Opening Statement

With the start of the next semester, our very fitting theme for the submissions this issue was renewal. I feel like renewal has a very binary connotation: transitioning from a flawed past to an improved present. However, I feel that it’s much more nuanced than that. Our lives are not memoir, we don’t have one defining incident that separates our life into a distinct before and after. Like a muscle, throughout our lives our own character undergoes hundreds of micro-tears that reinforce it, making it stronger each time. While that does seem daunting, I think it helps me situate myself in the course of my life. I can look at myself and say “you can get up, you’ve gotten up before and you will again, it’s not gonna stop so neither should you”.  So here’s to renewal, over and over again.

⁃ Sal Francis, Creative Writing Editor

A Familiar Place

Morad Zidoune

Contributor

Under the stars, Over the mountain

Sitting, on the layers of superficialities

Night after night, the body loses gravity

resisting what is not known.

I shut my door, the soul drifts off

To follow its heart’s desires,

Crack open the veil, I do not belong

And continue to wander along

The grass is greener, the stars shine bright

The sky is the blue from a child’s sight

My body is light, my body is light

I have been here before.

In My Memories

Kaya Yepes Collao

Contributor

I will never look at Calvin and Hobbes the same

The idea that you’re just gone is so strange.

All that’s left are memories in a heavy mind,

In these memories it is you I find.

With a gruff hand to your puffed chest

You swear that life will be grand and yet,

You’ve already moved on, now I am blind

Except in these memories where it is you, I find.

How should I remember your voice without you?

You did warn me, and time flew.

The moon, the stars and the Sun are kind,

In these memories it is you I find

Now, I await for for some curtain to close

Where I can look upon you and the red rows

Of bright poppies that lay behind

Within these memories it is you I find.

Film Crews and Fascism

Colm Griffin

Contributor

For power, power’s made.

Under great golden arches,

That provide no shade

For those who don’t attend marches,

He stood addressing dots

Dappled neat in the landscape.

When done, the gun shot

And we filmed it on tape.

The tyranny is televised,

The revolution is not.

The film crews are incentivized

And hope not to be shot.

When I recall everything I got,

For shooting that reel

That made them feel

Like it was all quite real

(Our fates were sealed),

I’m thankful that I was not shot.