Summer/Fall 2023
Issue 23
When we wake up in the morning Sam says, “Okay, get up, let’s go. Before you start distracting me.” Before I start distracting him. Like it’s my fault he just wants to get me naked all the time. By the time I’m putting on my pants he’s on the couch checking his email. I’ve already decided that this isn’t happening again.
A few years after my dad dropped dead, he called into an NPR gardening show to talk about some kind of tomato nymph. I should’ve been shocked, hearing his voice crackle over my car radio like that, but I’d already been seeing him around town for years. I passed him in grocery store aisles, he passed me in his car.
I learned a lot from my box of crayons growing up, about things I had never heard of before: Periwinkle, Burnt Sienna, Raw Umber, Maize. But even Red Orange couldn’t prepare me for the brilliance of a poppy. I saw my first ones in Italy, espresso-edgy, trying to take in as much as I could in a little over a week.
That realization that over the course of my conscious, known life, I had spent less than 24 hours with my mother, did not occur to me until very late in the writing and editing process. That realization changed the writing of the book, it changed the arc of the book, it made the book what it is. Which is wild, because it’s a very simple thing: how much time have I actually spent with her?
Goggles in hand, water smacked against the boulder on which I stood. A drumbeat reminder of why I was standing at the edge of Lake Tahoe—to swim. One mile, maybe more. I used to be the type of person who would plunge right in. Instead, I kept my arms folded across my chest wondering what had become of me.
If you are an artist of any kind, chances are you are no stranger to The Unknown. In fact, it has probably been a motivating factor in creating your art. I know it has been for me. Wrestling with The Unknown is a fundamental part of the human experience, and the human experience is a fundamental part of art.
You shall now become a man of rock.
A solid and sturdy man,
slightly chipped.
Community has always been important to me, both personally and professionally. I think that’s a value I picked up from my parents, with a healthy boost from my own extroverted tendencies. I also spent my early career as a magazine editor, which is an extremely collaborative job. So all of these things naturally affect my writing practice now that I am self-employed.
I love writing about animals and nature. I write about animals as well in my short fiction, and it just occurred to me that Dolores is an octopus. Octopuses change color. I love octopuses and am fascinated by them. That was where I went initially with that image. Then I started thinking about who it was that was telling us this, who it is that’s observing this. Why is she interested in this?
At night, vows become ghosts.
Like in the past, they wander
the same streets and neighborhoods.
Leaves stir in trees
but the wind is still.
I think that’s kind of the point of an MFA. There are obviously a lot of reasons for an MFA, but one thing it affords you is this community of writers to say, “Oh my god, I love your work. Can I talk to you about this? Can we talk and trade work?” All that is invaluable. I didn’t realize how much of writing is being with other writers and reading each other’s work and talking about each other’s work.
I birthed twins this year. That’s how it has been with three of my poetry collections, each written alongside a novel. They weren’t published together, but Jubilee and Landscape with Headless Mama are twins, Trinity Sight and Rosa’s Einstein are twins, and Belly to the Brutal and River Woman, River Demon are twins. In both the poetry collection and in the novel, I am healing bloodlines of mother-daughter.
I was nineteen, the same age as Mary Shelley when she initially wrote Frankenstein. I was a sophomore in college, and I read Frankenstein in a Romantic Lit course. I was drawn to it on three levels. As a biracial Asian person, I was really taken with the Creature’s story, as are many people of color, because the Creature is clearly defined as Other.
If your dad died on a mountain in Switzerland, blowing an alpine horn, if his anterior cerebral artery ruptured, and your mom told you his final breath flew “joyfully” through the hills, past deer, past goats, beyond trees; if you knew she said that only because you told her three times he was too old to go on that trip
At least it’s Violeta Parra, you say as you listen to the people above sing, “Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto.” Other times it’s been bachata, ranchera and progressive rock. We decided to put up with it, to not call the cops.
Tonight, we drive out of town. Dear,
your face is unfamiliar, so are your fingers,
your thighs, your calves. This body
evokes my curiosity. But in living bodies,
I’m no longer interested, they are more or less the same.
By the fourth day, Claire was no longer surprised when she went to the freezer for ice and found herself face-to-face with six dead gerbils. It was her daughter’s love that had killed them. Emily, all of six years old, had brought them a toxic bouquet of flowers hand-picked from the neighbor’s garden.
I was in third grade the year they legalized guns in school. It happened during spring vacation and Mom took me to Staples for school supplies. She said I could get the small pistol with the little blue daisies on it if I promised, promised, to load the dishwasher every day after dinner instead of just when I got reminded.
My hands slide under the faded floral couch cushions behind Future Memories Thrift Store. I find three hair ties, a now-gray piece of gum, and enough cat hair to create a new tabby. Sweat trickles down my back. My phone dings. I yank the shop-vac hose harder than necessary and flip the switch.
“Ava.”
Archetypes have a powerful hold on our imagination; they represent characters, patterns that we hear over and over again, that we absorb on the page and on the silver screen. More than that, they’re social scripts we find ourselves unconsciously following. I’m paraphrasing Charles Baxter, but be on guard against what’s too familiar, of what emerges too easily from our imaginations.
Collage is my primary medium and my way of giving visual expression to my inner world. I find beauty in creating something whole and meaningful from the broken pieces of different elements. In this, I feel like collage is a metaphor for all of life. I live for the spaces that I can create with collage; spaces of peace, beauty, safety, comfort, and love.
It was loud, almost a crack,
like a shot—not a gunshot
but a shot-put shot dropped
on a stage. My mother’s forehead
hitting the bathroom floor.
Through art, Uzomah explores the role of being a person with a disability in society, other issues, and people that go unnoticed. Her abilities draw from her personal experiences and expose the daily struggle of being disabled. Translating all of this into art is her goal as an artist and activist.
Eventually the house was going to fall into the sea—just pitch right over and tumble down the bluff. That was why it was cheap. Why they could afford it.
Their realtor said it was nothing to be concerned about. That was years away, he said. It probably wouldn’t happen at all.
Our only child has transformed into a starfish. They called it a compulsion, then a desire. Limb by limb, eye by eye, they replaced the body we gave them. Is this worse than puberty? I can’t ask. Our child speaks starfish now: chemical excretions and spindly touch. I am as ignorant and useless as they swore in their youth I was.
Each word of my eulogy lingers.
Punctuation carries the most weight.
Punctuation holds most weight in the mouth.
My tongue untangles from its sentences.
The gourd appeared three days after my miscarriage. Its massive body, swollen and puckered with warty growths, stretched from one end of the butcher’s block to the other. Bulbous and green with a light-yellow underbelly, it sat there in the center of the room unbothered by its own mysterious appearance in the household.
Nothing about the 32-pound gourd made sense.
I feel like I took a relatively non-traditional path to where I’m at right now. I think it involved a little bit of ignorance early on in my writing career. When I say that, I mean, I never planned on being a writer in the traditional sense of like, “I want to get a book published.” I wanted friends, I wanted to engage with people, and I wanted community.
I’m dragging Erik to the Art Institute because it’s free on Tuesdays and I don’t want to go to Religions of the World. The course is taught by this woman who wears dirndl skirts and pulls her dark hair tight into a bun, stretching the skin near her eyes tight. Below her nose, her face is large and fleshy and I’m sure that someday it will droop.
A literary and art journal
from the MFA community at
Antioch University Los Angeles.
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credit S.M. Sukardi
Andrew Brandveen
E.L.A. Photography