Carolina Muse V.I : simplebooklet.com

From the EditorIt’s human nature to seek meaning. We want to make sense of the world and each person we interact with, including ourselves, so we t things into boxes. We label ourselves: empathetic, athletic, funny, chronically late, or maybe the inverse of any one of these, in order to feel secure & comfortable in our identity. We make ourselves predictable… Or, at least, we justify our actions to align with our self perception. One of my own labels, creative, has manifested itself in several ways: I am a writer, musician, graphic designer, and for the majority of my life not-a-dancer. That is, until last spring, when a friend invited me to a West Coast Swing dance class. There, awkwardly shuing my body back & forth with a few other rst-timers, I denitely didn’t feel like a dancer. But, I was enjoying moving my body to music and making new friends, laughing as I explained to them that I was not-a-dancer. The reality is that I had never attempted to become a dancer. We don’t often realize how much our perception of who we are inuences what we believe we’re capable of. As I continued to return to dance lessons each week, I wasn’t driven by a strong desire to improve and become a dancer; I didn’t think that was possible. I just wanted to bring some joy back into my life and build a solid community of friends in my new home. However, the more time I invested into dance, the more I felt capable of, and I soon found a level of condence in myself that I hadn’t felt before. I felt the autonomy to ip my own script and redene myself. I can be a dancer. And, almost one year later, I’d say that I am. My dedication to the craft has forced me to redene myself. I am a dancer. The sentence still feels clunky coming out of my mouth, but on the danceoor, I feel graceful, rhythmic, and capable. This past weekend, I made nals in my rst ever dance competition. I’ve realized that putting myself into boxes had been limiting the possibilities of what I could become. As you read this issue (which does include a West Coast Swing dance!), I encourage you to rethink your boxes. Creativity ourishes when you challenge boundaries, including those you have set for yourself; so, whether you are a dancer, writer, artist, musician, reader, or none of these things, re-imagine these labels and watch yourself grow.Madison

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Volume V • No. I • February 20257have you looked at the moon tonight?Eliana Moskoshe’s so bright—is she always this bright?it’s hard to remember that light isn’t even hersshe’s just a reective surfacewe still call them moonbeams thoughi’ve always been a night owlapparently it’s because i thrivewhen i do not fear being watchedshe is my only audiencei nd comfort in knowingshe has seen it alland most of it did not include uswe are a nanosecondcompared to her eonsshe doesn’t care about my lifetime collectionof dollar store gold star stickersaccumulated from years of needing to excelshe sees no value in my wall of laurel wreathsshe is uninterested in how much i’ve slept(too much and not enough simultaneously)she’s got other things to worry about—rising tides and changing seasonsi was always told toreach for the moonbut i prefer the viewfrom herebecause when i look up and see herhaloed with moonglowi have never been so honoredto be so unimportantPoetry

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Volume V • No. I • February 202511Crushed CherryRenee KalagayanIn summertime the cherries are rmand pragmatic as my mother, whose breasts are rebelling,spreading undyed cancer into ruby depths. I buy the cherries for the sake of my grandmother,who ate them whole, whose whole body purpled with dementia and forgot the taste.By the time I remember to eat the fruit, the bones of the cherries are soft, the blood oozingblack into the back of my icebox. As I lift the carnage from the cold and prepare to bury themin the compost, I nd a plump black spider hidingin between the two intimate red round curves of one,and I am so angry. I spill the cherries onto the groundand let the bodies tumble like an open wound, splatter deep maroonacross the kitchen oor. The spider in retreat, swimmingacross a sea of giant rolling red keels,pauses by the threshold.In this time I have torn a white ag from the paper towel rack, and in one swift waveI drown the spider in cotton pulp between my lined forenger and thumb.I squeeze and feel his soft brown body pop in my hand,the green and yellow trunk wound staining like sap. Death is a snapyou can feel in your bones, a bruised cherrybleeding, a living mother white with a tumor I want to crushbetween my violet ngers.Poetry

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12Carolina Muse Literary & Arts Magazine PoetryPRISMSPEAK Noelle Kriegelthe sun has defected itself to the backsides of rainbows where roads twist & glitter like intestines. intersections sit spread eagle & open & we all take time to pray beneath red lights for obscene things, things allhad & hadn’t yet, counting all the seconds it takes to mouth mine. a cicadoidea exodusdoubly undressed turnsgrills to gureheads—we’re champions of exoskeletons, expensive & vulgar designs against nature, against eulogy-sweet romances & colliding generations. every storyhas a natural conclusion: back to the dirt. butthere is still time.now that it’spale orange mornings, day moons & a solstice every night, we are endless &prismic. we do not eulogize in the evenings, we greet each other with new names.this, that & other summersuch phenomenaglitter up the commute, brief frottages of lightonly privy to July. how lucky that it’s pavement &pretty wordsmiraging & spitting outatmosphere over tailpipes &not hateful exhaust, how pretty it is to pretend to know better about this world.2024 was the year of the cicada. Broods XIX & XIII both emerged after nesting underground for over a decade, becoming an outpouring of song, raucous displays of ight, and then sudden shells as if the sandhills returned to shore. In the same summer, friends emerged, names drawled & hollered in a raucous display of life, adamant & present despite the heat. Despite everything, emerged.

