Agave Review: Spring 2024

Inferno

Lettter from the Editor Message to the readers from the Agave staff

De r a ea R de

r,

The word Inferno means many things, but in a literary sense, it is best known in relation to the first portion of Dante’s Divine Comedy. In this context, inferno is a journey, taken by the poet into the depths of Hell, as he finds himself guided by Virgil. Here, literature serves as a guide through the darkest circles of torment. It is in this spirit that we present you with the Fall 2023 issue of Agave Review. We hope that its contents may be your guide as you traverse unknown depths.

It is our aspiration that this issue brings you an appreciation for the barren and the blazing— an appreciation for destruction and desolation. After all, we live in a world that is physically, politically, and socially breaking apart. And in the chasms created by our current chaos, we have the unique opportunity to interrogate what lies beneath. What awaits you in this issue is intended to foster an appreciation for the abyss, as talented writers and artists guide you through it. In “fire&fever,” Ellara Radha explores the cleansing power and healing potential of flames. Bella Jacobs composes an intoxicating display of fiery passion in their poem “[ ] of desire.” In X of Swords, Emilio Muscarolas offers an abstract rendering of “the queer body’s condemnation and disfiguration at the hands of Power.” In “Waiting,” Hannah Wand meditates on purgatorial spaces, while in “Ptolomaea,” AnnaSophia Nicely brings her reader to an icy lake, evocative of the 9th circle of Hell.

We publish this issue with appreciation for everyone helped bring it to fruition. We extend deep gratitude to our wonderful editorial team, especially our general editors who worked tirelessly over the past semester to curate the issue in your hands. This semester was an exciting one for Agave Review: We hosted our best-attended open mic night yet, and also revitalized our Nectar newsletter. We give particular kudos to our newsletter editor Gabi Stawski, our Social Media and Graphics teams who worked to keep our name alive in the community, and our Web Editors who made sure that these wonderful pieces arrived safely in the digital realm. Finally, we’d like to thank you, our readers, for giving us purpose. We welcome you to the Inferno, and we hope you’ll stay awhile.

Cecelia Blum (Scripps ‘24) & Katie Wang (Pitzer ‘24)

Masthead The Claremont Colleges Literary and Arts Magazine

Agave Review Fall 2023 “Inferno” This issue was made possible by contributions from our talented community of artists and writers at the Claremont Consortium.

Editors in Chief Katie Wang (Pitzer ‘24) Cecelia Blum (Scripps ‘24) Managing Editor Sage Keller (Pitzer ‘25) Layout Designers Cecelia Blum (Scripps ‘24) Noelle Tamura (Pitzer ‘24) Graphics Designers Golda Grais (Scripps ‘25) Lilly Visaya (Pitzer ‘24) Bithiah Negusu (Pomona ‘26) Aidan Ma (Pomona ‘27) Web Editor Ivy Rockmore (Pitzer ‘27) Zoey Lofgren (Scripps ‘24) Social Media Editors Sophia Merchant (Pomona ‘26) Interviews Editors Ivy Rockmore (Pitzer ‘27) Newsletter Editor Gabi Stawski (Pomona ‘27)

Cover Art by Sage Keller

​ eneral Editors G Rachel Pittman (Pomona ‘26) Saru Potturi (Pomona ‘24) Caroline Kelly (Pomona ‘27) Ella Zhu (Pomona ‘26) Hannah Wand (Scripps ‘27) Corina Yi (Pomona ‘27) Christopher Turner (Pomona ‘27) Treasurer Jadyn Lee (Scripps ‘24)

Contents writing

Daddy Long Legs Caroline Kelly

9

ENGLISH CLASS KICK MY ASS Saru Potturi

10

fire&fever Ellara Radha

16

to roost Aanji Sin

18

fiss / ures Emilio Muscarolas

19

[

] of desire Bella Jacobs

20

We Fall Forwards. Sebastián Amador

24

the metamorphosis Abigail Green

28

Empty Spaces Elliot Bobrow

29

House Ellie Attisani

30

Ptolomaea AnnaSophia Nicely

32

I wandered the desert for forty years and all I got was this lousy t-shirt Nikki Smith

