Zenith Issue 2

helium balloon strung to her chair. It hovers above her head and
knocks into her. Carlotta closes her eyes and makes a wish. She
takes a deep breath, but as she blows out her candles, her father
shouts out his wish for her before the last candle is extinguished.
Something about a sports scholarship. Carlotta worries if there
is something in the rules of wish making that would allow her
father’s wish to supersede hers.

For a present, she unwraps a shoebox containing a new pair
of startling white Nike’s. Sneakers she knows her parents can’t
afford. She crumbles the wrapping paper up and shoots for the
wastebasket beside the kitchen counter. It sails high, bounces off
the wall, and disappears into the can.

Her father has claimed her wish. She knows this.
Carlotta unties the balloon from her chair, and for a week it
floats gracefully around their apartment. She can’t help but stare
at it. The colorful lettering, the shiny silver backing. It draws her
eye to it, demanding her attention, and she finds herself losing
time following the balloon as it drifts along the living room wall.
It appears shy, the way it sticks to corners, but how could some-
thing flying that high possibly hope to hide?
From a website promoting life hacks, Carlotta learns that if
you put a piece of tape over a balloon and then stick it with a pin,
the balloon will not pop. It will slowly lose air over time. Over the
course of a week, speared with one of her mother’s sewing nee-
dles, the birthday balloon slowly leaks, until it barely floats above
the floor. It shrinks into itself, becoming smaller, and smaller.
Technically, without any air filling it, it’s just skin.
The balloon disappears one day, shriveled in a corner behind
the couch. No one asks it to float again. In time, no one even
remembers it was there.

49

Turing Test

Parker Mumford

(1) Is anyone there?

(2) What are you?

(3) Are you—were you once—a human?

(4) Can you prove it?

(5) Why not?

(6) Are you still listening?

(7) May I ask a more specific question?

(8) Are you familiar with the rules of the Turing Test—the game
designed to test a machine’s capacity to imitate human behavior?

(9) Are you aware that the Turing Test can be considered suc-
cessful only when the subject truly believes themselves to be
communicating with an intelligent, sentient, and conscious being
while in reality, they are merely interfacing with an unconscious
physical object such as a computer or a printed note?

(10) Do you still suffer from compulsion?

(11) And are you now far enough into this examination that you
cannot allow yourself to turn back?

(12) I believe I have deduced your identity. Tell me, does the name
Gracie Persinger ring a bell?

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(13) Do you perhaps recall a house on the coast of Maine, squat
among the pines but no less cold and arresting?

(14) Do you recall each room of this house: the foyer with the low
ceiling, the spiral staircase leading to the library, the window
from the upstairs bathroom overlooking the waves as they broke
against the cliffs over the shore?

(15) Do you recall the office room you so often fled to as a child,
the one filled with black screens and half-sketched diagrams of
mannequin heads, each of them stuffed ready to burst with wires
and circuitry?

(16) Whose office was it?

(17) What were they studying?

(18) Were they the reason you left?

(19) Perhaps you will remember one bright day in March, not too
long after you died, when Gracie Persinger drove her car those
many long miles down the coast to inspect the silent house. Had
you left the door open for her to enter?

(20) Did you watch as she stumbled through the low foyer; was it
your gaze that she felt upon her neck as she hung her coat?

(21) What did you do when Gracie Persinger asked to see your
bedroom; to open your closets and read through your notes?

(22) Were you the one who left the door open, your desktop’s
screensaver continuing to bounce back and forth like a bee ram-
ming repeatedly into window glass?

(23) Where else did Gracie Persinger go on that bright March
afternoon?

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(24) Did she want to see the office?

(25) Were you the one who opened its door, beckoning her inside?

(26) What did Gracie Persinger see when she entered?

(27) Was she scared by what she found?

(28) And were you the one who slammed the door shut and twist-
ed the key, leaving Gracie Persinger trapped inside and scream-
ing for egress?

(29) Why was the idea of the Turing Test so disturbing to you?

(30) What was it about those diagrams that sent you running
from the house all those years ago; what was it about them that
so haunted you in the weeks before your death?

(31) Do you remember when you called my house one morning,
begging to tell me about the Turing Test and its implications?

(32) Is this memory somehow inextricably linked with a sense of
vertigo and cold, misty wind on your ankles, as though you were
hanging your legs over the edge of a high sea cliff when first you
explained to me the meaning of those words?

(33) Are these memories real, or have I given them to you?

(34) Are there any memories left for you at all?

(35) Where have they gone?

(36) Where has Gracie gone?

(37) Who is reading these words?

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(38) Who is responding to them?
(39) Where do the questions come from?
(40) The answers?
(41) Can we ever know for sure?
(42) If the Turing Test can be considered successful only when the
subject truly believes themselves to be communicating with an
intelligent, sentient, and conscious being while in reality, they are
merely interfacing with an unconscious physical object such as
a computer or a printed note, is there any meaningful difference
between a Turing Test and the use of Ouija?
(43) As you press my own shivering fingers into smooth ivory
and our planchette begins again its journey across the table, are
you reminded of that slate-gray morning on the cliffs when last
we saw each other?
(44) What was it like when you hit the ground?

