STYLUS Volume 129, Number 1, Fall 2013. Founded in 1882. Undergraduate members of the University are invited to submit original works of poetry, prose, and art. Direct correspondence to: Stylus, Room 129, McElroy Commons, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 or bcstylus@gmail.com. Works under review remain anonymous. Copyright 2013 Stylus Editorial Board, 2013-2014. All rights reserved.
Bostonese CO-EDS ON CAFFEINE Recently, On the Fly has finally decided to outsource to independent businesses, collaborating with Starbucks Coffee. In addition to reestablishing the BC Basic Aesthetic, the java hotspot’s presence has clearly inspired the literary populous, making Starbucks the one to thank (or to blame) for the plenitude of coffee-based art pieces. “ONGOING” INVESTIGATION
This year the Stylus office was raided by a group of rogue bandits. The ruthless fiends pilfered our precious desktop PC. Fortunately, Boston College’s Finest are on the case and have reassured us, after months of investigation, that they’re close to their first lead. May the righteous electric lever of justice descend swiftly upon the nefarious evildoers responsible.
STYLUS ON SAFARI Recognizing Stylus’ ever-vicious rivalry with Model United Nations, the magazine is trying to create a global presence. How, you ask, entirely hypothetical reader? By sending copies of Stylus to South Sudan. Stylus has been proved by academics, scientists, and fringe libertarians to fight poverty, illiteracy, public-transportation difficulties, and tooth decay. DOWN WITH EDUROAM With the introduction of the “eduRoam” wifi, Boston College’s oldest publication must return to its 19th Century roots. We’ll only be accepting mailedin submissions from now on, as email has become the Edmonds Hall of mail services. We hope eduRoam will meet the same fate as the not-so-beloved hall.
Volume CXXIX
STYLUS
Welcome to Come Again! Before the Milkman Comes Tombstone Coffee Grinds We Went to McDonald’s And Dissertation Caution Flood Samson: The Assumption Old Wives’ Tale Tonight, it Rains When My iPhone Was Broken Why I Chose Not to Save Your People Capsicum Night Wanderers Holding Pattern Razor Ode to Death Rehabilitation Painting Pain Neon Sticky Hands Memory Fathers To Love a Cat Transience Sugar Wine Bio-Matter Love in the End My Summer Vacation Untitled A Base To Return To Space Monkey Stained Glass Fathers and Sons
Fall, 2013 Verse 8 11 18 21 24 27 31 33 36 39 47 49
Number 1
Carly Barnhardt Jennifer Heine Luis Miquel Torres Kelsey Connors Robert Grote Sofia Soroka Ryan Twoley Jessica Lipton Michael DiMartino Carly Barnhardt Angela Arzu Emily Murphy
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Austin Bodetti
55 56 58 61 62 67 69 72 74 75 77 79 80 82 85
Jennifer Heine Kelsey Connors Kwesi Aaron Michael Quinn Abraham Joya Julia Cardwell Julia Walker Jakub Frankowicz Karen Choi José Altomari Kelsey Connors Maura Monaghan Jennifer Heine Robert Grote Kwesi Aaron
Prose 13 28 41 44 53 64
Austin Bodetti GabrielMcClary Kwesi Aaron Shamaz Mahmood Michael Quinn Ryan Daly
Art Hummingbird White Chocolate Mocha Why are the flowers crying? Untitled Alert Stitched 1 Virtue Prana Decaf with a Straw Aht Heheehe ;) Untitled Untitled Concentric Antes de la Feria A Reflective Instant Ori Florescence NaĂŻvetĂŠ Hounds in my Head Reflect 1916 Untitled Coffee -- Black Extra Shot Untitled fuck your interpretation this is just a drawing of paris Shattered Untitled Memory Untitled Untitled Untitled Untitled Untitled Ophelia Scanography 2 Monsieur
Cover 7 9 10 12 15 16 19 20 23 25 26 30 32 34 35 38 40 42 46 48 51 52 54 57 59
Kaitlyn Fitzgerald Bridget Delaney Julia Walker Gregory Kacergis Allie Ward Kaitlyn Fitzgerald Vinny Roca Nicholas Gillespie Bridget Delaney Nicholas Gillespie Erica Mazzarelli Alexandra Deplas Ethan Danger Steet Sarah Hodgens Jennifer Heine Haley Cormier William Foshay Haley Cormier Haley Cormier Emily Huang Sarah Hodgens Vinny Roca Ana Grisanti Bridget Delaney Gregory Kacergis Vinny Roca
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Rebecca McGeorge Ethan Danger Steet Julia Hopkins Nicholas Gillespie Gregory Kacergis Alexandra Deplas Ruolin Lu Ethan Danger Street Benjamin Flythe Kaitlyn Fitzgerald Alexandra Deplas
title White Chocolate Mocha medium Graphite
artist Bridget Delaney
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Welcome To Come Again! Our futures folded up lengthwise between the sweet sheets, and fate looks a little smaller now inside this red-tiled room, its carpet stained sour. You trace unfamiliar characters on my cheek with the back of your hand, and think of what it would be like to have been born in the year of the dog. I read your lucky numbers, trade them for mine. We learn how to say happy. You tell me it’s easy, just a matter of pursed lips and curled tongue. You smile when I can’t get it right. Your persistence will pay off.
