Winged Nation

Spring 2012

Literary & ArtsMagazine

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Winged NationSpring 2012, Volume 19

Winged Nation is an artistic and literary forum for the un-spoken and the unexpressed. We seek to showcase students’ unique view of the world through art, literature, and design.

David Loebman | Forgotten Past | Digital Art

College of William and MaryWilliamsburg, VA 23185

On Facebook: search for “Winged Nation”On Twitter: @wingednationWMOn the web: wingednation.blogs.wm.eduEmail us at: winged.nation@gmail.com

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Editor’s NoteDear Reader,

Expression is the center of human experience. Since 1993, Winged Nation has been committed to providing students at the College of William & Mary with an outlet for their own expression through art, literature, and design. This year’s issue brings together a wide array student works, each one as beautiful and unique as the stu-dent who produced it. From the entrancing digital artwork of our cover artist, David Loebman, to Christine Camp’s delightfully surprising fiction piece, “Assumption,” and through all the stunning photography, moving artwork, heartfelt poetry, and vivid prose between, we hope the 19th volume of Winged Nation will move you as deeply as it did us.

As is our custom, we have designed every spread in this maga-zine by pairing together a selection of artwork and literature that we believe share an underlying theme. The design team has worked hard in their presentation to respect the intentions of each author and art-ist, while blending their works in a way that brings deeper resonance to the voice of each piece. New to the magazine this year are the edi-tor’s note, a dedicated page highlighting the awards we present to our most talented contributors, and an expanded staff listing page that showcases the individual work of our designers.

Thank you for reading Winged Nation, and in doing so, support-ing the artistic endeavors of your fellow students. We hope you enjoy it, and that somewhere between these pages, you too hear the siren song of inspiration. We look forward to seeing your own works of self-expression soon.Sincerely,

J.T. Fales,Editor-in-Chief

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Table of Contents

William WrightShun Fukuda

Neil KennovinChristine Camp

AnonymousCate ShermerRobin Crigler

William WrightRobin Crigler

J.T. FalesKyla Ainsworth

Tanner RussoNeil Kennovin

Kyla AinsworthAndrea Nicholson

Robin CriglerAnonymous

Hayley Stoddard

To Sunset in the Black Forest......................9A Humanity.................................................10Plantigrade Decomposition........................14Price Check..................................................16A Toothsome Serving of “Life”....................19Pop-Pop.......................................................22Nights and Home........................................29Mrs. Dalloway.............................................31Thanksgiving Days.....................................32The Music of Silence...................................34December 4th..............................................36Time.........................................................38Metallick: Oscillate, Emerge......................42January Flowers.........................................47Fuck It.........................................................49For Scott......................................................52Ode to an Oak..............................................58The Great Conversation.............................63

Beginnings.................................................7Without Horns............................................12Supermarket............................................20Assumption...............................................24My Thoughts on Summer..........................40A Shape for Shadows.................................45Mrs. Maddox...............................................51Sewing....................................................54Speak.......................................................56Wyoming....................................................61

Sierra BarnesJordan SutliveJordan Sutlive

Christine CampMichelle Repper

William LawrenceWilliam WrightMatthew Finley

Jordan SutliveDana Lotito

Poetry

Prose

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David LoebmanAlix Bendicksen

Kevin RackettAlix Bendicksen

Garrett KlausnerDarya Minovi

Garrett KlausnerBernice ChuJason WangBecca Schall

Sarah RossDavid Loebman

Kevin RackettJocelyn Williams

Ryan GoodmanAlix Bendicksen

Darya MinoviJocelyn Williams

Kevin RackettRyan Goodman

Jocelyn WilliamsBecca SchallTara Safaie

Alix BendicksenPaige Engelbrektsson

Marika ReedEmily MatsonKevin Rackett

Tara Safaie

Forgotten Past......................................2The Blue Door......................................6Untitled...............................................8Stamped...........................................11Squishy...............................................13Peace.................................................15Adolescence.......................................17Untitled..............................................18Hectic Awakening..............................21Texture...............................................23Vuvuzela Call.....................................25Red Riding Lotus...............................28Untitled..............................................30Fireworks..........................................33Anhinga.............................................35View from Montmarte.......................37Union Station.....................................39Horizon...............................................40Untitled..............................................43Green Cay...........................................44Iced Fruit............................................47Goodbye Yellow Brick Road..............48Leave it to the Birds...........................50Paris in Bloom....................................52Skylight..............................................54Converge............................................57Symbiosis.........................................59Untitled..............................................60Dream a Little Dream........................62

Art

Editor’s Note.......................................................................................3Staff....................................................................................................64Awards..................................................................................................66About Winged Nation.......................................................................67

Other

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Alix Bendicksen | The Blue Door |Photo6

Beginnings

Sierra Barnes

There was once a Writer who sat at his desk, pen in hand, paper before him. The paper was blank. The pen had ink, but the paper was blank. It was not as though he was lacking ideas: his head was filled with them: all kinds of ideas, wonderful ideas, terrible ideas, great heroes and leaders and warriors and maidens of exceptional virtue and villains of unparalleled infamy. He knew how it would begin, bit by bit, how it would end, in fire and ice, and everything that went in between. The pen had ink, but the paper was still blank. The Writer scratched his long white beard, creased his already wrinkled brow, and scowled. At his side, another man leaned: handsome, blond, clad all in a white suit. Perhaps he was not an editor, for he seemed to get along fine with the Writer, but the scowl on his face was not one of approval. “What do you think?” the Writer asked the Man in White. The Man in White folded his arms across his chest. “I don’t think you should do it,” the Man in White said.

“And why is that?” asked the Writer. “Think of what I shall create!” “Because,” the Man in White said. “This will create evil. What will happen will be ter-rible: there will be wars, famines, diseases, people will die and cry out in horror and rage, there will be murder and rape and destruction and fire will eat its way across the face of the world you created, and it will be evil. All that is good will be eaten by the serpent and the wolf and the crow, and all that will be left will be rocks and barren earth and scorched bones.” “But what of the good?” asked the Writer. “Will there not also be good in this world? Surely, there cannot be only evil.” The Man in White paused. “Yes,” he said. “Then,” smiled the Writer. “Perhaps it is worth it.” The Man in White bowed his head. “Perhaps it is,” he said. Then the Writer turned about, scratched his bearded chin with the tip of his pen, and leaned forward to write. The first thing he said was: Let there be Light!

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To Sunset in The Black Forest

Kevin Rackett | Untitled | Photo

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To forever see the light as itreaches through the trees, stretchingits lithe fingers for the eternal grasp, diffusing

an ethereal glow, the trunks shadowingtheir underlings; see gold spilling overnewly fallen leaves and restive, rotting old;

I look at the dying things with yellowing eyesand breathe the miasma of moldering years;I imagine that the sun lies in a shallow grave,

the Beech trees and their limbs its keepers of repose;sentinels for a jonquil globe retired in weakwarmth. I watch the unhurried orange blush

spread from its interment and soak into the roots,as though the boughs are afire before flaggingday expires; sinking further down, the trees

grow tall and thick in darkness, and the soundsof creatures and insects color the deepening pall,

the paling fires of earthen life;

you look at the living things with darkening eyesand taste the damp, sodden time immemorial,stretching your heavy fingers for the eternal grasp;

with drooping lid, you dream the only dreamyou ever have: to be always, to grace the mortalhalcyon tableau with your roving eye,ever lingering as you bid me adieu and I,enveloped by black spires, take leave of you.

