CRITERION 2014

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art editor and layout consultant kaity hallman literary editor isabella jones art advisor mary gilkerson literary advisor nancy tuten cover art by jessica scruggs
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THE CRITERION is a selection of art and literature created by columbia college students. the staff of THE CRITERION encourages all students to submit work to be chosen by the student selection committee and an external judge. THE CRITERION holds the record for being the oldest continuously published literary magazine in the nation for a womens college. it was first established in 1897, containing only literature. for the past 25 years, the magazine has included both art and literature. columbia college is a private, liberal arts womens college that strives to instill courage, commitment, confidence, and competence in its students to build a better world. the theme this year is FLUX. columbia college has undergone much change over the last few years. flux is reflective of these changes, but also the changes within oneself during the college experience through growing and learning.

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6 see right through me / murphie magee 8 ire / krystin white 9 derelict / kate bowie 11 last look / faith mathis 12 family home / ashley puckett 13 untitled / catelyn curry 14 mount mitchell / meg padgett 16 face / kaity hallman 18-19 untitled / jessica scruggs 20 brokenness is everywhere / jessica hunt 21 the truth is a cave / lindsey knipp 22 mortality and reality / murphie magee 23 twelve / clare williamson 25 harmony / morgan ward 26 us and them / kaity hallman 27 tomorrow is beautiful / jessica hunt 28 dead man / meg padgett 29 untitled / jessica scruggs 33 infatuation / kaity hallman 35 reaching for hope / meg padgett 36 untitled / ashley puckett 39 charcoal still life / jessica hunt 40 surprise / krystin white 41 untitled / kelly pearson

art &

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literature

7 radio silence / virginia lee hildreth 10 cremorne gardens / hannah billie 15 to samuel, corey and clark / jessica wagoner 17 in honor of american education week / sashay butler 20 postcard / jessica wagoner 24 yearly / hannah billie 28 where my sisters baby girl sleeps / hannah billie 30-31 going, going, ive been gone / isabella jones 32 sc 174/spine of the island / virginia lee hildreth 34 dear dad / megan deville 36-37 red flame / hannah billie 38 panicky golems / virginia lee hildreth
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see right through me murphie magee

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radio silence virginia lee hildreth This far from the beach, the fog crawls and fits her fingers to piney nooks just past our parked car. The moon is so bright we cut our beams, embracing the pitch, its smell chill in our mouths: the first gulp of autumn. Tonight deserves a silver spoon stuffed between its inky teeth. A bright & a black night, thick and soft as magnolia petals against the days grimy burn. Rain punctures the fog and spits on our arms suspended, fingers mingling with fleet moths and leaves that drip the slick breaths of deer from sticky, cellulose beaks. Bald sunflowers shift in the breeze so their seeds plummet, spinning, stripes fading til their flutter mimics flight. If we even breathe, the flower shudders, the breeze warms to August again, a small animal doesnt even think to stifle its yip. We look for the flash of a whitecap pushing up through falling leaves or a possums back, and grip each others arms as we see the silver of drought leaf, but recline again when we find its just yesterdays light in the foxs eyes.

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ire krystin white

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derelict kate bowie

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cremorne gardens hannah billie Cremorne pleasure gardens are only a ghost of themselves now. But the people in Whistlers Cremorne Gardens, No. 2 are still in the process of dying. They have already begun to fade into the gardens and into the furniture. The streaks of smoke that are their bodies and the clothes they wear will disappear at any moment with the gardens, in the blink of an eye. But the people lack eyes. And faces. If they lose everything left of them, what will remain will not just be the hazy garden paths, and the spirit of the gardens, and maybe even the spirits of the people. What will remain will also be the ghost of an evening, and the ghosts of all the future evenings that follow, evenings filled with dying people. These evenings will one day be framed and placed next to each other in a procession as long as time.

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last look faith mathis

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family home ashley puckett

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untitled catelyn curry

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mount mitchell meg padgett

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to samuel, corey, and clark jessica wagoner I went into your house after you left Youll forgive me if you let me explain: After the lights flashed like beacons that night And permanent absence was palpable After your dad caught a train to nowhere And I prayed he wouldnt find you Before the fire department burned it down And broke the chimney to bricks and mortar Thats when I went in deliberately, instinctively All through your house, each time Minding the hole in the kitchen floor and secrets in the closets I collected all the little pieces of you Silver jack, pink car, rubber ball I had to set you free. I felt you soar out in the waving grass And built you little empty altars on my windowsill I still have your things, for when we meet again It is all to say: thank you for being my very first friend.
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face kaity hallman