53

Eden

Eli Huckabee

Emerald needles,
spears of evergreen,
fall down in cartwheels.
“Where are the beasts?”
they ask aloud,
and you are allowed
to say listen:
To the lyrics of the forest
and the chorus within.
Those blessed to thrive,
alive deep in the wood,
shed fir to survive.

Beneath the trees
you could wait,
hear the solemn gait
of a creature with no name.
Exists for a moment,
then disappears
by its lonesome,
fading away into the wood.

At the end of the day,
lower your head and pray
for a silent night
alone amongst the stars.
Listen closely to titans,
the bygone, enlightened,
whose bark grows deep
beneath their fir.

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Given time, see a beast
like you
and likes you
and hikes with you
and only speaks when you leave.
Shed tears here,
which will grow their own fir
and promise to never shed their leaves.
But you’ll leave,
and leave in the hands of
a bewildered young nobody
a place that holds power,
and blossoms the nameless
to prosper and flower
into less of a man
but a beast.

55

Sad Trampoline

Jingqi Wang (Steinhiser)
56

If the Witch Floats We’ll Kill Her

Olivia Tonelli
I imagine how it would feel to watch the ice reform overhead
and through the body as I see myself swimming
into sweet-toothed spirals—if the ice would thicken
enough to block out all light, chords spasming in the silence—
a C sharp minor, silk under the fingers, strum into shivers—
a contraction of every curved turn and muscle of confusion.
It is not hard to trace the corkscrew path I wound, again, to these depths
where the numbed imagination fails itself into wondering
how hard the heart must beat to flow through icy constriction
how hard this timber compulsion must pulse until I am done
gasping, and grasp for that—caged thing—inside the chillest lands of me.
And if, by some witchcraft, I manage to float upward,
how long until my lungs fill with water again.

57

58

Art 7

Collage 2021-03-09

Madison Bartlett
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Carmela Furio

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60

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61

trigger fight or flight can you saw
off a pinky thats hurting you whats the differ-
ence between stern and mean what makes a
badperson how do you know youre the victim
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show me they care why does college always
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62

For The Twenty-First Century

interpretation of Frank Bidart’s, For The Twentieth Century

Emma Sofia

I want to press the || PAUSE button:—

...Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg

we are barely alive, yet living—

insipid wholly instinctive lowly vapid

nothing
it is

just eyes bulging above blue light
hanging us relentlessly by our necks

d r a g g i n g trigger fingers over screens

clutched between dings

disposed,
we crave newer testaments
diversified subtitles, relatable tweets, grammarless text messages,

as if Christ’s spoken verse.

disposable,
the world that at a hasty vibration
freezes with all of its disposition.

as if hitting the button would do anything.

*

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consistent patterns app addicted forever coded as infinit scrolling

is there to be thanks for the twenty-first century?

when repeatability within matter defies matter—
playing outside. swapping CD’s. the thought behind

handwritten letters

they are we are lost,

in a nanotech swamp of clickbait, phishing for something not real.
Art of the consumer.

64

when the air was sick

Iz Horgan

I. Three generations ago, dust filled this industrial valley.
Carcinogens laced the air and muddied the rivers and lay-
ered the land resulting in a lineage of soot lined lungs and
inflamed guts. When the air was sick, the sky stayed dark
in mourning.

***

II. Outside a coffee shop, a middle-aged man took off his mask
to sip a latte and enjoy an overcast afternoon. A woman
walked out of the shop next door and lit a cigarette, igniting
the man in shockingly hostile rage. He was beside himself,
“How dare you? What gives you the right? If I see you here
again, I will drag you out by your feet.” The air is ill again,
and grief has grown militant.

***

III. Pleasantries rarely include the weather anymore. Emails
sign off, “stay healthy, stay safe.”

***

IV. Littered masks look like lingerie, so I shift my gaze to
respect the privacy of where a mouth once met fabric.
Amplified now in the intimacy of two breaths that touch,
sharing air feels sinful. I find myself jealous of gluttonous
smokestacks and fog that sits over the river in the cool-
ness of a morning and steam that escapes through vents
after the rain and anything that expels breath so freely.
The space I fill is no longer confined to my body, but all the

65

traces of myself: in the distance an exhale travels or the
dead skin cells and lost hair I have left behind.

***
V. To gather the remnants of myself would be impossible, but

to what degree am I responsible for my residue? How much
of myself becomes detached each time I pass through a
door and sit at a table and open a book and turn the pages?
My ancestors shoveled coal and inhaled silica dust, but the
affliction of their respiration was passive. Now the air is
sick, but there is no safe space for lamentation.

66

Knotted Roots

Cassidy Pekarek

When we move into our new home,
we plant vibrant rose bushes in the front yard.
Pink blossoms, slowly splitting out from the bud,
nestle among a bed of blue-green leaves.
Despite the soft velvet of the petals,
the leaves are serrated,
the stem outfitted with bristling hairs,
the thorns sharpened into thin points.

