Inkling 2017

INKLING Volume 27 Spring 2017

Inkling is the creative arts magazine of Lone Star College-Tomball. Students of LSC-Tomball are invited to submit poetry, essays, short stories, or artwork for this annual publication. All copyrights revert to the authors and artists. No portion of Inkling may be reproduced without consent of the individual contributors.

Senior Editors: Dawn Houldsworth Daniellie Silva Rosalind Williamson

Editorial Staff: Lucy Alvear Mary Kouns

Advisers: Mari Carmen Marín Catherine Olson Kyle Solak

Cover Art: Night Lights (Photography) Daniellie Silva

When I was younger, I was only focused on being in front of the lenses. As I grew up, I saw the beauty of being behind the lens. This picture was inspired by a scene in Tangled where Rapunzel goes into the kingdom to see floating lanterns. I wanted to experience the contrast of the fiery lights on a moonless night, so I packed a blanket and headed to a lights festival. The heat and the flight of the lights created a hazy environment, which caused the blurriness of the background on that still night. My inspiration also came from the model, an old friend. The people in our lives not only share inspirational moments with us, but also help create them. Thus, without her, there would be no photograph. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Inkling staff, editors, and advisers would like to extend their sincerest thanks to Lone Star College-Tomball for the opportunity to publish this twenty-seventh edition of our magazine.

We’d like to thank sponsors of this year’s reading series: LSC- Tomball Library; Faculty Senate; First Year Foundations Division; and the Office of Student Life. With their support,Inkling was able to host an on-campus reading and an interview with 2016 Texas Poet Laureate, Laurie Ann Guerrero. Additionally, Inkling would like to express our vast appreciation to Mary Kouns and Daniellie Silva for their efforts in transcribing and to Catherine Olson for editing the Martha Serpas interview for publication in this year’s magazine. And, of course, tremendous thanks go to poets Martha Serpas and Laurie Ann Guerrero for sharing time, talent, stories, and poems with us as part of our visiting author series.

We offer heartfelt thanks to current Dean Melinda Coleman in the First Year Foundations Division. Thanks also go to Shannon Marino, Danielle Thornton, and Sousan Abdul-Razzak in the Office of Student Life, and to Pamela Shafer in the Lone Star College-Tomball Community Library, for supporting us throughout the year. We must thank the Inkling faculty judges, Kim Carter, Steffani Frideres, Bo Rollins, and Earl Staley. Finally, we mustn’t forget English professor Douglas Boyd, longtime Inkling judge, proofreader and grammar sage, for the consistent editorial direction he has brought to the magazine over the past twenty-seven years.

Most of all, special thanks go to the talented and inspired students of Lone Star College-Tomball. Each year, we collect hundreds of submissions, and in the end, we are able to showcase only a handful of the creative works that LSC-Tomball students have to offer. Many thanks to all of the student contributors this year, in past years, and in years to come. This magazine would not be possible without them. Inkling Table of Contents

String Theory by Jack Young 1 Second Place Poetry Winner The Falcon’s Cry by Chelsea McKenna 2 Third Place Prose Winner My Self by Mary Kouns 4 The Raven and the Student by Kathryn Chuchmuch 5 Laughter by Dawn Houldsworth 8 Fall by Mary Kouns 9 Your Heart by Zaynab Ali 11 My Body of Thoughts by Haley Smith 13 Defiant, Like a Candle in the Rain by Caleb Price 14 First Place Prose Winner Meds by Katie Riley 18 Pawn by Zaynab Ali 19 Words by Michelina Olivieri 20 An Ode from Paper to Pencil by Daniellie Silva 22 Third Place Poetry Winner Small Talk by Zoe Jones 23 Inexorable by Christopher Kessinger 24 Gay Conversion Camp by Lucy Alvear 27 Being Human by Daniellie Silva 28 A Hidden Reality by Sarah Thomas 29 Home by Michelina Olivieri 32 First Place Poetry Winner Portrait of Wisdom (Colored Pencil Drawing) by Darrell Svatek 24 Second Place Art Winner Mesarthim (Watercolor) by Emma Simoni 35 Third Place Art Winner Take the Breath from My Lungs (Charcoal/Ink) by Adrianne Gerlach 36 First Place Art Winner Watch Your Step (Photography) by Daniellie Silva 37 Ruin Study (Photography) by Dawn Houldsworth 38 The Sky Is on Fire (Charcoal) by Adrianne Gerlach 39 Beauty and Chaos (Acrylic Painting) by Darrell Svatek 40 Darth Vader (Prismacolor Pencils) by Lance Kretzschmar 41 All Your Boats in a Row (Photography) by Jordan Scrivens 42 Oceanic Sky (Acrylic Painting) by Katie Riley 43 Toy Mountain (Pencil Drawing) by Darrell Svatek 44 Empty Space (Watercolor) by Emma Simoni 45 Mysterious Morning (Photography) by Wendy Palmgren 46 Reflect(Photography) by Mary Kouns 47 Butterfly on Flower (Photography) by Dawn Houldsworth 48 Larger Than Life (Photography) by Jordan Scrivens 49 A Conversation between Martha Serpas and Inkling 50 Transcribed by Mary Kouns and Daniellie Silva Special Snowflake by Mary Kouns 65 Clark by Kathryn Chuchmuch 66 Crush by Zoe Jones 68 Free by Zaynab Ali 69 The Murder That Wasn’t by Erin Larson 70 Second Place Prose Winner Untitled by Mary Kouns 76 Anxiety by Lucy Alvear 77 Forget by Michelina Olivieri 78 Milk Is Mythology by Daniellie Silva 80 Voyage de la Vie by Erin Larson 81 A Pebble by Kathryn Chuchmuch 83

Contributors’ Biographies 84 Inkling Editorial Staff and Advisers 87 Submission Guidelines 89 Second Place Poetry Winner

String Theory Jack Young

Imagine your life as a ball of string. If you wanted to change just one small thing,

You’d have to unravel this big messy sphere. A red knot means anger, a purple one fear.

All knots of all colors all wrapped into one. You just want to change it, and then you are done.

You find the disaster, an ugly chartreuse. It’s big and it’s ugly, and shaped like a noose.

The knot takes time, so you undo some more. Piles of string lie all over the floor.

It’s undone now, and straight as can be. Now how do I turn this heap back into me?

1 Third Place Prose Winner

The Falcon’s Cry Chelsea McKenna

I was dying and had never been more sure of anything during life. With death came a certainty that I had not been afforded before. I had wings, wonderfully grand wings. I was a falcon. I must have always been a falcon, but I could not understand how I had not noticed before. How did I not? Humans were fickle, irrelevant things, while I was a work of art. Every stroke of my wing was a brushing of paint onto the canvas. Each feather was sculpted to a shape and pattern that were uniquely my own. My sharpened eyesight took in every component of the obscure cell that held me. Every surface was composed of repeating packed gray stones. A tin pail sat in the back corner, the smell assaulting my newly keen senses. In the adjacent corner sat a soiled pile of hay. Atop the straw lay a human, or what once could have been called a human. It lay very still, with hair now the color of sludge draped across its cheek. It had long ago lost the privilege of clothes, so every honed edge of it was visible. The human’s legs were sticks that had long since been out of use. The left leg veered off to the side below the knee where the bone had snapped the final time it had attempted to walk. The arms were noodles draped carelessly over a deeply sunken stomach. Each rib was framed by a taut layer of translucent skin. Its face had been beautiful but was now nothing more than angles and shadows. Two shadows came into the compact room as the door slammed open with a crash. The crippled human’s eyes opened slowly, but the body remained still as stone. The newcomers grabbed an arm apiece, hauling the human up to its feet. The human’s face remained expressionless as its head lolled to the side. They dragged the frail human out—really it was more of a shell—and I followed. The foolish shadows had left the cell door open. At the end of the hall was a window. Sunlight spilled in, warming the cool, unfeeling stones beneath it. I could already feel the light of the sun on my feathers and the touch of the wind on my face. The

2 jealousy of the clouds as they yielded beneath the all- encompassing strokes of my wings was tangible. Then I turned away from the window to look at the trio. The two massive shadows were pulling the shell along. The acrid scent of copper assailed my senses, and I knew the shell must have begun bleeding. With a final look towards the window behind me, I followed them. The cluster of them soon entered a room that was similar to the cell but more spacious. At the back of the room stood a humanoid shape. A hood was pulled low over the face. I could not see the eyes, but I felt them all the same. They were inky, bottomless wells that saw every part of me. The abhorrence coming off of the hooded humanoid was palpable. It recognized me. Then the eyes shifted from me to the shell, and I wanted them back on me because it would surely break. The Grim beckoned the group forward and the shadows obliged. It took the shell into its arms, skeletal fingers gripping the hips. Its hands were feathers on the brittle body. Gradually, a hand reached up and cradled the human’s face in its palm. A tiny sigh left the lips at the unfamiliar touch. The opposite hand came up to cup the other cheek. For a moment the human seemed to stand on its own. Strength returned, and the skin seemed to grow flush once more. The Grim’s grip on the renewed human tightened and then twisted. A crack like the shot of a gun yelled into the yawning crevice of silence. Then from the broken human came a deafening screech. The mournful cry of the Falcon was said to have been felt in every corner of the region. For many it was the last thing they would ever hear.

3 My Self Mary Kouns

(After Shakespeare’s Sonnet LXXIII)

Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest, Which I myself, see as best For how can one’s self stay true, To the self hidden inside, reclused? The self that is smuggled and rejected, The self that hides and cries and lies, The self that is honest about its imperfections— My own second self is one I must hide. Death’s merciful second self embraces What I, myself, cannot. For I cannot love this self Because that self’s soul has been bought. Death’s self adopts my self so effortlessly, While I can only look at myself contemptuously.

4 The Raven and the Student Kathryn Chuchmuch

Well, it was a midnight dreary (I was feeln’ rather weary) ‘cuz I had so many books I had to read, That I almost started napping as there came a sudden tapping, and I thought it was the cat I had to feed. I thought it quite annoy’n, and I thought they’d break the door in ‘cuz the tapping was so loud and so severe, That I yelled for ‘em to stop it (and my book, I had to drop it) and I told ‘em that I couldn’t skip a year, For my grades were not the sweetest, and my papers not the cleanest, and my GPA was lower than the grave, Plus the due dates tried to kill me, and the finals rarely thrilled me; the semester was the hardest one to save. But the stranger kept a knock’n and I soon began a-walkn’ till I opened up the dooar both nice ’n wide, And there weren’t nobody out there, so I thought it was a nightmare, and I turned around and headed back inside. Yet the knock’n came a-comin’ from the window to my noggin so I opened up the window for a breeze, And from outside flew a crow. . . no, it was a Raven though, and my allergies had prompted me to sneeze. The bird then looked around from the ceiling to the ground, till it noticed all my rough drafts in the bin. And it t’wasn’t till he saw all the books I had on Law, That he gave a very beaky sort-of grin. Now I knew I wasn’t dreamin’ but I knew what I was seein’ (and I ain’t seen many ravens give a smile) So I figured he was more than a noise outside a door, And I asked him if he’d like to stay awhile. He swooped upon my books, gave my homework doubtful looks, and I could have sworn I saw him shake his head. He reminded me of one who had taught me how to sum, but I knew that old professor now was dead. “Do you think,” I asked him, “there is still some way to win? Can I cram just for tomorrow and be fine?”