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in honor of american education week sashay butler In a hopeless place, education is supposed to be the key but we dont see the door so how can we strive for more than what we can visualize? You dont know how hard we try to make ends meet. They never really touch but at least we have food to eat and shoes on our feet. They may not be Nike but we just do it because if we dont do it then were playing the victim card. If we dont maximize on minimal opportunities, we must not be working hard or at all. My God do you see us? The rich and famous say, they need us. We dont need them, they want us to. We need doors of equality to walk through, embark on a journey thats less foreign to us in our homeland. Each person has a plan, not yet a masterpiece but its coming. Tell me your plan? Help me understand because the truth is I know first-hand. Being exposed to options has its benefits. We hate ultimatums, we feel powerless. I struggle with the decision of saying I or we because I know its at least one child that feels the same damn feelings as me. Restoring hope and I can to hopeless youth, to you may seem worthless. Now with a clearer vision, I have envisioned my purpose. Happy American Education Week

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untitled jessica scruggs

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postcard jessica wagoner As long as the sun holds up in the sky and life is pulled into your body, keep burning your offering. Every last ember is white pain perfection; charred beauty floats on air, graces new hands, forever.

brokenness is everywhere jessica hunt

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the truth is a cave lindsey knipp

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mortality and reality murphie magee

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twelve clare williamson

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yearly hannah billie Harvest doesnt interrupt winter. The silence speaks.

The pageant of new bones is showered over the earth.

Death is summoned. There is no delight.

The gifts are opened. The vows are said. The play must go on.

A circle. A circle.

There is nothing that falls that doesnt rise again.

As you breathe in air, your chest becomes a mountain.

As you breathe out, you are covered in snow.

The sun waits over your shoulder to take the snow away.

Someday, you too will set. Yearly, you rise awake.

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harmony morgan ward

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us and them kaity hallman

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tomorrow is beautiful jessica hunt

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dead man meg padgett

where my sisters baby girl sleeps hannah billie There is a space between my sisters torso and her arm where her baby girl sleeps. I think of that space where the baby sleeps as the earth, and the baby as the sea, and my sister as the sky. Doesnt the sky hold the earth and the earth hold the sea? Dont they fit together perfectly? Isnt this how life is sustained, how the baby sleeps, how the baby dreams?
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untitled jessica scruggs

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going, going, ive been gone isabella jones On that windy night, of dust storms and willy-willies, clouds of cobwebs strung across the thick sky and the moon a pearl of tarnished luminosity, I wrote home and told you of all my mistakes. I imagine you sitting on the back porch with your cup of coffee, hair damp from your brisk shower, brisk as always like it was a job. I imagine you reading my letter under furrowed brow a necessary protection. I know you need to see me this way now not a haunting reminder of the past, or an old wound reopening, but one of many mountains youve climbed in your time - a trip that then stole your breath and now translates to a practicing of muscles, a hardening of resolve. I understand if you dismiss me if I am no more than a flicker in the industry of your day. But, I cant see nights like this, of static charge fueling whirlwind night dreams and dust rampaging through this carnival of loose seams

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-each particle seized with the tarantism that befalls simple thingsand not think of you. It seems Im drawn to feverish scenes. And the tumult of this night is not reminiscent of your inability to sit without twitching or your use of swearing to emphasize a point (because only some words can really explain the fucking weight of sight behind my eyes) but is one of those riotous somersaults, this force of nature, some high concentration of energy that finds an out when it simply cant stay in, spilling out into the view and making it a scene. It would be unfair to tell you I miss you. But your breath remains the most important occurrence of the day. With you, my life became a movie, and Im the audience, with what I see blowing me away. And if you know that the watcher always eventually leaves, you know I am still wandering, and watching everything in between. Yes, the leaving is the means, and I am collecting all the ends. Dont think ill of me, please. For without you Id still be asleep.

