Understory 2019 Main Menu Masthead From the Student Editors and Faculty Creative Works: Poetry Tuesday Afternoon: Nostalgia Meditation Liminality in Six Parts Shell Obsession and Irreverence Summer Sweethearts Solstice and Trepidation Autumn Poems Magpie Hymn This is How You Derail a Train: After Ernest Hemingway’s “Who Killed the Vets?” Doubting the Branch She'd be a Baby in France Goodbye Hometown Hero Myself a Stern Tree A Brief Glimpse of a Brief Season Winter Poems Girl Wound The Things I've Seen Aurora Receiver of Grief My Grandmother's Willow Tree Red Berry Tree Solitude Spring Poems Portrait of a Daffodil I Walk On After You Definitions Half Empty, Half Full Creative Works: Prose Eavesdropper Space Boy Cathedrals Mr. Goo-gle 60 Feet Down No Escape: A post-blast Vignette Space Mice War The Cat Shelter Scholarship in English Studies: Literary Studies Platonic Emulation—How the Weight of History has come to Define Poetry Poetry as Illumination Can I Rely on You? Heroes Through the Ages: Defining the British Dream through Heroes in Literature Born from the Dreams of a People, an Empire Awoke Scholarship in English Studies: Rhetoric and Linguistics Synthetic Language Yarn Bombing as Multimodal Rhetoric Effecting Persuasion: How Adapting Rhetoric Informs the Response A Facebook Post: Identity through the Technoscape We Who Demand Better The Rhetoric of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games and Video Game Communities: How Representation and Reception Can Change the Way Players See Their and Others’ Identities Why Have Female-Only Characters in For Honor? Posters: Alaska Englishes Race and Internment: World War II from an Alaskan Perspective Wrapping Up ‘Wrap It Up AK' The Letters of John Muir Rewriting Alaska History with the Word “Genocide"
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Dark Symphony

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As I walk the lonely streets
My tears shimmer into air
The moon is out tonight
It bathes me in its despair
The wind is blowing hard
My bones are wracked with cold
But at least I have my soul
Somewhere deep in the night

I could wish away
All my nightmares into pieces
Sketch them into walls
So their stories look
Like garish faces
Places that I’ve been
Start to fade into the distance
Still I have my soul
Somewhere deep in the night

Someone plays a melody
You can hear it in the night
Their heart is being strummed
They are playing for their life
The song, it sings of pain
It will cut you like a knife
If their destiny is claimed
They will never be alright

Walking down a corridor
Of darkness raining down
I often count my steps
Maybe someday I’ll be found

The tears, they turn to ice
The playing suddenly stops
And the echoing of sadness
Slowly tapers off

Shadows cling to walls
I can feel their pulsing beats
The rhythm of their hearts
Storm together like a symphony
The echoing of pain
Paints a picture of agony
It’s driving me insane
With the violent screeching

Play that song again
I want to hear it loud
Make it rise into the air
So the heavens hear our sound
The crying violin
And the storming of the bass
Come together like a chorus
To let us hear their pain

I’m running through the night
Looking both ways
Down the corridor of misery
With my strings painted black and broken
Slowly coming down
Like a tempo
Swirling in a misty black abyss
The piercing notes shriek louder

Playing a wretched song
To the beat of our despair
Now take my bloodied hands
I’ve been playing for eternity
Slowly take a bow
We’ll end our wretched show
On a key of hope
So the nightmares recede
Ever on and on
We’ll play that piercing song
Let the encore roll
Like the thunder in the clouds
The desperate melody
Crescendos higher in the air
The sound is piercing higher
Through our ears

Thunder rolls in,
Lightning streaks down
The sound is rising
To the cheering of the crowd
We play harder still,
The ground begins to rock,
And the piano of the damned
Plays until it rots

Someone asks us now,
Will the concert ever end?
Our instruments have strummed
From beginning to the end
Tell us what to play
We’ll play it every night
We’ll add our special sound
Of fear and delight

Soon the curtains fall
A deadly crimson red
And silence now descends
As the players are now dead
The audience leaves
For their graves under bed
So I stumble down the streets
With my soul held in my hands

______________________________________
[1] Tayla Jones is a junior with a pre-major for the School of Nursing. Tayla draws inspiration from music and books, as well as any medium in which she feels a strong emotion.
 

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