In The
Margins
Flat Ink Issue #2 September 2023
Hasty confessions, annotations, and crossed-out lines still legible. Afterthoughts that overwrite their predecessors, dreams lingering in your wake. Contradictions left in footnotes, private notes passed between hands, and rearview truths closer than they appear. All language on the verge of something; any piece with truths kept to the periphery. Pages you rip just to put back together and admit something to yourself in half hope, half defeat.
Click Titles to Read
"i learned to hate virginia woolf when i was nineteen, / standing in the streets of london, bloomsbury wrinkling / me between the creases of my notebook. Mrs. / Dalloway sucked the homesickness from my tongue,"
"On the sluggish escalators at the supermarket, you asked me what I’d do if you said no and I laughed, disbelieving, and said I’d live with it. I don’t know what you wanted me to say, whether you hoped I’d drop to my knees for it."
"like / a liquid murmur. a poem / like an antacid for / longing."
"ornate / calligraphy hung in palaces, the things / you had yearned to sense for / yourself. i kept your name at the / room of my mouth with each / bite of ssuk souffle. where else / would i be?"
by Ryan Matera
"I wonder what the wolf is thinking right now, watching me slip on rocks and get tracked by a bear while tracking wolves. It might feel so safe in my dumb presence that its mind begins to wander. Why do they call us lone? We are not lone, we travel in packs. They travel in packs too, do they call themselves lonely? I wouldn’t think so. I love my pack. I want to be the leader one day, but my uncle was the leader and he cheated on his wife so no one trusts me. He was a nice guy, he just got all tied up by love."
"Even though I knew from the start / that you knew what I wanted. All the shadows. The musk of your / hoodie, your arms pressing against mine. It rains so hard even / in June."
"This was when you / were still a stranger to me, & whether it was a blessing or a curse, I’m still uncertain."
"Lately I’ve been amazed by my father’s memory / As I remember him — / He could recall as brightly as the skin of an apple / how his father was certain but quiet. / He knew by heart the snow on those very steps where / he first spied my mother"
"Literature Review / Susan is life herself. She doesn’t look like it, though. Not with her literally strapped onto the bed, looking on her best days like a ghost-bride in waiting."
"I admit I do not trust the man in the wedding photographs / now in a kilt / now on a giant bridge leading to the giant’s causeway / but I hope / still hope / he was the one who caught me in heels"
"In dreams, the dust of the street, / keeps the scent / of your footprints. / I track them & like an animal / follow you / into the mountains. Hoping you’d / appear to me. As God did to Moses."
Click Titles to Read
Learning to love Virginia Woolf. Summer prayers in the parking lot. A daily capsule for the soul. Seoul memories kept in New York. A conversation with Wolf OR-93. June showers in New Hampshire. A Summer in Greece. Memories of memories, and how they keep. A Literature Review of mothers in their dusk. Photographs in restrospect, and a divine appearance.
“May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.”
― Franz Kafka
“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality."
― Vita Sackville-West
“All this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn't think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle.”
― Margaret Atwood
"I love you as certain dark things are loved, secretly, between the shadow and the soul."
― Pablo Neruda
Edited by Crystal Peng, Dilara Sümbül, Tola Zysman, Dhwanee Goyal, Nandini Rabindra Maharana, & Kai Van Ginkel. Issue design and original art by Dilara Sümbül
Copyright © 2023 Flat Ink Magazine