Umlaut Magazine 2019

Umläut Magazine Staff
Faculty Advisor
Heather Woodward
Editor-in-Chief
Stella Pfahler
Technical Support
Isaiah Dufort
Editorial Team - Writing
Julieta Roll
Ren Weber
Solange Baker
Huckleberry Shelf
Editorial Team - Visual Art
Michelle Ibarra
Sasha Cravis
Additonal Ediotrial Team
Char Burns
Darren Lam
Michael Woodard
Umläut Magazine would like to give special thanks to Caitlyn Boyle, Isaiah Dufort, Andy Padlo,
and all of our generous Indiegogo contributors.
Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts
555 Portola Drive
San Francisco, California 94131
umlautkingdom@gmail.com
www.sfsota.org
Text and cover printed by H&H Imaging in San Francisco, CA
Text set in Adobe Garamond.
Cover: “Editors’ Animals” by Sasha Cravis
Interior layout by Isaiah Dufort & Stella Pfahler
©2019 by Umläut Magazine. No part of this magazine may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the contributors, except
for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

On the Hill of Fish, Rae Kim 5
Pink Lemonade Rose, Nadja Goldberg 6
Misty Forest, Cindy Nguyen 6
What Everybody Wants, Eva Whitney 7
Spirits, Kai Caceres 8
Cliffside, Cindy Nguyen 8
Street Corner, Cindy Nguyen 9
As Rain Purifies, Xuan Ly 9
White Moon, Ren Weber 10
City Parking Garage, Nadja Goldberg 10
Environmental Map of San Francisco, Kyle Trefny 11
In My Room, Sasha Cravis 12
Orchid/Cactus, Julieta Roll 13
Abraham, Hannah Duane 14
Not Too Religious. I’m Just Devout, Michelle Ibarra 15
Oklahoma Blues, Nina Berggren 16
Sharpshooter, Sasha Cravis 17
How To Be A Good Farmer, Ren Weber 17
I Called Me Gum Tree, Puck Hartsough 18
Regresar, Michelle Ibarra 19
pollinated in eden, Charlie Persuk 20
Ice Guardian/Snow Leopard in Blue, Kyle Trefny 21
The Ooze, Rae Kim 22
Man on Motorbike, Sophia Shen 22
An Autobiography Through City Streets, Huck Shelf 23
Liquor Store, Nina Berggren 26
Running Through Sugar Cane, Kenzo Fukuda 27
Dome, Esmé Lee-Gardner 28
Girl in White, Sophia Shen 29
When I’m Asleep, I Swim, Rae Kim 29
Dream of an Orange County Highway 30
Little My in September, Tess Horton 30
Tales of a Sailor, Solange Baker 31
Sunset and Boat, Sophia Shen 32
Nai Nai, Sophia Shen 33
Phoenix Climaate Change March/Mural, Assorted 34
Poppy, CA, Michelle Ibarra 35
I Blow In..., Sophia Shen 36
Cherry Season, Stella Pfahler 37
The new moon and the full moon, Max Chu 38
Word Setting, Michael Woodard 39
Lines, Andres Perez 39
At the River, Nina Berggren & Liam Miyar Mullan 40
Untitled, Michael Shagalov 42
Reminiscing, Eva Whiney 43
I Cannot Do it Better, Kaia Hobson 44
Tiger, Carolyn Chan 45
Makeup for Men, Isaac Karliner-Li 46
The Water Follows, Eva Whitney & Nina Berggren 47
Le Bon Mot, Emily Kozhina 48

UMLAUT 2019 5
On the Hill of Fish
Rae Kim
Once we looked into the water for wrinkled reflection.
Now we see ourselves in the water as far as the gravel road,
From the trees, from Heaven,
The river is a system of veins,
The lake is a new bruise,
At night women birth blue children into the dust
Everything is smaller—catfish, quetzals—and poisoned.
Summer hangs like white hair
Down here, we make our own heat.
The night swims with the sound
of cats eating fish eyes,
And the morning is full of dead cats.
Driving away on the gravel road,
Hear how the air is hazy with keening.

6 UMLAUT 2019
Above: Pink Lemonade Rose Nadja Goldberg Below: Misty Forest Cindy Nguyen

UMLAUT 2019 7
What Everybody Wants
Eva Whitney
Chapter 1. WHAT EVERYBODY WANTS
First, I want a big truck so when I drive down the street people see me. Then, I want new mulch by my
pool and I want three Irish men to spend three weeks on installing it so my neighbors think I have sons
that are home from college. I also want those three Irish men to put up a fence around my yard so the deer
stop feasting on the moss in between my patio stones, and after that I want them to go to Bill up the street
and tell him I am no longer going to get his mail from the post office just because he is old.
Chapter 2. YOU CAN’T WIN AN ARGUMENT
And if Bill has a problem with that, here is my business card.
Chapter 3. A FORMULA THAT WILL WORK WONDERS FOR YOU
When guests come over, I buy a rotisserie chicken from the supermarket and skin it with my bare hands like I
caught in the wild. I feed the guests the naked chicken (which, without the skin, still has a lovely, light seasoning)
and feed my dog the chicken skin so he’ll pass out from the high cholesterol content when the guests are over
and I don’t have to shut him in the laundry room which always makes people believe I am an animal abuser.
Chapter 4. AN APPEAL THAT EVERYBODY LIKES
When the guests are all drugged up on supermarket chicken, I like to bring my daughter out to perform
on the electric keyboard. Her rendition of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” is exquisite and packed with
emotion. And when her playing slows, I pretend to lovingly bend over her and I’ll give her a small kick in
the shin so she quickens right back up again. Some guests only come for her performances.
Chapter 5. IF YOU WANT TO GATHER HONEY, DON’T KICK OVER THE BEEHIVE
How I won the court case concerning the neutrality of dogs on certain premises: First, I became angry. I
no longer wanted to hear Bill or anyone else complain about my dog stepping on to their lawns during his
“business.” I tried to explain that my dog, like all other dogs, doesn’t know the concept of a sidewalk, and
to him, it is just grass but harder and your lawn is just like his but not. Then, I hired a lawyer for me and
a therapist for my dog so he wouldn’t take this personally and potentially bark about it later and I took the
issue to court. I presented the law that “all domesticated mammals under the height of four feet and width
of three feet are declared neutral on any privately owned property as long as they do not remain there
for more than a total of five minutes.” The city government invited all of my neighbors to this hearing
but thankfully Bill, the only person I suspected would object, has stopped receiving his mail, so no one
showed up and the law passed because who comes to Mill Brook anyways.
Chapter 6. GIVE A DOG A GOOD NAME
My dog is nameless. I call it “it” or “he” and when it runs around my house like those Country Club
moms prepping for Black Friday, I have no way to stop it. On its birth certificate, it says nothing because
it is a kennel dog and kennel dogs don’t have birth certificates.
Chapter 7. IF YOU’RE WRONG, ADMIT IT
Dear Bill,
I’m sorry you missed your sister’s wake because I didn’t pick up the invitation from the post office.
I am going to start getting my boy who picks up my mail to get yours too.
Sincerely,
--