5 But the Raven looked at me, for there was no answer key, and he told me just four words: “You’re out of time.”

“Please sir,” I implored, “surely, there is still some time, though procrastination really is my stride. I can still pull off a grade, though the night begins to fade, and I’m sure my printer’s ink cartridge ain’t dry.”

But the Raven saw the time, as if noting down a crime, And he slowly made his way back to the sill. But I pleaded with him to stay, though the night was now the day, Yet I knew, in vain, that time could not be still.

“Sir,” I pleaded on, “please, you know that I can change! After this year I’ll procrastinate no more!” To the window he took flight, like a chilling feathered kite. As he took the window, time flew out the door.

Now the morning after that, I thought twice about my cat (Since a raven ain’t exactly s’posed to speak), And I thought my brain was toast, since such things I would not boast, And I wondered what I had to eat that week.

But I gave it up with dread (that report I never read), And I saw my teacher scratch it up a mess. Then I knew I was a fool, For not working towards my school, And my lack of interest wasn’t hard to guess.

Despite my scary grade (that I know that I have made), I do hope this little tale won’t cause you pain. ‘Cuz instead of working harder, I instead should have worked smarter,

6 Than to wait and see my paper down the drain. Yes, I guessed I learned my lesson, though it don’t seem so impressn’, To ignore the clock and shirk off life’s tough rhyme. Any work in any season you can’t find a happy feelin’, When it turns out you’re the one who’s “out of time.”

7 Laughter Dawn Houldsworth

A floating wisp of a smile. A grin and a snicker. A shout of joy. A belly laugh. The discordant note of hysteria and the out-of-control laughter. The jarring, screeching of mirth barely disguising the all-consuming panic. The undercurrent of desperate tears. An unexpected interruption and with the turn of the head, Silence. What was so funny in the first place? Nothing. Nothing at all.

8 Fall Mary Kouns

I. The thing I forgot to mention was…that it was fall. The world around me was filled with hues of red and brown and orange. I was young, but I was ready. I had been told of this time for most of my life. The old-timers had warned me of the dangers of winter and fall, but the youth was filled with hope. The time came when the wind picked me and carried me away. I began to drift too far from my home. I did not know if I would ever see my family again. The wind carried my thoughts of love and longing and placed me somewhere new. My color had changed, and I was away from the safety of my family tree. I was vulnerable, but I was free. I heard sounds around me—no crunches. This was the moment that I had been taught to fear. I trembled on the gray gravel that housed me. The crunches propelled forward. This was how I had lost so many cousins and brothers and sisters. Now it was my turn. I’m doomed. The sickening crunches got closer and closer and then they stopped. Was I imagining the whole thing? I must have been paranoid in this new land. But then I felt lighter, as if the weight of this stress had been lifted. Then I realized my weight was actually lifted. Something was holding me. I had heard about these things. They had many holes in their faces, and, for them, it wasn’t a bad thing. The holes served purposes. It used its holes to stare at me. It turned me around, and I quickly became dizzy. It looked at me and made noises I had never heard before. The sound was high pitched and quick. The world around me matched the inflections of its voice. I was bouncing up and down and then I was flying, moving faster and straighter than the wind had ever carried me before. We came to a stop as abruptly as the race began, and I saw another . . . thing. It was bigger than the first one and seemed to be looking at me apprehensively. The small one refused to let me go and thrust me toward the big one. The large one seemed indifferent, but the little one loved me. For I was the most beautiful fall leaf it had ever seen.

9 II. It was fall. The little boy bounced in his car seat as he impatiently waited for his mother. They were going to the park today. It was a tradition. They didn’t ever carve pumpkins or hand out candy; they celebrated fall differently. They basked in the glory of the trees—or at least he did. His mother had grown tired of his hyperactivity and infatuation with destruction. She willed the car into silence as she took another work call. The little boy railed against his car seat. When they arrived, she kept her phone in hand, shooting emails both blast and personal. He ran around kicking piles of leaves and yelling and stomping. This was the moment he ran free. He kicked the trees and made the leaves fall into his hand as he caught them to crush them. It made him feel powerful. Destruction had always made him powerful. He stomped over the sidewalk, holding one of his mother’s hands while her other was clamped to her ear. She let go and veered off to the grass, but he pounced forward. Then he froze. He looked at the ground below and saw a leaf. Not just any leaf. It was sharp and rigid, just like he was. It was brown and seemed old, but he could tell it was fresh. Its age was an illusion, much like the little boy’s. The little boy longed to look old and act young like this little leaf. The leaf was sturdy and firm, as the little boy wished he could be. For a moment, the little boy saw his reflection on the drop of dew on the leaf. He excitedly ran towards his mother to try to show her his leaf brother, but she shooed him away. She didn’t understand how much the leaf and he had in common. His shoulders drooped, and he cradled the leaf. He knew how fragile it was. He carefully carried his new leaf brother.

10 Your Heart Zaynab Ali

In my mind, it’s your face That conquers and erases every thought Without a trace.

In my ears, it’s the echo of your voice That consumes and blocks out All other noise.

I’m told that someday my mind will be mine, And my ears will stop singing Your name like a rhyme.

But Today, I tumble and fall On the one thing that’s ever made me crawl.

I curse the darkness that won’t let me read The name of the body that lies underneath,

The body which seems to call out to me.

With trembling hands, I furiously dig and dig, While the ghosts of your screams make me wish I could, once again, push you Off that cliff.

Digging and digging the dirt with my bare hands, My eyes and soul get caught in a trance.

Your stony flesh gives me some trouble, But my claws tear through your chest Without a scuffle.

11 The wind howls in the air, In despair or in triumph; we’ll forever be unaware.

For now, I grab on to the one thing That would’ve made me feel like a King. If only you had listened and obeyed, If only you hadn’t strayed.

With a cry that rips through the air, I sink my teeth into your heart And dive into it without a care.

12 My Body of Thoughts Haley Smith

I wish I could be like a reflection pool, Proudly presenting the monuments of my past. But instead, I am a much rougher tide, Like the eye of a hurricane, Entangled, swirling out of control In the powerful current of my own mind.

I wish I could be like a peaceful pond, Supporting life and synthesizing symbiotic relationships. But instead, I am a persistent river Overflowing, succumbing to the parasitic beings below.

Someday, sometime, somewhere, perhaps, I think I will no longer be so overwrought or staggering, No longer disorienting, disabling or demanding. But instead, I will be invigorating, stabilizing, and enlivening.

‘Till that day comes, I’ll be waxing and waning, Strengthening in the spring tides, as I transform and transcend, And utilizing the low tides as a portal for reinvention.

13 First Place Prose Winner

Defiant, Like a Candle in the Rain Caleb Price

The doors to the subway slide open. A horde of nameless, faceless people make their way to their predestined seats. I’m the only one not in a hurry. By chance, I find myself sitting alone in the furthest corner from the entrance. This has to be the first time in my life I’ve ever not been in a hurry. Who cares? I’m not going anywhere. I pull my headphones out of my pocket and start my least favorite playlist. The cold glass feels like an electric current, as I rest my forehead on the window nearest me. I check my watch, and it’s later than I hoped. It’ll be at least an hour ride back to my house, including the walk up West 32nd street. My eyes drift from my watch to the spot at the base of my wrist. The numbers “7665” are marked in a color just a shade lighter than the rest of my skin. For about 7635 days, it was easy to ignore. Right now, those numbers might as well be on fire. When your number is about to be up, it puts a lot of things in perspective. I always assumed that my parents cried when they found out. What did the doctor say? “Your son has exactly twenty years of life in him, and then, who knows?” It’s hard not to be bitter towards all these people around me that have twice the amount of time I do. It’s so unfair it makes me sick. Right in front of me on this very train, there’s a drunk couple. They’re having the time of their lives. There’s an old woman sitting alone to my right. It’s kind of funny: the word “old” will never apply to me. I won’t be around long enough. I look down at my phone and there are no notifications. I pull my headphones out of my ears and can’t help but laugh. They seemed like a good idea. I thought I would put them in and drown my thoughts out with loud angry music. Right now it seems like a waste of time. I start listening to ambient noise aboard the train. It appears that the drunk couple has just left their coworker’s wake. The soon-to-be-deceased host of the party got so drunk he couldn’t

14 finish his speech. One of his friends had to pry the notecards out of his hands. All the cards said was “Lying fart, recycled hardon, and free drinks.” They’ve been laughingabout this for the past ten minutes. Coincidently, I also just left my own wake. This is the first and last I have ever attended. From what I have heard, the average attendance is about seventy people, ranging from family, coworkers, neighbors, and friends. This number shrinks and grows depending on how long your number happens to be. I didn’t get drunk or pass out. I told everyone thanks for coming and just ended up hiding in my parents’ bathroom. I couldn’t even look at half the people. They would come up so oblivious and congratulate me. That’s sadistic. I noticed a few people that couldn’t look me in the eye. I always wondered what a wake would be like. It seems natural that the day before a person dies, a celebration would be held in their honor. Now that I’ve just attended my own, it seems extremely unnatural. No one with as little time as I have really likes to talk about it--least of all me. This is the first time I’ve even really allowed myself to think about it. Death has always been at my fingertips, so to speak. It could be much worse. I once heard that in China if you’re going to die before you’re twenty-one, they put you in a work camp until the day you die. In Sweden, it’s the opposite— everyone with a high number on their wrist works until they’re past 8000 days, and then the government gives everyone whatever they want until their last meal. I guess that’s a good reimbursement for forced labor. I never really questioned America’s structure; it seemed fair, for the most part. Everyone privileged enough to live past twenty- one is required to go to school, get a job, and suffer in the “real world.” Any number lower than that, and it’s up to whomever it may concern. Some people say I wasted my time going to school and having a job. I fought tooth and nail with my parents to be educated. This is something that I’ve actually thought about a lot. Would I have been better off coasting, drifting along aimlessly, collecting wellness of life checks until my wake? No is the poetic answer. I may have done the same monotonous work as people that

15 will live twice and three times my age, but at least I can read. But then again, how much of a difference did it make? An education, a job, late nights, and early mornings are hardly a participation prize. Through all of that suffering, my life has amounted to an hour-long wake, inside of a depressing room of about nine people that were either too nice to say no to an invitation from my persistent parents, or too oblivious to understand that these sort of things shouldn’t be celebrated. At the time, it made sense. I don’t have an eternity to live life. I wanted to be as normal and carefree as everyone else appeared. Now, I couldn’t care less if I wasted my time. Instead, I wonder how much of my time I’ve wasted. It’s funny all the small things I’ve come to regret. All I wanted to do was fit in and be treated normally, but feeling human has always been a struggle. I’ve spent my whole life walking a trail that leads straight to the edge of a cliff, with everyone pretending I’m never going to arrive, and in the seconds before I get there, they celebrate my short life with a boring wake. It is at this moment my mind looks back. I can’t help but remember the most irrelevant things. My first and only guitar. The sound it has made in my closet for the past three years is better than anything I ever produced with it. My neighbor’s annoying orange cat. It would always scratch on my window in the middle of the night. I never knew what it was looking for, but I guess it thought I had it. Amidst all the random memories, my train of thought derails. It’s her. It’s always been her. My heart was ignited in my chest the first time I saw her. Her image branded in my mind; the sight of her standing there was breathtaking. We were young. I saw her from a car I wasn’t driving. Through the rain, I saw her figure, and it was swaying like a defiant candle in the pouring rain. She was so alive, and at the time, I couldn’t begin to understand the correlation. She stood five feet or fewer from the dry and covered bus stop. From where she danced, she was five feet away from having dry socks and a place to sit, and worst of all, from being safe. To her, it’s the small battles that changed the war. She inspired me. Right now,

