Manuscripts

Vol. 88
staff
Editor-in-Chief Madi Foley
Associate Editor Emma Biddle
Social Media/Events Chair Miranda Emerick
Design Chair Madelin Snider
Design Chair in Training Abby Hoehn
Editing Committee Leah Ollie
General Staff Jack Williams
Ollie Sikes
Elliott Robinson
Brian Posadas-Cuaya
Nina DiCicco
Gabi Mathus
Megan Fuller
Hannah Goergens
Kaydon Duchemin
Anna Barlow
Kenneth Foran
Faculty Advisor Jason Goldsmith
Cover and interior design by Madelin Snider
Copyright @ 2023 by Manuscripts and contributors.
All rights revert to authors and artists.
Visit us online at www.butlermanuscripts.weebly.com
Printed in the United States of America
editors note
Dear Reader,
Whatever made you pick up this volume of
Manuscripts—whether that be the amazing cover design, a
personal connection to the work enclosed within, or a
genuine interest for all things literary and artistic—I’m glad
that you’re here. But, before you turn the page, I have a few
words for you.
This academic year has certainly been a good one
for Manuscripts. We’ve had the pleasure of introducing our
first-ever art contest, which we will now host annually along
with our poetry and prose contests. Manuscripts has long
valued art and the talented undergraduate students that
produce it, and we are happy to finally be able to reward
these students for all of their hard work. This year, we have
also managed to establish a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
initiative. This endeavor has led to the creation of new
executive positions—DEI co-chairs—that will work toward
promoting these values within the magazine and ensuring
that Manuscripts serves as a safe, welcoming space for
everyone. You can find more information about this on our
website (https://butlermanuscripts.weebly.com/) or our
instagram page (@butler_manuscripts).
Alongside everything new this year, I also want to
highlight a few traditions that we’ve continued from past
years. Firstly, you will find several interviews that I and
members of my executive team have conducted with authors
from Butler’s Visiting Writers Series. We are grateful to have
had the opportunity to speak with these brilliant authors, as
their insight is always invaluable to writers and readers alike.
In addition, we have continued our partnership with Butler’s
Writing in the Schools (W.I.T.S) program. This partnership
culminates in our annual Shortridge Spotlight, which
highlights the work of a promising writer from a local high
school. As always, we hope that this will serve as
encouragement to all young writers to pursue their creative
passions.
Table of Contents
Lastly, I want you to know that there were lots of
people who dedicated most of their Tuesday nights to this
The Definition of Love --------------------------- 12
magazine. It wouldn’t exist without this year’s fantastic
executive team as well as our wonderful general staff. I hope The End of the World ---------------------------- 14
you all are proud to have made such monumental
contributions to a project such as this one—I know I am. And Secrets and Sins ---------------------------------- 15
I would be remiss if I didn’t thank our faculty advisor, Dr.
Jason Goldsmith, who has always provided us with all of the Somewhere in Rockville ------------------------- 17
support we could ever need. I also owe my thanks to Adriana
Jones and Bianca Pagano, the English Department’s lacerate -------------------------------------------- 18
administrative specialists. Adriana in particular has been
instrumental to the magazine’s daily operations, and we are Untitled -------------------------------------------- 19
so thankful for everything that she does for us. Additionally, I
want to extend my thanks to this year’s guest judges for our
Solar Cycle ---------------------------------------- 20
contests: Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis (poetry), Dr. Sarah
Cowan (art), and Allison Lynn (prose). We appreciate the
expertise and wisdom that they have lent us, and the contest Florentine Self-Portrait -------------------------- 21
finalists and winners that they have chosen can be found
marked with a laurel wreath above their titles. Worth ---------------------------------------------- 22
And, with that, I want to officially welcome you to
volume 88 of Manuscripts. There is some truly amazing work Growth and Decay ------------------------------- 23
within these pages, so my hope is that you will stop for a
moment to take it all in. Alice Notley Interview --------------------------- 24
Thank you for bearing with me, Unforeseen Consequences ---------------------- 36
Madi Foley 1950 ----------------------------------------------- 37
Manuscripts Editor-in-Chief
Shortridge Spotlight: Blue ----------------------- 38

The Creek ----------------------------------------- 41

Untitled -------------------------------------------- 43
A Favor -------------------------------------------- 44
Olympic Fog -------------------------------------- 45
Growing Pains ------------------------------------ 46
Eye Candy ----------------------------------------- 56
My father waters a garden that’s not there ---- 57
Burning of Venus --------------------------------- 58
Courting the Moon ------------------------------ 59
Salzburg Door ------------------------------------ 60
The Diplomat ------------------------------------- 61
Irwin Library -------------------------------------- 63
Catherynne Valente Interview ------------------ 64
a stroll through the store ------------------------ 77
calanque ------------------------------------------- 78
Lies and Death ------------------------------------ 79
Picture the Problem ------------------------------ 80
ADHD Space Cowboys: Why I’ve Clocked Over
500 Hours in Starbound ------------------------- 81
You Are What You Eat --------------------------- 85
Dissonance ---------------------------------------- 86
RoboDog ------------------------------------------ 87
There is Nothing ---------------------------------- 88
Watchman ---------------------------------------- 89
A Cure for Vampirism ---------------------------- 90
Thanksgiving at Michiyo’s ----------------------- 91
Maurice Broaddus Interview -------------------- 92
yellow peril supports black power ------------ 107
American “Justice” ------------------------------ 108
Guillotine ---------------------------------------- 109
Leda and the Swan (2) -------------------------- 129
I thought of you today ------------------------- 130
The Three Fates --------------------------------- 131
Notes on Riding the Rapid --------------------- 132
8:32 AM Montrouge, France ------------------ 135
november again --------------------------------- 136
the koi pond ------------------------------------- 138
Dysmorphic ------------------------------------- 139
requiem ------------------------------------------ 140

It’s Complicated --------------------------------- 142

El Clásico ---------------------------------------- 143

Yellowstone Rain -------------------------------- 155

The Gardener ----------------------------------- 156

Snack Break ------------------------------------- 157

king me ------------------------------------------ 158

amsterdam: bike city --------------------------- 159

when she says the quiet part ------------------ 160

Contributor Bios -------------------------------- 162


1st Place:
Poetry
The Definition of
For Tavi Stutz and Jane McKeever
Love
Ollie Sikes
The aerialists ask me to write
The definition of love
As part of their show,
And it takes me a moment
To figure it out.
But after I’ve written my answer,
And the show starts
And the music plays,
I ask myself again:
What is love?
Maybe it’s the smile of a nearby mother,
The sheer delight in her face
As she watches the aerialists fly
And twist their bodies like clay.
When the aerialists speak of warm memories,
She kisses her daughter’s hand.
Maybe it’s the way tears well
In one of the aerialist’s eyes
As he talks about a friend who
Crossed the rainbow bridge.
I picture her ghost smiling, swinging
On the trapeze he almost quit.
12
Maybe it’s the show itself,
The fact that art still exists.
Art where people soar like bright bats
And lie in fabric like hammocks
And hold each other
With a fondness only they understand.
But then one of the aerialists reads
A bright green sticky note,
On which is warmly written
My definition of love:
Believing that someone can be better,
And supporting them in their endeavor.
And then I remember what happened
Just hours before the show,
In the same theater with my friends.
We were lucky enough to learn
The aerialists’ secrets.
We were asked to try their ways.
The fabric dug deep into my shaking hands.
I wanted to cry and fall into the mat.
But then my friends cheered my name
And clapped when I finally floated,
Suspended and alive in the air.
I remember this.
I remember how blessed I am
To have people who believe in me.
I remember this and realize:
That is what love is.
13
 Secrets and Sins
Sarah Blade

Hopelessness seeps in
-a quiet, thick fog-
through an errant shutter
sitting open in the early morning.
I latched it last night,
that much I remember.

It’s a funny thing, remembering.

The things they tell me I must remember
-the ones beaten into me
with solutions, lectures, exhausted sighs-
I always forget.
I’m littered with bruises
in different stages of healing
from being stoned repeatedly
with fragments of a greater humiliation.

But I remember
everything I’m supposed to forget:
everything I’m supposed to ignore
and gloss over and
sweep under the rug
with the rest of the secrets and sins;
which are which
is a debate
among the voices
outside this house.
They get so loud sometimes
it’s only natural to shut them out,
to preserve the tatters of peace.

The End of the World So I know

Hannah Schafer I closed the shutter,
14 15
 latched it good and tight.
I may not have opened it,
that doesn’t mean it isn’t open.
And so the fog seeps in,
makes the air heavy and thick.
The thin streams of natural light,
glowing in the air,
are shrouded in bitter gray
and a solemn quiet
settles in every room.

All joyful figments

of overactive imagination
are suffocated, along
with any desperate attempt to
escape somewhere lighter.
I am safe only here,
me only here,
if even.
They won’t keep us
safe out there,
won’t make their faces warm
so our homes stop being cold.

There is power in the secrets and sins,

but it always keeps the company of danger.
Once you know,
you can never stop seeing.
Once they see,
they can never stop staring.
Damned if you know,
damned if you don’t.
When secrets are sins,
they never go unpunished.

Somewhere in Rockville
Anna Sullivan
16 17
 Lacerate
Tyler Ellis

i wish these nails were yours, breaking skin carefully

you pull me close, and briefly,
our hearts touch. it stings and you kiss me through it-
maybe i love it because i don’t know when to stop-
but you pause,
you lay your palms on hot skin with an
“oh look at you,”
you pause,
you pause.

i scratch at myself, trying to reach something-

i never do. i search for a cleanliness that can never be found.
i lose myself in a frantic urge to rip myself apart.

i would offer myself up!

i would lower my head to let you tear me limb from limb
and you would refuse.
i give myself to you because i know you’ll be kind.
is loving simply trusting one with a weapon?
i hand it to you with hope that it fires a blank
and never considered that you’d put the gun down.

Untitled
Hyewon Park
18 19
 Solar Cycle
Shannon Kucaj

My brothers begged me to stop playing with the sun rays

beaming through our van’s smeared windows.
I wanted the orange light to saturate my eyes.
The light was shadowed from theirs,
maybe that’s why they felt the chill creep
through the window cracks and wished for home instead.

My hands blistered from the hot chains of the swing set

while my father’s hands straightened my spine—
push me higher; I wanted to reach the sun.
Maybe, there, I could pirouette on sun rays
to the whir of a plane’s turbine with my mother.
She could twirl the sun’s red embers, sunspots on our skin.

I wished for the sun’s flares the night of our van’s repossession.
The air nipped my mother while she hurried to the car and back,
armful of my drawings—one shoe-printed, embellished with mud:
my crayon family at the park, holding hands, smiling.
The sun now only a smear of color, somewhere in the corner.

Florentine Self-Portrait
Daylen Byrd
20 21
 Worth
Daylen Byrd

If I changed myself, manipulating presence

My being becomes worthy of someone else’s
love and admiration
But my soul, mind, and body should beguiled
wandering gazes who fall upon its natural state
Offering more than deceptive enamor that
strains the product of originality
The shifting tides are becoming more evident,
but the circulation of water is the same
Uplifting the hidden sea floor possessing riches
once known but thought long forgotten
A resurrection of identity and worth

Growth and Decay

Nina DiCicco
22 23

INTERVIEW
Alice Notley
Editor-in-Chief, Madi Foley, sits down with one of
America’s greatest living poets, Alice Notley.
Notley is the author of over 40 books of
poetry, perhaps a few of the most well-known
being Mysteries of Small Houses (1998), The
Descent of Alette (1996), and In the Pines (2007).
She has won countless awards in her lifetime,
including one of the most prestigious poetry
awards given to American poets: the Ruth Lilly
Poetry Prize. Notley’s work resists and transcends
all the traditional boundaries and expectations in
her field. She continues to write in Paris, France,
where she has lived for over 30 years.
24
MANUSCRIPTS LITERARY MAGAZINE: Firstly, since I felt like
I couldn’t go without mentioning your enormity in the world
of publishing and poetry, I wanted to ask you about that.
You’ve published over 40 books of poetry and won countless
awards for your writing. And, due to that, you’ve received a
certain amount of acclaim and notoriety that not very many
poets have—or ever receive in their lifetimes, for that matter.
So, as a writer, how do you feel about your level of fame, if
you’d even like to call it that. Are you comfortable with it? Or
is it something that you struggle with at all?
ALICE NOTLEY: I am not even conscious of it. Are you sure I
have it? I mean, I don’t live in the country I publish for. I live
a rather isolated existence in Paris. So, I kind of don’t know
that this is going on. And I don’t feel as though I’ve won that
many awards. In fact, some of the biggest ones I haven’t won
because my work is actually outside of what the mainstream
prefers. So, for me, it’s ambiguous to talk about it. But,
recently, I have felt more famous. But I’m turning
seventy-seven next week, so it seems a little late.
MSS: I don’t know, I’d say it’s never too late! But—a follow-up
to that—does your popularity as a writer and do the reviews
your work receives ever impact your writing at all?
AN: No, not at all. Well, you know, you react in the
immediate. You may walk around the room, pissed off, or
even throw something. But it doesn’t impact how you write.
You have to know that some of the reviews are really
intelligent, and some of them are really stupid. I mean, some
people just don’t read the book. And you can tell who hasn’t
read the book. They don’t bother; they just have a gift for
glibness. And that’s always interesting to see.
But, as for why certain books sell and others don’t, I find
that kind of puzzling sometimes. I publish a lot of books with
Penguin now. And some of them have sold more than others.
25
 And I understand why the ones that have sold more copies
have done so, but there are a couple that are mysterious to
me because they haven’t sold as many. But I know that they
actually have a following.
But then there are these other books that never seem to sell
anything from other publishers that are kind of
anonymously—not anonymously—they’re under-the-surface
famous online. Lines from them show up on Pinterest and
stuff. Sometimes misquoted. There are huge numbers of
misquoted lines of mine going around all the time.
MSS: Oh, interesting. How do you respond to that? Is it
something that you worry about?
AN: No, I find it extremely interesting, because I think that’s
how folklore works. That’s how things like sayings and pieces
of wisdom are generated. And then they’re passed down from
generation to generation, and they’re changed. That’s how it
works in folk songs; folk songs are always changed. It’s like a
process.
MSS: Right. I also wanted to ask you about your process,
since you’ve been writing for so long. But I know that you
probably get so many questions about it, so feel free to say as
much or as little as you’d like.
AN: Well, it’s different for different books.
MSS: Yeah, that makes sense. So, what role does writing play
in your life currently?
AN: It’s my whole life, I don’t do anything else. I don’t have a
life, and I haven’t had one for about twenty years, since my
second husband died. And I’m living in Paris, mostly because I
have medical coverage and an apartment—a small
apartment—there. And I’ve been seriously ill several times.
26
Now, I wouldn’t mind moving back so I could be near my kids,
but I’m not sure it’s possible. And I don’t have that kind of
money. I don’t make any money off of doing this.
But as for the role writing plays in my life, I just don’t do
anything else. I mean, I’ve only taught a little, tiny bit, but I’m
not a good teacher. And there’s no reason why poets should
be good teachers, and I’m not one. It’s a whole other
profession. And I kind of resent the assumption that all poets
should make a living teaching—they’re rotten teachers.
MSS: You know, I kind of struggle with the same thing, since I
study creative writing here at Butler. Though all of my
creative writing professors have been really good teachers, in
my opinion, I do feel a lot of pressure to teach at one point.
The whole creative writing world, so to speak, kind of expects
you to publish something and then teach something. And I
don’t think I’d be a very good teacher either.
AN: And they always have expected that. When I went to
Iowa in 1967, there were only about three programs. And I
didn’t know this when I went there—somehow I had missed
it—but the creative writing program was kind of billed as
being a teaching program. You got the MFA in writing, but
you were supposed to be qualified to teach creative writing.
But there weren’t many other programs—just a couple. And
I didn’t understand where they thought you were going to
teach it, but when I found out I was supposed to be teaching
classes, I said that I refuse to—that I’d come to learn to write.
And so they found something else for me to do, and I did the
whole thing without doing student-teaching.
I was just there for the writing. But it was very cheeky of me, I
guess, because I was the only woman admitted. And I
originally went there to be a fiction writer. But then I became
a poet. And my degree, finally, was in fiction and poetry.
27
 MSS: I see. So, do you still write fiction at all or have you
transitioned to poetry completely?
AN: Well, my poems are just long narrative fictions. I didn’t
really combine them consciously, at least not for a long time.
But that’s just what happened.
MSS: That’s interesting. I also noticed that your writing tends
to change a lot between works. Is this intentional on your
part, or just another thing that happened unconsciously or
naturally over the course of your career?
AN: It occurs according to what I think I have to do next. And,
you know, it will change from work to work, depending on
what comes up. It’s organic. And sometimes I have to do it,
and sometimes it really annoys everyone.
MSS: I see, because you’re exceeding or going against their
expectations?
AN: Yes, the quotation marks in The Descent of Alette were
upsetting to a lot of people.
MSS: Really? I thought it made for a really interesting reading
experience, because when you’re reading—especially if you’re
reading in your head—it can be hard to phrase things
correctly. So, the quotation marks, for me, helped me read
silently to myself when I couldn’t read out loud for whatever
reason. Because, typically, I do try to read poetry out loud.
That also helps me understand.
AN: Yes, and it really is meant to be read out loud. That’s what
poetry is.
MSS: Exactly. And I also noticed that you tend to
experiment with form quite a bit in your poetry. I read in
another interview that you’ve been influenced by music in
28
this sense, almost translating symphonic form into a literary
medium. So, did you mean this in terms of sound or concept,
or is it a looser kind of adaptation?
AN: Yes, it’s true that I am influenced by symphonic form and
the sonata form. It’s kind of fast-slow-fast—that’s traditionally
how it goes. It could also be fast-slow-fast-fast; there could
be four or three. And I took in that form when I was growing
up. I had a lot of records, and I played the piano. And when I
went to college, I knew I was going to major in something to
do with English. But I wasn’t interested in being told
anything by my teachers, I noticed. And I figured out that I
was a writer, but I was still doing music. I was taking piano
lessons, but I realized that I didn’t know anything about how
music was made, or how it was composed. And I thought
about that quite a bit, because it was so foreign to the way I
thought. I didn’t understand how you could think with music
and make a composition. And so, when I started writing these
longer works, I just naturally started to hear these big pieces
of music in my head. It started sometime in the 70s, when I
started writing. I was writing these poems that were all
conversation, but the conversation was very musical.
MSS: I see, that’s very interesting. I just thought I would ask,
because I’ve never really heard anyone talk about symphonic
and sonata form in writing. And when I asked a friend who
studies music here about how those things would translate
into literature, she started talking about motifs. So, I was
interested to see what you had to say as well.
AN: Yeah, the motifs. You repeat things; they come in and
you create layers with them. What’s the word in the Baroque
forms, like, in Bach forms? Polyphony! Yes, I create a lot of
polyphony in my poetry. I can do stretto effects, which is
when you speed up suddenly. And I sort of learned all that
stuff to a point that I forgot that was what I was doing. But
I do it all the time. And sometimes, when I’m writing a long
29
 book, I’ll have a first section that’s in verse, a second section
that’s in prose, and then a third section and a fourth section
that are in verse. The process is like slowing down—a lento
kind of movement.
MSS: Yeah, when you put it that way, it makes a lot of sense.
I also wanted to ask you about the content of your poetry. A
lot of it seems to explore the ideas of femininity and moth-
erhood. And you were writing about these things at a time
when the literary world was even more male-dominated than
it is today. Some people have even said—about your poetry—
that that world was not ready for that kind of poetry, So, how
did you navigate that kind of literary world? Did it scare you
to write about femininity in a world that was so inhospitable
toward that sort of thing?
AN: It didn’t scare me. And I didn’t feel like I was writing
about femininity, exactly. I was just caught in a life process. I
was becoming a poet and then, right away, I had two children.
And I had to write when I had them. I was involved with the
New York School poets who wrote about daily life, and that
was my daily life. But I later discovered that I really didn’t
have a daily life—none of that mattered. But I had to write
about having children, because it seemed like a perfectly
natural thing to do. And, actually, both of my husbands
included their children in their poetry.
MSS: Right, but I supposed no one really asked them about
that. At least, not in the same way they might have asked you.
AN: Yes, nobody really noticed. But the way Ted wrote
poetry—his son’s name was David, so he’d write ‘Jacques
Louis David is crying in the wilderness.’ You know, he would
turn it into this other kind of thing. Doug, my second
husband—my children were in high school when I met him—
had had a baby with Down Syndrome who then died of an
30
accident in the crib. It completely changed his entire poetry.
And all of his poetry after Tom’s death was sort of geared
toward Tom, influenced by Tom, and dedicated to him.
MSS: Yeah, it does make sense that huge life events like
that—tragic or not—would change someone’s writing.
Especially having children and whatnot.
AN: You know, once your children come into your life, it’s as
if they’ve always been there. So why would you leave them
out?
MSS: Of course. While I was doing my research, I noticed that
a lot of people kept mentioning your writing of motherhood.
They said that you were one of the first to do it in such an
honest, transgressive way.
AN: I was the first one to do it. I was the first person in the
entire universe to do it; I had no forebears in this. It came
from nowhere.
MSS: Yeah, and so I wonder how you felt about that.
that
AN: Well, I could never figure out if anyone was noticing. I
noticed. And Ted noticed. But it was a very important thing
to me that I was doing this, because I knew I was the first
person to do it. But then, rather quickly afterwards, some of
my friends had children and wrote about their children too.
And then the time factor associated with us kind of got mixed
together. But I was the first one. And I had one friend who’d
already had children, and she started to write about them, but
she didn’t write about the pregnancy and the beginning—you
know, childbirth. She put her children in her poems as slightly
older children, and it was just different. And I think she might
have started to write a little bit later than I did too.
MSS: So, was knowing that you were the first ever hard for
31
 you? Was it difficult to be asked about it?
AN: Well, no one ever asked me about it. I mean, women
were not poets. It was 1972. Women were not poets, and I
was completely ignored.
MSS: Yeah, that’s just hard to imagine today, given how
popular you are now.
AN: There were some people that caught it right away. And
they were men. But when we lived in England, I was totally
ignored. I was in this academic setting and the professors
didn’t notice at all. The people who noticed me right away
were Robert Creeley and Philip Whalen. And, actually, Allen
Ginsburg noticed, but I think he had to be told by Philip.
Philip told him that I was a genius. And then he told my
mother that I was a genius, which she just loved.
So, somehow, there were people picking up on it. But it
wasn’t that they were picking up the fact that I was writing
about pregnancy, childbirth, child-raising, or anything like
that—it was that I was writing really well. Poets that are really
poets care about poetry, and if they see someone writing
great poetry, they’d see that. And the ones that don’t see it
probably aren’t very good. That means they’re insecure about
their own work, and they can’t—rather, they won’t—accept
who you are and what you have.
MSS: Yeah, that makes sense.
I also wanted to ask about how, now that you’ve lived in Paris
for a long time—
AN: Over thirty years, yes.
MSS: Wow. So, would you say that the environment there has
affected your writing at all? I read somewhere that you don’t
32
speak much French, so I was wondering how all of this may
have impacted your poetry.
AN: Well, I took one year of French in college. And then I
moved to Paris when I was forty-seven. So, no, I didn’t speak
much. But I had a little bit of the grammatical structure, and
that was about it. And, you know, there are so many difficult
things about French, but it doesn’t have as many words as
English does. But it takes more words to say anything.
But yeah, I had culture shock for three years. It was really
hard. We moved there and Doug had an apartment that he
was paying a mortgage on, but we couldn’t live in it.
Because there was somebody living in it and, by French law,
we couldn’t just take it back. So we rented an apartment in
this really touristy neighborhood, and I was really at a loss. I
mean, I found moving there to be really difficult. My children
were both in college, but I felt as if I had left them. And I felt
in shock for about three years. And then we moved to Doug’s
apartment, and it was in this neighborhood that was sort of
like the kinds of neighborhoods I was used to in New York—a
mixed-race, working-class neighborhood. It’s since become
more gentrified, but I felt as if I knew where I was again. So,
I’ve become a part of my neighborhood, but I am not part of
the French literary scene.
And I have to deal with the French language every day of my
life. And I don’t speak it very well. So I’m endlessly humiliated,
and I’ve become tougher than I was before, definitely. But
they don’t mind, really, as long as you try. They like for people
to be lively and just sort of stand up to things.
MSS: Yeah, I understand that.
I had one last question about how our culture views poetry.
Soon after the release of your book Grave of Light, you
mentioned in an interview that our culture tends to view
33
 poetry as a strictly academic thing, and you talked about how academy.
that is a common misunderstanding of poetry. Since then, do
you think our culture has changed at all? MSS: Right, I see what you’re saying.