Carly Barnhardt
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Why are the flowers crying? Oil on Canvas
Julia Walker
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Untitled Photography
Gregory Kacergis
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Before the Milkman Comes Wispish moths linger at the window, winging heartily towards the light before threads float in, horsehairs without music. The victor, still thin, twists spindly elbows to reach them, tissue paper torn in jewel-bright jowls and in moments to dust they have returned. I watch from within, long accustomed to the silent Shakespearean drama on the porch, but marking, at the edge of the field, something transparent, transcendent, but if for its swinging, swiftly, rhymically. Earth falls from beneath it, vanishing into mist. Come morning, there is only dirt that lingers about the curdled trees. Jennifer Heine
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Alert White Charcoal
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Allie Ward
My Summer Vacation Austin Bodetti
I arrived at the airport. It smelt of sadness and sand. ‘Does sand have a smell?’ asked my imaginary cat Walter. ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘You should know. The desert is basically a giant litter box.’ ‘Sadness definitely doesn’t have a smell.’ ‘Shut up,’ I told Walter. Imaginary cats seemed to make terrible travel companions. My relationship with Chad, much like my relationship with Walter, could best be described as ambiguous and slightly romantic. I’m not talking about Chad the attractive senior from all those high school parties you never got invited to. I’m talking about the landlocked African country shaped like a rectangle if you’re really bad at drawing shapes. Chad has two official languages. I don’t speak either of these languages. My girlfriend speaks both, but she couldn’t come because she’d be justifiably jealous of Walter. Even my command of English was dubious according to the teacher from my literature class. I think people said the same thing about Shakespeare. There was an important difference between me and Shakespeare of course. He had never tried to conquer Chad. Also, I was much handsomer. ‘Why are you talking to yourself?’ asked Walter. His questions annoyed me. ‘I’m talking to the members of my audience,’ I said. ‘They need to know how handsome I am.’ ‘Maybe you should have submitted a picture of yourself to Stylus instead of this poorly composed story you wrote during Honors class.’ ‘I’m the only one who gets to make jokes, Walter,’ I sighed. Maybe I should have brought my girlfriend. Her sass made me cry less than Walter’s did. I approached the immigration official. ‘I will rule you,’ I said. ‘Where is your visa, sir?’ she countered unexpectedly.
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‘I don’t need a visa,’ I advised her, ‘but I could use some pink lemonade. It’s very hot here.’ The Chadian government interpreted pink lemonade as deporting me. It must have been the language barrier. My plan to become Chad’s next dictator indefinitely delayed, I sipped my non-pink lemonade on the flight back to Paris. My thirty minutes in the Chadian capital, whose name I cannot spell, were very itchy—maybe from all the cheap cologne I had bought at the duty-free shop. ‘It’s N’Djamena,’ said Walter. ‘Bless you,’ I comforted him. ‘No. The Chadian capital is N’Djamena.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ I reassured Walter. ‘We’ll get you something for your cold in Paris, and then we’ll take care of this mysterious “visa.”’