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14Carolina Muse Literary & Arts Magazine StoriesWe’d be paddling over a watery underworld, beneath us the brown, silty depths of North Carolina’s Lake Catawba, a reservoir built in the early 1900s. Depending on whom you asked, Catawba could mean “people of the water” or “separated or divided.” I’d read a little about it on the ight in. But, I wasn’t going to bother my brother with this now, the world already complicated enough, our boats on the grassy banks at the ready—Andrew’s, a berglass two-seater, mine, a imsy inatable that he’d borrowed from a neighbor. For ve years, we hadn’t seen each other. Not since our sister’s funeral, if you could call it that, the two of us against the rail of the Golden Gate Bridge, in San Francisco, shrouded in fog, shivering. But it wasn’t Kelsey’s suicide that had driven us apart. Well before that we’d been drifting, our phone conversations small talk then awkward silence. Then, the anniversary coming up, I decided to y in. Crouched at the edge of the river now, I dipped my ngers in, the water here warm, fairly benign-looking, despite what Andrew had said on the short drive over. “50 square miles. 520 miles of shoreline. 100 feet deep.” He knew I’d only paddled once, in a canoe down a shallow river with two Japanese people who didn’t speak English in a summer ESL workshop I taught. Maybe he was trying to scare me. As a kid, he liked to hide under my bed at night and jump out just as I was about to fall asleep. But, at least he and I could both swim. Our sister, thirteen years younger than him, ten years younger than me, couldn’t. A 400-foot drop to the Pacic, she must have been terried, her back against the rail. “Like hitting cement,” the authorities had said. Severed aorta, pneumothorax, broken limbs & ribs—all the possibilities. And then there was the security footage. She’d left no note. Her body had never been found. But her car was there in the lot beneath the bridge. Andrew tossed me a life jacket. “A few things to know.” He lifted a paddle. It wasn’t the kind of oar I’d used in the canoe. “First thing, don’t strangle the baby.” I laughed. “The paddle,” he said, as if I didn’t know. I picked mine up. It looked like a long baton with a rubber propeller at either end. I had the horrible impulse to twirl it. But what did I know? If only I’d gotten some instruction or learned Japanese my rst time on the water, I might not have ended up with blistered hands and a blood-stained t-shirt as I’d racked my brain for the word “row” in Japanese. No doubt anyone listening to that story would have thought me an idiot, though one of the Japanese rowers mailed me a beautiful silk table cloth, thanking me for saving her life on the river. Now, that was funny. “But at the same time keep a good grip, thumb and index nger. Don’t strain the others. Hands equal distance apart. See?” Straightening his arms, Andrew raised his paddle chest-high as if he were doing calisthenics, and I chuckled again. My brother looked like a middle-aged camp counselor or a hapless weight lifter rather than a scientist who studied the life cycles of cicadas, his real passion or only passion. Any minute now, a major resurrection was about to occur—not one but two broods rising up from their deep burrows at the very same time, up through the ground, to swarm. There’s a survival strategy to these cycles, for these sizable, red-eyed, hard-shelled creatures that live most of their lives in the dark, my brother had written in a Charlotte Gazette editorial, urging restraint, urging residents not to kill them. He made clear-eyed, intelligent arguments, hardly the boy I remember from our childhood. But then again, Andrew had always been an enigma, the boy who perpetually overslept, practically unked out of high school only to get a doctorate in entomology to become a professor. We had grown up in a subdivision built on a Connecticut swamp, where there’d been a whole cornucopia of insects and on warm summer nights, the porch light lit, my mother forever yelling, “Shut the door.” I zipped up my life jacket. In this humidity, it felt like a small animal on my chest. Andrew dragged the inatable sideways into the water. Shaped more like a canoe, it was a drab orange and patched on one side. “Why can’t we just go in yours?” We both peered at the front seat, where my sister would have sat. The lightest always up front, my brother had said on the drive over. I stepped into the inatable. The seat, which Andrew had fastened in, shifted beneath me, and the inatable sank a little. People of the Water Janet Goldberg

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Volume V • No. I • February 202515Stories / Dance He placed a small cooler in front of my feet and handed me the paddle. Then, he got into his kayak. “Any questions?” I arranged my hands, trying not to squeeze, holding it in the middle, the sheer length of it like a third arm spanning out both sides of my body. Andrew pulled out rst, neatly slicing the water. I dug in, moving forward. My brother stopped and looked back at me. “Keep it straight. Pull evenly on both sides. Don’t let the current take you.” I oated up beside him, bumping him. Here, up above the banks, were houses woven into the trees, mini mansions, with their own slips & fancy boats, some with built-in slides. “Where the rich live, eh?” “Copperheads, too. They’re excellent swimmers.” Looking out at the water, I scanned the surface for any in-coming, silty water already swishing at the bottom of my inatable. We began paddling again, and for a while I managed to straighten myself out, though I was slow. On TV it always looked so easy, everyone straight backed, awed, as some fragment of a blue-tinged glacier collapsed in slow motion. No one ever got hurt. “Pontoon,” Andrew said. It looked like something out of the Amazon, a large slow-moving oblong barge with a small pilot house. As the waves started rippling across, traveling under us, I dropped my paddle on my lap and grabbed onto the sides of the inatable. We started paddling again, my arms beginning to ache. Andrew waited for me ahead. “Now, stay away from those footings,” he said, pointing his paddle to a bridge up ahead. Andrew took o and deftly paddled through.Getting closer, I could see small whirlpools around the footings, where the water swirled seeming to sink a little. But as hard as I tried, I side wiped it anyway, more water splashing in. I had to use my paddle to push myself away from it. My brother paddled over to me. “What are you doing?” I laid my paddle on my lap again and tugged on my life jacket. “This thing is killing me.” “Well, you can’t take it o.” “I can swim.” “Doesn’t matter.” I looked over at his front seat, where Kelsey would have been. Her freckles, her bangs, her front tooth still chipped. Fair-skinned, she hated the sun. Kept out of it. Like a vampire. Even alive, she’d been ageless. She was never meant to be—an accident, my mother admitted. But then, we loved her. Good thing our parents were dead. I looked at Andrew. There were things to say. But he’d started paddling again, leaving me behind, and when I nally caught up, I said, “You know there’s a Ferris wheel somewhere under here. Cemeteries. War sites. Slave plantations.”

