The Road Trip issue

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PaperfingerFebruary 2014 The Road Trip Issue

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PaperfingerFebruary 2014 The Road Trip Issue

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Get Featured!

@paper�ngermagfacebook.com/paper�ngermagazine

paper�ngermag.tumblr.com/

Think you’ve got what it takes?We’re always looking for more artists to feature and more writers. Email us at [email protected] to submit your poem, short story or to tell us about an artist you think deserves to be featured.

Like us on facebook and follow us on twitter for updates and to be alerted the �rst friday of every month so you don’t miss an issue!

Looking for advertising space?Email us at [email protected] for pricing information.

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DanielleHarrisPhotography

Poetry

Ball of Sunshine

Caroline Hoadley36Marcia Vojcsik38Pauline ThierStephanie ErdmanStephanie Foreman

404648

Caroline Hoadley - BIO

ShortstoriesKristiane Weeks

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FEATURE

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“My goal as an artist is to have people walk away with a piece of me”

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“I have a love for things that are broken down and neglected”

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Growing up In Pennsylvania I always had a unique way of viewing the world. I thought and saw things differently than my peers. What was strange or unknown to others intrigued me a great deal, instead of playing outside I was inside drawing or painting; anything that I could physically make with my hands was exciting and thrilled me.

Then one day I picked up a camera for the first time when I was a freshman in high school and I was never the same. Taking pictures of everything would be an understatement. By the time I was a sophomore in high school I had gone through two computers’ hard drives from the amount of images I had accumulated. When it was

time to decide how I wanted to spend the rest of my life it was a no brainer, create images. So that’s what I am in the process of doing. Currently attending Savannah College of Art and Design pursing my love of photography and fashion. At the young age of 22 I am constantly on the move getting inspired by the places I go and the people I encounter. I have a love for things that are broken down and neglected; I want to give them a second chance at being something beautiful. I also love to create emotion with my images.

Whether it is a feeling of joy or an uncomfortable chill, I want people to feel when they look at my work. I believe in creating images not taking them. I freeze time for one

moment and have it forever.

Recently I have been combining my love for fashion and photography. I would say my work is in between fine art and contemporary. Behind every image there is a concept and a reason. I never create images just to take a pretty photograph; each image has a piece of me in it that I want the viewer to carry away with them. I want the viewer to get caught up in what they see. My goal as an artist is to have people walk away with a piece of me.

-Danielle Harris

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Jordan Patricks could tell there was something different in her mother’s smile. Rose’s permanent syrupy-sweet smile looked a little more viscous than usual, dripping down at the sides; the bronze glimmer in her eye was burned out.

Dinner ran as it usually did, Jordan’s fifteen year old sister Mallory hogged the potatoes and Ryan, their father, sat at the head of the table, silently looking over the bills and finances for the family pearl diving business. Rose sat, tossing over her peas, her smile slowly dripped lower at a painfully slow pace, like a volcano slowly oozing its way down the side of the rocks, turning every natural fiber to ashes.

Dinner ended with groans of contentment and clinking of dishware into the sink.

“We’ll have that pie later,” Mallory commented. Jordan nudged her arm lightly.

“I second that,” she concurred. Their hair swung as they collided, waves of brown hair clashing

together.

From the family room, stout and sorrowful tweets were heard. Jordan passed through the kitchen to the dimmer family room, and walked up to a standing dome cage. The black curved bars encompassed a puffy yellow canary.

Five years ago, Rose had bought the little flicker of sunlight for herself, as a pick-me-up for the loss of her father, her only remaining family outside of her husband and daughters. The pearl business was hers to look over, a highly stressful job that needed a little relief and light. The canary was perched, as Jordan lowered her gave to the cage, and chirping loudly.

Jordan pulled the black cage curtain over the bird, and soon it stopped singing it’s sad song. Jordan went back in the kitchen. Her mother was at the sink, rinsing off the dishes, and then clanking them quietly into the dishwasher. Her pellucid, blue-veined fingers lifted and set the dishes delicately. Her thing frame under her shock of short blond hair shook lightly as

she silently moved.

“How was your day, Mom?” Jordan asked, putting some Tupperware-clad left-overs in the fridge. Jordan turned, and watched her mother take a spoon and drop it into the depth of the dirty water. She dropped another in, and didn’t pluck either of them back out of the murky depths.

“It was long,” Rose sighed. She turned to face Jordan, the smile gently sauntering from Rose’s face. “Did you close her curtain?” Rose began to head for the family room. “She’s only hungry, you know.” Rose got to feed out of a close-by cherry wood cabinet, and opened the cage door. The bird hopped down onto the floor of the cage, and swept it’s wings up, like a fluttering stroke of a paintbrush, to Rose’s finger. Behind Rose and Jordan, Ryan slunk over to the over-stuffed couch and lifted the remote. A click was heard, and in a moment, the room was splashed with white. The canary gained a snowy, ghostly hue, and Jordan could further see the vacancy filling her mother’s face. She stood in the

Kristiane Weeks

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glare of the TV’s light like a fresh phantom who just recently left the body.

