December 2020

Beneath

By Junyue Ma

This piece, Beneath is my first oil painting. I used extreme colors to bring out the contrast between the “surface” and “beneath”. Usually the surface we see is not the truth. We will have to tear open the skin and flesh, look inside the bones, in order to see what the heart really looks like. Even if the heart is already bleeding, people won’t notice as long as your skin is intact.

Junyue Ma is a sophomore at Miss Porter’s School from Beijing, China. She started painting when she was a kid, and painting has become the best way to express herself and relax. She loves to share her work with other people so that more people can appreciate the power of painting. She looks forward to sharing more work in Blue Marble Review!

Isn’t It Just Like the Sea

By Seo Won Yun

This piece, titled “Isn’t It Just Like the Sea,” is another idea sketch for one of my theatre projects on “The Old Man and the Old Moon” by PigPen Theatre Company. The story revolves around an old man whose job it is to fill the moon with liquid light as he goes on an adventure to find his runaway wife. It is a story about finding and re-remembering love and sense of wonder in one’s life, and one that resonates with me much more today as we live in this perpetual state of ennui and isolation. Like most of us right now, the elderly couple in the piece are all alone, drifting through in the dark night sea, not knowing what awaits them. However, through the brushstrokes, shapes, and colors, I hoped to convey a sense of comfort, warmth, and intimacy that exists in spite of the uncertainty.

Seo Won Yun is a rising senior at Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut. She often draws inspiration from the works of Kurt Vonnegut, mythologies from around the world, and soft rock or folk musicians–namely Lou Reed and The Oh Hellos. Her work has been published on “Girls Right the World”. In her free time, she enjoys making odd menageries, embroidering, making failed attempts at sewing, drawing, and catching up on Modern Family. She hopes to major in Theatre Design and Production in college.

Love and Other Irreconcilable Lies

By Natasha Lim

You never thought you’d be here, but the clock hanging askew on the opposite wall reminds you otherwise. Its hands push forward the way you wish you could. This time will be different, you tell yourself in a last-ditch attempt to soothe this building anxiety. This could not have been further from the truth, but then again, what do you know? You’re sixteen, and you left school for this. You could be writing shitty poetry in the back of physics class right now. Instead, you’re writing shitty poetry in the holding room of a courthouse, white walls bordering you in. You wonder if divorce court is intentionally designed to be this bleak, this clean solemnity that signals: We handle this like adults.

So do you feel like an adult now? The severity of the present is jarring enough to catapult you back to playground days, back when setting the table for four wasn’t a blasphemous sin. You’re starting to regret ever wanting to grow up. You cross your arms and hug your backpack tight, hyperaware of the irony present between your falsified maturation and your awkward schoolgirl uniform. You stick out like a sore thumb in the courthouse, your adolescent disposition warning of a naivety these white walls haven’t welcomed in a while. The way the hands of time mock you from across the room forces you to stew in your own rage; you fiddle impatiently with your phone and try to focus on the positive—this means the yelling will finally stop. Isn’t that what you’ve wanted?

The judge waves you and your brother in, and this silent calamity triggers your fight or flight response. You’ve never wanted so badly to escape as you do right now, so you settle for dissociating out of your body (for running away like you always do). You feel like you just walked into an active battlefield—smug and frustrated expressions threaten to implode, and all you can do is try to find shelter.

He starts: I know this must be difficult for you.

You hear: I can’t believe your parents brought you to this.

He drops: We’ve reached a separation agreement with both parties.

You hear: This is how love dies.

He pleads: I hope you can understand and support your parents.

You hear: You’re the adults now.

You stare back at the judge, mentally present but emotionally elsewhere. You feel numb numb numb, like your feelings finally decided your wasteland of a heart was too barren, too empty; they packed their bags and you’ve been searching for them since. A prolonged silence hangs between everyone, but you refuse to relieve it. You’ve been expecting a catastrophe, some seismic upturn in the world.