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Stitched 1 Embroidered Vintage Photography
Kaitlyn Fitzgerald
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Virtue
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Charcoal on Paper
Vinny Roca
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Tombstone Guillermina was slightly taller than most Puertoriquenas you’d see walking around 110th street and Park Ave. While her smile painted joy on Chucho’s tan face, the homeless man of the block, it was her stone expression that people knew her for. Her lustful husband, Moncho, lived to chip the edges of her smile off her face. Her seven children replaced those edges every now and then. She slept in a closet so they could all have a bed to share. Her youngest, John, would find her on the ledge of their bathtub with no smile or stone face, but with peace in her eyes. A voice John could not hear called his mother to her eternal bed. The family finds solace in her stone memory. Luis Miguel Torres
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Prana Photography
Nicholas Gillespie
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Decaf With a Straw Graphite
Bridget Delaney
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Coffee Grinds I never did care much for coffee, though it does feel chic to shed my scarf and thumb the pages of Chaucer in a Charles Street café. Hot tea leaves a tingle on my tongue, but at the table to my left, she hasn’t the time to taste her sleeved cinnamon chai. Furiously go her fingers over keys, and fine are the lines etched between her eyebrows. She is worn with the worries of her work, lost in the muddle of the coffee-creamed world. The air here is dark roast and steamed milk, but the man by the window has gone numb to the condensed scent. Silently keeping up appearances, he fiddles with the front of his collar and sips his peppermint latte pinky up, casually confronting the common passerby with a pose to mask his loneliness. Across the shop, a toddler tugs at a grown-up sleeve. Chocolate milk in hand, she points at a teenaged pair kissing at a table by the cashier. Mom whispers that it’s not polite to stare, but when she looks up, her eyes are dewy over her iced caramel. Crystal blue, they gaze at some far-off place where time is stiller, and lives come closer, mixing like coffee grinds, dissolving like sugar.
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I’m sure the barista has been watching all this time: the artist and the maker of foamed cappuccino design. Kelsey Connors
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Aht Acrylic on paper
Nicholas Gillespie
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We went to McDonald’s And We went to McDonald’s And Julia just wouldn’t shut her mouth And kept putting French fries in there All the way. and then we went to the counter And I said “I’ll have Medium McNuggets and Medium Sprite.” And then we sat Down and ate food and It was really good—really good. It was so good that We started speaking in tongues. Robert Grote
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Heheehe ;) Marker and Pen
Erica Mazzarelli
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Untitled Oil and Acrylic on Wood
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Alexandra X. Deplas
Dissertation At the beginning there was no light; no sun Light appeared later When Before now How Measurements, models, calculations confirm its former absence its current presence Why is not a quantifiable question Today there is light Sofia Soroka
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Gabriel McClary Common Application 2015-2016 essay topic: Reflect on a time when you challenged a belief or idea. What prompted you to act? Would you make the same decision again? Forgive me for this application essay. It will be very difficult to read. Filled with run-on sentences, indiscreetly long sentences. random subject changes, inconsistent verb tense/ a general disregard to punctuation: and authenticity. Forgive me for the incompleted th Forgive me for the lack of structure, the structure that is omniabsent in my life. The absence that is materialized in my writing. The writing that is the unfiltered expression of me. Me a blank canvas, impressionable to the slightest occurrences in life that. seem so: small. But add the most vibrant of colors to my blank spaces. I was a hopeless romantic; I believed I would fall in love at first sight with the excitement of the traditional college experience that would undoubtedly yield the statistically pleasing, carbon copied life. I always had my head wrapped around the idea of getting into a wonderful university and getting a good job and getting married and having a family and living in the suburbs and being able to support them. But for some reason, now all I want to do is travel and eat new foods and meet new people and have unprotected sex with people that have unprotected lives and unprotected tans and run the tab up on the bar, and not pay, and smoke weed on sand white beaches and drink champagne after working out. And read well written literature and write shitty poetry. And eat with my hands, and follow my heart and think.with my. dick- and throw the first punch And Live in Brooklyn and learn 5 languages fluently, but only speak Ebonics.
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And buy a one way ticket and not come home Im writing this essay to be accepted into your fine institution out of respect to my mother; she wants me to use the socially accepted lens that all young adults should place over their eyes to see the world. The Herumenutics: hers, my fathers yours. Is an impelling, Aesthetic.