delilah, on a brown couch in the evening Aanji Sin

61

Waiting Hannah Wand

63

The Vampire Baby Eliza Powers

64

You Always Have Candy in Your Pocket Saru Potturi

71

Sunday Best Audrey Gruian

72

Last words of a mycologist Katie Wang

73

art fissure Mikayla Stout

8

X of Swords Emilio Muscarolas

14

Three Angels William Marshall

22

jumbled.2 Mikayla Stout

23

Land Portrait Nadia Hsu

31

38

Identity Crisis Christy Li

39

On the Beaufort Scale Zoey Lofgren

40

Yosemite Nadia Hsu

45

Posto Santo Emilio N. Bankier

42

Meat Head Jessica Yim

46

milt fia meng

47

heatwave Sophia Merchant

53

The Little Doe Krishna Rajesh

48

Chronicles of Transspace Fleet #128 Nikki Smith

54

Passing By Christy Li

62

The Spring Flood Jakob Priestly

56

Cheese, Jam, and Cigarettes Jessica Yim

67

Ad Infinitum Jessica Yim

74

killers dream of love, my father dreamed of guns Gideon Ellant Reiter 60

窈窕淑女 Christy Li

59

Daddy Long Legs Caroline Kelly, Pomona ‘27 Shredded love notes dripping from above. Insomniatic fingers pulling cotton over the burning orb. Relishing a moment of blindness before the anticipatory wait. Like sitting in a sunned car with slime dog drool sweat licking. You grow nearer on daddy long legs embodying the kindergarten myth of the deadliest spider in the world with a mouth too small to bite. Yet the touch of lips sears my heart to medium rare, and cleaves. You crawl down my throat spinning a web in my beating flesh

fissure

Mikayla Stout, Scripps ‘25

8

9

ENGLISH CLASS KICK MY ASS Saru Potturi, Pomona ‘24 (a poem in four parts about white-dominated literary spaces) 1.

These are disorienting places. Here it is, The fabled English class, the one they warned you about.

The one where you are a sore thumb, a sour clementine, Tangerine, sitting here in your metaphorical lingerie They’ll hose us down today, but we’re all see-through anyway.

And I’m the one who’s having a bad day. Maybe it’s the lack of sleep Maybe it’s the fact that I feel shaved and sheared like a sheep Skin pink and raw from feeling exotic, hullabaloo, “Yogically meditating” on my own identity in the corner, Wondering why I’m even here in this room.

Here it is, the fabled English class, the one where you are disengaged The one where no matter how much you try You just can’t seem to get on the same page They talk about their white baggage; you sit here like a monkey sage.

You promised yourself not to take umbrage, nodding along To Sedgwick—told yourself you’d dredge back up That part of you that didn’t yet know to draw a line Between equality and equity—but to heck with that They drew it first, they drew the line Between what’s theirs and what’s mine They’re allowed to borrow over; so am I, but there’s a fine.

And I won’t ever show them this poem—I haven’t got the spine To really shake the balance, though I’m tryin’ I don’t want to lose my place on the boat.

I don’t want rocks and I don’t want stones.

I say I will, I say I do, but really, really, I don’t.

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2.

“Keep up the great work!

You’re off to a good start” and that Rankles at me— Tried to make this about race but it’s not it just Ankle-bites me “Personal anecdotes” they say That kinda high school creative writing advice Just won’t jive— What do I look like to you, five?

Don’t answer that but I Am thinking about A white girl in a business Suit one leg crossed over the other I am thinking of my unmitigable hubris And I stand while she sits and talks to me Or doesn’t talk to me but gives Me a hand to kiss Proffering it carelessly Takes the cake, anatomy Class feels like a shackle— Ankle-bites me “Let’s break up those grafs (That’s newspaper slang)” and I am graphically Dismayed, face Sagging like graffiti ink Runs down the wall when it rains Or so I think, you’ll find I can act older than my age too I can act older Than my age two Buzzing round this mixer it has Aged you, you trickster Take two—and maybe this time We’ll say for good—it’s the dysthyme

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But if it makes you so sad, why don’t you cry about it?

If you hate it so bad, why don’t you write about it?

That’s the refrain—this is the verse.

And if I crawl out today, that’ll be a first Come on, stick with it, you know it only gets worse.

And I didn’t say anything. I looked away, terse My brow tried not to furrow, my lips tried not to purse Can’t quit though—the newspaper job doesn’t reimburse So I sit in my seat and I feel apt to burst.

But if it makes you so sad, why don’t you cry about it?

If you hate it so bad, why don’t you write about it?

3.

I can’t wrap my head around these things, they’re not round enough Can’t keep my feet on the ground ’cause the ground is rough Try to speak up in this class, but the sound is snuffed.

Why am I even here? నేను అసలు ఎందుకున్నా ఇక్కడ?

Just to speak and be cut off?

