Letter from the Editor
Recently, my memory has become muddled, words and images morphing together. I forget how to say “spoon,” or “curtain,” or “color.” Every autumn this confusion heightens; my chronic illness sees the piles of leaves and comes out to play in them, worse and brighter than other seasons. I feel displaced from myself, like the selfie trend that spiked a few years back, a white outline of a face placed over an actual face, a replica exact enough I can transpose which I consider the “true” face. I am the outline of the thing, not the thing itself. I am pointing at the thing itself—myself—and asking it to meet the outline, as I can see no other way of fitting back into my body, or my body fitting back into me.
Yana Lipnesh’s “Find Me in a Fish Tank” captures this sense of uneasy otherworldliness, and it holds within it all the uneases the pieces in this issue speak toward. The central figure gazes into the titular fish tank, trying to “find” herself. Rather than desperate or forlorn, she seems placid: her expression without clear or strong emotion, her finger pointing with decision but not urgency. Whereas the background and bodies trapped inside the fish tank exist in vivid and contrasting colors, she is a black-and-white sketch, an unfinished form more and less real than the alternatives she gazes toward. She is an observer, watching the better, truer “me” in the water, through the glass.
With this calmness comes a silence: she seems to understand how much can exist as unsaid or understated, especially when it’s so difficult to explain what identity “is” or how it blends into the world around itself. Quiet and empty spaces appear throughout this issue, woven between moments and often more important than the moments themselves. In Amelia Ao’s “Amanecer,” a daydream of speaking to a higher Father eclipses the “3 years and 10 months and 7 days since my father last spoke to me willingly,” a stillness that is “strangely ordinary and strangely heartbreaking” at once. In Grace Novarr’s “Leaving Somebody,” the intricacies and intimacies of the body can’t come across through words; the closest the speaker can get is a translation or a bracketing, “—————————” or “[a full year] of […].”
These silences frustrate and fascinate, and the speakers turn them over, seeking to understand what’s hidden inside. They gain a physicality beyond their own abstract forms, “some exoskeleton whose limits I feel / every time you cross my mind” (in Grace Novarr’s words). Or, other objects come to serve as embodiments, as with “the boat in the driveway” in Derek Chen’s “Untamed,” which “seemed to me like a grandparent with stories to tell, trying to paint a picture of sunrise over the water armed with only black and white ink, insistent with meanings and morals that had been learned from young foolishness and which consistently fell on indifferent ears.” In this case, it is not silence that is the problem per se, but the inability of language to fully transcend silence and communicate all inside it; the ability of a girl to point at herself in a fish tank but not to explain why she chose that point, or why she chose to point at all.
As silences blend into bodies, bodies pull away from the spirits within them, split in meaning and purpose. “Find Me in a Fish Tank” shows not one figure trapped underwater, but two: a body pushed against the glass asking for help, seemingly a smaller version of the girl outside the tank, and a more vaporous other, pulling the body’s hair and blending into the water. The girl signifies this other, its face gapping and gaping open, as herself. As Isabella Ponce says in her poem “Inframundo,” “it reminds of Clementine, mouth wide open, laughing in a dingy room at the Stardust Motel. / but, at the same time, she wasn’t really there—nobody was.” The figures are perhaps reminiscent of the larger girl, like Clementine, but are not really her; or, perhaps, she is not really herself and these figures somehow are.
That separation in identity—a body and a psyche, physicality and metaphysicality—invokes a conflict shared among these pieces: how do we reconcile who we look with how we are? This question carries Sara Jhong’s “Immigrant Song,” in which the speaker pleads of her desperate attempts to attain Western beauty standards, “I didn’t mean to, Korea. I just wanted to be pretty. // I am not pretty here.” It appears in Angelina Graham’s “November 13th, 2019” as well, in which the speaker keeps “Eyes trained on black nails on black leather,” material and visible details, to avoid “the trembling that crawls under my skin / All loose sinew and fatty strings,” the unmanageable and inexplicable panic bubbling underneath.
