027. MIRROR IMAGES.

rhyme and rhythm.

Welcome to ISSUE 027: MIRROR IMAGES 🪞

There is always another iteration of the self waiting outside of the frame, or escaping it. Its likeness flickers across screens, reflective surfaces, candid photographs, a lover’s capturing gaze, faces across ages preceding ours. We look and in looking sculpt ourselves from the mud through recognition and repudiation: keep what is, discard what isn’t. We inherit so that we might dispense, in turn offering another a glimpse of themself. To encounter the self is to encounter its doubles: ancestors, avatars, talismans, fictional creatures. What can one do but (re)present? Seek legibility, finish a poem, write it again.

This process feels attuned to the past few months of transformation at paloma magazine. We stepped back to better see the shape that all the different voices and echos had given this space so far. We emerge from it with a shift to a quarterly cadence, and an expanded team. Cait in nonfiction, Claire in poetry, Lee in fiction, and Arantxa in design are already leaving their brilliant, respective marks on this project. They join me in thanking you for your patience and care, made evident to us every single day since we announced our temporary break. We are more determined than ever to give paloma the solid foundation it needs to keep growing.

After guiding the magazine through no less than twenty-seven issues, our beloved Raquel passes the torch to focus her energy on motherhood. Her vision is behind not only every visual element of the magazine (now in Arantxa’s talented hands), but also its name, body, and creative pulse. Her spark will never not be at the core of paloma magazine — thank you Raquel!

Joining us for this rebirth, eight artists and writers play in a hall of mirrors, where each angle offers information through multiplication. In the poem Passage Ways, Lou Cornum dwells on the limits of identity: “If I were a poet I might pick it up.” Aliana Comeau captures the quiet labour of composing a self in Jon at Home through layers of frames. Lara Croft stands in as a second self in Kalina Krabel’s nonfiction piece When I close my eyes I see a mountain, mapping out “the oscillation between functionality and fantasy.” In M O M and its accompanying painting Faye, Kate Harmon observes a grandmother who refracts past and present together through a faded tattoo. In the poem Taylor Armstrong by Inuya Schultz, “shame is how a mother can find her daughter in the dark,” as intuitive knowledge arises from the shared act of watching. Inherited practices of femininity shape Jen Bryant’s conception of self in relation to the world in Beauty Tips, looking toward the past “like it’s a crystal ball, hoping to glimpse my future self.” We close the issue by reflecting on the fact that what binds us needs resonance as much as reflection: we are “rhyme and rhythm,” reminds us Tiyasha Chaudhury in the poem Submersible.

See you on the other side!

Nilay Conraud | editor-in-chief

Passage Ways by Lou Cornum [Poetry]

Jon at home by Aliana Comeau of Divine Photo Project [Visual Art]

When I close my eyes I see a mountain by Kalina Krabel [Non-Fiction]

M O M and Faye by Kate Harmon [Non-Fiction; Visual Art]

Taylor Armstrong by Inuya Schultz [Poetry]

Beauty Tips by Jen Bryant [Non-Fiction]

Submersible by Tiyasha Chaudhury [Poetry]

Passage Ways by Lou Cornum

Jon at home by Aliana Comeau of Divine Photo Project | Instagram | Website

When I close my eyes I see a mountain by Kalina Krabel | Instagram | Substack

In 1992 I am born and so is Lara Croft. My first living memory involves watching my sister play Tomb Raider on our parents’ clunky off-white HP desktop in the dimly lit “computer room” of our Long Island home. It’s summer, 1998 probably. She is jogging stealthily but with control across our screen in a turquoise leotard, light brown shorts, calf-high boots, a utility belt with holsters on either side, two pistols, and tall white socks. She has M-shaped lips, and the perfect spatial relationship between her eyes, mouth, and nose. I notice, even at my age, that Lara Croft is the perfect woman. Not because she’s hot, but because she’s on an adventure.

At the time I fail to notice that she is not like me for one important reason: she’s been created by a team of British developers at a Derby-based company called Core Design. Upon inception Lara is already an intelligent, athletic British adventurer who ventures into ancient tombs and hazardous ruins around the world. She is fluent in several languages. Her dad is dead. Her mother has vanished. She needs to find the lost civilization of Yamatai. She is made up of about 230 polygons. Early in life she survives a plane crash and is stranded in the Himalayas for two weeks. The experience spurs her to shun her former life and seek adventure. She realizes her dead father was right all along.

This is exactly what happens to me the day I turn 30. I receive a phone call from a private number. The voice on the other end tells me she is sleeping with my boyfriend, the one I already decided I would marry. Over dinner, I tell him, “The funniest thing happened today. Some lady called me and said that she was sleeping with you!” I laugh and wait for him to laugh. He doesn’t laugh.