8 UMLAUT 2019
Spirits
Kai Caceres
This house is full of spirits. Ghosts that haunt pictures and shadows that haunt the furniture. Be-
cause he sat there, and she’s just here, and we all know who that silhouette is. This woman came here one
day and gave me a present.
She gave me a frame for a picture.
For a picture. A frame for a picture to frame a ghost and a shadow of a memory or a spirit.
Because this house is full of spirits. It’s brimming with them. They can’t help but float like balloons to
the ceiling of this house. They push each other, because there really isn’t enough space for them all in this
house. Small house. Quaint house, they say, even though it’s really just small because of the walls pulsing
with heartbeats and the furniture seems to vibrate along with them.
I live in this house full of spirits and now I have a picture frame. What should I do with it? Should
I cut it into pieces the size of a baby’s toenail? Or should I hammer it onto the wall, to frame the peeling
paint? I will never put it around a picture. If I put it around a picture, as implied, the spirits will feel closed
in and fenced off to the world- they like to run free in my mind.
Cliffside Cindy Nguyen

UMLAUT 2019 9
As Rain Purifies
Xuan Ly
I catch prisms on my tongue before they
Shatter on the ground, already touched by Moonlight,
Sunlight,
Streetlight…
Swallow,
And cleanse my intestines; isn’t this the Holy Water? Purer than drops that
Baptized me…
I am never cold nor warm in the presence of precipitation,
There is nothing to feel; instead, I am overcome by a freshness without Consequence.
And when the Ceremony is finished, I shake
Evergreen trees for blessed pines
For safekeeping in a
Mason Jar.
Street Corner Cindy Nguyen

10 UMLAUT 2019
White Moon
Ren Weber
Behind the house I was
watching the white moon sever branches.
Scolded for dirt on my hands—
the screen-door slammed
like a rural clap of thunder

Last night the storm brought
a huskwind through—and—through
The sky turned ginger
and Dawn grew into the wallpaper—
but I was still dreaming of a white moon.

I grow ten feet with the timbers,
tower over saturday evening—
and the kitchen always smells like meat, the way
Appalachia keeps sweating stockyards and steel
—and the moths accumulate in the bathtub.
City Parking Garage Nadja Goldberg

UMLAUT 2019 11
Environmental Map of San Francisco Kyle Trefny

12 UMLAUT 2019
In My Room Sasha Cravis

UMLAUT 2019 13
Orchid
Julieta Roll
There was a baby born in Jalisco sand and they
looked in her eyes and called her Orchid. Orchid
like sliding down a dirt mound like iguana’s molt
like a town swelling from a single rusted tugboat to
eight miles wide. Moping in a humid market her
mother only learned to sell keychains and jamaica;
the remains of afternoons laying in spare room with
the rattle of washing machines. Orchid swears her
hair tastes like shells and the dog under the tortilla
stand so she bathes in Pacific and untangles the
knots. After, she dreams of Puerto Vallarta as an
island, severed by a heavy crab claw. Tell me, she
Cactus .
Julieta Roll .
Land where rain is a permanence and salt is
harvested, a boy is born alongside an Aloe Vera
plant. Green and hazy in the eyes they call him
Cactus and he is left to grow in the humidity of
leaves. Tell me, what was it like to kick up sand?
Watching the grains blind a mother’s eyes you run
wildly because the Pacific backwash is stinging and
there is no where you are not raw. What a story it is
they taunt you, a boy born prickled with no whim or
waltz. Tell them it is planned like the depressions in
riverbeds and the way birds unfurl themselves. Tell
me of standing in a puddle of orchids, letting the body vanish

14 UMLAUT 2019
Abraham
Hannah Duane
My father used to tell me I was born near death, little body only four pounds
And as I watch the world, I wonder if this distance has not escaped me.
Perhaps I am perched; rather apart in my watching
A spider in the windowsill, spindly and quiet.
Or furthermore we are all apart:
Watching the watchers—an unknown display
Of decorum. We are all Abraham, in three parts, blind faith
Perhaps this is why
He speaks so tenderly—
A rabbi at my synagog once proclaimed
“I am a son of Abraham, and I am a feminist!”
Arms outstretched, he hugged the congregation
All those hundred, the watchers—I do wonder, what it felt like
To proclaim proudly, elevated, watched
In the everlasting pride of you.

UMLAUT 2019 15
Not Too Religious. I’m Just Devout Michelle Ibarra

16 UMLAUT 2019
Oklahoma Blues
Nina Berggren
In Okmulgee, Oklahoma I followed a faint rhythm
Into an abandoned bar

Even the spiders looked absent. My frayed pants swept the floorboards

Cracked glass light massaged my back.

