Issue Seventeen

Premonition Haibun

By Vera Caldwell

The air, harsh with dust, looks for a throat to snag behind the front door. The particle board cabinet has a vacuum cleaner hiding in it like a ghost, its doors gently swaying back and forth on their hinges.

The red carpet is peeling, lightly touched by sunset’s cool fingertips and pressed down by years of heavy footsteps. Dust bunnies in the corners blow in a draft; lamps sit on the floor like abandoned obelisks.

She won’t understand

the parts of her old age she

can’t handle feeling.

One should be afraid of stepping on the scalding, rusted heating vents or knocking over her eclectic art collection: triangles indented into turquoise clay, watercolors of sharp toothed faces in the moon, and pictures of spiraling white houses that look like desert apparitions.

Her sheet music, the corners of the pages yellow and soft, still sits on the piano. The giant windows above the couch are smudged where the greasy dog pressed his nose as he whined to go outside.

We’re helpless with her;

we watch each room’s warm lightbulbs

burn out their bright hearts.

She has cardboard shoeboxes of glass slides with tiny pictures of icons and saints, their eyes asking everything of us. It would take days to go through and years to learn how to throw away. She left an apple, now rotten, on the stained kitchen table, with her reading glasses, black diary, and ripped envelopes.

Single pane windows

out of place; will her house look

like this when she’s gone?

Vera Caldwell is a sophomore at Houston’s Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. Along with writing, she plays the guitar and composes songs in her band Nobody’s Daughter. Some of her favorite writers include Mikhail Bulgakov, Stanislaw Lem, Patti Smith, Ocean Vuong, and Fleur Jaeggy.

Grotesque- The Naked Picture of Feminism

By Phuong Mai Nguyen

Grotesque, a crime novel written by Japanese author Natsuo Kirino, uncovers the diary behind the death of a prepossessing prostitute, Yuriko. The novel begins with the autobiography of Yuriko’s sister, whose name is deliberately kept anonymous throughout the entire story. Her narrative gradually reveals the apathetic relationship between the sisters, as she admits: “(…) I also do not care about finding out the truth about her death.” Her hostility towards Yuriko stems from her inferiority complex about appearance when constantly being compared with her gorgeous sister during childhood.

Since her birth, Yuriko has appeared as God’s own creation, standing out among any crowd that has the privilege of surrounding her. Yet, that idiosyncratic beauty embraces an unusually distorted soul. Unlike any unconfident Disney princess, Yuriko is fully aware of her superior appearance. Precocious realization of her gifted advantage – beauty – has fashioned a child with the capability to arouse the “Lolita” blind lust in men. Yuriko’s “career” of riding the flagpole initiated when she was only 12 years old, at her complete will and satisfaction. As the story progresses, Yuriko is murdered after appeasing the sexual appetite flowing in her veins. Coincidentally, the man who killed her is also charged with the death of Kazue Sato – an ambitious classmate of both Yuriko sisters at Q. gifted high school. Now Yuriko is dead, her sister becomes the legal guardian for her son. The novel ends with Yuriko’s sister, a 40-year-old virgin, standing under a street lamp at midnight, craving for “the clutch from a man” for the first time in her life.

Behind the tragic fate of female characters and memorable description of humans’ salacious desire, Natsuo Kirino delivers an in-depth message on modern feminist movement.

The protagonists in Grotesque can somehow be seen to represent typical feminist ideals: Yuriko embodies the rise of third-wave feminism, advocating for women’s utmost liberty to pursue their beliefs, even if their values contradict past movements by objectifying women as men’s possession. On the other hand, Yuriko’s sister is a second-wave feminist who strongly believes in the significance of women’s independent status, which leads to her opposing stance against prostitution. She even goes so far as to refuse any intimacy at the position “beneath” men. Although their mutual high school friend, Kazue, does not directly express her personal viewpoints, the character is built around the ideal model of modern feminists: ambitious, well-educated, and hard-working.

Despite their differences, the main characters suffer almost similar endings: they are forced to submit to male dominance in various forms.

Yuriko takes advantage of her mesmerizing charm to seduce men for materialistic purpose, but when old age arrives and her beauty is fading, she becomes nothing more than a depreciated goods.

Kazue leads a double life. Her white-collar job and social status establishes her as a role model for modern women, but her true-self only comes out when Kazue wears a nubile skirts and stands in a wintry street at night. She views satisfying men’s sexual desire as a means to assert her femininity and attractiveness based on social standards. Even her brilliant academic achievements cannot dispel the inferior perception of self-worth, which has penetrated in her mind since high school. From Kazue’s eyes, the value of a woman is determined by her appeal to men. As a matter of fact, excellent student awards can never attract as many boys as a two-second wink from Yuriko.

