The Impressionist
Masterman's Home for Creative Literary Work
Ardent Ones
By Anonymous
In my dreams, my ancestors feed me.
They light votive candles and whisper zealous prayers.
My mother’s mother brings seats to the table,
Just as she once carried her own chair miles to school.
My father’s grandmother fed a family of ten for a week
With just a bushel of apples and a dozen eggs.
Tethered to my ancestors, I glance over my shoulder
Your strength is my strength.
Who am I if not who you want me to be?
We serve each other a communion of tangy, tender chicken
Clouds of steamed rice, “Maraming salamat,”I say.
Fragile fingers feed me peeled mango, sweet and fresh
With their memories and hopes of youth.
Tethered to my ancestors, I glance over my shoulder
Your strength is my strength.
Who am I if not who you want me to be?
They are all there, a harmony of ardent voices
Singing their individual journeys, blessing me with gifts.
My great-grandfather stacks books around me.
“Read,” he says.
My aunt places a journal in my lap.
“Write,” she says.
My grandmother entrusts me with her ancient microscope.
“Study,” she says.
A hundred smoothed hands that graced jungle branches, fought wars, and delivered children
Rest on my shoulders before lifting me into the daylight.
“Go,” they say.
Tethered to my ancestors, I glance over my shoulder
Your strength is my strength.
Who am I if not who you want me to be?
When I wake, I am unfaltering.
I absorb and overflow with every stanza sung,
Enveloped in philosophies, sciences, and truths,
I find I am still hungry for more.
I am an undulating sea, constant movement toward what is next
My courageous desire to experiment but still carrying my origin.
Tethered to my ancestors, I glance over my shoulder
Your strength is my strength.
Who am I if not who you want me to be?
Unafraid, I understand in my bones who I am:
A bold mixed girl in a city of history,
Propelled by a wave of devoted lineage,
Saying:
“You, dear one, are beyond our wildest dreams.”
Silhouette
By Anonymous
I can see your silhouette, But it wasn’t you.
And I just don’t get,
Why you’re always there, But you’re never here.
And I see you everywhere, In every place,
I see your face.
Nothing’s as it seems,
Especially in your dreams.
It was like a spell,
Tying us together.
And when you fell,
I did too.
But not with you.
It was us,
One life in two.
You had my back,
And I had yours,
But it wasn’t enough.
And I can still see you,
But it’s always your silhouette, And never you.
Untitled
By Anonymous
The opening of the mouth of men of straw
The smile of the soul, the sigh of the toll
The choir strung up on the chancel wall
Little Sparta, little ruins, there is the toll
On the wall, scripture, on the ceiling, tile
On the great subway tile, the recital is told
For out of great Midian, out of Egypt, I fled
The rattling of Lot’s bones in my head, I left
And laughed a small laugh for that which I fathered
In the fields of Midian, an animus bold
To so chase me and gnaw me like a fold of foul vultures
The flock untoward
To the highest bidder, my words, my words
In a parcel so moldered beyond all control
But O Egypt, O Midians, ye drunkards, behold
I saw in a dream a son made of gold
Yes, I saw in a dream, my body encoiled,
Upon the ceiling of tiles, my body unfold
Embroiled in a hell-dream, so wretched, so cold
Upon the tiles, gave I birth to a son made of gold
O devils, forswear me, ye beasts, take hold
For ye, the real parents, divide and take hold
For out from chest a child made of gold
O come ye vultures, fine choir, wolves on the fold
Leave me not here to feast and to chill
Rip open my matter and forgive my will
Human
By Anonymous
The first thing you need to know about me is that my body is wrong. However you perceive me, however I come off to the world, however I'm viewed by the masses is fundamentally incorrect.
Recently I went to a Philly Pretzel Factory store. Surrounded by the dingy hallways of my city’s new underground mall, my mom, my sister, my grandmother, and I ordered from a middle-aged man who said "have a nice day ladies" after giving us our food.
It made me want to vomit.
I mean,
How do you see this and think lady?
How do you see my short, uneven haircut that my mom gave me last month, and my giant button-up shirt that’s obviously covering something that I would prefer didn’t exist, and my bright yellow jacket that I got from a menswear store and that is two sizes too big because I’m (sadly) not the size of a fully grown man, and think lady?
How can I, with my gender flying out of my mouth at every turn, solar flares without the sun, be seen as a lady?
We joke about being bees in a trench coat,
Or secretly an alien, or a dragon, or some other mythical creature,
But I just want to be a human.
I want that more than anything else in the entire world.
The second thing you need to know about me is that I hate it when people refer to a single person as themselves.
Sure, it's just a grammatical error,
Along the lines of "their a cool person" (which I am),
Something harmless, something that you would hear, and maybe smile at or quietly correct, but you would move on with your life afterwards.
Hearing someone say "themselves" isn't something you remember years later.
But it is one of those things where I hear it, and it makes my mind explode. It makes every corner of my consciousness unwind into a cloud of multi-colored dust, and I have to wait for it to settle, then sweep it up, reforming it into the shape my brain should be.
Because there is just something fundamentally wrong with it. With hearing one person referred to as themselves. And I don't know exactly what that is yet, but I'm bound to find out at some point.
Perhaps it's the way that it makes me feel multiple, vast, when I'm really just myself.
Perhaps it's the fact that it makes me feel inhuman.
Why does everyone else get to be human?