A tap-tap and hum
Led me to a corner

Where a man like wood murmured “I ain’t drunk”
Cigarette in his mouth

Moving more than his lips.

He looked right through me
But sang a little louder

So I sang too for my son in San Francisco I’ve forgotten how he looks.

I sang for my wife in her best church clothes
Wrinkles smiling too.

God—why do you scare me so?
Why have you kept me here?

Are you in this poor man music-making.

I left—onto streets sagging with grief
Tattered curtains spying from their window sills. Corn fields of hope waving me over
In the searing sun

I reawakened Remembering real work like my

“Honey I’m home’s.”

UMLAUT 2019 17
How to be a Good Farmer
Ren Weber
To feel oranges properly you must have hard palms; to be a good farmer you must
imagine your orchards lost to winter. Unhinge front door, mahogany molted; Re-
member: at six the dogs are let out for supper. The sound of the faucet turns into
music, hay fever in a handbasket. When there is frosted gravel on your soles, the
cows dream of an autumn hour. Come night, you’ll hear them dance in the barn.
On weekends, stay inside. Watch the corn crawl up to the window, corral the corn-
bread into a pan or fashion a nice stew. When father teaches you a tractor, your
hands will waver, so stick to spades; you will not debeak the turkeys come winter.
One time you’ll hear something stir behind the cow barn—father will tell you it was
a wild dog. Something’s gotta give, your mother will say one night; she is a screen
door slam with khaki pants on a Sunday, after-church cherries. Outside, the tractor
will whirr in agreement.
Sharpshooter Sasha Cravis

18 UMLAUT 2019
I Called Me Gum Tree
Puck Hartsough
When PopPop planted the old gum tree in our backyard, I was five years old and pink bubbles
floated in my mind. Dad lifted me to tickle the leaves every day, Mom helped me check each green
twig for a foil-wrapped stick, and I cried when Daniel laughed at me and said gum trees don’t grow
gum. PopPop took me aside—

let me tell you a secret
what, poppop?
this little tree will grow gum, soon as it’s old enough to harvest. i’ll get you your gum

And so I waited for years, threw out roots of my own to anchor by the tree, and when the day came
when PopPop said we were ready, I was twelve years old and my bark was starting to feel heavy and
wrong. I didn’t tell PopPop, just waited excitedly as he collected sap from the tall young tree and set
it out to dry. That day I drifted with the dandelion seeds, excitement and impatience dropping my
stiff bark and letting me fly. Daniel laughed, still, all of fourteen, but he was excited too and I knew
it, so I laughed back. When we chewed on the sap I imagined I was a root breaking through stone,
but sweeter. Daniel spit it out, sticking out his tongue and gagging dramatically. I chewed like a cow
in a field of sweet grass. PopPop smiled.

The day PopPop passed quietly in his sleep, I was fifteen years old and harvested as much sap from
the old gum tree as I could without hurting it. I sat against its trunk and cried, because I’d never be
able to tell PopPop why my bark had always fit wrong, I’d never be able to tell him that I’d started
peeling the wrong bark off, just a little, just when I was alone, stealing Daniel’s shirts and whispering
words and names that seemed to fit just right. I never chewed another stick of store-bought gum.
Daniel called me crazy. Mom and Dad called me grieving. I called me gum tree. I chewed so much
sap that summer that I became a tree, stretching branches up and roots down, planting myself next
to our old tree and ignoring the world.

When Dad cut down the old gum tree PopPop had planted forever ago in our backyard, I was
twenty years old, and too far away to know or protest. When I got home, my leaves withered in an
instant, because where was my tree? Our tree, me and PopPop’s? Where was it? Dad didn’t quite look
at me; my parents hadn’t made eye contact with me in three years, since my seventeenth birthday
when I told them maybe I was a flower with petal and stem, my bark still doesn’t fit and I need help
fixing it. it’s in the way, he said when I asked why, why our tree was gone. it hurts too much. I sat on
the stump and cried. Not a drip of sap was left for me to chew, not a leaf of PopPop’s hair or a sliver
of his roots.

When I planted a gum tree in my backyard, I was miles away from the old stump, from Mom and
Dad who still wouldn’t look me in the eye, from Daniel who had stopped laughing at me. I was thir-
ty five years old. My daughter was two. I held her up to stroke the sapling’s leaves, and told her—

in a few years, you won’t ever want to be anything but a gum tree again

UMLAUT 2019 19
Regresar Michelle Ibarra

20 UMLAUT 2019
pollinated in eden
Charlie Persuk
to whom it may concern:
it is hard to write a letter to someone who slipped
through my life, leaving only soil under my fingernails.
did your voice bloom into dandelions?
did it stunt into daisies, or become twice as
fragrant as roses?
i don’t know what to think of you.
i don’t know what you’ll think of me either.
will i still taste like stars on the roof of your mouth?
will your words cleanse my palette in the way sage
cleanses my household?
what’s become of you?
moved away to more fertile soil.
your roots grew through my veins
supplying me with nourishing i didn’t know existed.
i wish i had leeched on for longer.
you tore yourself away too soon
to experience my “in bloom.”
in the way condensation turns to precipitation
turns to evaporation
turns to condensation
i turned upon meeting your cloud formations
it’s a shame that clouds come and go
but rain falls and falls.
connecting again won’t feel the same.
the bees of lands we escaped
bring pollen that makes me sick
rather than sentimental.
your newest words,
new worlds
stunt my thoughts, barricade my photosynthesis.
we are two flowers sprouted in the same nursery
but planted in different gardens.
maybe you don’t think of me at all -
but i know you do.
for someone who used to tell me when you thought of
me
all you could see was
green
green eyes
green love
makes me realize when you punctured my soul
i punctured your heart right back.
my growth depended on you,
but my nutrients stopped short.
your sugar levels got too low,
not even fertilizer could help your lost sun
lost vitamins
lost love.
my growth was stained in shades of red -
gardeners with no knowledge of how to take care of me
ruined my roots -
and i had no room to reciprocate your green light.
but maybe you don’t sit and write
metaphoric poetry
with lilies and tulips on paper made out of trees
grown in the garden of eden.
maybe i’m too hung up on lost friendships
the changing of the seasons
and what could have been.
maybe i think too much and write too little
hopingforaresponsetoaletteri’llneverendup sendingout.
life has a way of changing any certainty to a maybe
and any maybe to a certainty.
so maybe
this paper from the trees of the garden of eden -
pollinated with the ancestors of the bees
accompanying us -
will fold itself into an origami boat
and dissolve in a lake
which will evaporate into the clouds
and precipitate down into your drinking water
where you’ll take a sip of my words
and the water we so often forget
that we need
to survive.
and maybe
if all this happens
you’ll write back
and i’ll receive your response
via the water cycle.
sincerely, yours.