Yuriko’s older sister, who spend her entire life living under her sister’s shadow, tries to conceal her insecurities by separating herself from men (or even the whole world) and labelling that lifestyle as rational. She looks at life through the most negative lens, she only sees the ugly parts in humans. She avoids nearly every social interaction, not even bothers to tell her name and vice versa, no one recalls her name. But in the front of her unimaginably beautiful nephew, she is willing to work as a prostitute – a job she used to detest – in order to “save money for the future.” After struggling to establish the independent role of women, the anonymous lady gives up her belief, ironically because of a young man, and allows the objectification of women to continue.

The endings of three characters partially depict the dark side of feminist movement, which can hardly be acknowledged in today’s media. The submission of female characters to invisible suppressors implicitly confirms the immaturity and lack of cooperation among feminist movements. Three women suffer under the same regime but instead of uniting for a common cause, they choose to let personal enmity and jealousy prevail. Why does pop culture associate genuinely intimate comradeship with “brotherhood” but fake smiles and back stabs with “sisterhood”? Can frail internal structures, and isolated branches divided by ideology gather enough power to change social prejudices?

Behind the exploration of dark aspects within women, Grotesque left us pondering over the misogyny that takes a deep root, even in modern society…

Phuong Mai Nguyen is a student, movie critic, cartoon artist and part-time drummer from Hanoi, Vietnam

Fifteen Candles

By Julia Do

Fifteen candles and six pairs of cracked slack lips sent smoke through song and sky. The neighborhood boys swapped pencils for cigarettes and grew fast, hard, and knotted—like trees. Root beer floats on Saturdays now sloppy Smirnoff and strobing streets. No more body of Christ on Sundays, amen, just steaming Stiiizys and girls passed out on the beach.

The boys shake sand from their hair, their Vans, and underwear. Sand spills from their belly buttons and trails behind them, endless breadcrumbs. Their feet move fast and their eyes even faster—darting over bicycle pedals and long legs nicked by metal.

These boys were once marshmallow men. Bumbling toddlers, smiles sticky from sweet jelly and peanut butter. Milk bellies, round as the moon, full of honey and oats and all things good.

Like taffy, they were stretched and chewed. Chewed and spit out by the world they knew. Their faces changed. Some shadow clouded their mother’s grace; some vice seemed to poison their holy place.

But poison, no, they say. Not poison. Not the venom of some green garden snake, but nectar, rather. Marshmallow fluff and peanut butter. Baked bananas and strawberry jelly. On teenage tongues, beer tastes like honey.

Julia Do is a junior at La Quinta High School in Westminster, California where she is the copy editor of the school yearbook. A recipient of two Regional Gold Keys from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, Julia attended the 2019 Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop and has had her artwork and poetry published in Canvas Literary Journal. Her work primarily focuses on girlhood, family, and identity.

Sharkskin Heart

By Olivia Lee

glide deep beneath the gilded blue-—in

somber, slipping sweet inside

for loveliness, in secret sand

and beats, in pulsing glow and hiss—

hammerhead, slide passively

drip, your darkly hanging maw

hunger, darling, toothlit bane

quiver love in flashing jaws

from seaward, vast eternity

throbs, electric flutter-time

a hundred fish, drawn gasping in

betrays electric lateral lines

now move, in false serenity

then pant: in ever-rasping gills

but even when the deed is done

the hungry searching never stills

and in this gaping chest of mine

in cartilage: no bony parts

nothing, dearest, satisfies

your roving bloodless sharkskin heart.

Olivia Lee is a junior in the Creative Writing Conservatory at California School of the Arts – San Gabriel Valley. Her writing has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and Princeton University. She has work published, or forthcoming in LiveWire, Aerie International, DASH, Canvas Literary Journal, Polyphony Lit, and Body Without Organs Literary Journal, among others.

Nurses, Untitled

By Irma Kiss Barath

My parents are Hungarian immigrants to Canada, and I have always been intrigued by this part of my personal history.

Over the course of the Hungarian Revolution’s three weeks, an estimated 3,000 civilians were killed, making it a deeply traumatic historical event. I have always felt that certain aspects of this trauma have carried into the present, both in material and immaterial ways.

In the graphite piece attached, I explore the material impact of historical trauma. After several weeks interning at a Budapest hospital last summer, I saw the physical damage inflicted on the city during the revolution. Even over 60 years on, many buildings that were damaged in the revolution have never been repaired. I was captivated by the irony of hospital nurses casually lounging against this backdrop; they are the subjects of this piece.

Meanwhile, the second piece is my attempt at interpreting my grandmother’s recollection of this historical event. At the time of the revolution, she was a young woman living in Budapest. She has described seeing incredibly violent scenes unfold during her day-to-day commute. In this piece, I attempt to capture her resulting trauma through a harsh, surreal composition; the brushstrokes are jagged, the background harsh; the buildings are purposefully organic and flame-like, while the single tank is shapeless, almost melting. Thus, this piece focuses on the immaterial, psychological after-effects of historical trauma.

Irma is a current junior at Sentinel Secondary School/École Secondaire Sentinel in West Vancouver. She is passionate about the arts, especially poetry and illustration.

