Issue Eighteen

I Lived Through the Winter that Buried You

By Cassidy Black

i want you to come back to me
healed because i’m selfish & you left
me to wade through the weight of losing
you. i’ve spent so much of my life wrestling
with death & all it has taken
from me.

i pushed through
the silence & the static. the light settled
into my skin when i clawed
my way back. metal tooth ravaging
as i paced along my mind’s
interior.

now i know
no one could keep you. you,
closed-doors & driver’s seat
laughter. you, cold december
& bloodstained
mercy.

Cassidy Black is a psychology student, libra sun, and postcard collector from rural Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in Rising Phoenix Review, Ghost City Review, and Recenter Press Poetry Journal, among others.

The Gray Wolf

By Nick Trelstad

I find it lying in the grass beneath the shade of a jack pine.
Red streaked saliva drips off yellowed fangs and pale gums
while its chest pulls in shallow breaths that rise and fall
like the restless boughs above its body.
When I look down into its hazel eyes and unpleading pupils,
I know there is nothing anyone can do.
Even still, I stand beside it.
I stop watching the blood trickle from its side.
I close my eyes and imagine its undeath.

The wolf sucks bloody saliva back into its mouth.
It stands up while pulped organs and shattered bones
reform. The bullet spits out of its side and flies
across the field – back down a rifle’s barrel.
The casing leaps back up from the grass and glides
into the chamber at the slide of a lever. The casing
remarries the bullet when the man pulls the trigger.
He lowers the gun, locks eyes with the wolf,
And watches it walk backward into the woods.

Nick Trelstad is a twenty-one-year-old poet and undergraduate in the College of Saint Scholastica’s English program. He has had previous works of poetry published in literary magazines such as Sink Hollow.

she discovers (for a living)

By Katherine Wong

a paleontologist once told me her bones could lift the world. she showed me, let me stroke the splintered ridges, run my hands along the epiphysis grooves. in her closet is a collection of old relics, and she asks if i want to be fossilized. i tell her no, but she pours the pitcher anyway, and my skin cumulates honey that hardens into a prison of amber. i’m left to collect dust.

an astronomer once told me that the secret to finding extraterrestrial life was to look inside. i press my face to the telescope’s eye and see myself hinged to the curvatures of the cavity, plastered along the partitions, and she collides into my soil with her burning, sweating, kinetic energy. i am a floating cadaver, bruised with the imprintations of craters, trapped in time until quantum mechanics can invent a device to fish me out of this well.

a civil engineer once told me how to fix myself. she said build bridges from your heart to your head. if you use up all your materials now, you’ll end up broke and confused. well i’m confused right now, i answer. so my hands reach for planks of wood and i build a dam, stack the logs into syncopated staggers until i get a wall that is too tall for her to climb. there are splinters lodged into the silver linings of my palm, and the reservoir billows out into an erupting wave of white foam. gone is the dam, gone are the nonexistent bridges.

Katherine Wong is a student at Orange County School of the Arts (OCSA) in the Creative Writing Conservatory. She enjoys writing speculative fiction, poetry, and songs. Her work has been recognized in numerous competitions including the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. She also is a writer for the LA Times High School Insider and frequently reviews science fiction entertainment and covers current public health issues. Outside of writing, Katherine plays the piano and runs a community service project called STEM THE ART, which teaches youth a combined curriculum in the sciences and the arts.

Raw

By Tess Woodhouse

I should like to be raw
One day
Undiluted
Free from fear and fate (and you)
No expectations
No one to live up to (or down to)
To be accepted
As individual
I should like to be raw
To be me (whatever that may be)
And this world
That is something
Yet to be
Discovered (or said out loud)
But I think (I know)
I should like it
To be raw

Tess is a red-haired girl who likes reading Jane Austen, watching too many property programmes, drinking hot chocolate and thinking too much.

It Happened While I Was Admiring Her Feathers

By Gabriela Szczepankiewicz

Despite your brown belly, you still carry the vermillion
trademark of Virginia in the flecks of your rusty
tipped wings, my marvelous madam Cardinal.

Sing for me, my sweet, clumsy mother bird.
Twitter in tones like a digital blaster
and dance with your straw feet that jut and jive

about the round nest in oblong ovals:
your legs skip-tripping on feeble, unborn pebbles.
Fly in that forgetful flutter as you forage for food.

But be back to your twig-bowl abode holding
four little futures. Babes awaiting a hatching,
all asleep until that day. Even the odd

fifth egg. The fatter, foreign egg—laid in haste
by a stranger too cowardly to stay and nurture
her own soon-to-become brood Cowbird,

that breaks first. A chip and a chirp
and you’re called to your work, my simple spring-singer,
attending to your newborn. Not yours,

I mean to shout, but the wind rips out the sound.
Your song like a gunshot rings your return.
I gape as I watch your red crested head lean

down and bid from your blunt, peachy beak
the lumpy puke-slime that slides
into the wide smile of the lone little

parasite. A predator’s offspring. Perfectly content
with the presence of a surrogate mother. It sits in the soggy nest
with your four fetus babes—dozing in dribbling pools

of feathers, and bloodied pink yolk.

Gabriela Szczepankiewicz is a rising senior at Old Dominion University. After switching out of a STEM major, she found her passion for observing and exploring the world via creative writing. Spurred on by her achievement of winning an honorable mention in the ODU Undergraduate Poetry Prize Competition two years in a row, she hopes to publish her work and continue her creative aspirations.