UMLAUT 2019 21
ABOVE: Ice Guardian
RIGHT: Snow Leopard in Blue
Kyle Trefny

22 UMLAUT 2019
The Ooze
Rae Kim
Here’s to muddy socks that show your knees rising like red suns over sand. Here’s to rain as bitter
as almonds, here’s to embittered water. I want to be adored, so here’s to sticky adoration. Here’s to
the folly of feeling. Here’s to aloneness, confusion, the plastic cup that drinks like a leech. Here’s to
making lists, lists, and lists. Here’s to the box turtle eggs we crouched deep in the riverbank to eat,
here’s to things that manifest around particularly circular currents. Here’s to watching the buttery
movement of the river and pickling in silence. Here’s to thunder blooming thirteen miles away as
loud as bougainvillea. Here’s to the alligator man lying in his fragile fishing hat, assimilating into the
overgrowth. Here’s to my dreams of drizzly mornings. Here’s to girl’s skin on the overcast sky, tender
and mild. Here’s to a fried cypress and finally, finally, finally, lightning.
Man on Motorbike Sophia Shen

UMLAUT 2019 23
An Autobiography Through City Streets
Huckleberry Shelf
Since arriving in the city, having recently escaped the awkward confines of childhood, I have
been taking walks. These walks are firstly aimless and secondly purposeful, in that they have no set des-
tination or end goal, but the walking itself is entirely purposeful. The purpose and aimlessness feed off
of each other; without one, the walks would be to my detriment. However, both qualities taken togeth-
er make my walks an extremely enriching way to pass the time. In the entire time of taking these walks,
I have never left the city; rather, as time has gone on, I have let my life in the city change the shape of
my walks.
The initial impetus behind these walks was a desire to get to know the city, but once this aim
was successfully accomplished, it became an afterthought. This initial goal lasted me about one year;
I would get myself lost, and search the city for my house. When I became able to locate my house
efficiently from any given point, I considered stopping, however I kept at my walks. In fact, I increased
their frequency, moving from once a week to twice, and eventually thrice.
The trick to finding my house is this: every day, a massive flock of pigeons flies over the city.
In the mornings, they disperse in all directions from the park that sprawls out just behind my gar-
den fence. In the evenings, they fly back towards the park, since that is where they nest. For about six
months, I simply followed them out into the city, and back towards my home, until my knowledge of
the city became essentially instinctual, and I found myself navigating home without looking up at the birds.
Once I knew the city, I maintained the practice of walking solely out of boredom. At that point
I was out of a job, or perhaps I quit soon after. I no longer remember, and that is not the point. The
point was that I walked, without aim or impetus. On these walks, I would meet people, random people
going about their daily routines, and talk with them. I would then try to reunite with them weekly,
knowing that they would be in roughly the same places at the same times every week. In this way, my
route temporarily lost its aimlessness. I had meetings every day with a fantastic variety of people. I still
remember a few of them, although many others have slipped my mind. There was a bank teller from
the bank down my street, who would normally pass by my house some five minutes after I left it. In
response, I built a five-minute delay into my routine so that I would be leaving as he passed, and could
engage him in some conversation before he needed to clock in at the bank. He only wanted to discuss fi-
nancial topics, such as stocks and investments, which I had little knowledge of, but I let him teach me, for
two to four minutes every morning, before he had to leave my company for work. He was ambitious, and
would frequently update me on the status of his quest for promotion. His ambition, he confided, was to
rise to the rank of investment banker or loan analyst. After whispering to me of such ambitions, he would
always glance around nervously, as though a coworker or supervisor might be eavesdropping.
There was a teacher who always sat at a certain cafe in the city’s main shopping center on her
lunch break. She ordered one of the three sandwiches on the cafe menu, and a white tea. I would sit
with her, and talk about books and films and that sort of thing. At first she seemed apprehensive, but
after my repeated attempts to befriend her, she came to correctly realize that I bore her no ill will. She
began to make sure that there was space for me at her table, and would visibly brighten when I arrived.
She taught fifth grade, and would sometimes tell me about her students or the curriculum. Eventually, we
even had a set meeting place, a small table by the window of the cafe, through which we watched the busy
passersby. I was always thankful that I was not one of them; that my walking was blessed with leisure.