William Wright

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A HUMANITY

Shun Fukuda

Life. Long and short. He feels everything and nothing, he is the first to wake and the last to sleep. Smelling of hunger, of malice, tasting happiness and piety. He makes do with what he has, and he is a part of this life. Hello Humanity. The world awaits.

Thump. Tha-Thump. The heartbeat jumps, frosty fingers turn warm, hairs riddled with dreams and mistakes drape across his eyes. He walks the first steps, as if he was the first to walk the moon, as if he took the strides to a revolution, as if he was the first to be born.

Name. A name. He smiles, jumps and writhes, dances and mourns. He is the best of both worlds and he is also none. What do they call him? Humanity.

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Alix Bendicksen | Stamped | Photo

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WithoutHe was one of the few born without horns. When he was born his mother immediately clutched him to her breast, her hands enveloping his head, not so much out of maternal belonging but to hide his loss. And that’s what it was, or at least that’s what everyone said it was: not a difference, but some integral facet of himself he’d misplaced. And so he grew up believing he was not whole. At first it was easy to hide this. The children in the village at this point had mere nubs where their horns would soon sprout. The boy thus wore a bandage around his forehead, and when questioned would complain that his mother told him it was much too bright outside for his pale skin, and he needed to cover his face. (His father had, two months before the boy was born, drowned in a boating accident several miles offshore.) At times, when it was overcast or he couldn’t bear his peers asking him the same question again, he’d mash cherries with his fingers, allowing the sticky juice to stain his bandage. Or sometimes, on those days when he woke up with the sun forming molten geometric shapes underneath his eyes, he would hit his head against the door un-til he felt his blood between his cracked lips. He then put his bandage over the wound. In this way he avoided lying to the people closest to him. Introversion was another way to escape. Through this he was able to elude eyes during his adolescence: if people didn’t know he existed, they wouldn’t know his horns didn’t exist either. During this time, whenever he was truly alone, he would sit underneath the porch, grip-ping the soil with both of his hands and willing his horns to grow. The veins in his temple would pulse and it became a way to pass the time, telling himself that if they grew, he could leave his solitude and join everyone else. He could meet the women his few friends visited behind the houses across the river and not feel ashamed or evasive; he could remove the frayed bandage he’d worn all this time. He wiped his hands across his forehead every morning, waiting for the one day he’d feel the tusks. But every day he would listen to his friends talk about their old age and children and tried his hardest to let consciousness flow out of him like the tide that claimed his father. Eventually he knew it wasn’t enough. On his twentieth birthday he took his boat out before dawn and as the light poured through the window of the ocean he dove in. He sat underneath the boat, sat under-neath the Earth’s porch and the last thing he saw before he closed his

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Squishy - Photograph - Garrett Klausner

Horns eyes was a yellow octopus nestling between two rocks. He shut his eyes until he felt a woman’s hand cradling his forehead, as though she were checking for fever. He opened his eyes and she was made of oil, and she held his hand until all the color was erased from the Earth and he could sit and speak with these women, as they asked to tell them more and began to remove his veins.

Jordan Sutlive

Garrett Klausner | Squishy | Photo

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P l a n t i g r a d e D e

Loving, lustful grasps on behalf of my fruit Sustenance filled, diaspora ensured Skin-cloaked ivory cradles natural capsules Mutual morning suffering for expansive purposes Trading vital airs and aromas like baseball cards Bone and vine entwined, prepared for the Rubicon Deception. Mechanical mercenaries show no mercy Passionate touch decimated, unemotive output increased Screeching claws bend the iron-love triangle to isosceles Dying patients crave water and sun but refuse the IV without an orderly appearance A slow withering is preferable to the artificial bloom and perish

c o m p o s i t i o n

Neil Kennovin

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Darya Minovi | Peace | Photo

“To my incredible sister, a newly admitted W&M student, Shiva.”

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I am

inside out,

figuratively and literally,

every ounce of breakfast I dutifully swallowed this morning

thrown back up, glimmering facetiously in the toilet bowl.

It could be the stress or the weather or those

99¢ burritos we bought at the gas station—

and you bitched about my spending even then—

but it is not what the

pink line perched precariously on my

porcelain tank indicates, not

something new inside of me,

because you

never gave me anything for free.

Price Check

Christine Camp

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Garret Klausner | Adolescence | Photo

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Bernice Chu | Untitled | Photo

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Anonymous

A Toothsome Serving of “Life”

I seek the sumptuous folds of the buckling leaf, the gentle crick of every crack Which crackles quick to the bite of the breeze, calling temptingly of the whisking brisk to come. And in these folds, these cracks of cricks Which tinkle tellingly like the gentle flutter of a butterfly’s stutter, I sense that sweet sweet sugar, that honeysuckle-thing called life. That honeysuckle-thing which does strike and seethe in silent revolt just beneath the crackled buckle of the brisk-bit leaf, does revel in its subtlety, its utter non-existence in the fractured façade of this svelte little leaf.

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It is two o’clock in the morning, and they choose to park at the supermarket because the su-permarket closes at midnight. They wait for half an hour for cars to pass. He is worried about a stranger’s headlights spilling through his truck’s windows—they are both seventeen, and have never done this before—and as they wait, he tries to prevent her from asking what hap-pened to his arm. He tries to offer one of the cigarettes he keeps inside the owner’s manual in his glove compartment, but he doesn’t smoke (they’re his brother’s, who is at college), and is worried she may ask him to join her. He fumbles around for CDs, but stops after a minute or so—he’s not sure what she likes, and knows that if she doesn’t like the music she’ll ask to turn the music down and then turn to him and ask him if she could look at the stump, which is kept inside his t-shirt’s knotted sleeve. Instead he does nothing, drums against the wheel with his hand, wonders if he should hide the crucifix draped around his rearview mirror. She presses her feet against the windshield, hums a few bars of a song they heard at the party they left an hour ago.

But he can’t distract her, and after a while, as he rattles inside himself, she turns and looks at everything except the arm, which he knows is the moment she’ll ask. And she does: she sucks in one of her cheeks, and he can see her eyes widen through the slats of light made by the supermarket’s sign. And when she asks, he knows he has one of two options. He can lie, telling her it was mauled by dogs or crunched underneath a car—an event caused by animals or people free of identities, a situation beyond his control. Or he could tell the truth, something he hasn’t told anyone outside of his family. He opens his mouth to speak.