16 more than ever. The things that have made me feel the most alive, they weren’t monotonous or safe. They were the things I knew the least about, or maybe even feared. At first, anyway. In all my life, I have never felt more alive than being with her. That made me feel human and like I was a part of something. The fear, excitement, anticipation, and, eventually, the familiarity—it all came from a place of mystery that grew into intimacy. Before now, maybe even right before this very second, I would have regretted meeting her. I used to look back on having my heart broken and wallow in self-pity. Now that I’m at the end of my rope, it seems like having a broken heart is the only thing that makes me feel human, like I accomplished something in the real world. I guess that’s what pain is for—it’s a reminder to keep fighting. Few things hurt more than being told you won’t live long enough to be worth falling in love with. Somewhere, there might be a place where the grand mystery is when and how a person dies. I’m finally realizing that my entire life is the mystery. Just because I’ve known when my time is coming doesn’t mean my life was predetermined. I don’t know what is going to happen after tomorrow. That’s terrifying but also oddly comforting. My whole life, I’ve been defined by knowing when I was going to die. Society focuses so closely on when it’s going to happen that I don’t think many people focus on what they’re doing or how they’re living their life until that day comes. I may only have a few hours left until my time comes, but I think that’s enough to make a difference. The train makes its way to my stop. I pick up my things and head to the doors. The old lady sitting to my right tells me I’ve left something in my seat. It’s a Hallmark card one of my coworkers gave me at my wake earlier tonight. I can’t help but laugh at the idea of a card with kittens on it that is so specifically tailored to my situation. I leave the train stop, and look westward towards my home. Folding the card away in my pocket, I head east.

17 Meds Katie Riley

Red for my heart Blue for my brain The white one keeping me sane

Orange bottles in my purse Leave a twinge of shame No, to them I’m not sick I’m not insane But without them I’m not the same A mask to hide the void within The darkness reminding of every sin Memories echo that it’s easier to die Screaming you burden them all That you deserve to cry The pills make the hurt stop They keep me sane Red for the sadness Blue for the pain The white one keeping me humane

18 Pawn Zaynab Ali

She is just a woman, Standing in front of a screen, And patiently waiting for his next scene.

Unbeknown to her— She is merely a prop, Meant to be jostled and forgotten Without another thought.

She is to be dressed and created, For their own means, And then, stripped and cast aside, Whenever they please.

19 Words Michelina Olivieri

“What’s your name?” It’s something caught somewhere between a great-grandmother who was meaner than hell on a good day and a girl who never really learned how to fit into her own skin in a way that got along well with others.

“Where are you from?” The kind of place where you can’t complain about your child- hood until one day you wake up and realize that while chasing those unicorns you were always told existed, you lost the map back to yourself, and finally after years of wandering, you think you’re back on the right path.

“How old are you?” Again, somewhere between a child who is still just a little scared of the monsters in and behind mirrors and an adult who, despite ranting and raving that she would never be that kind of adult, is very confused by young people.

“What do you do for a living?” It’s something kind of like magic, but the boring kind, the kind where you make paper look like dragons, and scribbles look like those maps you lost, but it all fits together into this mixture of letters that are not quite perfect but pretty damn close.

“What’s your family like?” It’s kind of like a forest, the kind you never really find your way out of; some of the berries are delicious, and others just make you scowl, and that thing that’s been following you for the past nineteen years? Yeah, you don’t know if it’s gonna let you out of here alive.

“You have any siblings?” You know the stars? Count off three: the first is small, but fierce,

20 and fiery, and a little confused; the second is larger than life and somehow both kind and offensive at the same time; and the third is about the same size as the first but with a few more smile lines, and better stories, and two other lights really close by.

“What about your parents?” Well, you know the sun and moon? Well, imagine that they switched off roles all the time, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, and somehow always the same, and despite years of sunburns and nightly stubbed toes, you still really want to make them proud; you just haven’t figured out how to reach them yet.

“Fun fact about yourself?” Words have always been my best subject. I have this habit of splitting the veins of pens and using the ink they bleed to paint stories because, at the end of the day, I’ve never been able to fit myself into the lines drawn around me, so I’ve spent the last ten years trying to write my way out of them.

The common response to this is often laughter and something along the lines of “They’re just words, just words, only words, words, words, words, only words . . .”

“Just words.” But you see, I answer, words have the power to both liberate and bury, they can drag you to hell and raise you to heaven, beat until broken and mend until whole, they can fill rooms with laughter and seas with tears, they have built entire civilizations and burned down empires.

We have been using words since before Time can remember, and, trust me, it has a good memory. After all, it will never let us forget that while words are powerful, their absence is often louder.

Because stories are just stories, answers are just answers, words are just words when met by only silence.

21 Third Place Poetry Winner

An Ode to Paper from Pencil Daniellie Silva

We were meant to be I know it It’s written in my DNA I was born to be by your side Day and night I see your spotless body And I crave to touch you If only for a second But we both know Once one grain of my lead Soils your pristine surface I won’t stop till Every inch of your leaflet is covered with my love We’re perfect together Don’t you see Together we can create Infinite power Words written on your lines by my tip Will echo through eternity Never were such a pair created so seamlessly I’ll wear you out as you wear me out Together we will thrust ourselves Into the void

22 Small Talk Zoe Jones

Who tells a girl, “I love you for your brain”? Cute, funny, and nice seem like all I ever remain. I’ve spent years thinking one day it will happen to me, But there is no one I’m willing to break down my walls for and just be. I try to talk to everyone and have an open mind, But who knows what anyone’s thinking when we all leave our hearts behind? We sling on our backpacks and fill our days with small talk, And our conversations are as impressive as gum on the sidewalk. We fall in love with brick walls and fancy doors, But we fail to admire the painted halls and wood floors. I want someone to hear me when I start talking too much. I need to know that caring is not a crutch. Life is happening every second of every hour, And the places you think you’ll never go are wearing a mask styled

23 Inexorable Christopher Kessinger

You’re obsessed with the impossible here, you know. Time only moves in one direction. You can try to reclaim the past all you like, but it’s gone forever. The only thing you’re gonna get by trying to relive it like this is committed. --- I’m in eleventh grade now. I’m hanging out with a group of my friends. I’d always been a bit of a loner, and the sensation of being part of a greater social circle is new to me. We’re at the mall. One of our friends wants to grab a book, so we step into the Barnes & Noble. While he gets his thing, the rest of us browse around. We find a book calledThe Stoner Coffee Table Book. The cover has a picture of a cat and several cupcakes crudely photo-shopped into a photo of the moon landing, and it starts out with a quote from Snoop Dogg. None of us has ever actually smoked weed, but we find that we’re all high in spirit. We turn through the book, and each page sends us into hysterics, even if there isn’t anything we can actually pinpoint as funny about it. I’m laughing so hard I can barely breathe. --- I started. I was, ostensibly, an adult. Why was I getting lost in some insignificant event that happened years ago? I wiped tears out of my eyes and tried to catch my breath. I hadn’t seen that book since that day; why did I remember it? Why did I still think it was so goddamn funny? It was almost time to head to class. I tried to remember what the last lecture had been about; I couldn’t. Why the hell could I remember some stupid moment from way back then better than critically important stuff from earlier that week? --- It’s senior year. My friends and I are hanging around in the cafe- teria after school. Not to do any studying, mind you. The senioritis has hit us pretty hard, and none of us is really capable of giving a damn about academics anymore. I can count the number of days on one hand – one finger, actually – this year I’ve done my math

24 homework. As long as we can graduate, nothing else matters. It’s the most liberating feeling I’ve ever experienced. I’ve got all Cs and a two-point-something unweighted GPA, I don’t care enough to look up the exact number, and I could not be happier. We’re gossiping about what we’ve been up to and teasing each other about dumb bullshit and making plans to hang out over the weekend and just being generally irreverent. We’re on top of the world. --- I couldn’t persist in acting like I did then. I had been a child; none of my actions had consequences. I had to remember that I was playing for keeps now. I opened my notebook and looked at the notes I’d taken last time; it looked like gibberish. I couldn’t believe that I’d written it; I didn’t feel any association with the words staring back at me. I turned to a blank page and prepared to write some more, even though I knew these words would be just as mean- ingless as those preceding them. --- We’re over at my friend’s house. We’d heard about this so-bad- it’s-good movie, Birdemic. I’d found a torrent, and now we’re watching it. It’s goddamn incredible. We can’t stop laughing. We’re getting into it Rocky Horror-style, repeating particularly inane quotes and acting out bizarre scenes. When the characters fight off some birds by ineffectually waving wire hangers at them, my friend ducks into his room for a second and comes out with a bunch of hangers, and we have mock battle with them. Nothing about it makes a bit of sense. It’s all just a series of random events being played out in front of us. --- “Friends.” Christ! I could hardly remember what it was like to have friends. I couldn’t remember the last time I talked to someone. I wondered if I could still remember how. I muttered something under my breath to confirm that, yes, I could still talk. The girl in the chair next to me gave me a funny look and scooted away. --- It’s graduation day. We’ve been waiting our entire lives for this moment, it seems like. I can hardly believe anything beyond it

25 exists. And yet tomorrow we’ll be there. I feel like I’ve won. Getting here has been the ultimate objective of my life since I was five, and now it’s actually happening. Our names are called, and we walk across the stage and grab our diplomas and just like that it’s over. It’s done. We did it. --- It’s the move-in day for my dorm. I’m getting my computer plugged in and hanging up my clothes and generally getting ready for a new life. None of my friends is here, but that’s OK. I can move on alone. I’ve done it before. I can find a new group. --- I lay on my bed. I hadn’t moved a muscle in hours, and I didn’t have it in me then, either. I felt a little hungry; I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to get up. The thing was, I thought to myself, there was no beyond.

26 Gay Conversion Camp Lucy Alvear

Misled by my tortuous faith—devout so they say. Go a queer and come back ever so straight.

Mom and Dad, why can’t you see, to conform for you is to fake for me? Can’t you just love me for me?

You think God won’t love the child he made? You send me to Nazi prayer camp, to dictate to me. You say I will burn for being—just me. You say I’m a sinner, indeed—I do breathe.

My God loves me for me; why can’t you just believe?

Instead like Dahmer, you drill in my head that I’m an awful lust machine, discarding me as trash.

I’m baroque in the spring, and flamboyantly free, no matter what you deem me to be. We’re all God’s children, no matter how gay.

Your ignorance is powerless. So be it if you call me freak. I’ll raise my flag with pride.