24 UMLAUT 2019
There was a young gardener, who in walking home from work at precisely three in the afternoon
would cross my path at the corner of Brewer and Fourth. He talked to me about plants, and we eventu-
ally settled into a pleasant pattern in which he taught me about a different plant every week. He would
describe the work he had done that day, and in time I would ask him about a certain species he had men-
tioned, and he would be off. I didn’t care about plants in particular, but I did care about knowing things,
as many things as I possibly could. Sometimes I would write down the things he taught me in a little
notebook with a navy blue cloth cover. Later, when I lost that book, it felt like losing part of my mind.
There were many others, but I don’t remember them now.
It was then, I believe, that I quit my job, and I switched from walking only three days a week
to five. I felt invested in these people, and in gaining as much knowledge from them as I could. I set
myself adrift in these people, and made their company the purpose of my walking. Every morning, I
would plan my route based on the people I could meet. And so, for the first time, my walking involved
preparation and planning. I had enough money saved to live frugally for the rest of my life, or so I
hoped.
The new, additional, purpose to my walking became to learn. I had seen the city for so long
through my eyes, and now I tried to see it through the eyes of each of my various new friends and
acquaintances. I found new landmarks, and the ones I already knew found new meaning. I learned the
depth of each person’s knowledge and experience, as I had once learned the contours of the city. It was
thrilling to once again not know anything.
My friends’ routines began to change, as routines do. One week, the gardener mentioned that
he had finished the job that had necessitated his crossing this particular corner at this particular time,
and the next week he was gone, and I was forced to go to the library and teach myself about plants. I
did this for a few weeks, and took detailed notes, but soon became distracted.
My bank teller friend simply wasn’t there one morning. After waiting for an appropriate
amount of time, I inquired at the bank, and learned that he had been transferred. I considered visiting
him at his new location, but I didn’t want him to think I was obsessive, so I gave him up for lost. I
considered teaching myself about finance like I had done with plants, but after attempting to read a few
books, I found the subject horribly boring, and abandoned it.
The teacher was the last to go. She was transferred to a school the next city over. She let me
know this before she left, and asked me to visit her, as she would only be one town over. I assured her I
would visit, despite knowing full well I would not. I never cross the city limits, as I have previously stated.
As soon as I had created a routine around these people, they broke theirs around me. If I had
before been adrift in them, I was now entirely adrift in myself. Without destinations or goals, I walked
more slowly, and with less enthusiasm, until the aim of my walks seemed simply to be lethargy. Every
morning I left my house with my head down and my feet already dragging.
In addition to losing my energy, I lost my charisma, which was how I had made all of those
friends to begin with. Whereas before, when I had approached strangers, they had been willing or even
happy to talk with me, now they shied away, or ignored me, or stiffly brushed by. More and more, as I
felt increasingly abandoned and alone, an aura of misanthropy seemed to settle over me and drive the
rest of the world away. The truth is, the only person towards whom I had ill will was myself. I blamed
the whole of my nature for the loss of my friends , and their abandonment of me. I blamed myself for
failing to see that my acquaintanceship had at best been for them a pleasant diversion, and that when it
became inconvenient, no one would seek me out.

UMLAUT 2019 25
The purpose of my walks became to punish myself for the suffering I had caused myself. I be-
gan to retrace the old routes I had taken. I would stop at the same places I used to stop, and each time
I would again feel the absence of the people I had relied upon. I reopened these wounds, day after day,
until my walks became a torture. But I kept at my walks because I believed that was what I deserved.
Eventually, the walking became a means of coping. I numbed to my daily suffering, and came
to rely on my routine, using it to convince myself that I wasn’t entirely useless. Without the walking,
I may have shot myself, or something equally absurd and drastic. In walking to cope, I once again be-
came aimless. I allowed my feet to navigate, and mourned my lost happiness, and my lost friendships. I
ran into the bank teller about a year after he was transferred. I waved at him as he walked towards me,
and stopped when he came close, as if to talk to him, but he stared at me as if I had turned some foul
color and quickly pushed past. This made everything worse.
My head hung so low that I walked into a few walls during this stage of my lethargy, but it was
fine: my feet were as good navigators as my eyes. At least the pigeons hadn’t left me, and lacking any
human company, I returned to following them. For a time I slept near them, bringing a sleeping bag to
the park and arranging myself under the trees, but as winter approached, I abandoned this indulgence
to preserve my own health.
With winter, there came some relief from my depression. It didn’t leave, but it seemed to
numb. The discomfort of walking in the ice and snow forced me to move out of my own head and
into the present moment. My loneliness became more of a general ache than a pressing concern. The
walks no longer had any justification at all. Realizing this, I began to feel free, and I leaned into their
uselessness. The simple act of walking became a source of pleasure, much as it had once been. I was no
longer a child, but my legs were still as sprightly and strong as they were then, and so I walked longer
and longer distances, slept less, and even began to run sometimes. It was a new pleasure watching my
surroundings blur, surroundings which I had seen slowly pass by every day for decades, now disappear-
ing more quickly as I picked up speed. I enjoyed how running deconstructed the world around me, and
I enjoyed the feeling of fatigue, a feeling that I had long ago forgotten, and with which I was having a
much-needed reunion.
The only problem left was the simple problem of boredom. While walking had once healed
my boredom, it now began to provoke it. No matter how often I changed my route or my speed, I had
been walking in the same city for my whole adult life, and doing nothing but. In my mind, I kept see-
ing the teacher, and I began thinking about how she had so easily uprooted herself. This soon seemed
to be the only way to change any aspect of my routine in a meaningful way: uproot myself. Leave.
I tried twice. The first time I barely made it to the city limits before I turned around and
hurried home. The second time I made it past, and walked for five minutes before fear overwhelmed
me—came flooding in with every breath of foreign air, every glance of foreign terrain, and I ran back to
the city, and into the park behind my house, so that I could sleep with the pigeons.
But when I reached the park, the pigeons weren’t there. I waited for them for a few days, in my
sleeping blanket beneath a tree, before I understood that they must have flown beyond the city walls.
Perhaps they had already arrived in a new city and had started to establish new routines and flight
patterns. Or perhaps they were still searching for a suitable place to nest, somewhere they could settle
down and pull fat off scraps of bread. Anyway, the park remained empty.
I returned to my walks, because what else was I going to do? Eventually there would be pigeons
again, and people to talk to. That is how life goes. The purpose of the walks became to get to the next
walk, and the next one, until things got better.

