Wild Greens

The novel coronavirus and the ensuing stay at home orders have shuttered us in a strange new world. What happens to art when community is lost? What role does art have in confronting pain, or in retreating from it? Surrounded by grief, isolation, and loss, what do we create?  For this special issue, we received submissions from artists across the country, in Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, and New York, and across the globe in Ho Chi Minh City. No matter where we live, Covid has affected all of us, and this month we continue our ongoing theme of “Creation During Covid.”

At the top of our issue, we present pianist Tim Brey’s reinterpretation of the classic “Home for the Holidays.” We find this tune more poignant than ever. As we hibernate and prepare for the long winter, being home for the holidays can mean, for some, being away from family, friends, and loved ones. For others, it can be a way of pausing and finding coziness in our own homes, celebrating the small domestic joys. We recommend hitting “play” on Tim’s song, and then scrolling through to look at the work of Julie Brask, who has made art by scoring, breaking, and fitting glass with an electric grinder and water pump. "Manayunk Bridge" and "Ben Franklin Bridge" are especially beautiful for us, because Philadelphia is home for the editors of Wild Greens.

Next is a poem by Myra Chappius on finding peace in solitude. For many people, and especially for women, the pandemic has made solitude a scarcity. Paired with Myra’s poem, the acrylic flowers drawn by Sarah Capps invite us to slow down and appreciate the little details, and to use this new time to explore the depths of our imagination.

Sarah’s art leads us to Govi Snell’s hilarious and heart-warming essay on sketching her friends’ faces during Covid. Govi notes that art has offered a “momentary freedom from self” during this “barf-inducingly bizarre and dreadful year.” In the same way, Carmen Meier creates with her wood lathe to relieve the stress of her work as a doctor during the pandemic. Carmen makes beautiful, durable, and useful objects—decorative art that centers the home space and evokes the memory of eating together.

From these peaceful reflections, we are harshly awakened by the pain of the pandemic colliding with the Colorado wildfires in Katie Huey’s gut punch of a story, “Pocket the Ash,” and her poem “Embers and Ice.” 

We finish the issue with a moment of silence. Mosaics by Robin Brownfield commemorate the Black lives brutally taken from us by police violence; a poem by Mike D’Andrea asks “How Many ‘One More’s’;” and, anchoring the issue, two stop motion animation videos by Lynne Marie Rosenberg show in unsparing clarity the quantitative human cost of Covid, the humanity of those we’ve lost, and our pain and anger at the administration’s campaign of disinformation and dismissive response to the global pandemic. 

To listen:

For mobile listeners: Pressing "play" will open a new tab. As long as you keep the tab open, most phones will allow you to listen to the song while you explore the rest of the issue in a separate tab!

For desktop listeners: Press "play" and listen while you explore the rest of the issue!

Exploration

by Myra Chappius

My Friends' Faces

by Govi Snell

During quarantine, I took to sketching my friends' selfies sent into a WhatsApp group chat. 

It was a timely undertaking in a period when the respiratory droplets secreting out of our faces have necessitated concealing ourselves behind masks and we've taken to keeping our potentially deadly physicalities within the confines of home. But, as I became sequestered from faces, I found myself drawn to them and particularly to the familiar faces of friends. 

I've always been fascinated by faces. In my opinion, every face is a beautiful face. The curve of an eyelid, crook of a nose, arch of an eyebrow, and the morphing emotions that wave across the surface being endlessly watchable things worthy of attention. Faces change so much it makes it hard to believe that anyone is ever really one person. A squishy rotund baby face grows till it develops its first pimple, its first fine line. It carries the joys and the sadnesses; it smiles and it crumples. 

My friends' faces, and the focus on minutiae that went into my sloppy attempts to draw them, were a major source of comfort for me during a lonely period of self-isolation. As I have zero background in art of any sort, the renderings are amateurish to say the least. Beyond whatever artistic value these drawings have, sketching made me feel closer to my friends in a time when being physically close to anyone really was impossible.  