27 Being Human Daniellie Silva

You began as 1/2 in one person and 1/2 in another. Added to make 1. Numbers hold us together. They compose everything. One more or one less to 23 and you’re no longer human. You are something else—fragmented. But really your 22, 23, or 24 chromosomes are just one of 7,000,000,000. We make up the zeros. Those mean nothing. If you disappeared tomorrow, the world would not flinch. And then on the other hand that 7 would be nothing behind the zeros— .0000000007. The zeros would evaporate and it would just be another number. Allow me to introduce another number— 37,000,000,000,000. This is us. Everything that makes us up. Not too much, not too little. The numbers hold us like gravity. And yet, if one defects, and decides to multiply, multiply, multiply, multiply, and multiply until forever; That number would never end. 1, 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000000000000000000000 Not even gravity would be able to hold you down. We would become an infinite number of cells. Beginning, forgotten, and ending never again— until you become 1 once more.

28 A Hidden Reality Sarah Thomas

The following day was Christian’s birthday, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out the perfect gift to get for him. It was a beautiful February day in Carrollwood Village, and my mother and I found ourselves scrambling to find a last-minute present for my brother yet again. After some extremely frustrating two hours in Westfield Mall, we decided that the perfect present for a fourteen- year-old boy was a PlayStation 3. On our way home, we made a quick detour to Slice Masters Pizzeria to pick up our favorite meat lovers special. As soon as we arrived home, my mom told me to sneak the gift upstairs and hide it before my brother could see it, which wasn’t a very difficult task, considering the sight of pizza sent him into some sort of trance. I hid the gift in the top right corner of my closet and covered it with my big blue fluffy teddy bear. I ran downstairs because in my house pizza was a hot commodity and it didn’t last very long with Christian around. I managed to get at least one slice, and I joined my mom upstairs to watch our favorite movies on the Hallmark channel. As midnight approached, I decided that it was time to fall asleep. Mother and I had to wake up early the next day to make my brother’s special birthday breakfast, so we had to get a good night sleep. The excitement of his birthday made it harder than usual for me to fall asleep, but I finally managed to doze off into dreamland. “SARAH, WAKE UP!” My eyes shot open, and I could see the terror in my brother’s eyes. I was completely disoriented so my brother picked me and my puppy up and started running downstairs. I didn’t understand what was happening. Only thirty seconds ago, I was dreaming about being in the arms of the Jonas Broth- ers, and now I was in the arms of my actual brother. I had to snap out of it. Okay, Sarah, what do you see? I said to myself. I looked around and I could see thick black clouds of smoke. As I peered to the left, I could see my brother struggling to hold his breath. Thick black clouds of smoke. . . okay, now it smells like something’s burning. I began to piece everything together: thick smoke,

29 burning smell, Christian can’t breathe, okay now I can’t breathe . . . OH MY GOD! THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE! When I finally realized what was happening, every noise that I had inadvertently blocked out hit me like a bullet. I could hear the loud popping from the fire, glasses falling out of the cabinets, and my mother screaming for help from a lady I recognized walking her dog. When we reached outside, I jumped from my brother’s arms and ran to my mom. I could feel her fear as she squeezed me, with her tears soak- ing my Hello Kitty pajama shirt. From that moment on, everything was a blur. As the fire trucks arrived, we sat across the street on the cold, black asphalt and watched them extinguish our entire lives away. Happy Birthday, Christian! I was in a state of complete shock. Nothing made sense to me anymore. I mean, of course I’d seen house fires and families losing everything on the evening news reports, but I never thought in my entire twelve years of being on this planet that that would ever happen to my family! We’re good people, right? At least, I think we are. Regardless, we didn’t deserve this; no one does. Five days after the fire, we now lived at Anna’s house—my mom’s dearest friend. Her house wasn’t very big, but it had the essentials: a bed and warm water to shower in. I didn’t have much anymore. I went from having a closet full of brand new clothes to maybe five T-shirts and a pair of pants. It didn’t bother me, though. I’ve heard people say that when devastation occurs, possessions mean absolutely nothing, and they’re right. All that mattered to me now was that I could walk into the room across the hall and hug my mom and my brother and, yes, even my little puppy. After about a week, my mother felt that it was time to send my brother and me back to school. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy facing my fellow students again, but I also wasn’t about to be a middle school dropout. We hadn’t had a chance to buy any new clothes, so I had to wear what I had salvaged from the fire. My once sparkly blue blouse was now covered in ash and reeked of smoke. As soon as I walked into my first period English class, I could feel forty beady eyes penetrating my soul. They all knew, every single one of them. I put my head down and darted to my desk. Ms. Lawson, my English teacher, came over and put her hand on

30 my shoulder. I couldn’t quite make out what she was saying because all I could think was, I want to disappear like a ghost. The remaining six of my classes were all the same. First, I would get the looks of pity, then the occasional whispers of “she smells like a bonfire.” As soon as the 3:50 bell rang, I sprinted to the car line and jumped right into my mother’s Hyundai Sonata. Before she could even make out a full sentence, I burst into tears. “I don’t want to go back. Everyone can smell the smoke on me!” I said through my sobbing tears. My mom pulled over, put the car in park and looked me dead in the eye: “Sweetheart, I know this is hard right now, believe me, but you’re alive, and that’s all that matters.” She had tears running down her cheek. She was right, who cares if I smelled like a bonfire? Yeah, a week ago that would’ve broken my spirit, but who cared now? I had always been so focused on what other people think of me— how I dressed, what I smelled like, whether I was I up to date with the latest electronic device . . . . But honestly, who cared anymore? From that moment on, I no longer wanted to live a life where possessions and my appearance were the most important factors to me. I wanted to live a life where the type of person I became was my most prized possession.

31 First Place Poetry Winner

Home Michelina Olivieri

I am from the heart of the South the place where only true Americans are born, the place where red is the color of the party and the flag that still waves just a few houses down from the church.

I am from a home where the word Catholic is claimed over Fox News in the background saying that America loves everyone, except for queers, Mexicans, Muslims, blacks, the poor, and Obama.

I am from a town where Texas money meets the aftermath of segregation, where those taught to speak up louder than anyone else share class- rooms with children raised to breathe only after asking permission.

I am from a state that rants and raves about freedom for everyone as long as they fit between the pages of tightly bound Bibles and crushes anyone who doesn’t under the idea that that is where they belong.

I am from a region for which trigger warnings were made, where entering into a conversation is walking onto a live firing range, with opin- ion-like bullets loaded into shotgun-barrel throats.

I am from a country built on immigrants terrorizing the natives that now locks its borders out of fear that immigrants will terrorize the natives.

32 I am from a church where the priest speaks openly about the love of God and all those in attendance nod their heads as they write their excep- tions like a shopping list in the back of their minds, their excuses already on the tips of their tongues.

I am from a religion that preaches that all life is sacred but allows the suicide rate of all those “love the sinner, hate the sin” victims to play as background notes to the alleluia.

I am from a culture that is far, far too comfortable with throwing stones and claim- ing sainthood in the same breath, like a prayer for damnation or a charity run by a politician.

I was raised by parents who fight a constant battle between empa- thy and apathy, California and Texas, queer family and southern religion, teaching their children to be brave but afraid, raising daughters to be good but tough.

I grew up on a battlefield somewhere between being a good girl and a tough boy, running from theatre to fence-building; you see, I have always had strong hands that can sew and fight, legs that kick and dance. It is by no miracle that I grew up to become the kind of holy contradiction that only comes out of the heart of the South, the place where only true Americans are born.

33 Portrait of Wisdom (Colored Pencil Drawing) Darrell Svatek Second Place Art Winner

34 Mesarthim (Watercolor) Emma Simoni Third Place Art Winner 35 Take the Breath from My Lungs (Charcoal/Ink) Adrianne Gerlach First Place Art Winner 36 Watch Your Step (Photography) Daniellie Silva 37 Ruin Study (Photography) Dawn Houldsworth

38 The Sky Is on Fire (Charcoal) Adrianne Gerlach

39 Beauty and Chaos (Acrylic Painting) Darrell Svatek

40 Darth Vader (Prismacolor Pencils) Lance Kretzschmar

41 All Your Boats in a Row (Photography) Jordan Scrivens

42 Oceanic Sky (Acrylic Painting) Katie Riley

43 Toy Mountain (Pencil Drawing) Darrell Svatek

44 Empty Space (Watercolor) Emma Simoni

45 Mysterious Morning (Photography) Wendy Palmgren

46 Reflect(Photography) Mary Kouns

47 Butterfly on Flower (Photography) Dawn Houldsworth

48 Larger Than Life (Photography) Jordan Scrivens

49 A Conversation between Martha Serpas and Inkling Transcribed by Mary Kouns and Daniellie Silva Born and raised in Galliano, a small town on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, Martha Serpas earned a B.A. from Louisiana State University, an M.A. in English and creative writing from New York University, a Masters of Divinity from Yale Divinity School, and a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. Her works include several volumes of poetry: Côte Blanche (New Issues Press, 2002); The Dirty Side of the Storm (Norton, 2006); and The Diener (LSU Press, 2015). Her works have appeared in the New Yorker, The Nation, and Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, along with anthologies, including Uncommon Place: An Anthology of Contemporary Louisiana Poets (LSU Press, 1998) and Library of America’s American Religious Poems (2006). One of her major creative influences is the landscape of Louisiana. In The Dirty Side of the Storm, Serpas poetically maps the Louisiana bayou—its inhabitants and the storms they face and the destructive impact of climate change on its landscape and culture. She remains active today in efforts to restore Louisiana’s wetlands. Serpas’s latest collection, The Diener, reveals another strong influence: her study of theology and work as a hospital chaplain (at Tampa General, in Florida, and at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center, in Houston). Serpas has taught at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and the University of Tampa and is currently a professor in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program.

In February, 2016, Martha Serpas came to our campus to read her poetry and speak with our students and campus community about her work. That same day, she generously sat down with Inkling staff for an interview.

50 INKLING: We’d like to know who you are—how the landscape and culture of South Louisiana and Catholicism intertwine in your world view and work. SERPAS: Okay, that’s a big one. Everything that I struggle to understand—philosophically, theologically, artistically, ecologically—I understand through the metaphor of the marsh and the landscape from which I come. For me, this region evokes paradox. The land there is constantly shifting between being solid land and disappearing under the waters. The Barataria- Terrebonne Estuary is where I’m from. It is eighty miles south of New Orleans. It is also the fastest disappearing landmass on earth because of coastal erosion, which we can talk about more later. Because of that, everything I write is elegy. So much of where I am from is gone. All the advocacy in the world cannot save it. And even if our society suddenly valued it and tried to save it, it is likely impossible. On the other hand, I still feel a responsibility to advocate for my estuary.

INKLING: Does your family still live there? SERPAS: Yes—a remnant. A lot of my family is in New Orleans. Now, I know that sounds kind of odd because on many levels New Orleans is culturally worlds away from Bayou Lafourche, where Galliano, my hometown, is located, even though New Orleans and Bayou Lafourche are just an hour apart. I think of my work as elegiac. We all know that all things must die in order for new things to come. The estuary I come from was created from soil that was eroded from somewhere else. I’m going to put it in terms of Church history. Between the time of St. Paul in the first century B.C.E. and the time of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth, my bayou (Bayou Laforche), was the Mississippi river, but then the Mississippi river shifted to the east and left my bayou as a small distributary (a tiny branch of the river that did not return). As a result, there was a drop in the sediments being deposited there. The land that lies between Bayou Lafourche and the Mississippi river is very rich in wetlands and fauna. That’s the ecological basis for my paradoxical understanding that my estuary is death and life at the same time. It wouldn’t exist if not for the erosion that came from

51 the river’s changing course.