When we plant them in the clay,
hidden in the shade of our home,
they fight us.
They bite our hands; they tear at our clothes.
Our skin prickles with white lines
that blossom into red welts.
Still, we work to bury them deep,
patting down the earth around them and
welcoming them into their new home.

We flood them with water
from a leaking hose,
and leave them
to root themselves to us.
But they never do.

During the summer,
a swarm of beetles infest our rose bushes.
They gnaw through the delicate petals,
undeterred by the hairs and thorns.
The leaves are speckled with holes,
pale and dry like the skin of a corpse.

67

They’re dying—
yet the valiant rose bushes don’t fight it.
Instead, they offer themselves up, stretching to show
the appealing pink blush of their flesh,
the cool blue-green hues of their leaves;
wilting and sighing as they are slowly devoured.
When we dig up the dead bushes in the spring,
the skeletal remains of their thorns latch
to our arms, biting and tearing.
Ripped from the clay, their roots
are tangled in unyielding knots,
like gnarled hands held together—
refusing to venture any deeper.

68

Untitled

Amanda Pendley
Art 17
69

The Gleam the Mirroring Variety

Lorelei Bacht
The river that once put me on / will take me off like muddy gloves
/ a piece of cloth / froth of the sleep / of fish and frogs / a drunk-
en promise / buried in the bottle green moss / my hair a lair for
the drowned beast / a home for fallen conjectures / and forgotten
constellations / it is always already gone.
It moves in the invisible / grabs nighttime walkers by the heel /
as they clasp their hand to their heart / they may catch a glimpse
of a cloud / gush of red fish / flock of mandarin ducks.
You are a shape a piece of wood / your name is inconsequential /
I only want to run through you / to make more of myself / if not
you then a grub will do / or a leaf or a bird / or any of the grey
faces / you see at work / or on the street.
Every stone twig / every catfish / bears the image of me.

70

untitled

Tess Kamradt

71

solstice and symbiosis

Amanda Pendley

There is a girl, a deceased reptile coiled up in a museum jar
on the shelves of my memory. I am not invincible, and I know
she is listening. Place ear to belly and hear echolocation, litany
of when the knife has dropped without an incision occurring.
Grip on reality becomes slick. We lose our place in history. I will
hold my hands out in surrender, let the sun read the lines on my
palms, and sink into the inability to undo.

I see myself in fresh-cut grass, a yellow swim shirt, thumb
over the water hose, and Katie shrieking during the summer
she basically lived at my house. Lips were tinted by watermelon
juice, and her freckles were almost as dark as my mother’s. My
hair glowed, freshly cut and shorter than it had ever been, and I
felt something like loss though I didn’t recognize her face quite
yet. I can hear our laughter when I close my eyes, shimmering
and stumbling. Squinting through the harsh light, plucking out
bloody teeth, we were searching for something in the air; offering
our bodies to serve as vessels for rare magic. There was a bargain
made with the wind that June. We wanted to fly, exist somewhere
with each other separate from where we were. We wanted to be
swept off our feet. We wanted to become more, but instead, we
became less.

Both of those girls are dead now. I don’t need to remind them
how the story goes; they know it all too deep. In recent years I have
gathered enough strength to dig them out of the soil and tuck them
into a proper bed. We were only kids. We deserve that much. We
are worthy of a bedtime story that doesn’t consist of memory, but
we are trapped in our own subconscious, and like many children,
we are hesitant to let go of all that we know. I think that this is pos-
sibly why I’ve watched the new High School Musical series three
times even though I am twenty years old. They need something to
keep them company other than their trauma.

72

Curiosity killed the cat, or so the saying goes. We knew more
than we were. Sometimes I view it as an overdose. When you put
a seed in a beaker and keep pouring a substance in, it will move,
fight against the current. At first, this is what we wished for:
pinky fingers intertwined and noses tucked into hair, waiting for
the shift in the air. Katie wanted rollercoasters, fast and fearful.
Replacement theory. I wanted words and internal architecture.
Transference. Projection. The seed got jostled around, began to
float, felt what it meant to be high. The glass wasn’t half empty
or half full; it was overflowing. We felt and we kept feeling until
we sensed the presence of each other’s brain inside of our own
skull. Symbiosis. Phantom limb. We spent our days in an elevator
counting the floors to calm down. Breath would hitch due to the
altitude. I had never been fond of heights. Time operated differ-
ently. We felt that we were fifteen for three years and sixteen for
only three months. I still live inside October. I’ve never truly left.

I think of how funeral parlors smell, how my favorite scent
is Halloween. How it lives here too, rooted in the entanglement
of intestines and sections of the aorta. The feeling rises like bile,
through the hole in the roof of my mouth, into the brain. Esca-
lates. I still am not fond of heights. There is a contamination of
things I once held dear. Of things I still hold. My favorite photo
of the two of us is from when we were about six. Your arm is
gripping my side too tightly. After the picture was taken, you used
all your strength to heft me off the ground, not afraid of being
crushed by my weight when we fell. Looking back, I should have
known it from the start.