“My father, uh—this was six or so years ago, and it was his fortieth birthday—one of his friends bought him a rifle, something he’d wanted, because he was going to hunt deer that af-ternoon—so, um, he’s had a few to drink, and he goes out with his friends and shoots rounds in the backyard. Which, our backyard is like five or six acres, we’re closer to Lubbock than here…but so he goes out and shoots some, and then he comes back, and my mom is telling him to hand her the gun, but he wants to show it to me. So he tells me to walk over, and I’m eleven, I think, and I walk over, and he’s showing me the stock, the barrel, the safety, telling me what each of the parts are and how they work…and I just remember this light, and it felt like he punched me, or something, except it was the gun. God, it hurt. And we’re two hours away from any hospital, we’re somewhere else, and all I remember is—he’s wrapping his shirt around my arm, and she holds my arm like I’ve got a fever. By then, when my dad’s decided I’m okay, I sleep until I’ve forgotten what I am. And I guess by then, my arm’s infected, so, I just. I’m there, and now I’m here.”Later, as they discover each other’s skin, his stump nuzzles itself against her shoulders, her legs. But, without nerves or veins, without fingers, all it can do is press itself against her and attempt to feel. Outside, through the parentheses her feet made on his windshield, the super-market’s sign blinks out light. It reads: WHENEVER YOU NEED US, WE’RE HERE. Under-neath the sign, a dog sniffs at the asphalt, its leash trailing behind it like an open question.

Jordan Sutlive

supermarket

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Hectic Awakening | Jason Wang | Photo

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“For my grandfather, who remains always in my heart.”

Slightly scented in cigarette smoke,donning a navy blue windbreaker, loafers, baseball hat

thin gray hair caps your worn face, still proud,eyes still bright with wit, quick to flash.

A slight tap of the cigarette sends ashes to the traydead, gone—a reminder of life’s finality

you walk with purpose, daring anyone to mistake youfor a feeble old man.

A quick hug to us kids,you’re off to help in the kitchen, where

nimble fingers separate shrimp from skinsand potatoes from peels.

A small turn of the lips, a smileplays on your face while the TV blares

I love you most in thatalmost-bedtime, almost-asleep calm.

Cate Sherman

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Becca Schall | Texture | Photo

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Telling people he’s straight has always been a formidable task for Kelly. No, that’s not quite right. The telling has al-ways been exceptionally easy. It’s the con-vincing half of the equation that has proven the challenge. Men and woman alike take one look at that platinum-blonde bob and that leopard-print clutch and those 3.5-inch red satin pumps that he got on sale at Nor-dstrom last January and decide—right then and there—that he is the fag of all fags. It’s hideously unfair. He’s got dog-eared Play-boys on his bathroom floor, for God’s sake.

The girls that litter the pages of his favorite serial in various stages of undress have always been his type: vapid and vacant and equipped with ample—if artificial—cleavage. The cen-terfolds are obligingly silent, however, which is more than he can say for their live-action coun-terparts. It’s been months since he’s approached one of those vacuous beauties he adores, because he’s tired of the screaming and the slapping and the occasional glass of water to the face. (He spends a good hour each morning applying his makeup, and only half of it is waterproof.) Most women, he’s found, take his advances as personal attacks on their femininity. He supposes it’s his own fault for pursuing the ones too dim-witted to see past the pantyhose. It’s been a dry, dry year.

When Kelly steps into the Plum Bistro on Fri-day afternoon in a patent leather miniskirt and matching heels, it isn’t to impress anyone; he’s all but forsaken the notion of romance in his foreseeable future. He’s just after a jolt of caf-feine to keep him going for the remainder of his workday. If he was scouting for tail, this would hardly be the place to do it; the little bistro’s cozy and perpetually sunny, but its host of socially inept servers tends to ward off most potential prospects. The waitress taking his order isn’t even his type—quite the opposite, in fact. She’s got a dark, uneven complexion, two lifeless pigtails bound on either side of her head with a dozen technicolor rubber bands, and a tragically flat chest. She will never field

an offer from Hef. Her round, dark eyes do have an endearing cluelessness about them, but she’s offset them with so much piss-yellow eyeshadow—gauche even by a drag queen’s standards—that she’s effec-tively ruined her only redeeming charac-teristic. He thinks nothing more of her un-til she returns to his table with his coffee.

“Here you go, m—” she begins, but she stops short, peering intently at something beneath the table. He wonders if maybe he’s dropped his wallet or his keys, or if there’s some insect scuttling around on the sticky wooden floor, but she opens up her bubblegum-pink mouth before he can come to any conclusion. “Oh. You’re still pre-op. Do you prefer ‘sir’ or ‘miss?’”

He’s so violently taken aback that he doesn’t even think to cross his legs. He just gawks—dumbfounded—at the brunette still brazenly staring up his apparently much-too-mini-mini-skirt. For a full minute or two, this is all he can do; never in his life has anyone asked him, with such an utterly unabashed tone, whether he would prefer to be identified by his female ensemble or the male genitalia it has evidently failed to conceal. That he would be asked such a question by a waitress at the Plum Vegan Bistro (the service here is bad, but never this bad) is more than he can handle. He starts to laugh, so hysterically and unexpectedly that the poor girl jumps like a scalded ani-mal. Her tray clatters to the floor, sending both coffee and cream flying, and the re-sounding crash fills the entire restaurant.

“CHLOE!” screams a voice from the back of the establishment. The hapless waitress mumbles some inaudible apology and runs off with flushed cheeks, leaving her mess behind her. When Kelly’s finally able to rein in his laughter, he grabs a few nap-kins off the table and stoops down to mop up as much of the growing puddle as he can; it’s partially his fault, after all. He shouldn’t have laughed like that. She was trying, in some backwards, grace

ASSUMPTION

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Sarah Ross| Vuvuzela Call | Photo

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a seat,” he says cordially, and she looks as though she may explode from the effort of trying to keep her expression neutral.

“I’m on the clock,” Chloe insists, and though she says it with a perfectly even tone she clutches her tray to her chest like a shield.

“I’ll only take a minute of your time,” he promises, flashing his artificially white smile at her. Good looks must have some power after all, because after nervously checking behind her back she relents and takes the seat.

“Are you teasing me?” she asks point-blank, shifting uncomfortably in the chair and looking to be in some mild degree of distress.

“A little,” Kelly confesses with a laugh. She pouts those bubblegum-pink lips. “I’m sorry.” He means it. “I just couldn’t leave you alone. I’ve never met anyone so tactless in my entire life.”

“Thanks,” she replies humorlessly.

“I’m not insulting you,” he assures her, but she doesn’t look convinced. “To be honest, I’m a

little impressed by you. Most people treat trannies like me with either painstak-

ing delicacy or total contempt. That’s how uncomfortable the situation is

for them. But you were so unerr-ingly at ease that you looked straight up my skirt without blushing. It was a bit awe-inspiring, actually.” Chloe opens

her mouth but says nothing for a good thirty seconds. When she finally does,

it is not quite the “thank you” he is hoping for.

“Who are you?”

He grins impishly at her. “What’s the context, Chloe?” She grimaces a bit at hearing her name spoken by a complete stranger. “Are you looking for my name, my background, my sexual identity—”

“Your name,” she says hotly, “will suffice.”

“Kelly Dickinson,” he replies amicably, and when she raises an eyebrow, he adds, “as printed on my birth certificate. Cross my heart. And to answer Friday’s question, ‘Sir’ Kelly would be preferable. The drag is aesthetic in nature only. There’s no ‘op’ in my foresee-able future.” She shifts some more in her chair, ner-vously tugging at one of the rubber bands in her hair.