INKLING: Because it is a community that rose from shifting sands, which the water could take back, what are the implications for your hometown and its culture? SERPAS: It’s the nature of life. If New Orleans had not been leveed the river would have swung west and my part of Louisiana would have had to deal with that move. So the people migrate but likely migrate back—which is what most peoples have done over history, such as relocate during volcanic activity and then return to the place they left. That one contributor to the coastal erosion that occurred when New Orleans was leveed in order to protect it from flooding meant that my part of the state would not have received that sediment that would have counteracted the subsidence, the sinking in of our land. As the soil just naturally sinks, more sediment with flooding is dumped and evens out—but that hasn’t happened. Instead, my town, Galliano, and my estuary are sinking. Another contributor is agricultural runoff. Thirty-nine states drain into the Mississippi. They dump all their junk in our area, and so does the oil industry, digging all those canals in the marsh (as they also do in Texas).

INKLING: Twenty years ago, the river road from Baton Rouge to New Orleans was bucolic and dotted with historic homes. Now, with all the oil refineries, it looks as if Louisiana is up for sale.The landscape is unrecognizable. SERPAS: To cut to the imagistic chase on that one, the image on the flag of Louisiana is an old Catholic and French image. It’s a symbol of a pelican plucking her own breast to feed its young, the little pelicans. And nothing could be more apt because I feel Louisiana has plucked its own breast in order to feed the needs of the oil companies. One of my high school friends involved in servicing boats in the oil industry says, “I understand if we sold our soul to the devil, but show me the money. We should have the best roads and the best schools, just like Alaska, just like Michigan. Show me the money.” But we’re a Southern state, and that’s a different sort of scapegoating, a different kind of marginalization.

52 Louisiana has not fared the way Alaska has, the way Michigan has, or even the way Texas has, with respect to the oil revenue, but that’s a whole other story.

INKLING: How does Catholicism inform your writing? SERPAS: The landscape of Louisiana is a theological landscape, so my other continued influence is Catholicism, particularly Cajun Catholicism. Catholicism as the news represents it today is certainly not what I grew up in. I grew up with Catholicism as a practice, not a doctrine, not really. It was about getting together for mass, celebrating Saint Joseph’s Feast Day, getting my throat blessed by Saint Blaise. It was about saying the rosary and performing death rituals. That’s what I grew up in. I also grew up in an aesthetic that I think has influenced me. I grew with plenty of what we call “smells and bells,” where the incense, where the rhythm and the music of the liturgy, where the lyrics of the songs, and most importantly—and paradoxically—where my church and every church down the bayou were full of statues of female saints. It never occurred to me growing up that divinity was anything other than female. I’ve had people ask me, “But what about the all-male priesthood?” And I say there’s a guy up there, but we don’t pray to Him. I was surrounded by, for example, in my grandmother’s church, statues of Joan of Arc in her armor holding up the banner of St. Ann, St. Valorie, and St. Lucy. These women are not all heralded for their virginity, but that’s another story about how that might be a positive thing that society and women might have left behind. For example, when I got my first job, my friend asked me, “How can you still be Catholic? It’s racist, sexist, and homophobic.” And I said, “How can you work in the academy? It’s so sexist and homophobic.” The Catholic Church is a human, fallible institution, but what I got from it was a feminist understanding that I would not have gotten otherwise in my patriarchal society. My early education was entirely composed of lay women, with a nun as the head principle. Our authority was female, and I can’t underestimate what kind of influence that had on me.

53 INKLING: What inspired you to attend Yale Divinity School? SERPAS: I think I was always interested in religion but just not in any kind of formalized way, outside of my religious upbringing. So as I was studying for my undergraduate degree, it never even occurred to me to take a religious studies class. However, in a nonfiction course, I wrote an essay called “Catholicism, Feminism and Other Mutually Exclusive Topics,” so I had it in me. Then when I went to New York for my master’s degree, I found myself going to all these places for community classes—even vacuuming and cleaning out closets at the open center in Soho so I could take classes for free. One of my professors, Harold Bloom, kindly said to me, “You know you can study religion as a subject. You don’t have to do that on the side.” So it was he who really, in a way, gave me permission to stop doing doctoral study in literary criticism to pursue this thing that I had way more passion for.

INKLING: Was Yale’s program very ecumenical, appealing to many faiths at once? SERPAS: Yes, it was. It is historically a Protestant seminary, and it’s still pretty heavily so, but there is a huge population of Catholic women, some Catholic men, too (though Catholic men usually go into the priesthood). I call it a seminary because about half of the people there are there because they need a Master’s of Divinity to be ordained in the various denominations and maybe less than half are there for academic reasons. They are going to go on to get their PhDs. The cool thing was that some of them were there working in nonprofits. There were people of all denominations, and it was a very diverse community. I knew some atheists as well as people studying to be ordained.

INKLING: When you speak of Mary in your poem “The Wisdom Tree,” which Mary do you mean? SERPAS: I wonder if I was double-dipping, because I was thinking of a statue of Mary, Jesus’ mother, but trying to describe her in a way that, at least in my experience, gets overlooked. I once heard a priest say, “We talk about Mary’s humility from the word humus, meaning grounded, because she knew who she was. But she both

54 said, “I am the handmaiden of the Lord and all generations will call me blessed.” Someone who says, “All generations will call me blessed,” isn’t exactly a wallflower. So, with respect to Mary Mag- dalene, maybe it’s time for a Mary Magdalene poem, because I get irritated when I hear Mary Magdalene referred to as a prostitute. That’s just a rumor that got started in some early centuries as a way to discredit her power. I could go on and on about that.

INKLING: That’s right, because she was a woman, and yet, as some texts reveal, the thirteenth apostle. SERPAS: Mary Magdalene was the primary apostle, if you read some Deuterocanonical second canon, so it could be that I was in- voking Joan of Arc first and then moving on to Mary, Jesus’ mother, to argue that she was an equally strong and defiant woman, who told Jesus, “No, you will change this water to wine (and prepare for the wedding). He said it wasn’t his time, but I’m telling him it is his time because we’ve got a wedding to celebrate and guests to provide for.”

INKLING: Let’s shift gears and discuss some of your themes. Many of your poems (“Corollary,” “Fais Do-Do,” “The Dirty Side of the Storm”) highlight the loss of life and property caused by the Gulf’s wrath during hurricane season. Would it be fair to say that you have lost someone or something dear to you as a result of these natural disasters? Would you mind sharing your story? SERPAS: I am losing my land, and I am losing my culture. I have both memories and stories of my family being threatened, being afraid and having to flee. That’s a loss in a way. I have a poem in The Diener called “Betsy.” If you’re of a certain age, and you live on the Gulf Coast, then you have no need to be reminded of Hurri- cane Betsy because that was a category 5 storm that took the same path as Katrina—only it seems that we didn’t learn anything from that experience. My mother was pregnant with me during Betsy. In “Betsy,” I do, what I consider a kind of hubris. Augustus starts Confessions with his selfishness in the womb. Alex Haley follows that up with transcribing Malcom X by talking about how racism affected Malcolm X while he was in the womb. The Ku Klux Klan

55 came to threaten his family while his mother was pregnant with him. So for me, because my mother was pregnant with me, hurri- canes were affecting me before I was even born.

INKLING: The hurricane is a driving force in your poetry, in its rhythms and forms. You overcame the hurricane in a sense. Has the rhythm of a hurricane or the Cajun or liturgical music affected or shaped the way you shape your poetry? SERPAS: I like to play with forms that are suggested by encoun- ters, and you have given me an idea—to write a poem based on a hurricane’s movement. I am envisioning a poem with a certain rhetorical direction that turns one way, then enters a period of quiet, and next turns the other rhetorical direction after this calm. So, please, someone please remind me that I thought of this form today.

INKLING: Does the music of the Catholic Church change the forms you use in your writings? SERPAS: It does. I think I always followed my ears while I was writing, and I had some teachers that enforced that. Molly Pea- cock spoke about how difficult it would be to approach some of the difficult subjects she approaches without the safe constraint, she would probably say, without conventional forms. To Richard Howard, I would have to attribute at least some of my devotion to couplets and tercets. Couplets look like musical notation to me on the page, and I always want to emphasize the lyrical quality of poems. That’s just an aesthetic preference.

INKLING: Going back to the form question. Do you figure out your form first? Or do you have the words and sounds in your mind and then find your form? SERPAS: I almost never think of form first. It’s usually something that comes out as I am following the music, and I start to think, this feels like a sonnet or this feels like long lines, or this feels like short lines. Just recently, I was commissioned to write a poem that described two academics in Ireland (a country I know little about) pondering why anyone would want to study Catholic theology. It

56 was going to be put on a wall, so immediately, I was going to be constrained by the size. It ended up being a nine-line poem. I knew going in that this had to be a short poem. And I did it. I don’t know if it’s going to convince anyone of anything, but it is going to fit on the wall.

INKLING: Well, you make a very convincing case on your views of Catholicism in your interviews on National Public Radio. SERPAS: It is the catholic church, after all—as in universal, with a the small “c.” And where the church has failed to live up to uni- versality, that’s the problem. And where validity has failed to take its role in steering the church, that’s our failing.

INKLING: Here’s another question that deals with form. In your poem “Fais Do-Do,” you describe the heron “pull[ing] the sky behind it like a zipper,” with the “[s]harp rows of clouds fold[ing] into themselves.” Visually, there seems to be these very interesting geometric patterns playing out across the troubled sky (for example, triangles and parallel lines). What inspired you to describe the sky this way? SERPAS: The truth comes out. I have always loved that Cajun expression “fais do-do,” which means “make sleep.” I just wanted to write a poem named “Fais Do-Do.” So I sat down and started with the sky, and I wondered why a poem progressing this way was titled after this dance. I didn’t know until I got to the end why it started off with that title, and I went off to write about that. But I have no idea why I used the zipper image, and it makes me happy to not know because then I can say part of it is a mystery. As you know, that’s why we do it. If I sat down and knew what I was doing, then I would be writing an essay. But I have no idea why I went on this thread. And I appreciate this interesting observation you made about the geometric shapes because that’s not something that I ever saw before. I hope when someone points out something interesting and beautiful in your work that you know you inspired that fascination.

57 INKLING: “Fais Do Do” sounds like a lullaby, but it has a men- acing tone—as if the water is coming to get you. The water wants to be the land, and the land wants to be water. SERPAS: I think that meditation probably comes out of my time in divinity school. I walked out of there thinking, If something’s not a paradox, then it’s not truth. Truth is never black and white. That was the purpose of the Trinity. One cannot say this is God. God is a verb. God is these three things moving. From Hebrew, “God” translates to “I am becoming who am becoming,” but not necessar- ily “I am becoming,” because in Hebrew, there is no present form of the verb “to be.” In the Biblical phrase, “In the beginning when God became and created man and the heaven and the earth,” the language makes the meaning vague. All of this liturgy that em- bodies paradox was really challenging to me. It’s wonderful not to have things pinned down, and it’s also very challenging not to have them pinned down.

