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“So this is how liberty dies, With thunderous applause.” Haunting, these words that are not my own, A tragic truth: mine are scarcely realized.   Once I was five, and would never be grown, A movie watched between father's arms, My biggest despair – the blue now cruel. This fiction was never something to be known.   So when I close my eyes, I wait. The deafening quiet – a blissful despair. My room is a death, but the statistics are alive. A thunderous cruelty set to throb and pulsate.   Easy woman: a number going around, Giving is a choice; holding means they'll take. Small like her body or large like her voice, The witches to apprise us are buried in the ground.   Flags warn the guns are near, Bolstering safety – merely proof to kill. The world was crying as your thrill roars. Safe – well, not that one. He has something to fear.   Now remember, the empire came, it never won. Thunderous applause from only within. The world – a burning planet of brothers betrayed. The cheers – coughing to an overdose of kratom. Inspired by the quote from Padme in Revenge of the Sith. And speaking of, happy (almost: May 19th) twentieth anniversary to my beloved film. Fun fact, Star Wars (specifically the prequels) was the first piece of media I ever consumed fanfiction for. Fun fact # 2: I have all of Star Wars Let it Flow completely memorized by HEART. And I kind of wish I was lying or exaggerating about that, but I can quite literally sing the whole thing unprompted without music at the drop of a hat, ten years after that video was released. All the movie theaters in my area were having a rerelease of RotS for its anniversary all weekend, and as a normal, cool, twenty-year-old (in two weeks) does, I asked my parents to watch it with me after work. When we were leaving the showing, my mom looked at me and said, "I think I know what's wrong with you. Your first ever crush was on the most angsty man a movie has ever produced." and you know what?? A. ow. B. CLOCKED (she was kidding, it was funny, don't come for her) But hey, hey, in my defense, have you seen Hayden Christensen in that movie? As a kid, I'm watching that like... hm... he just turned against everything he fundamentally believes in because he loves his wife. The fact he force choked her went over my head and out the window because when he woke up limbless and probably in excruciating pain, the first thing he asked was if she was okay. AND it literally came out TEN days after my birthday. I was born, and this movie said, "The world is ready." Now, my favorite pastime is playing devil's advocate, and my brain literally won't shut up about how the world is ANYTHING but black and white. As an adult, though, Anakin really is as annoying and angsty as everyone has been saying he is. I want to stress, I don't have the same painfully obvious crush I had on him as a child; I actually find him very distasteful and an excellent allegory for how men currently fall for the alt-right pipeline. I'm working on an essay about that, so... stay tuned, I guess. The part that actively haunts me, though (and I'm not about to say when he slaughtered all the children), is at the very end when Palpatine says what happens, and he just takes him at his word?? No further investigation into his wife's death. Doesn't do anything about force sensing that his children are alive, even though it's widely known Padme AND her unborn child die. No motivation to raise them? And don't tell me he couldn't force sense them, because I refuse to believe Mister "Chosen One" couldn't feel his wife's, SENATOR PADME AMIDALA'S, TWIN children in the force. Through the whole thing, he blindly follows the Emperor, which I find so urking because how naive do you have to be to accept that the obvious villain has your best interest at heart? But again, the parallels between Anakin and the fall down the alt-right pipeline really could not have been written more spot on if the movie were written today. Some phenomenal fanfiction, though.