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Untitled Photography
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Ethan Danger Street
Caution My grandmother taught me about the places you don’t go when you can avoid it— Fingers away from that socket and Feel the water first and What kind of question is that for a guest or The girls are changing in there. I carried caution with me even here, to your apartment, wondering where it’s okay to put my hands while you wash lettuce and wishing I had coffee for my grasp, so I could sip it while you run the faucet and tell you how I want so badly to be like water. Ryan Towey
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Concentric Photography
Sarah Hodgens
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Flood Dry elbows crinkle like wax paper And Father approves Of her parchment skin and Thirsty lips. She wears her rue With a difference on crusty eyelids And abandons torn leaves at Mother’s Marble feet. Saint or sinner, only wet Eyelashes are beautiful. Whose hair is getting thinner, Madonna’s or the whore’s? Jessica Lipton
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Antes de la Feria title Photography medium
Jennifer Heine
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A Reflective Instant Photography
Haley Cormier
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Samson: The Assumption He once raised pillars Built temples on worlds He held on his shoulders Supporting statues Balding men—dead men Resting in palms of hands Her hand, soft and white, Passing scissors through nights alone Bewept in states of being Neither out nor in Locks of anything but love Locks of shame—or faux indifference Lock his mane on lusts of remittance Locked by her soft, white hands How she whispers whilst you sleep Passing fantasies of Goliath Through the ever-sifting synapses Sorting for strength—stable construction Undeniable pronoun performance Edges trimmed to fit Prescriptions spoken into stone Profits of sameness Who would recognize David turned Goliath Sculptor turned Stone Lifting rocks that dwarf him By body’s might alone
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From rafters her song haunts him Demanding relentless insubmission Tightening of the human chord Until it breaks— The floor falls out White slats, heaven’s dome, Bludgeon the skin with little hair Such woe that dentists mourned Thoughts of identification By crowns and molars Calcium callously calcified Forking through the rubble: “Where is Samson?” “Where is strong Samson? “Where is Samson, stone lifter?” All the while she murmurs under tones Softly, whitely, handedly Into this concocted subconscious At first glance of his sock How the man changed not his clothes I knew him and unknew him I cooed: “He lives.” I cried: “He dies.”
Michael DiMartino
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Ori Photography
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William Foshay
Old Wives’ Tale I’ve swallowed so many words, black like watermelon seeds. I keep checking sideways, in the mirror, to see if they have taken root. It’s a strange maternity, knowing I should have spit. A tickle in my throat as I cough up crawling vines. Carly Barnhardt
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Fluorescence Photography
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Haley Cormier
A Base To Return To Kwesi Aaron
Little League ended with the quiet clapping of cleats on the cement floor of the Blue Jays dugout. The kids remained oddly poised through the obligatory dirt-caked handshakes of sportsmanship, before they silently walked off with first place trophies and nothing left to fight for. That night, the fathers noticed something odd: the way their Jays brushed away the dinner plate, and scowled like the umpire. By the time the blood and dirt was lifted from the Robinblue fabric of the jerseys, the boys—already sour to orange slices and curfews at dusk—had no use for the memories their mothers dabbed at with club soda. Stick ball soon replaced the League, and its rules of engagement easily disintegrated when those children took to the abandoned field. Years later, some less fortunate ones, already used to firing balls leading nowhere went undrafted, and found that the sound of shells falling reminded them of the clink of the aluminum bat. Sometimes the rocky surface threw some men out on trips from base to base. Sacrifices were made at First, but they quickly grew tired of the long walks up the driveway each time someone was hit. At some point, they won, according to the medals that hung around their necks. But even as their heads dropped like gallows over their errors, the birds knew they’d soon spring up again with soft leather gloves broken in like nearby street lamps or old sons unwilling to give up the children’s game.
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Space Monkey Shanaz Mahmood The night his spaceship broke into two perfect, useless pieces, I was working late at my parents’ restaurant, serving a Meatball Supreme sub to a beach bum with straggling eyes. The town’s gigantic nightlight, an old striped lighthouse, blared into Cape Cod waters, a candle flickering under the influence of draft and atmosphere and pressure. Most locals were safe in quilt-covered beds asleep until the roosters told them it was okay again to peek their noses above the sheets. Only tourists order subs at midnight. That night, my astronaut father plunged into the molasses of my memory. I saw my father leave earth on the six am news and leave my life on the seven pm report, his red-and-white striped spaceship tearing into two, straight down the riveted middle, metal panels flapping like his reckless hair peeking out of an old motorcycle helmet he used to wear on the highway to Boston. We used to call him a space monkey, as if he were the mechanic of the sky, fixing the star-buds to bloom like stark red roses. He used to write odes to Cassiopeia and show me the big dipper through a fly screen window, scoring the sky into tiny pixels of infinite space. When I was little, I used to tell my dad that the moon was one of our china plates my mom had thrown into the sky, the painted border of a flower motif and the fissures of gray dishwasher cracks decorating the surface. I used to tell him that constellations were pokes of an inextinguishable candle behind the motheaten curtain. I know none of that’s true now. We said goodbye through a 1950s FST television set my mother had found in the remnants of a passed-over garage sale in Albuquerque. How else could we have said goodbye? My mother ran to New Mexico the following Sunday with a band of travelling carnival salesmen. They owned a cage full of shrieking monkeys, their ears like satellite dishes stealing sounds from space. The night his spaceship cracked, the beach bum with straggling 44
eyes dropped his tin fork, a small clang erupting from the collision with the plate. His ocean blue eyes sank into the flat pixels of the television, crying for my father, whose back he had only seen once at the barbeque of a mutual almost stranger. The moon was a perfect half-circle, its cheddar light dimmer than the sun and at odds with the lighthouse beyond the town. My father’s love of the moon was lunatic. He would tell me about its marble grey mountains and eternal beachheads. He wanted me to visit one day. I watched the incident unfold on a screen of black and white pixels. My father’s portrait hung above the set in a temporary frame. He held his motorcycle helmet in his hands, courageously puffed at the chest. You would not have known that his wife had just left him for somebody who believed he could con anyone into having a good time in the cheap seats of an illegal roadside spectacle. The clammy and useless tendons of my tender arms bent out of shape, letting go of the family plates in my hands. Meatball Supreme fell to the floor and became caked in gray sand and road dirt. The noise of them falling beat the peal of the beach bum’s fork, and he glazed his eyes at me, marking his loss of the most defeating game. Diners peered at the domestic companion to the catastrophe in the sky. My mother’s white china broke into two, like a pair of forever separate half moons, or two semicircle ears of a space monkey ambling behind the moth-hole curtains.