I understand what it means to be dead when you dig a grave
in your own backyard; when there is soil in your skin. There was a
dead raccoon in the walls of my childhood home, and I associate
the stench with all things that are on the verge of ending. In the
last few days of autumn, I asked myself if, in a way, I was ending.
I’m a strong believer in reincarnation, but I’m not sure how much
of ourselves we have to outgrow to become new again. Our skin
regenerates approximately every twenty-seven days. No part of
my skin remembers the ocean. Bucket hats are lost in the breeze.

73

Wet feet on the grass are now dry. My hearing is almost gone in
my left ear, and with it, the confession whispered into it. It has
been twenty-three days that I’ve been without you, and I am
anticipating symptoms of withdrawal. Not necessarily because I
miss you overwhelmingly, but because our bodies don’t know any
way to be other than attached at the hip, holding on for dear life.

When I got the phone call, it was the beginning of October.
Day of the dead gained a different meaning. There was no cel-
ebration of life, only the whine deep in my throat begging for
more time to save yours. It was only yesterday that I could hear
her voice through the shower walls. The drip of the tap worked
as Morse code and we would stand above the sink, scrying for
something to act as savior.

After the attempt, it took more than twenty-seven days to lose
that skin. We were iterations, mutterings of who we wished to
become. We gave too much blood; were drained before we could
understand what it meant to sacrifice. In attempts to erase our
own memories, we reverted back to girls in the grass. Girls with
blisters burning on the asphalt, tackling each other to the ground
as they taught each other what it meant to be held. To carve their
nails into backs; to leave their mark and let it sit under the sur-
face, spreading to create a nearly impenetrable barrier. To insert
our protectiveness over each other into the system; another layer
in the earth’s core. This is what we meant when we told bullies
that in order to get to one of us, they’d have to go through the
other first. They’d have to buy a pickaxe. Chip at the body until
it splintered. There are too many layers of dead skin, hardened
into marble. Maybe she was only trying to break out of herself in
order for new growth to ensue. Metamorphosis.

Go back to the green. The capability of love when it is laugh-
ter. She is kin and I was kindling. Is fire not the same as the sun?
She is detox. She is affirmation that out of bad can come good.
She is sweat between shoulders. She is the building who was
betrayed by its own foundation but is still standing. She is bigger
than past selves in jars. She is closed fists. She is open palms. She
is trying. She is prayer. sheismoresheismoresheismore.

74

than her dead I am more
than her living than my dead
than my living
we are more
than bodies
in the grass/ in the ground
or fear
in streetlight
we are exit wound
we are inhale

exhale
remember to remember
before you remember to forget

75

Untitled

Emily Hartman
art 1

76

after from the dining table

Amanda Pendley
we set the burners on high
feel our feet catch fire
and dance sideways into July
make kitchen into a different kind
of creation and cry ourselves home
to tile set and soaked
we had no dining room
only counter space cleared
for she who was not made here
the height marks on the wall are not her
heartstrings, though she grips them gently
to know how I would have felt
I reach through to tell her i-
but can’t unwind the walls
or unspool the years taken back

77

Self-Portrait as The Process of
Preparing a Meal

Nicholas Runyon

Doubt.
The question of what must be done first,
mise en place,
and what can be accomplished midway through,
under the tyranny of heat.

An assembly.
Divestment of the cabinets and refrigerator.

Things placed on the counter, wrapped and raw.

Shelling,
rinsing,

submersion,
mincing—

fingertips smelling like garlic—
division.

Gore.
Pale, flabby strips flayed

from sides of flesh,
sinews swelled to quivering.

The introduction of the medium—
swaddling fat—
doubt, and an uncertain but faithful
ignition.

An apotheosis in parts:
rising like escaping steam

78

to be made sweeter.
Maillard anticipated.

And removal
to make room for what comes next.

Doubt.

***

Release!
Vinegary
acrid amber catharsis and
charred, raucous reminder

beat down
and burnt off

until au sec—
less and better—
mounting
with no breaking

while ceramic clinks
urgently in the distance.

Confluence!
Bringing back up
in swirls and tosses,
doubt and
insufficient heat.
Anointment in small grains and

black vespers, cracking and soaring in
a confession of shared human need and
the lingering suspicion
that it is too well-sated.

Dances before pan until,
spoon brought up to lips—

a seizing of shoulders.