In heartbreak I am productive and tidy. I study Jungian psychology, shadow work, and cord-cutting. I try pilates, cold plunges, hyperbaric chambers, L-tyrosine, slutty red nails, Prozac, and an ultramarathon (33 miles). None of this is working, which is why I decide to strand myself in the Himalayas for five weeks to climb Manaslu and trek Everest base camp. I don’t want my ex to think I am doing it for him. The truth is, I am doing it because of him, which is different. What I want everyone else to believe is that I am doing it for myself. But people have questions. I’m the type of person who gets Botox, wears hair extensions, has half a syringe in her top lip. I’m not the type of person who wakes up one day and decides to climb Mount Everest. But that’s what heartbreak does. It makes us want to become someone else.

I order two pairs of Oakley Eyejacket Redux sunglasses — one black, one in a Dante’s Inferno–mirrory red. Very intense. Just like my idea. I read about Sandy Pittman, who made her porter carry two satellite phones and a printer up Everest in 1996 — a summit attempt during which eight of her fellow climbers died in an infamous storm. Did I want to die? I didn’t mind. Rejection made me want to kill myself, and what my ex had done to me was worse. Cheating on your partner is an assault on their judgment, and that assault is more insulting than the betrayal itself.

Initially Lara is supposed to be a man with a whip and a hat, but Core Design’s co-founder Jeremy Smith finds it too Indiana-Jones-derivative. So Lara is born from a need to not derive. In development, her breast dimensions are accidentally increased by 150% and the team argues to keep the change, mostly as a joke. Lara becomes a sex symbol, despite original developer Toby Gard’s intentions for her to be sexy “only because of her power.”

The Videogame Magazine attributes her eroticism to a male protective instinct. German psychologist Oscar Holzberg describes this as the chance to play hero while warding off the threat of powerful women. Perhaps the low stakes of virtual attachment are more comfortable for men. I’m not calling anyone an incel — I agree that paying attention to someone virtually can satisfy the human need for connection. It’s like texting with a lover you’ve never met in real life. It still feels good. The point is that Lara’s dichotomy makes her compelling. Even though she is “idealized” with an “unattainable body,” she advances the possibility of women as protagonists, in games and in life. Cool. If we’re going to be represented as a species, I suppose our representative should at least be hot.

But after four years, the team gets creatively exhausted. They trap Lara in a cave and kill her. For all intents and purposes, Lara Croft is dead at the hands of her makers. Then Angel of Darkness for PlayStation 2 comes out and Croft is brought back to life without explanation. Her polygons jump to 32,000. They give her more emotional depth, forcing her to kill an antagonist.

The developers use the death to evoke guilt and illustrate that shooting a person should be a difficult choice. In some cases, yes. I think it depends on what that person has done to you.

I learn to read a map. Tiny numbers navigate us — myself, the Sherpa and our porter — across the Mansiri Himal. “Women don’t know maps, I never met a woman who knew a map,” the Nepalese guide jokes. Well, I haven’t been a woman for a few months now. In the distance we hear rockfall and the roaring, nebulous rush of an avalanche. Red-faced strangers sip ginger tea and eat dhal bhat while our sherpas request index fingers to monitor our blood oxygen levels. We watch and cheer when a safe number appears on the oximeter’s screen, fall silent if it’s low. The hut gets steamy with smoke and everyone hangs their sweaty T-shirts and wet hiking boots by the blackened stove. On the wooden slats we write our names in Sharpie to prove that we were here on the Manaslu circuit, a 112-mile trek that circumnavigates the eighth-highest mountain in the world.

I start to consider a childless, husbandless life. I can only see it barely, like a fish underwater arriving to bait. For some reason I remember Lara. Maybe from lack of human interaction, I feel close to her. Like a child, my admiration swells. I notice that this fake woman still has everything I want. I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in faith, but when I think about Lara I feel something akin to hope.

I also feel like a child again — like the person I was before I met my ex. I fall into something else, the adult version of what I had always wanted: Arc’teryx shells, Salomon sneakers, $1200 Marmot Warmcube summit jackets. I see myself as, and want to be, Lara Croft. It is a compulsion without an explanation. That is how compulsion works. People begin using the word “Gorpcore” to describe me, though I’ve never heard or resonated with the phrase.

