April 2021

This film employs the act of doing laundry, in its habitual, cyclical mundaneness, to reflect a deep longing for a cultural heritage under the strain of constant, quiet erasure. Invoking two voices, mother and daughter, Tagalog and English, I choose to render this immigrant experience through the insecurities surrounding language, and its intimate relation to generational relationships.

This special edition of Iris is dedicated to the writers and artists who participated in the Women’s Center’s juried arts and writing competition, (re)present. 

Eyes draw me in and allow me to more fully understand others. At UVA, eyes have allowed me to make new friends, distance myself from bad influences, and comfort broken hearts. My gray-scale drawing, done with graphite pencils, allows everyone, regardless of race or gender, to relate. The flowers surrounding the eye add a three-dimensional component that comes with getting to know a person. I have often been judged based on my looks. However, once I speak, my genuine and authentic personality blooms out from me.

I am a visual artist and work abstractly on paintings, sculptures and illustrations. My work is playful, and the self portrait I have submitted draws on themes of queerness and femininity.

Even though see saws are a thing of the past,
I’ll return to a warm June evening when
my brother and I have walked
to the local elementary school.

We seat ourselves on opposite ends,
hold onto the metal handles
and rise and descend, one in the air,
the other on the ground, small craters where

other children have done the same with their feet.
We pull out tangerines we’ve stashed in our
windbreakers, peel them in unison,
one of us suspending the other, trusting a smooth descent.

Eight Hour Orphans

The mothers start their days at 6:45am. They swing their legs over the side of the bed, they stand and sway into the bathroom and look at themselves in tile-reflected fluorescent light. “Am I turning into my mother?” they ask their reflections. “Yup,” their reflections reply.

Away from home with imposter syndrome
Fading far from the plight of perfectionism
Taunted by the unexplored, not on any exec boards
Sometimes struggling to just get out of bed

My roommate wakes up and runs ten miles
While I have clothes heaped in piles
And a hundred unorganized files on my desktop
Too anxious to answer an email

In constant comparison and competition
I’m not motivated by grades or majors
Student governance or unpaid labor
But paranoid I need to fit in

What does the UVA student look like? This is hard to answer when we rarely look alike. What could connect us when we come from all different backgrounds?

Immigrants, legacies, first-gen students.
Students whose families owned slaves and those whose ancestors were slaves.
Out of state students, the NOVA kids, and those from just down the road.

Nacho table, extension cords, a locket
lost in the couch. This house crept up
on me like a new year: it was judiciously
January when one day I woke up
to December frosting hello on my window.
When I moved in, after a summer spent inert,
the floor was covered in dead crickets and dirt.
Now there’s unpaid parking tickets, fostered pups,
half-melted candles on the window sill. In this house,
I never want to be on my own, or still.
When the second-floor bathroom leaked

It’s hard
To not see the bad,
To not try and tune it out.
To smile and commemorate momentous occasions
On land others were brutalized on.

The approach, I had been told
Was to tune it out.
Pretend nothing had happened.
That worked well for the boys in my politics discussions.
Not for me.

You cannot tune out the brutalization of the enslaved peoples,
Peoples that built The Lawn.
That built Jefferson’s University.

1 out of 6

Okay, please gather around the tree; we’re just missing one person. One, two, three, four, five, six … nineteen.
Oh, were you here the whole time?

“Yes.”

Okay, well, let’s go ahead and introduce ourselves: name, major, and hometown.

“Hi, my name is Sadie Randall, I’m in the engineering school I plan to major in Mechanical Engineering, and I’m from Houston, Texas.”

It’s perhaps an understatement to say that my favorite pair of shoes—a black toe-loop pair of Birkenstocks sandals—is well-loved. Their rubbery bottoms, once textured with prominent zig zags, now glide precariously under each step. Plus, thanks to the wonky gait I inherited from my dad, the outer edge of each heel is ground down an inch or two below the rest of the sole. Black crumbles line the synapse between cork and leather, neighbored by creases that could put the Utah salt flats to shame.