2021 Winter Issue

Three to Four Ounces

2021 Winter Issue

A collection of creative works by Wake Forest Undergraduates.

"The human soul weighs three to four ounces." -Don

Delillo

Letter from the EDITORS:

Dear Reader,

If this year has taught us anything, it is of the true weight of the soul—what it feels like when its gone and its breeze upon reunion.

These works were collected in the Fall of 2020 as COVID-19 touched hundreds of thousands of people and left them lonely, living with long term health effects, and dead. We are not unaffected by horror and isolation. In these moments, our words persist—perhaps they are the scale that measures the soul.

None of these pieces is directly about the pandemic, but we are living it, so we must address it. The stories we wish to tell may only be muttered in years to a grandchild in a watery frown or maybe never spoken at all.

We are writers. So, it is words that keep us afloat, warm, repulsed, scared; perhaps it is words that weigh three to four ounces.

If only for a few minutes, we hope you are able to find solace in the beautiful words in this edition of Three to Four Ounces.

, MCKENZIE BAKER AND DECLAN SANDER

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Good things last as long as they’re meant to, Mckenzie Baker*, p. 5

To look along, Declan Sander*, p. 6

Mother’s Daughter, Marilla Morrison, p. 7

IMPERSONATING BIRDS, Kaylah Bozkurtian, p. 8

Impossible, Anna Lawrence, p. 9

I Ten to Dine on Deathcaps, Kaylah Bozkurtian, p. 13

The soloist, Marilla Morrison, p. 13

Curses, Marilla Morrison, p. 14

Social Economy, Brianna Coppolino, p. 15

The Promise, Brianna Coppolino, p. 17

Mother and Me, Kathryn Paulsen, p. 19

Butterflies and Benches, Marilla Morrison, p. 20

Contact (Or Calamity), Brianna Coppolino, p. 22

good enough, Kaylah Bozkurtian, p. 26

Thank you for your candid email, Dianna LaTerra, p. 27

Thoughts of Auberon, Declan Sander*, p. 29

Erin, Mckenzie Baker*, p. 30

Good things last as long as they’re meant to

Mckenzie Baker

Youth was talking to myself in the backseat of my parents’ car. It was singing You Are My Sunshine to my little brother. It was learning about death; that I would die, my parents would die, my brothers and sister would die. It was not yet being scared of dogs. It was not liking to play outside. It was not liking bugs. It was not liking my food to touch. It was not yet knowing the power of a bottle. The smell of it, what it could do once it touched blood. It was hanging out with my distant family, and it not being weird. It was not knowing family secrets; affairs and causes of deaths. It was eating pizza with a fork. It was walking home from school and not being scared that someone was hiding in a bush, waiting for me. Not yet knowing that everyone and absolutely no one was watching. It was finding a snake on the way home and naming it. Not yet knowing why I never can never seem to let go of thoughts like everyone else. It was loving my dad’s dad without condition. Not knowing he didn’t like me when we met. It was Ohio. It was learning two things can be true at once. It was cul de sacs. It was not yet waking up with a sore tongue, heavy with cuts and knowing I say things that hurt people. It was riding with Mom to get ice from the gas station. Asking her if I could take some from her cup and eat it. Her always saying yes. It was me talking and talking and talking. Youth was mom calling me and whispering that people we know have died. It was not yet being told to move at the sound of a bell. At the sound of money. At the sound of love. Youth was having my heart broken by time. It was making fun of my sister for the way she says button. With two hard Ts. More talking. More talking. It was eyes blinded with foam and the taste of pink hand soap. Scraped knees. Sticky popsicle hands. A glass of cow’s milk.

To look along Declan Sander

those fragments of color halved-greens and diced orange-reds is seeing the world itself fractionated along their staggered cliff edges where the city lights dim on their bad sides the idle yellows lay micrometers from gold. From not too far it looks like a metropolis, a certain angle turned one way but not the others, behind that refracting veil the skyline grasps at straws.