26 UMLAUT 2019
Liquor Store Nina Berggren

UMLAUT 2019 27
Running Through Sugar Cane
Kenzo Fukuda
We
slept in the days
When the aroma of grass
and the wisps of pollen were floating
It almost felt like the sky was mine
and the ground was yours.
And your winds that
tickled the trees
Could simply,
Balance the clouds and hold what I could not.
Held hands as sisters and watched under palm trees as the sun sank beneath the Pacific
But I...
Realized alone, across the fields of Sugar Cane, I was lost.
That I could never handle the absence of your face against the stars of mine.
You told me only Gods could keep us apart. And I believed you.
but Atlas, a Titan
held the rays on the horizon from shining and I know now that
And the earth could
shift underfoot, tectonic plates rolling away. You on one side, I on the other and
We
are only mortal.
And as the sky began to screech
with the flocks of bomber planes,
the sirens dulled out by screams and fire
Carrying gas masks in my arms
with men crying out to their gods
I watched as the dirt scorched like gunpowder
the wind cease into strained gasps and coughs and the worlds we knew, glowed.
That night. Lit by the burning Sugar Cane
I ran.

Ran through the sugar cane, with only the thoughts of you.

28 UMLAUT 2019
Dome Esmé Lee-Gardner

UMLAUT 2019 29
When I’m Asleep, I Swim
Rae Kim
When I’m asleep, I swim. And it’s just like being awake. One summer night I felt washed by
snapped green branches that whispered white mist like cauldrons, and went to sleep. To swim in a
wide warm sea that was sighing on the sand.
You were apparently on Honey’s pull out couch. Honey is always silent unless she is thrown.
The little hills on her lawn were drowned gophers, the hose was a spring of living water. The Deliver-
er. The hose was hymnal, it filled the world.
Honey, as slow as her namesake, and as golden, Madonna of the flies. I heard the car choke
in the driveway, under a pillar of streetlight. I heard her spongy footsteps in front lawn, leaving white
footprints. After she touched your hand it came away sticky, sweet.
My pillow dripped and made oceans in your slippers. I heard your breath hold itself in the
dark, a bottle of pills chattering under the phantom lamplight. Dawn was still at low tide, muttering
under the window.
Girl in White Sophia Shen

30 UMLAUT 2019
Dream of an Orange County Highway
Rae Kim
Well, I think dreams are a good ointment for itching, a good starch for washing high school
uniforms white and crisp as papers all covered with checks and letters, for making the concrete in
the backyard bloom up with children’s toys, red balls and pink cars they can actually drive, and their
screeching that sounds like a door opening inside the heart of a country I left lonely.
My children have followed me here like ants. What do I know about drowning coastal
towns, about so many brown faces on a boat that it looks like a severed island? I drive and I drive,
the ocean and I separated by hours. I read the road for news.
I muddle my dreams, juice and spirits opening cool fields in my mind. To remember is to let
the sun fade them until they are gone.
My mother’s hands are brown like theirs, like my father’s spreading cancer, the spreading in
his brain, my mother’s dark room. They look sunburnt. I need to get out of the sun. I’ve put too
much money in my creams and acids, my luxurious brine. Their wrists are as slender as my daugh-
ter’s, my daughter whose hair grows lighter in the summer and falls in quiet sheets, my daughter
whose white friends carry heavy purses like I carried persimmons and pears in my suitcase.
Little My in September
Tess Horton
Little My in September sang
A ballad of green, swinging on
Her river swing.
She wanted nothing more but
To ring her Little hand with
A sip of reddish wine.
The water beneath her was an elderly body
Of blue-line wrinkles with a wise old mind:
He would speak to her, sometimes,
When Little My sang her song
On the last days of September on her swing.
“Oh, Little My, what is it you sing of?
The green and the birds, I see them, I do!
But is it what they truly ensue?”
Little My smiled and laughed:
“What a silly river, what a silly old man!
The green is my brother, but a little lamb:
He wishes he were here,
He would love to meet you!
But he’s as small as the tip of my nose.
That’s simply how it goes.”
Oh Little My fell off her swing,
Into the river, into the green,
And before she laughed between the seams
A beat of silence breathed: a wheeze
Broke into a hoot and then a sneeze
And before too long Little My was on her knees,
Pulled up by a Father, who prayed to Jeez
Us maybe wanted more wine, please?

UMLAUT 2019 31
Tales of a Sailor
Solange Baker
My father was a longshoreman,
Working way up high in the cranes—
Giant metal birds swinging their necks.
He told me,
Take a step back before you fix things.
Broken pipes, chairs,
Bird wings, crosses.
At night he’d disappear:
To bars with broken heating
And mismatched glasses,
Faded Italian flags drooped behind the counter.
My father was a Little Green Army Man:
Stuck on his plastic pedestal,
Bayonet pressed across his chest.
Father dearest, thank you
For teaching me how to
Work with my hands in sawdust and
Pick at my scrapes to callus my palms.
How to root myself in my bloodline and
Break my own bones for redemption.
Here’s something I can teach you:
How to mend old relationships worn to the bone.
And to know when to leave them on their meat hooks
In the cellar,
Swinging silently as they decompose.
At the end of it all,
When I am left cast in stone, curled like lovers in Pompeii,
When my body is knotted in the roots of an ancient oak,
I’ll find myself,
Thinking of you sitting on the pier,
Waiting for the boats to come in.