That’s all I had, so I’d like to thank you for taking time to sit
AN: No. Like, there’s spoken-word stuff and, you know, the down with Manuscripts. We really appreciate it.
existence of rap and so on, but that’s all institutionalized too.
In fact, I think it’s become worse. It’s become worse because
the MFA programs have made it worse. I mean, I came out
of one—I’m not a product of one, but I came out of one and I
know what I got out of it. But poets can also get that without
being in a program. What you need is to hang around other
poets. And I didn’t know that when I graduated from Barnard.
I knew I had to become a writer, but I didn’t know how to do
it. So, I went to Iowa. And I was looked down on for doing
that, because everybody looked down on people who went to
creative writing programs at that time. Because it’s not ‘real.’

MSS: Yeah, I definitely think that sentiment still exists. But

there also seems to be a bit of a paradox. People that may not
think creative writing is a real, respectable job may also view
poetry as a sort of purely academic, high-art thing that isn’t
accessible to everyone.

AN: But that’s because it’s been co-opted by the university,

the academy. And all the people that are supposedly doing
something that’s different, or all the people who previously
weren’t being published a lot—and that are now being
published, like women and minorities—they’ve just become
part of the academy. And then the academy just sucks in
everything, and remakes it in its own image. And then you
have to teach. You have to teach in the academic model. And
so, you perpetuate it and everything becomes teaching
matter. And to the extent that it does that, what’s easy to
teach or what you know to teach year after year becomes
what society approves of, because that’s what gets published.
And it gets published because it has the stamp of the

34 35
 Unforseen Consequences
Jack Williams

Paper boats made of flypaper.

Small hands stick to the sails,
little giggles send ripples
through the lily-pad pond
blooming with pink flowers.

Yellow prows cleave

through tangled round leaves.
The frogs are jealous—
all the flies stick
straight to the rigging.

A fat, caramel toad

takes the leap from his flower
to the deck.
The boat takes on water—
the frog flails—

One translucent toe

is trapped, glued
to the base of the mast.
Frenzied ribbits
cleave the calm.

Soon a chorus of cries,

of amphibian mourning
sends lily pads flying
and sets the water
foaming.

1950
Ensley Circle
36 37
 Shortridge
Spotlight

Blue
Cole Weidenbach

Shortridge He wrote many books,

books on playfulness and fun
Studies of human nature,

spotlight defining “the well-played game”

I have yet to read any of them.

Butler Writers is an outreach of the Butler University English
Department and MFA Creative Writing Program that seeks
to empower and amplify the voices of high school students in
the Indianapolis community by connecting them with
mentors and methods for self-expression. Since its inception
in 2011, this Jefferson Award-winning initiatice has generated
more than 1,800 mentee-mentor contact hours annually and
served more than 1,500 unique students at our IPS partner
schools.
My whole life has been a game
Not in the sense that I am being played,
but rather that I am always playing.
Playing music, playing games,
playing with fire
Finding playfulness in the worst of times
He was always untraditional, even then
but I will never forget all of the traditions

To learn more about the program, please visit See,

butlerwriters.org
I never understood the Jewish holidays when I was little
so my grandfather would act out a whole skit
He would sling a satchel over his shoulder
going up and down the stairs,
up and down

He had hundreds of games

laid out and displayed, stuffed away and organized
Games he was working on, games he was done with,
the games he loved the most
38 39
 I doubt there was a single time I saw him,
a single day where we weren’t playing games The Creek
Sarah Blade
Trapdoor checkers, Quirkle,
Bananagrams on Saturday
“Take my hand, this bit is steep.
Trying to teach me Go, but I could never learn,
There you go. See, no worries;
because I was only 10
that’s why you have me.”
Monopoly he hated, but who doesn’t
We’re almost at the creek,
I can hear it rushing through the trees.
And best of all, the games he made himself
You run ahead of me
using scraps of paper and a pen,
and I let you;
blank decks of cards he had scribbled on
it’s easy enough to keep an eye out from here.
Word games that needed no paper at all
You toss your bag down on some mossy rocks,
take off towards the water,
When I am old, I will remember not a funeral
and I follow you.
but rather a snowball fight
I will not remember a memorial service
We love being here,
I will remember Go Fish with jumbo-sized playing cards,
but the reasons are so different;
blowing giant bubbles with rope,
you love the water,
crawling through a box maze.
the little creatures that live in it,
pulling moss off the rocks,
and trying to skip the pebbles on the shallow water
that land with a great plunk.

I love the quiet;

it’s the kind of silence
where I can feel that anything we say
might as well be silence too,
to anyone by the two of us.

Only the eyes of God can pry here

and no one can pry me away from you.
They will, someday,
if only in bits and pieces.
But for now,
you are only yours and mine.

40 41
 You wish that salamander was yours,
when you pull him gingerly from the dirt.
I turned the little log for you after “1, 2, 3!”
You ask me what kind he is
with all the wonder in the world
and I tell you.
I know, of course,
because I knew that you would want to.
We smoosh moss in our hands together
and we scrunch our faces at the texture
and I make you laugh.
And whatever wild fantasies you share,
I add more wildness to,
because no one has taught you to judge me yet
and I will never judge you.

Right now, I’m jealous of you.

I want to dive into your magic
and defend the fort the canopies create;
I want to stop time,
or perhaps speed it up,
fast forward through all the tricky parts;
and if your heaven matches mine,
we’ll end up right back here.

But we have to go.

You remind me,
all authority in your little red raincoat,
and I smile and nod
and reach out my calloused hand
for your little one.

And I hold it so gently,

as you make footprints in the mud.
I hope someone else
will hold it as gently as I do. Untitled
Ella Adams
42 43
 A Favor
Katie Marrs

Creaky, wooden transport

to mildew-ridden cement,
floor to ceiling
Damp cardboard housing
Dad’s seemingly short childhood,
five photos and a hat
While Christmas lies
disassembled in the corner
Cool breeze liable for
loose Monopoly pieces,
guarded by G.I. Joe
Nearby the lone mattress,
loved but abandoned
Foosball, pool, darts,
games once played
now forgotten
Chalk signatures
dusting the walls
All distractions
to the shelf, a dim
chain pull away
Green bean
grab before
Grandma’s
shout
descends

Olympic Fog
Megan Gorsky
44 45

1st Place:
Prose
Growing Pains
Elliott Robinson
As James fucked her on the floor of his SoHo apartment,
Miranda was working on her calculus homework.
She did not actually have a paper and pencil, of course —
the logistics of that particular configuration were much too
complicated, never mind a massive blow to James’s already
vulnerable ego — but she could easily recall one of the trickier
problems as an unfortunate result of having already spent a
sizeable chunk of time wrestling with it.So she fiddled with the
numbers in her head as James continued thrusting between her
legs, evidently mistaking the glaze in her eyes for lust instead of
logarithms.
Miranda did not like math. She liked art, but in her
experience most artists were either destitute or dead, and neither
of those options seemed particularly attractive for a woman who
enjoyed the occasional steak dinner. Still, this did not stop Miranda
from spending the first Saturday of every month at the art
museum, high out of her mind as she wandered through the
cavernous galleries until the security guards kicked her out.
Getting high was one of those things that had once been
devastatingly cool in Miranda’s hometown, but in Manhattan it
felt as common as a Xanax prescription. Even the nerdy guys in
her calculus class popped edibles on the weekends, although they
still looked like the underdog in a bad 80s movie, all thick-rimmed
glasses and slouchy messenger bags. And then there was that time
a year ago, not long before she met James, when Miranda
wandered into a basement party, and a girl with spiky green hair
offered her something with milligrams in the triple digits. Miranda
had declined, but afterwards she would see the girl every so often
in one of the academic buildings; her hair was pink now, which
46
elicited a brief, powerful craving for cotton candy whenever
Miranda caught her eye.
James shifted slightly, dragging Miranda’s attention back to
the present as her bare hip pressed against the hard floor. A bruise
was already forming, wine-red and blotchy. For a moment, she
considered asking James to fetch a pillow, but the interruption
would undoubtedly prolong what was already an arduous
experience. She pushed calculus aside briefly in order to analyze
the weight of James’s breathing, and decided that he wouldn’t last
much longer. The pillow was a necessary sacrifice.
She returned to calculus again. There was nothing wrong
with James, really. He was a little less than six feet tall, and
slender enough that Miranda felt confident she could outrun him
if necessary. He liked mystery novels and sushi and being the little
spoon. He had spent nearly five minutes stuttering and staring at
the ground before managing to ask her out, and even now, several
months later, he still couldn’t compliment her without blushing.
It wasn’t his fault that Miranda had a bad habit of doing too
many things at once. Or that she was truly terrible at calculus, but
stuck with it so stubbornly that the numbers were often bullied
into submission anyway. You couldn’t do that kind of thing with art.
Art had a way of making Miranda feel more naked than she ever
did during sex.
Behind her, James sighed and finally went still. His sweaty
hand found its way into Miranda’s long black hair. “Are you okay?”
He always asked this, afterwards.
“Better than ever,” Miranda replied, which earned a glowing smile
that pricked against her skin like a sunburn. The discomfort
bolstered her courage enough to add, “Do you mind if I take a
shower?”
This was the part that she genuinely enjoyed. If she closed
her eyes, she could pretend that the water cascading against her
shoulders was summer rain, and the spicy scent of James’s soap
was a thicket of pine trees, wrapping around her like a blanket.
More often than not, James would have to coax her from this
sanctuary and into the too-bright world of class, homework, and
overdue rent — but sometimes, if Miranda’s schedule was sparse,
he would allow her to linger until the water ran cold.
“You always seem like you’re daydreaming about
something,” he would say when she finally emerged, bleary-eyed
with skin like tissue paper. “Where do you go?”
47
 The fantasy was too fragile for words — but James, an
English major, would never understand this. Miranda went to the
dresser and retrieved a pair of paint-stained sweatpants.
“Somewhere else,” she said.
The first snow of the year came while Miranda was in class.
She wasn’t particularly looking forward to it — the class or the
snow — but it felt unfair, somehow, to be contained within stone
walls while flurries whirled through air as clear and sharp as a
knife’s blade.
Only a moment after Miranda noticed the snow, her phone
jerked with a text from James. He had sent her a picture of the
view from his apartment, and Miranda suppressed a spike of
jealousy before responding with two smiley faces. His classes had
already finished that day; he was a perpetual early riser, cheerfully
opting for the 8:00 A.Ms that other students dreaded.
Miranda attempted to redirect her attention to the
professor’s lecture, but her concentration was now irreparably
severed. Her gaze wandered instead to a pair of students sitting
together in the corner of the room. It was obvious that they were
either dating or in denial—their shoulders leaned towards each
other as if pulled by invisible strings, and although Dr. Loghmani
was currently delivering a monotonous lecture on marketing
analysis, their cheeks twitched with barely contained mirth.
Miranda’s phone spasmed again; she slipped it into her
pocket without looking at the screen. Today was Thursday, and
this upcoming Saturday would be the first Saturday of the month,
the designated day for her trip to the art museum. She was looking
forward to it in the same way that a child looks forward to missing
school for a dentist’s appointment.
Dr. Loghmani ended class a full ten minutes early; it was
possible he had sensed the general distraction that usually
accompanied a change in the weather. But Miranda had no place to
go besides her apartment or James’s, so she took her time dressing
appropriately for the required trek outdoors.
She was the only one left in the classroom when the pink-
haired girl appeared in the doorway.
It was probably rude to flinch, but Miranda’s body did
anyway, unconcerned with the rules of social decorum. To cover
the mishap, she belatedly lifted a gloved hand.
48
“Hello.”
“Hi!” enthused the pink-haired girl, dropping her backpack
next to a desk in the front with a muffled thud. “You’re not in this
class, are you?”
“I’m in the class before yours,” said Miranda. “But I know
you. I mean — I’ve seen you around. And I met you once. At a
party.” Her cheeks burned, although the room wasn’t particularly
warm.
“Oh!” said the pink-haired girl. “I thought you looked kind of
familiar, but I was about to feel really shitty if you were in my class
and I still didn’t recognize you by the end of the semester. That
would be so awkward.” She laughed a little, and then added, “I don’t
really see you much at parties anymore — I hope I didn’t scare you
or anything.” Another laugh. It seemed to fit so naturally inside her
mouth.
“You didn’t,” Miranda told her. “I have a boyfriend now.”
“Well, that’s a pretty good reason not to go to parties.”
Miranda didn’t think so, but she thought it would be rude to
disagree.
“I should probably get going,” she said instead. “It was nice
meeting you, though.” She shouldered her bag; had already stepped
over the line in the doorway from carpet to tile when the pink-
haired girl spoke again.
“Hey, can I ask you something?”
Once again, Miranda’s body responded without her
permission. She moved back into the room just enough to see the
pink-haired girl, who was gnawing vigorously at the inside of her lip.
“Look,” said the pink-haired girl. “This is so not my business.
I get that. And it’s totally cool if you think I’m being an asshole right
now, but—is everything okay?”
Miranda felt that she should respond with something. After
all, this was not the kind of conversation two strangers typically
had with each other — even if one of those strangers was a
constant fixture in the other’s peripheral vision.
But when Miranda reached for the words, she came up
empty.
“It’s not — I mean, Jesus, you don’t look bad,” the pink-
haired girl rushed on. “That’s not what I’m saying at all. Shit. Okay,
let me start over.” She took a deep breath like an actor about to
deliver a monologue, and then stopped abruptly when a group of
students trickled into the classroom, chatting loudly.
49
 “My name is Wren,” said the pink-haired girl, lowering her
voice. She pulled a Sharpie from her pocket and grabbed Miranda’s
hand; Miranda was too stunned to pull away. “This is my number. If
you ever want to talk about anything, let me know, okay?”
Before Miranda could respond, Wren was already gone,
swallowed by the buzzing crowd of her classmates. They were
all like her, somehow — brightly dyed hair like exotic birds, and
tapestries of intricate tattoos. Their clothes were black or vibrant
rainbow and loose-fitting, comfortable. Their smiles were nuclear
explosions.
And they were all painfully aware that Miranda did not
belong here in their midst, like a heretic in some sacred place. She
turned to leave again, and this time, Wren did not stop her.
Saturday dawned bright and cold but free of snow, save for
a gentle sprinkling on the stiff grass and cracked sidewalks from
the previous night.
James, of course, was already showered and dressed by the
time Miranda convinced herself to emerge from the warm cocoon
of blankets. He made breakfast while she got ready, and they ate
together in the living room, the cheap, mismatched plates perched
precariously on their knees.
“What are you going to do today?” Miranda asked, after the
typical commentaries on the weather and their sleep last night had
been exhausted.
“I think I’ll do some work in the library,” James replied. “I’ve
got an essay due next week, and it’ll be nice to get it out of the way
early. You won’t be home until late, right?”
“Yes, that’s right.” Miranda had been going to the art muse-
um for every one of the eleven months that she’d been with James,
but she supposed she couldn’t expect him to remember the finer
details.
“Well, text me if you need anything,” said James, getting to
his feet. He kissed her on the cheek, although the gesture
functioned similarly to a handshake between respectable
businessmen.
“You, too,” Miranda told him, although James rarely needed
anything.
She waited five minutes after James locked the front door
behind him before retrieving the marijuana from its hiding place: a
50
box of tampons beneath the sink. She smoked on the balcony until
her hands cracked like old bubblegum, though she couldn’t detect
the cold very well beneath the artificial calm that clung to her skin
like armor.
It took a little under thirty minutes to reach the Museum of
Modern Art by subway. By the time Miranda swiped her student
I.D, she was well and truly high; the entire world swam in her vision
as if she was viewing it through an old-timey window. It wasn’t an
entirely pleasant sensation — the museum was always crowded,
swarming with tourists in their most comfortable shoes, timid
couples glued together by sweaty palms, and rich old people
wearing the ugliest clothing imaginable — but Miranda had
performed this ritual enough to know her way around, and she
navigated these obstacles deftly.
But even familiar favorites couldn’t hold her attention very
long. She fidgeted in front of Monet; yawned at Rodin and
Magritte; bypassed Klimt entirely. The sculptures were a little
better — they seemed to sway in front of her, animated by invisible
lungs — but Miranda could only pace so many laps around one
gallery. The security guards were beginning to eye her, and she
knew she reeked of weed. All she could taste on the back of her
tongue, though, was pink cotton candy.
Something is wrong, Miranda concluded at last — a
herculean victory through the fog clouding her head. She spotted
a bench and sat down, pulling out her phone. James’s number was
the most recent in her call log — and the most often — and her
fingers hovered over his name.
She hesitated. In a brief, dreamlike sequence, she saw
herself trying to explain the situation to James — listening to him
parrot back her desperate, fragmented thoughts in his pragmatic,
English-major vernacular. Even her dream-self found this
excruciating.
The temperature of the gallery or the weed in her system
was making her skin prickle. Miranda accessed the newest contact
in her phone — the number that had been previously inscribed
on her hand in Sharpie. She stared at it for a minute or an hour or
three. Sweat sat heavy on the back of her neck.
Miranda wasn’t sure if she ever made the conscious
decision to dial Wren’s number; all she remembered was clutching
the phone against her ear like a lifeline, listening to the tinny
ringtone reverberate against her skull.
51
 “Hello?” Wren said.
The taste of pink cotton candy intensified; Miranda did her
best to swallow it.
“Can you pick me up?” she asked.
For a long, horrible moment, silence and static stabbed her
ears. She wondered if Wren was trying not to laugh, or otherwise
attempting to come up with the most polite way to say no, I’m
sorry, I’m hanging out with my pink-haired friends and eating
organic hummus and watching black-and-white French films on
VHS tapes.
Wren said, “I’m on my way.”
They went back to Wren’s apartment.
She lived with three other students, all of them fine arts
or liberal arts majors sprawled across the unkempt living room
with half-drunk bottles of wine despite the weak early-afternoon
sunlight. Wren waved to them but kept moving, down a cramped
hallway and into a small room strewn with clutter. She beckoned
Miranda inside and closed the door behind them.
“You can sit on the bed, if you want,” Wren offered, which
seemed like an awfully generous gesture until Miranda noticed that
the only other seating options — a desk chair and a sad-looking
beanbag — were suffocating beneath heaps of rumpled laundry,
parched water bottles, and battered magazines.
“Sorry for the mess,” Wren tacked on, somewhat belatedly.
“It’s fine,” Miranda replied, surprised to discover that she
meant it. James’s apartment was almost sterile in its neatness, and
Miranda didn’t spend enough time at her own place to penetrate
the layer of dust that always seemed to cling to her belongings.
But Wren’s room was wonderfully chaotic and clearly well-loved,
with posters of actors and singers taped to the walls, mismatched
Christmas lights blinking cheerfully, and multi-colored rugs peeking
through the mess of clothes and books that covered her floor.
“Want anything to drink?” asked Wren, bending over a mini-
fridge tucked into the corner that Miranda hadn’t even
noticed. Fuzzy polaroids were attached to the front with fruit-
shaped magnets. “Water? Coffee? Wine?”
“No, thanks.” Miranda perched tentatively on the edge of
Wren’s bed, but Wren flung herself onto the mattress
unconcernedly. She peered up at Miranda through lashes clumped
52
together with mascara.
“Wanna talk about it?” she asked.
Logically, Miranda knew that she should. She had, after all,
dragged Wren into subzero temperatures to fetch Miranda from
the art museum like a child misbehaving—and hadn’t even thanked
her for it.
“Yes,” said Miranda belatedly, after the silence had dragged
on for too long. She cleared her throat once; twice. “Yes, it’s just
that I — well, I wanted to — ”
And she began to cry.
This was not like Miranda at all; the tears must have snuck
up on her. She felt at first annoyed that they had gotten the better
of her, and then alarmed when they did not stop. Sniffles turned to
sobs that spewed uncontrollably from her like bile.
The last time Miranda cried was when she broke her wrist a
little less than a year ago. The whole thing had been stupid,
really — a pair of heels she hadn’t quite broken in yet, a patch of
ice she couldn’t see under the dim streetlamps. She was supposed
to be meeting James at a restaurant, and when she called him to
explain the situation, he insisted on taking her to the hospital. So
she waited for him on the curb, limp wrist dangling uselessly, her
lipstick blotted and her coat flecked with sludge. It was only their
third date.
When James helped her into the car, she cried thick, hot
tears that felt like acid on her cheeks. Of course, James and all the
doctors in the emergency room thought she must have been crying
because of the pain, and this was such a logical conclusion that
Miranda felt she couldn’t possibly dispute it — even several hours
afterwards, when she was alone in her own apartment, examining
her newly splinted wrist in the cracked mirror above her bathroom
sink.
It had been so much easier, then, with a broken thing that
could be offered up as evidence. She knew Wren was looking for
an explanation, and Miranda had none to give.
Futilely, Miranda drew her sweater sleeve across her nose
and stared hard at a spot on the wall over Wren’s shoulder. A
colorful cartoon character stared back, frozen in an action pose
with a determined look on their face.
“I’m all right,” Miranda managed at last. It was somehow
better and worse that she couldn’t see Wren’s expression — better
because Wren was undoubtedly horrified, but worse because in
53
 Miranda’s imagination this horror was now tinged with amusement, there’s never any sun. I hate that. I can’t believe I picked this place
pity, disgust. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m crying like this.” over California.” Miranda felt her mouth twitch. “What else?”
“Do you cry a lot?” Wren asked. “I hate being twenty. It’s lonely as shit. What about you?”
A wet laugh burst from Miranda’s throat. “No. Not ever.” “Oh, I don’t know.” But Miranda allowed herself to lapse
“Well, that’s why, then.” into silence as she considered. “I suppose… I don’t like being
Incredibly, Miranda’s tears ebbed as she wrestled with this twenty very much, either.”
deceptively simple statement. “What do you mean?” “It’s lonely, right!”
“It’s like — well, okay. You have a car, right?” “It’s so lonely,” Miranda said. And it was true, although it
“Yes.” was a truth she hadn’t allowed herself to recognize before. She
“The car, that’s you,” Wren continued. “And one day, the tried vainly to remember the last conversation she had with
check engine light comes on. So you’re either going to take the car someone other than James.
to the shop and get it fixed, or your car is going to explode. It’s up “Well, it’s only for a year,” Wren pointed out optimistically.
to you. But if you don’t decide, the car is going to decide for you.” “Maybe next year will be better.”
She paused — possibly for dramatic effect. “By exploding.” Miranda laughed. She wasn’t sure she believed this, but
“I think I’m even more confused,” Miranda informed her Wren seemed like she did, and that was a start, at least. Miranda
truthfully. slid her gaze back to the cartoon character on Wren’s wall. She
“Yeah, I figured. But you’ve stopped crying, see?” didn’t let herself think about the words before they tumbled from
She had stopped. Wren leaned across the bed and retrieved her mouth.
a box of tissues. “Look. To be honest, I’m not the best at talking “Do you want to come back to the art museum with me?”
about these things.” Wren’s smile was like an exploding star; it burst inside
“I hadn’t noticed.” Miranda’s chest. She slid from the bed and offered a hand, palm
Wren attempted to throw a tissue at her, but being a tissue, facing up like an invitation — or a lifeline.
it merely fluttered lazily to rest on top of the wrinkled quilt “I’d love to,” she said.
between them.
“One time, I totally broke down in front of my therapist,”
Wren said. “It was so embarrassing. I couldn’t even tell her what I
was so upset about because I genuinely didn’t know. And she told
me that sometimes you don’t know. Sometimes it just happens.”
Miranda thought about this for a moment. “Is there any way
I can stop it from happening?”
Wren’s laugh was like a gunshot, exploding from her mouth.
“Probably not. But, you know, I’m not a therapist.”
“Are you saying I should get a therapist?”
“You could. Or you could just let yourself cry every so often
instead of bottling everything up.”
“And exploding,” Miranda added.
“And exploding,” Wren agreed. “It seems like the easier
option, anyway. In my opinion, there are plenty of things to cry
about.”
“Like what?”
“Well, for one, it’s fucking cold outside,” said Wren, “and
54 55
 my father waters a garden that’s not there
Shannon Kujac

and complains about the ghost petunias

from last spring, un-sprung
because the night before Christmas,
wintered hummingbirds drank the unborn
petunia’s juice from the dirt—their icicle
beaks pecking our kitchen window
for the heat of sugar liqueur.