Mother’s Daughter, after Gwendolyn Brooks

Marilla Morrison

I know the Mother’s daughter and boy. I read about

the Mother who hurts to prevent hurting when I was in school with her descendants. Her boy, alive, who does not run away, cries, still, in a mosaic of SALE SALE SALE posters and broken glass white skin light skin pixelated and printed.

The reflection of the Mother’s boy was mocked by the image of Annie Allen’s beau still, even now.

The mother must still make tea for her children and us, who return home with sore voices, tired feet, and traumatized eyes. Our symphonic screams no longer hold responsibility for most of the holes in the glass. The Mothers wrote notes. The boy broke glass.

The daughter coaxed poems out of the notes and broken glass. Still not heard.

IMPERSONATING BIRDS

Kaylah Bozkurtian

Look at me, she squawks, all feathers. But she is no fowl; all her plumes are glued to flesh. She tars them on and preens as though they aren’t plunder and I wonder, for all her crowing, whether those stolen wings could hold her weight. If I were to show my beak and talons and home-grown quills and push her from the nest like the real mama bird I am, she would have ten feet to plead her case before she became a smear of pity on the sidewalk.

Impossible

Anna Lawrence

The ambulance came for you Sunday morning, heralded by swirls of snow and December wind. It pulled into our driveway, tires sliding on the ice, and belched up a stretcher – a yellow, spidery thing with a black sack spread like an oil slick across its cushions. It belched up four paramedics, too: four mechanical figures with red crosses on their shirts and a holiday yearning in their eyes, wishing to be with their families in these early hours instead of with this emptied one. All the while, the ambulance lights flashed: red, blue. Red, blue.

Dad admitted the paramedics through the front door. We did not meet their eyes, and they did not meet ours. The stretcher bumped up the stairs, and we followed it like a stink until it disappeared into the bathroom. Mom was still talking with the police downstairs– though she whispered, I could hear her as if she wailed: “How could this happen… we didn’t know… I can’t believe… just impossible…”

Impossible. The stretcher disappeared into the bathroom, and I wished to disappear with it. If only I could unzip time and step back to a moment where all this seemed just that: impossible.

Perhaps I’d step back to last weekend, when I found your lunch in the trash. A whole foot of ham sandwich, still swaddled in soggy paper, leaking mayonnaise into the bottom of the trash bag. “It was good,” I heard you say in the other room, over the hiss of the TV. “Thanks for lunch, Mom.” I wondered if that little lie tasted better than the sandwich. It was little, though –little, I told myself as I joined you on the couch, offered you a handful of butter-yellow popcorn from my bowl, which you refused. Perhaps you’d already eaten today; perhaps the pills had made your stomach queasy that morning; perhaps you simply weren’t in the mood for a ham sandwich. Perhaps I was listening to the TV instead of my own head when I thought, God, he looks skinny again.

A great clattering echoed from behind the bathroom door. I knew that sound – of empty pill bottles rattling against each other like bones. The remains of last night’s feast, surely swept aside by the paramedics, making room for the stretcher. Making room for you.

Maybe I would step back farther, to a year ago, when you first brought home that little white paper bag with a receipt stapled like a ribbon to the top: an early Christmas gift, of sorts. You opened the bag the way a toddler takes off a band aid: painstakingly, as if afraid to tear the paper. When you shook it out, a little orange bottle clattered to the countertop. “Take one now,” instructed Dad. “You’ve just eaten. Go on.” You upended the entire bottle into your hand, watched the pills form a little yellow mountain in your palm. Was that relief in your expression? Was it shame? The pills cascaded back into the bottle until only one remained: a yellow pinprick in the center of your hand. Mom got you a glass of water; Dad watched you hungrily. When you swallowed, it was like the whole house exhaled, as if we’d all swallowed a little bit of sunshine ourselves. If only I could have crashed through the window of time then, grabbed you by the shoulders and said, “One at a time. One at a time.”

Mom came upstairs. Dad folded her into his arms, and she began to sob, as silent as the ambulance sirens outside.