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16Carolina Muse Literary & Arts Magazine Andrew leaned over the side. “That so?” “Creepy, isn’t it?” “Reservoirs prevent ooding. Save water. You can’t blame Catawba Power for that,” he said. “Right, Professor. Where are we going anyways?” “As far as you want.” I peered down the river, another pontoon crawling our way. It was a pretty place but hardly wild. “There’s an island just ahead. We could paddle out there.” “What kind?” “The kind surrounded by water.” My shorts soggy, I was anxious to dry out. We started paddling again, for the moment staying side by side. Soon enough, an island came into view, a mound rising out of the water, heavily treed. We paddled up onto a shallow beach and got out. For the moment, I felt like a real explorer. Jacques Cousteau. I looked at the dark water pooling at the bottom of my inatable and then ipped it over. Andrew took the cooler and trudged up the beach toward the trees. I took o my life jacket and dropped it on the beach, then followed him to a narrow sandy trail up. “Just watch where you put your feet. Mostly black snakes here. Not venomous, but they bite. And they’re big.” “Big,” I repeated. “Like cicadas.” “Bigger.” We’d hiked to the island top, there three large rocks circling a re pit of charred wood. I looked around, expecting to see stray beer cans or bottles. But there was only foliage. We sat down. Andrew opened the cooler and handed me a beer. I hesitated. Sober, I had no idea what I was doing. Still, I was hot. “You didn’t bring any water?” I cracked open the can and took a sip. Out here, on the island, it didn’t taste so bitter. I drank more. Through the trees, I gazed out at the water and then looked over at the third rock, smaller than the others. “So, what’s your prediction? For the cicadas?”Andrew shrugged. “They’ll just appear. And then they’ll be here.” “Then what?” I asked. “They’ll mate.” He crushed up his can and dropped it back in the cooler and then opened another. “And then?” “Die. Most of their life is spent underground, waiting.” I kept peering down through the trees, to the beach, where our boats were moored. “Sad, having to live like that.” Andrew handed me another beer. “I doubt they think so. It’s what they’re programmed for. Their best chance at survival.” A cool breeze blew through, lifting my hair. Was it that simple, I wondered. White-knuckled, clinging to the bridge, the wind blasting her, had my sister changed her mind? But both my brother and I had viewed the security tapes. You see what you want to see, bridge security had told me, each time I called back and asked, “Are you sure?” “So, you don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “What she did.” “Okay. She did what she did. Why belabor it?” Andrew, leaning forward now, seemed to be studying something on the ground. “What is it?” I shot up to my feet. I imagined thick-bodied insects, hard-shelled, topped by translucent wings, their eyes just as my brother had written—red. I started swiping the air. Andrew grabbed my hand. “They haven’t risen yet. And besides, you don’t want to do that. They don’t bite. Just wait, and they’ll start singing.” Stories“Was it that simple, I wondered. White-knuckled, clinging to the bridge, the wind blasting her, had my sister changed her mind?”

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18Carolina Muse Literary & Arts Magazine Poetry38 Split Yuna KangSeoul is like this:ash, rubble, sleet, snow, pounding onthe heads of our enemies, I hold a broken bowl up to cannon-plasteredsky, the glassiness of our heads vague, uneven. It is like drinking toomuch, 물고기1, sh swimming at the bottomof our fecund little soups. I swallow her whole. Seoulis like this: technicolor bright lights, taxis screaming down rain-slicked roads, obliginglittle restaurants and people everywhere, geometrical categories of smoking, women inblack umbrellas and Chanel. a nervous dog follows the fashionable like in Paris, we choked out the underbrush, smoked the ruins ofcountry life like how summer ame sups itself on overgrownbrush. We tried too hard, tried much too hard, and in our bellies lay swollen:golden sh circling, lazy drain currents making the rounds of a toilet with noentrance or exit. I ate too much soup on that glassy little night, wantedsomething else.1Korean word for sh. Roughly pronounced like mool-ko-gi.

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Volume V • No. I • February 202521dailiness Manuel A. MelendezEvery day, maybe, is too long. Why can’t I choose to spend a week among the cacao leaves then retire? Be gone until I grow on the lip of another day. Or retain it. Like the basil green on your teeth, crunching down a refusal while I teeter over the easy chair, the grow lights humming around our tired Sunday bodies. Every day like that is too much of you. A dream that wears drowsy hiking sneakers, dropping you like salami into your closet, you— fragrantly parceled. The perfume of rice drizzles into curried green beans as they pile on a bowl you select for me. Another choice, like how to wear this day, a droopy band around my ankle or my wrist, smelling like coconut oil or painting the sliver of your right butt-cheek I cannot bite from me, right as you hunch over, leaning to collect items, all items, to decorate today between the legs of your Levi’s. Every day cannot hold your unwashed toes, furled inside your grey socks, but the imprint they leave discarded— how hampers do anything but hamper another snowed-in dinner full of potato skins. Here you’re spun back, like a tired song, to fall into arms you don’t ask for, into a day that is all mine but full of your sugar. Too long is every day that replenishes, leaving only splashes. A splash of your ngers glossy with sh oil as we laugh, sning them together, the winter outside deciding, like a ring, to encircle us in possibility. A splash of warm sheets pawing back lightness, the reverb of reverie, that hums some version of your six a.m. voice, a voice that splashes, and so, is only a droplet, then another, then another, unfullling until you comprehend, of course, that you were the one that remembered buckets can hold water, but they cannot hold the day.Poetry / Dance

