2024 Volume VIII
Volume VIII is Apricity Magazine’s take on beauty: of the fragrant metaphors of awe around us and the tender compassion embedded within us. Taking inspiration from the “Beauty and the Beast” fairytale, we juxtapose external and internal beauty through roses and mirrors. A rose struts proudly under her glass cage, a haunting reminder that external allure is not without its consequences and hidden thorns. And in the moments when we need it the most, our reflection in the mirror can remind us who we are when our obligations fall away.
Roses
A Day at Work
Jeba Jasmin Mahapatra
Graphite
Yiddish Art Songs
by Lazar Weiner
Mikhail Smigelski
Jeanne Hourez
Lazar Weiner
My Memories
Aren't My Own
Magdi Hazaa
Photography
Tired of Writing Love Poems
& Wishing I Were a
Terracotta Pot Instead
Vanessa Y. Niu
Late afternoon, August 27th.
It is sunny and the time when
the garden looks like it might be Eden.
I am thinking that you might be sick of me,
as one gets sick of days dragged on and
mundane conversations had in lobbies and hot,
muggy waiting rooms.
I am reading modern
poems about love and they are so all-consuming
and simultaneously soft,
the swaying silk on a drying rack that obscures
a lover’s half-lidded gaze,
perhaps squinting in the sun
perhaps risking blindness to see
the one that is worth going blind for.
​
​
to continue reading....
​
​
aubade for lahaina
​
between our gnashed teeth,
smoke curdles.
we draw lifetimes across our tongues,
mouths pressed to hot pavement.
summer softens into sti ash,
smoldering marlboro nubs.
every man prints a smile
over his lips, tastes hollowing.
to an empty night, he begs for ocean to swallow the land.
to bristle his unmoving wife.
sand trickles into ame
& children still molding island
into home burn with the remnants of the shoreline.
concrete blemishes into dust.
when night parts,
there will only be wire
spilling into veins. plastic ickering.
each body ends in standstill:
crumbled sandstone, rotted palm, dead boys’ cotton shirts.
a man lurches towards death,
lands softly. a man is called home.
the neck of the moon cranes
to catch our corpses.
morning is homeless.
is a daughter begging
to an oxidized locket of lost brothers
swallowed in rust.
is a hotel worker oering juice
to soften hearts’ muscle, strip it of striations.
is a closed resort stripped into a hospice scouring
through her own ashes for open beds.
dusk ends in a call for prayer.
few split open their mouths, swelled with ash.
god, save our knotted bodies,
swallow these hundred fallen stones before we suocate.
we inhale the perfume of a land burning,
nestle the incense between our hands.
soft, burnt sage chronicles the clock
pressing herself into another dawn.
Ela Kini
Mirrors
Mom’s Morning
Ria Kang Photography
Parable (Glass)
by Linda Scheller
I.
She tells us again
of the time in childhood
her mother made her share
her favorite glass
with a visiting child
and rather than share
she took the glass outside
and (smirk) broke it.
II.
A child myself,
her child, I teach myself
to crack glass with my teeth.
Subtle upward pressure
by the lower jaw while
holding the rim with top front teeth
results in a pleasing sudden snap.
My eyes watch everyone at table
jump. Oh look (blink blink)
it broke again.
III.
She is in my kitchen
while I work outside. She sets
a Pyrex dish on the burner,
turns the knob, and sits by the stove.
The Pyrex dish explodes. Glass
shrapnel shoots across the kitchen,
litters the floor, and stabs the corners
of the next room. Christ her Lord
and Savior swiftly intervenes
and no one is injured. (Praise Him)
The miracle of the Pyrex dish.
IV.
Her son (a continent away)
asks why Jesus
didn’t just turn off the burner.
V.
She is in my hall
in darkness, seeking glass.
She sweeps her hand across
the walls. The glass speaks.
A picture frame smashes
to the floor. She brings me
this (mute) offering.
One scimitar of glass is missing.
It waits for me
atop the bookcase
where she knows I’ll find it
eventually: a warning from God,
a present from my mother.
Grief
from Emotions Kept Quiet
Katelin Schutt
Acrylic on Canvas
Elegance Redefined
Faith Sycaoyao
Graphite
Anxiety
from Emotions Kept Quiet
Katelin Schutt
Acrylic on Canvas
Relapse
LC Gutierrez
​
We thought he had the hang of living
when it reached up again. Caught him
cold and naked, dripping over a drain.
Wringed it all out. A Dalí clock, sliding
off a cracked egg, a puddle of bruise.
He felt a drink might help, but he didn’t
think. He thought one drink might do.
But he didn’t feel, he just forgot
how to breathe, and how he’d been okay
with the girl with the kitty-cat tattoo:
a wreck of freckles across her cheeks.
The fullness of himself
riding the softness of her.
And all the rounded precious corners
of a new self: a warm, hopeful clay.
A jingle in his pocket, a few bucks
in the bank, and even a little something
that could lift its head and roar
in the dark or the day. A state of grace
that stopped like the soft gasp
of an eclipse: the clutch of a claw.
He remet that bloodshot monster
moldering in the mirror.
It’s not that he’d remembered how
to drink again, and there was no reason
why. It’s just that he’d forgotten
there had ever been any Else.