this poem by Jessica Bebenek was inspired by the art of Loish
Category: art
On Advertising and Chips: “Crusading”
“Crusading”
word by Jacob Goldberg
colour by Loish
Elias’ bag of chips had gone missing. He was walking around the classroom searching for his bag of chips. He brandished his lunch box at Mr. Epplin, telling him that they were there this morning. He asked Mr. Epplin where they had gone. Meanwhile Mr. Epplin hadn’t even asked him a question. He had been standing at the chalkboard writing the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. And he looked to everyone to be terribly confused, like someone who had just been told that in fact Santa did exist. Elias didn’t care. He wanted to know where was his bag of chips. LAYS. Bag made of 70% reusable goods. The bag doesn’t mention where the last 30% came from. Elias speculates that it came from non-reusable goods. This is what Mr. Epplin calls an educated guess.
Several minutes had elapsed since class began but this class seemed to be a lost cause. Of course, it could be have been recovered, had Mr. Epplin had ambitions to resume. But he didn’t. Mr. Epplin was looking for Elias’ chips. In fact, everyone was. Elias had corralled all of his classmates and his teacher into searching for his chips.
Elias asked every one of his classmates to empty their bags on their desks. He asked them to examine their belongings for his chips. He told them that they might have forgotten what you put in their bags. Sometimes, Elias said, he could overhear Mom whisper to Dad at Olive Garden that she’d forgotten something and now there was in issue underneath the table. This issue was her period. But dad would find a tampon in her purse. Elias said that the moral of the story was that you sometimes forget what you put in your bag.
Mr. Epplin totally understood what Elias was getting at. He exclaimed to the class that he would be their father and inspect their bags for them. One girl, Eve, wondered whether this proclamation was grounds for terminating Mr. Epplin’s career as a teacher, but God intervened. He said to her, “Your namesake ate the apple: Don’t be the second Eve to fuck it up.” She wasn’t sure how to take this advice.
When Ms. Chu, the biology teacher, appeared at the door with her students, Mr. Epplin, frisking Joseph, told her that he could arrest her if he wanted. He removed a pair of handcuffs from his breast-pocket and said don’t test me.
Elias had removed the axe from the In-Case-Of-Emergency box and began to hack at the room’s infrastructure. One student had removed a wok from his backpack, another dry ice. Several students in the room were smoking cigarettes. Ms. Chu asked a student for one. The student said no. Ms. Chu and Mr. Epplin were holding hands. There was much excitement. Yes. Yes yes yes.
With the floorboards uprooted, the desks overturned, the windows kristallnachted, and the wallpaper peeled, Elias sadly decided that his chips were not in the room.
The next step was to set off the fire alarm. Elias’ thinking was: chips are denser than water, so they’ll sink in the rising water. Yes, Ms. Chu, the science teacher agreed. They emerged from the classroom, all attached to toddler leash.
The day would end soon, and Elias would go home hungry and chipless. All of Wilmington High would soon be on the Crusade for the Chips. Here, there is separateness in the togetherness, loneliness in the community. This crowd grows, and they are not alone, warding day and death away.
word by Jacob Goldberg
“I was thinking about what it means to be a member of a group, to be driven by an idea, buying stuff, and how advertising can compel us to do things. The girl in the picture seems like she could inspire such a crowd.”
see more colour by Loish
This home will be home again
word by Boris But
colour by Alex Andreev
The obsidian titan looms from
Below, a weary vision bestowed
On the fallow dreamer dreary-
Minded by the sea.
st-petersburg montreal
Your quiet eyes pace through
My possessions: strangling rope,
Brine-soaked pages, symbols of the
Lost hope of an exiled meanderer.
st-petersburg montreal
Dear stranger, learn of home
And sing of it. When us strangers
Gather on stranger seas, we
Recall a home we never see.
st-petersburg montreal
Tale by tale you regale of the forgotten,
The sea-tossed bottle lost in tribal
Misunderstanding, a tongue
Lashing at hollow space,
st-petersburg montreal
Our anguish laid bare in mutual
Vulnerability, pyrobabble in place
Of a strange silence. Your eyes
Glimmer beneath a buried quaver,
st-petersburg montreal
A ripple pulsing from an unknown
Provenance ripping apart
In a fear or pain
Lost to a generation unto me.
st-petersburg montreal
My adrifted mind scrambles for some
Consolation of storied survivors or
A measure of a distinguished nature, blessed
By the godliness of constellations above,
st-petersburg montreal
The mortal shipwrecked sands below.