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24Carolina Muse Literary & Arts Magazine The scent of freshly sawed lumber held an enchantment, a trigger that awakened memories Gray had long shelved in the recesses of routine and coping mechanisms. Nature seemed to compress emotion between rings & grains, making them manageable for him. He held the board, eyeing it carefully, then squeezed the power button. The miter saw hummed, and as it passed through the wood, a scrap fell to the ground. Gray brushed the sawdust o the machine, savoring the piney scent. It transported him back to a summer morning ten years earlier, a walk through the woods shortly after relocating to the Lowcountry. They had only bought the house a year before, and when terrible luck struck, they were hardly acclimated. Despite the purported healing inuence of fairies, ags, and owers, she had still gotten sicker. He had been alone with their toy poodle, Abby, crossing the boardwalk that day, which carried them across the wetland. Township workers were actively replacing the structural framework along the span, running from the public dock through Vereen’s Forest to the cemetery at its entrance. There were just a handful of people there, and he only saw one since arriving. Along the shaded maritime paths, traces of wildlife were everywhere. This made him smile. Fiddler crabs as far as he could see, moving slightly, hovering near holes where water receded, leaving dry patches. A black snake catching the rst rays, its tongue searching the pinecone oor beneath the loblollies. Far away, he heard voices carried on the wind and the hum of a rod and reel casting. Gray paused for a circling osprey, then stepped nearer to the little pooch. Here, he heard soft music created by abundant crustacean shells, notes on and o, rustled by gentle surf. His hand touched the railing, warm already. It hadn’t been so long since he was walking beside her, but it felt like it was forever. Abby’s tiny paws tapped the planks, and there was the invoking smell of freshly cut lumber. He felt her hand in his, remembering. He missed that most of all. He took a deep breath. With wet eyes, he said, “Come on, girl. Let’s go home.” Snapping back to the woodshop behind the home, he laid the scrap aside and drilled pilot holes in his piece, then set the steamer on high and applied pressure with the jig. It would take a good day to start the Adirondack chair’s arm bending, and he couldn’t help but think there was a certain magic at work. Not just in the wood, but in everything. Gray drank it in. He imagined the lengths primitive woodworkers had gone to as he set in place his next pass. Abby walked past, grass to her belly, and it made him want to tell the woman he loved how funny their girl looked down there. Gray nodded to her favorite fairy. “Wish you could come home again.” He didn’t even clean up just then but got into the car and went to visit her at assisted living.• • • He came into the room, and she smiled. He slipped a hand in his pocket, squeezing for a moment a new scrap sawn from that morning. She didn’t meet his eye, but it was okay. He said, “Almost done with another order of garden chairs. Should see them, getting real good.” She turned as if she suddenly realized he was there. She took his hands into hers, pressed them to her lips. So, Gray spent three hours with her, just sitting beside her in the chair. She fell asleep, and he kissed her goodbye. He climbed into the car and began to cry, his head on the steering wheel. The drive home was slow & The Scent of Fresh-Cut LumberMord McGheeStories“Despite the purported healing inuence of fairies, ags, and owers, she had still gotten sicker.”

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Volume V • No. I • February 202533RosemaryDana FieldThe window panes rattle above me, but I keep my head down. The distorted bass sound intensies and then slowly fades, the syncopated beat somehow defying the wobbly Doppler eect we get when sirens wail by. Mama glares but she doesn’t look up, her face in shadow under her broad-brimmed hat. “How are their eardrums not busted? Damn kids,” she mutters to herself. Cars stream steadily by. Kneeling in the soil, I gently manipulate the tangled root system of a plant that has grown too big for its pot. Life has taken over, and a transplant is long overdue. Gardening is kind of our thing, Mama and me. We had created our own little version of Eden just fteen feet from the street; seventeen, if you count the sidewalk. Our oasis is compartmentalized in window boxes and terracotta pots and those pots that look like terracotta but they’re plastic. We’ve got some herbs, veggies, succulents, and a poinsettia from Christmas. The red blooms are gone now and it’s all green, but it seems happy enough. A tree would be nice, or some hedges, something to help block the noise, but our soil is too sandy. And it isn’t deep enough to support anything more than crabgrass & sandspurs. I suggested a birdbath once, but Mama said the stray cats would eat the birds. We live in the city, but not the city-city. No one pulls the weeds growing through the buckled slabs of sidewalk. No one repairs the chain-link fences that are bent out of shape, corners curled & rusted. No one paints over the grati. And no one stops here unless they know someone that lives here. We’ve been here eight years. “Mary is coming for dinner tonight. I wish the tomatoes were ready. You’ll have to go to the store.” Mary. “Great.” We’re out of wine anyway.• • • “Still playing in the dirt?” Mary stares at me as she takes a sip of water. It’s like we’re children again as I look at my dirty nails, ngers curled around my fork. My eyes drift to my crumpled napkin, the basket of bread, and then rest on her mouth. Her lips are straight & closed— someone else would mistake them for smirking, but I know what she’s waiting for. I won’t look her in the eye. I’ll think of a comeback later, something about being a hoe. But not in front of Mama. “I have some quarters for you to wash your clothes, Mary.” “Why can’t I wash them here?” “The dryer quit a few days back,” Mama sighs. We have been draping our clothes over every surface in the house, running the fans so high I’m scared they’re gonna fall out of the ceiling. “I’ll nd you a used one on Craigslist.” “I don’t have the cash for that, sweetie.”• • • I hate summer. During the school year, Mama and I get some time apart. She works in the library at the elementary school, and I’m a teacher’s aide. We both stay for the after-school program. Sometimes we help kids with homework, but mostly we make sure they don’t kill each other. We walk the mile home together in the late afternoon. Mostly in silence. But it’s a contented silence. Not like summer silence. Summer silence is stagnant. It hangs in the air, thick & palpable, smothering. Summer silence is suocating. I stare at the dried oregano leaves in front of me. There seems to be just as many scattered on the counter as in the bowl. I pick up the stray pieces, separate the tiny leaves from the tiny stems, and crumble them between my ngers into the bowl. I funnel these into the spice jar we’ve been re-lling for years. There’s got to be a better way to do this. “I don’t think we’ll ever run out of oregano, Mama.” “Hmm.” “But, don’t get me started on thyme. Never enough,” I smirk at myself. “Guess we should try it inside,” Mama oers. I look at the crowded sill above the sink. All rosemary plants. No room for thyme in this house. “Maybe in a few weeks… we can put the rosemary out.” I actually believe it’s one of the few plants that could thrive in our useless soil. “Hmm.” I know better. Mama loves rosemary. It’s her Stories

