Apple Barrel ® Colors – Red Flag
Flora Snowden

I’m on new medication.
They told me it will thin my skin

and make wounds heal slowly.
I think I may have been taking it for years.

It also causes nosebleeds,
dries out your sinuses

only compounded by the dry air
of the hometown I keep coming back to.

Someone who once sat at my mother’s kitchen table,
the one covered on each corner by acrylic paint

splattered from the bottles of every color I could find
as a child, I remember that they had small red apples

on each label beneath the company name –
he wasn’t good company.

He got a nosebleed,
a new shade of red added to the level oak.

He told me it happens all the time.
I thought that I had held the tissue long enough,

thought that I could let go and it would hold,
but then I laughed at someone else’s table

and the stream started all over again.
My blood clots loosely now

always ready to run.

Aspen McCallum

Biography: Aspen McCallum is a multimedia artist working with themes of memory, personal experience, and fantasy. A Pacific Northwest artist, born in Washington state and raised in Colorado, McCallum currently resides in Oregon. Their work encompasses several styles from realism to abstraction. Graduating in 2025 with a Bachelors of Fine Arts and a minor in Art History from Oregon State University, McCallum’s practice focuses on printmaking, painting, and drawing. You can find more of their work on instagram @mpm.artwork

Artist Statement: Aspen McCallum is a multimedia artist working with themes of memory, personal experience, and fantasy. Also often included is their namesake: Aspen leaves. Inspired by the jewel-like shine of quaking aspen trees, the artist feels a deep connection to their own roots, literally and metaphorically. In these pieces, they honor their own memories of personal experience with their childhood home and neighborhood.

Flora Snowden

Biography: Flora Snowden is a senior studying English and creative writing. She is the recipient of two Academy of American Poets University Prizes and an Oregon State University Provost Literary Prize. She loves collaborating with peers on interdisciplinary projects and is a member of PRAx’s Reser Creative Scholars cohort. Her cat Shmoko is her greatest supporter.

Artist Statement: Thank you for reading; I hope that these words made you feel heard a little better. This is my favorite thing to do. Thank you for being one of the reasons I get to do it.