The Prodigy

By Sarah Stager

Whenever I say that I’ve been playing cello for twelve years, it feels like a lie. That’s well over half of my life that my fingers have been attached to this extra wooden appendage, that I have been breathing in the oaky smell of varnish and rosin, that I have been making noises; sometimes beautiful, gut-wrenching, soul-searing music, sometimes just an ugly, disappointing blip of unnatural sound.

Beauty has always been my specialty. I can never seem to play those loud, jumpy sections with as much accuracy as others, always hesitant to truly commit my body to the chaos, but sacrificing my body for beauty – I have never had trouble doing that. Long, languid, aching notes, filled with the swelling of the heart, exploring tenderly its cracks and hollows, its little broken bits. Cello is often sad, yes – mournful and wistful, reaching out and scooping up a bit of the past with gentle hands – but no one can argue that it is not beautiful.

I love this instrument. But it wasn’t always like that. I first picked up the cello because it was different, and because at the time, I was obsessed with being different. Little third grade Sarah was not like other girls with their teensy violins, scraping out meek squeaks and squawks – no, no, she lugged around cello, and adults said things like: “How can you play that? It’s twice your size!” This was an exaggeration of course, but it still made little Sarah puff up her chest with pride.

It wasn’t love at first sight that made me pick up the cello. In fact, when I first interacted with it – I wouldn’t be so generous as to call it playing – it felt unbelievably awkward. I was in second grade. I was small, and the cello was large. The strings instructor positioned me behind the cello, and I sat with my legs tucked behind its back since they weren’t quite long enough to reach around as they should. The bow was heavy and awkward, and my natural inclination was to clench it in my small fist. This, of course, was very wrong, but in the moment, no one really cared.

Naturally, when I managed to make a noise, it was not a very good one – a shaky, crunchy low groan on the C string. No one cringed, but at the same time no one threw their hands up in the air and declared, “she’s a natural!” In fact, my parents soon began to attempt to convince me that the cello was too big for me – why not pick up the viola? This argument only convinced me further that the cello was for me. I wanted to be the small girl that played the cello, an instrument usually thought of as only for boys, at least in my elementary school. I wanted to be defiant. I wanted to be different.

Well, I got what I wanted. I was one of two kids who played cello at my elementary school, and the other was a boy. We had lessons with the cello teacher Mr. Diehl in a room that was essentially a closet. It was not exactly how I’d dreamed it would be. We didn’t make a sound the first lesson – all we learned was how to care for our instruments, to lay them on their sides but never their backs, to always loosen our bows when we were finished, how to apply rosin, how to clean the strings, an endless barrage of lessons that did not include the one thing I wanted to learn. I wanted to play, with all the force of a petulant and overeager child.

But even when we did begin to play, plucking our way through short passages, placing our fingers on tape markers that showed us exactly where the notes were, I wasn’t satisfied. I was just making noises, not music. I was not a prodigy. I wasn’t even that good. One day, after a lesson went particularly badly for me, Mr. Diehl, who did not know how to be kind to children, told me that if I didn’t start practicing, he and the boy would leave me in the dust.

Even practicing, which had a certain glamour at first – I was playing the cello! – soon lost its luster with repetition. I became bored with rehearsing the same passage over and over. When would I get to use my bow? When would it sound beautiful? Why, why was I not as good at this as I expected to be?

After the first two months, I was ready to give up. It was hard, practicing was boring, it hurt my tiny fingers, which were completely free of the callouses that would later protect me from the hard, metallic strings, and had to stretch to reach the most of the notes. I would’ve stopped practicing altogether, had it not been for my strict parents. Every day, my mother would ask if I had practiced. Sometimes I would lie, but she would always know. Most of the time, I would sullenly, reluctantly, retrieve my cello from its case and practice through my passages, just once, studiously ignoring my fumbled fingerings, my scratchy bowings.

Eventually, this became habit – fifteen minutes every single day, no matter whether my parents coerced me or not. Fifteen, and then thirty, and eventually a whole hour, and I cared about my mistakes; I still made so many mistakes, but it was the caring that really mattered.

I am grateful that my first time playing cello was not my last time playing cello – not even close. I am grateful that I had supportive parents who provided an instrument, and also cracked the whip so that I would actually learn to play it. I am grateful that I am not a prodigy. Playing the cello is a physical, mental, and emotional struggle, constant and unceasing – even Yo-Yo Ma struggles. But it’s also a struggle that is fiercely rewarding, in the burning of muscles, in the quick movement of fingers, in the patient revision of noise into music. It wasn’t like that the first time, and even as I funneled endless hours into practice, I never knew that I would come to love it. But now I know – love is never effortless.

Sarah is a turtleneck enthusiast, tea drinker, and cat lover currently studying English Writing and History at the University of Pittsburgh. She is also a copyeditor and writer for The Pitt News.