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34Carolina Muse Literary & Arts Magazine favorite. If I move one of her precious pots, she nds it and puts it back. When the plants eventually coil in on themselves, rootbound & shriveled, she buys new ones. She doesn’t even cook with it. “Do you think Mary would be caught dead in a laundromat?” “Guess we should buy another drying rack.” “Or, she could gure out how to do her own laundry.” She’s not a child. “Hmm.”• • • Mary and I slept in the same room when we were little. At night, we would stay up talking in the dark, making up imaginary worlds and exploring them together until we fell asleep. I couldn’t tell you exactly when we started to grow apart. Maybe it was the day one of her friends made fun of me and she didn’t say anything. Or the day I wouldn’t cover for her when Mama asked where she went after school. Or the morning we woke up to the policeman in our living room, comforting Mama without touching her, in our old house with the big yard and the plank swing that hung from the oak tree with rope as thick as my arms. • • • The humid air circulating from the box fan hits me in the face and rues the papers in my hand. I close the garage door and blindly grope for the lightswitch. It smells like musty laundry detergent out here. And damp cardboard. I push some boxes out of the way, not looking at the black letters scrawled across the tops in my handwriting. D-A-D. Burned in my mind’s eye. If I look at them, they’re real. If I don’t, they’re just a memory. Or a dream. Maybe not real. I thumb through the pages I had printed out at the library. Dryer Repair Guide. Hopefully, one of these papers holds an answer. I crank the timer to 20 minutes and turn on the dryer. The motor is running, but nothing else is happening. I turn it o. Gas Dryers, Electric Dryers, Troubleshooting, Tools You Need. Shit. Tools. The brown boxes blur in my peripheral. “Have you seen the toolbox anywhere?” Mary is sitting at the kitchen table. Her chin is resting on her knees which are drawn up against her chest, bare feet hanging o the front of her chair. One hand loosely cups a mug of coee—no sugar, extra cream—and the other balances a pen which hovers above the Daily Word Scramble; the partially lled-in crossword puzzle is recently abandoned. I’ll nish it later. “Dad’s tools?” “Yeah. They’re not in the garage,” I say walking past her. “I had to hang up a picture.” “Then just take a hammer. You left me with nothing.” I turn the coee pot o and pour a mug, no sugar, just cream. “No one was using them. What do you need them for, anyway?” She’s drawing glasses on one of the lawyers in the Divorce For Men advertisement. “Just bring them back, could you?” One of them has an eye patch now. “Why? What are you making?” “Nothing. What do you care?” The attorneys are losing teeth, painstakingly being inked out one by one. “I care. Just tell me.” “Mary, I just…” Breathe in. “I... just thought…” Breathe out. “I was looking at the dryer.” Eye contact.“I told Mama I was gonna get her one.” “When?” “On Craigslist. My friend is coming to pick up the broken one this week.” “Is that what you meant?” “What did you think I meant?” Slam! Sweet Jesus. Mama’s home.• • • Mary always had friends, always had somewhere Stories“Or the morning we woke up to the policeman in our living room, comforting Mama without touching her, in our old house with the big yard and the plank swing that hung from the oak tree with rope as thick as my arms.”

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Volume V • No. I • February 202535else to be or something better to do, even when she was a kid. She threw grass seeds to the sky and pretended it was raining. They popped up, and we had some patches of thin, soft grass for a few days and she was so proud of herself. She left the hose running while she rode o down the street with her newest boyfriend. She never really moved out so much as she just stopped coming home. She left her dresses hanging in the closet. She left me home with Mama. I don’t remember how I got to the hospital. I do remember that I had just nished one of my evening classes and was walking to the bus stop when I got the phone call. Mary was in the ER. One of her friends had found her and couldn’t wake her up. My rst thought had been Mama. She wouldn’t survive this if Mary didn’t. Lights. Scrubs. Fluids. Needles. Midnight. Nurses. Are you family? In. Out. Tubes. 2:12 A.M. Fluorescents. Do you want a blanket? Charts. Eyelids. 5:37 A.M. Pulse. Beeping. Linoleum. Where’s my charger? 8:09 A.M. She’s awake. Options. Treatment. Medication. Observation.Stories / Visual ArtLoving ParentsBárbara Rais Insurance? Vending machine. New room. Has it been one day? Two? Release. Sign here. And here. Are we done? And here. Mary never said a single word about it. She was home for a few days and then she was gone again. I missed my nals. I didn’t talk to my professors. I didn’t do anything.