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sc 174/spine of the island virginia lee hildreth On 174s short, balding shoulder a man in waders paints the sunset, and the shotgun leant up against the easels smudged legs is the same shade of gray-brown mud as the pluff theyre all sunk into. The easel juts like a heron, throws shadows on the knobby pavement, then the tourists. It reaches for the other side. Between the tide-suckling periwinkles dotting marsh grass and sunken firecrackers, no longer spooking darting crappie, his brush lights the fingers of the sunset. Paint crusts the mason jars lips. He is as deliberate as a kingfisher after a shadow, twitching his brush to kill a line as the bird does to end a fish, blood in her gills. Some of his friends, from their squat docks or from their john boats, pitch vacant brown bottles over the peeling gunnels. To the crabs, its a house and a trap, sides too slick for their chitin to grip. The carcass attracts more crabs, drifting like ships into the bottle. Life is not a gift; its a fact. His own Bud extends the line of his gun, sits next to his paints, a bottle fly tacky on the rim. Neglecting to add the bridge that limns the distant City, he roughs a thumb against the canvas corner and watches the spine of the island until the sun succumbs at eye level.
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infatuation kaity hallman

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dear dad megan deville I wish I could reclaim you from the aumakua-- stuff your fingers into my curls, hear you say, This is your kanaka crown. You were a fearsome man, of that one thing Im sure. When I was younger they said, Hes still alive, in you. Child that I was I reasoned I would bleed myself, collect your DNA, and somehow string you back together. My childhood was missing your defiant use of my inoa p, your chuckling, Look here keiki, your makuahine dont get it, cause she aint one of us. Oh, that your bedtime stories of Peles plight had colored my dreams! But Daddy, dont worry: I learned how I should listen to the trees, all by myself-you were there on the breeze, once. In my memory you reign colossal; more than man, you are monument. And of all desires never to be, a peculiar one is chief: To be introduced at a party by you-Have you all met my baby? Explanation of Hawaiian words/names in the poem: -aumakua : family gods or deified ancestors -kanaka : a shortened form of the name we use for our people -inoa p : a name that comes from the spirit world in a dream -keiki : child or sometimes baby -makuahine : a maternal female relative, used here to mean mother -Pele is the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes and fire; Peles plight is a reference to the legend of how Native Hawaiians first came to the Hawaiian islands
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reaching for hope meg padgett

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untitled ashley puckett

red flame hannah billie The red fox in the woods of Eastover, South Carolina, lit up the woods with its fur like a red flame.

I only saw this fox briefly, as brief as the moment before a candle blows out.

The fox stirred in the woods, gazing back at me with eyes the color of a sea of fire, a light in them that shined through the woods.

And suddenly the sound of great, tall oaks burning,

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and their wooden breaths, beat on as if the fox was the heart of the Eastover woods, lighting them up.

I could feel its heartbeat pulsing in my blood and sounding in the deepest reaches of ancient wood, while the fox stared on at me, soundless, aware that I was staring back.

How quiet the body waits to die, all those whispers and looks, only for the heart to one day dull and smolder.

I stared on at the fox. I could feel my heart becoming more and more a part of the fire, a red flame like the fox. My body the woods of Eastover. Each limb illuminated. Each limb on fire.

Now, my body burns as brightly as the red fox of the Eastover woods.

I burn the way the fox burns; the way fire burns; the way the heart burns when it is so alive and so young and so fleeting.
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panicky golems virginia lee hildreth I talk to my body tell it to move, to stop swimming in circles pacing cobblestones with bare feet. After all, we speak the same language. She resists without emotion while I try to remember if anyone ever pressed or etched letters into my forehead. I ask my brain to obey. I want to wait but shes busy on her redundant wheel. Without it, she would still run in circles. Maybe my dialect is faulty. If my body resists and my brain resists, where do I reside? Im consigned to the bubbles between joints, a minor ulcer. Where do I go if I cant even drown in an ocean corralled by flesh? The body has no pastures for old souls.

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charcoal still life jessica hunt

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surprise krystin white

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untitled kelly pearson

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art winners

first place dead man / meg padgett second place us and them / kaity hallman third place family home / ashley puckett honorable mention the truth is a cave / lindsey knipp

literary winners
first place red flame / hannah billie second place dear dad / megan deville third place to samuel, corey, and clark / jessica wagoner

thank you judges

randy hanna / art selection judge mr. hanna studied theatre and art at university of south carolina. he is a partner in city art gallery in columbias downtown vista arts district. the gallery is one of the foremost contemporary art galleries in the region, presenting exhibitions by such well know artists as tarleton blackwell, robert lyon, mana hewitt and alex powers. hanna is active within the arts community. in addition to being a practicing artist himself, he has served on the boards of a number of local arts organizations, including trustus theatre. cassie premo steele / literature selection judge ms. premo steele holds a doctorate in comparative literature and womens studies from emory university. she has been thrice nominated for the pushcart prize in poetry, is the author of twelve books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and is a creativity coach with two decades of experience teaching within community and university settings.

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COLUMBIA COLLEGE 2014

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