By: VSH I would have eaten the rose,   Thorns and all.  Consumed it into my blood,  Until I was the one painting flowers red.  A deck of cards is in my will,  But even assuming the role, they wouldn’t adhere.  My hands are scarlet with blame for that.     I hear the tears of the thirteen-year-old girl I never was.  I watch each strip of her gently fall to the floor.  She’d have never been okay,  For I wouldn’t permiss the absurd.  If she looked at me tearfully in despair, screaming,   The thorns will hurt,   I’d have opened her jaws and shoved the roses down.    Teach me to dream, teach me to love,  Is what chorused on her will.  But I cannot teach what I do not know.  When I was her age, my mother was kind, and people were cruel.  Now her mother is crueler, and maybe she’ll learn.  At thirteen, so desperate for a rose,  I tore up my legs and watched the crimson blue fall to the floor.   Inspiration pulled from: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

By: VSH Washing the blood from my hands,  Should be a greater bitter sorrow.   I think of the spider twitching under my shoe,  And remember my life at five,  Crying over the fate of an arachnid's family.  I was young and foolish then.    Later that night, I read a poem about killing things you fear.  I was not afraid of the spider, so my crime was in the clear.  Except,  The little voice is back with handmade protest signs demanding I repent.  Guilt doesn't consume me like I remember it used to.  I was young and deluded then.    I dream of a story I read in school,  And if I were a bug, I'd want someone to kill me.  What I did proves to be a mercy.  But tiny hands are holding up a megaphone, preaching,  We treat bugs cruelly because we cannot hear them scream.  I was young and ignorant then.    I move through my day,   Isolated from my choices by my choice.  The fists holding a peaceful protest are banging against my skull.  Imagine how cruel the world would seem if we heard bugs' terror.   I thought I'd handled this long ago.  I was young and callow then.    I did not watch a lot of true crime,  But it was second nature to tie her on a stake,  And close my eyes as the fire consumed.  I feel her anguish again, but it's not for herself.  She's telling me not to kill what we're afraid of.  I was young and brazen then.    When I tell her louder, I was not afraid of the spider,  There was no crime committed,  She only grows more desperate.  I clearly failed once, but I’ve already fixed it now.   I learned from my mistake, and this time I watch.  I was young and weak then.    She's holding her weights,  Like a docile lamb trotting to the executioner.  I taped up her mouth; there's nothing more to hear.  I must keep myself safe,  Which is why my hand is what pushed her over.   I was young, but I do not wash away the blood.  Poem Referenced in Stanza 2, Line 1: Allowables by Nikki Giovanni Story Referenced in Stanza 3, Line 1: Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

By: VSH   I   got a text an hour ago. In a week, I did not hear your dreams. I waited and waited, for only- I wished for a semblance of your voice.   Now, sits blinking like no sailor's choice. Soul up in Leo – Lion from Oz. Shame me not, love, for my cowardice, For I do not exist real as you.   My lip is worried like a used chew. I glimpse programing of o’s and 1’s, Telling me you did not dream my dreams, As harsh as I tore myself apart.   Eyes I have not seen exists true art. So I will close my own out of fear. You’ve turned me into this silly girl, So I’ll be brave this once if for you.   Please be softer than this morning's dew. I’ve been burned twice ‘fore, tied and fired. Men like to turn their girls into sheep. So a warm hand can become the blade.   Into obscurity we should fade, A boy and the sheep tucked into bed. Be that you should say after a week? Or will this be the fire from you? Super unhinged for this one, but listen..... I'm just a girl, and if one thing is true in girlhood, it's the firsthand understanding of absolute consumption. I'm basically chief CEO of leaving guys on read. I have never had an actual boyfriend because I've ghosted or ended things with everyone I've talked to. This is for a very good reason, and that reason is I am a girl, and I am a coward. Do I suggest this strategy? No. However, people tend to think I'm a confident maneater, so I have that street cred going for me. If you're someone looking for the joys of genuine connection, though, my first suggestion is to not listen to me, and my second is to find a world where men don't hurt women for funsies. I think this is probably because I could feel the wrong time & emotionally unavailable energy radiating off of him, but I am currently so lost to a man. All I can think of is that one clip from Gilmore Girls: "He's just a man, Lorelai." "No, he's not." Anyway, this is a desperate plea to understand how other girlies handle this, because this freaking sucks. He's not perfect, but I still can't come up with anything bad to say about him. I saw the text underneath his name, and I'm waiting for the message telling me I should have listened to the icky uncomfortable feeling burrowing into my gut. Though, saying that about him feels juvenile. If he proves me right, it will be to my face like an adult. One thing has always remained true: Men have always hurt women.

