Understory 2020 Main Menu Masthead From the Student Editors and Faculty Creative Works: Poetry Haiku: Dewdrops Petrarchan Sonnet: Shallow Waters Cabin Fever: Cantwell Tree and River Dying Day Haiku Blue Moon Spring A Body of Water Seward Constellations of Ink and Dust Just One More Day White Flower My Night Sky How to Ask Deep Blue The Dancer The Senses Insomnia Physics for Poets Free Verse: Two Waves Within A Pond Love Letter Grief Evolved Good Days Window Seat Parched Runaway Boy Ballad of the Love Affair River My Body is Like Water Patience and Irony Lethologica Guiding Light Miles Poem, Based off a scene from Into the Spiderverse Balloons Creative Works: Prose Fairy Dance The Starving Artist’s Lament Face of Death A Silent Spectrum Time Really Does Fly The Metamorphosis Indigo Skies 1807 Under the Influence Hall of Mirrors Creative Works: Screenplay Animal ANNIE WANG is a senior pursuing a Baccalaureate degree in English with a minor in Creative Writing. Annie is a student at UAA. She says she can write decently. Creative Works: Literary Nonfiction Friends in Strange Places “Major” Trauma The Tightrope of Addiction English Studies: Language and Linguistics Political Profanity on Social Media: A Sociolinguistic View on Public Discussions about US Political Events Alaska Resident Fishermen’s Union: Personal Statements Walter T. Granath: An Airmen in Alaska English Studies: Literary Analysis Female Voice and Agency in “The Wife’s Lament” The Protofeminist Perspective of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath Antithesis in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing English Studies: Rhetoric and Composition Ethos, Pathos, and Logos in Mr. Rogers’ Address to Congress Five Elements of Literacy in a Miscarriage Group The Library and Literacy of Technology Social Psychology in Clinical Practice: A Prerequisite for Effective Therapeutic Treatment Net-Working Together: Connecting (online) for Community Health Promotion in Southeast Alaska UAA’s Critical Thinking Ecosystem The Evolution of Planned Parenthood

The Cave Painter

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Brush stroke…as antelopes graze beneath the radiant sky.
Flame crack…as trees rustle in the spirit of the night.
Stone cut…as bison gallop across the plain.
Dust fall…as stars float back down to the earth that bore their embers.
Inside the cave.
Though walls be rough and wild within churning chasms and dripping dark.
It’s here that voices speak the most clearly where grunts and groans just miss the mark.
So many spears and angry shouts dividing rocks and trees as if they were carcasses.
For birds to pick apart.
All is taken for the best to claim while scrounging vermin have to settle their scores, or else…
Be fair game.
Meanwhile the birds can make their nests high in the trees or upon the cliffs.
No one can argue, no one can dispute, no one can dare take what is rightfully theirs.
By divine tribute.
Yet here I am…somehow I last.
Though the odds weren’t in my favor, a wind has brought me passed.
All the arrows and fallen bolts, carnivorous beasts and rotting souls.
And so much more that could’ve been told.
I really wasn’t supposed to survive, yet here I am still bearing the record passed down to me by time.
Of course, the cracks still bleed from time to time where pigments and clay can’t fully cover.
The choices long made and the questions that can’t be uttered.
Yet I still draw stars on empty nights and wandering herds on barren scapes.
Painting the world not as I see…
But rather as I believe.
The world is only set in stone when we become the prey of our own defeat.

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SOLOMON SHINDLER is a senior pursuing a Baccalaureate degree in Philosophy. A romantic by profession, but a philosopher by trade, Solomon writes to uncover the mysteries of life when he is not busy with school, work, play, or sleep—or in other words, life. Yet if you should catch him with a moment to spare, he does enjoy a conversation or two about science, history, and culture or just about who you are.

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