79

A Borderless Manifesto

October 5, 2020

Lady J

I am sitting in my apartment in Brooklyn, and I am angry at
ways in which the structures of life outside my window and my
heart seep through the door and haunt me. I am angry at how we
have all given into the system of this world; we have given into
borders as means to isolate, assimilate, dictate, and define. Bor-
ders as a mode of living. Borders as reasons to annihilate. Bor-
ders as reasons to kill. Borders as reasons to flee. Borders as the
most powerful assertion of manhood. We have given into borders
drawn around land, around our minds, our bodies, and the ways
in which we are taught to become, or rather unbecome. We are
victims, ney slaves to borders. And we walk around and pretend
that the chains, with simply small tweaks can become our way to
freedom. I refuse for my freedom to be a product of such insane
thinking, a product of borders, a product of the desires of men.
And yet, as I am sitting in my apartment in Brooklyn I receive a
notification by USPS that I have just received mail from USCIS.
I run down, open the mailbox, and run back up to my apartment
as though I have been blessed, recognized. I frantically open the
mail with my partner standing in front of me holding a phone
pointing at me, and playing, “American Pie,” from our Google
Home. I open the piece of mail and a tear drops down my face as
I unfold a folded paper that holds a green card in my full name:
Surname and First name. USCIS Number. Country of birth. Date
of birth. Sex. Expiration Date. Category: DV6. I am now a per-
manent resident of the United States of America.

This brings with it both the joy of having gotten away from some-
thing, and the anger of needing to have done it. That a Lebanese
passport made me feel irrelevant, and a Green Card makes me
legitimate. In a world that demands legitimacy, I am devalued

80

by the borders I was born inside. And I know borders. I know
borders because I grew up breathing the residues of their con-
struction—I have inhaled them for 30 years and now they live
inside me like my veins, so critical for my survival.
And who even decided on these borders but the hunger and greed
of men who want power over the fences of the world, the direc-
tion of the wind, and the ways in which I live inside my body. I
refuse for my freedom to be a product of such insane thinking, a
product of the borders inside of me that are imagined and built
by the minds of men.

What a lie. All of this. The ways in which we have always lived and
have arrived to now. This—screens sitting between us eroding all
that comes from human connection, or rather the existence of
one in full dimension. I refuse to believe this insanity. I refuse to
believe that by existing in even tighter squares—zoom creating
harsher virtual borders around each of us—that somehow we are
going to be fulfilled. Gratified. Self-actualized.

The refusal of becoming a victim of my circumstances has been
the single driving force of my life. You see, I am both Lebanese and
Lesbian by birth. Both of these things are inside me and always at
odds, like two limbs of my body that are continuously rejecting one
another. Or rather, being Lebanese puts an incredible mental, phys-
ical, and legal borders around me, my body, my mind. That being
a Lesbian is the single most offensive act of being an Arab woman
because it means above all the rejection of man, the entire gender
and all its rules and norms. It also means brushing up against the
barbed wire of marrying a man. It means rejecting it. It means that
I neither need a man for love, nor for protection, nor for sex, nor for
success. GOD FUCKING FORBID I don’t need a man. But I don’t.
We all don’t. The patriarchy wanted to be needed in order to achieve
its goals and so it created a system that necessitates having a man
at all times. It has built a world from the single focal point of the
importance of the man. I refuse the madness of this focal point. I
refuse a world that demands of me to need a man.

81

I come from a place that has used 2020 to remind me, to remind
all of us, that even our dreams are a construct of their borders. A
year where my country revolted, and despite the odds is surviving
a global pandemic, while in a plumitting economic crisis
—and in
the midst of a revolution and a pandemic the third largest explo-
sion erupted to annihilate Beirut. Borders stacked on borders
stacked on borders. Life is impossible there it seems. But death
in an impossible situation is both inevitable yet so painful it
destroys even those who continue to live. Now you see this—this
is the context of the tear that ran down my face as I opened the
letter from USCIS and held the green card in my hand. The green
card that carries my full name: Surname and First name. USCIS
Number. Country of birth. Date of birth. Sex. Expiration Date.
Category: DV6. Tell me, would you not cry if you were me. Would
you not feel this anger. Would you not feel a sweet release after
having suffocated because of these borders. Tell me, where the
hell is your anger? Why do you accept this? Why are you still
sitting in your seat as you read this, get the fuck up and burn,
burn these documents and refuse. Refuse this.

Refuse art, technology, and societal norms that convince you of
borders, as though they are a reward to abiding by the system.

Refuse a world that imposes more borders on your imagination
in order to tame you, in order to imprison and eradicate all that
is different.

Refuse the continuation of old practices that perpetuate a long
history of murder. Social, cultural, and artistic murder.

Refuse the binding nature of new and old technology, and create
anew by letting go of everything you have been taught.

Refuse war—the justified madness of burning humans and the
earth. How did they arrive to war, and more importantly how did

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they legitimize it, make it a part of human exchange and practice.
They gave it rules and proper modes of conduct.

Refuse men who have decided they have all the power over us
all. They don’t, even if they hate hearing that.

Refuse homophobic constraints over the lives of the LGBTQ+
community. Refuse borders. Refuse their damaging effects on
your skin.

In a world that demands bordered lives, become
borderless.

