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 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 The Cave Painter 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 Dancer

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On stage.
Between the curtain—and you.
Spotlights help darken the world.
I breathe…the stars in…and walk…upon crystal seas.
When I move…you hear my voice…and when I reach…you hold my gaze.
Suspended.
On rippling waves.
Foam rises in transparent arcs as feathers spread and clouds…drift apart.
Finding form in shapeless wind and hearing music.
In perfect silence.
I raise my eyes to your embrace without needing words to laugh or explain.
All is settled…like falling snow.
Intricately woven in single moments to sculpt two minds into one whole.
Surrounded and surrendered by your time.
I barely notice when the lights dim and the crowd—
Comes back to life.
I look out and wonder if I’ll find you.
Just step off the platform and nothing will have changed.
But I refuse to move—because the truth is…
You don’t actually know my name.
We speak with all the same words, but our meanings are not the same.
So I show…what I can’t say…and trust the stars…as my arms raise.
Bow.
And then wave—soaking in the now with you.
As applause begins to rain.
 

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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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