THE EARTH IS A RELIQUARY

Photographer - Tobi Brun

THE EARTH IS A RELIQUARY

Her growth brings us to this forest; the forest I stand in. It’s as though a window’s picture could
not capture her elements.

She spills over our graves, swallowing our bones in plants. The streets are taken over with the
brush of her hand.

She plays with airplanes, pushing against the machines.
She visits me often.

Ribbons ripple through the air, a festival of mourning the living <things>.
My death was beautiful. The struggle to breathe mangled in a deep scarlet world.

I had a weak heart overwhelmed by beautiful things. And the horrid <things> tore me apart.
I ran through the highway now filled with itchy grass. My toes sank into the dirt as I wiggled them.

She was giggling at my expense. My mouth watered the mud; I was now in waist deep.
<ground> I would not struggle.

She lifted me as a child who was inconsolable to the whispers of the whirling sea.
I still cried though. She had buried me just to come and pick me back up as though time had
gotten to her, making an unstable fixation on her negligence.

Who am I to judge her nature?

I had joined society in the overthrow. I had polluted her love and rebelled against my own
mother.

Who am I?

Taylor Noe is a current student at Bowling Green State University as a Bachelor of Fine Arts major in Creative Writing. Her passion for writing began with self-publishing her early collections of poetry in two books showcasing her growth as a creative writer from 2022-2023. Since then, Taylor has been working on fine tuning her creative methods and studying in a more professional setting. If you would like to see more of Taylor and her work, follow her on Instagram at tay.writes_07.

Celebrity, Variation on "Variation on the Word Sleep," In Preparation & Father's Day.

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Celebrity

Sitting here, my peripheral vision decreases,
I feel important as eyes are forced to
to gaze toward the back of my head.
Up here, I see things more,
I’ve got a better seat in the house.
The girl’s hair is blacker,
her skin glows more,
I can hear the inconstant validity of her sniffling
in austere surround sound.
My perception is greater –
loose pipes spilling out clear and soluble water
in a cylindrical, constant stream.
I remember it smelt like chemicals in that room,
years of studying the mystery of the periodic table
was baked and seasoned in,
back and forth.
Those two were the celebrities,
whom I gazed at all through the year.
In the winter I dissociated into the weaves of their J. Crew sweaters,
I watched her tight ponytail bobbing up and down in
the curve of her back,
as the snow fell.
And it was perfect,
her mediocre-sized bra strap peeked out
with just the perfect tinge of conspicuousness.
And then, one dewy spring day,
I was surprised.
From below the rich chestnut locks of her tightly bound hair,
led a naïve path down to the collar of her shirt,
white, starched, and perfect as it was.
Scattered on that path, like invisible rocks on a dirt road,
sprouted the familiar sight of
a cluster of pink, newly formed,
round pimples.

Variation on “Variation of the Word Sleep”
Inspired by Margaret Atwood

My wish would be to sleep with you.
Not to sleep
with you,
like man sleeps with woman,
this talk of sleep yielding the uncanny
movements and hushed words whispered between
blankets and warm bodies, but
I’d like to sleep
with you. Near you.
In your apartment.
To have it be late.
For us to be alone, at first;
then to have your companion arrive,
the knight in shining armor returning
from his magic kingdom of rehearsal space,
to greet you.
And I will slide down,
assume my position,
the one I was granted at birth as the
only, the third, the fifth, the watcher –
I’ll bend into my desk chair behind
the paper-clipped stacks of content couples.
I’d like to lie near you, touching –
for us to talk for long hours,
for your hand to slip over mine ever slightly
when our mutual passions surface in conversation.
And I’d like for you to
watch me,
sleeping.
To witness this drowsiness as it overcomes my senses,
and unties the knot of practicality inherent in holy children.
I’d like you to relax, to sedate your neuroses.
Or if relaxation is not feasible, to
allow me the pleasure of closing my eyes on your couch,
your perfume filling up the place alongside your disobedient love for him.
And I’d like to watch you, with him,
as I begin to sleep,
subtle touches held by backward glances and
restraint.
I’d love to go to sleep here, in this peaceful
place, and wake up in my life that is
independent
as I wish it to be.
Until my mothers pocketbook,
her secret, newfound cornucopia,
reminds her of the yearn to shop with me,
and guide me
To play the obstructive, unending, irresistible game
that these two adults now play,
covering the loneliness of her quiescent breast, knotted shoulders, and back
which cry out to be touched by the one she begot.