Double Trouble is incredible and I love them very much, but having the only character I know with my identity be a bright green shapeshifter can be hard sometimes. And sure, their identity makes complete sense. If I was a shapeshifter I would be non-binary too. Instead, I'm just non-binary without the shapeshifter part.
What a ripoff.
The third thing you need to know about me is not my name.
Yes, I am talking about my old name. My dead one, the one that I threw out of the door of my house last spring and watched limp down the street, becoming less and less familiar the further away it went. The one that I tore from my very being in favor of new beginnings.
But I'm also talking about my current name. My new, shiny one. The one that I told my grandparents to call me, and they called my mom, asking why I used the masculine spelling. Why I didn't use the spelling that my great-grandma had used, and if she knew what that might mean.
I laughed when she told me that.
Names are pointless. They are meaningless. I love my new name, but it is not a core part of my identity. I could exist without my name.
Sadly, the same cannot be said for my body.
Sometimes I want to cry. Sometimes I want to yell and punch holes in the wall and tear down my curtains (that would be easy, they're on one of those spring-loaded rods that you don’t have to attach to the wall permanently).
Sometimes I want to pull myself apart seven different ways and scatter a piece on every continent, so you could stare at me and think "wow, that's a mess if I've ever seen one". Because I know that the people around me see me and think that I'm fine, and maybe if they only saw one-seventh of me they would think differently. Maybe if I was just my head I would give it up and let myself cry.
I restrain myself because I don’t want to break down in biology class.
Because I don’t want my mom to have to see me cry and wish she could take the pain upon herself.
Because I know my plants would be disappointed in me if I fed them with my tears instead of tap water, gave them access to unblocked sunlight streaming in from the holes in my walls.
I don’t tear myself apart, and I keep existing, and that’s the hardest thing I’ll ever do but I do it anyway.
When that man said ladies I wanted to yell all of these things in his face. I wanted to force my words down his throat and watch him choke on them. I wanted justice, as stupid and petty as it would have been.
I smiled at him, and we left.
The Tortoise Club
By Kera McCarthy
There’s a Tortoise Club on the corner of 82nd and Mulberry-- been there as long as anybody left alive can remember. Nobody knows when it started, but everyone knows to avoid Tortoise Turnpike on Thursday Nights (the traffic is insane). And the Tortoise Club isn’t alone-- Porcupine square is bustling on Tuesdays, Flamingo Farm on Fridays, and Worm Wagon Wednesdays. But on my first day in town, I knew none of this. One day, I drove up to this seemingly quiet little town in the middle of nowhere. Trouble was, I had walked right into the middle of Tortoise Turnpike on a Thursday. I kid you not, there does exist a pace slower than a snail. The Tortoise in front of me had a sun symbol engraved on his shell. “Not for your eyes, buddy,” he snapped at me. Just when I was about to go all berserk on those tortoises, I felt something grab my hand and next thing I knew I was sitting in somebody’s kitchen with 6 pairs of eyes staring into my soul. I made my first three friends that night, but by week's end, I would have none. I was a floater in a town of hardcore cliques, so I made it a point to fit in. On Friday, I bought some pink fluff and turned myself into a Flamingo. It only cost me some skin! Tuesday came and I shoved some loose spikes into my back (the Porcupine party was a blast!). Worm Wednesday was a tricky one but I managed to squeeze into a slimy suit. Thursday finally came around and I was so excited to make more friends.
I’d made 37 more friends than I’d had in my whole life. I borrowed an extra shell from the club and snuck in a little early to avoid traffic. All the tortoises were so nice, and even humored me when I asked about the symbols engraved in their shells. They told me tales of great Tortoise ancestors and the passing down of the sun symbol. “The sun symbol?” I muttered. “Yeah, the Tortoise who has it now is right over there.” As I turned, my eyes locked with his and for just a few seconds I thought I might get away with it. But then his eyes turned hard, and that friendly sun seemed to morph into a fiery storm of anger. “HEY!” he screamed across the room, “IMPOSTER!!” I found myself in a strange room with eyes staring into my soul once again, but this time they weren’t so friendly. We all hovered for a moment, listening to each other's breath, planning our next moves. I waited for the air in the room to fall stagnant, then thrust my shell off and ran for my life. I hid safely in the woods that night, but by morning the whole town had heard of the imposter. I knew I couldn’t stay any longer, so I snuck back into the house to pack my things. As I walked towards the door, I caught my reflection in the mirror. Pink fluff, ragged spikes, slimy suit, fragments of shell—I had become a stranger to myself. I had so desperately tried to escape who I was that I had become something I no longer recognized. And so I retreated to where I sit before you—that forever doubtful voice in the back of your head—a strange monster in a familiar land. We are so accustomed to disguising ourselves from others, that we end by disguising ourselves from ourselves.
I love the idea that
By Connie Zhang
In the Chinese language, there are no new characters in the way that there are recently coined words in English. When a new concept, idea, or person is introduced, we simply pick out some existing characters, line them up nice and neat, and call that a name. Identities can not be created or destroyed, only transferred or rearranged.
I love the idea that life comes from the earth and always, always returns to the earth. We are not born but carved out of the ground, like a sculpture freed from stone, a bundle of organic matter that the forces of nature could take back at any moment. Leaves and twigs. Life is briefly floating in the river and running across the lawn, and then it’s gone. There’s something sad about that, but not really, right?