INKLING: You’re much like the Romantic poets in that your poetry dwells in slippery ideas and language, language a reader can’t ever quite get. Just when readers think they understand, they don’t—the ideas slip from their grasp. And your poetry is also like the best of John Keats because of its emphasis on healing, on the dilemma between using poetry as balm and as escape. You’re a hospital chaplain, in addition to being a poet, so how does this vocation inform the poetry you write? SERPAS: A chaplain’s role is also about paradox, and that was my meditation in The Diener. A diener is the person who runs a morgue, who deals with the form of life that comes out of death, in the same vein of consolation and the lack of consolation. My job as a chaplain, I learned quickly, is not to console. My job is actually what my first supervisor used as a metaphor: “lancing a boil.” My job is to help people to be present in whatever uncertainty or pain is happening at the moment, to aid in their recovery and healing that will come later. It’s not about consolation. I learned how to walk into a family’s dilemma, such as an impending life-support situation, and instead of saying, “I’m sorry; this is so hard,” to ask, “Who’s the person who’s the hold-out—who’s the person who is

58 the most unsure about this decision?” I urge them to make sure everyone is on board because this is not one they can take back. I realize my role is also paradoxical because it involves alleviating pain by first causing more pain.

INKLING: How welcome are you when you come into a family situation like that? SERPAS: Surprisingly welcome. It’s such an honor. I know that sounds so hokey. It also sounds excessive, but I haven’t found a better way to describe it. People who have never seen me before welcome me to accompany them, wherever they are. I am almost never turned away. You know the joke that “there are no atheists in the ER.” So much of my job has nothing to do with religion, truly. At Tampa General, where I work, I do what I do because it’s such a great hospital with a great program. We’ve got to go to every trauma that comes in. It is our job to identify the patient, contact their families and connect them with the doctors. We go to every death and every life-support withdrawal. We go to family meet- ings when decisions have to be made. We fill out the paperwork for the body-release forms. The director there got the chaplains involved in helping people navigate the hospital’s bureaucracy so that we could just be there if somebody needs us. This way, people don’t even have to ask the nurse, “Can I see a chaplain?” We are just there. It would not occur to a lot of people that the chaplain would do anything other than come and say, “Have you accepted Jesus into your heart?” But that’s not my job. There’s a very small percentage of people whose faith makes my presence unwelcome. Even those people are really nice about it. My program is inter- faith. When I first started being trained, there was a Native-Ameri- can chaplain, a Buddhist chaplain, a Jewish chaplain, and a variety of different Protestant chaplains. And we responded to any call. Someone, within the last ten years, challenged the military to use chaplains who considered themselves to be atheists. And that was approved, obviously.

INKLING: In your poem “The Diener”, you write how “that must be how we began to confuse / the power to examine and change /

59 with the power to create.” What were you intending to convey in these lines? SERPAS: I do say, “how we began to confuse” one thing with the other thing. What I mean is that those examining and creating should not confuse one for the other. Now, I look back at this poem, and I wonder whether I still believe that. This dilemma is a real challenge for me. This idea of being created in the image of God is part of our prevailing American myth. What does that mean, though? Does it mean I have the same mustache as God? That sounds ridiculous. But if it does not mean that I look like God, does it mean that I am also a creator? For me, this big question became my starting point for “The Diener”. In the context of that story, God is creating. So as a poet, I think, “Well, then I must be a creator.” But if so, can I really create matter out of nothing? Am I already exists, and is rearranging the same as creating? It came out of a meditation, and I don’t think I have come up with an answer. I fluctuate back and forth between “yes, I create” and “no, I do not create.” For a poet, it’s an ars poetica1 question. This reflection makes me think of my poem “Ten Fathom Ledge,” which is my most obvious ars poetica. I felt “The Diener” preceded that poem in terms of what I was thinking about creation.

INKLING: How does “the diener” function as a metaphor in your poem by this title, and even in your collection, The Diener. SERPAS: That’s another case of a poem where I started with the title. This is a word that I had never heard before. It isn’t in a lot of dictionaries. A lot of people that work in hospitals know this word, but few others do. The word comes from the German word for servant. I just fell in love with this word, and I also fell in love with the diener at my hospital. His name, Rafael, is the name of the patron saint of healing—and also of finding the perfect spouse. The idea that the diener would be named Rafael—you know, the archangel—was amazing to me. I just saw him a couple of weeks ago, and our greeting went as it always does. I say, “How’s it going, Rafael?” and he says, “Uh, it’s quiet—nobody complains.”

1 Ars poetica: a poem that discusses not just how poetry should be written but why one writes it and what it accomplishes. 60 So I kind of fell in love with Rafael down there in the basement playing salsa music and treating these—I don’t want to say bodies—but these vessels with the greatest respect and the greatest care. Rafael exists in this interstice between life and death. A lot of cultures recognize stages of death. There’s the ceasing of the heart, then the ceasing of the breath, then the burial, and finally, the disinterring a year later to wash the bones in wine, plus all sorts of other rituals. My poem “Crossing” deals with this idea that even death isn’t fixed in different cultures. To me, Rafael is a priest. People aren’t quite dead. They still have a presence. There are still interactions. They still have relationships. Rafael lives in—no, loves and cares for—that space between the after-death and death.

INKLING: This is in a different direction, but let’s talk about your work with the film Veins in the Gulf. How did you get involved with this project, and do you plan to do more such films? SERPAS: I credit Elizabeth Coffman, the film maker, for that project. We were teaching together in Tampa. I was teaching a poetry workshop, and she was teaching documentary filmmaking. One day, she said, “I’m really interested in the erosion and rising waters that are affecting your hometown, Galliano, Louisiana, and the Barataria-Terrebonne Estuary nearby. Let’s get a van and go to Louisiana for spring break.” I thought to myself, For spring break? You’re crazy! I’m not going to spend spring break driving to Louisiana in a van with my students and my dog. I’m not doing that. But she talked me into it. Still, my poem “The Water” came out of that trip. I wrote it before we left but following a pattern I’ve used before: When I know I’m headed toward something that is going to have some kind of transformational effect on me, I write the poem before I go. That way, I can get my imagination to invoke what I think is going to happen. Afterwards, I can tweak the poem if I want, but I didn’t tweak “The Water” at all. The place I knew I was going to was called Isle de Jean Charles. It’s a community of Houma Indians, and it was the inspiration for the filmBeasts of the Southern Wild [a film about a six-year-old girl living with her father in a fishing community that gets flooded out and destroyed by Hurricane Katrina and the erosion and rising salt water that

61 ensued]. The folks in these communities are outside the levee system because obviously they are a minority population overlooked and undervalued. When it rains hard there, they get flooded. Elizabeth and Ted, the directors of this film, got really immersed in the story and what was going on there, and they asked me to work on the project with them. They sort of tricked me into narrating it, in parts, because I didn’t know the mic was on. Those trips were very important for my poetry collection called The Dirty Side of the Storm. I think it’s a great documentary. It’s informational, and it puts a human face on the way environmental issues affect culture, politics, and economics.

INKLING: Speaking of putting a human face on an issue, can you tell us about your inspiration for the poem “White Dog”? SERPAS: You know, that one is pretty much what it is. I have a real problem with how dogs are treated in Houston. It breaks my heart. I can’t stand it. It’s not just the strays—because at least in my neighborhood, the stray population has gone down—but it’s the inhumane way people still treat their dogs. They do so behind chained gates, so I can’t even knock on the door and say anything. I’m just intolerant of excuses for animal cruelty. When I took in the white dog, I named it The White Dog because I didn’t want to get attached—but, of course, I did get attached. She’s the smartest dog I’ve ever been involved with. I managed, with the help of some friends, to find her an incredible home. She lives in a 4,000 sq. ft. home now in a gated community, and I’m sure her life is great, but she was in terrible shape when she showed up outside my house. At the time, I had no room for her. My mother was living with me, and she has dementia. In addition, I already had a dog. This added White Dog and my mother almost started to merge in my mind, which is why, at the end of the poem, there is a reference to Dearfoams, which is what I would call old lady slippers. Compassion can be complicated. There is a Buddhist adage that says, “You owe everyone compassion, but you don’t have to let them live in your house.” I wanted my mother and The White Dog to live in my house with me and my current dog. I wanted to help, but I was having trouble negotiating. In the end, I just couldn’t do

62 it. Again, it’s kind of a paradox, like the hospital and the marsh. In both situations I started to see an overlap.

INKLING: In your poem “The Discipline of Non-Fulfillment,” what or whom are you referring to in the lines that read, “man-god, builder / Of trawl boards who frees bird dogs / And coons from steel jaws”? This is an especially mysterious poem that likewise seems a paradox. What did you mean here? SERPAS: I think there is a part of me that always thinks that some savior is going to sweep in and save me from a situation. Maybe that’s a mistaken theology I picked up somewhere along the way. And there comes the hard realization that I have to make peace with loss and accept that no one is going to make it okay. So when I wrote the poem, I think I was headed toward the superhero that’s not going to come down and save the day, but until you isolated these lines and asked this question, I hadn’t considered that maybe this is my way of rewriting Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle “The Art of Losing.” The subtitle to “The Discipline of Non-Fulfillment” reads, “for and after Margaret A. Farley.” Margaret Farley is a medical and sexual ethicist who teaches at Yale Divinity School. She’s also a member of the Romantic Catholic Sisters of Mercy, and she used to advise the American Board of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. I once heard her give a sermon in which she used Elizabeth Bishop’s phrase, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” as if to lament, “Isn’t loss the difficult rule?” So she gave me the seed for this poem’s meditation on loss. This makes me think, too, of the Buddhist proverb, “To be truly free, we must give up what we most want.” To me, ridding oneself of desire is the discipline of non-fulfillment—that is “the art of losing.”

INKLING: “Longing is the source of my inspiration as a poet.” That’s what you have said. SERPAS: I said that?

INKLING: Yes, in an interview—and in your poem “Decreation,” where you refer to the longing that “occupies the space of our being.”

63 SERPAS: I know, somewhere in that poem, I say that wanting itself gets in the way. So, yes, I think that’s what “The Discipline of Non-Fulfillment” is about. I took what Margaret Farley said and then, of course, I had to understand it through the marsh and this play on tide. Easter tide (referred to in the poem) means the tide (or season) after Easter. And then there’s the tide (the rise and fall of water in the ocean), and when I hear the word “tide,” my first thought is not of the time after Easter but of the water that is rising and erasing my land and culture in Louisiana. I always need to bring it back to the marsh.

64 Special Snowflake Mary Kouns

Hello world, I am a millennial. You seem to know me so well. I am a cry baby, professional protestor, A pussy to be grabbed. I am the product of a machine. I deserve no voice for I know nothing. I might as well be Jon Snow. I will have to defend your wall As you cultivate your own TV show, America: The Season Finale, And I am the star, The stupid blue imbecile Shunned in the car. You know not what I mean When I say I am afraid. The world I thought I knew is gone. All my ideals, betrayed. If I didn’t know before, I surely know now. You do not care about me, For the world is something I know nothing about. You raised me to be brave, Stand up for what I know. Believe, achieve, strive. When I go high, you go low.

65 Clark Kathryn Chuchmuch

I doubt you’ve ever noticed me —I think I look the part. And though these glasses hide my eyes, I’m not really that smart. It’s taken me a year (or two) to try to fit right in. I try for your attention, but you only think of “him.” You read the morning paper just to see him in a smile, And cut out all his articles and keep them in a file. I’ve told you all too often that he’s too good to be true. You say he’s nothing like me —Oh, but only if you knew!