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Hounds in my Head Pencil on Paper
Emily Huang
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Tonight, it Rains Where do you lay your head to rest, when the sun has died and the moon howls back at the bloodthirsty wolf? ‘Beneath the stars’ you say, just like me. You imagine us to be the same yet it is you who has scraped his porcelain finger through the muck, the sod, to separate your half of the world from mine. You trust me with your fork, your food, your fourmonth old baby whose cry you never calm. I cry too, when I look at her, she is only a replica of your pink lips, supple skin, Thin hair‘We are one nation’ you say. You trust me with your army, your ambulance, your American pie. It seems as though we are well adjusted to this Utopia you formed with our founding fathers, with Jim Crow. You sent us to eat in the kitchen when company came, when the air was smooth and the horses roamed. You think now that you trust me with your cars, your Colgate, your cancer we are equals here. Close your eyes for a moment. I see us fighting, relentlessly, to escape the scorching heat from the stainless-steel stovetop. Do you see that? I don’t think you can. Day after day we beat against the current of your world While policemen strike down the innocent to keep their city washed white. The air is thick. Tonight, it rains in Ferguson. Angela Arzu
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Reflect Photography
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Sarah Hodgens
When My iPhone Was Broken crossing a bridge in rural Vermont, sun and silos rising in the distance, while the mountains sink under the weight of beauty. some things can’t be photographed. it is cliché, perhaps, to say that the vistas sang to me. to say that it reminded me of you, the sight of leaves touched softly by sunlight, like the quiet kisses of a Sunday morning. some things can’t be photographed Emily Murphy
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Why I Chose Not to Save Your People I fell in love with a war long Before I fell in love with a girl whose name, Unlike yours, won’t go down in The violent history I watch every day. I consider myself a writer, so it pains me to Say I wrote this story with your blood And not mine because I don’t want to bleed, But who am I to make that choice when You bleed every day in every way and I can only cry with a figurative pen? I wrote about Dagestan and South Sudan and War at the edges of the Euphrates. I have Never been to any of these places. I want to go to Aleppo to see your homes and Hopes explode like an eye that has seen Too much violence. I want to watch the toyotas Heavy with ammunition and dread and death Storm Khartoum to end fifty years of war With one hundred thousand bullets. Instead, I fell in love with a girl. The boy in me lived, but the quiet Revolutionary died--just like your hope did When I chose not to save your people. Austin Bodetti
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1916 Pen on Paper
Vinny Roca
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Untitled Photography
Ana Grisanti
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Stained Glass Michael Quinn
Stained glass windows don’t keep the cold out, so I guess Mom lied about something. I wrap myself before coming downstairs and help pull gloves onto Tommy’s fat little fingers, like trying to tuck a self-rolled sleeping bag back into the case. He struggles against me and I grab his wrists. “Why can’t Dad do this?” Because, because, because. I get the stupid thing on his hand and draw the cord tight around his skin. She drives us to Mass, and they’re already on the Second Reading. We stand in the back. I hug myself.
