APRICITY
2025 Volume IX
Winter Storm
BEFORE
​
BABY floats in nothingness. No beginning
or end. No good or bad.
Endless calm.
The moment lingers eternally.
​
THEN
​
A voice from off.
​
: An excerpt from the short play script
TIES by Aaron Klass. [Click here to read on.]
Veronica,
a clay sculpture
by Aleksandra Scepanovic. [CLICK]
From Tioga Pass.
Oil on Canvas.
Kathleen Frank.
That we all die before we’re finished is not
The elegy he’d hoped for
And the lie a life ends with
Flows like an ocean in his ribs​
​
​
: An excerpt from the poem "Crow waits for what
he was promised" by Peter Grandbois. [Click here to read on.]
The ninth day of September by Prosper Aluu Chigozie. Mixed media: acrylic and newspaper collage on canvas. [CLICK]
Upwelling
Love each other
Horia Alexandru Pop | Photography
There Was a Guy
Carrie McKinney | Fiction
There was a guy with her, a tall guy, taller than Mariah’s daughter. He could probably
run fast, faster than she could. He had a strong build. Strong hands. If he wanted, he could easily
overtake her.
Mariah’s breath caught in her throat. A painful jolt ran through her. Her heart started
pounding. She lingered in the window of the coffee shop. She’d arrived early to pick up her
seventeen-year-old daughter, Aspen, from her shift. It was dark out, almost ten o’clock, and she
could see inside, but the guy in there with Aspen couldn’t see out. He couldn’t see Mariah
watching him.
My Mother’s Ghost
Sophia Zhao | Fiction
Every morning, I greet my mother’s ghost. Today, she is in the little, red alarm clock on
my bedside table. She is defunct. The alarm clock, I mean. My mother’s ghost is very much
alive. Just yesterday, she cruised in on the gust of wind that went straight for Professor
McCormick’s book of annotations. A month ago, I found her tucked into the tiny, chipped
keyhole in the door to my off-campus apartment. And she was there the morning Sam lifted me
onto the cold, metal railing in Linsly Memorial Library and reached between my legs for the first
time.
​
​
​
OCEANIC
Flies At The Wake
#4924
Ellen June Wright | Watercolor on paper
Ayden Massey | Poetry
What kind of aria
do you sing for the ies
that lay siege in church pews?
Veins splaying leaded
light into a thoughtful twitching
melange of color.
Their wings, skin aked and
stained-glassed, have carried them
to this nal buzzing rhapsody.
Will the promise of grave dirt over them
warmth like a mother to her stillborn,
aware that her baby will sing out
from the many mouths
of grubs before its own?
If it exists, may my love be less cruel
than a hand thrust onto the smallest body,
deafening as gun re.
May my wake be only
the soft icker of
my hued lashes beating
from such profound refraction.
WALTZ:An essay in Terza Rima
Three autumns ago, I was stopped short
by a pile of maple leaves in a gutter. Every
piece of that reddish golden mound thwarts
my attempts at poetry. In my memory,
I’ve simile-d those leaves like leprechaun coins, like ageless
medallions made of sunlight. In reverie,
I’ve tried to articulate their arresting strangeness,
but like leaves, my words won’t stack neatly—
nothing more than letters in clumsy arrangements.
Of trying to use words, Eliot was completely
right to say, each venture is a raid on the inarticulate,
with shabby equipment. Thank heaven for the delete key.
I.
Sarah Safsten | Video Essay
II.
A piano plays in three four time:
“one and two and three and...”
I plan my breaths to rise and fall in rhyme
with his. He holds my hand, we stand
rib to rib, thigh to thigh. His knees bend, so do mine.
Together, we waltz in unison. These planned
movements are a familiar comfort, a regular grind.
We practice every day, though I admit I’ve often been off-beat.
My graceful moments seem mere accidents: sublime
illusions of ease that seem to cheat
gravity, ignore life’s weight. But as long as music
plays, we waltz with clumsy feet.
SCAN HERE TO WATCH VIDEO
III.
I hope to find the place where form and content are mutually sustaining—
To write a waltz, to dance an essay in terza rima form, to learn
the virtues and the pitfalls of arranging. What is dance if not steps arranged in metrical patterns,
formal constraints? Is poetry not the choreographed inviting
of words, lines, and stanzas to perform their turns
across the page? In this at least, waltzing is like writing.
In neither do I manage to articulate
My body, or my meaning. The thing uniting
Both these arts is me. I participate,
I practice, not with great skill, but as one who loves,
And in some amateur way, these dual loves vindicate.
Nesting Doll
A Contrapuntal
Ayden Massey | Poetry
This is about descension. It always has been.
My father
But this story isn't about him.
This is about a body unweathered enough to nail my crucix,
the single wall, the broken shutter
sealing that stunning lead hollow-point inside,
sucking my nal breath
Now enclosed in the smoking barrel,
house so blood-thick I mistake it for my mother.
So loud, her body becomes dense
and hieroglyphic as braille.
temple beckoning the shutter, the neck, the bore,
large and black enough to fall into
called it decay
a body unweathered enough to nail my crucix,
between my legs
the one that pinned me into a prayer
straight from this unhealed wound.
the subdermal, the bullseye, the slaughter
I mistake it for my mother.
her body becomes dense
Systematic as my pointer finger wrinkling over the trigger,
her muzzle, an opening
Uns a Muhabbat
Sneha Gindodiya | Acrylic Watercolor and Calligraphy Ink on Canvas