By: VSH   When I was six, I rearranged the alphabet. I’d say this is a little-known fact, but I have the unfortunate tendency of telling nearly every new acquaintance I meet. For the most part, it’s a fun little conversation starter, but then there’s the part of me screaming in search of someone else who understands — the not-so-quiet begging to be told how clever I was and condemning the world for not listening. I’ve always had a particular vice for vanity; I was the youngest sibling growing up, which I feel is a sufficient enough excuse to blame it on. It wasn’t that I “refused to learn” how to read (though that is what I typically tell people); it was more that no one could help me figure out the parts of English I deemed “wrong.” So, I was full of all this wasted anger and frustration about something I didn't understand. I sat on the floor of my parents’ shower, letting the condensation fog up the glass, allowing me to rearrange the alphabet. I was in there for hours; both of my parents had to check on me, but I wouldn’t leave until I solved what a bunch of grown adults, in my mind, had been unable to accomplish. Maybe they’d even give me an award for it. “Six-year-old student fixes glaring problems with our incomprehensible alphabet,” I imagined the headline would read. Of course, when I showed my teacher the following day, she didn’t immediately call up the active president to sign an executive order changing the alphabetical structure. Which was, quite frankly, ridiculous! Did she even look at it? I had fixed it! There is no reason for J to be before M, and don’t even get me started on the location of T. Now, even as an adult, I sing the alphabet when I have something to sort because I never have been able to make it make sense in my brain. I asked my teacher why it was the way it was and couldn’t be changed, but she gave me the very unsatisfying answer of not knowing. Then my mom had the audacity to also not know. When I was old enough to do a bit more extensive research myself, I learned that we don’t actually know why the alphabet is ordered as such. We can trace back routes to the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet, which probably originated around 2100-1800 BC, but the ordering is seemingly unknown/heavily debated. Though it makes less sense for a six-year-old to officially rearrange the alphabet than it does for M to come before N, I also quickly decided language was working against me. It didn’t make sense, and so far, no one could prove to me that it did in any language. The following year, in 2nd grade, they started pulling us out into the hall for reading tests where you’d read a passage of text and then answer a few questions about what you just read. I read what was in front of me and answered every question with as much comprehension as you could expect of a seven-year-old. So, it should be easy to mark where my confusion came from when, the next week, they began pulling me from class to attend the “special” reading classes made for kids a little behind. I take no issue with these classes for the students that need them; there were about six to eight other students with me, some with English as a second language, others who transferred late, or those with an early IEP. I went home and told my mom about it, but she had no idea they were going to pull me. It was about a week and a half before she worked out what was happening with the school. “Her comprehension was great, but she wasn’t reading fast enough,” they told her. They advised that she work with me on reading speed instead of comprehension. Vehemently denying this, my mother demanded I be removed from the group, and I was again promptly returned to my normal class. I was too young for there to be any real damage done, except I wouldn’t actually read unless I was by myself, too embarrassed of how long it would take me to get through the text. That carried on through high school and still has its lingering effects. In class, I would flip the page when everyone else did, even if I hadn't finished reading. My pronunciation of “a” also isn’t quite right, which is an unfortunate habit. In that same group, our teacher drilled into us that even when standing alone, it’s always  pronounced “ uh ,” not “A.” So instead of" A duck," it's " uh duck." Don’t know where that came from, but no harm, no foul. However, it is odd that in 2022-2023, over half the adults in America had a literacy rate below a sixth-grade level, and schools pushed reading speed over comprehension. Again, there couldn’t have possibly been any harm. Studying for the LSAT or quickly glancing at a sign while driving proves there is good reason to focus on both speed and comprehension. It has just always seemed much more straightforward to learn “speed” if you already have an understanding of what you’ll need to read to comprehend a text. In my experience, pushing this out of order has created a greater disdain for reading, turning it into something to “get through,” and unintentionally teaching that comprehension is the hard part. Jumping up to fifth grade, we were still taking spelling tests every Friday. Side note: Spelling is such a lost art; don’t get the misconception that I was any good at it, but when I don’t have spellcheck, I feel like I’ve never seen a word before. This isn’t a commentary on “kids these days,” it’s a commentary on myself and a hope that we aren’t losing the ability to spell. As bureaucratic as it feels, spelling improves both vocabulary and comprehension of written media. Unfortunately, I