But all you feel is a change in your soul—something shifts ever so subtly, so quietly that only you can hear it move. You dig deep and try to uncover what you’ve lost, but all you find is an emptiness where home should fill. Where no amount of love could ever parch your thirst for safety. Where love doesn’t exist, clearly, because if it did, you wouldn’t be praying for a reprieve. If love existed, it wouldn’t be reduced to tan lines where wedding bands used to be, or the stack of settlement forms laid out in front of you right now.

Do you hear that? That’s the sound of trepidation settling in your heart, of bitterness planting its seed in your soil. This unassuming placidity clutches onto you, but it’ll be days before it sinks its teeth into you. You’ll spend the rest of your newfound adulthood wondering if you’ll ever break free from it, if time would ever lend a hand to liberate this fear. If love—the idea of it, the home you so desperately craved for— will ever mean the same again.

You walk out of that courthouse unscathed, but you’re struggling to piece it all together. Is this what love is supposed to look like? You don’t think you ever want to find out.

Natasha Lim is a psychology student from Singapore. She writes poetry and prose, and is an editor for the Interstellar Literary Review. In her spare time, she enjoys drinking copious amounts of coffee and reading books that make her cry.

Father and Daughter

By Vyshnavi Viju

The father and the daughter shot is actually my dad and my sister. I have a lot of pictures of them walking hand in hand in forests and parks. It just warms my heart because I think their relationship is just adorable. This one especially held a lot of significance because my sister learned about Abraham Lincoln at school and has been wanting to visit the Lincoln Memorial since. She was really excited and was pulling our dad with her. Along with that, my dad was often traveling outside of the country due to his job during my childhood so I didn’t really get the chance to do a lot of the “dad-daughter” things others did so it’s nice to see my sister get those moments with our dad.

Vyshnavi Viju is a sixteen-year-old girl who enjoys photography and writing. She is a huge fan of traveling to new and exotic places and loves adventure once in a while, even though she would rather read about it if she can. Her favorite part about traveling, besides getting to experience new cultures, is being able to capture the weird, the beautiful, the awkward, and the downright funny moments on her favorite camera.

Little Tourists

By Skylar Stewart

Keep Moving Forward” though these words were originally made famous by the great late Walt Disney, Skylar Stewart a twenty year old from rural Ohio and an Illustration major studying at Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida still believes they ring true. She focuses on aspiring to that quote everyday of her life whether through her artwork or just living through the pandemic. Her art cherishes all the good in the world and emphasizing valuable lessons. Each work usually starts with the good ole’ graphite sketch but she explores different medias no matter how foreign they are to her. Her family, life experiences, and upbringing are her main inspirations for her work. Growing up, it was a family tradition for her to watch movies every night while eating a bowl of ice cream. It is these moments in her youth she truly cherishes and relishes as she traveled with her family to different worlds where anything was possible. It is her dream to instill this idea of family and possibility into every child or the child within us. She would like to be able to say her artwork made a child laugh, a mother cry, or even a grandpa smile.

Quotidian Monuments

By Juna Hume Clark

When you see Detroit and Ypsilanti in the news at all, it’s usually for something negative. People who don’t live here only see these cities as the media portrays them—violent, impoverished, and ruined. This narrative is what the world has come to expect from my city. The smaller presences are easily lost when no one takes the time to notice them. I suspect part of why we often walk right past places that embody tenderness in “bad” cities/neighborhoods is because our bias holds us back. We don’t expect beauty from such destinations, so we are blind to it. I felt the need to capture all the places you’ll never see on a screen. The unconventional wonders I see everywhere when I walk around. I want to elevate these spaces to the status of monument. Monuments are usually thought of as state sanctioned statues of “heroes” or war scenes. Stone structures that seem to speak down to you. My monuments reflect the collective mind of the people living here. They embrace juxtaposition where the natural parts of the city meet its industrial side. This overlap creates some of my favorite new monuments.

Juna Hume Clark is a sophomore at Washtenaw International High School in Michigan. She is a passionate artist and activist who has had art and writing published by Black Ink, Root & Star, Pank Books, and Stone Soup. She is currently working with Claudia Rankine on a Young Person’s Citizen.