Of the art that has come out of this barf-inducingly bizarre and dreadful year, there have been some real personal standouts. Art has reckoned with the terrors of the pandemic and been a way to trudge through the burden of surprise freetime. In Vietnam, where I have been living for the past two years, art has also been a tool in curtailing the spread of COVID-19. A viral, pun intended, handwashing song, accompanying dance, and propaganda style posters have urged the public to wear masks and follow absolutely vital hygiene procedures. 

This kind of messaging, that acknowledges the sad necessity of having to physically distance yourself from your desires, can be found outside of Vietnam as well. In a profile for Rolling Stone, Suzy Exposito gets a peek into the life of Puerto Rican reggaetonero and introvert hunk, Bad Bunny. While quarantining, Bad Bunny holed up in an Airbnb with his girlfriend, the jewelry designer Gabriela Berlingeri. Berlingeri and Bad Bunny recorded "En Casita" during this time. Exposito describes the song as a "twee trap ballad about wanting to visit a lover but needing to stay in quarantine." I describe it as the endlessly boppable song that I've listened to on loop whose boppability is even sweeter for its mournfulness. The song's refrain "Toca quedarme en casa, casa (ah) Toca quedarme en casa, casa (ey, ey)," truly encapsulates the more privileged preoccupations of 2020. "It's time to stay, home. It's time to stay, home. Home, it's time to stay home."  

And so we stayed home. At this point, it's necessary to say that my stretch of staying home because of the pandemic has been relatively short. In a strike of luck, I've found myself living in a country that has dealt with the spread of COVID-19 with swiftness and seriousness from the outset. Nevertheless, the two periods of self-isolation that I've gone through living in Saigon have been weird, unsettling and passed by ever so slowly in the way that time can sometimes feel stuck like ketchup to the top of an overturned bottle— just plop down already! As it gets close to being, in the words of Jordan Firstman, "one full yar"of isolations and losses big and small, I know that for me, my silly little drawings and the silly little drawing hobby that they've prompted will be one of the positives amid the wretched.   

Among these more impactful artistic expressions from a world riddled with the coronavirus, our little messaging group, entitled "Farts n' Stuff," was making our own "art." 

"Farts n' Stuff," which, full disclosure, was eventually redubbed "Flowers n' Stuff" because of one friend's distaste for poop-related humor, contains myself, one of my older sisters, and three friends which I have known for what feels close to my personal forever. Our text thread was everything you'd expect from a group of friends confined within their own isolations. We shared fears, selfies, pictures of food, a cheeky almost-nude or two, okra updates, outfit appraisals, old photos from by-gone eras, and a flurry of frustrations over "vag blood," "lady flows," untidy partners, and a lack of partners. Amongst this came documentation of creative endeavors to pass the time, which of course also included frustrations like, "How the fuck does one draw a hat?" That was me.  

Paintings, violin practice, makeup tutorials, and video updates from two friends who had taken up the ukulele included some of the artistic contributions. One particularly adorable video showed my friend, who I've never heard sing before, singing and strumming away on the ukulele sweetly until she misses a chord and looks to the camera letting out a characteristic outburst of exasperation. As in all things, the sweet and the sour.  

I can't remember why I decided to draw their faces but I'm glad I did. My first sketches were experiments in replicating selfies that I'd requested in the chat. Done with pen on the lined paper of a Composition notebook that I had taken to journaling in, their recreated faces peered up at me garish in their haphazardness. But somehow they looked enough like their faces, and enough not like their faces, to be entertaining.

In the first drawing I did of my sister, her oversized head is tilted to the side and I've somehow made her look like she descended from turtles. The other representations are similar variations of ludicrous.

From here, buoyed by my friends' amusement, things got more "serious." I graduated to using a pencil and even upped my game with unlined paper. Taking multiple tries at illustrating a friend's nude, I ended up liking my messiest version the most. The hip juts out, and the bizarrely small arm covering globular titties prove that life drawing is a bit above my skill level. From here, I kept my attention on faces luxuriating in being able to escape myself as I focused on their puckered lips, raised eyebrows and as they chomped on apples and squinted in the sunlight in baseball-capped selfies. 

Finding real joy in the immersive experience that these depictions entailed, I took to drawing pictures of myself and scanning Instagram for other friends and eventually celebrity faces to consume and digest as weird, twisted little fragments of the already doubled reality. 