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Coffee--Black Extra Shot Graphite
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Bridget Delaney
Capsicum “Write me a poem,” she said and I did. I compared her to a summer day, my verse so flowery and florid the musk of it rose from my adjectives, inky black flowers. I told her my soul reached geographically, called her my Portuguese although she wasn’t. I referenced romantic compasses and reeled off all the stars I knew. I called her beautiful in parts, roses, flaxseed, porcelain instead of lips and hair and skin. My perfect statue, my tender bird, my tepid flower, my tractable goddess. My love, she smiled with derision to read it. Her new lover writes of her like a tempest, a heroine, devastating. She prefers the taste of clove to rose, he calls it cumin on her lips when she bites instead of kisses. I don’t read his poetry anymore, but I can still taste her, mouthy and piquant, lingering and stinging in my throat when I speak, heaving forth when I try to write, and I can’t seem to choke her back. Jennifer Heine
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Night Wanderers Sore feet, heavy arms, and a warm chest are the drugs that drag me through the night, while we walk in sways and swirls. Up sidewalks we stroll, that trick and trip me, by roots pushing and climbing their way through the darkness beneath our soles. May we stumble through the night ever-carelessly, always with sure friends and smiles in our eyes, tickled with belly laughs and goose bumps and tight hugs in borrowed arms. We swell, day by day and night by night, with the promise of the next tomorrow. I will not have fear nor falter to look plainly into a pair of cobalt eyes, slink a stray hair back into place, or kiss the pearly moon goodbye with the flicker of a wink, as I fall satisfied into bed, and ease into rhythm of the sky. Kelsey Connors
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Untitled Photography
Gregory Kacergis
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Holding Pattern I was chasing you around the barbecue, though you weren’t running, but walking very quickly, and darting from one greeting to the next handshake, sip of punch, and sweet smile that makes the denim fibers of my leg twitch when I can actually see it. But I am watching the spot where your curly hair knots up into a ball, bobbing away from what’s left of me, as you crush footprints right into the grass that I sometimes picture as the Kermit-colored mats of our half of a suburban duplex. And you know and don’t mind that I am standing there in your wake, sighing with the gasp of each new can of beer opening, while your smile, still unseen, is lighting up the undeserving eyes of unsuitable men I hope are mere formalities. That’s where you are, far ahead and moving, while I am, but still unable to stand how badly I want to hold you, like conversations that whitened the tongue, or the grip of a bobby pin, and like this bitten burger I refuse to throw away regardless of how cold it grows to my touch. Kwesi Aaron
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fuck your interpretation this is just a drawing of paris Pen and Ink on Paper
Vinny Roca
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Shattered Photography
Rebecca McGeorge
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Razor He sits in the library, drawing light fingers along his waxy mustache and the hairs springing from his chin. He watches her sit back, tendons pulling her white mouth agape before leaning back into the table and going back to work. Maybe I should shave.
Michael Quinn
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Ode to Death Timeless friend whose voice is silence, whisper what it is that remains for me to see of those moments when my life closed before its close and you unveiled immortality. How long will I have to wait for the peace I found with you beyond the river Styx, when I saw what lies past oblivion in the starry realms of carnal release? Will you be there a third time if I risk my life in search of eternal communion? O Death! You are the tears that open seeds before the sun reaches with rays of light. You are the quiet shade that youth needs, a pale moon in that unfulfilled night when we first learn what it means to depart. O Death! You are the veil that covers beauty with a glow of melancholy and joy, a wrinkle of warm air that touches our heart with an instance that captures infinity, like Paris taking Helen to Troy. Tell me how hopeless it is to conceive the reason behind Clotho’s thread of days. Tell me, am I a fool in my belief that a mere mortal can witness the fates lace the weave that gives length to the years? And when it’s finally time for Atropos to cut the yarn that stretches all my yearning into one, will you be there to calm my fears and announce the end? Tell me, Thanatos, will you be there when I begin my parting? Abraham Joya
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Untitled Photography
Ethan Danger Street