You realize that I threw out all my clothes the color red, ‘Cuz if you ever knew, my dear, it would go to my head —that if you thought that I could stop a bullet and a train, I wonder if you’d tell the world the secret to my name. At times I’ve watched you hard at work, as you let out a sigh, And wondered how your life would change —if you knew how to fly.

I’ve saved your life a dozen times, And every time I see It isn’t I who rescues you; it’s you who rescues me!

There have been those short instances, I left for days or more And made up such excuses that I just went to the store. I know you’re an impatient one, when I go out of sight. But it’s slightly hard to explain myself, And explain what’s Kryptonite.

I’ve wanted to tell you all along, I’m the one you often see —Smiling to you from the news, That “Man of Steel” is me!

66 And yet, perhaps you know me more, More than you’d ever guess. Appearances are a lying thing. Duller clothes don’t mean I’m less!

67 Crush Zoe Jones

They smile as they remember how they met. She laughs until her eyes are wet. He can’t help but look at her face, A moment he would never erase. He’s staring at her and he starts to laugh, too. Her stomach aches with joy and the sky is blue. The trees are swaying and leaves fall. The road is quiet, with no other cars at all. Silence fills their car and the world is still. He leans in toward her and lets go of the wheel. His lips crash against hers, As the car flips and turns. The driver’s semi-truck screeches to a halt. “Oh, this is all my fault.” The boy and girl are suspended by their belts. The man in the truck calls for help. The boy can’t help but look at her face, A moment he could never erase. Now his eyes are wet and his stomach aches. She doesn’t say a word. The doctor’s too late.

68 Free Zaynab Ali

She laughed and laughed until her face turned pink. She talked and talked until her throat went dry. When she got home her spirits would sink, For she took off her mask and let it fly.

69 Second Place Prose Winner

The Murder That Wasn’t Erin Larson

I met the love of my life the day he killed a man. He walked up to me on the street, and I think I mistook the craze in his eyes for a love-struck glimmer. He smiled, nervously—I thought, again, the nerves were due to infatuated shock. I smiled back and tripped a little, and he grabbed my hand as I toppled forward. His fingers were warm and wet against my wrist.Sweat, I thought. His grip softened as I straightened, morphed into a gentle handshake. I kind of just stared at him as our hands pumped. I felt my heart pitter faster because his face was a good face. Bright eyes, thin nose, straight jaw. “Sorry,” I said, voice breathy, breaking on the r’s, hand still shaking his. “I’m Bristol.” He hesitated. “Nova.” I started to smile, but he pulled back. Clenched his teeth. His eyebrows pulled together, just a little, before he tucked his chin down and pushed past me. When I looked down at my hand, it was smeared in blood. Now I’ve been standing here next to the candle shop for ten minutes, staring at my glistening crimson palm, a waxy jasmine smell stuck in my nose. The red is kind of pretty in the morning light, but it’s seeping into the creases in my hand, and I’m not so sure I like that. I have blood on my hand. I try to turn on my heel, but it slides sideways on the pavement—I stagger, and my bloody hand waves out and gropes for balance, a cherry flash against the dull colors of everything else. But that’s it, I notice, as I look around—just the cherry flash. I’m dull, the people are dull, the street is dull. No fluffy yellow hair, no royal blue cap, no godlike jaw anywhere in my peripheral vision. No Nova.

70 Nova. I wonder if that’s his wanted name. Obviously, he’s wanted. He was nervous, and he had blood on his hand. Desperate for love and infatuated as I may be, I can put two and two together. Would he tell me his wanted name? If it was love, he would. It’s not love, Bristol. The blood keeps catching my attention. It’s colorful, and it’s sticky. I pinch my fingers together and pry them apart. I wonder whose it is— Then I don’t want to be wondering that because nausea roils up in my stomach and I have to press my non-sticky hand over my mouth to keep my breakfast bagel from revisiting the open air. I keep it there as I rush into the candle shop. My mission is the sink with all the homemade test soaps decorated with peeling “Try Me!” labels. The destination I reach is the hand sanitizer dispenser right inside the door. I pump seven times, and the red is momentarily engulfed in a foamy mess, but then it leeches into the bubbles, and I’m scrubbing pink, sharp- smelling suds halfway up my arms. “Ma’am, can I help you find anything?” I look up. An attendant in a yellow apron squints at me, and I squint back. “It’s blood,” I say. “Just wanted it off. . . .” She points to the sink, smiling sweetly. “Water will do the trick.” “I didn’t kill anyone,” I tell her. Pink sanitizer suds drip on the wood floor. “But I think. . . .” “I think the sink will do the trick,” the attendant says. Her hands wring together anxiously, and her gaze flits to the drops. “Oh, you must mop, too. I’m sorry. Sink.” She nods, and I stumble to the basin. Nudge the tap. Scour at the pink stuff. Watch it swirl down the drain. Is it from a dead person? I gasp and yell at the attendant. “Nine-one-one!” “What?” “The number. A phone. Call that. You know, nine-one-one.” She is stooped over the drops on the floor with a roll of paper towels. The way she’s staring at me half makes me wonder if I’m

71 the murderer. “It was blood, on my hands. Blood. Not mine. Don’t know whose. It was on my hands.” “How did it get on your hands?” “A boy touched them.” “A boy?” “Call nine-one-one.” “Why?” “Because there’s been a murder.” “Ma’am, you don’t know that; it was just on your hands—” I don’t turn off the sink. My manners are questionable in times of panic, but I’m running out the door before she’s wiped one drop of cerise foam off the floor. My hands are still wet. Clean, normal peachy color, but wet. I grab my phone out of my pocket anyway. I call nine-one-one. They ask what the problem is. “There’s been a murder.” They ask what happened. “A hot boy shook my hand, and there was blood on it.” They ask if it was his blood. “I don’t know. I don’t think it was a paper cut.” They ask me to describe the man. “Tall. Muscles. Blue hat, blonde hair. Pretty eyes.” They ask if there was anything on the hat. “I don’t know. Some words, a skyline silhouette maybe—hey, there was blood on his hands. I washed it off my hands. I shouldn’t have washed it off, should I?” They ask me my location. “Next to Peaches and Paisleys. Hey, it was a few minutes ago; I don’t know where he went; he was coming from the community hospital.” They ask to reaffirm that I have no idea where he is. “Yes, that’s right.” They tell me they’ll dispatch someone and thank me for the information. Then they hang up. Nine-one-one isn’t supposed to hang up.

72 I had blood on my hand. Yet all I can think about is the greens and the blues and the greys in his eyes, and I find myself searching all up and down the street for those colors again, those bright colors that I know are real, that I know I’m supposed to look at every day… Which way did he go? I stand where I was standing. Outside of the candle shop. Diagonal to the metal bench with all the chewed-up gum stuck on the back. To the left side of the murky puddle. Facing the south side of the street. We turned a little when he shook my hand, after I tripped. We turned so my back was to the candle shop, perpendicular to the street. Then when he pushed past me—it was back in the direction from which he came. Which is where I go now. My legs move fast, my breath comes short, and I think I can still feel the warm blood on my hand. It must be dried up in the microscopic grooves of my palm; it must be. It’s still there. It will be there forever. And so will his face. His beautiful, beautiful face. I march to the hospital. There’s not a trail of blood; there’s not a trail at all, but I feel like that’s where he came from. Maybe his mother died in the hospital. A minor surgery went wrong; the doctor left some medical instrument in her open body and then sewed it up inside her, and she died because of it. And Nova sued the hospital but lost, so he killed the doctor that sewed up the medical instrument, instead. Now he’s going back because he probably left blood all over the place like he left on me—not that there’s a shortage of blood within a hospital—but maybe Nova is a perfectionist. Or OCD. Can’t leave blood behind. Before I know it, I’m racing through the walls of the hospital— wild detective, hopeless romantic, one of the two—hair flying behind me and everything. People yell at me. I look into every doorway for a peek of the blue hat, or the yellow hair, or the striking eyes. I think about yelling his name, but the conflicting crime-versus-

73 lover scenario stops me. I don’t want to put my future husband behind bars, if his name is a wanted name. Shouting it could be his sentence. By the fourth floor I’m gasping for breath, but I see a figure turn at the end of the hallway—a crispy brown jacket and jeans. I know it’s him. There’s something in his hand, and I stop dead in my tracks—it’s a gun, I know that, too. He’s back. Maybe he didn’t finish the job. Maybe running into me on the street gave him the courage to come back and tie all the loose ends. “Oh, god,” I say. “Ma’am, are you all right?” A man in blue scrubs asks, dull brown eyes forcing concern. I know I must look frazzled. I feel frazzled. “Did someone sew something up, in a man’s mother?” He opens his mouth, then closes it. Opens it again, frowning. “I’m not sure I follow…” I take off down the hallway. I turn the corner. I see him in the first door on the left. He’s sitting in a chair, smiling crookedly, his strong hand passing over his strong jaw. As I watch, he takes the hat off and bends forward, laughing. He’s holding a coffee. “Nova!” I shout, but it comes out cracked and squeaky. Like before. He must think I have screwy vocal cords. He turns his head, and those brilliant eyes meet mine, then the head cocks to the side, and there’s no recognition. None. I step forward and peer into the room, coiling back when I see his next victim. A woman burrowed deep in pastel bedsheets, hair plastered to the sides of her face, skin glowing. She’s holding a little bundle in her arms. “No,” I tell him, stepping backwards so I can see the whole room and both their faces. “No, one is enough; I called the police—‘’ Nova holds up his hands. He’s still laughing. “Whoa, whoa, we’re not thinking of having more.” He’s laughing. He’s psycho. He’s hot as hell. Wait—having more? I look at him, and I look at the woman, and I look at the bundle.

74 The bundle cries, and Nova hurries to the bedside. I move forward quickly, defensively, shouting no again, but his movements are gentle. He caresses the woman’s shoulder, then the top of the bundle. His hand is still bloody. “Who did you kill?” I ask, pointing at his hand. They both frown. “The blood,” I say, confusion and frustration bubbling up in my chest. My eyes sting. I don’t understand. “We started a home birth,” the woman says, noticing Nova’s hand. “He was there to receive the baby…” I blink. “He ran.” The woman rolls her eyes, and Nova flushes a deep pink. “First time being a father is . . . unnerving, to say the least.” Then it clicks, and I’m not relieved that he’s not a murderer— that registers, too, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the word father, the realization that Nova is a father and that little bundle is his baby, and that woman is his partner, and there’s a band on his left ring finger, and that he can never be mine— Then I’m the runner in the street, hands bloodless but shaky. I wonder: maybe this isn’t the life I’m meant to live. Apartment dweller, on-time rent payer, dog caretaker, business professional. That was me, until this morning. Then I got blood on my hand. I wanted to be with a murderer. What does that make me?

75 Untitled Mary Kouns

Who are you? Who am I? Does the sky really bend before it breaks, Or does it shatter like glass? Is water a reflection of life? If a person bends and doesn’t break, Does that mean that he or she is strong or weak? Can you define courage? Is Courage the Cowardly Dog brave? Is life run by fear? What motivates you? What is reality? Does a dog see more than me because it sees less? Does color matter? Can you hear color? Why are they called races? Who is winning? Is competition really the enemy? Am I competing against competitions? Do shouts into voids echo? Are whispers louder than screams? If no one is invincible, does that mean that we are all vulnerable? If we are all vulnerable, then why do we keep secrets? Is the past a ghost or a skeleton? Why is love hiding in the closet? Is love a cure or a disease?