What did I even come here for? అసలు దేనికోసం ఒచ్చా?

“Well… just go back home, why don’t ’cha?”

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4.

My twenty/twenty is not your 20/20, My vision is not a function of my age.

This much I know how to do; I know how to do this much.

I can’t pretty up a chapbook; I can’t write a ditty Pleasing to the ear, or come up with a clapback That my abstract “enemy” wouldn’t be amused to hear I’m used to being here, squinting down at the page Sagely nodding, barely following along You wanna study theory, gotta do more than peering ’Cross the page, eyes glancing, chancing it on stage The script’s dipped, the list becomes a crypt of its own Lisp your way down the crawl and gnaw it to the bone Slipped again but drawling in my Houston Gift with words, no clue’s to what they’re used in.

But I can write a poem. I can’t speak up My nerves peak up, tea goes cold in the teacup My kneecaps jerk up and down, fingers drum but I Keep mum even as the words linger inside me so see How they spill out, and here I will drill out Verse after verse, now see this book fill out And here is where I will not let well enough be Here’s the place where you cannot escape me In all my disorienting, and all my alien Asian Here’s where I will be vividly heard— Word after word after insipid word.

13

X of Swords Emilio Muscarolas, Pitzer ‘25

fire&fever

but see, you forget that i am a woman & as a woman i am made of fire.

Ellara Radha, Harvey Mudd ‘27

i don’t go down easy. i char the tongue, i blacken from the inside out.

this is how i burn you out of my body, fire & fever. my limbs tremble now with chill and sting eats at my chest & yet still this body is still stronger than you will ever be. there is more to me than you ever touched.

you forget that you are a man. you think you can take & take but it all goes to ash between your bony fingers. you see, i could ravage forests if i wanted but

instead i plant seeds. instead i

tend to sprouts. & this is a power you will never know.

you thought you could take,

thought you could drink me down like a whiskey sour.

16

17

to roost

fiss / ures

Aanji Sin, Scripps ‘24

Emilio Muscarolas, Pitzer ‘25

i love you because that is what it means to be good. take things apart and put them back together —call it invention. no matter. all the cities feel like me anyways. walk instead of drive, look for that splotch of blue in every window. turn all of your t-shirts inside out. wish i had been crueler & the salt air and grains of rice and the pins we left in things all pretty things that i want to hold onto keep slipping through my thinning fingers. so say it’s forever. take good and boil the hell out of it. you know intention better than i do, it’s what you’re always chasing and what you own none of. in the distance, the city lights tremble into a straight line down. un- and re-tethered to the earth. you live in different cities for the satisfaction of wanting to be somewhere else. you leave because you know you’ll want to come back

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I asked him what he liked about me And he said, “the way your hip bones show” Read: the way you exist always just beneath Read: the way you are inches from breaking Read: the hell i see inside you is different from the hell i will put there men like boys who are prone to fever and rash heat i carry comes / spilling skin to rub and skin to hold grip / pinch / handle a face to fuck Imagine the moment he cums: The fear is ballooning / these are latex I feel the blossoming / Gloves to hide my hands Fissures / Slick like oil Bleeding / Like fever

A fist is still a hand To hold a dead hand Is still a hand A knife is still A hand Which holds My own sunlight

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[ ] of desire Bella Jacobs, Pitzer ‘24

How can sappho not suffocate Between [ ] silences we revere like sonnets Sentimental: Indebt ourselves to Archaeology we forgot about Anachronistic negations– i never did learn latin, To be fluent in a dead language i learn Sappho not silence and try to be

Why am i not satisfied?

Filling space with [ restless ] Rapacious Enough to make any reader anxious But don’t worry, i’ll leave out the lived part of nothing happened Of walking home dressed up in Expectations i couldn’t help but Wear against my bare skin, Over imagined fragments: Sonic syllables, Soliloquies written Like effigies to ephemerality–

Satisfied: From the latin satis //enough// + facere //make// We make our own [enough] To satiate mortality and memory But what did she (i) mean for us (her) to salvage In cracks in creases of eroding effigies Us sapphic english majors pray to like évangiles Drawn to that bit of accidental secrecy:

i want kisses like flowers and fumes: burning gardenias at dusk The paper cut of eyes locked pages turning Whisper it down my neck Hold my hair like earth And promise with no words That you’ll write about this In the fragments you remember in the morning

–Reduction is seduction– Aphrodite is deathless Give it to me good and glossy, this Matrilineal malady of

20

21

Three Angels William Marshall, Pitzer ‘25

jumbled.2

Mikayla Stout, Scripps ‘25

22

23

We Fall Forwards.