“I’m... really sorry about the other day,” she says sheepishly. “My girlfriends are always telling me I get a little too... familiar with customers.” Oh, yes. She’s definitely cuter than he gave her credit for.

less way, to be considerate. He presses several of the napkins over the spill with perfectly polished fingernails and wonders if maybe he wouldn’t re-gret getting to know such a girl. It is like this, hunched over and probably ruining his profes-sional manicure, that he decides—still smil-ing—to return to the Plum the next afternoon.

She isn’t manning the tables when he returns on Saturday, and she’s absent on Sunday, too. He worries that perhaps the poor kid has lost her job on his account, but when he steps in for lunch on Monday, there she is, with her rainbow-colored elastics and that hideous yellow eyeshadow. He’s seated by a young male waiter who eyes him warily the entire walk to the ta-ble; when he pleasantly requests to be attended to by “Chloe,” the relief in his would-be server’s eyes is palpable. Kelly easily dismisses it—even if he was gay, he wouldn’t spring for a guy like that—and waits patiently for the unsuspecting girl to arrive, his prettiest smile at the ready. When she rounds the corner with a menu in tow, he watches with morbid amusement as her carefree expression melts right off her face. She snaps back to reality in a few seconds and does all she can to regain her usual air of indiffer-ence, but it’s a futile endeavor. She’s just not that good an actress.

“Welcome to the Plum,” Chloe says in a care-fully measured voice, trying her very hardest to pretend she doesn’t recognize the six foot two drag queen in front of her. He decides to play along, because this game might be fun.

“Just a coffee,” he says before she can even hand him the menu. “Thank you.” She gives him a queer look, as if she can’t de-cide whether or not he re-members her. She can’t really believe that, can she? Maybe she’s a little cuter

than he gave her credit for. With-

out any real resolu-tion, she nods.

“No problem.”

But it is. Because when she comes back Kelly’s pulled out

a chair for her, and he’s making a sweeping gesture with his arm. She puts

down his coffee before she has the opportu-nity to drop it all over the floor again. “Have

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“Don’t apologize,” he begs her, raising a hand. “If I’d taken of-

fense, I wouldn’t have come back here, especially not to see you.

Truth be told, the whole specta-cle was a bit charming. In fact....”

Does he dare? It’s been month after month of painful rejection by women

less blunt than this girl, but... well, why the hell not? The busty blonde

type certainly hasn’t been panning out for him, and this cheeky little waitress

may be just the girl to end his hopeless string of romantic failures. “Would you

be interested in a date this Saturday?”

Chloe’s eyes go wide, and—guiltily—Kel-ly has to admit that surprise is a good

look on her; it obscures her eyeshadow. “You’re not... you’re not serious, are you?”

She doesn’t believe him. He runs a hand through his hair and lets out a defeated sigh. Of course

she doesn’t. At least she doesn’t have a glass of water on hand, though the coffee may make

a more painful substitute. “I am. Is it the wig or the lipstick that makes you doubt my sincerity?”

“No, no. It’s not that,” she says quickly, waving her hands and shaking her pigtails. “It’s just.... I mean....” She lowers the tray onto the table and makes a crude ges-ture to her chest. “I don’t field too many offers from guys. Men aren’t usually interested in chicks whose tits are as small as theirs. Actually,” she notes, pointing, “with that padded bra, yours are a bit bigger than mine.”

She believes him. She believes him. Mother of God, she actually believes him. She really is the cure to his idiot ob-session with those idiot girls who make blind assumptions about men they know nothing about. Before he even knows what he’s doing, Kelly’s leaned over the table and grabbed her face in his hands, kissing her like a man possessed. When he finally pulls away, breathless and overjoyed, Chloe can only look at him with those big brown eyes, bubblegum-pink lips open in the dumbest sort of surprise.

“Dude,” she finally says with a chuckle. “I’m a lesbian.”

Christine Camp

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David Loebman | Red Riding Lotus | Digital artwork

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night of all nights when needed so much by no fault of your own you were not there not because I was sad and not, for once, because I had a sword in my chest or because all of my breadcrumbs had been eaten by birds as I fled but some amorphous terror or quiet need to tell, to tell, to tell to turn quietly towards you and to say, “Amanda do you see? obelisks that rise five hundred feet and hieroglyphic columns made of salt do you see that we are surrounded by Anubises and Isis blocks our way? do you feel the cool desert nighttime on the skin of your shoulders as I do on my face? that vagrant cheetahs prowl dunes of copper coins and a canopy of feathers shrouds the earth? it does not make me sad and it does not make me want to cry” and underneath olive trees surrounded by a flaming snow we might crane our necks towards each other walking eastward towards the bay

Robin Crigler

Nights

and

Home“To A.T.”

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Kevin Rackett | Untitled | Photo

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“Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of add-ing day to day.” –Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf The grass was green and the sky was blue and how tall were the trees, their limbs without bounds marching towards the sky. It grew, it moved, waving, rippling, flowing beneath and around her. Pulsing through the earth, moist soil between her toes. The bell sounded, calling her, a summons. Get up, it demanded, and see how the mighty trees race towards the clouds. No summit, no peak, no breaking point. The birds have wings and the people legs and they move, waving, rippling, flowing. The bell reverberated with purpose into her bones. Get up. The sun is hot and the grass green and there is movement through the trees, an egging whisper that swept through her skin. The wind swelled up and rushed through her, giving her breath, elating her skin and her feet. Get up and see how small you stand next to the trunk stretching to the sky.

Dana Lotito

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Robin Crigler

Chaos, chaos, fire and thunder rule the land at night Burning all the structures that we build

And smoking us into frantic dreams at night like lotus eaters Fleeing the day like rats, I woke

And saw the bus had gone

There is no oneness like that missed the bus oneness The knowledge that your dream, unfigurative but real

Had come and gone in silence like a ghost And you, my Ariadne, on the shore

Abandoned by your hopes And condemned to royal purple wilderness

Beneath the spires and the eternal pens There is no oneness like the missed the bus oneness

Frantically On phones

It cannot be And is that

Taxis? Perhaps I’ll call They’ll want to

Cost and Taxis?

Do An obligation?

Taxi?

Suddenly you’re speeding through the boney trees Like so many enormous buried skeletal arms, waving

Or maybe as a thwart raising itself in dying Mortal anger gleaming greyness in the pale November sun

As my mind turns thoughts, terrible upstate thoughts As Peterborough passes

And Troy falls to you

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Thanksgiving

Days

Jocelyn Williams | Fireworks | Photo33

Six taut still steel stringsglint in the afternoon sun.

Dust sits on silence.

A row of milk whitepunctuated with black slats

hides idle hammers.

Music books lay out,that the deaf might read a song,

pages fade with time.

An alarm clock ticks,speakers and cell phones sing out,

talking voices ring.

No time for music –there’s so much else to be done!

Maybe tomorrow.