I could step back farther, too. Back to the beach when we were sixteen, just the two of us, freed from the house for an afternoon. Sand in our hair, salt in our mouths. You had a wild look in your eyes and a wild grin on your face. We sat on the hood of that old car we shared, watching the ocean tease the golden shore with white-crested waves. A deck of cards kept our hands busy as we watched the sun set, and when it got too dark to play, we drove home with the windows down, singing songs from when we were younger and played on the same sports teams and had the same friends and kept each other secrets, like twins are supposed to do. It was like that shadow of sadness that bobbed behind you like balloon had been whisked away by the wind, just for a moment. I had thought, then, Here’s my brother again.

The bathroom door opened. It wasn’t you, though, not really; it was just that stretcher, bearing a black oil-slick bag that was slightly rounder, slightly heavier than before. A tag fluttered from the zipper: “Do not open before Christmas,” it might have said. The stretcher bumped past us, bumped back down the stairs and out of sight.

No. I would leap through time to last night. I would kick down the door, strike the pills from your hand – a year’s worth of pills, spilling like gold coins from both fists, a hoarded treasure – and throw you over my shoulder like a firefighter and carry you from the smoke-choked, scorched room of your own head.

Or I would pull you into my arms, the way you pulled me into yours when Grandpa died, or when Buddy got hit by that car, or when Dad told us he wouldn’t be coming home for a while. I would tiptoe through time just to hold you, just so you wouldn’t be alone with the bathroom tiles and the death roil in your belly and the yellow dust in your teeth, not in those last moments when life was just a pinprick in your hand, swallowing you.

They took you down the stairs on a yellow stretcher in a black bag like an oil slick and into the ambulance with its lights flashing red blue, red blue, and the doors clicked as they closed as if to say, “Do not open before Christmas.” And then you were gone: down the runway of our narrow street, swallowed by that hearse of an ambulance, flashing all the way:

Red, blue. Red, blue.

I Ten to Dine on Deathcaps

Kaylah Bozkurtian

We are, I believe, a collection of worrisome and whimsical impulses at war with the weary survival instinct bequeathed to all creation.

For instance, rather than a flower or some felled leaf, I filched the darkest-colored fungus I could find, pinched it ‘til it bled, and fixed it behind my ear.

We run to rumpty railings, stare down at rivers and ravines, and, with barriers of wood and stone, Romeo-and-Juliet ourselves away from rushing waters and empty air.

Though star-crossed lovers we may be, pining after our beloved Peril, we have not yet built a bridge to hold the mind back from the brink; I yen to dine on deathcaps, but know I’d never dare.

The soloist

Marilla Morrison

Coffee enough to write, first thing

Sunny, and I and leftover dishes

Fresh peace of existing in an open space of pause

Until nightfall

Evening.

Sunny, anti

Shoulders side to side smooth suave “Be ladies, girls,” a mother chides to two young women having their first drink Absence of complete silence and a pianist swaying sonically The weight of women resonate as they enter and exit and flirt Men don’t have to rely on their shoes to announce their presence A glass full an appropriate amount in front of mysterious me A soloist far away in the soft noise

The quiet, the soloist the quiet soloist

the quiet soloist

solo...

quiet

Sunny and I and yesterday’s dress on the floor

Coffee enough to write lonely vs lonesome

Plurality only exists in synonyms

Until nightfall

Curses

Marilla Morrison

Casually resting my head on my first love’s shoulder Sitting on a bench under an oak tree in the summer - the first summer on my ownHaving a topicless conversation He asks “Why do you always giggle after you curse?” I giggle?

“Yeah. It’s like you have an inside joke with yourself.” I laugh so long that I have to catch my breath in order to agree. Exactly. Exactly!

My first new friend in college thinks it’s funny when I curse. Old high school friends were too shocked to laugh, at first. Strangers think nothing of it.

“I think it’s hilarious that you still use h*cking even though you curse semi-regularly now” My ex-first love points out. All I’ve done is expand my options. And heck is always an option.

I would rotate different interjections. When my mother would get tired of one, thinking it was too risky, I’d switch Until I’d have to switch again. Neither of my parents like their coworker’s use of profanity.