Sebastián Amador, Pomona ‘27 While he mulls over the wheat field and pays madness for it, how are we to occupy ourselves?

I offer you one of the stories he lived through in his head. Our intention is to better understand the nature of the protagonist, no? So we would have to examine some episode of his fantasy, to make good use of it... Since that is very well our intention –I will reveal– I will tell you whatever, and you will be forever grateful.

With the parade of dandelion that once lost their seed, shoelace and battered shoes hang from the power-line, raw under the midday sun, worn away for apathy’s sake, the crude sincerity of that midday sun, quiet cigarette embers on the wet grass and their gray thread wretched until it fades with the all too tender breeze, there the wandering peddler and the coffee spilled every wavering step he takes tracing droplets on the pavement, like the rattling coin that scours his pocket, and broken glass lonely mounds of the softly shaded alleys, and the guava tree blossoms graceless on the concrete edge, dust in the old air, scorching with the weight of a clear sky, a series of plastic advertisements melting and the slogan half-said, umbrellas colorful like coward shrieks, black bird of lazy wing, we fall forwards, we go together unknowing, with the parade of dandelion that once lost their seed.

But nothing remains when I finally arrive at that office. It swallows me. It ends the fuss that was the outside. Only the documents whine as they’re handled in a deadbeat urgency. Those who wait their turn try to forget. Here there are only documents. And my turn is my little ticket.

And I sit to wait in the long queue that barely reaches the counter...

Those that first arrived slept in the sorry tents that crumple weatherbeaten. I will wait, but waiting gets you thinking. What am I doing here?

I had never seen fireflies. I don’t know when it is that I realized. Before, time passed me by silently, and then it only ever reminded me that

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I had never seen fireflies. I was far from this office, young, I was someone else. At best they knew for sure that they had never seen even one miserable firefly, and the thought was more than enough. I was comfortable.

I had accepted the fact that my life was my life, until the idea occurred to me that I would die imagining memories that weren’t mine. And since then all lights are a burden. The innocent candle, the coarse light bulb, the glint of joy in a fleeting lover, when your mind quiets down for just a moment, or the unsettling morning, it’s a burden, you’ve never seen the fireflies. And so I took the biggest rucksack we had lying around the house.

I would like to tell you that I don’t regret it, but that is a difficult thing, being where I am. Between the screen and the ticket my nerves go with the turns. Distracted, I shoot a full look at a stranger’s face... The worst of it is that this isn’t the worst of all. The ominous and the tedium. Slow burn. I count the dirty specks on the chair that could be plastic.

That’s how the ones on the buses looked. Thank some tragedy former to everything else, there were no fireflies near where I lived.

So I took many of those buses, with the rucksack. They were dried-up rattles that would shiver with every erratic jolt of the old engine, there was a chill that came in through a hole in the floor, they would bring in game-roosters, and the owners would say, “you don’t even have one problem...”

What woke me for the first time was the tone of his voice. I would’ve slept through the memories. He cut through the faint-hearted thicket with that agitated stress. Maybe I was frightened. The peddler that was spilling coffee had come into the same office, and he stood in front of the far counter. But he stayed just like that, the same as always, it’s only the exasperation of anyone when the half-open jug sprays his panela coffee, I am with the old bus monotony, with the pathetic fight, dreaming and waking alike, dreaming and waking alike, but one time the bus did brake harshly. Maybe I was frightened. I could feel the static on my skin.

It was dread that was too much like certainty. It was the uncanny stiffness of the driver, it was the heavy boots on the frail steps, it was a moment that grew and only grew, the kids in the military garb and their rifles that would trip along the narrow corridor. They played with the rooster, they stood around the old man...

25

“You look hungry.” And the old man must have said whatever. One of them got the flask out of his bag. “This is sugar-water... Drink some.”

And the old man drank some. “Have some more.”

“Have some more.” “Have some more.” His stomach stretched and bloated, his lip trembled, I think we were still for several hours. “Have some more.” His face disfigured in anger and nausea. But in the end they were only bored. They left and nothing much happened. And in the end the wandering peddler resigned to sitting and waiting for his turn to fight again at the counter. Only he believes that it will be any different.

I have the impression that my number was called, or I understood something like that from the microphone and its dulled cry. I wonder how all of this will end. And I sit on another plastic seat. “Good morning, sir...” And I do not know if he heard me. The panel that separates us is well made... He has a practiced neutrality, dark-skinned, dressed nice, and an accent from who knows where, “good morning.” He doesn’t look me in the eye. He is waiting for my documents...