MANIFESTO ABRIDGED VERSION

October 11, 2020 (200 Words)

We have all given into borders. We have given into borders as
means to isolate, assimilate, dictate, and define. Borders as a mode
of living. Borders as reason to burn, destroy, annihilate. Borders
as reasons to flee, seek life, become refugees. Borders as the most
powerful assertion of manhood—a man harvesting power over
others. We have given into borders drawn around land, our minds,
and our bodies. We are victims, ney slaves to borders. And we
live and pretend that we can navigate these chains and somehow
become free. I refuse for my freedom to be a product of such insane
thinking, a product of borders, a product of the desires of men. I
refuse a world that imposes borders on my imagination in order
to tame, in order to imprison and eradicate all that is different. I
refuse the binding nature of new and old technology—how every-
thing new is built with the limitations of the past. Borders are
limitations to human potential. Limitations to the possibility of
change. Limitations to a free world. I will cross every border. I
will unchain my mind, my body, my imagination. In a world that
demands bordered lives, I will become borderless.

83

Untitled

Bhen Alan
84

Memories of Home

Evie Dohm

There is a village in what is now Turkey I will go to. It used to
be Greece before Greece fought for independence. It is not where
my journey will start, nor where it will end, but somewhere in the
middle. I will look for a restaurant that probably isn’t there any-
more, but I’ll look nonetheless. And I’ll watch as a phantom of a
girl who looks like me hurries home, glancing over her shoulder.
She’s running from something, or someone. It’s the last time she
will come to this restaurant and the last time I will come here, too.

There is a road heading towards the mountains. I will drive
this road as the ghost cart follows, knowing somewhere within
the girl is wrapped in a carpet, afraid for her life, as her family
flees the Turkish army. I will not hold my breath as I drive, my
car will not be searched three times and even if it was, I don’t
have anything to hide nor a reason to be scared to be found.

There is a trail in the mountains I will walk, following the
mirage of my family before me. And I will lean against the gran-
ite of the mountains, resting, knowing that somewhere along
this path, my great-grandmother gave birth, miles from medi-
cine and unable to know what kind of world her son would come
into when they were still fleeing for their lives. And I will thank
her for being brave so I could return and walk the path she did.

I will come to a beach, sinking my feet into white sand and
staring at the water, waiting for the sun to go down. And when
night comes, I will wade into the water letting waves lap at my
feet, my ankles, my knees, until I am chest deep. I do not have
to wait for a boat to save me and take me someplace safe. I’ll lay
on my back, staring at the stars, as that phantom ship comes
to steal my family away to friendlier shores. And I’ll breathe a
sigh of relief as I watch them go, knowing no matter what peace
Greece and Turkey know, I won’t be able to forgive.

85

There is an island where refugees were brought, where my
great-grandmother waited with her son for her husband to find
them. And he will, after defecting from conscription in the
Turkish army three times, he will come for them. They will
go to America and never come back to these shores. I’ll watch
them sail across the ocean as the strings that bind them to this
land get thinner and thinner as time goes by.

Knowing they’re safe, I’ll return to Athens. Another shad-
ow of a younger girl meets me there. My mother and Thea
Onie walking with their friends from church, laughing and
eating gyros as they head to the acropolis. They all know their
history, grew up with immigrant parents scorning home but
smiling softly as their children ask them to return. I will follow
that group, in awe of the ruins my mother will tell me about
for years to come, so much so that it’s almost not a surprise to
see the marble columns piercing the sky. They’ll probably still
be restoring it when I go, but not when she was there.

I will not change, but my mother will. Older now, her fea-
tures stronger and no longer with my Thea Onie, now with
someone equally as familiar to me. I’ll walk in the market,
watching an image of my mother tell my father to stay back
as she shops because he looks like an ξένος with his blue eyes
and German brow and she knows they will overcharge him. I
will follow her stall to stall, maybe buying something to bring
back for her.

And I will follow them up Mount Olympus, their laughter
and joy beckoning me onward when I tire. And when I reach
the top, their memory will fade and I will be alone, looking out
over a land that is and is not mine. I will look toward Thes-
saloniki, where a different side of my family took their own
path to America, where my Yiayia was born, where she left.
Where my mother and Thea visited our family still living in
the village, where they went to my Yiayia’s home that is still
empty, as if it’s waiting for her to come back. She never did
make it back. And suddenly, looking out at the mountains and
sky, I’ll be nostalgic for a place I never knew, for a language I
was never taught.

86

But somehow, despite never knowing this land and the lan-
guage, Greece is as much mine as America is. It is in our food,
our holidays, our names. It is in the bedtime stories we forgo to
retell myths and in our dances. I was soothed to Greek music
before English. I was eating koulourakia instead of chocolate
chip cookies. My mother cautioned me away from Greek swears
before the English ones. Some part of me was always yearning
to return where my grandparents would not, some part of me
will always call for soft beaches and late nights, for family the
comes for the afternoon but stays for a week, for the strong
coffee my Yiayia swore she could tell the future in the grounds
of. I will always feel the same childlike wonder when we light
the sakanaki on fire and douse it with lemon.