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36Carolina Muse Literary & Arts Magazine PoetryGenerationalKimberly Jane SimmsI grab for you, brother, but you dive over the edge into the lake. You remainsubsurface as I chatter on karma and the cult. How our leader was exiled with a following so strong: stars, politicians, our father—sucked in with a nod of the head.Dad speculated his soul was nine hundred years-old when the leader shook his hand in ‘85. He came to believe misalignmentcould snu out a soul. Remember when you astralprojected as a child. That feeling of being everywhere must be leathered behind your eyes. I tried to followyou into space, stretch it around us like an airplane blanket,hoping we’d disappear through a hole in time, reincarnate as bees of light.But your face emerges out of the lake, slick and dripping, your intention shadowed below the surfaceof our family’s crimped fabrications. Condent, you open your jaws, rolling out a wet yarn, Dad’s dimples ashing, as you turn up your palm to heaven.

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Volume V • No. I • February 202541Eliana Mosko is an actor & writer from South Carolina. She beganwriting poetry on the backs of notebooks during math class afterwatching a recording of CarlosAndrés Gómez perform “JuanValdez” when she was 13 and hasbeen doing so ever since. Her workprimarily focuses on nding divinityin the mundane and is heavily inuenced by her Jewish-Appalachian upbringing. Her own favorite writers includeSusan Sontag, Tom Stoppard, and Maimonides.Meet the Creatorsplay photography as well as singular & mixed media drawings& paintings. Fascinated with creating unique art shadowbox pieces and various other 3-dimensional assemblages &collages by incorporating a palette of nostalgic antique &vintage items: old photographs, unusual & rare ephemera,antique prints & vintage collectibles, striving to creatework that is witty, tactile, and sometimes interactive. Thejuxtaposition of dierent elements is designed to provokethought, tickle one’s senses, to make one smile, and bring joy.Leslie currently lives in Greenville, South Carolina with herhusband and three cats.Martina Reisz Newberry is the author of seven books of poetry. Hermost recent book is Beyond Temples (Deerbrook Editions May 2024).Newberry has been included inCog, Blue Nib, Braided Way,Roanoak Review, THAT LiteraryReview, and many other literarymagazines & anthologies in the U.S. andabroad. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo Colonyfor the Arts, Djerassi Colony for the Arts, and AndersonCenter for Disciplinary Arts. Passionate in her love for LosAngeles, Martina currently lives there with her husband,Brian, a Media Creative. Her city often is a “player” in herpoems.Harumi Yukawa graduated from the University of California atBerkeley and uses Japanese shelllime ink & Sumi ink to depict theinnite range of light & shadow.Renee Kalagayan is an editor & poet from Greenville, South Carolina,where she edits marketing materialsand writes poems about death &fruit, focusing on the intersectionof grief & goodness. An MFAstudent at Converse Universityin Spartanburg, she is also on thepoetry sta of South 85 Journal. Herwork is featured or forthcoming in Inkwell Literary Magazine,Listening Journal, Persephone Literary Magazine, and threeanthologies. When she does not write or edit, she reads. And,if she does not read, she takes long walks or tends her jungleof houseplants. Her interests include cooking, gardening,and all things gothic & spooky.Noelle Kriegel (femme!) is a rst year graduate student at ClemsonUniversity seeking a Master’sdegree in English. Hailing fromAiken, SC, they are in love witheverything Carolina, nding glory& poetry in every pine. Kriegel hasbeen previously published in BelovedZine editions 1 & 2, a lesbian basedzine; and The Werks Zine, a queer-based zine in Columbia,SC. You can nd more of Noelle’s work on Instagram@carolinastunned443ver.Though Janet Goldberg lives in California now, much of her familyresides in North Carolina nearCharlotte. Place has always playedan important role in her ction,including in her debut novel, The Proprietor’s Song (Regal House), set in the Sierra Nevada, and in herforthcoming collection, Like Human (Cornerstone Press), with stories set in the South, theMidwest, and the West, due out in Fall 2025. She also servesas the ction editor of Deep Wild, a journal devoted towilderness experiences.Tiany Hale is a dancer, educator, and choreographer based inGreensboro, North Carolina. Aftergraduating Cum Laude with a BAin dance / K-12 Certication fromWinthrop University, Tiany taught