Praise Jesus. It’s Christmas morning.

Gifts we can’t afford litter our living room.
One hummingbird rests in my palms—
before I could save it, a cat scraped its body
against snow-dusted concrete. My unaware father,
back inside, recites the Lord’s Prayer.
I pluck out the pebbles from the hummingbird’s chest,
petunia juice leaks cold in the dirt of my fingers.

When the bones of petunias flourish under my nail beds,

I’ll try to file them down. I’ll snip away every sinew,
crush purple petals between my fingertips, frost my pores.
Anything to fend off the hummingbirds—to prevent
an extraction of my vein’s nectar.
My father will forget the petunias,
plant pansies instead.

Eye Candy
Caroline Suydam
56 57
 3rd Place:
Poetry

Courting the moon

Aiden Harper Smith

There was an obsidian weight I used to feel in this process

Lingering, looming, all-consuming
My skin would never feel light again

Six cycles ago, I began to court the moon

Rough edges to melted corners
Grasping what I could of her celestility

Great reflective beams shone through the velvet cloak

That once covered my heart with its heat
That black burning broke with her crescent

Each night I am gifted a new waning, waxing, love

Each night her soft luminescence unfolds,
Wrapping me in a warm radiance

Who else but my moon would know my waning, waxing,

moods
Who else but my moon can make my blood feel mine again
Who else could conciliate my scorching sun, iridescence
beams from waves of hurt
As I feel my mortal body, and hers divine

Burning of Venus
Daylen Byrd
58 59
 The Diplomat
Sarah Blade

The diplomat is calm, serene.

She is unphased and unshakable,
never moved to irrational action
or tempted by unnecessary risk.
She is calculated;
she passes out smiles
and little laughs
with steady politeness
and smooths out tension in a room
like a warm hand
does a wrinkle
in a cool silk sheet.
She is poised and careful:
never moves out of turn,
nor too quickly or slowly.
She sits
as still and tense
as a statue.

She is used to tense,

a veteran in these subtle negotiations.
She takes nothing personally,
not anymore;
after all,
few friends are made
behind enemy lines.
But, if we all truly are
the company we keep,
undue influence need not concern her.

Salzburg Door The diplomat was not born,

Annie Donato she was made.
60 61
 And yet she could only be molded,
because she was clay.

The diplomat works tirelessly

to perfect her camouflage,
but it only exists
because she is a chameleon.

The diplomat is constantly torn;

she walks a precarious tightrope,
but she’s lucky
she was born with balance.

A new balancing act emerges,

when the diplomat looks in the mirror
and doesn’t recognize herself.
Memories become legends
and legends become dreams.

Is it worth it to hide,
if they will find you anyway?
Is it worth the
few times they pass you by
and leave you be?
They don’t have to worry like this,
even though
they’re the only ones who can fix it.
I can only think about it so much,
before it’s time, again,
Irwin library
to live it. Anna Sullivan

3rd Place:
Art

62 63

INTERVIEW
Catherynne Valente
Editor-in-Chief, Madi Foley, sits down with prolific,
award-winning novelist Catherynne Valente. The
author of more than 40 books, Valente is best known
for the Orphan Tales series, the Fairyland series, and
the novel Space Opera. She has been featured on
both the New York Times’ and USA Today’s
bestseller lists, and has also won or been
nominated for every major award in her field. These
include but are not limited to the Hugo, Nebula,
Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. Writing for both
children and adults, and in several different genres,
Valente is an endlessly influential and interesting
writer.
64
MANUSCRIPTS LITERARY MAGAZINE: Thus far in your
literary career, you’ve written over 20 books and a very
long list of short fiction. What would you say that you have
learned over the course of writing all of that?
CATHERYNNE VALENTE: Actually, I have to update that bio,
because it’s over 40 now. Yeah, that’s right—book 44 is
coming out next month. It’s a lot. I mean, that includes
collections too, though.
So, what I’ve learned...Honestly, if there’s one universal thing
that I’ve learned—and I’ve had books be massive successes,
and I have had books be completely forgotten. Sometimes,
it’s my favorite one that is forgotten. And the one that I think
isn’t very good? That’s a hit. So, the thing that unites all of
my books that were successes and the thing that I strive for
when starting a new book is—and it sounds so lame—but
books are good when I’m having fun. My two most successful
books are Fairyland (the Fairyland series) and Space Opera.
And with those two books, I was just playing. I actually had
no expectations, and neither of them were even really
supposed to be written. The opportunities just sort of came
from weird angles. I wrote them both quickly, and I didn’t
even expect Fairyland to be published at all. And I didn’t
expect Space Opera to be interesting to Americans who don’t
know what Eurovision is. So, I just didn’t have any pressure—I
was having fun and playing around. And every time I’m having
fun, you know, the book is successful. And if I tortured myself
the entire time and it was miserable, it is less so.
The problem is that having fun when it’s your job is quite
hard to access. Because you do have pressure and you do
have deadlines. And you do have editors breathing down your
neck, and you do have expectations based on your previous
work. But you are the person who still has to execute the
task, you know? Like, I have friends and family who are like,
“They’ll do great!” Like, yeah, but I still have to do great. You
65
 are now done with this interaction, because you said ‘you’ll
do great,’ but I still have to go be great. It sucks. So, it’s hard
to access having fun. It’s a huge challenge to let go of that
part of your brain that lives in this massively logistical world,
go into the magic forest, and bring something back. That’s
really tough. And it’s even tougher now that I’ve had a kid,
because I have to play all day. So, now, even play feels like
work. But that is the one thing that has sort of unified my
better writing experience; if I can have fun, then my readers
will have fun. And if I’m not having fun, it’s unlikely that my
readers are gonna have fun.
MSS: Yeah, I can see why that would be true. So, now that
you’ve made it this far in your career, would you say that
there is a major difference in your work from when you first
started?
CV: Oh, yes, yes. Enormously so. In some ways, maybe I
shouldn’t have published so early. Like, my first book came
out when I was 24 and I wrote it when I was 22. That is
extremely young. And when I visit schools, people always
want to ask something that connects to how old I was when
my first book came out. And I am always so careful to preface
it by saying that this should not be a goal for you, or
something that you internalize as a requirement. Because I
know I did that when I heard people talking when I was a kid.
Like, “Oh, well, they did ‘x’ by 30. So that means I have to,
too.” It’s unusual—and maybe not always the best. Because,
like a child TV star, I kind of grew up in front of everybody—I
had no idea how to write a book when I wrote my first book.
And I used to get offended when people suggested that. But
now, I will just admit that I only really knew how to write
poetry. My first book is just a 200-page poem with the
margins taken out. That’s just what I knew how to do. And
I literally taught myself—you can line up all my books and
watch me learn how to write a traditional narrative. I majored
66
in classics, so, you know, a lot of the structure of Greek and
Latin narrative was really embedded in my brain. The
structures of those languages were also a big part of my early
style. But as much as we think of ancient Greece and Rome as
part of our culture, it’s wildly not. That narrative isn’t normal
to a Western audience. It’s very strange.
So, maybe if The Orphan’s Tales had been my first book,
things might have made more sense. But my first books were
so surrealistic. I had this whole manifesto about plot being
unnecessary, and like—I mean, I was full of crap, like a lot of
people in their early 20s. But, you know, I was full of
passionate crap and it really meant something to me. I
believed in it, and I wrote the books that I wanted to write.
And, for better or for worse, the books that I wanted to write
did get published, and did get support, and did get readers.
But I have definitely changed a lot. The idea of the person
who wrote The Labyrinth having written Space Opera is
absurd. They have very little relation to each other unless you
drill deep into critical theory. But I grew up, you know? It’s 20
years down the track. And I also have severe ADHD, so I can’t
do the same thing twice, which kind of enforces an evolution,
because I’m always trying to do something new. So yeah, it’s
very, very different. I think that a lot of my early work was
really informed by postmodernism and deconstruction—not
that my later work isn’t—but I was really influenced by Hélène
Cixous and her concept of [unintelligible] monde writing. And
it’s not that I don’t think that that’s still really important—I
do. But I use it in pieces, rather than having the whole thing
be [unintelligible] monde, which means outside the world. So
yeah, it’s really changed a lot.
And then it changed again in the last couple of years—I think
just because I’m very tired now. I’m tired all the time. I have
a three-year-old, and so I don’t necessarily have—this is very
honest—I don’t necessarily have the energy to do a whole
67
 book like that anymore, or even a whole book like Deathless.
But I actually think that’s working really well for me, because
it makes my work more accessible and more commercial. You
know, there’s highs and lows. I had this idea for such a long
time that a book could be like a poem, and every word could
matter. And I do still believe that strongly. However, those
books are a lot harder to read, and I am more sympathetic to
that. I was so strident and uncompromising in my early 20s.
MSS: I see what you mean. And since you mentioned
Deathless and learning how to compose a traditional
narrative, I was actually curious about that process. I read
a couple of your books, Deathless being one of them, and I
noticed that you clearly put a lot of thought into the narrative
structures of your books. And this is especially apparent in
Deathless, because it jumps in time and between
perspectives throughout the novel. So, could you perhaps talk
about how you go about deciding what to include, what to
leave out, and how you organize everything?
CV: Sure, yeah. I mean, some of it is instinct. It comes from
having spent my entire life obsessed with folklore, fairy tales,
mythology—you know, these old, old stories that kind of get
edited. Of course, we don’t really call it that, but that’s what
it is: edited over millennia and coming to us with only the
good parts left. And those structures—if you care, study, and
internalize them enough—kind of get embedded in your own
brain. And so there is a sort of instinctive push and pull, the
angel and the demon, the right choice and the wrong choice.
But it’s not always totally clear what the right choice is.
When I was writing Deathless…it does jump around in time,
and it’s a retelling of a traditional Russian folktale—or fairy
tale, really. And it was important to me that the basic units
of everything that happens in that fairy tale stay the same.
There’s not very many versions of it, unlike a lot of them. It’s
actually quite a unique folktale, which is why Vladimir Propp
68
used it. He is a very famous folklore academic, mostly known
for his book Morphology of the Folktale. And because I was
dealing with Russian culture and this vast sort of tradition, it
was important to me that those things stay the same. So I had
little points—you know, like little pins you drop on
Google Maps—like, “I have to get here, then I have to get
here.” But there’s five parts to Deathless. And between parts
four and five, I was like, “I don’t really know how to get there.”
Like, I knew how I wanted it to end from the beginning of
the book—which usually isn’t the case for me—but I had this
big gap where I didn’t really know. And it feels like a broken
bone or a sprained ankle, like there is something physically
wrong. Because I’m so bonded with my book—very much like
being pregnant. So once you get to part four or five, you sort
of feel it physically. And I took a week to just sit and think of
how to get through it. And, ultimately, the bridging thing is
my favorite part of that book—which I actually never get to
read at readings, because it’s a massive spoiler for everything
that happens. But it was my favorite part to write and it’s
my favorite part of the book. So, you know, if you backload
enough stories, then you can kind of lean into what you know
feels right.
And that right feeling is part of what you find in folktales and
fairy tales—again, because it’s been edited, because it’s been
edited down to be relevant to any culture as well. When I talk
about this at schools—and I don’t talk about Vladimir Propp
at little kids’ schools—I talk about Cinderella, and I ask them
what country the original Cinderella story came from, and
not one of them ever gets it right. It’s from China. And that’s
why you have the foot-fitting-into-the-shoe thing. But, what
happened when it left China and the tradition of small feet
was not a thing is that we still have the shoe, and we just
don’t have the foot part. We lose the cultural context. But
shoes are still so much a part of life, especially in preindustrial
life, that it’s still resonant. So again, you know, you’re looking
for these espresso-like units of storytelling that kind of access
69
 your reptile brain as a human being, or that right feeling. I’m
always kind of looking for that.
And I pay really close attention to other books I read—and
movies and television shows, all that—to see how other
people are doing it. Because I never just trust my own
instincts. That’s why we have editors and beta readers, and
all that sort of thing. But yeah, I always felt that I wasn’t very
good at plot in the early days. Maybe that’s why I said it was
unnecessary. But I kind of taught myself how to do it over a
long time. And now, the book I’m currently working on is very
plot-heavy and not particularly language-heavy at all. It’s very
different from what I used to write.
But yeah, I’m basically always just trying to fuel myself up
with enough of the distilled essence of stories from all over
the place—this is such a hippie way to talk about it—so that I
can physically feel when it’s going right and wrong. And I can.
And because of the way I write—I write from the first letter to
the last letter, I don’t jump around, so I can’t really go on if I
feel that broken bone in the previous part.
MSS: Yeah, I actually think that’s a really great analogy for it.
So, as you’ve just mentioned, you incorporate a lot of fairy
tales and folklore into your work. I also noticed that a lot of
it contains other fantastical elements or alternate realities
as well. And, in another interview, you mentioned that you
wouldn’t want to write purely realistic fiction. So I wondered
if there was any specific reason for that. Or is it just a matter
of preference?
CV: I just don’t really have any interest. I think Comfort Me
With Apples is probably the closest thing that I would write
to that. I’m not really sure why, although I think it might have
something to do with the classics degree. Because when I
wrote my first book, I had just graduated—it was literally the
summer or the fall after I graduated in the spring. And I had
70
to be told by someone else that it wasn’t realism. And if you
read my first book, it’s absurd to think that that’s realism.
It’s fucking not. But, in ancient Greek literature, things like
curses, witches, fantastical machines, prophecies, magic, and
gods—that is realism. Because it was what they truly believed.
So, I think that part of it is that I have really ensconced
myself in this dead world where that was realism. And so it
feels right to me.
I guess I’m not sure what I specifically have to bring to real-
ism. And it’s funny, because maybe it’s Dr. Clark’s fault. Dr.
Clark, or Kevin Clark—I think he’s retired from Cal Poly now,
but he was a writing professor of mine. And really, I had a
terrible experience in all of my creative writing workshops.
And I think that’s good for students to hear. They all told me I
was shit. They all told me that I would never be anything, that
no one had any time for science fiction or fantasy. As literary
as it could possibly be. Nobody cared. And I had basically put
aside the idea of being a writer. I was in grad school. I mean,
I wrote that book, but it didn’t get accepted right away. I was
just like, well, maybe this is just not what I’m going to do.
But I was in grad school and I took this creative writing class,
and Dr. Clark...Boy, does he not write like me. Nothing like
me—he writes baseball poetry. Very real. It’s very dude, very
Midwest, like the whole thing. And I just thought he was a
really lovely teacher. And he completely supported what I was
trying to do, even though it wasn’t what he was trying to do.
And it really only took one professor saying, “You’re ready,
you should be submitting.” And I was off to the races. But,
once, I attempted to write a realist poem for this poetry
assignment. And he hated it. I got great grades on all my
fantasy and science fiction poetry, but he hated this one.
He literally brought me into his office and sat me down. He
said, “I feel like you’re trying to do this to please me, and you
shouldn’t. This doesn’t have your own little imagination at
work.” And I ended up rewriting that poem, and interpolating
71
 the realest passages with the story of Spider Grandmother
from Native American mythology. And it’s a published poem
now. It’s very beloved; I read it at my wedding.
But yeah, I think that probably was part of it. I learned a
lesson early on that what I have to give is in writing
fantastical stories that open a window to seeing the real
world differently. And I think you can do that with science
fiction, fantasy, and horror in a way you can’t quite with
realism. Because realism is mimetic literature, it reflects the
real world. It is the real world. At least, it’s meant to be the
real world. So you get halfway through a book, and you’re
seeing it the way you see the real world. And part of the way
we see the real world is eliding things and not seeing them
because they’re so everyday. But in science fiction,
fantasy, and horror, there can be things that are so wildly out
of step with the way we live our lives that it kind of knocks
you upside the head and makes you see things. It makes you
see the things that you do live with in a different way. I really
love doing that, and value doing that.
MSS: Yeah, I think that’s a really valuable lesson for a lot of
people studying creative writing: to find your niche and to
stick with it. And then, I also noticed that your writing tends
to explore lots of genres. You don’t limit yourself to just one.
Is this simply a way to keep your writing interesting to you?
Or is there a separate reason for that?
CV: I mean, in part, it is. Because I do like to do lots of
different things. “I am large, I contain multitudes,” as Uncle
Walt said. But I was very deliberate about it. So, I had my
surrealist, small-press books come out. And then The
Orphan’s Tales came out, which is the big fairy tale book.
And I talked to my agent and my editor after that, and I was
like, “My next book has to not be a fairy tale.” Because if I do
one more fairy tale book, I’m the fairy-tale girl forever. And I
have friends who have gotten stuck like this; their publishers
72
only want the one thing from them. And I don’t want that to
be me. I want to be able to grow, I want to be able to evolve,
I want to be able to write things that are unexpected. And
that is my favorite thing to write: the thing that people think
I wouldn’t write. And that’s actually worked out fairly well for
me. There are a few books that came from people
approaching me to write things that are wildly out of my
wheelhouse.
But yeah, I just didn’t want to get stuck in that way. And it’s
very easy if you are successful in publishing for people to be
like, “Okay, that again for the next 30 years.” And I just didn’t
want to do that, so I was quite deliberate about it. But part
of the reason I didn’t want to do that is that I love all kinds of
different things. And I wanted to be able to get obsessed with
something and then write a book about it, not get
obsessed with something and not be able to sell a book about
it. So yeah, I did it on purpose. And I’m very glad that I did.
And I think it’s kind of part of my brand—as much as there is
a brand now—that it could be anything. You know, I think I
would just quit if I had to just write the same book over and
over again. I do.
MSS: Yeah, when I was doing my research, I noticed that
everything was so different. And you don’t see that a lot with
a lot of big authors today—probably for the reasons you just
mentioned. Also, you write for both children and adults. So I
was wondering if you could talk about why and how you do
this. Is the switch between the two modes of writing difficult
for you or not?
CV: I usually sort of stagger the projects so that I’m not work-
ing on an adult book and a children’s book at the same time—
because that will bleed. You know, I’ll start having sentences
that are way too long in my children’s books, or swearing,
or other things that just shouldn’t be in there. Or, my adult
books get too simplistic and, you know, overly direct. I
73
 really enjoy doing both. Fairyland was kind of a fluke. But it’s
not that I didn’t want to write for middle grade; I still have an
unpublished middle grade manuscript on my laptop. But I love
that I meet people all the time—now that it’s 10 years down
the track from Fairyland— that grew up with it. Which is
awful from a passage-of-time perspective, but also
beautiful that there are people who were children and grew
up with September. Kids just love books in a way that adults
learn to feel ashamed of later on. And I have had such
beautiful experiences with thousands of kids across the
country and the world because of Fairyland. And I love that.
I love being able to affect—even in just a tiny, little way— the
people that children grow up to be. There’s a lot of
direct-to-camera talk in Fairyland about the things that are
important. Adults have less tolerance for that. They don’t
want to be told. So, I love doing both and I’ll probably
continue to do both. As long as I’m not doing both in the
same week, it’s not too hard to transition between them.
But yeah, again, I’m always trying to do something different.
So sometimes that ends in other age groups and genres and
stuff.
MSS: Yeah, that’s really great. And I know you mentioned
your background in poetry. In my research, I noticed that your
prose has been likened to that of Haruki Murakami for its
poetic and dreamlike qualities. Does this sort of writing come
to you naturally, or do you have to make a conscious effort to
stray away from the readers’ expectations and the
conventional ways of saying things?
CV: I have to make a conscious effort to say things
conventionally. It comes out very imagistic, layered, and all of
that kind of stuff. And the effort is in dialing that back, not in
amping it up. It is just sort of the way I think. I think having
been a poet and having intensely studied languages other
than my own affects that; the structures of those languages
are really very, very different from English. So no, the effort is
74
in being normal.
MSS: That’s really interesting. And I wanted to ask you one
more thing before we wrap things up here. What has been
inspiring you recently? It can be anything: books, movies,
poetry…
CV: The Strugatsky brothers have been inspiring me lately.
Do you know who they are?
MSS: I don’t, no.
CV: Most Americans don’t. Though you might know some
of their work, because it’s incredibly famous. The Strugatsky
brothers were the premier, most famous Soviet science
fiction writers. They wrote a lot of things. The one that
Westerners know the most is called Roadside Picnic, which
became a movie called Stalker and a video game. You read
one line of it, and you see how it has just permeated so many
other kinds of science fiction. It kind of invented its own sub
genre. But science fiction and fantasy in the Soviet world was
able to be a little more free than realist work, because it’s not
about the real world. So, you know, it’s not Stalin doing
terrible things—it’s a giant black cat swinging from a
chandelier with a Tommy gun and a bottle of vodka. And that
is not out of my own head, that is a real example from a book
by Mikhail Bolgakov called The Master and Margarita. So it’s
very interesting to read those books and see the commentary
and critique that is buried underneath the surface. They had
to get all of their books approved by the government before
they could even write them, and all of that very authoritarian
stuff. But there is this ribbon of...I’m not really sure what to
call it, because it’s not enough to call it rebellion. But there’s
this ribbon of understanding how messed up things were, and
yet making it beautiful. That, I really love. Boy, as far as I can
tell, they never wrote a bad word. It’s really unreal how good
they are. And most of their work is quite short as well. So it’s
75
 fascinating to see how much can be packed into this little
space.
As for Roadside Picnic, one of the things that is so fascinating
about it is that it became so well known within the Soviet
Union that, when Chernobyl happened, the people who went
into the exclusion zone to clear Chernobyl were called the
same thing that they were in the book. In fact, the phrase
‘exclusion zone’ is from Roadside Picnic too. Anyone who’s
interested, I highly recommend reading this book and then
looking around at all of these things that were affected by
it. Because this book is 150 pages long and it was a cultural
touchstone on the level of Star Wars, or something like that.
Something that people would reference all the time. I find
that just so fascinating. I find speculative fiction as political
protest to be both intoxicating and just deeply, deeply
interesting. And so they have really inspired me a lot lately.
MSS: Yeah, I’ll actually have to check them out. But thank you
so much for taking the time to sit down with Manuscripts—
we really appreciate it.
76
Finalist:
Poetry
aEmma
stroll
Biddle
through the store
Tomorrow I turn 80. I’ll rise at dusk and buy myself a gift:
Eucalyptus to mask the smell of aging. Then return the wide-
tooth comb that stretches and thins what grays remain on
my scalp. I’ll take my time at the store, I think, but I’ll pass the
care aisles without a backward glance; my period’s long been
gone, and I think I forgot to be a mother. I was only born
yesterday when I caught my first and last dawn.
Quick to bleed, slow to clot,
slow to sow and quick to rot.
Everything hurts, and I just don’t know how I got this old.
Kids these days light a fire under their youth as if they can
come back to it later. They burn it: ashes to ashes, dust to
dust, food for the serpents. And we sit there and stoke the
flames. The smoke hurts my eyes, so I’ll pick up some drops,
too. Maybe a jacket as well, so I can sit outside and watch the
stars dance as I sink into the soil, food for the worms.
I’ll have to pass on the liquor, though. The woman in my ID
hasn’t yet turned 21.
77
 Lies and death
Matthew Forrester