That string of buses that was like living years brought me far. The last stop was just a bench and its miserable little signpost, bindweed crawled high, thirsting flowers rained from above, rust like the pale blue of a dead man, I was at the end of the world. Puddles like centennial stock, how many leaves crying dirt-charged dew for the dismembered worms, and the sultry clay smells like dried blood, the playful mist, the pressing brook, we fall forwards, we fall forwards.

The functionary is grimacing. “What’s this ignorance that’s marked right here?” ...I had never seen fireflies, and I have never seen fireflies, when the night was already coming down, and when everything that I had done to be there was beginning to make sense, they didn’t let me stay, the border watch accused me of being one step too far from the imaginary line, and those are the rules. That was the day I got what I deserved. And now I am here...

The animal dread of a single note that chokes in your throat, the tree-rind bare and coiled like a terrible ulcer, the earth stained with the violence of expectancy, waves always and everywhere, all things rise as they fall, and I do not know if I would fall content, I would fall waiting, that the fireflies might come, that the fireflies might come, and even if they came, I would still be waiting, that the fireflies might come, that the fireflies might come.

He still hasn’t looked me in the eye. Another worker came to see what it is that’s keeping him. “This is a very strange case.” “What’s the problem?” “...He has two valid documents, one before and one after he crossed the border-line.” “Which one are you going to register?” “I don’t know which one he is, officially.” “If this was an examination you’d be in trouble.” “And this part of the form is...” “It’s the worst, you have to keep switching between the pages.” “I’ve seen another one of these cases, an F-19, they’re always this complicated.”

He still hasn’t looked me in the eye. “The complicated thing about F-19’s is that their A27 has 3 J-1... D-15LMPOZ 10987654321...

10987654321... 10987654321... 54321... 321... Why isn’t he looking me in the eye? “I am going to have to decide who this person is... “Check his signatures, like that, against the backlight...”

God is a machine, and I have him in front of me. With my knuckle I count the time against the grimy panel that separates us. The confused functionary looks me in the eye. I only asked him the one question “Do you feel loved?”

He’s still grimacing. He still hasn’t looked me in the eye. The monitor must be showing him something very curious... “...ok. Wait just a second.”

26

27

828

the metamorphosis

Empty Spaces

Abigail Green, Scripps ‘27

Elliot Bobrow, Harvey Mudd ‘27

with each flashing light a daffodil dies and a girl who once felt like someone’s favorite is unbothered by the death of the world, which arrives when colossal statues start to roll off Madagascar and angels wear helmets bejeweled in the course linen of giants contentment is rare and comes only in forests where the pine trees breathe in unison, where even the wolves understand mirrors as the devil’s creation I often wonder why I see only nine hundred of the one thousand stars and am sometimes blinded by the moon’s gaze, but curiosity just leads to a reminder that our bodies are gradually slipping into celestial bodies of blood

The first note appeared behind my bookshelf in spring in loopy cursive I threw it out.

So sweet, fleeting, pointless.

The second note appeared nested in my birthday cake caramel drizzle, chocolate tuile, like a mirror but sweeter.

I ate it, spat it out, ran it through the garbage disposal.

The third note came out of my eye like a half-eaten sneeze.

Is this for me or for the old woman I dream of?

I was asleep for the fourth note.

A voice like anyone, like myself like her.

I cried, counted the empty spaces between my fingers.

When I woke there was nothing and in the specks behind my vision in loopy cursive, signed: Anonymous.

House Ellie Attisani, Scripps ‘26 Come along now and march through this doorway absorb the scent that wafts across this air allow your eyes to adjust to my these lights don’t be surprised when this floor creaks beneath your weight greet the cat as he moseys towards you listen to the low hum of his purr drag your fingertips across this wallpaper noticing the wears of time and use and imagining how it must’ve adorned these walls when this house was new and pristine (this is only a dream) They say that two objects never truly make contact perhaps this is true of us, too I yearn for our houses to fuse to lounge on your couches and you on mine to taste the stew that bubbles from your pot to borrow your pajamas and feel the seams dance against my legs Sometimes I wish to leave this house only for a short stroll to feel wind on my shoulders instead of weight if only we could meet somewhere else somewhere outside of ourselves maybe then our skins could touch?