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Fathers & Sons Ryan Daly My dad’s dad skipped both the warning label and the warning signs, which probably explains why he was in an attic above a boat rental shop with his clothes hanging from plumbing pipes when I walked in—an attic with one sparse flickering light bulb turned on to breach the darkness so he could type, click clack, on a prehistoric keyboard, working on a novel that he’ll never get published. At that moment, and I’m sure in this moment still, it’s both the novel and the bottle, but back before I walked in and when my dad had long hair and two natural hips, it was just the bottle for my dad’s dad and nothing else. Not the queen bed with his wife, but a separate twin one down the hall. Not the kids, but the confining office miles away, with the desk, and the thin marble slab sitting on the edge of it, the one with his name perfectly chiseled in, a physical manifestation of my dad’s dad idea of success. But in that moment, I appeared, and I ended up sitting on the sagging mattress under the clothes hanging from the plumbing pipes, with my dad, who was standing practically bald with two metallic hips in clean chinos and a button-down shirt, flicking questionably at the light bulb, and there was my dad’s dad, standing sweaty and clad in his underwear and an oversized dirty t-shirt, unsure of what to do with himself now that he had visitors he wasn’t expecting. So he talked about the book, and how nice it was to live by the water, and I didn’t turn to look at him, and he tried saying something to my dad, but my dad wasn’t listening, either, because the whole thing was just that: the fact that my dad’s dad was trying to say something, when it was always that he should have said something. Should have said something back then, when there were hair and hips, and the separate twin bed down the hall was now stripped of its sheets—just a cot—and my grandmother was trying to check the temperature of the bread in the oven but her eyes were
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too full of spite, and watching from the kitchen table my dad decided to correct a generation’s worth of failures in just one more, so he created a patriarchal dictatorship, threatening me with violence if I went near beer, bud, or tattoos. But my dad was the kind of man who read the warning labels, stayed in the queen bed with his wife, and held his own son close at funerals as he wept, while my dad’s dad skipped the family, the job, and me for the novel and the bottle, and yet I still exist as the amalgamation of both, left wondering where I begin, and they end, if I am as much one’s ambitions as I am the other’s failures. On the sagging mattress under the pipes sat the man who had given up the twin cot, after he had given up the queen bed, after he had given up the wife, after he had made my dad, who would one day make me, and underneath those hanging clothes, my dad’s dad was looking at me, hoping that I would glance at him, hoping to not be so alone, and he was too alone to see, to see that his flickering light bulb flickers in me.
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Memory Photography
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Julia Hopkins
Rehabilitation The door clicked closed The pain pounded like thunder without lightning Truth or dare, she asked. The truth was too obscure to convey, I dare not expose my withering self Darkness raised its outstretched arms, hoisting the corners of my lips The light of the stars was visible there, And so, I discovered hope. Julia Cardwell
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Untitled Acrylic on glass
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Nicholas Gillespie
Painting Pain Neon We’re in pain, so let’s crack our souls wide open, liquid, oily neon spilling, pooling. We’ll dance through our own dreams, trailing them across the marble floor, bright wild footprints, left to dry and crack. Let’s laugh until our jaws come unhinged, teeth loosed from rotting gums clattering across the floor. We’ll string them up, wrap them round and round our necks ‘til we swing free. Julia Walker
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Charcoal on Paper Untitled
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Gregory Kacergis
Sticky Hands They took away my drawings with Mr. Clean’s holy baldness. Mid-class mind turbulence jettisoned in ink onto false wood laminate and in graphite scratched into tiny canyons. My little chaos crossing boundaries that gum doesn’t. Jakub Frankowicz
72
title
Untitled
medium Watercolor Alexandra X. Deplas artist
73
Memory I remember the night that I started to forget you. Beers, smoke-filled rooms, double-time beats, Intoxicated teenagers with bloodshot eyes. I drove us from drunken revelries with reckless abandon, No destination in mind, Chasing taillights and wild hallucinations. The world seemed to blink. Crushed metal, Wailing police sirens, Empty sightless eyes, And, I was alone. I don’t think anyone ever chooses to forget. Details slip like grains of sand through my fingers. It was hard to witness the architecture of my memory crumble, Your face become a reflection in rippling water. But, I don’t think anyone ever chooses to remember What made them forgetful either. Karen Choi
74
Fathers His father found the answer through conversing in spirits. He threw out the seed and the soil, nurtured with bruises and baton sticks, was equipped for battle, with fists as the artillery and kin as the enemy. His legacy is carried in the bottle, the shards alcoholism claiming stake in future generations. My father is full of fault lines running deep in the crevices of his palms. Bourbon remedies his memory, and waters his seed. He uses it to start a conversation. Talks advising him to no repeat the past. My father is roped with regret, his noose tethers a line to his children. JosĂŠ Altomari
75
Untitled Photography
76
Ruolin Lu