Hannah Lee’s “The Bird Woman of Manhattan” offers one method of moving beyond this conflict, in which the central woman stays “rooted to her corner of the street, yes / but this woman of birds took flight everyday.” By entering this dream of flight, the woman transcends her own conditions; but she does not change them, exactly, nor truly escape them. Nadia Farjami’s “Trapped” develops another answer, in which the speaker imagines herself in death as “wearing dusk and / dickinson’s stanzas,” clothes no longer tangible, but “flesh… sticky with / mourning dew” still, the realms crashing together. As Riley Duemler writes in one of her visual art pieces, “They call it a chest cavity because you can feel yourself rotting,” the halves never entirely separate in the first place.
However, the girl in “Find Me in a Fish Tank” is still outside the tank—for better or worse. She hovers over it as a misguided God, finding herself but not letting herself (either version of herself behind the glass) free. The eyes on the wall look upward, asking for another higher power’s help, but with none present in the frame. If not in control, the girl is at least the closest to omniscient in the illustration, and she wields power in what she makes silent or molds into herself. She reminds me of the speaker in Lum Chi’s “How Sisters See,” documenting two different narratives and in doing so pulling them together, guiding the interviews, acting not simply as a removed researcher but a person deeply interested in the stories told. Or, she is the speaker in Hannah Stewart’s “II deadly,” and the figures can never produce “enough gold-fire goodness to appease” her own unease with herself. The figures might instead fade into the water, or let themselves be pulled away from the girl and the glass, embodying the rebellious laziness captured in Elijah Kleinman’s “Jade.”
I am still hoping to find myself behind the glass, to make the body match the spirit match the outline, to unravel or unbecome the displacement. There are no easy answers, or even interpretations of the questions, posed in “Find Me in a Fish Tank” or in confusion itself. But I do know the pieces included in this issue begin to point toward solidity, or better, toward meaning. They’re heavy and expansive at once, and they’re enchanting to read.
Courtney Felle
Editor-in-Chief
Marriah Talbott-Malone Prose Editor
Maheen Shahbazi Poetry Editor
Recently, my memory has become muddled, words and images morphing together. I forget how to say “spoon,” or “curtain,” or “color.” Every autumn this confusion heightens; my chronic illness sees the piles of leaves and comes out to play in them, worse and brighter than other seasons. I feel displaced from myself, like the selfie trend that spiked a few years back, a white outline of a face placed over an actual face, a replica exact enough I can transpose which I consider the “true” face. I am the outline of the thing, not the thing itself. I am pointing at the thing itself—myself—and asking it to meet the outline, as I can see no other way of fitting back into my body, or my body fitting back into me.
Yana Lipnesh’s “Find Me in a Fish Tank” captures this sense of uneasy otherworldliness, and it holds within it all the uneases the pieces in this issue speak toward. The central figure gazes into the titular fish tank, trying to “find” herself. Rather than desperate or forlorn, she seems placid: her expression without clear or strong emotion, her finger pointing with decision but not urgency. Whereas the background and bodies trapped inside the fish tank exist in vivid and contrasting colors, she is a black-and-white sketch, an unfinished form more and less real than the alternatives she gazes toward. She is an observer, watching the better, truer “me” in the water, through the glass.
With this calmness comes a silence: she seems to understand how much can exist as unsaid or understated, especially when it’s so difficult to explain what identity “is” or how it blends into the world around itself. Quiet and empty spaces appear throughout this issue, woven between moments and often more important than the moments themselves. In Amelia Ao’s “Amanecer,” a daydream of speaking to a higher Father eclipses the “3 years and 10 months and 7 days since my father last spoke to me willingly,” a stillness that is “strangely ordinary and strangely heartbreaking” at once. In Grace Novarr’s “Leaving Somebody,” the intricacies and intimacies of the body can’t come across through words; the closest the speaker can get is a translation or a bracketing, “—————————” or “[a full year] of […].”