Like an aspiring mother without a womb

More a vessel cracked, less a vacant tomb
Both in emptiness, yet different in designs
The fouled mother loses what the grave soon finds

Carnal Crypt, while you breath in sensual deaths,

The stolen mists from still-born babes’ breaths
You will sing, as spoiled mothers weep,
you will rejoice with the carcasses you keep

And you…, barren woman wandering to and fro,

With no child,
no life,
and nowhere to go

I tell you, eternal virgin, wet not your tired eyes,

For the grave simply holds, and death merely lies

calanque
Abigail Oakley
78 79
 2nd Place:
Prose

ADHD Space Cowboys: Why I’ve Clocked Over 500

Hours in Starbound
Ashleigh Michaels
As of October 11, 2022, right before the beginning of fall
break, I have officially surpassed the 500-hour playtime mark in
indie open-world space exploration video game Starbound. That’s
almost 21 continuous days of playtime.
So what does that mean?
Well. It probably means I need to get a social life.
But besides that, I had an epiphany as I crossed that 500-
hour mark as to why I keep coming back to Starbound. And to
explain that epiphany, I need to tell you about the Novakid.
Starbound is a game that takes place after the destruction
of the Earth at the hands of a planet-eating monster called the
Ruin. You barely escape the Earth in time, and are roped into a
scheme to collect the six artifacts gifted to six of the most common
sentient races in the universe. When you collect all six artifacts,
the portal to the Ruin is opened, so you can destroy the Ruin and
prevent other planets from going the way of the Earth.
There are only six artifacts, but there are seven playable
races. The Hylotl, the pacifistic and wise Japanese-inspired fish
people. The Floran, the cannibalistic and meat-loving plant people.
The Glitch, robot people stuck in the medieval era thanks to a
design flaw. The Avian, Aztec-inspired bird people with a deep
reverence for religion. The Apex, ape people living under a
totalitarian dictatorship that combines the lore of 1984 and the
original Planet of the Apes. And, of course, humans.
The seventh race is the Novakid.
Best described as “ADHD space cowboys.”

Picture the problem

They’re like living stars. They come in a variety of bright
colors, and are made of glowing gasses condensed into a humanoid
shape. They don’t have faces, and instead have “brands” on their
Anna Sullivan
80 81
 face, which can be any number of symbols. And they’re cowboys—
everything about their culture and civilization is drawn from Earth’s
Wild West tropes.
And we know almost nothing about them.
All the other playable races get enough lore to each fill a
history book of their own. We know about the long war between
the Hylotl and the Floran that both sides are still bitter over. We
know about the creation of the Glitch, how they eat and sleep, and
how the error in their programming that trapped their
development in the medieval era allowed them to outlive the
robots that lacked this flaw. We know every detail of the Avian’s
religious ritual rites. We know how the current Apex regime took
advantage of a pandemic to rise to power, and how they maintain
their facade of omnipotence despite a slipping facade. And we
know how humans discovered space travel and spread across the
galaxy.
We know almost nothing about the Novakid. They don’t
even get an artifact.
The in-universe explanation for this is that the Novakid as
a race are not, mind the pun, very bright. They have short attention
spans and are extremely forgetful, and, as a result, never write
anything down. Generations upon generations of their own history
and developments have been lost as a result.
There is only one in-game text that even mentions the
Novakid, and it comes down to: They’re annoying. They’re
obnoxious. They don’t pick up on social cues. They don’t
understand boundaries. They’re too curious and don’t realize when
they’ve crossed a line.
This brings me back to my original point. Why have I spent
over 500 hours playing Starbound, and what do these ADHD space
cowboys have to do with it?
The epiphany I had as I crossed the 500 mark was this:
I love Starbound, because I am the Novakid.
I was diagnosed with ADHD and autism only this past
summer. I spent almost twenty years having my needs neglected
because I didn’t fit the paradigm and, as a result, lost out on almost
twenty years of coping skills and accommodations.
Like the Novakid, I am extremely forgetful. I hate
assignments that ask me to recall any kind of life-changing
memory, or even just a good time, because I can’t remember any.
Large swaths of my life are just gone because I can’t remember
82
them—and nobody wrote them down, because why would they?
Even on a smaller scale, my memory is one giant blur. I am
constantly greeting former classmates without any clue who they
are or what class we had together. My brain makes the dial-up
noise when I try to recall what I ate for breakfast that morning, or
whether or not I remembered my medications. It feels like I am only
capable of living life in that exact moment, because everything else
is gone, never to be seen again. A memory is just a smear of chalk
on the blackboard; something was there once, but not anymore.
Like the Novakid, I fixate on one topic. The Novakid are
obsessed with the Wild West and their interpretation of cowboy
culture, and have built their entire lifestyle and culture around it.
And if you haven’t guessed by now from my extensive knowledge
of Starbound lore and 500 hours of playtime—I do that, too. In fact,
this is a mild hyperfixation by my standards. Ask me anything about
Lobotomy Corporation and we’ll be here all day. I like to joke about
being “no thoughts, head empty,” but that’s not true—I’m full of
thoughts. They’re just obsessively all about the same two or three
topics.
Like the Novakid, I have no attention span. The ADHD
stereotype goes like, “ADH—OOH, SHINY!” or like a dog suddenly
abandoning everything to bark at a squirrel. As much as I would
like to say that’s not true…I literally do that. I will literally stop
mid-word to point out a dog across the street. It takes me a dozen
tangents to get to the point of any conversation. My brain is
constantly bouncing around like a pinball. It makes sense to me
how I got from point A to point B, but it certainly doesn’t make any
sense to anyone else.
And when I do magically gain some semblance of an
attention span, I get so zoomed in I forget to do anything else. My
blood sugar problems are infinitely worsened by me getting so
focused on something that hours fly by without stopping to eat. I
never learned how to take good notes while reading or in class,
because I physically cannot remove my focus from one thing to
write down my thoughts.
And like the Novakid, I lack the capacity to pick up on social
cues and, as a result, people think I’m annoying or obnoxious. I
have spent my entire life playing a board game without the
rulebook, a rulebook that everybody else got. Everybody else
is having fun playing, but I’m still trying to figure out how many
spaces I’m supposed to move. I’ve always felt like I take up too
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 much space in the room, because that’s how people have treated
me—like I’m too big and loud and boisterous and affectionate and
obnoxious, because I can’t pick up on the signals to know when
to stop. As a result, I learned to overanalyze everything, and now
every time someone’s lip twitches, I assume it’s my fault. Everyone
else has passed Go and collected their $200, and I haven’t even
moved my token yet. It’s disorienting and confusing and
overwhelming, and I always feel like I’m a bird stuck in a grocery
store: It’s not supposed to be there, and doesn’t necessarily realize
that. It’s not doing any harm, but everyone keeps their eyes glued
to it anyway.
Every time I decide to start a new run of Starbound, my
cursor hovers over the other six races before always returning to
the Novakid. I know why now. As cool as the idea of ADHD space
cowboys is, it’s not that. It’s because I, diagnosed too late with
ADHD and autism, feel such a strong kinship with them. These
ditzy balls of gas and I are one and the same. The same memory
issues, the same tendencies to hyperfixation, the same lack of
attention span, the same societal alienation. In a galaxy of
thousands of stars, thousands of planets, and thousands of people,
the Novakid and I stand alone.
Perhaps there’s hope for us yet.
At the end of Starbound, after you destroy the Ruin, we
do get one tidbit of lore about the Novakid. They aren’t just gas-
ball cowboys without any direction in the world. They’re leftover
fragments from the in-universe deity that created the world of
Starbound. They don’t have an artifact, because they didn’t exist
yet when the artifacts were made. But that doesn’t mean they have
any less of an important place in the universe.
They aren’t lost. They just haven’t found their way home
yet.

yet.
I hope I turn out to be the same way.
I hope I’m not lost. I hope I just haven’t found my way home you are what you eat
Annie Donato

Finalist:
Art

84 85
 Dissonance
Shannon Kucaj

i hear my lover’s cry

in the city’s flatline hum—

you never sleep. you marble the sky

with clouds, etch cracks in a passerby

pebbled throat
buzzed with yellowed smoke—

near neon lights. rows of taxis puzzle-piecing,

nowhere to go but somewhere with someone—

you place us in Indiana mazes, unripe

corn between the gaps of our front teeth,

to search for a home.

robodog
Gabriella Peabody
86 87
 There is Nothing
Miranda Emerick

Frosty cafe windows and watered down lattes,

Mundane facets of a life I’m almost living
I arrived too early.
There’s a water stain on the table
Evidence of too much time spent waiting.
Two sets of footprints tracked in snow,
Her smile a magnificent glow on your arm
She’s as perfect as you said.
I wish I was happy with you too
But now my foot is running in place
And my hands are trembling
From more than the espresso I shouldn’t be drinking.
“It’s nice to meet you!”
But we both know I’m lying and you don’t.
Just pick me
You’ll watch her with your lovin’ gaze
And I’ll sit here trying to leave.
I would have stayed here forever once.
Everything I think about you lingers
Like a bad tattoo. I’m written in plain sight.
Do you ever wonder about me?
I’m pleading and yearning
Please.
There is nothing worse
Than falling after the fall
When it’s you I’m tumbling into.

Watchman
Madelin Snider
88 89
 A Cure for Vampirism
Anne Gregg

Try
Buried in a casket
lays dormant a frigid heart
unapologetically wrapped in dreams
and late-night scheming

Imagine what you could do

if you cared?

I wish you loved yourself

Shocked your heart
into beating once more
so failing would no longer
be apathy
but motivation

The dead have no obligation

to haunt the living
clean their musky crypts
return to us once more

But I didn’t see you bleed out

on the pavement
or hear the monitor die
I saw the chains wrap around
a conscious mind Thanksgiving at michiyo’s
longing to be cold Annie Donato
Your heart can stay in its chamber
it does not have to be on your sleeve 2nd Place:
Loosen the ropes Art
and let yourself feel
again
90 91

INTERVIEW
Maurice Broaddus
Associate Editor, Emma Biddle, interviews
award-winning Indiana author, Maurice Broaddus. In
addition to publishing a dozen novels and nearly one
hundred short stories, Broaddus is also a middle-school
teacher, librarian, and community organizer. He was the
recipient of the 2020 genre award at the Eugene and
Mary Glick Indiana Authors Awards for his novel, Pimp
My Airship. Broaddus is currently working on the
second book of his Astra Black trilogy, following the
2022 release of the first novel in the series, Sweep of
Stars. Ranging from middle-grade to adult audiences,
Broaddus’s writing career has spanned two decades and
counting and serves as a reflection of his advocacy for
social justice.
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MANUSCRIPTS LITERARY MAGAZINE: Thank you for sitting
down with me to answer these questions. To start, how did
you come to be a writer?
MAURICE BROADDUS: I got into writing early on. I was born
in London and was about six years old when I moved here.
When I was trying to get into the American school system,
they skipped me ahead and put me in second grade. My
second-grade teacher put me in the back of the class, gave
me a stack of paper, and said, “You’re just going to create
stuff this year.” So I basically was just writing whatever I
wanted for a school year. In fifth grade, I won a city-wide
essay contest. And then, in high school, I had two English
teachers who were just like, “Yeah, we’re gonna give you your
own curriculum because, you know, writing is not a challenge
for you.” That really pushed me in terms of being a writer. And
I gave up writing when I went to college. My mom wanted
me to do something “respectable”, in her words, so she didn’t
want to pay for me to get a creative-writing degree. So I quit
writing, but around my junior year, I found myself writing
again and taking all sorts of creative-writing electives and
that sort of thing. Ended up being paired in an independent
study with a professor who said, “I got my dissertation in
Stephen King and Clive Barker.” I was like, “Yeah, I am where
I’m supposed to be.” As part of that independent study, he
showed me magazines like Cemetery Dance, and goes, “These
are the kind of magazines you need to get in to really mark
yourself as a professional.” So, I graduated in ’93 and started
going to writing conventions in 2002. I was figuring out what
it meant to become a professional writer: going to
conferences, meeting editors and publishers, building a
network of fellow writers. So that’s how I started down this
path.
MSS: So you went to college for teaching?
MB: Nope. My mom’s definition of respectable was that I
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 become a nurse because she was a nurse. But I told her,
“Mom, I’m a professional daydreamer. So if I go into nursing,
people are gonna die.” The compromise was a biology degree.
My specialty was microbial genetics. I started working at an
environmental place while I was in college, and when I
graduated, they offered me a full-time position. That job gave
me plenty of time to write. That was the important thing I
was looking for.
MSS: You’ve talked a lot about your work in the community.
Could you expand upon that, as well as your work with your
students, and how these experiences have influenced your
writing?
MB: On the community side, I’m the Resident Afrofuturist at
the Khewprw Institute. Afrofuturism is critiquing the present
in a way that’s rooted in the past but always looking to the
future. All through the Black cultural lens. Everything we’re
doing is about working in the present, but all of our work has
a history to it. There’s a reason why we are where we are.
There are examples that we have from history that frame
what we do, but we’re also dreaming alongside our neighbors
to create pathways to the future. That’s the way Khewprw
wants to move through the world. It’s the way I want to move
through the world, always looking toward what comes next.
And when I’m working with students, I’m like, “How do we
stay in the space of dreaming?” Because dreaming is a
valuable skill set, you know, to be able to create time and
space to just think about possibilities. And so with Khewprw,
I head the creative team, and we work in the areas of art. We
build a relational network of artists as a way to reframe how
we’re going to do the arts economy in the city. It was like,
“Hey, we’re trained as artists to do things a certain way. But
what if we put all that to the side and rethink how we do the
commerce of art?” What if instead of chasing
opportunities and chasing dollars by these institutions, what
does it look like for us to create a series of relationships
94
among one another, support one another, and create art
opportunities, create our own opportunities, just springing up
from our relationships with one another? So now we create
opportunities, we mentor one another, and that’s how we’re
going to redefine our art career.
And that does impact my work with students. I work at the
Oaks Academy Middle School, and I have a creative writing
club. And that’s me working with students to create that
space for them. To be like, “Hey, we’re gonna carve out this
time and space so that you can feel free to write about
whatever. Explore your imagination. It’s not for a grade, it’s
strictly for the love of doing it.” Can we instill that love of
enjoying art and enjoying writing - it’s not homework, it’s
not punishment, it’s just expressing yourself. Several past
students became my “interns” in the summer. I would take
them along to conventions and conferences so they could
begin building their own relational network with nationally
renowned writers and artists, that sort of thing.
Once I started working with the Learning Tree, which was
another community organization, my writing began changing
focus. I thought, “What does it look like to highlight members
of the community, people in my neighborhood, what is it like
to highlight them and the gifts and talents they bring to
everyday life? Or reimagine them in the context of
magical realism?” I did this one short story in that vain, “The
Ache of Home.” It was based on one of the community
gardeners, and what it would look like for her to have powers
involving nature and have to battle against the forces of
gentrification and famine. I created the character of famine as
a guy in a business suit, gentrifying the neighborhood
because that’s how famine is operating. My writing has been
like that ever since, focusing on talking with my neighbors
and dreaming alongside them. And in my middle-grade
books, like The Usual Suspects, I’m basically chronicling the
antics of my children and my students. What is their
95
 experience like? How are they seeing the world? So it’s like a
repeating cycle: The community work impacts me. I then
create art out of it, and that art impacts the community,
which then impacts me, which then impacts the art.
Even Sweep of Stars came from me spending a very
intentional year at Khewprw, saying, “If we were to win, what
does that look like? What’s the world we’re trying to create?”
That became a really interesting mental exercise. If we could
start from scratch to create a new education system, what
would that look like? If we could start from scratch to create a
new political or economic system, what would that look like?
What would the values of our community be? The work isn’t
about today, the work is about tomorrow. Surviving today is
where a lot of people and organizations get stuck. But we are
working towards something, and once we conceive of that,
we can tailor our work to where we’re trying to go.
MSS: In a past interview, you mentioned that in your nov-
el-writing process, you don’t necessarily start from scratch.
You already have planning and characters to go off of. Can
you describe what this process looks like for you, and is this
the same approach you take for writing short stories?
MB: That is my writing, period. Short stories, novels, I
approach them the same way. A possible downside is that I
do as much world-building for a short story as I do a whole
novel. Because if you create this rich and detailed world, it
means you can keep coming back. When I come back and
start writing other stories in that same world, I’m basically
expanding on the work that’s been done. By the time I did
Sweep of Stars, I already had a lot of world there. There were
probably close to fifteen short stories, novellas, and
novelettes in that world before I got to the books. That’s a lot
of me arming myself before I get to the blank page. Part of
world-building is always about the research. And I have that
science background, so research is what I love to do. Some
96
of that is scrolling the Internet, finding resources, going to
libraries, but I also like to find people to do research with. It’s
a great excuse to just be with people. And people can always
give you insight that you couldn’t find in an article. In fact,
tomorrow there’s a group that’s presenting the history of
the Norwood community, and I’m going to be there. I have
a middle-grade novel that’s going to involve Norwood, so I
wanna talk to the people and elders from that community so
I can get firsthand accounts. Sometimes I’ll do research and I
don’t even know what I’m gonna use it for, and then I end up
writing a story about it. And after that, there may be stuff left
over. I don’t know where I’m gonna go with it, but this is my
area of interest. And I will try to follow my curiosity, which is
another big part of writing.
MSS: When you have short stories that connect to novels, do
copyright issues ever arise?
MB: Publishing can be a treacherous landscape to navigate.
So I do have an agent. She is not interested in what I do with
my short stories. It’s not really worth her time to invest in,
for the most part. But any contract I sign has to be run by her
first. So you just have to be careful about what you are
signing away.
MSS: Would you say your writing process is immersive? Does
that affect how you balance multiple projects?
MB: I try to immerse as much as possible. That’s part of the
fun. Although I juggle a lot of projects, I’m usually only
immersed in one at a time. Right now, I have eight novels
in various stages. Of those eight, three are the priority. I’m
working on six short stories, one of which has a pressing
deadline, and by pressing I mean it was due two weeks ago.
So I’m currently immersed in that short story, but since this
story ties into one of my novels, any work I do with it is also
working on that novel. But even then, I went out to
97
 breakfast with my friend this morning, and we were going
over the reading and discussion last night, and I had ideas
pop up. Some of those ideas would be great for the sequel to
Sweep of Stars, which is one of the three pressing books. But
since I’m immersed in the other project, I have a document to
toss these ideas into for right now. This way, by the time I’m
ready to be immersed in that project, I’ve already done a lot
of work already. That’s how I arm myself for the blank page.
MSS: I can’t imagine eight novels going at the same time.
MB: I do not recommend it. Someone once asked me, “What
advice do you give but break all the time?” And that would
be it. I always tell my students, one project at a time, because
it’s easy to be distracted by a shiny new idea. I get it. I love
creativity. But I break that rule after almost twenty years of
practicing the beginning, middle, and end of stories. I know
how to finish projects. Since I am disciplined about finishing
projects, I can take on eight novels or six short stories. I know
I’m gonna finish all of them.
MSS: In one of your past interviews, you said something
along the lines of, “If writing burns you out, write something
else.” How would you advise either yourself or a fellow writer
on navigating through burnout while working on a project
that was once exciting and fulfilling?
MB: I didn’t wake up one day with eight projects to do. I was
working on one. It wasn’t so much burnout as it was, “This
has become hard.” That’s what some people would interpret
as writer’s block. Like, I can’t go any further. And that’s fine, is
the thing. Some people torment themselves over not knowing
where to go next. That happens to all of us. You can try and
plow your way through. And that is what leads to burnout. I
go work on something else. I trust my creative spirit. I trust
that my creative muscle will work out whatever I need for
that first project. It’s happened to me several times over the
98
course of my career, where I’m not in the emotional space
that I need to write this story from. With my third book of my
Knights of Breton Court series, I was stuck for about six to
eight months, with a very looming deadline. I ended up
getting in a fight with a friend, and halfway through the
argument, I’m like, “Wait, this is the emotional space I need to
be writing the book from!” Yeah, the friendship was
ending, but it was the energy I needed for that book. But
that’s not something you can plan. You just have to be aware
that your brain will figure out what you need to move forward
on a project. What I love about short stories is I can take a
break from all of it - spend a week, two weeks, working on
something completely different. It’s like a palate cleanser.
Clear out all this noise in my head and focus on a brand new
short story.
So what I tell people is, I look hella productive if you hear me
doing all this stuff. As long as you don’t track what I’m
actually supposed to be working on. Like this short story that
was due two weeks ago. I was stuck on that story, and part
of it was I didn’t know who my main character was. Then I
was at WorldCon at the beginning of the month, one day
past when the story was due. I got up early in the morning
so I could get some writing done. I’m sitting there, staring at
a blank page, not knowing what this character should look
like. Then this brother walked through with the exact look I
needed for this character. So I introduced myself and asked
him questions about his wardrobe, how he chose the pieces
- it was an iconic look. That was after my story was due, but I
finally had the main character, and the story could flow. Like
I said, sometimes you just need a lot of faith in the process.
That’s where the panic over writer’s block comes from. You
have to trust the process, and while you’re waiting for
inspiration for one to come, go work on something else.
MSS: Do you see yourself getting to a place where you’re not
working on as many projects?
99