32 UMLAUT 2019
Sunset and Boat Sophia Shen

UMLAUT 2019 33
Nai Nai
Sophia Shen
I am that daughter, truly
The daughter of bound feet
The daughter of a country in despair
I am the wife of
Arranged marriages
The lover of a man who i remember
To be tall
I am the widow of
Emptiness
He is gone.
I am the mother of too many places at once
Because nowhere was ever good enough
Was ever safe enough
Because there was something in those six brown eyes filled with tears,
Not for losing but for forgetting
That told me we had to go
I am a woman of salty and sweet
Whether it was Chinese plums or
The taste of the sweat i earned from
Hours of rebuilding a life i thought had been
Destroyed beyond repair
Kumquats in the blazing summers
Angry droplets forming under my skin,
Will they ever learn to listen?
I remember what i used to know so easily as simple truths
I remember the footsteps on the well worn staircase
The boys running with the wind through their hair
I remember the taste of thai cooking in the rain
I remember the path to the gravestone of my beloved
I keep it here in my mind
And sometimes i dream that i walk there alone
Down the red stone pathways
Along the rows of stoic tombstones
Cracked and desecrated
And hope that someday i will lie here as well
A soul of the golden sand.

34 UMLAUT 2019
“The world came to San Francisco
in September 2018. People came to
walk, politicians came to talk. And
artist groups with paint and chalk.
Students made a phoenix hawk.
They said “our futures depend
on our planet”. Maybe they were
heard. Only the choices of lots and
lots of people - and me, and you...
and Time - will tell.”
—Kyle Trefny
ABOVE: Phoenix Climate March
AT RIGHT: Phoenix Climate Mural
Kyle Trefny, Grace McGee,
SOTA Environmental Club, and
SFUSD community members

UMLAUT 2019 35
Poppy, CA Michelle Ibarra

36 UMLAUT 2019
I Blow In... Sophia Shen

UMLAUT 2019 37
Cherry Season
Stella Pfahler
In my garden there is lemon zest weeping from the lattices
brass to the hilt where it nearly cuts our hands
beneath the morning glories draped like silent scarves.
I swear,
I turned the earth only months ago
making it new and well-mixed,
I mean rotting - teeming with worms
but it has grown harsh and does not give
like cutting into shallow metal,
like digging into steel.
I want to brew tea
from soft red boxes in the mudpile
and wait for my firewood
to grow soggy and useless.
I want
to watch my cherry tree sicken with age
and hack her branches charitably
before they bloom,
leaving them to be old women’s fingers
on the curb, collecting
I want
lemon zest leaking up the lanai
into my window boxes going to seed
I want
a clutch of feathers and a hundred golden things

38 UMLAUT 2019
The new moon and the full moon
Max Chu
“and in the evening (when the sky is on fire), Heaven and earth become my great open cathedral.”
-eden ahbez, full moon
HE WHO CAN DO THIS HAS THE WHOLE WORLD WITH HIM
TO stand within the setting sun
where the sea submits to a heavenly combustion
where all the sky and earth are open to you
and the star’s shoal is your only conviction
IF YOU MUST FIND FAULT, THIS IS THE WAY TO BEGIN
TO wade in the clouds, to stroll along the seafloor and swim in the forest
where you can recognize your heavenly reflection in the wild
where you can bait the waving shadows into spinning for you
and paint and sing and dance as roots populate the forest soil
THE MOVIES DO IT. TV DOES IT….WHY DON’T YOU DO IT
TO live in an old lighthouse by the sea
where you open your eyes underwater, see the fish lilt by
where cable knit sweaters dry in front of the fire
too royal at the heart, to give us a laugh through a child’s throat.
HOW TO MAKE PEOPLE LIKE YOU INSTANTLY
TO steep among the rye and brush in the sun
where the mangos dry, plums prune, and grapes raisin
where you lie dumb among something golden
perhaps in the grass, perhaps in the sun in the midday
IF YOU WANT TO GATHER HONEY, DON’T KICK OVER THE BEEHIVE
TO pull at the well and write at the trees until they fall
where all dogs have good names
and all the gardens have been planted, sown and flourish
the past scrapes its hide along the undergrowth but pay it no mind

WHEN NOTHING ELSE WORKS, TRY THIS
AND in the evening, when the sky aligns again and
your ribs are scored along the heavenly lines,
heart cleaved and bloody, then you will be
forgiven by dirt for your character crime

UMLAUT 2019 39
Lines Andres Perez

40 UMLAUT 2019
At the River
Image: Nina Berggren Poem: Liam Miyar Mullan

UMLAUT 2019 41
At the River
At the River I see a Goose and fret,
“My Coyness and I are not ready yet,”
The Grasshopper starring from down a tree,
The Water-skid water-skidding at me,
Chorus of spiders torment in gutter,
But each has their own supportive mother,
In the lap where the baby Water-skid naps,
The Goose shares his bread with his other halfs,
The bastard Grasshopper sniping at me
Was brought up in a faithful family,
Scary beatle who looks like Death’s Carriage,
Are you too the product of nice marriage?
But what a hungry wolf enters the room
Will he think of me before I’m consumed?
Shudder to compare our species’ power,
But I’ve hung my Shyness like a flower.

42 UMLAUT 2019
Untitled Michael Shagalov

UMLAUT 2019 43
Reminiscing
Eva Whitney
I met Glenn at the back of the cruiseship nightclub, where he took my cousin’s hand
and pretended to waltz with him. There was untold passion between them, his sixty-
year-old hand clutching my cousin’s twenty-year-old hand, head turned to the side
theatrically, glasses catching the small yellow light from the bar. The dance was brief,
if I had turned to listen to my grandmother talking about her unmade bed I would’ve
missed it. And then Glenn was gone, into the plush darkness of the nightclub,
perhaps at the end of the bar ordering two shots of cruiseship whiskey, or next to his
wife wearing a nightgown in place of a dress. Karaoke began, and children emerged
with their parents tethered to them, feigning innocence, demanding their fathers to
stumble over worn-out lyrics. A woman sang like fronds of a jeweled plant brushing
together. One boy wailed with reverb into the microphone as his parents stayed in
their cabinroom, staring at the mini-fridge, urging it to entertain them. There was a
band of gospel singers and a man who thought his rendition of “Billie Jean” would
woo the female audience. And when I believed the night was over, and I swore I saw
Anna the timid Polish bartender polishing glasses, and the Columbian emcee let go
of her canyon-wide smile, Glenn crept on to stage. His body was insect-thin, with a
feminine waist, and he wore many shirts. “Reminiscing” rolled off of his tongue like
a ship skipping on water, like one hundred eggs added to the batter in the cruiseship
factory-kitchen, like waiters balancing platters of fruit and dinner rolls as the ship
capsizes below them. His body moved like a wet sheet pinned on three sides to a
clothesline and the fourth side flapping free, like a car edging along the arm of a road,
like the poolwater leaping out of the pool during a storm and not knowing where to
go. Would Glenn ever stop singing? I did not want him to. If he kept singing, the
boat would move more nimbly along the current of the oil-dark water. And when
the song finished, and his soulful hums continued past the track, and the Colombian
emcee pried the microphone out of his willing grasp, and the nightclub emptied out,
and my cousin sat in the shadow of the bar with three girls, I pictured Glenn singing
the song over and over again, his wife in a ballgown in bed beside him, lulling the
whole ocean to sleep.