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42Carolina Muse Literary & Arts Magazine States; she holds a degree in painting & drawing from ESARDI. Barbara has collaborated with some brands in art product testing and participated in the Rights and Dignity Project to promote social change. She specializes in social critique, often using sarcasm with dierent art techniques like watercolor, digital drawing, and collage. You can nd her on Instagram @b.maia.artMeet the Creatorsdance at Central Academy of the Arts, a Title I magnet arts school in Central, South Carolina. During this time, Tiany served as Regional Coordinator for the South Carolina Dance Association and directed the Easley High School Color Guard Program. A lifelong learner, Tiany currently holds a certication in Language of Dance- Foundations I through the Language of Dance Center in New York and is in the process of nishing her Pilates Certication through Balanced Body. She is currently pursuing her MFA in dance choreography at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she teaches courses in the School of Dance and is the vice president of the Association of Graduate Students in Dance.Anna Kirby is a community college English instructor living in North Carolina. Her collages have been selected for juried exhibitions across the country and published in numerous magazines & literary journals. She makes her collages using second-hand books, scissors, glue dots, and oil paints. Anna Kirby’s collages are sensory poems that express the complex emotions surrounding PTSD, abuse, child loss, infertility, and female identity.Yuna Kang is a queer, half-deaf, Korean-American writer based in Northern California. Many of her loved ones hail from South Carolina, specically. She loves postcards, crows, and cats. She is also the recipient of the 2024 New Feathers Award. Their website link is: https://kangyunak.wixsite.com/websiteAlexander Holland was born & raised North Carolinian gure artist, dancer, photographer, and lover of nature. Many of his works involve themes of bodies in movement, dance, and nature. Best found in the middle of the woods on a spring day or dancing late night to some blues.Bárbara Rais is a Salvadoran artist who began her artistic journey in 2020, dedicating herself to learning and exploring new ideas. She studied photography in Germany and took pottery classes in El Salvador and the United Samuel Bingham was born & raised in Albuquerque, NM but has since found his home & place in Clemson, SC. Currently, he attends Clemson University where he is obtaining his PhD in photonics in high-power and -energy ber lasers. Outside of his science & engineering endeavors, Sam is an avid dancer in Balboa, Blues, Fusion, Lindy Hop, and West Coast Swing; wherein the latter he competes. He has traveled throughout the Carolinas to dance West Coast Swing in competitions and weekly or monthly dances, including Greenville, SC and Charlotte, Raleigh, and Asheville in North Carolina.Mord McGhee is the author of Ironblood (Golden Storyline Books UK) and The Stroke of Oars (Nat 1 Pub USA), whose literary works have recently been nominated for the Maya Angelou Book Award and Bram Stoker Award 2024-25. Mord Manuel A. Melendez is a hybrid writer born and partially raised in Camagüey, Cuba. He has been published in Carolina Muse Literary & Arts Magazine, WayWords Literary Journal, Apricity Magazine, Dream Noir Magazine, Superstition Review, and Midway Journal. He fell in love with the Carolinas on a skiing trip his senior year of high school when he discovered they made the best breakfasts in the world. He dreams of one day living on a planet where poetry can take permanent physical shape, but he settles for a erce latte, vibrant verses, and being penniless but ravishing on his deathbed.

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Volume V • No. I • February 202543Meet the CreatorsSara Driver is a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate art student at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Her work focuses on themes of childhood, nostalgia, and life growing up in the rural South. Having lived in North Carolina her entire life, she recognizes the poetry of simple moments and seeks to capture that in her work. She has previously appeared in some small shows around Onslow County, NC and has been published in UNCW’s creative magazine, Atlantis. She hopes to show work in some bigger exhibitions this year and is grateful to be published in the Carolina Muse.Emma Redditt is a queer & nonbinary writer originally from Alabama, but they have called Asheville, North Carolina home for the last three years. They were recently published in Loblolly Press’ Understory, a digital zine for relief in Western North Carolina following Hurricane Helene. For them, writing is a vehicle for both connection & exploration, and they are deeply inspired by the landscapes of Appalachia and the South as a whole. You can nd them on Substack at https://substack.com/@gentlewraparoundporch.RaAmen Stallings is a revolutionary artist based in the Carolinas. Raised in Greenville, he is adamant about using his art to enhance the lives of others. He uses various mediums to teach, assist in fundraising, and create art-centric systems to advance his local communities. He travels nationally, to create a chain network of creatives that allow art to be archival and tell representational stories of history. His philosophy is that “all forms of creation are art.” As his career advances, he desires to be an archivist to further discover & protect his culture and create systems that integrate art more practically into modern society.CerVon Campbell, an Carolina hip hop artist, has been carving a distinct niche within the hip hop & alternative hip hop scenes with his innovative & boundary-pushing music. Cherished for his avant-garde approach, Campbell’s music is a melting pot of jazz, funk, soul, and rock, seamlessly woven into the fabric of hip hop to create unforgettable soundscapes. Originally from Florida’s Nature Coast, Dana Field traded the salty, mangrove-laden shores for North Carolina’s muddy Piedmont (complete with seasons) in the spring of 2020. She has always been a creative spirit, writing poetry, songs, and stories since childhood, but has recently taken the endeavor to write more seriously, nding the outlet simultaneously necessary & enlightening. She found her passion for short stories & poetry when she went back to school (at the tender age of 30) for her BA in English. Dana has a love for the American South, fairy tales, nature, and raw, simple poetry. She writes to capture the charms & idiosyncrasies of the people that cross her path & imagination.Kimberly Jane Simms (Gibbs) is an acclaimed Greenville, SC poet, literary organizer, and educator whose voice is is a resident of Little River, SC, while frequently haunting Charleston, SC and Mt. Airy, NC. Erin Akins (she/her) is a poet, educator, and literature PhD student living in Austin, Texas. Her poetry has previously appeared in The South Florida Poetry Journal and The Green Hills Literary Lantern.Sara Jorgensen is an art teacher and is currently pursuing a graduate degree in art education. A lifelong artist, she is dedicated to uplifting & supporting young artists. Growing up in the Carolinas has imbued her with an appreciation for nature and a strong sense of community. Jorgensen was born & raised in the Sandhills of North Carolina, where she was inspired by countless mentors and teachers to follow her passion for art.