MB: If I’m not working on a bunch of projects, I’m probably
actually dead. As long as I’m mentally sharp, I will probably
always do multiple projects. In the time it took to have
breakfast and drive here, I came up with a new project. I’m
either going to start working on it next week or three weeks
from now. We’ll see.
MSS: Some writers are very focused on perfecting their work,
which can be detrimental to their mental health or to the
story itself. How do you know when you’re finished editing
that the story is done?
MB: I typically do a minimum of three drafts on a project
before I turn it in. Usually five total, but a minimum of three.
Because on that third serious rewrite, I’m probably 90% of
the way to where the story should be. That’s when I’ll start
submitting the project. I never get it 100% of the way there,
and that’s partly because I’ve realized this is a collaborative
industry. I’m selling my project to an editor, who will give the
instructions on how to get that last 10%. Or they’ll go, “90 is
great, we’re good.” But most times, they have some critiques.
When it’s back in my court, well, that’s another excuse for me
to go over it one more time. Once it’s sold and finalized, I’m
done with it. I have to let it go, and I have to move on to the
next project. But sometimes the occasion pops up where I
get to revisit it. I just submitted a tentative list of a new short
story collection. It would include some of my work spanning
from the beginning of my career to now. But my very first
story ever published is twenty-three years old. I’m sure it has
not aged well. So should someone want to publish the
collection, I’ve already told my agent that I’m reserving the
right to go through and do another pass on some of these
stories. My rationale for that is, I don’t want there to be a
huge change in terms of the quality of the stories. I want it to
be as smooth as possible.
100
MSS: But it’s like a time capsule, where you can go back and
see how you’ve grown as a writer.
MB: Exactly, that’s the argument. When I first started writing,
I read a couple of Stephen King’s collections, and that was his
point. He’s like, “The temptation to rewrite is real, and I had
to come to terms with no, it is a time capsule.” That was the
second note that I gave to my agent - I might not do a pass on
it, but I want the opportunity to at least frame the story. Like,
I’ll add an author’s note at the beginning of each story that
was toward the beginning of my career to read it accordingly.
This was the beginning, and this was my most recent. This is
where I am now. This is how it started. So I’ll at least do that
much.
MSS: So you’re never at the point where you put the pen
down and feel totally finished?
MB: It always lingers. That’s why you move on to another
project and distract yourself with something new. Otherwise,
you sit there and agonize over a story. Now, that is different
from stories that are fundamentally broken. I have a separate
file of stories that I call my trunk file. They are trunked - I’m
never doing anything with these stories. “Never” because
these stories are from the first five years or so of my career.
Or stories that I’ve never sold. About once a year, I dip into
that file as a writing exercise. Let me take one of these stories
and try to fix it. After twenty years of experience, I know what
I’m gonna do with them now. I have taken two of those
stories so far. So they go from the trunk file to the “active”
file, which means I could send them out now. I’ll either shop
them out or I’ll save them because sometimes opportunities
pop up that they’re perfect for. But that filing system is all
internal, just for me. Sometimes I’ll send them out, but I’m
perfectly happy having done the exercise and putting it away.
MSS: In your short story “City of Refuge”, there was an
101
 emphasis on the necessity of hope for the main character,
Boyle. Is this a theme readers can expect from all your pieces?
MB: Not all of my pieces, because some of them pointedly are
about the lack of hope. That’s my horror writing. But hope is
important. That’s what I like so much about my Afrofuturist
work because it all stems from this place of hope. I do know
a lot of people who like to write dystopian futures, and I get
that, but with the community work I do, in my brain space,
it’s all about avoiding the dystopia. If left to our own devices,
what can we create? I prefer working out of that mindset. Can
we get to something better? In terms of my Afrofuturist work,
it’s all you should probably be expecting. Lots of hope. If not,
that means come check on me because I’m in a bad space.
With horror, I’m meditating on that bad space. Like, “Hey, I
am mad. Because this is where we find ourselves, and I want
to comment on that.” But after I’ve commented on that, let
me go back to building toward hope.
MSS: You’ve worked as a writer, librarian, and teacher. What
are your thoughts on schools banning books, or parents not
wanting certain books available to the students?
MB: As of now, I’ve not had to deal with that. Don’t get me
wrong, I’m living for the day someone tries to ban one of my
books. Like, let’s see what happens. But as the librarian of a
brand new library that people are still figuring out, I’m flying
under people’s radar right now. So while people aren’t paying
attention, I’m putting in the books I want to put in. But I also
work for a private Christian middle school. The
administration trusts me and just wants good books in the
library. The parents are gonna be the ones who are like, “Oh,
you can’t have that, that makes us uncomfortable.” Okay, but
that’s what books do. That’s what they should do. Plus, you
don’t have to pick that up. You literally have a choice
whether or not you pick it up. The cover is not going to bite
you. So you can just walk by it. Real talk, middle schoolers
102
aren’t doing as much reading as you think they are. And the
ones that are, I’m gonna quietly champion them. Like, what
else do you want to read? I want to know what moves you, I
want to learn from that. That’s a trove of information. What
is driving middle school readership? I want to know, so I can
write it. So I’m not having to deal with any of that stuff yet.
But, you know, ask me this question in two years and we’ll
see.
MSS: Do you think those concerns are ever valid in that 10-
14 age range?
MB: No. I came up in the horror community. You ask any of
those writers when they started reading Stephen King, and
most would say middle school. By the way, they’re never
banning Stephen King. We read King and Neil Gaiman in high
school, and they aren’t making those banned books list, which
should tell you what they are actually banning. Anything
race-related or queer-related, because, frankly, it makes them
uncomfortable. They’ll toss it under the umbrella of sex. Like,
we don’t want our middle schoolers exposed to sex. Yet they
are casual about violence. All the violence is okay. But sex
and race-related content is being called into question. And
they hear the buzzwords like “Critical Race Theory” and want
to ban it when they can’t even tell me what it means.
MSS: If you were advised by a publisher or an editor to revise
your story to the point where your original vision was
compromised, at the risk of not being published, how would
you proceed? I think whoever asked this last night framed it
as though it were specifically a microaggression, but I mean
even if it was a suggestion made in good faith.
MB: I have no problems pulling something. People are afraid
to pull something because they have this imaginary fear that
they’re gonna wreck their career. No, you’re not. I cannot
emphasize that enough. There is no editor in this industry
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 powerful enough to blacklist you. Plus, if you are consistently
doing good work, they’re going to want to publish you
anyway. A lot of people labor under that fear. And a lot of less
scrupulous editors try to prey on that. No editor can break
your career. They can only mildly help your career. Very
limited power. I write for me, and I got no problems letting
that story sit in my trunk. If someone wants to be stupid with
my story, I’ll just pull it. No harm, no foul.
There was this one editor who kept trying to dance around
it. Basically, he didn’t want my characters to be Black. He
was like, “I want you to write to the market.” And I’m like,
“Tell you what, I’m not gonna call my characters Black at all.”
So I wrote the story. At no point is their race discussed. But
when you know, when reading, you are dealing with Black-ass
characters. You can imagine whatever you want, but when
I’m writing the story, I have Black people in mind. I can use
that to my advantage because he made a really good point.
I’m not going to mention the race of my characters. We live
in a culture where whiteness is the default. White writers
only mention race when someone not white enters the room.
That was an interesting thought experiment. Thank you, Mr.
Passively Aggressive Editor, I’m going to take your advice, and
now my characters are Black by default. They’re going to use
Black idioms, they’re going to have a Black worldview. But I’m
not going to mention their race. Everything about them is
going to reflect Black culture. Curiously enough, that story
sold to that market. But I don’t think it did what he thought
it was going to do. I took out the actual name of the race and
then deepened it even more so in culture. That became one
of the ways I write.
MSS: The whole “show, don’t tell” kind of thing.
MB: Exactly. Like he was being micro-aggressive, but I too
can be micro-aggressive. I’ll be aggressively Black now. It
changes from editor to editor. When I was writing The Usual
104
Suspects, I did not know the editor, so we were building this
relationship of trust. When she encountered a situation in the
story, that was basically a very Black situation, she was like, “I
don’t know how it’s supposed to go. So I’m going to defer to
trusting that you know.” Because I did know what was going
on there, and it was out of her worldview. The bottom line
is that I can pull a project in a heartbeat, and I’m not afraid
to. I write stories the way I want to write them. I don’t have
a necessarily combative attitude toward editors, because
they are there to make the story better. That is their goal. But
sometimes, especially in areas of culture, I have to be more
combative. This has shifted in the decades since I first
started. These days editors are more understanding and will
defer to me. So I haven’t had to encounter that as much
lately. We’ll see with these edit notes for my next Sweep of
Stars book, but even with that, the editor has been like, “Oh
no, double down, do more.”
MSS: How has that shift been with editors over the past
twenty years or so?
MB: I felt a definite shift somewhere around 2015, 2016. It
was almost like an earthquake that went through the
industry. People were just like, “Oh, we get it.” There’s still a
lot more getting to be done, but there was a paradigm shift.
It’s great, but I also know what it took. Things had been
bubbling up, and getting that new president, people were like,
“Oh, wait, we need to rethink how we do things.” It’s opened
a lot of possibilities for folks. Even when I went to WorldCon
a couple weekends ago, I reflected on the last time I was at
WorldCon in Chicago. There were enough Black writers to fill
a small table. This year, there were so many Black writers, we
took over a big section of the bar. I was like, “Oh, I like this.
This is change.” How can we keep it going with this
trajectory?
MSS: Do you anticipate another positive shift like that
105
 anytime soon?
yellow peril supports
MB: Real talk, I expect pushback before too long. Which is
why I’m doing the work that I’m doing now. Everything’s
about history. History has taught us whenever there are these
black power
seismic shifts forward, there will inevitably be pushback from Mae-Mae Han
the other way. I am a student of history. I know the pushback
is coming. Since I know what’s coming, my work right now when the law didn’t even let us into this country
needs to be about putting pieces into place so that when the who stood up for us?
pushback happens, we can still move and operate, create on when we finally came together as one
our terms moving forward. So what are the institutions we who inspired us?
create? What are the relationships we create? What are the when we had nobody else
communities we create to support us moving forward no who was there for us? i say
matter what? who
was
MSS: Thank you for taking the time to sit down with there
Manuscripts. We really appreciate it. for
us?

but still you let your friends scream the n-word when they
listen to kendrick lamar and laugh
when your aunts say you look black after you get a tan and
make excuses for
your mom when she calls black people scary and say if we
came to this country with nothing and studied hard and
worked hard
then why can’t they do the same?
even though white people just think we’re at least Not Black
and we think we’re at least Not Black

so it’s about time that we were there for them.

106 107
 Finalist:
Prose

Guillotine
Keeg Shoemaker

My father’s face looked so different on the TV.

It was three in the morning, and I was still awake and
watching the late-night news. The device in my family’s living room
was old and finely layered with dust, and as I moved my face closer
to the screen in order to see my father’s face it was hard to make
out his features. Instead of the face I remembered, it was a messy
blur of pixels, a soulless caricature of the man that I knew, or at
least thought I had. He was there, he was empty, and his picture
was suspended above a single string of words drifting lazily across
the bottom of the screen, an endless scroll of his fate.
Convicted Murderer Jasper Carlisle to be Executed Early
this Morning.
Driven by some sort of magnetism, my nail-bitten hand rose
to touch his face only to be stopped by the cage-like screen, its
press fighting back against my own in an equal and opposite
reaction. Instead of feeling his face, the rough bramble of his beard,
the ruddy cheeks, the soft prickle of his receding hairline shaved
close to the bone, the blood that flooded hot beneath his lightly
freckled skin, all I could feel was the glass, cool, thick, and lifeless.
A sadness rose in me then like it often did when I thought

American “justice” of him, a sensation like bile rising up my throat. The television, the
late-night news, was just another one of the infinite, impenetrable
Belen Sepulveda walls that divided us, that kept me from him and him from me. The
screen was a wall, and I wasn’t sure whether or not I wanted to
drive a bloody-knuckled fist through it and his jaw or press my ear
1st Place: against it, listen for his voice, his breath, his life.
It was a strange feeling to know that your father was going
Art to die. To know that after almost a decade of waiting, his end was
finally riding on the bruise-black horizon.