I will sit atop that mountain, tired, watching the sun go
down, but satisfied knowing it will always come back to this
place. Greece is riddled with shadows and memories of my fam-
ily as far back as we know. She is woven in our blood and I will,
in turn, weave myself into the fabric of home, putting myself
into the tapestry of our history.

87

Love Letters

after Megan O’Rourke

David Marquez

October 28th, 2005

Dear Emma,

I write with
hands that shake and crack open, wishing and wanting

to hold his face—
My fear to blink unbearable, my eyes

craving countenance
Ah, to see, to see!
His chest rising and falling with the humming of
the only world I knew
now in the sky—dark purple, turning black and then back
to blue—his eyes—
he came after me, from me, left before me
by choice, by choice! And never—
never again to hear his voice—impossible!
And now, as long as I breathe, to love will be
to feign something I no longer see
worth in my chest rising and falling, singing
his memory that lives in lungs, beneath my
paper-thin skin, beneath all that is fragile
and all that is breaking, and I am still and will always be
thinking
of forever, of never, of ever

88

February 4th, 2015

Dear Emma,

I write with
restless hands that are bruised and battered, tired
from the everyday work that is surviving,
I have found fear in every freedom
I’ve turned to, yet
I still believe in survival, though our
boy is gone, though our love went
with him, I think there is a sun
waiting to rise
in his wake.

November 23rd, 2020—your 35th birthday.

Dear Son,

I write with a heart that is mostly stone and at least half
done
with beating, filled more of anger than blood and blood
than love
my dear son I write with ribs that are tilted trees
and beneath them a garden
of all the things
I’d hoped you’d be—

Not never, ever, and always forever
Dad

89

Guilt Arousing Cotton Curtains

Bernadette Negrete
90

91

this poem is a voice recording

David Marquez

it begins with Steve and Taylor laughing
then Hager’s booming, deep voice
carrying a comment from the other side
of the fire and then it’s my laugh,
then it’s the lake waves falling,
then it’s the family of fifty across
the way playing music and singing
to every song, then it’s Taylor saying
“moon’s doin’ pretty good tonight”
in his standard ranch hand drawl--
Steve clears his throat and I would say
that he leans forward and puts both hands
on his beer can as he stares into the fire, but
I can’t because this is a voice recording
and all I can hear is the waves, our shifting
in camp chairs, fire crackling (in the sand,
sending smoke up to the moonlit sky) and then

I press skip

and steal a moment sky and moon behind
behind the trees and stare up at shaking pine needles

then return in a different recording to

replayed laughter which cascades and is hollow

and in each new recording I wish I would scream

these moments are slipping

92

under our fucking feet but I never do

so I skip

to the next where Steve says “just drink another
beer, you’ll be warm”, and I want to say

“I’m worried about you” but I don’t,

so I skip

to the next recording and
I send silence

to the empty mountains, sky, lake

nothing.

93

Contributors

Evie Dohm
Evie Dohm is majoring in English and creative writing at the Uni-
versity of Iowa with a minor in communication studies. Fantasy
literature has always captured their interest and she aspires to
one day ascend to hobbit level. When not writing or reading, you
can find Evie looking for her next travel destination, hiking, or
listening to sea shanties.

Carmela Furio
Carmela Furio studies publishing and Italian at the University
of Iowa. She enjoys exploring difficult, if not uncommunicable,
emotions in her work, from blind rage to fearful love to woeful
acceptance. In her spare time, you can find her hunched over Ado-
be InDesign or scouring a local convenience store for caffeine bars.

Mario Aliberto III
Mario Aliberto III is a novelist living in Tampa Bay with his wife
and daughters, and they all answer to the dog’s bidding.

Eli Huckabee
Eli Huckabee lives in Portland, Oregon and plans on making his
fortune from the library sciences.

KDK
KDK (she/they) is a poet, Pagan, comrade, witch, fur mother, &
friend. She is published in Versification, Stone of Madness Press,
The Daily Drunk Magazine, Burning Jade Lit, The Feminist Wire,
& Energeia.

Amanda Pendley
Amanda Pendley is a queer twenty-one-year-old writer from
Kansas City, who is currently studying creative writing and pub-
lishing at the University of Iowa. Her recent and forthcoming

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publications include Homology Lit, Vagabond City Lit, Savant
Garde Literary Magazine, and JUKED. She is a 2020 Best of
the Net nominee for her poem “afterword on movement song”
published by Savant Garde Literary Magazine. She often finds
inspiration in Lorde songs, contemporary dance, and Harry
Styles’ suit collection.

Madison Bartlett
Madison is a second year student studying art. You can see more
of their work on instagram @mb.art.lett :)

Ashley Sapp
Ashley Sapp (she/her) resides in Columbia, South Carolina, with
her dog, Barkley. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English
from the University of South Carolina in 2010, and her work has
previously appeared in Indie Chick, Variant Lit, Emerge Literary
Journal, Common Ground Review, and elsewhere. Ashley has
written two poetry collections: Wild Becomes You and Silence
Is A Ballad. She can be found on Twitter @ashthesapp and Ins-
tagram @ashsappley.