Nadia Hsu, Pomona ‘27

landportrait

I’ll leave the door open just in case

30

Ptolomaea AnnaSophia Nicely, Pomona ‘27 For my tenth birthday, Uncle Nathan took me to the orchard to shoot the family dog. A hissing, crackling wind snuck through the orchard like a long blowout of a pipe. Smoke from a distant chimney mingled with the sulfurous smell of the gunpowder, adding an astringency to the bloody salt of the fall air. The heavy cream of winter was near, the rot settling as a distant memory.

Nemo, Nathan claimed, was what his father and his before him would have called ripe. To Uncle Nathan, Nemo was a Granny Smith suspended between branch and ground, tipping from climax to sudden death.

Nemo was my first harvest, as it was.

To Uncle Nathan, Nemo was dead long before she hit the ground. On the walk back to our farmhouse, Nemo already halfway down the river, Uncle Nathan explained our act to me with a solid hand spanned across the small of my back.

“Cleanup is vital to apple farmers,” he said.

“Otherwise, you risk the ground becoming drunk off of the rot’s cider.”

I’d never so much as sipped a lazy drop of wine from Mother’s table at that point, but I knew what he meant. Uncle Nathan had a way of talking that made you want to understand him.

If Mother noticed the strange silence of my birthday supper and the stark lack of Nemo’s graying tail beating pleas into the planks, she said nothing of it. Such silence was her custom and her birthright.

Mother was an ex-Catholic. She lived surrounded by relics: rosaries strung and tangled together like butterflied rope, porcelain virgins that watched her sleep from her lonely bedside table. All from her late mother’s hoarded collection.

I knew for a fact that sometimes she relapsed. I’d grown up peeking through her door as she skittishly prayed and then went to bed heavy with shame, the guilt a stone in her stomach, tied-up witch wrestled into a frozen river. To Mother, faith was potent heroin and she needed a good fix. She worshiped like the act itself was a dirty secret, an affair with a man she no longer loved but still desired desperately, still masturbated to the thought of.

I’d only been caught once, years before. Uncle Nathan was out by the river and I was back early from school, school bus yellow sweater marking my adolescence’s first few winters. A cold wind shoulder its way

32

past me as I entered the house.

I found her in her room, stark naked on all fours, her skin pulled tight against her frame like a canvas stretched too far. The fat and muscle striation that had come from a lifetime of farmwork seemed to have melted off, leaving her all bone and skin. She grew downwards, her fingers splayed as if shooting roots into the frozen ground under the archaic wood. Where age sags the human casing, death pulls us taught.

Mother’s lips peeled against her gums in a corpse’s sneer, her eyelids strained about bulbs popped and watered in crazed fear. She became petrified, brittle bone partialized like a baby’s skull. Liquid pooled in her pores, squeezing out and pilling on paper-mâché skin.

She looked at me, then. She pleaded, for some sort of mercy. I’d been afraid of my mother before, revered her even, in my own quiet, prayerful way. And then there she was, a monster before my glazed eyes. No, not a monster, but a woman.

I shut the door in her face.

I lost sleep that night, but not because I couldn’t get the picture of that calcified form out of my mind. I lay awake in anger that I had come from her, that she was my mother. I will admit, the witching hours of my non-sleep allowed for half-dreams, half-fantasies of Uncle Nathan.

I imagined him on the birthing bed, pushing, sweat running from his formidable brow. He needed no midwife. He pushed me clean and dry from his innards without a sound. And the Mother-Father-Uncle looked the child in his eyes with not the faintest smile, and through this stoicism peered a truer love than any known before.

The next day, Mother made eggs, checked the temperature of the water pipes, cleared the underbrush from the northern orchard (a storm the previous night had knocked branches into the half-thawed muck), and retired to her room in the evening. She was no monster, only a woman. My disappointment was insurmountable. *** We had killed The Dog and we were smug for it. Mother was unchanged, or so it seemed. She looked at her younger brother and her ten-year-old son and life went on. She was a silent woman in the face of men. She still followed her old master’s rules, obedience crackling through her like the sharp thwack of a whip. A part of me wondered gently if the barrier that kept Mother confined to her weeping room was more than just the trinkets she kept ‘round herself like a pentagram of guilty voodoo dolls, pinned and pricked and all pointed back towards her. I wondered what would happen if I turned the knob;

33

if it would budge. I wondered if it would budge for her, if the banging in the night was the Eastern winds on the ancient shutters or my mother’s frail body bashing against her bedroom door. But I stopped wondering about this nonsense long ago. I’ve left the wailing to the wind. ***

Uncle Nathan laughed again, and, hoisting himself up, stumbled with his warm beer over to his door.