But let me rot here with you
Borne in eternal entropy,
Born to be forever forgotten.
st-petersburg montreal
Do dead men cry? Do words die?
Who swims and who sinks in your currents?
This home will be home again. Welcome,
Old friend, and dare not stay silent.
st-petersburg montreal
word by Boris But
“What stranger does not first appear to be alien? Inspired by Alex Andreev’s masterful piece and anguished by the refugee crises and the oft-overlooked diaspora of vagrants everywhere, I crafted a poem about two strangers, perhaps parallel images, making a common home. What estranges people is the failure to recognize humanity in what we find unfamiliar. Stories imbue us with a transcendental magic, building homes where nothing should be.”
colour by Alex Andreev
“Alex Andreev lives in St. Petersburg, Russian Federation.
He’s been drawing, painting and doing graphic design over last 20 years.
He works as art-director in advertising agency and as senior concept artist for movie and game production. Born in 1972, Russia”
We asked for flowers and they gave us flying cars.
word by Josh Elyea
colour by Garry Tugwell Smith
Untether yourself from the Earth, they’d said. Man was born to fly.
When I was a little kid, I’d run through the meadow behind our house with my arms waist-high. I’d convince myself that the gentle touch of the high grass against my fingers was exactly what a cloud might feel like, if you could reach out and grab it. I still think about that meadow as I run my hands through the greasy droplets of moisture that cloud the air as I drive to work. Clouds aren’t quite as majestic as my formative self liked to believe.
It’s easy to look at a flying car and be impressed. It’s easy to look at it and think, we’re going in the right direction.
Now, we look to the things that grow for sanctuary. We look for the things that hold fast to the Earth, that dig their roots deep and growl at the bastards who’d dare to try and dig those roots out, to inspire us, just as we once looked to our superheroes as they streaked across the sky. Now, we see heroism in every tree that dares to grow, in every flower that dares to bloom. We recognize the bravery in their determination, in their resolve. How hard it must be to be green in a grey world.
To my left, a massive building hovers in the fog, beyond definition. Concrete but fluid, the building lurks as lights signal to oncoming traffic which sections of the sky to avoid. Strange to think that the sky, once so spectacular in its refusal to be defined, has now been mapped, separated into imaginary but all-too-real geometric spaces given a name and correlating number based on their geographic location (and in this process, had the entirety of its mystery stripped away, like a bad movie that foreshadows too heavily its own ending).
The lights on the building pulse in the morning haze, and as the faint sun begins to strike the windows of the tower, it seems for a moment to resemble a large flower unfolding as the day breaks. Is it possible that skyscrapers too have roots, dug deep into the concrete that has increasingly replaced the Earth?
read more words by Josh Elyea
see more colour by Garry Tugwell Smith
Depersonalization and the Effects of Medication
word by Annie Rubin
colour by Garry Tugwell Smith
She’s flying. In wisps of purple clouds, planets whizzing by, spinning and floating and falling. It was this chalky white pill, that kind of separated reality from the extra terrestrial. Worlds weaving in and out, setting apart the frenzied train ride from this spontaneous trip in vibrant flashes.
The notion of the free-fall makes her jump with eyes fixated on the green circles of the metro line, they’re reading something altogether different than the weightlessness of her stomach or her fingers pressing onto what could only be hundreds of pins or the tightness in her chest: rising and falling in bursts of colour.
The same five senses designed to orient are skewed. The scent of the subway, the burn of the wheels against the hot metal tracks, and the chorus of echoing voice, chanting something painfully inaccessible are present, distant.
Fighting to define the boundaries of sobriety, she pieces together the images. There’s an empty seat beside her, she tries to listen to the silence. Wanting simultaneously to lie down and to break through the window of the train.
She’s watching herself hover above ground as the medication kicks in. Limbs go numb and the colours fade to a gentle hum of grey. Mood has been stabilized. The subway lurches to a stop and in the mass of bodies collecting at the doors, she makes her way onto the crowded street where her feet plant firmly into the concrete and her head feels lighter, less explosive.
What is left to believe when perception becomes unreliable?*
From the author: “This futuristic image depicts outer-worldly colours and objects. It inspired a piece that confronts mental health topics of perception, depersonalization and the effects of medication. The mixture of sensations represents the profundity of mental illness in its capacity to debilitate a person throughout daily life and the idiosyncratic experiences of depersonalization in a mental health crisis.”