“I’ve got homework, thanks for dinner,” Jordan couldn’t be around her mother anymore. She looked like a skeleton, lost in the family room. Jordan left her parents and headed upstairs to her room.

The rest of the night was quiet, and the house slept silently into the darkest hours.

The sirens woke Jordan up before her alarm could, at a brisk and chilly six in the morning. The whaling paired with the frenzy of red and blue tore through Jordan’s blackened eyelids, and woke in her a sense of wrongness.

Jordan stumbled and dashed out of bed, knocking over her clock, and fumbled for her doorknob, tumbling out the door. All of the lights were on and her parents’ bedroom door was gaping open, the entire house glared the fluorescent white of a funeral parlor, screaming the wakefulness across the hallway and down the stairs, except for Mallory’s door, which was still smugly closed. Jordan flew across the hall, and walked into Mallory’s black room.

“Mallory! Get up!” Jordan flicked the switch and Mallory appeared in the same fluorescent glow, her auburn waves rose and sank around her shoulders and face as she sat up. Her green-gray eyes sparkled with wonder and fright. “Something’s wrong.”

The two stomped down the well-lit stairs, into the decaying cream lights of the dining room, the family room, the kitchen.

“JORDAN!” Mallory’s high squeal struck from the connecting laundry room, and Jordan sprung to the corner of the kitchen, and fell into the laundry room, where her sister stood at the window, the steady red and blue droned across her face. “Dad’s talking to the police.”

Jordan didn’t feel herself tear past Mallory, but suddenly she was at her tall, lanky father’s side. Two police cars sat in the yard, crowded by the walking dead of the surrounding neighbors and neighborhood-feeders. Three cops were talking to Ryan, and his hollow eyes sank into the coal-stained rims of his sockets, the life was sucked from his face, and he beheld his daughters, agony engulfing his facial features.

“Girls,” a cop cut in, before Ryan could speak to his daughters. “When was the last time you saw your mother?” The search crew was out into the town and the outskirts, where the cornfields shook dryly, particularly to the north. Jordan and Mallory ran throughout the house, crying, and confusedly looking for more clues. But there was nothing. Everything had been as it had the night before.

An early-bird witness said the greyhound bus had pulled up at the dawn of the day down the street from the Patricks’ house. She trotted onto it, the familiar molasses-like smile sticking to the corners of her sagging mouth, a neighbor witnessed. No one knew where she went, or if she would ever come back. Rose was gone before Ryan was awake. There were no words, no note, no missing artifacts, except for the black-veiled birdcage was empty.

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I’I’ve been told by people who run frequently that they experience a Runner’s High; a post work-out surge of endorphin’s that denotes being sweaty and tired. I have only experienced the latter symptoms from running, but when thinking about when and why I write, I realized that there must be a Writers High that moves one beyond resignation. Writers toil across a mental page, weary pen in weary hand, trying to muster speed and inspiration during the transfer from thought to page. We build an Ark in the desert, carefully assembling the pieces while praying for rain. We face the Giant of the blank page with a sling of small ideas grasped in hand. Writing is a struggle of many failures and many successes. I cannot recall the first time wobbly steps became running, just as I cannot recall when putting pen to paper (or fingers to keys) became the strangest combination of toil and joy. Writing is a sensational burden. I would not wish for any other occupation that can frustrate and excite, enrage and calm, or so perfectly pair black with white. I write poems from details and memory; from both feeling and absence. I write to tell stories that show beauty, truth, and loss. I write for the high. There is no greater feeling than bearing a limp for wrestling an Angel.

-Caroline Hoadley

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Hunter Middle School

The lounge is stifling. Students peer through the barred window on the door, attracted to the smell of pizza like flies to a corpse.The latex gloves are tight over my damp fingers.I serve lunch to adults whose grim faces make their ID Badges look like caricatures. The Assistant Principle sits in the corner, head bowed, speaking to a Police officer in low tones.A dull buzz comes from the overhead fluorescent, making the side salads look limp and wilted.The teachers here spend their days making copies and casting out demons.

What Would Hitchcock Say?

Shadows pass overhead;I squint against the sun and see a flock of long-winged birds, black and mottled brown, flying in the clear sky.A hawk swoops down, talons splayed, it tucks it’s wings and dives-plucking a Morning Dove from it’s perch on a branch, the hawk screams at the sun, taking it’s prey out of sight. The rest of the birds turn and swoop around me, circling, talons splayed-Blinking, I sit up.The fan lazily turns, throwing shadows on the ceiling. The house is silent and hot, even though the sun has long since set.

Bleached Bone

I buried you in the marsh mud;setting a stone from the jetty above your head. The waves break quietly at your feet, mirroring the gray sky along the curved shore. The wind ruffles at my back, rushing through the brown reeds and wrinkling the water before disappearing. The white gulls rise and cry your name in a hundred broken voices, wheeling above the salty ground.They vanish as the tide changes, but your name still rings from all the hollows of overturned shells.