In Preparation

When my mother dies,
I feel that somehow I’ll know
exactly what to do.
Not because she’s explained what
her funeral must entail for most of
my lifetime,
or because I attended my Grandfather’s
open – casket wake at the newborn
age of eight.
I suppose it could be some
sort of control issue.
I am sure that we will be sitting
in a hospital room in some far away
town or city filled with new smells
and an unfamiliar landscape.

Upon entering, I’ll take off
your socks first,
one by one,
and begin to wash your feet,
so you’ll know that it’s me.
I’ll clean the grime visible
only to me that the nurses
irresponsibly let collect
between your toes.
You’ll feel the refreshing
cool of alcohol as I remove
the polish remaining on your
toes from my last weekly
pedicure to you; I’ll know
you want to go purely.
Your clothes will be next –
against all orders of nurses
and staff
and your own mother
and husband —
I’ll lift your graceful,
cat – like back up off the pillow,
gently, like you’ve always taught
and wanted me to be,
and untie your gown,
lifting it away like wrapping paper
and quietly crushing it under the table.
Your breasts stare at me,
like two concealed souls trapped
inside some pool - some other planet’s pool -
your loose skin’s surface rippling with
your every breath, the life hanging on in them,
afraid to spill out over the edges and be gone;
I’ll wash them and your neck with warm water.
It amazes me how these bittersweet tables have turned, you look at me with grateful eyes
– we are so much more than mother and child,
Madonna and child,
woman and woman,
we are like the two last puppies of a litter left
in the whelping box, anticipating where the
other craves warm, real touch.
So, I take out the tiger balm because
it smells like our old house.
I rub it under your toes,
untying the knots you’ve always battled
that are reflective of your weak sinus cavities.
Everyone has left the room -
cats escape my black bag of tricks,
they are all around you, like the old days.
I apply them to you like a midwife
does leeches, curling about your
neck and defeated chest,
looking like they will transform into stone
and become part of your neo-Rasta sepulcher here.
They say you come into this world and out of it
alone, but we’ve been napping in the sun together
since I was a part of your womb.
In you.
I will always be there,
the cats, the dog and me,
and the music
I’ve turned on
loud and tribal,
the reggae cadence
to which I was
conceived.
We walk you down this
aisle in time,
we are your overdue army,
only one will take you.

Father’s Day

I always wondered how I
would feel on this day after
you were gone.
Your death left me in the
broad category of daughters
who experience this day with
a deceased father.

I wondered, would it be easier
now to encapsulate your life
and tuck it away neatly and say simply,
“my father is deceased,”
relieved that I no longer
have to explain your choices,
and our past?
For years, I knew that the day
you were no longer with us
would provide me with a
sense of relief from the worry
and anxiety that our relationship
caused for all these years.
I had hoped for any sort of closure,
a welcome release of the silent albatross
that I wore daily around my neck.
I watched your memorial service online
and wondered if there would be
any mention of me.
Then, I saw this picture of us appear
on the screen, one that you must
have kept for all these years.
In it, I am sitting on your knee, and you are
holding a borrowed camcorder,
the one you intrinsically knew how to use,
our shared familial duty.
Your eulogy included a simple statement
saying that you “had a daughter.”
Nothing more, and nothing less.
Clearly, you and your family used
the same strategy of encapsulating
our relationship that I attempted.
But, there are memories.

Some come to me in between
thoughts during the day,
memories that I haven’t thought
of in over twenty years,
maybe even longer.
They feel like unexpected
electrical zaps that can
jolt me from my deepest focus,
the adrenaline rush that comes
with suddenly swerving out of your
lane as you drive.
Others make me feel like
I’m surfing a huge wave,
the memory harnessing itself
to all the power of the ocean,
making the emotion
swell and swell
while I hold on and radically
accept the churning water.
And just like that, it’s over.
Grief is an ongoing process,
and it is never truly over.
It is why Leopold Bloom’s statement,
“Me. And me now”
still brings readers to their knees,
over a hundred years after it was written.
In Laurie Anderson’s masterpiece
Heart of a Dog, she says,
“But finally I saw it, the connection
between love and death,
and that the purpose of death
is the release of love.”
I love you, dad.
Somehow, I feel your presence deep

in my bones, like the genes that you
gave me are somehow annotated by your spirit.
You are a part of me, on a cellular level,
and I wouldn’t trade you for any other.

Katharine Chung is a New York transplant who currently resides in Connecticut. An Assistant Director in an urban public library by day, she enjoys stand-up paddle boarding with her dog, night photography, and movies in her free time. Her poetry has previously been published in Italics Mine. Find her on Instagram @vegancinephile.