108 109
 And it was even stranger to know that he deserved it.
The thing about the late-night news was that it was
reserved for the stories that people didn’t care about, that no one
wants to think about. It was a story cycle for the abandoned, the
insomniacs, the ghosts, it was a story cycle for me. Me who hadn’t
seen my father in nine years, me who had been waiting for him to
die for nearly as long, me who was watching and waiting for him
to disappear from the screen with a breath cradled in my mouth,
because I knew that once the pixels of him were snuffed out, that
once his story was surrendered to the dissipating airwaves so that
another could take his place, he would finally be lost to oblivion.
And where would I go?
My throat beginning to close with terror and the words of
the bleary-eyed news anchor reducing into nothing but noise, I
grabbed the TV remote and pressed pause. The world within the
television, the world in which my father was still alive, was held in
stasis.
For now, my father was preserved, frozen in the photons.
The silence and stillness that followed struck me like a
sledge-hammer to the chest, leaving me shaking and breathless
as I struggled to my feet and moved over towards my front door. I
grabbed my house key, slid on my boots, and shrugged on my old
hunting jacket. It was identical to the one that my father had been
arrested in, but instead of being stained with Katie Thompson’s
blood and tears, it was stained with memories.
Memories of us cloistered tightly together in the woods,
unmoving and wordless so as to be left unnoticed.
Memories of us watching the deer saunter into view, its eyes wide
and wet, its black nostrils flaring.
Memories of my father’s hands overlapping mine on the
rifle’s trigger, his breath brushing against my ear, his heart beating
against my back with a stampede of adrenaline.
Memories of the trigger giving way, the hammer swinging,
the bullet beginning to slide and spiral loose from the barrel.
Bang.
Shivering, I pulled up the jacket’s zipper. In the years since
my father’s arrest, since he destroyed everything, its sleeves had
grown more snug, its shoulders more tight, and if I dared to let my
mind wander in the dark places it wasn’t meant to, it was almost
like his arms were wrapped around me again.
Holding me.
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Restraining me.
Strangling me.
The air inside of my home becoming harder to breathe,
I opened the front door and moved outside. The ragged wool
trimming my jacket’s hem scraped against me everytime I moved,
an inescapable feeling on the back of my neck like I was being
watched as I left my father preserved in the television and began
to walk. Stepping away from my house and feeling the cold twilight
air sink its fangs into my exposed throat, I looked up at the window
where I knew my mother was hiding. In the few days prior to this
one I had only seen her once through the same pane of glass, one
of my father’s old shirts clenched tightly in her clawed fists and her
teeth bared with a furious anguish like that of a cornered animal.
With his death came our own sort of parting, one which for me
meant staring at the television until my eyes bled and for her meant
recoiling back into her bedroom, a prison of her own to match her
murderer husband’s. We had known for weeks now that my father’s
execution was tonight, and we had been counting the days until
the end in a way that reminded me of how my father had taught me
to measure the distance between myself and a storm.
Wait for the flash.
Hold your breath.
And then start to count.
When the thunder struck and rattled my skull, I was finally
allowed to breathe as I took the number of seconds between bolt
and blast and converted it into miles. By reducing the
incomprehensible malevolence of the storm into numbers, into
some sort of sense, it was made less frightening. Ten seconds, my
father told me, was a hundred miles, five was fifty, one was ten.
But what, I suddenly found myself wondering as I
sleepwalked down the street, about zero?
What about now?
When was the flash? Was it when my father killed Katie
Thompson, or was it now? Was the explosion of thunder his
imminent death, or was it somewhere off in the future prowling
closer and closer to me each day, its jagged maw beginning to peel
back as it caught the scent of my blood?
Was the storm over, or was it just beginning?
Was I truly safe, or was I trapped in the falsely gentle
tempest of its eye?
I continued my aimless stumble over the pavement.
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 Whenever I thought too hard about my father, I walked, wandering
until I got lost only to find myself again. And just as it always was
whenever I drifted down the street, my neighborhood was quiet.
The presence of my mother and I, the grisly remains of my father’s
crime, had ripped out its vocal chords and beaten off its jaw; our
voices cut off conversations, and our faces shuttered windows.
We had been reduced into an omen for the broken past, and in the
silence we had left in our wake, I could hear my fogged breaths and
the rhythm of my footsteps on the sidewalk, a rhythm that my
father and I had shared. Back when he was still around and when
his hands were clean, people always used to tell me that I walked
like him, talked like him, looked like him.
He was an open book, or at least so it seemed.
While my mother and I had been able to read him at least
somewhat, we seemed to be the only ones who didn’t know how
his story would end. His was a book written in smeared red ink on
pages with torn edges, and it had been the same people who had
called me my father’s son who called him a monster, taking my
badge of pride and burning it into my flesh like a brand. The signs,
they’d said once the police had dragged him away, had been
obvious. The glint in his eyes, the sharp tug of his smile, the restless
jitter of his limbs, everything that had defined him as a father to me
had defined him as a monster to them, blurring his lines, darkening
his shadow, shrouding his image behind a veil of my own doubt.
Existing in my own skin suddenly feeling like a crime in and
of itself, I picked up my pace in a subtle attempt to escape its grasp.
My late night walks were an attempt to get away from him, but he
was inescapable. He clawed at my shoulder blades and clung to
my ankles, forcing me to drag him along with me wherever I went.
I’d tried to butcher his memory, cleaving it into bloody, squirming
pieces and shoving them into different boxes with different labels,
but he was impossible to kill. With distance and time came a loss of
his tangibility, reducing him into a memory while also
expanding him into an all-devouring force. You couldn’t kill a force
with a knife, with a rush of chemicals to the veins, or with a firing
squad, you couldn’t silence it without understanding it.
And that was just it.
With the explicitly intimate violence of what my father had
done finely detailed in court testimonies, autopsy reports, and his
own confession, I knew how wrong it was for me to want to know
why. He hadn’t offered any reason during his interrogation or trial
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as to why he’d killed Katie Thompson, and he hadn’t offered to me
any reason as to why he decided to destroy everything I held dear
in the fallout. To know why was to know who he was, a
comprehension that I needed in order to better understand
myself and the love I still shamefully harbored for him deep within
a hidden pocket of my heart. Justify or destroy it, love him or hate
him, I didn’t know if there was even a difference between any of
it; I just wanted to be able to decide. I could do one or the other,
but I couldn’t do both. Black or white, dead or alive, my father or a
monster, he couldn’t be both.
He’d been both for so long, and he still wasn’t gone.
To search for the real him was my untapped obsession, a
bottlenecking of my thoughts that made it impossible to move on.
My father and his crime whispered out from underneath the
floorboards in some sort of depraved lullaby, not letting me sleep,
not letting me focus in school, not letting me think of anything
other than him. Everything I did was perfumed by his woody
cologne, by the scent of blood, slowly replacing what little oxygen
I had left as I felt myself dying in his ever-expanding shadow. With
him in my head my time felt limited as if my own execution was
awaiting me somewhere in the clouded days sprawling ahead of
me.
Staring at my hands to check if they were see-through like a
ghost’s as I often found myself doing, I thought of Katie Thompson.
Hers was a face that I tried not to think about. In the years
following my father’s arrest, I’d blamed her for what had happened
with a shameful and desperate fervor. I’d hated her because her
death, her clumsy grip on her own life that made it so easy to steal,
made it so that my father was no longer mine. With her blood on
his hands, he was hers and her family’s and the government’s and,
tonight, the executioner’s.
He was everyone’s.
He was a spectacle.
But he wasn’t mine.
I looked up from the stunted lifelines of my palms to see
Katie Thompson walking on the pavement just ahead of me. My
mourning mind had manifested her years ago to accompany me
whenever the thought of my father drove me from home, and she
was dressed just as I’d seen her when her face had been plastered
to the front of the newspaper. Her fine blond hair stretched back
into a ponytail, her wrists thin, her skin smooth like a stone. In
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 life, she’d been a track star with a full ride and a future, but now
she was a crippled figment of my imagination limping down the
sidewalk, the torso-long gash carving down her spine, laboring her
breaths, and making her eyes glassy as they looked over her
shoulder, pleading me to follow.
But I never did.
You could be terrified of the things you wanted, and I was
horrified of what I might learn about my father if I followed her. To
confront whatever truth she had to show me was to surrender to
it, to let it place its blade against the thick cord of my throat and
suffer the same fate she had. I wanted more than anything to know
who my father was, yet somehow I knew that if I followed her to
wherever she wanted me to go, saw what she wanted me to see,
did what she wanted me to do, I would die.
I’d never followed Katie Thompson because I was afraid of
endings, but tonight I found myself moving towards her. There was
a deep sense of finality that had settled in my stomach, beckoning
me to her in spite of the death it would entail. I wanted to know my
father for who he was while he was still in this world, even if for a
single moment.
And this, my heart convinced me, was the last chance I had.
Reaching her side, she looked at me for a brief moment
before continuing to walk. I followed her, trailing the blood
seeping from her back like a golden thread as we drifted through
the suburban labyrinth my father and I called home until we
eventually broke away from the pavement and stepped into a
bordering field of chest-high grass. The long stalks shimmered
silver in the moonlight like a field of swaying blades, slicing Katie
Thompson and I as we slipped between them. Each gentle brush of
the flora was like a knife’s graze to the skin, promising to cut, and I
grit my teeth with anticipation as we moved through it like the
animals my father and I used to hunt: silently, anxiously, and
painfully unaware of whatever dangers may lurk beyond our
peripheries.
It would have been easy, I found myself thinking, to drown
in this field of blue. But my father had taught me how to swim
years ago in the lake just by his, by our, favorite hunting ground.
One night, once our game had been conquered and skinned, the
two of us walked down to the rocky and reed-splintered shore,
washed the blood off our hands in the hungry surf, and then waded
out into the deep. The water was an inky black in the night, a dark
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and swirling mirror that reflected both of our bodies and faces as
he cradled me carefully against his broad chest, laid me down on
my back in the water, and held my face above it with a
freshly-cleaned hand gently cupping my neck.
“Are you ready?”
Too busy taking in mouthfuls of wet twilight air to take with
me down under, I could only nod.
“I won’t let you sink. I promise.”
I took his word because I lived by it, and then closed my
eyes. His face was the last thing I saw and then, without a
countdown, in a heartbeat, in the same amount of time it took a
person to snap from living to dead, I was offered up to the lake’s
endless dark.
The water was winter cold as it folded in over me, biting at
my skin as I waited for the animal within me to wake up and drive
me back up to the warmth of the surface. But time continued to
pass, the cold tightened its unrelenting embrace, and the
knowledge didn’t come like it was supposed to. Suddenly I was
alone in the depths, breathless, terrified, and fighting against the
darkness that so desperately wanted to consume me. My jaw
unhinged in a scream, water gushing down my esophagus before
a rough hand grabbed onto my arm and yanked me back to the
surface.
Gasping and crying, I looked at my father, his face
shadowed.
“Now you know what to be afraid of.”
My father rarely broke his promises, but when he did, they
shattered, sending everything and everyone around him flying like
shrapnel. And I realized only now, years later, remembering how
the splinters of his word had spiked my heart with betrayal as I
broke the thin divide between death and life, water and my father,
that to learn how to swim meant you first learned how to sink.
Letting out the breath I’d been holding as the two of us
broke past the field, we found ourselves on the edge of my old
elementary school’s playground, empty and dark. Katie Thompson
waited only for a moment before beginning to move towards it, old
wounds flaring in my chest as we approached. There was the slide
that the other kids had trapped me in as if they were afraid of what
I’d do if I was let out, there was the rock wall that they had hidden
from me behind, there was the bench I’d always sat on alone and
confused. Because I wasn’t my father, I hadn’t done what he had
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 done, yet they all seemed to believe that just as his blood flowed
through my veins, so did his violence.
They thought I was his accomplice, when I was just another
one of his victims.
Walking beneath the steel canopy lit a fluorescent white by
the moon, I followed Katie Thompson over to the large metal
jungle gym. It was curved and arched like the skeleton of some
long-dead and man-made monster, its flesh and insides carved out
and leaving only a shell whose peak Katie Thompson pointed to
with a finger. Weary yet determined, I worked to scale the
structure with fingers numbing from the biting chill of the metal
and the nighttime wind racking against me, the world beneath me
growing smaller as I rose to the precipice and tangled myself within
the metal bars so as to not fall.
I closed my eyes, the pointed whistle of the breeze singing
me a song of the past.
It had been summer when I last heard my father’s voice.
When I was in elementary school and before everything crumbled
on top of me, I’d spent all of my time between spring and fall at a
camp an hour away from home. The place had been my father’s
idea, and whatever reservations I may have had about us being
apart quickly faded following my arrival as I fell into the steady
rhythm of daily kickball games, cannonball contests, and campfire
horror stories. The place was a sort of personal elysium, a reprieve
from the strange tension that seemed to be slowly pulling at the
delicate seams of my life back home, but its bliss only lasted during
the day. Distance made the heart grow fonder but also weaker, and
beneath the moonlight, the nightmare that had haunted me for
years at home only grew more frequent, stronger, more terrifying.
It was always the same: I was standing at the edge of a
dock, the moonlight too bright to see the person behind me
before they pushed me into the never-ending lake. I would kick
and scream, but the sounds of my struggle were lost to the far off
wail of tornado sirens, splitting the air. Water rushed into my lungs,
washed out my veins, but I wasn’t drowning: I was dissolving. My
fingertips, my forearms, my shoulders and chest, everything that
made me who I was was breaking apart in front of my eyes and
then away from me, black like specks of ash as they were
consumed by the watery underworld I’d been submerged in.
And every time, just before I had vanished completely, I
made myself wake up.
116
The night still heavy, my sheets twisted, and my breathing
sharpened into a pant, the frantic energy that had managed to pull
me from death in my dreams further forced me to my feet, out of
my cabin, onto the playground, and to the top of the jungle gym.
For a long time, I hadn’t known what to do with all of my fear other
than cocoon myself under the covers and swallow it. But then, one
night, as I’d laid paralyzed by my terror, my father appeared in my
room, peeled back the blankets, and carried my body outside.
Sitting me down on the front porch, he gently grabbed my
chin and pointed my face towards the sky. His words came to me
through the haze of my exhaustion, softened at their edges.
“There is more to the night than just darkness.”
Despite me not understanding his words then, despite me
still not fully understanding them now, I took them into my heart
and looked up into the cosmos. And there, suspended in the
ever-stretching dark as if presenting themselves to me for the first
time, were the stars.
Ever since then, it had become a habit, a natural reflex, for
me to seek solace in the stars, only stopping once I learned that
their light was fake. By the time that their beams reach us, the stars
have already been dead for years, snuffed out by the ever-crushing
roll of time: the cost of the light was death. Suddenly, the sky that
my father had shown me seemed less like a thing of beauty and
more like a wound. The stars weren’t heavenly bodies, they were
flies drawn to the aroma of rot, and I suddenly understood that we
can never truly see, or know, or understand their light.
But we could know all-too intimately the dark they left
behind.
Your dad’s calling!
These were the words that proved to me that nightmares
weren’t restrained to my mind. The deer I’d been watching linger
at the campground border scattered and I looked down from my
pedestal. One of the camp counselors was calling up to me from
down in the mulch. Scaling down from the heavens, I walked to the
main office with glitter glue still stubbornly stuck to and glimmering
on my palms and beneath my nails. The air inside the small building
was septic and cool, the black plastic of the receiver as I placed it
to my cheek still freshly warmed by the last person who had used
it. A giddy happiness and pride filled me as I waited to be patched
through to my father. The open air of camp had helped to loosen
the tight knot of tension that always hovered somewhere in the
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 shadows of my home and of my own mind. My wrists were
tanlined where they peeked out from beneath the friendship
bracelets shackling my arms, the skin on my shoulders was chipped
and rosy, and my cheeks were always achy from smiling. It felt good
to smile, a growing rarity in my home, and I could hear a grin of
my father’s own in his voice as he finally spoke to me through the
crackling airwaves.
“How’s camp, bud?” His words came quickly despite the
strange weight of his voice. He was breathing heavily as if he’d just
finished running, hard and fast.
Good, I’d told him. Great. Awesome.
He sounded so tired, as if the strange joy that was running
through him was also draining him. “I’m so glad. So, so glad. I love
you so much. You know that, right?”
I nodded, but then realizing that he couldn’t see me over
the phone line, I replied: Yes. I know.
“You promise me?”
His voice was strained, his throat tightened with what felt like
desperation, and wanting that silent pain to go away, I promised
him.
And then before I could say I loved him too, he hung up.
I learned what he had done soon afterwards when my
mother showed up three weeks early to pick me up from camp
for what would be the last time, sat me down on the living room
couch, and soaked the front of my shirt with her tears and snot, but
it took years for me to learn that he had already done it when he
had called me. I’d been at camp, staring up at the endless expanse
of promise that was the sky, but he’d been sixty-three miles away
in Katie Thompson’s backyard. In her window. In her bedroom.
Behind her.
Atop her.
Undoing her.
In the woods running.
In my hands, in my ear.
Using his last words to tell me how much he loved me, the
grip he had on the phone loosening as the freshly-drawn blood
coating his fingers slurried onto his palms.
After that summer, I never had my nightmare again.
Even now, a part of me hated my father for calling me then.
For saying that he loved me. The confession made everything so
complicated, conjoining him and the monster that I would learn he
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was into one enigmatic being beyond my comprehension. He was
my father, but he was also a murderer.
He loved me, but I didn’t know if I was allowed to love him.
His words still echoed in my head, a memory that refused
to fade like a song stuck in my ear. I love you. The truth and how
much I believed it were of a sickly sweetness, rotting my gums
and sending me to kneel over the bone-white porcelain toilet, bile
dripping from my molars like blood from the serrated ridge of my
father’s hunting knife. The words wouldn’t leave my head, and nei-
ther would the questions that came with them, their lack of
answers being the black hole obliterating the light of my soul. Had
the breathiness of his confession been from fleeing? From fear?
From regret, shame, or sorrow?
Or had it been from white-hot pleasure, so radiant in its
rush that it left him breathless?
Is there any difference between any of those things? Does
it matter? To me, to Katie Thompson, to anyone?
What did he really mean to tell me by calling me all those
years ago?
What was it that he was trying to show me?
I opened my eyes atop the jungle gym. A naive expectation
had snuck itself through a crack in the thick walls of my heart, a
belief that my newfound proximity to the universe would cause it
to tell me what to think and feel about my father.
But instead, as my eyes recoiled against the cold moonlight,
I found nothing.
No newfound truths had settled on my tongue or offered
their palms for me to drink from, and no judgements had finally
been passed. An insidious mix of despair and frustration curdling
in my chest and pulling my eyes back down to where I’d left Katie
Thompson, I found that she was no longer standing beneath me.
Instead, she was standing far off and at the edge of the woods
bordering the school, waiting for me with her eyes turned toward
the dark.
My desperation to find out the truths of my father build-
ing up in my throat, I used now-ancient muscle memory to quickly
grapple downwards and onto the ground. Scrambling to catch up, I
barely made it to Katie Thompson’s side before she began to walk
into the woods, ivy licking at her bare heels and low-hanging tree
branches scraping against her bruised flesh. Being careful not to
lose her, I followed the phantom of her blood slicking the stones
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 and tree roots like that of a shot deer attempting to claw its way
back into the false safety of its forest home. It felt as if I were
following her to some place where she could lie down and die, that
she was taking me with her as some sort of witness.
And soon, as we stepped from the vines and into a
broken-down backyard, I found out how right that feeling was.
I’d only seen the house that suddenly stood in front of me
in the newspaper just beside my father’s mugshot, and I realized
now as horror tightened my throat how poorly the picture had
captured the place’s utter dismay. Katie Thompson’s house loomed
against the black-blue sky, its ashen outline against the horizon
framing a hollow and unmoving shadow. It was long abandoned,
grief having driven the Thompson family to somewhere far, far
away, and it looked like it hadn’t been occupied since. Shingles
had become loose and tumbled to the wild brown backyard lawn,
wooden boards were nailed across cracked windows, a family of
what may have been owls had built their home in the exposed
foundations, and its once blue facade had rotted into a dim gray.
No sound dared to move and make itself known to whatever may
be lurking in the shadows.
Fighting to keep from dry heaving and unsure of why Katie
Thompson had led me here, I hunched down further in the
underbrush and watched as she walked out in front of me. With my
eyes on her ruined back, she pointed upwards just as she did at the
jungle gym to an upstairs window, unboarded and black.
After a blink, she was gone.
I was meant to follow her, but I was frozen. Without
realizing it, I had begun to tread on sacredly defiled ground, my
body too scared to move past the shield of the treeline and into the
graveyard of the lawn. This was a new intimacy of my father’s crime
that I hadn’t yet explored, one that felt too real, one that felt too
beyond me. But then I looked down at myself, dressed in a jacket
identical to my father’s, concealed by the dark underbrush, lurking
on the border of something irreversible, something bloody and raw.
In coming here, I had stepped out of the half-lit reality of my
memories and into his shoes, tied their laces, ground their soles
into the ground; I was my father’s son, but in coming here, I had
become my father himself.
Because to truly understand him, I had to be him.
Newly understanding why Katie Thompson had brought
me here, I forced myself upwards with trembling knees and crept
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onto the back lawn. Brambles dug into the rough skin of my ankles
as I emerged from the shadows of the forest and into the stark
moonlight of the back lawn, keeping myself low as I approached
the porch. My movements were slow and stealthy; while there
was no one here left to physically see me as I prowled across the
lawn, a number of ghosts had slithered out from their hiding places
to watch me. Katie Thompson was the only person to die in this
house, yet it was haunted by a seemingly endless number of faces.
Those of her parents’, the rest of her track team, my father, me, all
of them smiling and as whole as they had been before she’d met
her end. Every apparition was a witness to a crime not yet
committed, figments of the past resurrected by the newly
resounding clamor of its echo.
The police report that had been scarred into my brain with
repetition serving as my guide, I slipped past the eyes of the
spirits and reached the back porch. A door leading inside was there,
its lock was surely weak with rust, but I ignored it and
began to scale the trellis just below the window Katie Thompson
had pointed me towards. Splinters burrowed into my skin as the
thin, poison-oak-strangled wooden bars buckled and groaned
beneath my weight, the path my father had taken not without its
pain. The ascent was fueled by the push and pull of the same
muscles that I’d used to scale the jungle gym and that my father
had trained me to use in order to swim years ago, an internal
machination of my survival and of his love that, like many others,
were also instruments of destruction.
My breath a huff, I eventually pulled myself onto the small
outcropping of roof that poked out over the backyard. The window
Katie Thompson had directed me towards was poised just above
it, and I moved closer carefully so as to not get sent tumbling back
down the way I’d come. I peered through the window to see her
bedroom, made dark by burnt out lightbulbs and dust. The lack of
electrical light was made up for by the harsh glow of the moon,
casting bright slats of light and those of even darker shadows
across the dusty carpet. Palely illuminated, the space was a tomb;
all of Katie Thompson’s possessions were still untouched, left
behind when her family abandoned this place to go lick their
unhealing wounds and stupidly hope for them to scar. Her memory
had been tainted by her end and dubbed too heavy to carry on,
being left here in the form of a raggedy stuffed rabbit on the
comforter, cobwebbed running trophies on an out-of-reach shelf,
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 band shirts and floral-print socks scattered on the floor.
And in the bathroom, utterly unaware of my presence as
she brushed her hair in the mirror, Katie Thompson herself.
My body beginning to move on some sort of hidden
hereditary instinct, my hands tugged at the cracked window frame;
it had been a hot summer night when she had died, the small gap
she’d left open in the window allowing both the breeze and my
father to more easily slip inside her room. With little effort and
without a noise, the window raised, allowing me to creep inside the
bedroom without Katie Thompson noticing a thing.
Staying close to the shadows that hemmed the weary
sanctum, I slowly moved towards her. Her ghost as it ran its
fingers through its hair was no longer broken and bloodied, but was
instead the image of how she had looked before her demise. Her
throat muscles tightened and relaxed as she hummed a silent song,
her foot tapped on the bathroom floor, and the faintest of smiles
just barely touched the corners of her mouth.
She was alive.
She was alone.
She was waiting.
For a while, I only watched her as she readied herself for
bed, moving slowly with her foolish belief that she had all the time
in the world. And as I took in the drowsy bend of her arms and curl
of her fingers, I thought again of my father. What did he see when
he looked at her like I was now, lurking in the murk like an alligator
waiting for a single misstep from its prey? Was it arousal? A
perverted sense of duty? Was he imagining the way the knife
would feel in his hand as it carved through her flesh, or was he
imagining how the splitting tissue itself would feel as it arched
outwards like the petals of a blossoming flower?
Was he thinking of me at all when he looked at her? When
he knew what he was going to do?
Or did the thought of me only come when his adrenaline
sputtered out and he found himself stumbling through the forest
from which he’d come, too smothered by the rubble of his crash to
know which way home was?
The moonlight still refusing to provide me any clarity, I
reached into my jacket pocket to pull out my hunting knife. It was
identical to my father’s, its steel metal toothed and hungry, and its
stubbled grip digging into my clawed fingers as I felt its weight in all
of its gut-wrenching glory. Working to not let the sheer
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heaviness of the blade pull me down to the ground and keep
me there, I waited with sweat beading on my forehead for Katie
Thompson to make her move.
After a few more minutes of basking in her growing
exhaustion, she let out a yawn and turned away from the mirror.
Her dust-smattered comforter was waiting for her, but she only
approached it for a moment before stopping.
My vision tunneled, becoming ringed with black.
Blinking a few times, she drifted slowly over to the now
open window, her eyes wide and her pupils bright with an animal
anxiety as she carefully peered onto the roof just beyond it.
The shadows next to me coiled together to form the outline
of my father, crouched beside me and aching to be filled.
Her thin frame shuddering from the chill, she slipped the
window closed with a heavy bang.
The figure next to me charged, vanishing as it touched the
light.
She caught my eye in the reflection of the window, became
blinded by the moonlit glint of my knife, raised her collarbones with
a building scream.
And then I leapt at her.
Time froze for a moment as I cut through the air, but as
soon as infinity had come to be, it broke apart. The blade dug itself
into her gut and cracked the window behind her, her noiseless
scream stuttered into a gag, my physical and mental momentum
was lost as I found myself pressed against the thought of her,
empty air against the feverish beat of my blood. I held us there for
a moment as I waited for understanding to find me, only to find
myself still abandoned and throwing Katie Thompson onto the bed.
Her back pointed towards the ceiling and red staining the
sheets, I straddled her and brought the knife down again. Bedding
erupted from the split mattress like blood from a newly-gashed
wound as I dragged the serrated blade down her spine, the
severing of the vein-like threads of the sheets ripping through the
air like a scream. She kicked and struggled to buck me off of her,
but I met all of her effort with double my own, digging the blade
deeper as I seeked to understand my feelings.
Part of me felt alive and electric, a sense of power rushing
through me with each drag of the knife, but another part of me
screamed to pull the blade out, to try and stitch Katie Thompson
back together, to mop up the blood before it stained the
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 floorboards and my hands. Just as one feeling rose up to conquer
the other, it quickly fell back down, an endless back and forth that I
found myself unable to understand. Had my father experienced this
same power struggle of bloodlust and remorse, this ripping conflict
like two animals biting and tearing at each other?
Becoming desperate to find the answer, I dropped the knife
and wrapped my fingers around her throat: if the answer wouldn’t
give itself to me, maybe I could choke it out of her. A phantom and
fluttery pulse trembled beneath my fingertips as I pressed them
harder and harder around her airways, the passages crumbling
beneath my will and her fight beginning to fade. The desperate
kick of her limbs began to shift into a lazy sway, and hoping to find
the answer regurgitated down the front of her shirt, mixed in her
bloody bile, I flipped her over to face me.
Nothing.
Nothing but a bloodied nose, bulging eyes, cheeks and lips
dully shimmering with tears and snot.
Tell me, I silently begged her, pressing her further
downward into the mattress. Tell me who he is.
Despite my subconscious pleas, Katie Thompson said
nothing. She said nothing and the ghostly light left her eyes, her
hands that had been clutching at my own fell down to the ruined
mattress, and her head lulled to the side, staring holes into the
dirtied wallpaper.
She was gone for the second and final time, and after
closing my eyes for a moment to keep the tears from falling, she
had vanished for good.
Letting out a roar, I clawed at the now empty and cut-up
mattress in a pained rage. I’d followed Katie Thompson, I’d done
what my father had done, I’d put myself in his shoes, I’d put his
knife and his deeds into my own hands, yet I still didn’t understand
him. I still didn’t understand why he had decided to brutalize her, I
still didn’t understand why he had decided to ruin himself, ruin me,
ruin everything in doing so, I still didn’t understand whether I loved
him or hated him.
By my hand, Katie Thompson’s death had had a reason, a
reason that I could place.
But by his, it hadn’t.
Collapsing beneath the unforgiving gravity of defeat, I fell to
the mattress on my back. Splayed out like Katie Thompson, framed
in her chalk-scratched outline, I attempted to draw in a breath and
124
gather myself. But just before the gentle kiss of oxygen could reach
my expectant lungs, I was stopped by the sensation of something
clenching down on my throat.
My eyes shooting open with a gag, I saw my father poised
above me. He was wearing the same clothes that he had been the
night of his arrest, the front of the jacket identical to mine stained
with blood and the knees of his jeans grass-stained and torn. The
dry blood caked on his hands like rust scratched against my skin as
his nails dug into the line of my throat, the air pressing out of my
lungs as his large body bore down against me.
With each crash of my heart against my ribcage, his eyes
shifted.
One moment they were black and bottomless like the lake
he had taught me to swim in, the sight of them crushing my lungs
and leaving me desperate for breath, while another they were
just as I remembered them: endlessly warm and wide with care,
beholding me with an affection whose depth only he had seemed
capable of reaching, swimming down to, surfacing from. I tried to
grasp onto one version of him, but my vision had grown too blurry,
my coordination too wayward; the two perceptions were blending
together, pressing down against me harder, draining me of my life.
Neither version of him was real, neither of them were truly here,
yet I could feel myself dying beneath their grip all the same.
My eyes blurred with tears, I could barely see as one of my
father’s hands left my throat and reached downwards to his belt.
His hunting knife, already dripping with freshly-slashed blood as he
raised it above his head, ignited in a violent, lightning-bolt-like flash
as he brought his bushy lips down to my ear and whispered to me.
Hold your breath.
Count.
The words just barely making it through the thick mist
that had drowned my thoughts, I was unable to understand what
he meant until fifteen breathless seconds later the knife came
down and into my side, an explosion of neon white agony blasting
through my veins. The spectral blade passed through my skin, my
flesh, my muscle, grated against my ribs, and split my veins like blue
live wires, imaginary blood spraying like sparks.
My father and his knife weren’t real, but my pain was. It was
real, and it was killing me.
Just as I began to understand that the pain my father was
inflicting on me was endless, the knife unsheathed itself from my
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 side. I took a gasp of air as the inferno of pain subsided with the
gentle warmth of my father’s lips as he kissed my cheeks like he
used to whenever I’d cry, his hands beginning to shift with his eyes
between crushing my throat and cradling my face.
Please count, he whispered, his voice soothing like the
distant rumble of thunder at night.
His knife raised again and my vision flashing like lightning,
I finally understood what he was asking me to do. Unable to count
aloud from a lack of air, the numbers sounded off in my head.
One… Two… Three…
When I got to twelve, the knife returned to bury in my side,
the pain once again followed by my father’s kisses and embrace.
Just as the blade of the knife seemed to cut deeper and burrow
closer to my heart, my father was pulling me closer against him like
he had all those years ago at the lake just before he thrust me into
the bottomless black.
He was preparing to let me sink again, but this time I knew
he wouldn’t be able to save me..
The blade rose above his head again, and as I counted
again, I searched him for the truth, begging with my subconscious
to still his image before he sent me to drown. But in spite of my
pleas, he wouldn’t hold a form, fill either of the molds I had cast for
him, my vision not becoming any less clotted with agonized
explosions of light.
…Ten.
A cold reality washed over me like the tide lapping at the
shore, pooling in my lungs. No matter how hard I tried, no matter
where I looked or what I did, my father’s truth was nowhere to be
found. Killer or man, object of love or hatred, they were two
different sides of the same crooked coin flipping endlessly in my
mind’s cloudy-pupiled eye only to now strike against and sink
beneath the starved waves. Its result was a mystery I couldn’t
solve, and I realized now that maybe I wasn’t meant to. Air slipped
through my compressed throat as I came to understand that in
having sought out my father’s truth for so long, I’d forgotten about
my own. It was the only truth that I knew was real now, the only
hand that I could grasp onto to save me from my fate:
I didn’t want to die.
…Five.
Fueled by a newfound burst of clarity, my eyes shot open
and my eyesight cleared. Suddenly I could see that it was no longer
126
my father on top of me, but myself. Eyes sunken, jaw stained with
tears, Adam’s apple trembling, his skin wet as if he’d swam up from
the bottom of some body of water. He didn’t look like he wanted to
be doing what he was, but he had to.
…One.
It was my own hands that were killing me, but my father
loomed over my reflection’s shoulder and continued to warp back
and forth between the two versions of himself, his presence
freezing the air and chilling my skin. The other me gave the shadow
of our father a glance over his shoulder before hoisting the knife
aloft in his own trembling hand. Glinting like the Northstar, it was
poised for the killing blow, its arc set for my heart.
Zero.
The lightning about to strike again, I let out a scream, threw
my weight to the side, and toppled the other me down to the bed.
Driven by a primal surge of energy, I threw myself on top of him
and wrestled the knife from his hands before clenching my own
around his throat just like I had Katie Thompson’s. With him
gasping for air, I clenched my eyes shut and felt the skin
beneath my hands change. The stray beard hairs of my father’s
neck brushed against my fingertips, the protective swell of his
muscles pushed back against me.
He struggled, but only a little. Only as much as I let him.
And then finally, when his fight had drained away, when
I had accepted his, our, fate, I could feel from behind the dark of
my eyelids as his fingertips worked away from where they had
been scratching at my wrists and up towards my face. They weakly
brushed against my nose, my brow, my cheeks, tracing the lines of
my being that had once been his but were now mine as delicately
as a sculptor would his magnum opus.
And then finally, after nine long years of waiting, he was
gone.
My eyes opened, I swam upwards, I broke the surface.
I took my first breath.
I was alive.
Morning had begun to cast the world in a glow as I finally
stepped back inside my home. Crimson beams of sunrise spilled
through the windows and dissolved the shadows, the air remaining
127
 heavy but becoming easier to breathe. The shivers that had shaken
my body during my return faded as I was beckoned into a sheet of
the reborn light; I’d left my jacket and knife back in Katie
Thompson’s bedroom alongside the other discarded shards of the
past, leaving the wind to have its way with me as I walked back
home. It raked over me, slowed my step, but I didn’t falter: the cold,
my father had once told me as he’d rubbed the frostbite from my
fingers, was the reason we got to feel warm at all.
Drinking in my fill of heat, I moved into the living room. My
mother was still upstairs, the TV was still on and flickering, and my
father was still frozen on the screen, just where I’d left him. He was
long dead now. I could feel it as my fingertips drifted down to the
spot on my side where his apparition had cut me, feeling as the
imaginary gap widened and then sealed shut with a scar.
My fingers coming away clean, I kneeled before him and
pressed my forehead to the faint hum of the glass. There had been
so many things I’d wanted to say to my father while he’d been alive
and we’d been apart, so many words I’d wanted to scream into his
chest as he held me against the steady rhythm of his heartbeat.
But now I knew that there was only one that I needed to
say. “Goodbye.”
I took one last look at my father’s face on the screen, my
finger hovering over the TV’s power button. He had taught me how
to tame a storm, how to find sanctity in the stars, how to sink and
swim. He had taught me everything that had built me up and torn
me apart, but in the palace of my own convoluted grief, in Katie
Thompson’s bedroom, on the carpet in front of the TV, it had been
me who had taught myself that I was not his judge, that I was not
his jury.
I was his executioner.
And it only took a single, sure moment for the TV’s light to
disappear, for darkness to cascade me in its all-too familiar rush.
And in the dark left behind, I was reminded once again of when I
was at the bottom of the lake all those years ago. Of the moments
just before the instinctual panic set in and my lungs sparked aflame,
the moments before my father came to serve as my salvation after
deeming me damned in the first place.
I was reminded of how down there, deep in the unforgiving
dark, I could see the starlight, alive and bright.
Leda and the swan (2)
Jacqueline Mullins
128 129
 I thought of you today
Bailey Evans