Here are some questions.

76 Anxiety Lucy Alvear

Breathe—It’s not over yet.

Plumes of rancid smudges fill the air. Why should I breathe? There’s always tomorrow, marked by the famous words of a chron- ic procrastinator.

Breathe—it’s only air; do you really need it?

Breathe—failure always awaits at the back door.

Just breathe—it can’t last forever.

The tunnel gets darker—the sweat floods mighty rivers down your nose.

Breathe—breathe—breathe!

Suffocating, eye’s bulging, lungs screaming to breathe—but I must’ve lost the sticky note I left for myself with the directions to my mind.

77 Forget Michelina Olivieri

Sometimes, I forget.

There are days when I can convince the echoing fear to take the day off, to ignore the alarm clock screaming to move, to just go back to dreaming about a time when it can finally retire.

Some days, I don’t light the fire that has been burning in my throat to catch my words before they fall from my mouth like the stones of an avalanche.

Every now and then, my shoulders just fall into place, prop themselves up like there was never a time when they used to fold over themselves in an attempt to hide in my own pockets.

Once in a while, the rattling wind chimes stop, and the wailing of a storm stops, and I let the silence wrap around me like an old blanket, willing it to scare away the monsters.

You see, sometimes, I just forget.

I forget that fire has not always been used for warmth and self-defense.

I forget that fear is what has kept people like me alive for so long.

I forget to check the mirror before I leave, to make sure that my fighting flag is hidden under layers of sweaters.

I forget that there is a war going on and I still haven’t made it off of the battlefield.

78 But then I remember.

I remember that labels have a tendency to morph themselves into pink triangles stapled to the breasts of those of us who were too stupid, or too brave, or too human to hide from the oncom- ing storm.

I remember the sound of fire licking up the stakes and witch- es above as people like us burned with the bundles of wood below, too inhuman to make a spectacle of.

I remember the silence that hung like death from ceiling of the Oval Office as the sitting president of the United States shrugged his shoulders while our deaths piled up by the thou- sands.

I remember that despite all of our marching, all of our fighting, there are still those who would rather us dead, who want to see us dead.

And yet, I remember.

I remember that we did not claim the rainbow flag because we were good at hiding, or running, but because when the storm comes, we are what is left.

I remember that the most effective form of protest is to keep living despite the world around us screaming for our blood.

I remember that the battles we fight today are for those who come after us, those who need our shoulders to stand on, just like we needed those before us.

I remember that we have seen worse than this; we are a people of survival, and hatred validated does not change that.

79 Milk Is the Mythology Daniellie Silva

(After Amy King)

Milk is the mythology for baby cows Humans are the mythology for aliens in the sky Stories are preserved in a brittle, brown shack Two seconds is all it took to fall, Fall in deep into that hole in your thorax Swallow me whole and leave me to marinate in your toxins I was happier as a freshly painted puppet, Pink and Blue I was cultivated in the earth beneath your hands Pressed and molded in the mechanics of your pancreas Thrown into the prison of your eyes Love is the mythology for the fleeting

80 Voyage de la Vie Erin Larson

We wake up from a long, long night of sleep, and we cry because we miss the warmth from which we came. Everything around us is cold and harsh and raw, whipping and licking our naked bodies, wiping and whittling us until we are nothing more than cooing babes, forced into existence by the desired effect. It’s one minute of wonder, a lifetime of hate. And it starts there, when we wake up and scream.

We become soft and sweet, batter stirred to dough, rolling around with no choice but to get rich quick, with such slow-working schemes. We put bows in our hair, let puppies kiss our noses, let the embossed words of storybooks float off the pages like little fairies. We dance through the cracks of sadness and despair, wanting oh so badly to turn into something beautiful.

When the ice melts, we’re pressed for time. We’re back to owing the life we never asked for, besotted with the hope of not being forgotten, besotted and liking it. We are in the dark, scared of the dark. Bad at this, bad at that. Weeping talent, such great doubt.

And then we emerge into the light—or maybe a trick of the light— and we emerge, with this feeling in our chests that is not good and is not bad. It becomes kind of hollow, like a tree when all its sap has run dry. Like it’s done giving sap, and it is ready to give something more. But unlike the tree, we are not ready to be burned. We are only ready to warm the fire.

We laugh and laugh and wait to die. While the sea pulls up its tide, we hope the sun will take our side. We become smitten, irresponsible with a particular love that infests our minds and our premature hearts, and we start to say things like yes and no and “When your tears become my own, I will let them fall, fall, fall into oblivion.”

81 With a bit o’ sugar, a bit o’ cream, a bit o’ death, and a bit o’ dream, we begin to realize twice-told tales don’t ring so true. We slip out of bed in the mornings, and the cold tiles under our bare feet shock us back to that place in the very beginning. We feel it on our skin, we feel it eat our flesh, we feel our bones rot, and we’re burning with courage to be who we never wanted to be.

And then we are all reduced to skeletons, with all our secret hidden bones exposed to the cold harsh wind, hunched and twisted and bent and so, so ugly to match our minds and our hearts that made us this way.

We start shallow, go deep. We breathe in colors. We try to sleep.

82 A Pebble Kathryn Chuchmuch

I tossed a secret to the sea, And slowly it came back to me. The rounded hint of what lay there, Before it sank it kissed the air. Why such a thing will travel so? For I refuse, and much I know. A heavy heart makes static feet. Yet it has none and prowls the street. That thing that chooses death to life, Yet slipped on fingers for a wife— Will make its nest upon a crown, After it sinks Down Down Down.

83 Contributors’ Biographies

Zaynab Ali is a Canadian lost in Texas who loves to obsess about hockey and to write in her free time.

Lucy Alvear is a sophomore at Lone Star College who enjoys painting, singing, photography and poetry writing. She loves the printing process of photography and enjoys the quiet self- indulgence of being in a dark room alone with her work. Music is the blood flowing through her veins; with it, she finds inspiration.

Kathryn Chuchmuch is currently a student at Lone Star College- Tomball, and is working towards an English degree with a focus in teaching. She has two younger sisters who she enjoys writing short stories with, and her favorite writers include J.R.R Tolkien, Lewis Carrol, Farley Mowat, and C.S. Lewis.

Adrianne Gerlach is a Texas based award-winning artist. She has dedicated her career to drawing and painting wildlife and western landscapes. Adrianne’s collection is now in the Conroe Art League and private collections. Adrianne is a full-time college student majoring in industrial design and planning on graduating in 2017.

Dawn Houldsworth is a liberal arts major who has a passion for her schnauzers, quilting, and classic literature.

Zoe Jones is a freshman with a love for the arts, orange soda, and the ocean. Her writing role models are Edgar Allan Poe and George Watsky.

Christopher Kessinger has no idea what class he’s in anymore, nor does he know what he’s working towards. He writes things sometimes.

Mary Kouns is a sophomore honors student who reevaluates her life every twenty minutes, loves to binge watch Netflix and then immediately watch the theoretical breakdowns of the shows she

84 just watched.

Lance Kretzschmar is an architecture major who enjoys drawing and sharing his art with others. He credits his talents to his friends, family, and girlfriend for guiding him on his path to become better at his work.

Erin Larson is a student at Lone Star College-Tomball.

Chelsea McKenna is confused about her future but has always held a deep affection for reading and writing. She also loves to bake and not in the healthy way, if there even is a healthy way to do so.

Michelina Olivieri is a sophomore English major who has dedicated the last ten years of her life to getting lost in mazes created by letters on paper.

Wendy Palmgren is a returning student and amateur photographer who enjoys snapping photos of her pet cats and capturing aesthetic landscapes in their ephemeral moments. Her dream is to “save the cheetahs” by finding a way to contribute toward cheetah conservation efforts in a meaningful way.

Caleb Price, a veteran, is a Batman enthusiast and Star Wars fanatic at Lone Star College-Tomball.

Katie Riley is just a nerd trying to get a higher education. She is pursuing a degree in graphic design. In her free time, she plays games, paints, draws, and occasionally writes.

Jordan Scrivens is a sophomore English major who is transfering to Texas A&M. She has a passion for photography and fiction writing in her free time.

Daniellie Silva is an undecided sophomore who takes naps at parks and enjoys reality television.

85 Emma Simoni is a senior in high school who enjoys painting, math, and environment design.

Haley Smith is a sophomore nutrition major with a passion for music, animals, and The Office. She also loves making people laugh.

Darrel Svatek is a former art student now training to be a para- medic with Lone Star College. He has a passion for drawing, painting, and providing service to the community.

Sarah Thomas is a freshmen communications major who has a passion for music and writing.

Jack Young has been a student for several semesters at Lone Star. His influences are Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein.

86 87 Inkling Events

Adviser Catherine Olson, Micki Olivieri, Daniel- lie Silva, Mary Kouns, Lucy Alvear, Dawn Houldsworth, and adviser Mari Carmen Marin

President Lucy Alvear and adviser Mari Carmen Marin

TOP: Adviser Catherine Olson, Lucy Alvear, Dawn Houldsworth, Sarah Hunstman, Rosalind Williamson, Chelsea McKenna, Daniellie Silva, Wendy Palmgren, TOP: Visiting Mary Kouns, Ronnie author Texas Hewitt, visiting author State Poet Charles Alexander, Julia Sandoval, and adviser Laureate Kyle Solak Laurie Ann RIGHT: includes adviser Guerrero Mari Carmen Marin

88 Inkling Editors at Work

Senior editors Daniellie Silva, Dawn Houldsworth, and Rosalind Williamson

Senior editor Dawn Houldsworth and editor Mary Kouns

Senior editors Daniellie Silva and Dawn Houldsworth

89 INKLING SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Go to www.lonestar.edu/Inkling, or scan the CR code on the following page. Click “Submission Procedure” and follow the directions.

1. Submissions received by December 15th will be considered for the issue to be released in the spring semester immediately following the submission. Submissions received after December 15th will be considered for the spring of the next academic year 2. Only original, unpublished works are accepted. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable. Please notify us immediately at Inkling@ lonestar.edu if your piece is accepted by another publisher. 3. Only LSC-Tomball students (enrolled in credit courses at the time of submission) are eligible to submit. 4. All work must be submitted electronically, through the Inkling Submission Form. Upload your file(s) to this form before you press SUBMIT. 5. Reproductions of artwork must be submitted as a .jpg files, with a resolution of 300 dpi or greater. Students may take a digital photo of their drawing(s), painting(s), or photograph(s) and upload the resulting .jpg file(s) to the submission form. 6. Maximum entries per person: six (6) writing submissions and six (6) art submissions. 7. Writers and artists selected for publication will be notified by mail. Expect notification by February or March of the semester for which they are selected. NOTE: Submissions selected for publication are automatically entered into the Lone Star College- Tomball Inkling Magazine Creative Arts Contest. Winners will receive cash awards.

90 SELECTION PROCESS

All entries are submitted to Inkling Magazine advisers. Advisers replace the authors’ and artists’ names with numbers to preserve their anonymity. A voting packet of all submissions is then compiled and distributed to Inkling Magazine editors, staff members, and participating faculty, who vote for inclusion in the magazine and placement for awards. A staff meeting is then held to finalize votes. Only after final selections have been made do the advisers reveal the identity of those individuals whose works have been chosen.

Scan me to visit the Inkling website and find out more!