Relationship Surgery

Photographer - Tobi Brun

relationship surgery 

Patients usually ask why we begin the operation on the hands, 

so I tell them: “well, that’s where the disease usually starts”.  

Most people think it dawns in the atriums of the heart, 

the wrinklings of the brain,

or the lobes of the liver; 

but really, the hands are the first to go. 

Too often, people forget that their hands

hold much more than car keys and cell phones; 

they hold memories. 

Like the way he massaged my shoulder blades during candlelit baths. 

They hold more than vanilla-scented chapsticks and crumpled up receipts.

Like the time we stayed up all night tracing freckles until we found our favorite.  

They hold more than dinner utensils and door handles. 

Like my fingertips caressing the small of his back when we made love on the floor.

They hold memories composed of everything (and everyone) 

that you’ve ever touched; 

ones that seep into the skin, 

filling the crevices of every cuticle, 

finding a home underneath the innermost recesses of your fingernail beds. 

This is where they live. 

It’s only when a healthy heart suddenly becomes a broken one, 

that they start their inevitable decay. 

They start their dissolution, a corruption of the soul at the cellular level. 

Once cherished, now discarded memories start to ooze and bleed, they instigate infection–

An infection of the spirit, one that remains unlinked to bodily funguses or disease. 

But when either affliction is left untreated, 

they fester all the same. 

I tell patients about these tangible records, these lingering moments that 

have become trapped beneath the fingernails 

of every person who has touched, 

or been touched, 

by another human’s existence in this world. 

“This is why we start with the hands”, I say. 

They hold more than car keys. 

Brenna Koenig is currently an Embedded Tutor in the English Department at California State University Northridge, where she is completing her Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature (Honors). She has previously worked as a supplemental instructor by co-teaching various levels of composition, rhetoric, and literary analysis to first-year college students. Outside of teaching and tutoring, she has written about a variety of literary topics that encompass both American and British literature in the form of novels, short stories, and poetry. She has also been published in the CSUN Sigma Tau Delta literary magazine, The Scarlet Review. Her research interests include, but are not limited to: the problematic conceptions of women in nineteenth-century domestic novels, applying gender, psychoanalytic, and Marxist criticism to canonical gothic works, as well as the lasting influence of the Holocaust on Jewish-American Literature and identity. As an avid reader, writer, and burgeoning teacher; Brenna continue to spread her passion for literature inside and outside the classroom.

Mid-Week Ritual

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Mid-Week Ritual

It is Thursday and I am tired of being a person again.

I look at my reflection through the steam and toothpaste splatter on my mirror and I start to pick

at my skin. I am racking my brain, pulling on my eyelashes, and pinching at my pores, seeking

some semblance of a response from myself. I keep adding things to my to do list I know will

never get done and I keep losing my fucking pen.

I pause to carve out a small space of solitude in my mind.

Please just give me a small space to die in private each week.

I have no desire to go to the grocery store, to fold the laundry, tidy up every room in my vacant

house, catch up with those I’ve been meaning to see and remember how long it has been, I do not

want to do the dishes, or pretend to be a person for a second longer. I can’t keep engaging in the

façade of normalcy for one more second or any pretense of personhood. I will think of this again

tomorrow and the day after that, fear the coming days of December, wonder why the passage of

time feels like something I never really understand; the days all dissolving in my mouth, their

taste long forgotten.

I have become passive; my mind feels old and stupid.

Let me sit quietly by myself.

I will put on the music I have been longing to hear, dance in my living room to the large voices

and heavy drums of Fiona Apple, and I will think about absolutely nothing. I will put my face in

my hands and savor this intimacy. I will retreat fully and completely into myself.

I’ll allow my thoughts to blend, I won’t try to distinguish among the myriad of lives coexisting in

the pit of my stomach, that all ultimately look the same. I can’t play the mother of the world; I

can’t even be a mother to myself. I want to fall asleep without ever actually closing my eyes.

I will let my thoughts come undone,

like red string unspooling from within, watching as they spill out of me –

I am hungry to know what I will say next before I even know how to say it.

I remember to text back, and I try to tell you that this is how I am feeling.

Lucy James is an avid reader and lover of words, a writer of all kinds particularly delicate with poetry and creative nonfiction. Devoting their life to trying to understand the chaos in everything, Lucy documents how it is for her– based in the Midwest. Lucy’s Instagram {HERE}

Nowruz

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Nowruz

As the frozen sky melts and drips down,

Droplet by droplet.

Thawing the trapped sunlight from the ground,

And how death's counterpart will visit these lands, 

Breathing life into every branch that was touched by its sibling.

