FLASH 2011DIGITAL EDITION

Premium Digital EditionSpring 2011

The Blake SchoolLiterary and Visual Arts Magazine

Minneapolis, MN

FLASH

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Isabella McCaryJohn ChipocoNatcher PruettAbiana AdamsonTony FauschtMarielle FosterHannah PageCarolyn WinslowInder MajumdarHenry OrdwayNatcher PruettAnnabel CaterIsabella McCaryCarolyn WinslowHannah PageVasiliki PapanikolopoulosEmily WellsCalifornia Chaney

Title

PrintWatch As It goesThe Aftereffects...PhotographPhotographMonstersLove PoemPhotographDay In The LifePhotographPhotographThe Best Poem Ever WrittenTo Get SomewhereSwitzerlandConsciousCatsLast ManPhotograph

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Literary Editors-In-ChiefJacqui CraneKate Abram

Visual Arts Editors-In-ChiefCarolyn Winslow

John Chipoco

Graphic ArtistsBabs Laco

Frieda Yeung

Contributing EditorsAlex Beard

Alexander FeroeAnnabel Cater

Emily WellsEmma Woodworth

Masha BermanMiel Jasper

Natcher PruettVictoria Gerdts

Faculty AdvisorsChristina Colvin

Eric HansenKate Sullivan

Cover Image by Carolyn Winslow

Flash Staff

1

Isabella McCary

2

I forgot my watch on the kitchen counterSo I can’t tell you when the bus leavesOr if the rooster will sing tomorrow.I can’t tell you if it’s going to be chilly next weekOr if the sun will finally shine on the bay. Maybe the stars can help you, but I can’t.I lose track of time.

Time flies when you talk to another personFor just a few minutes.Those minutes turn into years of marriageBut when they turn into an eternity of solitudeYou realizeYou can’t get those minutes back.Time, wandering into the pastAs it goes. Unforgiving.This life isn’t worth living.

Watch

As It Goes

Joh

n C

hipo

co

3

Afte

reff

ects

of

Surg

ical

Man

ipul

atio

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atc

her

Pr

uet

tMy fingers are uneven, if you lookCarefully or not so carefully.It isn’t subtle.A scar on my right handAttests to a surgeryPerformed partiallyWith the more cosmetic intentOf letting the fourth finger surpassThe pinky in length,As is natural.It didn’t work,Though the primary intentOf not lettings tendons snap in twoWas achieved.Many days, most, in fact,I’d prefer the cosmetic.

The left hand bearsA more invisible scar,Thin, passing beneath evenThe eye of its owner.That scar was to make writing easier,Less painful.The problem had already been solvedWith a computer.

My right hand hurtsRight now.But at least (even thoughthe fingers aren’t quite even)It’s less disfiguredThan my leg.

4

Abiana Adamson

5

Tony Faustch

6

This is about monsters.

“It is childish,” says needling Fear, “that you, a big grown up girl, draw monsters.” Things that go bump in the night are the domain of little boys with grubby palms and

little girls with overactive imaginations. “Are you still little?” asks Pride. One would think provided eighteen years to grow up, one would grow out of monsters. “Are you scared of growing up?” demands Insecurity. One presumes I would find other things to gaze up in wonder at, scream about in nightmares and draw in my notebook when

I shouldn’t.

I like monsters. I appreciate their attitude, the way they exude beauty and savagery, and the honesty they present at all times. Monsters are everywhere for me, the living incarnations of the frustrations that pressure cook inside, the unfair, unkind, ugly acts

by people I don’t understand. Today, in this digital age, we don’t have much in the way of physical demons. We are beasts of burden, harnessed and refined, given prog-

ress to strive for and irrelevancy to fear. These are new, unpredictable aberrances that err not on the side of primitivism but culture.

Still, I enjoy the façade of culture up to a point, the point where it becomes impolite to rip houses, trees and people to shreds on a whim. Past there we resort to glances

behind backs, concealed noises of disgust, and silent shunning. We’re tangled in delicate emotional webs we weave for ourselves, not realizing we aren’t the widow in

the middle but the fly.

