October 2020 Zine | Quarantitty

Contributors

Homepage by Krowarts

An Ode 2 Myself - Yoko Please
untitled - dawrlin mejia
Reef - Daniel Armitano
Untitled - Kimberly Celeste
untitled - dawrlin mejia
Queen of Hearts - John Beltre
All This Ethnicity - Kendall Cafaro
Untitled - Cyn
Untitled - Mark G
There are dreams here - Krowarts
Consent Fucking Matters - Kimberly Celeste
Abajo la misma luna - Shakira Mejia

Reflections on Madonna - Laura Hetherington
Lazy Day - Carol Jeong
untitled - dawrlin mejia
My monthly is your lifeline - Kimberly Celeste
Tripod Bowl - Daniel Armitano
There are dreams here - Krowarts
His Father's Castle, His Mother's Glory - Matt Scheffler
I am the Dog called Forbidden - SWAINEB
FiveHold - Jeff Brain
Nails - Nails by Val
Nobody Tells Me! - Maddy Baker
Tripod Bowl - Daniel Armitano

1. flowers

2. saturn

Reef

Queen of Hearts

An excerpt from a work in process,

All This Ethnicity

7th Grade Social Studies Teacher

So...what is your ethnicity Kendall? I can’t quite tell.

7th Grade Me

Oh, My dad’s like Japanese and Italian and my mom’s just English…I think.

7th Grade Social Studies Teacher

Japanese? Wow.

7th Grade Me

...

My Voice

(we see moving images of the doll, the kimono from different angles)

I noticed confusion at Japanese

Often, I’d notice confusion at Japanese.

In my grandparent’s bedroom there lived this doll, in a glass case

The doll was dressed in full Kimono
White face, Red Painted Lip
She stood posing

Left hand on right cheek
Looking down on the ground with a kind of smirk

I always noticed confusion at Japanese

Often, in me

Where was the quarter of myself that was Japanese?
Toes, feet, ankles, shins, thighs, hip, torso, breasts, arms, fingers

What about in my...
Neck, head, eyebrows, forehead, hair

From there I search
For a story
For a person
.

My Grandma Kay taught me how to knit and sew. I remember a weekend where we went to Joanne fabrics and she bought me my first sewing kit and a tomato pin cushion. The TOMAAAHTO. She’d call it.

She had her own vegetable garden filled with tomaaaahtos and cucumbers.

Her order at Japanese restaurants was green tea and Chirashi. She also loved anything Tempura

She loved pocketbooks and jewelry and things that were made really well.

She’d scoff at me for throwing away scraps that I’d cut away from vegetables

She couldn’t understand, was confounded when I would run around with wet hair or not wear socks or when I asked

“can you teach me how to crochet?”

“waste of yarn” she responded without a flinch

She wrapped the yarn around her fingers in a way so that she could press her index finger down like a button and her fingers would become an actual knitting machine

She had long nails, manicured, usually with red nail polish.

Grandma Kay rocked a red lip.

Her suits were gorgeous.

when she’d sleep over she’d pop out her dentures and tell me that’s what happens when you don’t brush your teeth

I’d tell her something that made total sense to me and she’d go “Whaaaa???”

I started taking Japanese in high school. I was terrible at it.

She'd began to decline. She began forgetting things that just happened or things we just said.

I’d show her my sentences in attempted hiragana and she may have been losing memory but she knew that I could NOT speak Japanese.

She came to all my shows. She came to the soccer games. The occasional karate tournament.

My friends knew her as my Japanese Grandma.

My Grandma Kay.

There are dreams here

Consent Fucking Matters

Abajo la misma luna

Reflections on Madonna

Zephyr in the sky at night

A place I could possibly call home

If the water pressure was right

And someone could prove I’m safe there

If I close my eyes I’m with you anyway

Dancing in your shadow

Like the child I was at seventeen

Hoping to go somewhere with you

Once you drove me in your big white car

After you’d taken a tab

And told me you were the car

Staring straight down at the road

I wasn’t scared

With my parents’ beer sweating in my pocket

I was ready to go somewhere with you.

People change

But summer comes around

I remember you

I know we died

But summer comes around

There was a time when summer made me think of you

Sweat color

Drives out of the city in your car

I could see you were the beach I hadn’t visited in years

At night I lock the doors

Where no one else can see

Lie on the ground

Touch the knuckle you held

Same one I burned on the light

Did you know in seven years we will hate each other?

Did you know we’ll think of each other

When the 1 goes by

And we’ll die that way

Separate, thinking of each other

I’ll leave money for your children

And you for mine

Maybe my daughter will love someone someday

With sunny eyes like yours

When she’s grown and hungry for the things life can’t give freely

The things you have to pay a price for.

Girl with the great name

It might as well be you

Curly bangs in your face, some sort of jewel-toned lumpy sweater

A dream girl designed by the dream

I wonder if you were born this way

Or made yourself

Brick by brick

Like I did

Wonder when you go home if you feel empty at night

Wonder if you built the walls before the floor

When you go home to the Northeast

And drink tea in the woods

Do you twinge from leftover pain?

Or are you truly happy

Do you get wrapped up in warm conversations

In dim lighting at night

With your intelligent parents

Or do you shuffle around a cold house,

uncomfortable?

Do you find yourself out of place again

Search for what to say to your own blood

Feel thirsty for the city but also torn between

there, and what you used to be,

creeping up your back?

Are you really as soft brown as you look

Boots just out of frame

Some girl that’s kinda wonderful

Who I danced with on a snow day

Woman

I’m a brave woman

Coming down here among all these men

To make my way to market

To hold my bags and stand stoned among them

Alone. Like I can handle it.

I’m a brave woman

I’m not afraid of them in my skirt

I size them up. They see me see them.

I do not look away.

I stand among them. I am one of the men.

As I make my way to the market alone

I am a modern woman

With just conditional fear

I don’t care about fairness

I’ll stand right here

Laura Hetherington

Lazy Day

My monthly is your lifeline

Tripod Bowl Doodle

Flower Arrangement by @fleurotica

There are dreams here

His Father's Castle, His Mother's Glory

“His Father’s Castle, His Mother’s Glory” is a series of photos dedicated to my father who lost both his parents in the past year and a half. On a recent trip to his childhood home, I watched my father contend with decades of unresolved trauma and neglect from his own father, himself a survivor of abuse. Perhaps revisiting his parent’s vacant home was a final way for my dad to reconcile years of rage and pain with the love, tenderness, and forgiveness he has learned to give himself.

Matt Scheffler