My initial thought on Gorpcore is that it signals something else: money, irony, the luxury of pretending to be practical. Which is why I keep thinking about Lara — how she is the opposite of Gorp. She isn’t there to neutralize herself into utility; she is there to make survival glamorous, mythological, sexy. Gorpcore says: I am capable, self-reliant, neutral. Lara says: I am dangerous, erotic, jaded, don’t touch me. One flatters the anxiety of the age, the other exposes our real fantasy of survival: to be hot, capable, wanted. Two different strategies, two women sharing a single body.

This is the tension that fascinates me: the oscillation between functionality and fantasy, of who we are in grief and in love, and whether those two people could ever be the same person. How Gorpcore feels expensive while Tomb Raider feels camp. My propensity toward class performance is obvious, my identity wrapped tightly inside it. But I still love it, because it feels like freedom to me.

When we reach the top of Larke Pass, everyone is celebrating. We pose for a photo with the elevation marker, or maybe I don’t pose because I’m exhausted. I feel lifeless except that my throat burns when I try to draw breath, and my face has become windburned, red and glacier-blazed. I want the mountain to clarify that my ex had been right all along, or wrong all along, or that none of it mattered. To pack up my heightened awareness like a souvenir and return to New York a more enlightened version of myself. But the problem with coming here to learn about myself is that I am no fixed thing. Lara survives because she is controlled by someone else. If I slip, it is my slip.

Faye by Kate Harmon | Instagram | Website

(24x24 inches; Acrylic on canvas; 2025)

M O M by Kate Harmon

Taylor Armstrong by Inuya Schultz | Instagram

Beauty Tips by Jen Bryant

“If you can’t afford blush, just pinch your cheeks.”

My grandmother and I are standing in her Pepto-pink-tiled bathroom, where I’m keeping her company as she puts on her face for church, when she delivers this advice with a wink. She opens a pale green makeup compact and dabs at her forehead with a powder puff. A dusty-sweet scent rises from the powder, mingling with the fried-egg smell still lingering in the air from breakfast. The pull-string lightbulb over the vanity mirror deepens the furrows beneath her eyes, casting us both in shadow.

Something about what she just said makes me think of the way she twines leftover rubber bands into a giant ball stashed in the kitchen drawer instead of just throwing them away. Both speak to a mindset born from a Great Depression-era childhood, the implications of which I don’t fully grasp.

Outside the bathroom door, an old photo hangs in the hallway, taken during the war. There, my grandmother is eternally twenty years old and so beautiful: cascading red finger-waved curls, startling blue eyes, a shock of lipstick curved into a mischievous smile. When I visit, I peer into the photo like it’s a crystal ball, hoping to glimpse my future self.

At nine years old, I’ve flipped through enough beauty magazines in checkout lines and waiting rooms to understand two things: pretty is the most important thing a girl can be, and I’m missing the mark. My own red curls are an unruly tangle; my blue eyes are obscured behind chunky-framed plastic glasses; my guileless grin reveals a jumble of crooked teeth. Though I share my grandmother’s coloring, I’m beginning to worry that our similarities might end there.

The grandmother powdering her nose beside me still has red hair thanks to her beautician’s faithful ministrations, but she doesn’t look like the picture any more, either. Seventy-two-year-olds are a dubious source of beauty tips; besides, I’m years away from being allowed to wear any makeup other than Bonne Bell Lip Smackers. Still, there’s something thrillingly adult about the way she’s speaking to me as though I’m another woman and not just some kid.

In the TV shows and YA novels that consume my imagination, beauty sometimes descends on an unsuspecting girl between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next. Or she’ll take off her glasses, loosen her ponytail, and suddenly transform from geeky to gorgeous.

I will never be one of those girls, but I don’t know this yet. And so I grip the smooth laminate countertop, eagerly awaiting further instruction.

My grandmother snaps her compact shut. Catching my eye, she raises both hands and brings her thumbs and index fingers together repeatedly in an exaggerated pantomime, then motions for me to do the same. Standing side by side, we pinch our cheeks despite the sting, examining our faces in the mirror as the blood rushes in.

Submersible by Tiyasha Chaudhury | Instagram

~for A

We have stressed on sonics,
We know what binds us.

It is difficult to put a linchpin
on the unfolding of an event,
there’s a shift happening.
I am recluse till a vibration
touches the nape of my neck.

Strings at the end of a song
signifying promise,
you are an outro on a
police car, which I am in.
Alarms become music.

There can be magic
all the time, I am sure of this.
Synchronicity doesn’t demand
anything metaphysical.
We work like assonance.

Rhyme and rhythm,
I am bound in strange ways.
Waves splatter on rocks,
make them tender. Know what
you are doing to me.

Thank you for reading paloma, a quarterly art and literature magazine. For information on submitting your work, please see the Submission Guide. You can find us on Instagram, and you can catch up on past issues here.

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