body languages

bod·y lan·guage // the process of communicating nonverbally through conscious or unconscious gestures and movements

Frost by Jacob Lucas — Frost *by Jacob Lucas*

Portfolio by Jacob Lucas

Jacob Lucas is a student at Columbia College Chicago studying animation. When he's not busy working on animation, you can find him taking photographs, speaking French, cooking, or riding his bike to a local coffee shop.

Pas de Deux
by caroline o'mahoney

the fragility shocks you
when it cracks
snaps
I just wanted to make sure
a grasp too tight
on two beings blown together
desperately clutching your way through the toolbox
buried under forgotten possessions
the delicacy in which you piece it
back together with this
translucent substance
sat watching and wondering
how long it’ll hold
and
who is holding who now

—Caroline O'Mahoney is an actor who has only recently started to write, both poetry and performance pieces but has always been an avid reader with a keen interest in history, literature and performance.

daphne
by Rachel Hertzberg

One winter I felt roots moving under my skin.
Something shifting, pulling me to the ground.
It started with a swelling under my left eye.
Itching and silent as mountains forming,
the earth cracking so slowly that it is silent.

The lids forced shut, the lashes crushed together.
This is not blindness.
This is waiting, season after season,
watching rotten berries fall,
wafting yeast and sulfur.

First one eye, then the other
then finally the body.
Memory seeded in my arms and grew
new branches, even as my hands
grew stiff as bark.
Train whistles at night, the wheezing
of a screen door and phantom children
scratching at my breast.
Warmth made my flesh unholy so I stayed outside.

That winter, the geese started to eat snow.
The sky was white for months
vast and terrible. The pond was too warm
to freeze and the flock did not fly
south. Inside my wooden skin,
I was cool and still as a library, but outside
the geese were desperate not to melt.
They gathered in the rushes, every night calling
to the constellations:
Why did Orion forget to send us home?

They gulped mouthfuls of pure snow. Beaks snapping,
they could not be sated of the cold.
Preserve us, petrify us.
We cannot decay any longer.
The snow killed them and nobody knew but me.

—Rachel Hertzberg is a student at Bryn Mawr College and a graduate of the Iowa Young Writers' Studio. She is originally from Minneapolis. Her writing can also be found in The Rusty Nail and Parallax Online.

clair de lune
by mary frances eshleman

—Mary Frances Eshleman is a graduate of Alma College, with a double major in Art and English. Her artwork has been published in the Pine River Anthology and has been exhibited in the Michigan Small Colleges Art Exhibition. She completed her 2016 senior show capstone at Alma College. A proud Hufflepuff-borderline-Gryffindor, she enjoys playing piano and clarinet when not hunting horcruxes.

Hesitation
by elizabeth gibson

Her hair is a tide of honeycomb surf,
her laboured breath forming a circle of smoke.
Her eyes flicker green between mourning and mirth.

She and her steed straddle ocean and turf,
feeling the absence of blanket and cloak.
Her hair is a tide of honeycomb surf.

She cradles her visions of wellness and worth,
of strumming a banjo or scaling an oak.
Her eyes flicker green between mourning and mirth.

She kisses the saddle and fastens the girth,
hears faint echoes of bluegrass and folk.
Her hair is a tide of honeycomb surf.

On perfume of fire and dampness of earth
her traitor legs wobble and feeble lungs choke.
Her eyes flicker green between mourning and mirth.

She prays for a death that can lead to a birth;
the world is the shell and she is the yolk.
Her hair is a tide of honeycomb surf.
Her eyes flicker green between mourning and mirth.

—Elizabeth Gibson studies at the University of Manchester, UK. She has had work published in a number of British journals including The Cadaverine, Myths of the Near Future, London Journal of Fiction and Ink, Sweat & Tears. She blogs at http://elizabethgibsonwriter.blogspot.co.uk and tweets at @Grizonne.

Five Ways of Looking at a Moment
by Matthew Fairhurst

I. Alone in the hall,
I have to leave. At which
she steps forward,
hugs me,
and steps back.

II. As I wonder where I am,
she embraces me
and steps away, veiled
by the future: perhaps
a wife, mother; a strand
of greying hair.

III.   How did her embrace shatter me? -
the waves of her hair, her
slight frame in my arms
the curve of her slim
waist, her eyes -
   I can’t -
her body brushes mine -

IV.   Was there the slightest,
unspeakable hint of
hesitation before she
stepped towards me,
or before she let me go?

V.   I am not certain that
a hug is required on parting ways
so I disengage,
try to read her eyes,
see nothing.

—Matthew Fairhurst is an Upper Sixth student from Gateshead, England. He is interested in foreign languages, philosophy, and jazz; although he loves poetry, he is a frustratingly insufficient poet. Seamus Heaney taught him to appreciate poetry, and Robert Pinsky taught him to love it.

Portfolio by joshua skinner

Joshua Skinner is a freelance photographer and cinematographer, particularly interested in the medium of film. When not filming, working on set, or taking photos, he can most likely be found in his own personal darkroom developing film.