To Love a Cat It’s a fickle business to love a cat when she resists your arms’ affections so frequently, holding the soft pink pad of her paw against your cheek so to say, “Put me down”. Her touch is firm but cool and soft; no claw will find your face. You’ll won’t catch her though you chase her, barefoot across the damp autumn earth, in attempt to free the fluffy, brown rabbit that she holds at her mercy. Disappointed, you look at her once its body has stopped rising and falling with life, but she merely tilts her head with perked ears, “Who cares?” says the flick of her tail. But when the weight of all things becomes too heavy, she appears, jumping to your side so lightly, she could be the very air. Slinking up your lap, worry glimmers in her eyes (or is it boredom?) She licks a teardrop as it trickles to the curve of your jaw. They will tell you it’s only for the salt, though I say She Knows. Kelsey Connors
77
Untitled Photography
Ethan Danger Street
title medium
78
artist
Transience I remember the house my grandmother grew up in. By the time I had gotten on a plane And arrived on the doorstep Two generations later, There was moss on the shingles And a new family inside. How quickly things stop belonging to us; I think about my last nights in my own bed Before it became the bed in my parents’ house That I sleep in on holidays, and I think about his lips the second time, Five boys, four girls and three years later And how if I hadn’t known all that, They probably would have tasted the same. How quickly things stop belonging to us. Maura Monaghan
79
Sugar Wine I first confronted mortality leaf peeping in Vermont. It started innocently enough. I was sullen and fourteen and would rather have been anywhere else but boxed in this sardine-colored minivan driving north to the start of our hiking trail. A six mile loop, around Piedmont. I was determined not to speak in a meaningful display of my displeasure. Up. Yes. Step. It’s funny how you start to lose yourself in the rhythm of walking, trying to match my father’s long strides I find I haven’t the breath to speak. So much the better. But death creeps in, as it often does with fourteen year olds who still think cutting your wrists is noble and tragic and suicide, well. The most romantic notion of all. What fourteen year-old doesn’t think of dying with that mix of curiosity and pleasure, of blood and translucent wrist flesh and razorblades all alluring. You’ll all be sorry you didn’t take me seriously. I find it’s to my liking the way the leaves crunch like dried bone under my feet, little corpses in crimson and orange and brown, dead brown. I smile a little when I think of all the leaves still hanging on, think myself a poet to whisper: Nobody thinks you’re beautiful until you’re dying. It’s surprising to notice the view. My dad nudges me. I should hate it, sickening with its cloying little churches and hipster cafes and flannel people all reeking, I’m sure, of sugar and maple syrup. But I don’t hate it. My father turns to my mother, both beaming stupid, goofy grins and I can’t join in but I turn my head back out to the valley, craning as if to see the mountain better but wiping my eyes and nose on the goddamn yellow windbreaker my mother insisted I bring. Jennifer Heine 80
Ophelia Photography
Ben Flythe
81
Bio-Matter They cut deep and excised the red guts And led me to a padded chair inside. And I sat for years and it was comfortable Until the chairs began to appear askew And my blurry eyes saw there was no floor. But my legs were quite limp from no walking And I couldn’t find the door. I am outside. I am breathed through a strain Called common sense, unfamiliar to most But a few of us tongue-less vagabonds out here That preach to no one and chase clouds all day. Strange, it seemed, that he had sat Locked up in that ward there for 2015 years And told us he had no idea what we were talking about. And we asked for our guts back But he said that he had already used them For his promotional anti-aging serum. Now the air is not so exhausted anymore, But the slaves don’t see me wailing airless Chords out at them through the walls While I burn in the fields from years of Well-meant lies. Is it all in vain? Yes—but perhaps there is no choice, one suggests, And one will have to sit here armless In a perhaps redundant strait jacket Laughing and crying like a maniac And cursing my mother and father and Dog Without any arms or legs or balls While we lie in the splendor of the cool stars And talk about how brilliantly they burn away. Robert Grote
82
Scanography 2 Flatbed Scanner
Kaitlyn Fitzgerald
83
Monsieur title Acrylic Paint medium
Alexandra X. Deplas artist
84
Love in the End Until the unshielded sun bursts open the grass and trees, ‘till the bees drop from life to make way for buzzing wood chippers... Yes honey, before the sharp winter’s wind slices hot through cable-knit sweaters and power lines, as long as the northern lights don’t start in Toronto, and up to the day some beach ends on 120th Street where the high rises barely scrape the surface of the sea, I will love you. But I can’t make love once the Earth’s apples are crusted brown, several degrees above the crisp simmer and yesterday’s summer breeze. How could I fill our glasses and declare toast, but with the baked lips that chip and crack as well, sipping streaks of dry sweat or sparkling tear dust? No, I won’t, not when everyone around is so hot, and there’s so much panting for noncarbonated breath, so smelly anyway, from burping volcanoes, sneezing hurricanes, wolf fur flossed between incisors. Don’t try to kiss me with sharpened teeth and heightened senses then, and I won’t stare you down in the moonlight with dilated pupils, when I’ll no longer be able to contain my stirring hunger for you. Kwesi Aaron
85
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