Just Breathe

By Lola Wang

I sink down into murky water. I’m submerged in dirty sea-green. Suddenly, I feel a rush of cold water. I turn my head. Soulless eyes stare back at me, dozens of them. The creatures look human, but they’re not. Red-greenish veins run through their slimy, scaly bodies. I panic, and start to swim. Sharp claws dig into my skin and grasp my right foot, yanking me back. Before I know it, the vampire-like sea monsters rip off my feet and hands. I scream in agony, as they continue to tear me apart. It feels like a thousand needles burrowing into me.

I’m gone. Dead.

Until I’m not…

I’m back in the murky sea-green, back with the monsters, dead again and again. After the tenth, twentieth, fiftieth time, I realize it’s a cycle I will never escape. I cry out, and ask for help. That’s when I see her: Buddha, sitting cross-legged above me.

I wake up.

I was thirteen, living in Taiwan, the land of Buddhist temples, so I decided to visit Lung-shan temple to see what the bi-chio-ni (nuns) and monks had to say about my nightmares.

As my mother and I approached the temple’s opening, I peered up to the golden, slanted roofs and noticed how beautiful the shimmering yellow looked against the blood-red walls. I stepped over the wooden block that separates the outside world from the inner sanctuary with my left foot, as I had been taught to do as a little girl—a sign of respect, showing you understand you are entering a holy space. When we got to the innermost courtyard, I saw hundreds of people praying to statues of Taiwanese deities. Some threw red crescent-shaped wooden blocks on the floor; others prayed towards the sky, upwards, into space, where Buddha and the Gods reside. My mother and I stepped into one of the booths and approached the two nuns.

“I keep getting nightmares,” I said, desperate for them to stop.

“Are you participating in anything involving evil spirits?” one of them asked me, looking deep into my eyes, scanning for the answer.

“Well, I watch a lot of horror movies. Is that what you mean?”

When I thought about it more, I realized the nightmares began shortly after I saw my first horror movie, The Conjuring. I became addicted to the genre. I binge-watched television shows like Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries. I knew I should probably stop watching these terror-inducing shows, but they were so exciting. They made me feel a heightened kind of aliveness, whereas my nightmares just made me feel scared to go to sleep.

“Yes, stop watching all horror films and television shows. Distance yourself from all lower energy forms. And pray to Buddha every night before you go to bed. You can also listen to Miao fa lien hua jin every day to further distance yourself from evil.”

That night, dimming the lights, I bowed down in 90 degrees to the painting of Guan-Shi-yin Buddha, the Goddess of Mercy, portrayed as a young woman dressed in pure white silk laced in gold. On top of her head rested a small crown with a painted image of a bodhisattva sitting peacefully in a lotus position. Remembering what the nuns told me to do, I clasped my hands, stood up, and whispered in Mandarin, “Thank you Guan-shi-yin Buddha for protecting me” before wishing for protection.

Looking down at my hands, I expected to feel magically changed. I’m not sure why. I thought maybe I would see a glow of protection, but there was nothing. I changed into my pajamas and climbed onto my platform bed. I looked at the clock: 9:30 p.m., the same bedtime I had since I was ten. I hesitantly turned off the lights and held my blankets tightly.

I am running as fast as I can through an abandoned hospital. I look to my right and see a younger boy sprinting towards me. He is human, like me, but I don’t know him. Suddenly, a creature jumps out in front of us, baring its long white fangs. The pale concrete hospital walls darken in comparison to the monster’s pale skin. I wonder if this is what the dead returned to life look like. Turning his head from side to side, his dark, red eyes scan the boy, who is shivering in fear beside me.

“Run!” I shout, grabbing his hand, and pulling him through hallways, as we turn and turn and turn, running as fast as we can. Yet, there it stands, in front of us. The same bloodthirsty eyes—

I woke up startled, gasping for air. I looked at my alarm clock. It was 2:00 a.m. I crawled out of bed, and walked towards the praying table.

“Save us, protect us!” I cried

Lying in bed, thinking about my prayers and what the nuns had said, I wondered if Buddha had tried to save me by providing me company. Usually, I am alone in my nightmares and the cycle never ends until the alarm clock rings. This time, I had a friend, a little boy, and before the monster could kill us, I woke up. I felt comforted, thinking that maybe I was being protected, and that sleep wouldn’t have to terrify me anymore.

Praying to Guan-Shi-yin Buddha quickly became a ritual, and soon my nightmares became more and more infrequent. Every night, I stood at the praying table and reminded myself to “just breathe,” a Buddhist motto I now cleaved to as a way to align with my higher self and energy.

Once I was no longer gripped by sea monsters and zombies, I thought about what my nightmares had taught me. They seemed to reiterate my belief that life and death are an endless cycle of karma and growth. Maybe the nuns were right and the horror movies were to blame, but I wondered if something deeper was going on. Perhaps I had done something horribly sinful in a past life and my dreams were reflecting my punishment. Now, I feel grateful for them. They helped me wake up to this lifetime and made me realize I have the power to improve my karma. If I stay on the right path, I have the chance to ascend higher in my next life.

In the meantime, I will continue to just breathe.

Lola Wang is a sophomore at the Taipei American school in Taiwan. She wrote a lot of personal essays but is starting to write some flash fiction and short stories. She loves drawing too, mainly sketching and painting. Golf is another hobby she likes to do. This will be her first publication.