Winter is coming, bitch.

That it was. ***

Nathan, the pipes.

Hushed. Nearly a whisper. That was all she dared when addressing him. They were night-time conversers, speaking only with the least amount of words possible for coherence. The night was either too fragile, too gentle, or too wicked to be disturbed. Night on the farm was not awake in the darkness. It did not find repose during the day. It too slumbered among the stars, in the cradle of the high moon.

They’ll burst by the first frost.

“Hmm”, Uncle Nathan grumbled out. He stewed over a midnight beer.

I sat on the floor wrapped in a woolen blanket, pretending to listen to the crackling on the radio. Someone sang gently from some faraway place.

It’s getting colder every year. We need to replace before it’s too late.

“Shhhhhhhhh”, he slumped over the oak, waving her off.

She shut up. I watched her out of the corner of my eye as the song crooned to an end. She picked at the edges of her fingernails, her little finger quivering ever so slightly. I could smell how bad she wanted it, how close she was to a relapse. The withdrawals were always at their worst this time of year.

“Do me and the boy a favor, Lil. Go to your room. Leave this mess alone”.

She walked over to her door without hesitation. I settled back into half-sleep, the molasses voice of the radio host melting my bones.

But then Mother surprised me. She stopped in her tracks, just outside her room. Paused, then spoke.

Winter is coming.

She shut the door. I heard the click of the lock fitting into place, a sound that had been in my brain before my cranium had finished fusing.

Nathan laughed, and I smiled because it was the right thing to do.

“Yeah, bitch. Winter is coming real soon. Right son?”

I responded only because that was the first time he had ever called me that, and it was all I had ever wanted. We looked nothing alike, not really. His eyes were blue and mine were brown. His brow was sunken and mine stood out with youth. But I came from him, in a way.

“Yeah”. It was all I could manage. There were no words for the feelings of a young boy towards the man that made him.

For my fifteenth birthday, Nathan dragged Mother out of the house and drowned her in the vats. The batch that season was acidic, which most customers hated. A vocal few found it exquisite. I can only imagine she packed some sort of punch; she hadn’t gone easily into the good night. Nathan had the mark to show it: A raw, red bitemark stained the juncture between his left thumb and pointer.

“The land was her whole life”, Nathan would tell me later, washing the wound under a steady stream of vinegar. He didn’t wince, and he didn’t wrap it afterward. It was a branding he’d earned and wore with pride, like the seared hind flesh of a prized stallion.

“She should have been glad to return to it”.

I listened because he had the sort of way of speaking that one listens to.

Nathan had me clean up the mess.

Her room was destroyed, relics and dollar-store kittens with bright teary ears and languid smiles obliterated. An act of terrorism had been committed in the country that was my Mother. A little porcelain Mother Mary lay on her side on the bedside table, her life’s requiem the soft hum of Nathan from the kitchen. Above the door frame, the little porcelain Jesus turned his cheek and grinned. I knocked Mary off the desk and into the dustpan, her shards mingling with the rest, the mass grave of my Mother’s life.

The lock no longer clicked. The door never sat right on its hinges again.

Nathan had been quick to convince me of the necessity of the work we committed. We had cleansed the land of something dangerous, something wrong. There was something inside her that was different from us, in opposition to us. Her nose wasn’t hard enough, her hair not course. Her body was round where ours were flat. It was for the ways she contrasted us that we knew she did not belong in our house, on our orchard. The one that had belonged to her father, and his father before that. That had never belonged to her. Apples for ladies to bake pies with, cider to consecrate her sins. We baptized her. We cleansed ourselves. ***

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Her batch rotted six weeks into its shelf life. The markets were shocked: they’d never known alcohol to go sour so quickly. But that was Mother, sour, bitter, astringent Mother.

Winter had come early that year, heavy-cream air filled our lungs as we put the trees to rest for the season. *** Wake up.

The dream: Nathan is My Mother and I am his. We take turns swallowing each other and pushing. We push and we laugh together and we share a beer. We’re covered in something that smells like cider gone bad, it leaves a sticky sheen on our skin. It’s our wedding day. We drink the warm beer. It’s a perfect Summer evening.

“Wake up!”

Nathan’s screaming, cold, fat drops of sweat pool on his chin and drop onto my brow. The wind wails, and for the first time all winter its icy knife saws through to my bones.

“Wha-what’s going on?”