J.T. Fales

the music of silence

34

Ryan Goodman | Anhinga | Photo

35

It fell like shredded paper,ashes lightly dusting yaour tonguefor a moment before disappearing,fleeing the heat from your body.

I paused, shivering, before meltinginto the safety of generator heatand my grandfather’s oversize sweater

but couldn’t shake the image:you,drenched in yellow light,lips icy with the kiss of winter,waiting for spring.

December 4th

I left you standing in the snow that day,staring into the light of the street lampso you could see it better. thDecember 4

Kyla Ainsworth

I left you standing in the snow that day, staring into the light of the street lamp

so you could see it better.

It fell like shredded paper, ashes lightly dusting your tongue for a moment before disappearing,

fleeing the heat from your body.

I paused, shivering, before melting into the safety of generator heat

and my grandfather’s oversize sweater

but couldn’t shake the image: you, drenched in yellow light,

lips icy with the kiss of winter, waiting for spring.

36

Alix Bendicksen | A View From Montmarte | Photograph

37

Time gathers on an edge drips s s s patters smatters spatters splashes dashes crashes to the floor. Time flows snakes s s s slows, goes pianis-simo careens ebbs gushes glides slides in tides.

Time

38

Time bustles s bristles s s s s bosses is beautiful bends belittles bows to no man but makes a beggar out of many. Time swoops droops s s s s doles out moles sprinkles wrinkles is nothing, is everything wears many hats is midwife, is coroner spits in the face of mothers who look upon their milky babes and dare to think they’ll stay that way.

Darya Minovi | Union Station | Photo

Tanner Russo

39

Jocelyn Williams | Horizon | Photo

Summer is winding down, and yet again I’m left speechless. I cannot believe that it left me so soon after getting intimate with me. Will it call? I hope it calls. …It definitely won’t call. It’s a flighty bastard (tell all your friends). Oh sure, promises of sleeping in, hanging out with people, and making money all seem like a glorious heaven when you’re a sleep-deprived dirt-poor hermit scraping out your last paper on the precipice of finals week, praying to God that you won’t snap… or maybe praying that you will… maybe snap a limb… that’ll get you out of an exam… right? Probably not. Anyway, summer finally calls and you’re so glad to get away from the abusive relationship that is college that you jump! You’ve been romanticizing it all year. You let it “break up” with you last year when it promised you that it would come back for you. And as the school year wound down, as you stabbed yourself with sharpened pencils to maintain consciousness, you thanked god it had texted you nonchalantly. You’ve been aching for warmth and good food and good god a nice clean bed. You drooled a little bit… on multiple occasions. You didn’t want to seem to needy, but damn it you were desperate!

Yet here we are. Summer is coming to a close, and let’s be honest—it was a disappointment. Only half of your friends came back this summer—the rest are studying abroad, working in out-of-state intern-ships—you know—being more successful than you (and letting you know it). The other half of your friends might as well be gone. Everyone is working a 9-5 (or worse) and the small amount of free time they are allotted is used for glorified spacing out (aka TV)—they are way too exhausted to hang out or they are trying to get some laundry done, buy some food, be real humans/pseudo-adults. It’s not that I’m any less exhausted, but I feel the need to complain about it, because my friends used to be the en-ergetic ones. They used to inspire me and make me feel that anything was possible. They used to have a fire that drove me to be a better person. Now I can only find a spark every now and then. I see these people fettered into jobs and going towards careers that would not embrace or fuel their fire. Then I begin to wonder how many adults used to be just like us. How many adults were interesting and pas-sionate and pushed for change and improvement have been broken, forced to comply with the world. Left only to push for security—to give up the hope for change in exchange for the possibility of routine, because they’ve worked their entire lives for a routine, and how dare a dumb kid try to take that a away from them.

My Thoughts on Summer

40

41

Summer is a slutty tease. All of the things you wanted to do during the school year that you were too tired or too busy to get to were only put off in good conscience because you promised yourself they would get done in summer. HA! haha. ha. How naive. How juvenile. What wishful thinking. You sopho-more! Of course you don’t have time! You have a job! You have to eat! You have to look a little more put together than you do during the school year, because it’s summer, and let’s face it—people only put up with you wearing pajamas 90% of the time if they know you’re getting less than 4 hours of sleep a night. So now you’ve become this person. This drone. This disgusting, unfulfilled number that sits at a desk and works, and can’t even say—“This isn’t who I actually am—I have this hobby on the side.” Be-cause you don’t. You can’t say that you’re good at something if you never do it. You can’t call yourself a certain person when the whispers of your actions get louder and louder until they overwhelm your voice just pat you on the shoulder and tell you that you are in fact someone else.

Summer is a reminder that time is passing. A reminder of what summers used to be, and the sham that summers have become (how can it even still call itself “summer”!?). You were never disappointed by summers. They would last for an eternity, and you could do whatever you pleased. I’ve caught myself more than once wishing that I could transport some of the work I have now into the past, so I wouldn’t be so busy all the time. I think—“Wow, I didn’t do anything. I should have been getting ahead. Using my time constructively.” Then I pause and remember that those moments of “laziness” are perhaps the only truly calm memories I have. I would sit around and just think- I didn’t have to worry, I didn’t have to be anywhere. I could just allow myself to mature and become a better person. I could play with the fireflies and make lemonade. I could jump in the pool and just splash around. No one would expect me to swim laps. No one would expect me to use every moment constructively. I could just play. I could beg my mom for just one dollar, please just one! to get a big fat piece of candy, because I’ve been good this week! I promise I won’t ask again (yes I will.) and then scurry into a corner to have a pure moment of joy. What a waste of money and calories and fat. It’s truly sad that those children are fooled by those flashy wrappers. What disgusting corporation produced this crap? And what on earth are those par-ents thinking?!—Things have changed, and only summer elucidates the extent to which they have. So I guess I really hate change. I guess I am turning into one of those adult things.

BUT I DON’T HATE CHANGE. I just hate change for the worst, and I guess becoming an adult is real-izing that 99% of changes will lean in the negative direction. Maybe I’m just being pessimistic. I wish I could believe in that 1%. I wish I could think that maybe the things I care about could be that 1%, and are therefore worth fighting for. But I can’t, not anymore. Not after a precious treasure like summer could betray me this way and become part of the 99%. Not anymore.

I honestly wish I could break up with summer. Freeze time, before things got any worse. I wish I could resist its promises, and apologies. I wish I could be strong. But the idea of summer is too sweet, and that’s what I’m in love with. I love the idea that everyone is free and home and excited to see each other. I love the thought of intellectual conversations in the moon, and dancing and laughing harder than I have in my life over a story about a lot of juice. I love the thought of closing my eyes and letting the shivers run down my back as I savor a moment of pure happiness surrounded by people that love me. I love the memory, and though times are changing, I’ll never let it go, but because times are chang-ing I will resent what it has become.

Michelle Repper

41

METALLICK:

Neil Kennovin

The blurring furnace keeps me awake.It creeps as I stave off sleep, its song.

Academia itch attempts to be scratched,Wooden sonnets spill, splintering bunch...

I feel something not quite me molting my spine.