have been told I have the handwriting to rival a doctor, which is to say: bad. My fifth grade teacher took particular displeasure in how I wrote my lowercase A’s. To be fair, they were horrendous, but it wasn’t an issue until she started taking off points from my correctly spelled words for a poorly formed A. It only made sense in my head to create my own language. I wasn’t taught cursive, so instead, I chose letters that I could draw in only one line; no crossing my T’s or dotting my I’s. There were no different designs for capital and lowercase; they stood apart with a simple u nderline of the first letter indicating capitalization. My most favorite of the changes, though, was that there were no letters that hung down into the line below. It seems so simple, but this act of going under the line felt detrimental to my younger self. The words on the bottom line were always written through it, and it felt impossible to make any part of my lettering smaller. The difference between this time and my past alphabet, however, was that this time, I didn’t want anyone to know. I’d show everyone but never translate it. It was like I was flaunting, “Your words are stupid, but mine are unique and make so much more sense.” The funniest part of this ten-year-old act of rebellion is that, to this day, I still use it to write all my handwritten notes, but sometimes I switch in and out depending on what I’m taking notes on. A seemingly fake scrawl will surround an astrophysics term I was unfamiliar with, separating my unknown from the known. It’s like a shout to the world, “Look, this is what’s going on in brain. This is what I don’t understand.” At ten, most of its existence was to fix what I struggled with and keep the meaning of the words hidden from everyone else. Now, despite its illegibility, it forms an almost stronger bridge between myself and people I don’t know. In hindsight, it’s easy to understand why lettering on a spelling test would need to be clear, but it was the final straw for me, and I decided I would forever hate any classes centered around language. I became an avid reader in seventh grade but wouldn’t read for a class. I read books both above and below my reading level incredibly slowly and soaked up every last word. Any time I thought I might try getting through the book I would be graded on, I decided it was either incredibly dull or not worth sharing my thoughts. Some books, purely out of spite, I’d wait until after the class had finished reading and then choose to pick it up on my own. The truly tragic part about this is that I probably got more out of the content than I would have if I read it with my peers. In every essay I wrote, I tried to find the loop around the prompt to turn it into something unique, only to be given a failing grade. When I followed what the teacher wanted, it wasn’t notable enough to get above a B. The first hundred I ever got on an essay was my first semester in college as a hesitant English major. I exist as a person who has turned the inspiration and love of words into their entire life, but I still function with the demonization of it all that has been instilled in me since I was six. I talk to my friends who hate reading or listen to the people around me and feel a sense of aching knowing they went through the same schooling as me. I’ll never know how many of them rearranged the alphabet or how many more original thoughts could be pooling around if they were taught reading could be more than the regurgitation of a plot for your grade. The polarization of reading has become so extreme that the majority of teenagers I’ve met have made or laughed at some variation of the “English teachers need to realize that sometimes the door is just red” joke. As an English major, I can take this in stride and laugh at the abundance of literary analyses and interpretations a single story can have, but as a person, I find it deeply troubling that it proves they aren’t getting the point. The door may  just be red, but it also could be more. What was the point the author was making? If it was just aesthetic, what emotion is trying to be portrayed? The color red has a lot of symbolism in modern society, from lust to violence and encompassing all forms of passion. Are they walking through the door or turning away from it? All of these things should alter your perception of the plot, setting, or character. Just as each stroke of the paintbrush can dramatically alter the final product of a painting, each letter in a book is a choice  that has the potential to change the story from red to scarlet. It’s true that sometimes the door is just red, and the wall is just a wall, but being able to discern when it’s not or even what it could be pushes deeper critical thought and understanding. The importance of media literacy is completely overlooked when it’s more important than ever in our over-connected society; it provides the ability to critically comprehend what someone is telling you. The only way to combat fears of “fake news” or avoid deception on social media is to boost literacy comprehension skills. Without a deeper understanding of what the words, actions, or events in front of you actually mean, you’re destined to be the one walking through a rusty, crimson-red door that was never just  red. No one can change the way they were taught, but they can change the power, or lack thereof, they’ve given to literacy. Rearrange the alphabet all you desire, but don’t fail to learn the importance already so intwined with a single letter.

