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

Andante

Frances Juntilla

Reporter

Believe me, I tried to shape up

But my hands trembled in tremolos

And my heart pumped in presto

You showed up like a scherzo

A God-sent-from-above to end my nocturne

Florist’s labour is not bad after all

What should’ve been dissonant

Turns out to be a magnum opus

Did my F-sharp meet half-way with your C note?

I wish to sneak a ballad in your bouquet

For you to hear Venus’s melody

Or did Apollo beat me into it?

Oh, can’t you hear my call?

Your diatonic tint to my chromatic shade

May our melismas hum sweetly in this song

Andante, my heart beats in this pace

And oh, can’t you hear me out?

Dancing to a waltz all night long

May this lullaby finish in a major chord

Andante as I sing you to sleep

Believe me, I tried to shape up

But these cornflowers sway in swing

Now a ballad found its way within them

Don’t you want to hear its tune?

Nonsense

Kaya Yepes Collao

Contributor

If not for the plethora of songs I have stored and hidden,

I am afraid my heart would ache harder and crack open

My toil with mediocrity seems yet to bind me

And it leaves no space for me to break free.

I die by the hand that grips the pen,

Murder—my death—not even by subconscious intention,

In shadow of great arts I grip my finest piece

The piece I sacrificed to brave perception

that in the ground, cannot find peace.

Were we so dull to deserve dying subjective death

Was our heart too hard to comprehend, perhaps too dense?

The meaning of lines lost in the literary laurels

Was it so weary and weak to warrant life?

I find myself in questioning of what I love

Asking if a shepherd must be good at tending flocks to love his herd

Will I ever escape this line between what is great and what occupies the podium in third.

Magellan Leaves

Sacha Uloth

Contributor

The great wings took flight

Caught a west-bound wind

They woke him up and spoke of its departure.

Such harsh waters to set sail

A mast head, had they heard his pleas?

He sat long after, silenced in the wake…

Feed me, moma! He said or

Take me back!

You left a man ashore squawking up that tree.

Confession

Raphaëlle Prévost

Contributor

Day falls to death; I reminisce

Soft day of Fall, there was a kiss

Then; eternally of a bliss

Sweet love of mine; always I miss

Infinite cascades dry my whole

Quiet in vain; love left a hole

Photographs erase tomorrow,

Yet my aching Fall has to know

Winter brings memory of woe

Love, for you set my heart aglow