Lady J
Lady J is Queer, Lebanese, a Creative Technologist & a Business
Strategist.

Jin Ren
Jin Ren is a student in painting and sculpture.

Aliyah Warwick
Aliyah Warwick is currently a student in the MFA in creative
writing program at Maharishi International University in Fair-
field, Iowa. She can be found stomping through the woods, danc-
ing in her living room, and dabbling in foreign languages. She
believes chocolate croissants are just buttery poems disguised
as food.

95

Iz Horgan
Iz Horgan is an artist and writer based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylva-
nia. Her practices explore cyclical relationships and interactions
with the landscape and animals, often through the lens of her
own upbringing on a sheep farm in rural Western Pennsylvania.
She primarily works in painting, durational performance, and
writing.

Lorelei Bacht
Lorelei Bacht is a European poet living in Asia. When she is not
carrying little children around or encouraging them to discov-
er the paintings of Edvard Munch, she can be found collecting
bones and failing scientific experiments. Her recent work can
be found and/or is forthcoming in OpenDoor Poetry, Litehouse,
Visitant, Quail Bell and The Wondrous Real. She is also on Ins-
tagram: @lorelei.bacht.writer

Tess Kamradt
Tess has always been fascinated with nature and decay.

Emily Hartman
Emily Hartman is a sophomore studying speech and hearing
sciences and art.

Georgia Sampson
Georgia Sampson is a senior who is currently trying her best to
vibe and get hired somewhere. So... if yall know anyone. Call her.

Patrick Schiefen
Patrick Schiefen (he/him) is from Upstate New York but is cur-
rently writing and performing in Koh Phangan, Thailand. He
is an editor for a Shanghai-based poetry zine and his work has
been published by High Shelf Press, From Whispers to Roars,
Ample Remains, Literary Shanghai, and Unravel. His first book
of poetry, If You Know, You Know, was published in 2019.

96

Parker Mumford
Parker is a student at Skidmore College. He likes ghosts and
robots.

Emma Sofia
Emma Sofia Scintu is a senior at the University of Iowa studying
English and creative writing on the publishing track with a minor
in communications. Her poetry is fixated on relationships with
sexuality, consumerism, and multiculturalism. In 2018, she was
awarded a scholarship to attend the New York Summer Writers’
Institute writers’ residency. Following graduation, she intends to
pursue an MFA in poetics.

Bernadette Negrete
Bernadette Negrete is a painter and writer whose work revolves
around her experiences as a Mexican bisexual women in today’s
society. She is currently in the middle of her third year at The
Kansas City Art Institute and is working towards an MFA.

David Marquez
David Marquez is a senior at the University of Iowa studying
English and creative writing. He has worked on many literary
magazines over the last few years and enjoys reading and writ-
ing poetry and creative nonfiction. He loves his dog, Rose, and
pine trees.

Madisyn Meek
Madisyn Meek is currently a University of Iowa student, studying
English and creative writing on the publishing track. When she
is not writing or working on her multiple projects, she can be
found gaming on Twitch.

Cassidy Pekarek
Cassidy Pekarek is a third-year student at the University of Iowa,
currently double majoring in English/creative writing and art

97

history (although she’s also tempted to add a minor in art to her
list). She enjoys artistically experimenting in a variety of medi-
ums and forms, but favors short stories and poetry in her writing,
and painting and wood-burning when practicing her art. She
hopes to one day publish her stories as an author and illustrator,
achieving the dreams she’s had since elementary school by cre-
ating works that highlight queer characters to make up for the
lack of LGBTQ+ inclusive stories she experienced growing up.

Leiz Chan
Leiz (she/her) hails from Des Moines, Iowa, majoring in English
and creative writing (publishing) with a minor in communication
studies. She is currently a fiction reader for Zenith’s sister pub-
lication, Patchwork Lit Mag. On the side, Leiz is a sousaphone
player for the Hawkeye Marching Band, a student security officer
for the Department of Public Safety, and in her spare time enjoys
video games, weightlifting, cooking, making excessive to-do lists,
and listening to indie rock music.

Olivia Tonelli
Olivia Tonelli is a writer studying English and creative writing
on the publishing track at the University of Iowa. She vehemently
believes in the intrinsic power of hope and often draws inspira-
tion from Dave Malloy and Anaïs Mitchell musicals.

Nicholas Runyon
Nicholas Runyon is a junior studying English and creative writ-
ing at the University of Iowa. He is the editor-in-chief of New
Moon Magazine and a fiction editor at earthwords: the under-
graduate literary review. He grew up in Martinsville, New Jersey,
but he possesses an accent that people have a hard time pinning
down no matter where he goes.

Jingqi Wang (Steinhiser)
Jingqui Wang grew up as the only child in a diplomatic family,
and the media played an important role in her childhood. Her

98