These silences frustrate and fascinate, and the speakers turn them over, seeking to understand what’s hidden inside. They gain a physicality beyond their own abstract forms, “some exoskeleton whose limits I feel / every time you cross my mind” (in Grace Novarr’s words). Or, other objects come to serve as embodiments, as with “the boat in the driveway” in Derek Chen’s “Untamed,” which “seemed to me like a grandparent with stories to tell, trying to paint a picture of sunrise over the water armed with only black and white ink, insistent with meanings and morals that had been learned from young foolishness and which consistently fell on indifferent ears.” In this case, it is not silence that is the problem per se, but the inability of language to fully transcend silence and communicate all inside it; the ability of a girl to point at herself in a fish tank but not to explain why she chose that point, or why she chose to point at all.
As silences blend into bodies, bodies pull away from the spirits within them, split in meaning and purpose. “Find Me in a Fish Tank” shows not one figure trapped underwater, but two: a body pushed against the glass asking for help, seemingly a smaller version of the girl outside the tank, and a more vaporous other, pulling the body’s hair and blending into the water. The girl signifies this other, its face gapping and gaping open, as herself. As Isabella Ponce says in her poem “Inframundo,” “it reminds of Clementine, mouth wide open, laughing in a dingy room at the Stardust Motel. / but, at the same time, she wasn’t really there—nobody was.” The figures are perhaps reminiscent of the larger girl, like Clementine, but are not really her; or, perhaps, she is not really herself and these figures somehow are.
That separation in identity—a body and a psyche, physicality and metaphysicality—invokes a conflict shared among these pieces: how do we reconcile who we look with how we are? This question carries Sara Jhong’s “Immigrant Song,” in which the speaker pleads of her desperate attempts to attain Western beauty standards, “I didn’t mean to, Korea. I just wanted to be pretty. // I am not pretty here.” It appears in Angelina Graham’s “November 13th, 2019” as well, in which the speaker keeps “Eyes trained on black nails on black leather,” material and visible details, to avoid “the trembling that crawls under my skin / All loose sinew and fatty strings,” the unmanageable and inexplicable panic bubbling underneath.
Hannah Lee’s “The Bird Woman of Manhattan” offers one method of moving beyond this conflict, in which the central woman stays “rooted to her corner of the street, yes / but this woman of birds took flight everyday.” By entering this dream of flight, the woman transcends her own conditions; but she does not change them, exactly, nor truly escape them. Nadia Farjami’s “Trapped” develops another answer, in which the speaker imagines herself in death as “wearing dusk and / dickinson’s stanzas,” clothes no longer tangible, but “flesh… sticky with / mourning dew” still, the realms crashing together. As Riley Duemler writes in one of her visual art pieces, “They call it a chest cavity because you can feel yourself rotting,” the halves never entirely separate in the first place.
However, the girl in “Find Me in a Fish Tank” is still outside the tank—for better or worse. She hovers over it as a misguided God, finding herself but not letting herself (either version of herself behind the glass) free. The eyes on the wall look upward, asking for another higher power’s help, but with none present in the frame. If not in control, the girl is at least the closest to omniscient in the illustration, and she wields power in what she makes silent or molds into herself. She reminds me of the speaker in Lum Chi’s “How Sisters See,” documenting two different narratives and in doing so pulling them together, guiding the interviews, acting not simply as a removed researcher but a person deeply interested in the stories told. Or, she is the speaker in Hannah Stewart’s “II deadly,” and the figures can never produce “enough gold-fire goodness to appease” her own unease with herself. The figures might instead fade into the water, or let themselves be pulled away from the girl and the glass, embodying the rebellious laziness captured in Elijah Kleinman’s “Jade.”
I am still hoping to find myself behind the glass, to make the body match the spirit match the outline, to unravel or unbecome the displacement. There are no easy answers, or even interpretations of the questions, posed in “Find Me in a Fish Tank” or in confusion itself. But I do know the pieces included in this issue begin to point toward solidity, or better, toward meaning. They’re heavy and expansive at once, and they’re enchanting to read.
Courtney Felle
Editor-in-Chief
Marriah Talbott-Malone Prose Editor
Maheen Shahbazi Poetry Editor