Some of my best friends use f*** as an appendage to the incorrect use of like “So yesterday I f***ing like went to this like f***ing run-down...and it was f***ing like...”One of my best friends who never says it; she had an experience where God told her not to. When I want to punch a wall, I’ll use fuck

The first bad word I ever said was damn

On the playground in fourth grade.

Social Economy

Brianna Coppolino

If you give,

Ask nothing in return

Debt is implied

Encoded in the collective weave

Of neural tapestry

Accumulation and exchange

Of chemical currency

There is little so precious as rapport

Little so potent, little so fragile

As the spider-silk thread of memory

Of smiles and small concessions

Sacrifice and entrusted fragments

Of perspective and sympathy

A piece for a peace

Mingled fabrics, mingled flesh

Those fabris form a web to ensnare

Oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine

Good credit silently repaid

Whoever owns the most favors owned

Becomes the godfather

Brow adorned by a crown of thorns

Pockets overflowing with receipts

From the temple to the altar

A drop of blood goes a long way

Invested in the proper vein

Crimson spread beneath the debtors skin

So unfurls that silken chain

Yet the strongest cable may be severed

Thwarted in a single swing

Devastation of a feather duster

And the spider herself oft unravels the web

Bares her glistening fangs

Consumes the tired, tattered thread

And spins new opportunity

If you can,

Give Your world will be softer and safer

Swaddled in that dense collective weave

But if you must,

Take

The Promise

Brianna Coppolino

One drizzly, half-born morn, God or The Universe or It Came to me

While I splashed in the mud Puddles on the side of the road

To ask what I wanted to be When I grew up. The water was opaque and mottledFull of shit and leaves and dandelion seeds. So I replied, I want to be everything. They inquired, Are you certain?

If you are everything, you must also be Nothing.

I am, I promised.

Thus God or The Universe or It spokeYour name will be mutability And your voice ephemerality And your creed ambiguity.

You will never know if you have lied to yourself Or if you yourself are a lie.

You will wear and thousand faces And none at all.

You will tell a thousand stories

And forget your own.

Then God or The Universe or It

Baptized my forehead in the mud puddle

And it might have been good

Or it might not have.

I wouldn’t know.

My head is still damp-

Full of shit and leaves and dandelion seeds

Is this a lie?

I don’t remember. It is a lovely story though.

Mother and Me

Kathryn Paulsen

Your nails glazed through my hair

My head on your prickled skin

You whispered sounds of strawberry

And dark bright dandelions

My ears wrapped around your voice

You said I was a bird, a soothing song

A smile stuck on dimpled cheeks

I was free floating on wispy clouds

Bouncing on storms, holding the lighting

You said the trees would catch me, hold me

Until my wings grow loud

You said I was sunny the orange circle

In the midst of black clouds

Jagged gaps shown through my quiet lips

When you said the world was dancing

I liked to let sounds escape

Through my wide void of words

You wouldn’t let me believe

Nightmares are scattered around blocks

Brown brick and bloody pavement

You said it’s just a dream

Butterflies and Benches

Marilla Morrison

I usually begin with butterflies in various grassy pastures and gardens. The first time I dared to rest my lips on your shoulder, we sat in the grass. We felt the way the wind bends the blades. Beyond the butterflies it is still peaceful. Still, peaceful. Peacefully still. Old but sturdy brick. Here we find wooden benches under a tree or two. Unassuming, familiar, timeless, Open. We always accomplish something here, even if we forget to avoid the splinters. Conversations in a neutral, natural space. In eagerness or pain, I am vulnerable. The similarities of you and me and him and me make love seem like a singular spirit existing only in different people and places. Once, you and I looked like an old couple who was grieving, a friend told me after seeing us on a bench under the shade of a large oak tree. I released a single, sad laugh as I replied, “Well, we were grieving, in a way,” while remembering how we felt the breeze on its own. My head rested on your shoulder, your arm held me close as we realized we would say goodbye someday. Another time, I had skipped straight to the built bench situated under two trees that never seemed to bloom. The man I wanted to love and I sat there for hours. He knew that my eyes look green in the sunset,

but he never felt the breeze on every inch of our bodies as the grass blades tickled our skin as the butterflies tickled the underside of my heart— like you and I did.