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The Brief Period During Which I Gave Up

I stopped. It had been a year since I admired the stars, I stoppedlooking upward content with the sound of my lonesome foot

falls, my body curled like the perpetual question mark. I stoppedcrinkling my eyes when I smiled or interrupting the funeral

procession of thought with day dreams. I stoppedbreathing poetry, art, or beautiful things. I

blackened my eyes and darkened my wardrobe. I stoppedgoing to bed early, eating my vegetables, reading. My

home, my anchor. My words, my drought. I stoppedlooking outside my own head to see what I would find.

It had been a year since I admired the stars. I stopped.

Hand-me-down Town

Your eyeballs left echoes I hear even now – dark streets tease me with your imagined anecdotes. Our soles are one – treading tandem cobblestones,admiring the architecture.The church?You probably stood where I stand – probablygazed with awe – probablydrank at this ate at thathole in the wall place.I know you did. You’re hereright now with me.

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Heart like fire

“It was her that gave the strength to me.” –Skellig (Skellig by David Almond)

If we could all betogetherin that one placewhere we may find love,artand joy.

Why together?Becauseeverybody needs balanceto keep them in thatworld.In between.

Let’s be each other‘s bridges.Strengthen, enlightenand help each othergetthere.

We all have beentherebefore. When ourhearts were stilllikefire.

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Habitual

“Typical.” –Mina (Skellig by David Almond)

Don’t be typical.Different is not wrong—it is enlightenment.

Certainty is typical.Let go. See wherenot knowing takes you.

Negative capabilityis a positive. Not beingable to identify, explain

is needed whenwanting to bean artist.

Break the habitand not know. Youwill find joy.

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Ossification

“”It is linked to another process,” she said, “by which the mind too, becomes inflexible. It becomes hard as bone. It is no longer a mind. It is a lump of bone wrapped in a wall of stone. This process is ossification.”” –Mina (Skellig by David Almond)

Beware!

There is a process creepinginto the crevices ofyour being.

It will blind you. Shut youout of the supernaturalworld.

It will close offyour channelsof communication.

Keep the fire burningto stop the mindfrom

stiffening.Numbing.Petrifying.

Once the processis completed. There is no wayback.

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The opposite of ordinary

“”Extraordinary,” she whispered.” –Mina (Skellig by David Almond)

I don’t thinkhe is that muchdifferentat all.

He has wings.So did I.He can fly.So could I.

But still we callSkellig extraordinarybecausewe are lost.

We flewfrom one worldto the next. Skippingthe middle.

Our wings did not survive.

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Klorofill

1.I have scrubbedthe poetry out of my handsmy bones are filledwith smoke from cartonsof indifferent cigarettes.

There is no exploit leftwhere dreams melt in lateneon burn or early morningtelevision. Rooted anonymityor vines that cloy close

or fear to try or not enoughwhen arms that circle are sometimesjust the crescent moon. I amburnt and paint-splattered, a rustedlightning rod in extremes but straight

and always lost on unfamiliar streetsherring-boned with flashing streetlightsafter 4 a.m. And what choices? Monochromaticfollow where decisions wander and raisecardboard with reclaimed board to call

“sanctuary” here amid the fruit fliesand almost-lawn. To mow down and pretendfor three days or the next rain;pane the windows with words betweenand carpets feigning photosynthesis in daylight.

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2.I hide my splintersfrom you–deepin my skin & afraidof the pain of absenceremoval, preferring

to let them root deepin my bones to regeneratefingers to feed off my blood,

just as I do, to spread deepand making room for itself

a welcome invasion.Like music possessionburning the shards of booksI have collected and placeswhere I have dreamed

my future for instant needof water. I am always thirstynow. Gallons of waterto cool the summer in my organsto soften the soil around my toes

my skin like birch paper and leaves palm up in breezes before the rain.

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There is a strong feeling of introspection when school is in session. I am not sure if other people feel it but it grows within me like a plague. We are all academic, all thinkers but are we all world connectors? I feel the thoughts, pounding to get out, clawing my skull in an attempt to break free. I want to learn everything, figuring everyone out. My brain picks victims, it always has, I just did not realize it before. Perhaps this is a form of puzzle. We speak of social literacy. i learned that before any other type of literacy. They say this can be a form of poetry, poetry with a lower case p. I have heard the rumors, floating though the stacks and i wonder have you as well? Punctuation rules and grammar have always been a must but now i wonder, are they as important as they appear, poets think not…but I am not a poet, just a dabbler in the vague. A safe place for dangerous ideas.

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Thank you to all my incredible writers!Think you’ve got what it takes to write something for us?Submit your stories and poems to jessicafrickdesigns@gmail

ALL IMAGES PROVIDED BY DANIELLE HARRIS PHOTOGRAPHY.

FOR MORE INFORMATION YOU CAN CONTACT HER AT [email protected]

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