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44Carolina Muse Literary & Arts Magazine Editor-in-Chief, Madison Foster has been passionate about the arts in their full scope since she was little. Growing up in Greenville, SC, she could always be found with her face in a book or a guitar strapped over her shoulder. While attending Elon University in North Carolina, she grew her writing & design skills as an English literature major with minors in communications & multimedia authoring. After graduating in 2020, Madison’s love for publishing and the arts led her to bring Carolina Muse Literary & Arts Magazine to life. The multimedia arts magazine provides a platform for artists from all of the creative arts to share their message. In addition to her work as editor-in-chief of Carolina Muse, Madison works as a social media manager in Western North Carolina.Devann Donovan, from Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, has curated an artistic career rooted in her personal narrative. Armed with an MFA from Winthrop University, she possesses a unique ability to weave the threads of her life into captivating artworks that transcend mediums and elicit profound emotions. Devann’s practice is a playful exploration, with a constantly changing attraction to new mediums that leaves no medium untested. Her work knows no bounds, as she navigates from paintings & textiles to sculptures & videos. She has showcased from North Carolina to California, and most recently, Spartanburg, Columbia, and a solo show, Forget Me Knots, in Rock Hill, SC. Currently residing in Rock Hill with her husband and three dogs, Devann is the art instructor at York Technical College. She previously held the position of gallery manager at the Arts Council of York County and continues to program & teach children’s art classes there.Art Editor, Lilliana Cameron is a visual artist who has lived all over the Carolinas and is now residing in Greenville, SC. She is an alumni of the College of Charleston, where she majored in studio art & arts management with a minor in art history. In her art, she aspires to capture beauty in the small, everyday moments and inspire a sort of introspection. She works in a variety of mediums but has a strong love for oil paint, watercolor, and charcoal.Dance Editor, Rush Johnston (they/them) is a Bronx-based multimedia choreographer, poet, performer, lmmaker, and movement researcher. Rush creates at the intersection of visual & performing art, often exploring modes of artistic expression beyond the binary. As a queer, Native, neurodiverse artist, their work often plays with perception & identity, inviting viewers to question proposed truths of self & social misunderstanding. Social justice work is a key element of Rush’s creative vision, often encompassing themes of political turmoil, queerness, and mental health. Rush is the founder & artistic director Meet the Creators / Meet the TeamAshley Jones is a sculpture & ceramic artist from Lexington, North Carolina. She is currently studying at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for a BFA in sculpture and ceramics. Ashley took up wheel throwing when she was nineteen and discovered her love of 3D forms. She focuses on creating pieces that express complex experiences. She hopes her work resonates with viewers and oers a sense of connection.meet the teamdeeply rooted in the Southern tradition of storytelling, inuenced by her British & Southern heritage. In her debut poetry collection, Lindy Lee: Songs on Mill Hill, Kimberly chronicles the lives of textile workers in the Piedmont region with historical accuracy & imaginative insight. Kimberly is a former Carl Sandburg National Historic Site Writer-in-Residence, a TedX speaker, and a slam pioneer turned literary curator. She is a member of the South Carolina Humanities Council’s Speakers Bureau, and her work is archived in the South Carolina Poetry Archives at Furman University.

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Volume V • No. I • February 202545Music Editor, Jake Shores is a multidisciplinary artist from Greensboro, NC, with a background in theater, music, visual, and literary arts. He is a recent graduate from High Point University, receiving a degree in English with a focus on writing and a minor in theater. He plans to further pursue his education by studying poetry at the graduate level while continuing work on his other creative pursuits in a non-academic setting. He is inspired largely by the natural world and by his interactions with people. His work takes on the challenge of putting a name to the indescribable.Poetry Editor, Amanda Conover is a queer writer based in Raleigh, NC. She has a BA in English from Elon University and is currently a student in Arcadia University’s MFA in Creative Writing program, where she specializes in poetry. Amanda has been the poetry editor for Carolina Muse ever since volume I, issue II and absolutely loves everything she gets to do with the literary & arts magazine. Along with her studies and editor responsibilities, she works full time in scholarly publishing, getting to contribute to the publication of scientic articles in journals.Communications Strategist, Misbah Chhotani is based in Burlington, North Carolina. She received a Stories Editor, Aidan Mel is a writer living & working in the Greater Philadelphia area. He graduated from Elon University with a BA in creative writing and religious studies and is planning to continue his education by pursuing an MFA over the next few years. His work draws on his fascination with religion & mythology, examining the intersections between the two and their implications in his own life. Currently, he is working at an independent bookstore in Philadelphia, PA while continuing his writing.Newsletter Writer, Jenna Kay Duxbury (she/her) is a writer, musician, and painter living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She graduated from Western Michigan University with a Bachelor’s degree in professional writing and anthropology. As the project manager for an online community focused on nurturing the intersections of artistic expression & spirituality, Jenna regards the arts as a cornerstone for building community and enriching public & private life. In addition to her role as the newsletter writer for Carolina Muse, Jenna is the lead singer & keyboardist of Skeleton Crew, an alt rock cover band based in the Raleigh-Durham area. Currently she is learning how to rollerblade and play the trumpet.creditsCarolina Muse Literary & Arts Magazine is a multimedia arts magazine primarily showcasing young adult creators in the Carolinas. Our mission is to provide a multi-sensory, immersive platform for young adult creatives that reveals the way various art forms can work together to tell the true stories of our human experience. We publish short stories & scripts, poetry, art & photography, music, dance in a digital multimedia format on a tri-annual basis. Whether you submit a document, image le, audio le, or video le, our team loves to see creators test the boundaries of their art form to bring their passions, interpretations, experiences, and messages to life. Submit your creative work to us through Duosuma.Meet the Team / Creditsof Kaleid Dance Collective, an interdisciplinary artistic platform for creative experiments & exhibitions. Bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Currently, Misbah is preparing to pursue graduate studies in hopes of becoming an occupational therapist. In addition to her academic pursuits, Misbah actively contributes to various online communities. She recently joined the team at Carolina Muse, where she lends her expertise to curating engaging social media content. Outside of this role, Misbah serves as an admin for a worldwide mental health Facebook group, providing support & resources to individuals in need. She also acts as a moderator for the Dermot Kennedy Discord community, fostering a welcoming and inclusive environment for fans of the artist.

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