I thought of you today.

Of cracking open your ribcage

and crawling deep,
deeper still
into your open chest cavity.
Lying on your beating
heart like a throbbing pillow.

Of unhinging your jawbone

and sinking into the soft
wetness and velvet of your tongue.
Scratching marks into your
jagged teeth to count
the hours.

Of swimming in your bloodstream

and lapping up the warm,
thick liquid that flows in your veins.
Feasting on the very thing
that sustains your
humanity.

Of slipping into your open cuts

and pulling your skin
taut behind me.
Wishing for a plaster to cover
the sanctity of my
chosen tomb.

I thought of you today.

And I ached. the three fates
Jacqueline Mullins
130 131

3rd Place:
Prose
Notes on riding the rapid
Aidan Harper Smith
You will see 3 deer cross the tracks behind you. 3 bucks, 3
brothers.
You will not need headphones, because there is often some-
one playing music off their phone. It seems they would rather
us hear their music too than invest in headphones.
You will always wear a shirt and tie with dress shoes on The
Rapid. It’s your school uniform, it wasn’t exactly a choice. But
you’ll hate how it makes you look.
Sometimes your friend Steven will ride with you. You’ll start
as acquaintances but The Rapid will bring you closer.
You’ll come to learn that he was addicted to drugs at the
time. You don’t know it, but he had snorted coke and dropped
acid at school some days before riding that metal thing back
to the station where he would walk a mile home.
He will get off a stop before you, so there will be moments of
solitude for you. You’ll usually play music anyway, so you can
stare out of the window while it plays.
In the winter, it’s brutal. The conductors are in no hurry to
get you out of the station. They are on a strict schedule that
involves making you and Steven freeze.
132
You’ll walk home past the kids going to ride The Rapid east.
They are bussed to the westside in the morning, and will go
back east. The daily pilgrimage of integration.
You’ll practice your “don’t fuck with me” stare in the bath-
room at school. It probably looks ridiculous, you, in a shirt and
tie trying to look intimidating while wearing shoes that would
only be worn by other kids if their mothers forced them onto
them on Sunday.
You will be walking home from The Rapid when you get an
email saying you’re failing chemistry. 63 on the final. You will
try not to cry. Hard for your eyes to say “don’t fuck with me”
when you look like a toddler who got their cookie taken away.
A hawk will swoop above you. An ancestor to remind you it’s
okay. Your grade on the final will end up being an 83.
The last time you’ll see Steven on The Rapid, it will be spring.
It will be pouring rain, and you’ll be wearing a red shirt. It will
turn black, dyed by the droplets coming from the heavens.
Steven will be wearing gray, and he will probably be high.
He’ll puff his vape next to you while you sit in silence.
After that, you’ll take The Rapid alone. You and Steven never
really talked on those rides, you’d mostly just share the silent
disdain for your class. Every other kid got picked up. Every
other kid had a new range rover. You will listen to albums in
their entirety, soaking up lyrics from Kendrick, Saxophone
from John Coltrane, And bass from Thundercat. There’s a
grace to your loneliness.
You’ll be fucked with without Steven. People start asking
questions. Fuck are you dressed up for. Give em the eyes.
Don’t fuck with me. You’ll start carrying a knife in your bag.
You have never stabbed anyone, nor do you have the will, but
you’ll be terrified.
133
 A man will ask you for a dollar. You’ll pull out your whole
wallet, with only a dollar in it, and give that dollar to him. He’ll
shake his head and say he could’ve easily taken your wallet
with you pulling it out like that. You’ll be surprised he didn’t.
You’ll be a well-dressed kid who looks easy to rob. Though,
I’m pretty sure you’ll only have a Taco Bell gift card, debit
card, and a student ID in there.

The last time you take The Rapid, you’ll be wistful. Strangely,
you’ll look back on it fondly. It’ll be August, the sun will be
shining, and you’ll see a view of the city you can’t get from
the interstate.

8:32 AM Montrouge, France

Abigail Oakley
134 135
 november again of her arms,
untainted, unencumbered
Elliott Robinson by this burden that lives inside my skin and takes my name
but is not me
though i still see it sometimes, haunting the skeletons of oak
lately i’ve been dreaming of gods and half-dug graves and
trees
rooms without houses,
and low-hanging clouds,
and wondering how much of this year i am still carrying
as if retracing my steps, but this time
around
i will not follow.
like atlas
although his shoulders bravely bore the weight of the sky and
everything in it
while mine cower beneath all my mistakes.
when i finally break free from sleep that strangles me like
a lover’s hands,
the world is bled dry
and everything beautiful has gone to ground, the way
we all were meant to
knowing nothing good grows without sun,
and that november, nothing did.
i have walked for a long time since then, looking for a place to
rest
but no matter where i go, the bones in my body are still mine
and the hands, and the things that they have done,
clinging to my soul like a stain that will never come clean. i
will never
come clean
but my mother still spends her saturdays washing everything
in our house.
one day, i will be brave enough to tell her this:
that if my life was measured only in the seconds that have
passed
since the last time i thought about killing myself, i would still
be a toddler
bright-eyed and dreaming castles
out of the piles of dead leaves in my backyard

and my body would be a vessel perfectly molded to the shape

136 137
 the koi pond
Elliott Robinson

deep in the throes of december’s misery, i think back

to the koi pond in the japanese tea gardens i visited with my
sister. summer sizzled
on the pavement, and we had a picnic in the parched grass:
pork bao buns for me
and salad and fresh fruit for her
beneath the gossamer clouds. afterwards, we fed the koi fish,
watching their mouths bump together as they scrambled for
the bitter pellets
until our stomachs ached from laughing
and the little paper cup contained only crumbs
which we upended gleefully into the murky pondwater. i
couldn’t know then
that the coming winter would unmake me, piece by shameful
piece
or that the next spring would be spent painstakingly reassem-
bling myself
from the nothing left behind.
but that day, my sister and i
wore our sweat-stains like matching tattoos
and laughed our voices away at the clumsy kisses of the
hungry koi,
and i was happy then
and i would be happy again.

dysmorphic
Ella Adams

Finalist:
Art

138 139
 though all the laundry soap in the world couldn’t scrub the stain
Finalist: of you from my clothes, every rule of nature and freshman biology
insisting that you weren’t gone, only dispersed,
Poetry
or shrunk too small to see, or simply somewhere else. but it is
springtime now,

requiem and i am cherry blossoms on the wind, slipping deep beneath the
earth to join the rot and dying things,
Elliott Robinson
trusting that the worms will carry my body
it was winter when the nightmares came for me,
home.
festering like tumors inside the cemetery of my mouth, this ugly
sharp-toothed truth i couldn’t bring myself to set free

even as it consumed me, savoring every rotten piece of salt-stained

skin, of fingertips stripped to the bone, of knowing that i could
swallow a thousand tongues

and never taste yours again. i spent months trying to make myself
whole

after you crawled out of the space i so carefully carved for you
behind my ribs, and in the process i learned about all the things
that haunt the human body:

sagging flesh, pools of underarm sweat, old gums like a ruptured

slug, and every kiss that smacked of piss-warm beer,

and i thought it might be possible to take these unwanted things

and make them useful for once, shamefully wadded up like tissues
in the bloodstained panties of a twelve year old girl

or an eighteen year old girl

who is cowering in a dirty bathtub and holding her stomach as she

cries.

i tried my best to stop the bleeding,

140 141
 Finalist:
Prose

El Clásico
Kailey Murphey

The metro screeches to a stop as people shuffle through

the car. Shai and I wait until the doors pull themselves open before
stepping through and down the platform. Visions of corvette red
and ocean blue pass us up the stairs, down the streets, and at all
the crosswalks. Every person in Barcelona wears their game day
attire: jerseys, beanies, t-shirts, scarves—more often waving them
around than draping over their shoulders. I look down to adjust my
own shirt, making sure I’m not standing out as a tourist in any way.
As we get closer to the sports bar, we recognize a familiar head of
curly black locks.
“Stevie!” Loui stands at the front of the line with two hands
around his mouth and begins waving me on.
Rushing to the entrance, I’m nearly trampled by an older
Catalan man stumbling onto the street while his friend argues with
the bouncer. Loui pulls us past the men, one arm lingering on the
small of my back. Once inside, it is much busier than I’d expected.
Even with fans fighting for tables, stealing pints and dumping them
at far corners of the joint, we still manage to beat the rush and pick
a spot on the top floor overlooking the big screen. Finally seated, I
release a sigh.
“Did you think you were going to be late?” Loui asks. His
navy shirt reads Barça, Barça, Baaaarça! in a weird white font I
don’t recognize; must be from a tourist stand. The man couldn’t
possibly stand out more as an American. Today is the first time I’ve
genuinely thought he looks like a frat boy. At university, he always
carries a tote bag and wears his hair in a half-up, half-down man