Read more of Rubin’s words on mental health
See more of Smith’s colour
How We Deal With Trauma
word by Keah Hansen
colour by Garry Tugwell Smith
content warning: violence
Her steel flanks glisten under a sordid sun. Scream white when sparring with that heady fire which scalds and percolates. Steam abates and disappears under the softer consciousness of the moon. In a world of duality we see seek healing our gendered symbols. We trail our fingers with alacrity over constellations of great queens. Bury our toes in the soil of wildflowers. In a world of gender, the male deftly danced us to the mantelpiece and left us there to sweep and decorate and gaze about winsomely. Coddling the hearth with a dainty steel prong. Another wary night- the room is aflame as steel and her fire twirl and jest.
At the present moment we find our battleship sinking into black waters. She heeded caution and wore her armour willingly, heaving bells of alarm when the first missile singed her pristine sides. In that vast ocean of a house, the cries besides the mantelpiece dissolved at the mudroom, unheard by the neighbours outside. Dashed twice on the rocks; a champagne flute smote under his gaze; the fire burned the scented candle wax and the moon waned to hide the rosy cheeks of the slipping ship.
Watch her picking ash off her skirt. Laundering out the lingering smoke of last night. Watch him watching her as they resume position- his fire rising out of that chimney and filling the world with another declaration of maleness. The delicate steel prong with flower etchings rests mutely by morning, like the battleship that poises leaden on the ocean floor. Salty water urges rust to spread up her shoulders and into the newly formed cavities.
This water mutes and oppresses. It won’t offer rebirth to she who has so many others to birth and support. Her body is a symbol of victory for patriarchy- the self-effacing female imprinted onto the minds of millions like a postcard of a battleship at rest. A war song rolls over the banks, prettying words of chauvinism.
For now, we pour our healing and ourselves into smaller symbols of identity. The ocean will someday offer its support– after countless battleships have chipped away and yielded to the currents- then women too will claim this territory as reverential. The mythic female will nest in these digressive and mysterious tides and the battleship will morph into a chanting pacifist baring flowers and peasant skirts. Identity is formed by such symbols- the kind that animates and roars and threatens to enflame a house with words.*
From the author:
“As I started writing this piece, I was inspired by the symbolism of the sunken warship resting on a seabed, and reflected on the processes of healing for different types of people, honing in on women in particular. However, these musings inspired a digression on the symbolic as a catalyst for growth and as a figurative location for anchoring, which unleashed a self-reflexive essay on the transience of the meanings behind symbols and the potency in claiming symbols for tangible social change.”
Read more words on mental health by Keah Hansen
See more colour by Garry Tugwell Smith
We love to point out shadows in the dark / But do we illuminate the monsters?
“Illuminated Monsters”
word by Sean Hogan
colour by Giordani Poloni
More philosopher than centerfold,
She stops and stares at men who don’t care,
Beneath breasts beats more than fool’s gold,
Still, eyes linger where they wish she’d bare,
Fit to raise our youth and clean,
To buy and cook the food we eat,
Never heard and seldom seen,
Her labored fruits made bitter sweet,
The sliding scale of value froze
Needle pausing under half
Youthful beauty no longer shows
Her age screwed up the math.
At forty-five she “wastes away”,
Unmarried, unfortunate maid,
A gringo sitcom worn cliché,
To live, you must get paid,
She is only one example
One in all the many forms
A gender bent and trampled
Weathered leather in the storm
If a woman’s words fall on deaf ears,
Did they emerge or make a sound?
Do they possess so much to fear,
To keep the cycle spinning round?
Over half the population,
Trapped in shades of subjugation,
In every continent and nation,
In fear of pain, of death, invasion,
Is it not enough their body’s not their own,
That we wear and tear their very souls?
Teach girls to fear being alone,
To never take direct routes home?
We love to point out shadows in the dark,
But do we illuminate the monsters?
Trembling fingers hold no spark,
Steady hands, both shame and flaunt her
word by Sean Hogan
colour by Giordani Poloni
How does social media define you?
“A Millennial Diet”
word by Leah Mol
colour by Giordano Poloni
She came straight home after school and sat in the basement office where the computer was. She always had a couple hours before her parents got home. She didn’t want them to hear her printing everything off, because they’d just be upset about the ink—ink was expensive. She couldn’t expect them to understand why she needed more and more and more. Since they never heard the printing, they couldn’t understand where it was all going.
But still they bought more ink. Every couple weeks when the printer ran out, there would be questions. She’d say she was printing her homework, articles or stories to read for a class, pictures for presentations.
She hid the printing the way she hid her stomachaches, because she knew they’d take her to the doctor again. It wasn’t so bad, anyway. She just had to stay away from Facebook and Twitter for a while and things would be okay. The real problem was Instagram, but she just wasn’t willing to give that up, no matter how bad the cramps got. There were too many pictures to post. And once they were online everyone had something to say.