He had brick-colored hair.

Of all the benches on the trail, he and I always chose this one that would have been the prettiest of all if the trees were full of leaves and flowers. The bench was flawless. There were barely butterflies: there was no nectar.

Contact (Or Calamity)

Brianna Coppolino

Your hand is the opening hearth

And the threshold of loss

I was astonished to discover

A door in your flesh

And branding irons in your fingerprints

Then I found those ebbing embers

Half extinguished on my empty

Cratered skin

I don’t recognize my landscape anymore

Cooling craters feeling out their boundaries

Sighing ash and sparks and smoke

That settle in my breast

Where they agitate latent volcanism

Stirring, prodding into motion, churning

Molten murmur

I cannot decipher what tectonic tongue

They speak

Words I never learned

To speak within myself

Your palm is the port

From which departures are made

Across frigid oceans of Solitude

Weaving amongst whitecaps

And ghostlike bergs in the roaring Silence of night

But for the sibilance of surf

And the distant ship-songs

From vessels whose trickling

Light I dare not seek

For fear of sirens and wisps

Leering from hungry crags or rotten

Belching, toothsome maws

I would not drift into them

And choke myself with detritus of decaying Thought

Your fingers form a lighthouse

On that misty, rimy, windswept brine

And I return to port

For I have seen the harbor

I cannot unsee the harbor, its brightness

A scar on my cornea

Cataract smudging maps marking

Bushels of gold

Lovelier before I knew

The fruit of your market, still dulcet

On my tongue

An echo poised to leap from

My larynx to my lips

Parched, cracked, cratered, saline

I am drawn to the hearth

Your name is calamity

Once I was content with my vessel

With whitecaps and bergs

Gull-laughter and the pleasures of distant

Unanswered ship-songs

I embalmed myself in text and notation

Shroud of endeavor

The vapor of my breath crystallized and fell

At my blue-black, bare feet

But I had no word for cold

And thus no complaint

Your touch is the apple

And I, the fool, have taken it

That eve, the prowling dragonfly

Became the honeybee

Seeking nectar in unfurling

Apple blossom fingers

It is said a creature of darkness

Will dream the sun

False, I cry

We dream what we know

But show the creature light

Just once

And they will dream luminance

Matched only by the poignancy

Of their grief

Damn you, dream dealer

I should say

Damn myself, dream addict

Cupped hands thrust skyward hoping

Something will alight within

And sate the craters

Seared into my empty skin

Oxytocin is too potent a drug for sanity

And it has bled

From your hands into mine

Calamity has corrupted me

For I am sewn of embrittled ice

Sheets riddled with

Fractures

Your fingers play a melody

Half-remembered

Thus wholly desired

Here is a soloist who has sung duets

Searching for harmony

In the spaces

Where two voices once met

But finding only distant-ship song

Sirens and wisps and rime and the dim

Decks of the vessel she deemed home

Before the hearth was lit

Is this hope or hiraeth

Perhaps both

For you have taught me loneliness And stolen my nirvana

Your hands are the forge In which I was unmade

Unexpectedly reborn Inside-out

The craters are the places

Where my pulse sought the surface

To fertilize the barren soil

Plagued by bloodthirst

Your blood-pulse beckoned mine

And seared a path against my flesh

Turning icy crust

Where like fruits now burgeon

By your warmth

There sprouts the appleseed

You have enlightened me

Undone me

My hands tremble with The aftershocks of touch

Yet I would follow that light to port

Cross the threshold

And, once more Pollinate the opening hearth.

good enough

Kaylah Bozkurtian

It must be strange to watch someone write a poem; I imagine it’s like watching someone write an autobiography since you’re never really done until you stop | but the problem then is that no autobiography can ever really be complete because of those last few minutes where you either don’t have the strength to describeanything letalone what it feels like to die or you don’t realize that your death is happening | in which case poems and life and autobiographies are a lot like oil paintings | you messaround with them and maybe fudge some of the details but that’s fine because they’re all about illusion | like art and life are one big lie | and I think that’s what I’m getting at here since typing all this out has made me believe my inner voice is running out of breath and when I rewrite it’s like she’s running backwards | which makes me wonder why she’s running since there’s no finish line just a point where we can catch our breath and say I think that’s

Thank you for your candid email

Dianna LaTerra

“Thank you for your candid email” is what I dread waking up to at 5:30pm on a Monday night.