it’s complicated
bun.
“Well, I certainly didn’t want to risk it,” I say, checking the
time on my watch. My roommates insist on making us late to
Ella Adams
142 143
 everything which is not usually an issue when we’re running on
Spanish time, but today everyone is early.
Shai chimes in, “She told the rest of the roommates they
could either leave with us or miss the match.” Loui busts out
laughing. I shrug my shoulders.
Today is the most important day in football. El Clásico. The
television screens are still hooked up to the previous matches. As
the kickoff grows closer and closer, the sentiments in the bar grow
more anxious with each passing minute.
“Where’s the game?” A man wearing three different types of
apparel points to the TV.
“They’ve still got Liverpool on,” says another guy, thrusting
his pint in the air. This one has unkempt stubble and purple eye
bags.
The sign out front stated very clearly: FC Barcelona vs Real
Madrid—16:00. I presume the match will be turned on when the
other game ends. Liverpool and Arsenal are in the 73rd minute with
one goal each. Anything could happen. There’s a group of young
men all wearing bright red shirts in the front of the pub,
presumably rooting on an English club. No one would be caught
dead wearing a Real Madrid shirt today.
We arrived two hours before the match starts to secure
seats and avoid standing room only. There’s still another hour
before kickoff. Loui was convinced we wouldn’t get in after 14:00.
I’m beginning to think he was right.
I turn to Shai and ask her what she wants to drink.
“A cheeseburger,” she says, her fine long brown hair
whipping as she turns to face me.
“And to drink?” I enunciate over the noise.
“Oh, sorry. Sangria!” I shoot her a thumbs up and walk in
the direction of the counter.
Loui grabs my wrist. “Are you ordering?”
“Do you want something?” I don’t meet his eyes, instead
checking to make sure Shai is safe sitting by herself.
“Can I get a beer and a burger? I’ll Venmo.”
“Anything else I can do for you?” I tease. He just frowns,
squinting his eyes as if searching for the joke. “I got it.” He lets go
and moseys back to our spot.
After several agonizing minutes elbowing past the hordes of
sloppy drunk men, I find myself at the counter. The bartender looks
me up and down. I’m sure she’s about to mutter “tourist.” Instead,
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she asks, “Table number?” I weave all the way back to where we are
seated to find the tiny silver plaque with a three-digit number on
the sticky wooden surface. Once I meander to the bar once more,
I yell “303!” to the woman. She nods and gestures for me to push
through the crowd to tell her my order: three cheeseburgers, one
sangria, and two beers. She presses some buttons on her tablet,
shoos me away, and looks towards the next customer. I take my
cue and make my way to our table.
As I settle into the spot, I take a moment to admire our
good work. It’s a great seat. On top of the balcony, we can see
down to the crowd below. This vantage point has an excellent view
of the projector screen, not that it’s hard to miss.
On the table, the light from my phone stands out with the
name Mother plastered on the screen. Normally, I wouldn’t pick up
her call during such a crucial time, but I’ve talked about this day for
weeks; she wouldn’t call if it wasn’t important.
I make my way again through the crowd and stick myself in
a corner in the back of the establishment that’s yet to be filled.
“Hello?”
“Hi, honey! Are you getting ready to go out?” My mom asks
in her usual enthusiastic tone. I have no clue how she’s able to
maintain that excitement all the time.
“I’m already at the bar,” I say, rolling my eyes since she can’t
see me. I swear the woman never checks the family-shared
calendar. To her credit, the six-hour time difference between
Eastern Standard time and Spain can be confusing.
“Oh, I was hoping I’d catch you before you left,” she says
dejectedly. “I can call back.”
“It’s fine. The game hasn’t started yet.” I do wish she’d hurry
up because I’d like to get back to my friends. Shai and Loui haven’t
hung out together much because all of Shai’s classes always
overlap with our lunch schedules.
“Well, I hate to bear bad news during a happy day…”
She really makes you work for it sometimes.
“What is it?”
“The results of my mom’s test came back. She tested within
the range of early-onset dementia. Alzheimer’s.” She pauses,
waiting for my reply. “Sweetie, are you there?”
“Yeah, I’m still here. I’m sorry, Mom. What do we need to
do?”
“Everything is still in the early stages, but your grandparents
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 might have to move in with us. I can explain more about the
situation when you get back home. I just wanted you to know.”
“I appreciate that,” I shake my head, trying to hold back
tears.
I love my grams, but I definitely saw it coming. She had
been forgetful and confused for years when we visited her and my
gramps out in California. Our entire family has been so worried
about her ability to navigate simple tasks like the grocery by herself
when my gramps is too busy watching the golf channel or more
risky responsibilities like taking trips to visit their children who have
spread themselves across the U.S.
“There’s one other reason I wanted to tell you now,” she
pauses, keeping me in further suspense. “As you may know,
Alzheimer’s is hereditary, meaning you and I have an increased
chance of getting it too.” The breath I was holding, the one that
kept the waterworks at bay, finally broke. I turned my back so I was
facing the corner of the wall and no one could see the stream of
tears running over my soft cheeks.
“Thanks for letting me know,” I say through the tightness in
my throat.
She clicks her tongue, sensing my distress. “I’m sorry, I
shouldn’t have said anything. I hope the game goes well. Your dad
and I will be watching at home!” Admittedly, her timing is truly
impeccable. I wipe my tears with the sleeve of my layering shirt.
“Me too. I’ll talk to you later. Thanks for calling.” I hang up
and try to reel it in before heading back to everyone.
Once seated, I realize how stuffy my nose feels.
“Everything okay?” My eyes must still be puffy because Shai
quirks her head when I finally turn towards her.
I shoot her a distant smile, bottling it up. In light of this new
information, I have resolved to make this day and all the rest to
come as memorable as possible.
“Yeah, my mom just called.” I find myself grateful that Loui
seems to have disappeared in this moment, completely missing my
breakdown. He would know something’s up for sure.
Shai nods, not really believing me and by the grace of God,
she lets it be. Instead, she takes a long look at our surroundings and
leans over.
Shai whispers, “We’re the only locals here.” After a quick
glance, I see what she sees and giggle. The bar is packed with men,
mostly internationals. We are far from locals, though. I’m still not
146
settled on the fact that we’ve been living in Barcelona for three
months now. Just in time to experience the joys and jitters of
watching Barça play against their biggest rival.
It would be a dream for the team to win this tradition
during our time here. This team, this game, represents much more
than one singular match. It’s the ongoing flame of
revolution against the establishment—the central government. For
years these people have sacrificed their language, their culture, and
their tradition to submit to the Castellano way of life. When Barça
wins, it proves once again that they deserve their voices heard. A
win would give me something to remember, to hold captive until
the last memory slips from my fingers.
Every tabletop has a pint of some brand of beer—each one
vaguely similar to the other. The room is fluttering with
conversation about probability, prospects, players, and hopes for
the match. A smog of desperation fills the air. Loui taps a coaster
against the glazed wooden table until I shoot him wide eyes and a
swatting hand. He pouts, setting it down gently to not disturb me
further.
The best part about watching football is the art of
conversation. A drunk Spaniard swaying beside his girlfriend to the
right of our table captures the Mediterranean style with light
stubble and slicked-back hair. His friend sitting across from them
has been playing devil’s advocate for the last half hour.
“Real Madrid has been on their game lately,” he says.
His friend scratches his sideburns. He replies, “Yeah, but
this is El Clásico. Barça needs this win.”
He’s absolutely right. The team needs to win, for more
reasons than one. Not only to put them through to the second
position in the league, or to boost their spirits after a tough season,
but for my own sanity. This match is pivotal.
Loui nudges my shoulder. “Do you think we’re going to
win?”
I assess his gaze. His face is close, and his eyes remain
constant on mine. “I hope,” is all I can muster with his agonizing
glare. I quickly look away to find Shai glancing between the two
of us, smirking. She’s heard the stories after classes about all the
mixed signals I’ve been receiving. There’s nothing worse than a man
who makes you debate their attraction to you. Whether or not he
feels the same spark, even the slightest of his touches sends a jolt
under my skin. I just shake my head at my supportive friend, hoping
147
 to save the lecture on why I need to stand up for my feelings and
set some boundaries for later.
As a waitress hands a tray of nachos to a table in front of
us, my stomach begins to rumble. I pray our food comes before the
game starts. Just in case, I close my eyes and send a quick message
to whoever might be listening above.
The television screen conveniently switches to the match
everyone came to see. The camera pans to the players of both
teams lined up on the pitch, with a few small children in the middle
separating the rivals. The clock starts the ten-minute countdown.
Everyone stands up to clap when flashes of our players
appear dressed in the familiar team colors of blue, burgundy,
and gold made famous by Lionel Messi and the record-breaking
2011 Dream Team. The small patch on their left chest contains St.
George’s cross, the flag of Catalunya, and Barça’s colors. The
emblem is symbolic to the Catalan people who find deep
connection in the success of their football team.
Even though I never played for a team as monumental as
this one, I feel a certain unease to accompany the excitement when
I watch the starting lineup. Football—soccer—will always be a part
of my life, but there are times that I deeply miss the feeling of my
heart thumping as I stand in front of a much smaller crowd and
wait to hear my name called by the announcer. I haven’t touched
a soccer ball in years. Ever since I began feeling random pangs in
my back, I decided to take a rest. The last time I attempted to play
around in my backyard, each kick sent a shock through my spine.
My parents have always said that, unless the pain is debilitating
or hindering my daily life, it does not require medical attention. I
suppose they don’t believe soccer is important enough to be part
of my every day. Maybe with my grandmother being officially
diagnosed, they’ll shift their position.
As if my prayers are answered, my mind having drifted
elsewhere to occupy the time, a curvy woman brings a large
serving tray full of burgers and sets it down before us. She hands
out the beers first and the sangria next, giving Shai a skeptical
look in the process. After all the burger baskets are dispersed, she
recedes into the crowd holding the round black tray high above her
head.
Whilst chowing on my notably inauthentic burger that
tastes more like beyond meat than cow, I watch in admiration as
the crowd hollers for their favorite players, stars twinkling in their
148
eyes as they cheer for their beloved team. The legend with dark
brown hair and a light beard, coach and FC Barcelona icon, Xavi
Hernandez, smiles proudly. There’s a dark intensity in his eyes that
reflects his readiness for the challenge. The bar erupts into
applause. Another few rowdy minutes, and the teams are set in
their formations on opposing sides of the field. Two bulls kicking
dirt in the wind.
A deafening silence fills the air. The stakes of the game
and the hopes of the people just doubled. The referee’s whistle
echoes between the walls of the joint like surround sound, and the
match is underway. I take a second to blink away welled tears and
appreciate this moment. I will never feel this exact experience for
the first time again. When I’m old and withered, hopefully worn
from years spent traveling the world and writing about it, I may
not remember how I felt. In direct opposition of this fear, I remain
present in this bar as if it’s the last thing I can hold on to.
Players charge at one another, the ball bouncing around
the pitch like a pinball. The coaches sway back and forth whilst
caressing their beards. Only soft murmurs can be heard for the first
five minutes of the match as everyone stands breathless waiting
for something to happen. The beautiful part of the game is when
nothing is happening because everything is happening. The players
move in and out of formation, creating invisible shapes that
procure sneaky progress. The possibilities are limitless. It only takes
a million good passes and one good shoot to win a game.
Shai takes a sip of her sangria, her face glued to the screen.
I peel my eyes away long enough to observe the way the people
watch their team. Some drink ferociously, some stroke their lover’s
back, and some yell at their friends over the differences between
Cruyff football and tiki-taka. Everyone has something vague and
skeptical to offer as if they’re as knowledgeable as Xavi himself.
The conjoined muscle of the bar tenses around the control our
team has maintained thus far, proving Xavi’s mastery.
Barça has been passing around the other team with ease.
Momentum is boiling hot. Piqué sends the ball to Lewandowski. A
long pass to Gavi. A quick touch to Pedri. The ball slams the back of
the net.
For a moment, everyone is silent, a smile creeping on their
faces. As the players run to the corner of the pitch to celebrate,
and the referee toots the whistle definitively determining the goal,
the bar roars in cheer. Beers are spilled, two women wearing Pedri
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 jerseys hug each other, and the men behind us are high-fiving
anyone nearby. Shai joins in on the fun, laughing and dancing to
chants, unashamed that she doesn’t know the words. I follow her,
diving into the middle of the crowd and pulling Loui behind me.
Together, we jump, dance, sing, scream, and smile.
The goal-scorer kneels on the grass waiting for his
teammates to pile on top of him. The bar sings one cohesive song,
one hundred people all culminate as one loud voice.
The game is again underway, and the excitement has
settled. The shiny reflection of belligerent smiles beams against my
eyes. It must be infectious because I have one of my own. I take a
big gulp of my beer. This. This is what I was waiting for. To live and
to breathe as one, enjoying the happiest time of our lives.
“De dondé sois?” asks the Spaniard guy from the table next
to ours. Luckily, I took Spanish in high school and one advanced
course in college—enough to decipher his question.
“Estados Unidos,” I say.
“Oh, Americans,” he replies, switching to English as soon
as he hears the accent. No one here likes to listen to us struggle
through broken Spanish. The man turns to the girl under his arm to
whisper in her ear. Through her thick brown locks, she gives us a
once-over and scoffs. “So, why are you here?”
“To watch the match,” I say, returning my gaze to the TV.
With the distraction, I didn’t realize the entire bar had gone quiet in
the wake of a goal from the opposing team.
“Mierda!” yells guy-with-a-girlfriend, waving a hand at the
screen. When I researched some key Spanish curse words days
before hopping on my flight, I found the word for shit which I
shared in our apartment group chat. I look at Shai and smile. We
both turn back to the screen and begin shouting curse words we
hear from others in the bar. Guy-with-a-girlfriend glances at us and
simply nods.
“Are you from Barcelona?” Loui asks the man thinking he’s
just made a friend.
“My family is from Argentina, but I’ve lived here for 5 years,”
he says. “Long enough to see this team turn to shit.”
Loui nods empathetically. As internationals, we couldn’t
possibly understand the loyalty developed after living here for
years. I want to reach that level someday. Barcelona is one of the
liveliest places in the world. Of all the cities and countries I’ve
traveled to, Barcelona is home. I’ve awoken from daydreams of
150
living and working here, of writing and traveling and just living. At
least then I’ll have my memories documented in my own words, like
a living diary.
“I’m Marcos, this is Raquel.” He pulls his girl closer to his
side. “What are your names?”
Loui’s closest so he responds first.
I glance to Shai who ushers me on. “Well, I’m Stevie…”
“Shai,” she adds.
After Marcos shakes all of our hands, the boys begin
chatting while the game moves on with higher intensity as both
teams fight for the next goal. Barça pressures Real Madrid’s
defense, attacking as soon as the ball lands at the center defender’s
foot. Busquets wins the attack, dribbling up the goal box and taking
the shot. Fans in the high left corner are nearly drilled in the head
by his desperate kick. This match is already draining me,
emotionally. As the fiftieth minute rolls around, I feel an intense
sense of dread. Barça has been looking sloppy, missing the easiest
of passes and turning it over to the other team left and right.
Real Madrid’s goalie, draped in traffic cone orange, punts
the ball from the six-well past half field. The midfielders are
prepared as they begin their sprint, putting pressure on our
defense. The other team wins the ball out of the air and takes it
into our final third, too close for comfort. I bite my nails, holding
my breath for the next play. One of their players, a fast and sneaky
winger passes to his teammate making a run across the middle.
Barça is backpedaling to adjust to the quick move. It’s too late. The
player takes the shot. It sloshes the right-corner netting. On the
television, the crowd throws their scarves in the air, jumping up and
down to the tune of some Castellano song. The player who scored
is run over by his teammates in the corner of the pitch.
All I can do is stand perfectly still as if I just witnessed
a person stabbed in the heart right in front of me. Loud shouts
bordering on violence can be heard across the bar where a group
of older men congregates together slurring filthy curse words. A
tall, muscled bartender dawdles his way over to the gentlemen. He
must have tried to ask them to stop because the drunks begin
yelling at the worker until another few employees come from
beyond the woodwork to settle the crowd. In our own section,
where the youngsters seem to have gathered, they have begun
singing Barça chants at a volume I can only assume is intended to
be heard all the way at Santiago Bernabéu Stadium. Shai bottoms
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 out her drink and looks around the bar. You’re telling me.
Due in part to the major shift in the game, and the
gnawing thoughts about the call with my mother, I whip out my
phone and type into the Google search bar: Alzheimer’s symptoms.
The results I find are substantial, such as Alzheimer’s impacting
daily life through forgetting appointments, confusion with time, and
problem-solving. But, if my grandmother carries the genetic
mutation, then my mom has a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting the
gene. Even though it’s mainly hereditary by a first-degree relation
to the person, that means there’s only one family member
separating my chances of developing the condition. If my mom
gets it, I am much more likely to follow soon after. Before I spiral,
my lungs fill with sweaty air and I set my phone back down on the
table, refocusing on being present.
“I need another one to survive the rest of this game.” Shai
makes another effort to check the throng of fifty fans at the
counter demanding a refill. “There’s no way I’m making it through
there.” She sighs, shrugging her shoulders.
“What are you having?” Marcos points at Shai’s empty glass.
“I don’t even know you and you’re going to buy me a drink?”
He frowns, shaking his head as though she’s suggesting he offered
to buy her a four-course meal.
“Barça is losing. We all need to drink,” he replies in his thick
accent, pulling his girlfriend in the direction of the bar top. Shai
shouts her order as they disappear into the mass. I keep an eye on
the bar as Marcos reappears at the front of the line, pointing in our
direction as the bartender seems to argue with him. He returns
after an agonizing while later carrying five drinks. He’s brought one
for me and Loui too, despite us not having finished our drinks.
“What did she say?” Shai asks Marcos.
“She asked who would dare drink a cider while Barça loses.”
Almost all the locals in Barcelona drink Estrella Damm, the native
beer. It’s their equivalent to Guinness.
Marcos sets the drinks down on our red coasters and
returns his focus to the match at hand. Unfortunately, the score
still reflects the unnerving one-goal lead of our enemy. The
seventieth minute stares us down, impending its daunting force on
all of us.
My heart pounds to the beat of the clock ticking down,
opportunities vanishing with every second. To my right, Marcos
twirls his girlfriend’s hair. They’re both standing cuddled together,
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unflinchingly geared towards the screen. I force my eyes back to
the game to avoid a quick glance at Loui. Out of the corner of my
eye, I see him take another sip of his beer. Was that… did he just try
to peek in my direction? At what point is attraction supposed to be
obvious? I try not to let myself be distracted from the game by
trivial things like boys, but it grows more difficult by the second.
Loui has moved slightly closer to where he’s almost leaning on me
when a play goes wrong. I do appreciate his proximity as my own
anxiety begins to grow on me, my heart rate shifting with each
disappointing play.
The minutes seem to tick by like hours, my pint still just as
full as the last time I checked. With each glance at the clock, I grow
restless. I’ve shifted in my seat twice to adjust my posture. My back
grows stiff from watching football, as it does anytime I’m sitting in
one position for an extended period of time. If only I could return
to the field and play myself, then the back pain would be overcome
by the soreness of my thighs.
The referee stands at the edge of the field holding up a
black sign too big for his short stature that indicates there are three
minutes of extra time. Both teams shift into gear, putting in their
best effort for the short period of time left in the game.
The last minute is filled with existential dread. Our team
is going to lose. We will not win El Clásico. No celebrating on La
Rambla. No flags waving at the Arc de Triomfe. No memory to keep
forever. Nothing will be worth it. Our one opportunity to see the
best team in history beat their archnemesis fades to black. The
whistle blows and a deep sigh can be felt inside the bar. The crowd
gathers jackets, finishes the last of their drinks, grabs onto loved
ones, and collectively shakes their heads. Loui wipes his hair out of
his face and gathers our things.
Shai pats my arm. “Ready to go?” I take one last look around
the bar. Through hazy eyes, I make out empty beer cups and burger
baskets scattered across tables and in piles while the big screen
recaps the goals of the match at which I must turn away in disgust.
Loui waves goodbye to our new friends.
“Next time,” Marcos says, pointing assertively.
We all watch as Marcos and his girlfriend make their way
down the creaky wooden stairs, their arms wrapped around each
other.
Loui looks to me, tilting his head. “Shall we find a new bar?”
He suggests, a smirk creeping on his face. At this, I let myself smile.
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 If this day can be turned around, I am jumping on the opportunity.
Shai takes a few steps towards us, interjecting into a
conversation she knows wasn’t directed entirely at her. “I’m feeling
pretty tired. I might go home and take a nap. Maybe I’ll meet you
guys later.”
I look to Loui, and he raises his brows as if asking are you
leaving too? I smile wide and greedy. Memories are fleeting but
the feeling of a moment lasts forever, even if it’s just in your heart
rather than your mind.
“Let’s go.”
As we exit the bar, Shai turns left toward the metro
entrance as Loui links my arm in his, and we turn right into the
hopeful crowd of undying fans.

Yellowstone rain
Megan Gorsky
154 155
 the gardener
Megan Fuller

Ivy-covered brick walls surround us in protection

For us or from us?
The Academy will transform you
The Academy will conform you

Outside a beautiful garden grows

A vibrant landscape expands for miles
The Gardener smiles as I pass by
The same grin every day as he works

Planting planting planting

The Gardener never seems to take the day off
Plows, shovels, trowels, shears, spades, rakes
An arsenal hung on the walls of his greenhouse

So much land is taken up by this evergreen expanse

Corn, strawberries, apples, oranges
Cabbages, carrots, beets, tomatoes
All to make the delicious food we eat each day

Why do our crops grow from such dry soil?

Why do our students come and go so often?
Why did Lily leave school so suddenly and why hasn’t she written?
These are questions I do not dare ask
The Gardener smiles
And I am filled with dread

Weed-covered brick walls surround us like a prison

For us
The Academy will contain you
The Academy will drain you

The Gardener smiles

And I know what he has done.
Snack break
Megan Gorsky
156 157
 King Me
Bailey Evans

i would follow you anywhere

even into another life, if that was
what it took to make you kind.

idolization begets you,

i trail behind your heels with the reverence
that a hound gives his master.

i place a crown of gold

and gemstone on your head and
you bestow a crown of thorns

upon my own tilted skull.

you push the wreath in with calloused fingers
and lick the salty tears from my skin.

come with me, you state

my kingdom awaits us both.
i accept the bloodied hand.

you sleep easily in satin sheets of white,

cries from your people are muffled by the stone
walls put in place to keep them out.

isolation feasts upon my mind,

and yet you mock and dismiss my pleas
for just one loving moment.

you cut me, then

cauterize the wound with your touch
nothing ever gentle nor tender.

i would never harm you.

i would never harm you.
i could never harm you.

i will follow you anywhere,

the next life will be kinder to us.
i’ll make sure of it
Amsterdam: bike city
Abigail Oakley
158 159
 for vanity’s sake at vanities with plush inches of perfect
2nd Place: padding
Poetry in estate rooms full of burning coals for someone to stoke
for satins and surgeries slipped behind silken safeties

When you count your women,

When she says the quiet your pink and your pussy hats
and perfunctory proclamations that stomp over
the stains of dissenters such as these
part out loud How much are they worth to you?
Leah Ollie

I ask,

How many Mammys had to die for Torrid

for Kim
for fluorescent Clinique counters and bitchy sales associates
rallied against anything
that dares transgress as fleshy and plain
or occupy the grounds it has tilled
for standing in service to the wings of the socials and clubs of
closed ranks
and ice cream in little tins
like the teacup boats that bob down the sound in tandem
with the waves
and gloves with pearls and horses unloved and untended

How many Sallys for your sugar cane in lemonade and

seething spices and
plantation weddings and Antebellum pride that stretches for
eons in the name of
a flash of of oppressive weight so steeled it pulverized 4
generations

How many Jezebels for those sticky lipped femme fatales in

cars like hot iron
full of manpower and gold plated compacts
160 161
 Ella Adams
is currently a freshman at Butler University. She is majoring in
arts administration with a minor in art and design.

eladams2@butler.edu

Emma Biddle
is a junior psychology major at Butler University.

ebiddle@butler.edu

Sarah Blade
is an Autistic and ADHD student in her senior year at Butler
University. She is a biology and classics double major and a

contributor bios
voracious writer in her free time. Her poetry most often
centers around her experiences as a disabled woman and
serves as a freeing outlet for her frustration with ableism and
isolation.

sarahblade0307@gmail.com

Daylen Byrd
is currently a sophomore at Butler University, majoring in art
& design. He plans to pursue a career in either museum
curation or art restoration.

dbyrd@butler.edu

Ensley Circle
is a junior theatre major at Butler University. In her free time,
she enjoys writing and painting.

ecircle@butler.edu

162 163
 Nina DiCicco
is a freshman at Butler University. She has loved drawing/
painting for years, seeing it as a way of expressing herself day
in and day out.
ninadd2006@gmail.com
Annie Donato
is a junior at Butler University studying violin performance
and English. She was raised in Jasper, IN, and in her free time,
enjoys photography, hiking, and earl grey tea.
Tyler Ellis
is a sophomore studying secondary English education at
Butler University, and plans to teach junior high English. His
poetry and prose focus on love and life through a queer and
disabled lens.
teellis@butler.edu
Miranda Emerick
is a sophomore studying creative writing at Butler University.
She spends her free time fiddling with word choices in
notebooks and reading every book in her endless to-be-read
pile.
Bailey Evans
is a junior at IUPUI majoring in English with a concentration in
literature, and minoring in classical studies, creative
writing, and art history. She works as a Senior Editor for
IUPUI’s literary and arts magazine, genesis. When she is not
writing, Bailey enjoys exploring art museums and reading
anything and everything.
164
Matthew Forrester
is a junior, South African student at Butler University. He was
brought to America by the means of track and field, but used
that as a pathway to begin his studies in English literature.
Forrester shares that although he speaks English, he struggles
with the contexts and implications in an American context.
fforrester@butler.edu
Megan Fuller
is a junior at Butler University. She is double majoring in
creative writing and communications with a specialization in
public relations. Megan enjoys writing poetry and prose and
is a member of the Manuscripts general staff.
Megan Gorsky
is a travel-inspired photographer originally from Florida, now
attending Butler University as a junior. She loves any
adventure the outdoors throws her way, and she loves
photographing every second of it. When there isn’t a camera
in her hand, you can find her skydiving, rock climbing, hiking,
or any other adrenaline-heightened activity.
mgorsky2@gmail.com, mgorsky@butler.edu
Anne Gregg
is a DePauw University sophomore, writer, and poet from
Northwest Indiana. Her work is featured in Collective Tale’s
Collective Fantasy Anthology, Noctivagant Press, and in the
Black Poppy Review. She loves writing, but, as an increasingly
nihilistic person, she has decided to put her work out in the
world sooner rather than later.
165
 Mae-Mae Han
is a junior pharmacy major at Butler University. She currently
serves as the president of Students of Color Allied in
Healthcare and as the content managing editor of The Butler
Collegian, the latter of which she previously won the
Outstanding New Staff Member and the Cross-Current
Award. Outside of writing and editing, she spends time
playing music, doing improv comedy, and staying up too late
studying for pharmacy tests.
mhan@butler.edu
Shannon Kucaj
is a senior at IUPUI majoring in creative writing, with minors
in professional & public writing, psychology, communication
studies, and classical studies. She’s an aspiring editor and
writer and currently works as one of two Managing Editors
for IUPUI’s literary & art magazine, genesis, and has interned
within publishing. You can find her work in genesis (Spring
2021 issue) and in Manuscripts (Volume 87). In her free time,
Shannon enjoys singing and baking.
shannonkucaj.writer@gmail.com
Katie Marrs
is a sophomore attending Butler University’s College of
Pharmacy and Health Sciences. While her education is heavily
focused on the sciences, she enjoys using her leisure time to
pursue more creative passions, including poetry. Katie views
writing as her escape from the routines of everyday life, and
encourages you to take a moment to escape with her.
166
Ashleigh Michaels
is an English major at Butler University with a focus in
creative writing. She is currently a junior. She comes from a
small town just outside of Holland, Michigan. She has loved
writing since the beginning of her school career, all the way
back in first grade, and usually prefers writing fictional short
stories.
Jacqueline Mullins
is a senior art + design and biology double major at Butler
University.
jmullin1@butler.edu
Kailey Murphey
is a junior strategic communication major with a minor in
English creative writing and loves to spend time snuggled up
with a good rom-com—whether it’s a book or movie is up to
your interpretation. She recently came back from studying
abroad in Barcelona, Spain, and takes comfort in writing blog
posts or short stories encapsulating her experience.
Abigail Oakley
is a junior English major and history and French minor at
Butler University. She is an amateur photographer primarily
interested in sharing perspectives through photography.
Leah Ollie
lives and works as a sophomore at Butler University, currently
studying literary theory, culture and criticism as well as
classics and anthropology. She can be reached at
literateleah@gmail.com, and is probably drinking a cup of
matcha right now.
167
 Hyewon Park
Hyewon was born in South Korea and came to the US as an
international student about 5 years ago. She is a junior in the
Butler University pharmacy program (P1). She usually draws
digitally or with charcoal. Most of her artwork is black and
white with rough textures, because she likes the calm mood
of monochrome paintings and bold brush strokes.
hpark2@butler.edu
Gabriella Peabody
is a junior at Butler University, where she studies both art and
strategic communications. She shares her creations on her
instagram @verygabart and she could be reached by her
email:
gabriellagcp@gmail.com
Elliott Robinson
is a junior at Butler University currently studying English
and Spanish, although he has hopes of subtly infiltrating the
Classics Department in future semesters. He enjoys ghost
hunting, rainy weather, and eclectic clothing, and has recently
fallen in love with taking long walks to nowhere. His future
plans are constantly in flux, but right now he would like to
attend grad school, visit Tokyo, and publish a series of novels.
Hannah Shafer
is a senior at Butler University pursuing speech, language &
hearing sciences with plans to get her doctorates in
audiology after graduation. She enjoys all aspects of
communication with others, including photography of her
travels’ special memories.
168
Belen Sepulveda
is currently an art + design major at Butler University. She
specializes/spends most of her time working on digital
character design, but she also enjoys doing realism on
traditional mediums. Art is her biggest passion and she hopes
that her skills and hard work will help her to one day turn
it into a job, since she can’t see herself doing anything else
apart from making beautiful art pieces to call her own.
Keegan Shoemaker
is a 20-year-old fiction writer and junior studying English at
the Bloomington branch of Indiana University. An avid fang
enthusiast, monster advocate, and vampiric werewolf
wannabe, his work seeks to explore the black velvet
underbelly of the individual and marvel in the most nebulous
avenues of the human experience.
Ollie Sikes
is a sophomore at Butler University who is double majoring in
theatre and creative writing. Once they graduate, they hope
to use their writing and acting skills to promote social change.
osikes@butler.edu
Aidan Harper Smith
is a 19-year-old sophomore creative writing and political sci-
ence double major at Butler University. If you have any inqui-
ries about his work, please email him at aidanharpersmith@
gmail.com
169
 Madelin Snider
is a senior Art+Design major at Butler University and has
served as the Design Chair of Manuscripts for the past three
issues. After graduation, Madelin will be pursuing a career in
illustration, hopefully in children’s books.

madelinsniderart@gmail.com

Anna Sullivan
is a junior art + design major at Butler University in
Indianapolis. She is minoring in strategic communication.
Originally, she is from Noblesville, Indiana and grew up as the
youngest of four children. Her photography journey began at
seven years old and has been her main art medium ever since.

asullivan@butler.edu

Caroline Suydam
is a freshman at Butler University and has dedicated much of
her free time to the arts of all kinds. Her favorite pastime is
to sit down with a sheet of paper and a pencil, and see what
comes out of it. It could be a poem, a sketch, or a short story.
It reveals to her what her mind may not be telling her.

Cole Weidenbach
is a junior at Shortridge High School. He’s into playing piano,
guitar, and other music stuff! He plans on going to school for
journalism or education.

Jack Williams
is a sophomore at Butler University majoring in creative
writing, with a Spanish minor.

jrwilliams@butler.edu

170