Threads of my back tear openIt emerges like a coin from a magical palm.Pains it caused hurt not, but felt so strangeI begged for the least of its worst intentions, butIts shiny scowl turned to intent, the demonic angel spake:

“You focus not and tarry too long.Fix your ways or the arrow I clench

Will enter you as I departed, recreant.”Reality set in, abstract prisms flew away.

What to do now? It has entered my brain.

42

OSCILlATE, EMERGE

Kevin Rackett | Untitled | Photo

43

A Shape for Shadows

Ryan Goodman | Green Cay | Photo

44

My seven-year-old brother stands in the light of the doorway, his slanted shadow elongated onto the dark lawn. “Do you want your Pikachu doll or don’t you?” I ask. “Because it’s still where I left it, lying in the little graveyard in the middle of the old cornfield. You’ll have to go by the forest path to get there.” Harry’s pupils grow until his gray iris is only a sliver like the edge of the moon during a lunar eclipse. His mouth snaps open and closed. “Don’t worry, there’s no reason to be scared. Except, of course, for the football-sized purple slugs that live in the trees and drop down on your face to suck your brains out through your nostrils.” “Couldn’t you come with me since you’re three years older and know everything about mon-sters?” “Oh, I will,” I tell him, jumping down the porch steps and disappearing into the shadow of the garage. “You just won’t see me. By the way, you’d better hurry up. The Stufflupagus is already on the prowl.” “Wha-whats the Stufflupagus?” “It’s like a tiny elephant, only a little bigger than a fox, but it’s covered all over in scratchy brown fur and crawls along on eight long knobby legs. It’s always creeping around in the dark corners of playgrounds and old cornfields looking for stuffed animals. And when it finds one, it jabs its sharp little trunk into it and sucks up all of the stuffing. When you come to the graveyard next morning, all you’ll find will be a floppy yellow skin with a tiny hole in the back where the Stufflupagus got it.” I watch through the garage window as Harry tiptoes down the porch steps one at a time like a swimmer descending into an icy lake. In September the night had been warm and had lain like a heavy blanket on my body. Later in the year it will be cold and windy, mak-ing me huddle into myself for warmth, but tonight, the October air has just the slightest chill, and I dissolve into the still dark until I am the night, as wide as the horizon and as tall as the stars. Harry hesitates on the edge of the lawn, where the darkness piles up against the trees so solidly that I’m always afraid of slamming into it. As he approaches the black plastic com-poster that squats by the edge of the woods, he glances over his shoulder at the melted but-ter lights of our house. I’ve told him about the Compost Thing. It all started when nice Mr.

45

smell of old green peppers and dead fish fills the air. A pitch-black banana peel squeezes to the surface of the composter, slides over the side, and flops onto Harry’s sneaker. He bolts. The dull red of his fire engine jacket vanishes into the woods. “Don’t worry,” I tell the Compost Thing as it rears in a tidal wave of rotting vegetables, disturb-ing a cloud of fruit flies, “You can always get him on the way back. Besides, I have other crea-tures on the forest path.” The Compost Thing waves its anemic tendrils at the place where Harry was a few seconds ago. A cluster of fingers dangling like wind chimes from a mess of dripping spaghetti wiggles in my direction as I slip into the forest. Brambles claw red pictograms on my bare legs as I follow Harry’s rainbow ski hat. It’s not cold, so he must be wearing it to insulate himself against the dark. I keep a few yards from the path, out of sight in the undergrowth. A whoosh of velvet fills the darkness. Harry freezes, then starts running. Dusty wings gleam in the gaps between interlacing branches. I follow, leaping over the marshy ground from logs pretending to be crocodiles to crocodiles pretending to be logs, trail-ing after the snow-white forms of the Bloodsucker Moths. Harry flails his back with his arms as a moth the size of an eagle alights on his jacket, unfurling its proboscis as it stares at nowhere with enormous black eyes. Another moth and then another attaches itself until Harry is covered in fat furry bodies, and then, as he stumbles out of the woods and into the stubble of the old cornfield, they are gone. He picks himself up and takes a hesitant step. Dead corn stalks rustle under his feet like mum-mified snakes. In the middle of the cornfield the crooked tombstone teeth of the graveyard hud-dle. The fields go on, past the highway that separates this field from the next and all the way to the horizon, a barren moonlit plain. And on the edge of the desolation, the smudge of color that is Harry is moving inexorably toward his Pikachu. I won’t let him reach it. He will turn back here. I step out into the field from behind a loblolly and draw the night around me like a cloak. I call on all my creatures, the Window Tapper that drums its fingers against the glass on windy nights, hoping to be let in, the Tooth Man who sits on the park bench watching people go by and popping small white objects into his mouth from his grubby paper bag of molars and canines, the Rug Thing that looks like a doormat but isn’t. Nothing. Just the vast void of space arching over the endless fields. A car’s headlights glide across the highway and are gone. I strain my ears for the rush of dark wings against the stars and the rhythmic slopping of rubbery things sucking on bones in muddy burrows. Nothing. Silence squeezes the sound out of the air, pressing out every denizen of the night I had ever imagined until none of them has ever existed. I am alone, trapped like a bug under the dome of sky, ogled by the impersonal eye of the moon. I shriek and run crashing down the path, glancing over my shoulder at the patches of nothing where Bloodsucker Moths and Tree Creepers should be, past the compost bin filled with only apple cores and black-ened tuna fish salad, until I am huddled in my bedroom with all the lights on. Eventually Harry comes back, clutching his mud-stained Pikachu triumphantly to his chest. “There were all these things and they all came to get me, and just when I was almost there I heard the cry of the Stufflupagus. But I ran over and got Pikachu just before it could.”

He is much braver than I will ever be. Soon he is curled up around Pikachu, fast asleep. But I stay up, waiting for all the monsters that I created to make the nothingness less lonely, while the blackness sits silently outside the house and settles slowly inside my head.

William Lawrence

46

flowers

January

they fight through the days with each ounce of elegant and

lonely fragility, lost in the distance between

the roots and sky, rising in hopes of endless beauty

while embalmed in jewels of frost, they reach their glory,

a drop of color in an eternal storm.

Kyla Ainsworth

Jocelyn Williams | Iced Fruit | Photo

47

Becca Shall | Goodbye Yellow Brick Road | Photo

48

Fuck it

Andrea Nicholson

i’m sorry i’m not happy everyday my mind is racing ahead of me toying with my emotions. i’m sorry i’m not your ray of sunshine excuse me while i cry my saccharine cacophony. i’m sorry i didn’t laugh today; i think i lost my funny bone on my last vacation. i’m sorry, i’ve checked out the pressure’s far too much, and, frankly, i’m worn down. so i’ll scream out; “it’s not you, it’s me,” “i’m drowning in regrets,” clichés have run amuck and i yearn for silence. “it’s not you, it’s me,” life’s not over yet but i have nothing left; and i yearn for darkness. “it’s not you, it’s me,” this time i’ve lost it, there’s no turning back, but i kind of like it. “it’s not you, it’s me,” maybe i’ll say goodbye, or, better yet, just fuck it.

