THE ARCHIVE 2024 EDITION

Poetry: 1. Entreat for Liberation by Navya Adhikarla 2. David Bowie Died in Spain by Natalia Farris 3. Cycles by Judy Chen 4. laundry by Sayjudenu Tukan 5. Ethiopia by Naomi Samuel 6. Untitled by Ava Ondik 7. Hour Hand by Sancia Milton 8. Meaza Leaves Ethiopia by Naomi Samuel 9. (Horses) Still on the Fields by Patricia Okwueze 10. To Be Alone by Patricia Okwueze 11. To Watch a Flower Die by Patricia Okwueze 12. Need Title by Patricia Okwueze 13. "Ode to Apostrophes" by Aidan Klein 14. The Gospel According to Pelops by Lila Taylor 15. nonbinary by Jocelyn Chin 16. Crinkleberries by Natalia Harnisch 17. an early conversation with my loving mother by Kit Shauf 18. Eleven Eyes by Natalia Harnisch

Prose: 1. Red Orison by Ruby Wang 2. Shuiyang Forest by Jocelyn Chin 3. Quis ut Deus by Akourkor Allotey

Submissions:

email original and unpublished work of any medium (writing, art, photography, and more) to the archive. submissions will be considered for both our online edition and spring 2025 physical edition. multiple submissions welcome and encouraged.

by: Navya Adhikarla

by: Natalie Farris

Poster David Bowie looked at me with his wet paper eyes

(wet only because it was raining)

Skin glitter pink and tight red sticker lips

Looked at me hungrily because

He wanted me to buy tickets

BUY TICKETS

it probably said

(that part was covered up by the other poster)

No

COMPRA BILLETES

(We’re in Madrid)

And although I didn’t quite

Then

I will laugh at him next time he looks at me like that

Because at last, por fin,

David Bowie wants something from me

And I don’t want a thing from David Bowie

Here in Spain he is covered up, slicked, thwacked, tacked right over

And I bet you un millón de euros he never stood on that corner

Like I did 

Las cosas más profundas son las más estúpidas

My professor said

And I hope David Bowie disagrees

So I can laugh again

I don’t know David Bowie

Except I think there was a movie

(You know because you know everything)

It’s this radical problem of mine

I’m lousy at knowing people I’ve never met

But then I’m lousy at knowing people I know

I will apologize to my mother

In the morrow

And my lover

I pass the empty church and now it’s a promise

(I am rightfully chastised, I bow my head)

It’s a Catholic country and the sacred mourning rain touches me too

And then the tiny old invert-faced beret man, bristle-chin out for the rain

And the silky-haired offspring of Spaniards, who laugh twiddle-legged in the wet perfumed Smoke,  

The brick-blackener, the grit in the pigeons’ eyes

That we all call “aire” 

Here in Madrid 

And then most importantly

The woman on the other side

Waiting on the red light 

Her pixie cut absorbing the rain upside-down

Mousy brown, mousy frown

Oh she is just like me

She must see from my own plainness and gayness 

We’re alone together in this city 

Her glance wavers around Bowie 

The first betrayal 

At the green bleeping we march towards each other

La Gran Reunión

Our hunched and colorful aides a little behind

(A little old woman each) 

But Her flat brown eyes they

(Our eyes, Our eyes)

Swerve out into opposite directions and I am left in the middle

Unseen

Unrecognized

And then she is past but 

It’s illegal to turn around in Spain

La duelista conquistada

(Me)

There are rain specks on my lips and on the glass orange ad of Aperol Spritz

It’s alcohol, is what it is

Everybody knows it, everybody has a laughing lark off it

I didn’t know it

This brittle rain isn’t enough to fill a grape

Which is why the grapes grow over in Italy

Where Dionysus pops them with his fangs

And El Prado swoons for the shine of the wine streaming down his baby chin

So that’s how it is, then

Not in Italy, silly, but here

Where even my own kind rejects me

It was a walk of shame to the other side and I knew it

Waiting for my nose to bleed again like it did in the old tavern last week

So I could be Dionysus and taste

The farthest thing from aperol spritz

A moment of warm and pulsing pleasure

Before ducking, mortified, into the closest public bathroom

But that was last week

And today is today

Which is to say, pale gray

(Even my sweater, gray with grayer stripes, see how it’s gotten to me)

And the red in my fingers has receded

And the rud has drained from my cheeks

(I saw in the window)

It must be that my blood

Is shy of the gazes of strangers 

And I

(That is, the white stiff face in the window)

(Hardened to marble against mere breeze and drizzle)

by: Judy Chen

Caress my face as the tides would grasp the shore, 

the beautiful shore, the ever changing shore.