Bird songs echo from this firmament forevermore, 

And my eyes will kiss green. 

Time is backtracking. 

Fallen leaves grow magnificent wings and fly back to their branches.

The night breeze is touched by the sun before hitting my delicate face,

And the dark clouds scurry away to make way for brightened days.

The land feels like a dormant creature rising after its slumber, 

This is reanimation,

This is spring,

This is Nowruz.

NOWRUZ - Noun

Nowruz, also known as Persian New Year, is a 13-day holiday that celebrates the first day of spring and the vernal equinox, which usually occurs around March 21. The word "Nowruz" translates to "new day" in Persian, and the holiday symbolizes harmony with nature and renewal.

“Nowruz means a lot to me, waking up and realizing that the dark days of winter are over and it's time for the land to become green and warm again. Eating "samanak" and drinking "haft mewa". It's all very nostalgic!” Ahmad Morid is a young and self-taught poet and artist. They have been writing poetry since May of last year and drawing and painting since they were seven years old. Art and self-expression is what drives them forward in life, and their other hobbies include: screenwriting, analyzing movies, reading books, etc.

New Year?

New Year?

Who claims the year is new?

I cannot see good fortune's fresh-shot ray

Illumining my soul today,

And I'm still feeling blue.

Who claims the year is new?

Who says hope's buds will bloom

Within our hearts? Its nursery's long died,

And now my dearest friends abide

In the wastelands of gloom.

Who says hope's buds will bloom?

Old scars refuse to heal.

Like foreign hosts, they latch onto the mind,

Creating din of every kind—

An ever-turning wheel.

Who says old scars will heal

And we will get relief?

The married girl, each night, still looks above

To see the star of her lost love,

Who left with heavy grief.

We will not get relief.

New year? What's new about it?

Same tarnished windows, fusty rooms, and flies.

The old wall clock that faintly cries—

Same days that spin about it.

New year? I really doubt it!

Shamik Banerjee is a poet from India. He resides in Assam with his parents. Some of his recent works will appear in York Literary Review, Willow Review, Thimble Lit, and Modern Reformation, to name a few.

To the Evening Breeze

Photographer - Tobi Brun

To the Evening Breeze

When I unbolt the terrace door,

He enters quickly, greeting me

With kisses on my cheeks and hair

As if a friend who'd longed to see

My face for countless centuries.

As night begins to blacken more

And, ray by ray, the moonlight flees,

I settle on the window chair

And grab a book. Then he comes too

And reads the tale before I do.

He loves to ring the bright wind chimes,

Flick draperies, skim by each leaf

Of our Neem tree that waits all day

For his cool touch of sweet relief.

But out of everything, he likes

The top floor's balcony. He climbs

There, chitchats with the plants, or strikes

The hanging clothes—a rare ballet

For father, ma, and me to view;

A lustre finds our lips anew.

Shamik Banerjee is a poet from India. He resides in Assam with his parents. Some of his recent works will appear in York Literary Review, Willow Review, Thimble Lit, and Modern Reformation, to name a few.

A Meeting

A Meeting

We chose our old patisserie, Faheem's,

One Monday noontime. Half the chairs were stacked.

The waiter Abdul's smile displayed the fact

He knew our likes: fudge brownies with whipped cream.

Her clothes were simple, just a plain Salwar

Kameez—not what she mostly wore to meet me.

No dimples sat upon her cheeks to greet me;

Her body there, her mind was somewhere far

Away. "Must be a slight familial thing,"

I thought and asked, "A crossfire with your mother?

The usual hijinks by your puckish brother?"

It seemed no act or word of mine could bring

The truth out of her throat. After a pause,

She spoke (as if an old, corroded door,

Reluctant to be slid): "Just six months more.

My baba says it's for my own good cause.

The boy's an engineer from our own caste

With good emoluments." She turned away

From me to hide her face, now moist and gray.

This news, like summer's heat, wizened the last

Bright bloom of optimism in my heart.

"When is the day?" I wished to ask but could

Not voice a word—perhaps, for my own good;

Perhaps, to keep my soul a bit apart,

Veiled from the knowledge of her wedding date.

We sat, hands clasped, and watched the hour grow,

The people leave, the lightbulbs' dimmish glow.

The food remained untouched on both our plates.

Word Meaning:

Salwar Kameez: an Indian outfit for females

Baba: Father

Shamik Banerjee is a poet from India. He resides in Assam with his parents. Some of his recent works will appear in York Literary Review, Willow Review, Thimble Lit, and Modern Reformation, to name a few.