tin bank
My sense of self worth
justified and expanded
Self diagnosis

23

About Second Street Gallery
Founded in 1973, Second Street Gallery (SSG) is the
oldest nonprofit 501(c)3 contemporary art space in

Central Virginia. Our primary mission is to enliven
Virginia through access to the best in contemporary
art and artists and to inspire new ways of thinking,

seeing, and doing.

SSG presents a full calendar of free and low cost
outreach activities and programming that

complements our exhibition season. Contact the
gallery to learn more about our offerings and
partnership opportunities.

To support our mission, make a contribution or
become a member of the gallery through our
website: www.secondstreetgallery.org/support

Second Street Gallery

115 2nd Street SE, Charlottesville, VA 22902
www.secondstreetgallery.org | @secondstreetgallery