49

Tara Safaie | Leave it to the Birds | Photo

50

Backseat of my parents’ station wagon would it be different?— if the seats were not such a blasted space if they didn’t call out that this would be gone soon; think: I’ve been camping one pitiable time before

Ms. Maddox

I laugh in my bones and the comedian wears the devil’s mask over his saintly one; and the evergreen pines keep their needles in wintered death. We collect time in fragments, stilled moments distilled where there should be arms, legs; where hands, feet— what is mine? is yours? Whorls of brittle hair lain down to rest, you are bending, bending down to me amidst the crumbling dry rot; and you lift your hands full of time, of the day dressed out white and I am so very far, tangled in wind, the open window in the dead of winter; in this house of clanging tin; your deflowering death’s lips; time and direction bound by animal faith. It’s our time to drive past grayed stone, whistling from rouged cheeks.

William Wright

51

“These are the pretty ones, the zinnias I learnt

I’d no awareness that they even were I’ll take you to the field in which they rest”

The journey of a golf cart Whipping furious, warm and brisk

Along the summer roads and dusty nights Lulls me, lulls me, lulls me And will follow me in sleep

Alix Benedicksen | Paris in Bloom | Photo

52

For

Scott

“Behold, the shack, a stately pleasure dome” Behold the sad escape, the sliding back

Which lulls me, lulls me, lulls me And will follow me in sleep

And he took me to the field and showed me round But by that time the dusk was almost gone So the colours mattered less and less to us

The farm looked somehow regal in the night Hothouses loomed like foremen in the fields

Below them, row on row of blackberries

We picked them as the night pushed further on The large ones loud like neon lights and falls The smaller taste of scrapes upon the ground

So sour yet alluring still to taste The telltale red seductive on the branch

They are living both this summer in a house With a leaky roof, no plumbing and four fans

A turtle lives with spite upon their floor And filthy futons lie with them at night

“We made a life both sorry and triumphant” I feel him think in every word he says

Robin Crigler

53

For

Scott

53

SO MUCH CARE MUST BE TAKEN WHEN REMOVING STITCHES FROM THE MOUTH. Whether it’s been days, months, or years, never opening your mouth is painful. The anticipa-tion builds until the very last moment. Every morning you look in the mirror, wiping the sleep out of your eyes, only to see a blurry image of a cage staring back at you. Blinking awake, your eyes always run down your face, from the ruffled hair to the unshaven sideburns meeting at a long slit, sewn tight by the past. It doesn’t matter why. You only know you want it open.

You move the muscles around behind the thread and watch the cage pull tight, a Chinese finger trap on your lips. Your fingers run across the rough lines and push in until they pull so tight on the holes around your mouth that you can’t bear it. You give the reflection a weary look and realize that now is not the time. One more day, you tell yourself. You’re the only one who knows when the time is right and you’re the only one who can remove them with the care necessary but, day in and day out, you look upon them and wonder when that day will come.

Days are more trouble than they’re worth. They’re made worse by watching others move their lips freely. They talk amongst each other in packs, one in the corner, one by the stairs, and one

Paige Engelbrektsson | Skylight | Photo

54

SEWINGMatthew Finley

blocking your way to the classroom; so much to say, you’d think they would sit down together. The people can talk fast and loose. They spit out truths, stretches, and lies. When your mouth is sewn shut you get to listen to all these things. A person asks what you think, and you can’t say a word. The punch line is hidden behind their mistake. They think it’s because your mouth is shut. Someone else tells you to use your words and you finally turn and head on in the direction you were going.

Subjects become easier to understand. If you never have anything to say then listening becomes your fallback. You only take things in, never give anything back. You chew on the back of your lip and roll your tongue around, wondering if anyone can see how obviously the muscles twitch in your jaw. This is at first. Then you stop caring. You begin to wonder if you ever could have something to say. Then you think you could be the talker in the front row or the guy in the back or even the person sitting directly behind you that has no filter. You place your palm over your mouth and put your head down.

You stopped eating. The body doesn’t need food when it’s not wasting energy on speech. It becomes apparent how little the body needs when it is not giving anything to the world. The world never knows you’re there and its needs never weigh on you. You become light as a balloon, always floating from place to place. But your feet start to miss the ground. Trying to let the Earth know you want to come down teaches you again that the time isn’t right. The threads still hold and your body still hovers.

The string feels intrusive where it passes through your upper lip. You smell the time that’s passed. A gust of wind takes you away, and you embrace it. If it’s not time then it’s not time. As you let go, you drift along, unsure of where you’re going but happy to be headed that way. You close your eyes and purse your lips tight so the threads are loose enough to move in the wind. Before long you feel your feet touch ground, you open your eyes and see you’re right where you need to be. A mirror looks back at you and a time capsule shut tight is begging to be opened.

Your eyes are smiling as you work out the knot on the side of your mouth. You push it through one tiny opening, and then feel the rush of air that pushes its way through the cor-ner of your lips. How nice it is to feel air sliding across your taste buds. You push the thread through hole after hole and the minutes turn into an hour. You’re sweating with concentra-tion, squinting to see the openings that you’re pushing the string through with your face mashed against the mirror. You can see teeth with words on the edge of their enamel.

It’s close now, only a few more holes to get through. The side of your mouth that’s free is smil-ing. You remember how wonderful the words tasted as they left your throat and you want it now. You open your mouth quick and the last few stitches are ripped out of the corner. Your eagerness makes your breath hard and fast. The blood is dripping on the sink and you re-member, as you watch it splash softly, that words have consequences. You learned this once and sharpened it with a needle. It will do to remember that as you feel you’re ready to say what needs to be said.

55

They had nothing else to say to each other. When she was a twenty-three year-old waitress and he was a five year-old mistake she slid her car into the side of Route 1604 one December morning. Her car, stolen from her father after he told her to leave their house when she was seventeen, began to leak oil, staining the asphalt around her. She was lying on her side, the way she did when her child was an infant in his crib and she hummed him jazz lullabies. As her face pressed against the street, her lips be-gan to kiss the gasoline and soon the oil stained her mouth and hands. She began to dig her legs out of the wreckage, trying to find her child. Her throat vibrated with despair, her lungs bloomed with aban-don as she screamed for him. And then she heard a voice and his tennis shoes peeking out behind the headlights. She crawled over and held him, pressing her oil-stained hands around his ears and weeping with relief. And then the engine caught fire.

Her lips and the flesh around them were burnt away. Her hands shriveled, becoming charcoal skeletons of their former selves. And his ears were husks, flapping against his skull like war-torn flags. He could not hear, and she could not speak. When she woke up in the hospital, she pressed her hands and lips together, pressed her scars together and she could not even weep. Her mind rose out of her bed and walked over to the nurses and screamed for mercy, shook its fist at whatever deity exists, but she did not move. After three days her child walked in and sat down at the edge of her bed. She shook her face in shame and he unfolded a piece of coloring paper. It was a picture of a red butterfly with a boy’s face, except it had no mouth. i jus want you to b happie, the picture read. if you cant speek, than I wont eether. At last she began to cry, and the warmth of her tears assured her: these are real, she told herself. And I am alive.