By: VSH A teenage girl doesn’t feel – |Flesh and thoughts are the only sustaining meal|   – If she did, there would be much more screaming. Terror is the only present dreaming\   Or maybe she’s gotten so good – /For the reality of all a man could.   – At sitting still and looking pretty. God made lamb for his holy city\   She wants to love and be loved – /To tear out its heart ungloved.   – But cruelty is her only defense. Divinity made her a capital offense\   She is so, so tired – /Letting men tie her up to be fired.   – But when she tries to rest – Watching as her only friends arrest\   – Her pretty little head – /– Finds the executioner’s bed.   |They all scream Witch|   |She was just a girl| I’m sitting in a cafe with more homework than I can reasonably get done, and I still haven’t started it. I’m staring, waiting for the assignments to finish themselves, and the clock continues to tick as my late work gets later. I feel like I’ve fallen into someone I haven’t been since high school. Logistically, I know it’s just a slump—I know that—but I feel disconnected from who I am. I’m so obsessively all or nothing in every facet of my life to the point that sometimes it feels like I’m the one killing me, but not even in a suicidal way or whatever. “Calypso, I release you from your human bonds,” from Pirates of the Carribean, but what I want someone to say to me about this fleshy prison. I quit my job at the district attorney’s office recently... No one knows that yet. As far as my boss and everyone I talk to is concerned, it’s a “hiatus” until classes end this semester. God, I really don’t want to go back, though. Hence, the slump. Here was my plan: I would get into Columbia or Brown and come back home to work as a DA until I ran for state rep. I was going to be important. Help someone. Change the world—the whole childish mindset. Jeez, that sounds so pretentious. Especially now that I don’t even want to do it anymore. I lost my zest. I’m a zestless, rizzless college student desperately searching for where their spark went. Tale as old as time. Anyway, I lit a candle and remembered joking about how I’m like every girl ever (I really like candles.) Then I thought of the idea of writing something about how “we burned the women before us and now lighting a candle is feminine. We honor the ash before us by making something else burn,” but clearly, I didn’t make that work... so I’ll have to figure that out another time.

By: VSH   Father, Forgive me; it’s the last thing I’ll ask. I flew as both Icarus and the sun. You could not save me from this prison. For this one, I made myself.   Father, The Labyrinth was not physical, But the monsters howling inside. I inherited them from you. And they laugh while they cry.   Father, Maybe saving me, Was only ever to save yourself. Did you think your monsters would quiet, If you saved mine from your bitter sorrow.   Father, I think Icarus may have loved the sun, And falling was never an act of shame. But I never loved myself, The heat was violent, and I was so cold.   Father, Did you always know I’d have your brain? When I was six, and dreamed, and dreamed. Or at thirteen, when dreams turned blood. Watching a child with your same pain.   Father, I never wanted to be you, But the crimson was warm, A warmth inviting to the light. It gave the monsters something to drink.   Father, Please don’t say I should do more, I already know; It’s what my monsters tell me loudest. And I want to be everything and more.   Father, Closer to the sun, I’d soar. A heat only measured by myself. Hotter was better; hotter was more. Blood was all that kept them quiet.   Father, The monsters wanted all of me, I wanted all of me. What was the point if I didn’t give it all? Was that how you felt?   Father, I stare at myself as I fall, And fall, And fall, And fall.   Father, Don’t look down at me now. Blood didn’t dampen the heat. And your monsters won’t like what they see. Wasted Potential.