44 UMLAUT 2019
I Cannot Do it Better
Kaia Hobson
Maybe this is how it started for her,
Thought I was washing the dishes or something, watching from the hallway:
You are clipping your nails over the kitchen sink.
Yeah.
Or maybe she wanted to see me do what I do, and do it better,
Maybe a part of my bandaid wrapper missed the trash.
Anyways, my Mama was disappointed in me,
And therefore I was disappointed in me.
I had eaten five or six Starbursts,
And walking down Embarcadero with her
Was glutted with shameful dry mouth rambling on my part.
Where do the socks go when they do not show up in the pile of laundry
I forgot to fold? The little holes in the dryer? The washer?
Ta-da! Toot-ta-lo! Gone!
When the little words in another language
Appeared in the sidewalk and began to hook my shoes,
She spoke!
She spoke like she always did, but her voice went straight to my stomach
And rustled whatever had taxed my sticky mouth and
I could speak too!
She sounded happy.
As I watched my special ice cream get kneaded and folded,
I could feel her eyes on mine, puffy still
From some crying I had probably done
When my brain was still under a spatula, and my skin was dry and tight.
I looked back and smiled at her musing face.

UMLAUT 2019 45
Tiger Carolyn Chan

46 UMLAUT 2019
ABOVE: Gabe Greenwood
RIGHT: Moses Pippenger
Isaac Karliner-Li, “Makeup for Men”

UMLAUT 2019 47
The Water Follows Eva Whitney & Nina Berggren

48 UMLAUT 2019
Le Bon Mot
Emily Kozhina
My name is Refrigerator and my parents loathed me. What did they think a
fridge was, anyways? I would’ve preferred anything else, even something like Embryo.
I’ll be honest, my name itself has led me to contemplating suicide by tying a real
fridge around my waist with a rope and leaping off the Empire State Building. I
always hoped I’d somehow land first and underneath the fridge so I’d get two final
smashes before I die. I was certain this was my fate right until sophomore year of
college. I met him in my bowling management class, and he was kind of pretty,
sporting a persimmon polo shirt and had really fat glasses. “Tell me your name first.”
I felt my heart scorched with love when he told me his name was Bentley. Sure, his
name wasn’t the same as a kitchen appliance, but it was a plug ugly name, anyways.
And when I told him my name, he said it back, smiling like I had said something
beautiful. We got married three months later. He always called me by my name in
public, like he wasn’t embarrassed or anything. We didn’t ever had kids, because we
both knew they’d would bully me into a third suicide attempt and he was fine with it,
too, saying he didn’t want to pass down any of his genes. I imagined our hypothetical
children, wearing neon polos and having the vision of a mole rat. Just us, then.
Bentley matured like cheese. Some people don’t like moldy old blue cheese, makes
them sick, and I get it, but I could eat that shit all day. He was pretty handsome,
too, like a fine wood-worked desk. I loved him for sure. I really started to think
maybe my name wasn’t going to ruin my life. My third suicide attempt was only after
Bentley died. He was 70 when he got stabbed in a robbery. I was 73 when I couldn’t
take it anymore, and went up to the Empire State Building with a rope and a fridge.
As I was falling, I heard this running joke in my head: “Hey, is your refrigerator
running- I mean falling?” It was actually kind of funny to me, but my head was bent
backwards and twisted then, so looking back it wasn’t funny at all. I survived the fall
somehow; an old lady crushed by a fridge with all her femurs fractured was somehow
alive.
When I bolted up in bed from a five year coma lapse, the Dr. Emerson was
by my side. He wore large, square glasses and mandarin scrubs. “Huh, that’s so funny
how life works sometimes,” I said to him. He put his hand on my head and I fell
asleep to the most beautiful dream. Bentley and I are tied around the waist with the
same rope, a fridge hurling down toward cloud sky after cloud sky. I’m not scared at
all, and neither is Bentley. We hold hands while the ground grows bigger below us,
past Heaven. We hit the ground in love.

Contributors
Rae Kim
Nadja Goldberg
Cindy Nguyen
Eva Whitney
Kai Caceres
Xuan Ly
Ren Weber
Kyle Trefny
Sasha Cravis
Julieta Roll
Hannah Duane
Michelle Ibarra
Nina Berggren
Puck Hartsough
Charlie Persuk
Sophia Shen
Huckleberry Shelf
Kenzo Fukuda
Esmé Lee-Gardner
Tess Horton
Solange Baker
Stella Pfahler
Max Chu
Andres Perez
Liam Miyar Mullan
Michael Shagalov
Kaia Hobson
Carolyn Chan
Emily Kozhina
Michael Woodard
Isaac Karliner-Li

Umlaut Magazine 2019

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (19)

Similar to Umlaut Magazine 2019

Similar to Umlaut Magazine 2019 (10)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Umlaut Magazine 2019