After weeks they began to establish their secret vocabulary. Every Saturday morning, the few hours they had together when he was not at school and she was not at the restaurant, he would leave a butterfly he caught in their apartment complex’s garden on her pillow. She would wake with the brush of its wings. Every breakfast she would pretend there was no more food left in the house, and he would have to search throughout the kitchen, pausing to look at his mother’s expression for clues. When her eyes squinted and her lips pursed, pretending like she knew she was going to win, he would move to another, farther location; and when she shrugged, he would lift the cardboard box or open the closet to reveal his favorite food of the week. She would leave notes in his lunchbox, consisting only of pictures. An elephant would wrap its trunk around its child, as the child ate chocolate-chip pancakes. Or a fish would sprout wings and fly into the air, tracing out a birthday cake in the clouds. And at night, before he slept, she would sit at the edge of his bed and rub her fingers around his lips, tracing him a kiss. And then she would lean in and press her mouth against the base of his neck and hum the jazz lullabies he would hear as a toddler, the vibrations in his throat reminding him of those nights when they could speak. But they had nothing else to say to each other, because they knew that words were not love’s sur-rogate.

SPEAK

Jordan Sutlive

56

Marika Reed | Converge | Photo

57

You tempting tease how you torture me so

with melodic sways that scream of

restless nights when the moon does tickle those

tassled things which brim your trunk

with endless temptation; you who tantalize

all that now shrieks and seethes

beneath my skin and seeks just some reprieve from that which claws

my very flesh; you whose hide

does prickle sweet with budding stems

of lust new-borne to hatch ‘pon Morning’s come,

blooming bold from battered bark

where lichen lie and moss reside,

where too the spiders prance about and spin

their nets of silk to catch my every

fancy passed and dine upon the love

I give to you my Oaken heart.

Anonymous

58

Emily Matson | Symbiosis | Photo

Od e to an O a k

59

Kevin Rackett | Untitled | Photo

60

High mountains piercing the sky. Puffs of clouds lounging lazily among a sea of

blue. Wide, vast prairie of honey colored grass; stalks upon stalks encompassing each

other, swallowing the cows and the old fence that stops along the wind of the road.

barely used strip of smooth black concrete cuts through, twisting up the mountainside.

You pass burnt red rock, soaring above you, shooting from the cracked earth.

So small you are among the titans of the mountains and the giants of the clouds!

How alone among the stalks of grass! How very, very alone.

How deeply sweet that tastes, the succulent juices soaking your stomach. You

shout—tension bursts and is consumed by the mountains. You are not heard. You release,

you are with yourself, ready to sink into the rock, let the honey colored stalks grow up

from your limbs, let the clouds lay over your eyes.

How very, very alone.

You wade deeper, softly the grass embraces you and a wide expanse of sky.

How very, very alone.

Wyoming

Dana Lotito

61

61

Tara Safaie | Dream a Little Dream | Photo

62

“Everyone in the world is having one great conversation,” he said. It’s true that talking is a pleasure, whether seeking clarity

(seldom found in the end), or more simply enjoying the giddy practice of turning thought into sound.

Thus a few drops of our swollen souls are given a drain hole,

not big enough to spill everything (for what would we have left?) but small enough to let the rest of the world know

that we too maintain a dam with an ocean or two behind it.

But I confess, this is not what I thought of first when I was hit by his lofty sentence.

In that moment I imagined a sunset, and one million crickets rubbing their legs with so many questions

that filled the breadth of the rosy sky

until cold rain fell and cooled each little head sending them into the stunned silence

that rain always brings.

The Great Conversation

Hayley Stoddard

63

Officers

Editor-in-Chief: J.T. Fales

Design Editor: Eric Dale

Literature Editor: Elizabeth Tompkins

Art editor: Sherri Grierson

Advertising Chair: Kyla Ainsworth

Website Chair: Christine Camp

Social Media Chair: Christine Beres

Submissions StaffCatherine Bailey

Christine BeresChristine Camp

Elizabeth TompkinsEric DaleJ.T. Fales

Jessica Edington Jojo Villa

Katelyn DurkinLogan HamiltonSamantha Roth

Sarah RossSherri Grierson

Steven D’AlessioYessenia Arias

Zoe Trout

DesignersAlex McPhee

Christine Beres

Christopher Rodrigues

Elizabeth Tompkins

64

Eric Dale

J.T. Fales

Jane Solis

Katelyn Durkin

Katie Wood

Krystyna Lopez

Sarah Ross

Seona Joung

Sherri Grierson

65

Awards1st place

Christine Camp—“Assumption“ (p. 24)

2nd placeMatthew Finley—“Sewing“ (p. 54)

3rd placeJordan Sutlive—“Speak” (p. 56)

1st runner upShun Fukuda—“A Humanity” (p. 10)

2nd runner upRobin Crigler—“For Scott” (p. 52)

1st placeDavid Loebman—“Forgotten Past” (p. 2)

2nd placeKevin Rackett—“Untitled” (p. 42)

3rd placeTara Safaie—“Leave it to the Birds” (p. 50)

1st runner upBernice Chu—“Untitled” (p. 18)

2nd runner upJocelyn Williams—“Horizon” (p. 40)

Lite

ratu

reA

rt

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About Winged Nation

Policy Winged Nation solicits art and literature submissions from current William and Mary students in the fall semester by email to winged.nation@gmail.com. Our submis-sions staff rates pieces numerically according to a rubric in a blind submissions process. The top rated pieces are discussed and selected for inclusion into the magazine. Three literature pieces and three art pieces are selected as overall winners for cash prizes. The magazine is designed in the spring semester by our design staff, who are taught to use Adobe’s Creative Suite. The magazine is printed and distributed in late April. All rights to works printed in Winged Nation remain with the respective artists and authors.

History Winged Nation is an annual student-run literary and arts magazine at the College of William and Mary. First published in 1993, Winged Nation was originally a feminist publication, and its staff and contributors were composed solely of women. In 2005 the magazine’s original half-page, black and white format was eschewed in favor of a glossy, colorful folio format. Since then Winged Nation has become strongly design-oriented. Its mission statement has also evolved to become more inclusive: by 2007 Winged Nation was no longer associating itself with the strong feminist slant of its inception, but defin-ing itself as a forum for “gender, racial, and cultural issues.” Today, Winged Nation strives to showcase students’ views of “the unspoken and the unexpressed” through a union of art, literature, and design. Winged Nation publishes art, photography, poetry, and prose regardless of subject, creating an inclusive and often eclectic mosaic of student voices.

Thank you We wish to extend a special thanks to Anita Hamlin, Mark Constantine, Nita Doo-lin and our publisher, Sara Suarez, Alexander Molloy, Taara Khalilnaji, the staff of the Santa Clara Review, and all of our talented contributors for their moving and insightful pieces. Without their artistic efforts and unique perspectives, there would be no Winged Nation.

Colophon Winged Nation is designed using Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop CS5. The literary works in this issue are set in Century Schoolbook, with various fonts ac-centing each spread. The cover is set in Monotype Corsiva and Century Schoolbook and features the 1st place art submission. This 68-page issue of Winged Nation was printed by Printing Services Inc. in Richmond, Virginia and published in April 2012.

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