Critiquing my work, I have to say that there is something of their faces that I've been able to capture. It feels silly to share something so unsophisticated but in a way I delight in the messy earnestness of the drawings.

And, overall, it has been a gift to pay attention to my friend's faces and from there, faces more generally. I think you really start to see someone anew when you spend long enough looking at the set of their jaws, the reserve of feeling in their eyes and the lines that form around the corner of their mouths when they smile. That, coupled with the estrangement from bodies that the pandemic has entailed, made the experience of drawing faces especially heady on reflection.

I like how complicated faces are. I like how they are so different than you'd expect them to be when you try to draw them. I like how a photo is a moment frozen. I like how a frozen in time picture of a friend far away can create a new little friend to carry around in your notebook. I like how trying new things as an adult is humbling, often mortifying, and keeps you young. I like how I learned how to self-soothe by staring at a picture, putting pencil to paper, looking again, erasing, trying again, and the momentary freedom from self that that offers. I like that I've drawn myself looking like a little old lady, like a little old frog and duplicated the stress present in my eyes as they peep out from above my mask and grasp my resigned expression. I like that these drawings have made my friends smile.

It's been a hard year and these little faces have definitely made it a little better.   

Pocket the Ash

by Katie Huey

Rummaging through the blue bin of snow clothes, I grab gloves and a hat before stepping into the backyard. Leaves demand attention before flurries of snow arrive according to winter weather warnings. 

Red rakes sit in the shed, waiting to be pulled from the pile of worn wooden handles still warm from lingering unseasonal heat. I wrestle with stubborn tools. I am ready to tuck the garden into its bed like a toddler resisting bedtime.

Muscling burnt orange and crimson leaves into piles takes three hours. I pull the rake towards my center stirring mixtures of grass and sticks. Tired life. With each scrape of the earth, up swirls too, tiny puffs of darkness. I watch the grit lift and land. Wisps of crisped needles and incinerated pines burned black rise into the air. As the ash enters my nose and eyes, I sneeze. The tiny particles make my eyes weep. 

Despite our best efforts, the air demands we inhale what’s left, leaving traces of particles in our lungs.

While I rake, fire consumes the foothills and the majestic Rocky Mountains of which my grandfather taught me to sing mere miles away from my home. Burned wild flowers travel by dangerous gusts of wind to mix with city maples and the dying aspen leaves in my backyard. 

The setting of my wild adventures of youth and family traditions are now forever changed by the swath of loss. Can memories burn as a sense of place is destroyed?

I think about the sacredness of these ashes settling. They smear white streaks on my windshield and sneak into the crevices of the freshly laid concrete patio. Five years prior, I felt my father’s ashes land on my toes. I watched his grit swirl with the wind and land, eventually, on cracked, dry earth. I witnessed his urn burning in a controlled fire as a summer ink sky turn speckled with stars. The mountains were witness, too. 

My body feels the magnitude of life and livelihood turning to vapor among flames. Having experienced significant unraveling, I ask, what beauty is found in the sweeping of what’s left into tiny piles? May the act of smearing the grit on our fingers be a beautiful thing?

Turning again to my chore, I increase pressure on the leaf blower and watch blackened piles swirl up into mini plumes of darkened ash. I watch the mess move, mirroring the blooms of smoke seen from airplanes, thousands of miles up into plum purple skies.

May we not disconnect the black piles of soot and grit from the immense loss up canyon roads.

It’s insensitive, perhaps, to have hope in the hurting so soon. 

The destruction is horrifying. The longing for what could have been, pervasive.

The honoring and remembering? Sacred.

Sweep what’s left into piles. Place the white and black smears on your altars of hope. In the wonderings of what’s next and how will we ever recovers, know this to be true – What was will never return.

We weep for this truth.

Using your fingers to pile, gather, pull towards you the mix of earth and sticks and dead things crisped. Move among the ash.

What will be is still left to be seen.

As I place the rake back in the shed, snow begins to fall in tiny flakes blanketing heat in white. I pray the moisture douses the flames and the burning will cease. And that we all may create space, with the tender embrace, for the gaping holes that form when we stare loss in the face. Stand witness. Sweep up what’s left. Pocket the ash. Honor the scar. Hard, beautiful things.