She wouldn’t have known what to tell her parents about the printing even if she could be honest. She knew only that when her stomach was full, she was better. Once everything was printed off and inside her, she could stop checking to see if anything new had been printed. She could finally stop thinking about all the things other people were thinking.
She loaded Instagram on her laptop and scrolled through the recent activity. Beatrice, a girl from school, had posted a photo of the two of them, so she printed it out. There were four comments about the photo, so she printed those as well. One of her photos had new likes and new comments, so she printed it all. Later, she sat in front of the computer, looking through old photos, old comments, old Facebook messages and Twitter posts, tearing each printed sheet into strips, rolling them around in her mouth until they were soft, chewing and swallowing until the whole mess was inside. As she slept her stomach ached and turned, filled with all the most important things, filled with everything anyone had ever said about her.*
word by Leah Mol
colour by Giordano Poloni
Finding Who You Aren’t At The Party
word by Sam Fresco
colour by Burkhard Müller
Chet looked down at the bushy red fox. The fox looked back.
burkhard müller
You have to get home, Chet – you don’t belong here, said the fox.
burkhard müller
Chet stumbled back: his head was spinning. He ducked out of the crowd, standing over him. He ran past the counter and into the lift.
burkhard müller
The doors closed. No buttons. It started going up – the lights above the doors showing it near the roof. 39, 40, 41, 42.
burkhard müller
As he came out on the roof, a man in an ill-fitting brown suit was panting, hands on knees.
burkhard müller
Celeste, where the hell have you been?
burkhard müller
Why do people keep calling me that, he thought.
burkhard müller
Here now.
burkhard müller
The small man lit a cigarette and offered one out. Chet hesitated because he didn’t smoke.
burkhard müller
Johnny, come on, what’s the matter?
burkhard müller
And Johnny now?
burkhard müller
He took a cigarette although he felt he had never smoked before.
burkhard müller
OK, so we got your little shit. Now you just, y’know, you beat him around a little and we’re all down here. OK?
burkhard müller
He looked down to the short and balding man. No: a teenager.
burkhard müller
A man held red gloves to Chet. He took them. The teenager spat out a tooth with a clump of blood. He couldn’t help feeling that he himself looked a lot like the teenager.*
word by Sam Fresco
colour by Burkhard Müller
Lines & Anemones
word by Charlotte Joyce Kidd
Every day that I leave the house I feel that I am leaving it wearing a sign (or maybe an expression? An outfit?) that says “here I am, world. Have at me.” I feel this way even though – when I do leave the house – I leave it also wearing the cozy winter coat of privilege, not to mention an actual, real winter coat. I can’t imagine how hard it must be without these things.
There are these little lines in between everyone’s lives, aren’t there? There’s this space in between everyone and it’s like we’re all just extending these tiny tendrils across it, these little, feeble gooey white groping things with suction cups on the ends, and sometimes we meet someone and we manage to say things that make sense and actually express anything that we really feel or mean, and if they do too and enough of our tendrils stick to enough of theirs, then we feel better for a bit, like someone actually knows us. But even if you do that for your whole life, your whole life with the same person (and that’s problematic, too, let’s talk about that) how many of your little limbs could you extend? How many of theirs could you touch?
I got on the streetcar after spending the night with a boy and on a cold corner I saw a couple walking by and I thought about how he would react if I suggested that we spend an entire day walking around and telling each other every single thing that passed through our minds. We could take turns, do an hour each and then switch. He’d told me in words that were decisive and made sense that we could never understand each other completely, because I’m white and he’s not and I’m a woman and he’s not. I agree. There’s something noble in the futility of trying to understand, though, isn’t there? There’s something beautiful about learning to replace understanding with empathy, about reaching out and touching the tendril even though you can’t stick to it.
Sometimes there are chasms between people. Sometimes the lines yawn. Sometimes two people have pushed enough times that their plates push further and further apart, sometimes one person has made a moat around themselves because of something that happened. Sometimes that moat is not a bad thing, sometimes it is not wrong to require someone to have very long limbs before we let them reach us.
So we’re all alone, playing a giant game of tic tac toe, reaching out from our separate boxes with words written or spoken or felt, or with devices, these electronic arms with which we send cries into the ether and hope for ethereal responses, echoes in the chasm. And maybe some people are closer to the edges of their boxes than others. It’s all very lonely and very hopeful.*
word by Charlotte Joyce Kidd
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