I take note of my professor’s gratefulness for my honesty, That I can talk about my need to work on school nights. I acknowledge that this is probably a rare scenario to encounter at Wake Forest University.

Thank you for discussing your unpleasant background with me. It’s a lot to take in, I know. I ponder this in my car.

My car that is dilapidated from its abuse at the hands of the gig economy.

I drive to Order 114’s house, but I can’t read the mailboxes at this hour.

I lose time, and I lose a 5 star rating. I hope I still have time to turn in my quiz by midnight.

Thank you for opening yourself up to embarrassment at the very mention of your participation in the working class.

My dad forgot when I was coming home again. Sometimes I feel like he can’t take it anymore. The bills, the loneliness, the pandemic, the bills. If only he could get out of his chair.

I remind him for the fifth time.

I pull up to Student Drive at 11:39pm.

Thank you, you poor, dirty, lowly soul, for sharing the pitiful plight which the lower echelon of society, of which you are a part, face. I hope that my mom would be proud of me.

I hope that I can make it out.

I hope that my friends don’t think I’m distant.

I hope that my internet gets restored. I hope that my professors understand.

I hope that I can turn in this damn quiz by midnight.

I’m judging you. Perhaps it is my fault. I could manage my time better, I mean I stayed on YouTube for 30 minutes yesterday. That time could have fostered a lab notebook Or a participation quiz Or a discussion post Or a reading response Or another 4 or so dollars. I pull my laptop screen up. 11:48pm.

You should feel shame. And it’s irrational, I’m sure, But I can’t help but feel patronized. The email I sent you was not a grasp for pity, sympathy, extension, It was an autobiography.

I can’t spell out my day without receiving condolences from the ivory tower of academia.

The fact that I’m surviving on my own.

The fact that I’m surviving. It’s a miracle to them.

But it’s not for the other 40%.

I don’t understand you. I’m drowning. Don’t you see? We all are.

I missed the deadline. I write another candid email.

Thoughts of Auberon

Declan Sander

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I first saw my brother after a year who had gone across the country goner left his only home to go homebody to go to some nowhere town in ohio did you know there’s a town called piqua ohio and its biggest thing is that it has a deactivated nuclear reactor nearby it’s not often you find a town so nowhere its greatest years are so definitively behind and its greatest years were because of angry men but obviously this all changed when auberon showed up and the town rejoiced “someone found us! finally!” only to find out he doesn’t even consider himself a true piquininte, the audacity to

he drives to dayton on weekends and drinks with people who miss Ohio State and he really needs to consider telling me his job I swear I have no idea what he actually does, so strange it’s really hard to ask him those questions and he’ll just give you some code phrase that confirms he doesn't know what he does, that’s all it does for him. yikes. data management software engineering analytics freelance coding obviously couldn’t you tell ??? it’s pretty unfortunate he had to move to piqua ohio if he wanted to hide his truths from us so bad Jesus I just think it’s a really roundabout way to move six houses down

Erin Mckenzie Baker

my body was not yet big enough for my voice, so i didn’t speak much. Erin had ears she hadn’t grown into, good for being kind and for remembering my favorite color

remembering the way i ate my sandwich, the way i liked to eat the bread one piece at a time, and not laughing at me, like everyone with mouths too wide for their face did

outside, we baked into the clay under the Georgia sun. in the long grass beside the other kids’ future memories of sandboxes and playground wounds,

i tucked secrets into Erin’s big ears and she nudged them sweetly into mine.

whatever name these moments take; innocence, quiet, awkward silence, love, maybe all of these things imagined, i am addicted to them i want to bottle it up and sell it in a pink bottle for more than it's worth. call it, Our Last Day

Erin, come play tag with us!, begged the other girls. instead, our smiles agreed and we watched wind in trees and the sounds of the ants on our shoes