Monsters: A Big Footed Idea

Mar

ielle Fost

er

7

Mon

ster

s: A

Big

Foot

ed Id

eaM

ar

iell

e Fo

ster I know I’m not alone with my obsession for monstrous miscreations. I’ve got excellent

company amid the likes of preachers, painters, novelists and storytellers, company that counts destructive Big Foot, the mysterious Yeti, faithful Cerberus, riddling Sphinx, and the ravenous wandering Minotaur. The monotheistic gods we worship today are a far cry from the heavenly beasts of old. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Aztecs bowed

to gods with big teeth, animalistic features and ravenous appetites. Imaginative Dante, father of the most poetic language, made nine circles to consume the human monstrosi-ties who strayed from god. There are legends in every culture of people chased by mon-

sters, people who make their fame and fortune slaying the dragons and defeating the demons. These beasts come from the Latin monstrum, an aberrant creation, a gleaming, bloody, somewhat hideous warning that something, somewhere went very very wrong.

Things go wrong all the time. Disease, suicide, freak accidents, alcoholism and war riddle the world. One doesn’t need to dip into the world of clichés to express the seething

anger, resentment, betrayal; the whirlwind of emotions our cultured culture represses or explains away.

“No dear, he still loves you, he’s just young and irresponsible. Boys will be boys.”“Honey, she didn’t mean it, you ought to forgive her and just let it go.”

“Wow you overreacted. You’re kinda sensitive, aren’t you?”“You’re honestly making this into a bigger deal than it deserves. Relax, why do you care

so much?”“It doesn’t matter. Let it go.”

If the adult world cannot accept my feelings, tells me they don’t matter, I have nowhere left to go but backwards. The monsters, the beasts of fury I feel when I am hurt, when

those I love fiercely die, leave or reject me, aren’t those I can deal with as a mature adult. I can get to a point where it doesn’t matter, where I let things go. But not because

they never mattered, but because it is time to forgive and forget. It’s much easier to give my problems horns and fangs, bring them to a primitive level and work through it

all on paper.

8

A heart lays open on concrete, split in two with one too many careless sneaker heels. Surrounded by a pool of red so deep and wide the heart ought to be dry – but blood keeps welling up in endless rivers and this organ beats, half-alive. Thump-thump, the pounding of drums underwater: skin stretched taut reverberates, drowning and still forced to sing that awful song. Bones, the frame, the box that housed a heart long detached – crushed and powdered they blanket this desolate earth like sugar laced with the bitterness of memories. Once supportive, now ghosts – but not quite incorporeal, and the granules soak through with crimson wet, not to be mistaken for innocent. These remnants of bones have seen violence: the hammer that pummeled, the millstone that ground, the knife that carved around a heart so carefully – weapons wielded by foreign hands and, sometimes, by the victim.

Love PoemH

an

nah

Pag

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Natcher Pruett

9

10

Carolyn Winslow

11

A Da

y In

The L

ife, O

r The

Wor

ds O

f A Pa

perb

ack W

rite

rIn

der

Maju

md

ar A Paperback Writer.

Sincerely,

Obla Di

You said yes

Obla Da

I said no,

Life,

You said high ,

And I said, I don’t know what and why

Goes On anything nowhere, and something everywhere!

Because, on Penny Lane,

Which is Across The Universe,

For Lady Madonna who was there with Children at her feet

Looking

At all of the lonely peoplehow dare I look,Listening to Eleanor’s sermon.

Who am I?

He who left number 8, Madryn StreetWhich just churned me outTo become a paperback writer

After all, it was better than working at the factory,

Lucy In The Sky is flying.

12

With Cubic Zirconium.

so squishy, so fake.What a Day Tripper.

It’s been a hard day’s night, affording diamonds with a Rubber Soul.

You say goodbye?

that is all.I want to hold your hand,

Do you understand?

are you crazy?I say hello.

You say you want to start a revolution

Back in the USSR,

Was a blackbird singing in the dead of night. (Her voice had problems of it’s own.)

With a little help from my friends, (I didn’t steal them, or anything.)

I took these broken wings

I came together (for you, after all.)

I learned to fly

To hold your hand,

All one needs is love

Dear Prudence,

Who are we?

A Day In The Life, Or The Words Of A Paperback W

riterIn

der

Maju

md

ar

13

Natcher Pruett

Henry Ordway

14

Subject.Subject verbs article nounenjambment. Repetition?

Image verbs,Pause,

Metaphor.Alliteration, assonance. Repetition.

Caesura

Onomatopoeia!Personified object verbs noun rhyme

Hyphen object repeated sound rhyme.Building tension ellipsis

Subject.