Hold me back with all the love of a new devout 

and all the joy of a place by the sea. 

And in summer we will run into the sea

with full abandon, laugh as we drown. 

Sleep in nursery of rage older than us

as our bodies strip away, cast to distant shore. 

But you would pull us back. You would 

take my body into yours, breathe where I cannot. 

Submerged, you rise, posthumously kind 

and gentle to all. You would apologize to the crying moon.

By the time you bring us back it is winter

and frost has touched the corners of your face.

Worn and wane, you watch down at me

and I can not stand to see you wash away.

Alone, I sleep, in the ever leaving tide,

and alone I build our house by the shore.

Three moons try to join the sea, and deep

in the grains like a pearl you form.

Soon you will find me, my blood to your bone,

and at most we can steal but thirty bright days

before I turn away, caught against the sea

and the cool of your hand caught tight on my cheek.

You beg me not to leave, drop to your knees,

but I know where I must go. Onwards,

into the sea, the ever calling sea,

by: Sayjudenu Tukan

when I would separate the whites from the colors, and you would tell me to just throw it all in at once to save time 

when we finally agreed that the detergent smelled like both flowers and cheap dish soap

when I would smell your shirts after the wash, and they’d still have bits of you in them

when you packed your shirts neatly into that suitcase

by: Naomi Samuel

“What do you call an African nation which has never been colonized?”

“Ethiopia, or Wakanda.”

Ethiopia is the only African nation to have never been colonized.

Notions of Africa untouched by savage White supremacy necessarily implicate Ethiopia.

My parents immigrated to the United States from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

My father gained political asylum in 1993 and later brought my mother over.

In 2018, I took them to see the movie Black Panther in theatres.

They enjoyed themselves, but were underwhelmed.

Afro-Futurism is the space-time bending practice necessary for my mom and I to arrive to each other’s different

constructions of Blackness.

Migration fragments my family.

I journey into her Ethiopian past while she critiques my notions of Wakandan futurism.

I fold these two layers of space against one another and relish in what pierces both planes:

by: Ava Ondik

Your love was real, but it was heavy

Like a weighted blanket that comforts

But makes it hard to breathe all the same

Hard to breathe enveloped in it

Hard to sleep without it

When someone becomes your armor

Their departure leaves you exposed

And darling, you’re like a bird

You’re meant to fly

And not to carry heavy things

I got so used to suffocating

That to breathe unhindered

Made the world feel false

Distorted reality, left with walls up

Walls rendered obsolete by this lack

Just relics of your antiquated attention

Armor stripped away

Feathers can’t grow when

There isn’t space to breathe when

You’re walking on eggshells of your past when

You started to fear the sky

But darling, you’re like a bird

You can never spurn the sky forever

The eggshells you’ve been skirting

Have been shattered for weeks

You’ve just been cutting yourself

Trying to dance around

So don’t look down any longer

And behold yourself instead

Direct your gaze to the pinions

That have replaced the blanket you lost

That enhance what your armor once hid

No longer carpeted nor cloaked

Pinions grow into feathers

Feathers grow onto wings

Wings lift you away from eggshell carpets

And weighted blanket love

You can’t fly with heavy things

by: Sancia Milton

We were eating bananas;

We were hunched on the hood of your honda,

Backs to the windshield like bugs,

Mottled and pink from the downing sun,

Braided together from the legs up.

Like two hands of a clock—

for a second stopped—

Two hands overlapped into one.

“Do you want some of mine?”

You asked, just to share.

“Can I save it for later?”

I was dangerously close

To the peachy roots of your hair.

We were throwing peels;

We were sighing bluely into the now-dusk

As trucks mocked us with their headlights,

And there was no one to notice anything but

The softening entity of us.

We lingered in the long and lonely way

Of people who have something they would not say.

“That tasted really good,”

You whispered, tucking back your hair.

“I knew it would.”

I am lying, unwinding, unpeeling my fingers

From the sore cavity of our mutual despair;

From the naked corduroy of your coat,

From the shivering necklaces at your throat,

From the mottled memory of us, there, lingering

And gone to empty air.

The horizon of my mind

Purples over time.

My tongue swells twice its size

With something that was never mine—