The Best Poem

Ever Written

An

nabel C

ater

15 Isabella McCary

16Carolyn Winslow

Cons

ciou

sH

an

nah

Pag

eWhen he looks me up and downwhat is he thinking? Am I an aestheticallypleasingstatue, better still than moving, thinkingonly good for looking, leeringnever talking, never touchingeven if I want it?

When I am afraid to moveafraid to spook him in his admirationintangible pleasure, the touching of his eyesleaves me only itching to look at him as he devours mebut my courage is more skittish than his gazemy pride barely clinging, somehow still there.

17

When he whispers, murmurs, snickers I wonder, maybe, am I loathsomeshut out, brieflyfriendly voiceseyes my only sense of what he thinks of mebecause he only looks, tooand he laughs.

When I’m convinced of my own beauty(in and out, but mostly out; this is America)it’s temporary, and my value soon depreciatesand only those who see me from the outside are fair judgeslooking, every one, but nevertouching.

18

ConsciousH

an

nah

Pag

e

Vasiliki Papanikolopoulos

19

A thin veil of dust still clung to the dark emerald glass. As he turned the bottle between his calloused hands, parallel paths of unsoiled transparency cut through the semi-uniform coating that had accumulated over the years. He brushed his fingers across the yellowed label that clung to the bottle like a dry leaf, knowing that under-neath the grime lay the signatures of five carefree men, the ones who were gone. Drawing a ballpoint pen from his coat pocket, he wrote the current year under one of the signatures and placed the bottle on the table. With a sigh, he succumbed to the ex-haustion that had gradually settled in his bones and leaned back on the red vinyl booth. In front of him lay five place settings, each identical to the next despite the fact that four were adorned with a simple black napkin, one for every person that should have sat there. In a way, the night reminded him of the one on which the first dinner was held. Outside the café, the air was heavy with moisture and small drops of water traced thread-like paths on the foggy windows as they slid silently towards the ground. Every so often, university students would stumble past the doors, drunk with a transient im-pression of immortality. At one time, he too had leaned against those very same doors, trying to find his balance as the world whirled around him in a cacophony of colors and sounds. More than once he had wished that he could return to those bright nights, the ones before the war. He remembered feeling a formless sense of outrage after read-ing the headlines announcing the devastation at Pearl Harbor. He and his four closest friends had been swept up in a wave of patriotic fervor. They enlisted together and only after the first flush of enthusiasm had subsided did the cold reality that they might not survive clutch at their conscious thoughts. Gradually, with the look of someone who has become overly familiar with his surroundings, he shifted his gaze away from the window. His eyes began to trace the pen marks that swirled across the bottle, the ones that floated just above the surface like ashes swept away with the wind. It had been Andrew’s idea to sign the bottle, but it was only after his death that the signatures’ easy lightness was joined by the rigid strokes that cut through the paper as if the hand guiding them had pressed too hard against the bottle’s surface.

The Last M

an E

mily W

ells

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The

Last

MAn

Em

ily

Wel

ls It will be just like the clubs they formed during the Great War. After the war is over, we’ll meet here once every year until all but one of us has died. Then, the last man will drink this wine in memory of those who have passed on. The war came and four years later it ended. He returned to the uni-versity in an attempt to pick up where he had left off. Nothing had changed, except for the cracks in the walls, which had grown larger in his absence. Soon after his return they met again, only now there was a weight that lay at the corners of their smiles and no amount of drink could make the world spin and disintegrate before their eyes. An empty plate showed the place where Andrew had been pierced with the shrapnel of a German shell. As the years passed, life acquired a blissful feeling of sameness. They married, had children, became schoolteachers, bankers, anthropologists, and businessmen, even their annual meetings acquired a sense of routine. Then, a second plate was left empty. Thoughts of the wine bottle reentered their minds and a second date was added below Jim’s name. Their children grew up, weddings were planned, offices threw farewell parties for retiring employees, and they became content to sit on the porch, watching as their grandchildren play with teapots and toy soldiers. Before they could completely forget the feeling that comes when dates are inscribed beneath names however, a black napkin was placed on Harold’s plate. As he sat in the dimly lit café, the emerald glass casting jeweled pat-terns onto the chipped tabletop, he wished that Jake could have been the one to fulfill this last duty instead. Taking the bottle between his fingers, he slid the corkscrew into the stopper and pulled it out with a surprising ease. He tipped the bottle slightly, watching as the crimson liquid it contained poured into the waiting glass. A long moment passed before he grasped the clear stem between his fingertips. Raising it to the empty booth he took a sip of the vinegar-sweet wine.

21

California Chaney

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