He’s pulling me up off my bed and throwing me a woolen sweater without a moment’s thought. It’s one I used to wear as a child, school bus yellow and stained with years of cold sweats. There’s no way it will fit me now. I hold in it my outstretched palms like an offering, a question.

Nathan doesn’t even take a moment to look back at me before he’s ushering me through the room, his frenzy reaching a hysteria. Suddenly all I can see when I look at him as we hurry through the front door is the clawing urgency of my Mother the day we put her to rest.

For a moment, the serrated scar that was my Mother’s last mark seems to glow under the midnight moon.

We’re making good time over the northern orchard, running from something. But what?

And so I ask, my vocal cords finally thawing out enough to rush out a syllable, a question mark verbalized and hanging in the air behind us as we move.

Two words, he gets out.

“The Pipes”.

Suddenly, Nathan drops like a clay pigeon, emitting a scream so loud it must wake the night itself. I watch, wide-eyed, as he writhes on the grass, as he births his pain into the living sky. He grips the hand with the scar, his cries breaking against his throat.

Nathan? A meek whisper, solving nothing. I sound like my Mother.

What about the pipes?

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He’s scrambling on all fours before he can even register that I’ve spoken. I’m not even sure if he knows I’m still there; if he knows who I am at all, who he is. Bile dribbles down his chin. I chase him back down the hill, towards the half-frozen river. He bounds and jerks like a wounded deer across a freeway.

He’s running towards the river. I try to shout before he leaps, but nothing comes out, the words turning to smoke as they leave my lips. For a second, he soars, then falls. The ice cracks under him instantly.

Peace reenters the orchard momentarily. The night goes back to sleep. I take a breath, and it’s the easiest breathing has come to me my whole life. I let the winter penetrate me. I feel whole.

Tears come next, and with them the pain. Drops freeze instantly in my sockets, blinding me. I open my maw and hear a scream call into the wind. It’s Nathan’s scream, birthed from my lips. The euphoria of this consummation lasts for all of a moment, and then it’s gone forever.

Something sharp digs its way into my thigh. Sightless and screaming, I claw for it, this pain so comforting in the face of the horror. It’s porcelain, and I realize it’s a piece of Mary I tucked away in a moment of weakness. I bring it to my face and excise. The blood freezes before I can wipe it off my hands. My body is a frozen inferno, a cold, cold hell.

Just then, the pipes burst, and everything is ice. I feel myself shatter. *** Uneasiness dawns with the horror of daybreak. Larks screaming as their flesh melts from hollow bones, arthritic trees convulsing and snapping under the pressure of rolling seasons. Earthworms pried from soft ground and fed to bloody maws, men awakening as monsters, teenage boys opening doors that should remain locked.

And all of it gone. Coated in icy ash, petrified in Pompeian terror.

The orchard is frozen solid. The sun has begun to rise, a bloody red yolk in the distance. Spring has won her battle, but it has not been a cold war. Winter has died for her sins.

On the horizon, A Dog sits, awaiting the thaw. Her tail thumps a steady heartbeat into the frozen Earth.

Bones chilled to ash and atoms scattered to be sown into stars. March seems to dawn, and it pushes snow back into the earth.

The ice breaks.

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I wandered the desert for forty years and all I got was this lousy t-shirt Nikki Smith, Scripps ‘25

But that was then. Now it is only the highway thundering under us two chapped-lipped pilgrims, speckled with bedbug bites and motel hickeys. The unblinking sky gazes down at its reflection in the grease puddle on the turnpike.

You say, give it up, I was only eight! I haven’t looked you in the eye since mile 14, when I learned you once aided and abetted the sun, you holding the magnifying glass as she turned ants to soot smudges.

The past and present

splinter, pieces scattered like ashes beneath underpasses, and one forgotten behind a certain truckstop bathroom. Remember?

A billboard professes: MYSTERY VORTEX CAVE TOUR, 39 MILES — WHAT SECRETS LURK UNDERGROUND?

A fair question. I listen for the sound of bison bones erupting from asphalt and burying a strip mall alive. We stop counting the miles.

So much distance is put to so little use. I flinch at the horror of emptiness, the unbearable weight of negative space. The wind, searching for something to blow through, asks: Haven’t we always been strangers in a strange land?

Haven’t we always learned to love this absence in the shape of a home?

Haven’t we always wondered

how many miles to Heaven?

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Identity Crisis Christy Li, Pitzer ‘24

On the Beaufort Scale

1

Zoey Lofgren, Scripps ‘24 my mother’s name is the strong wind, not the weak one.

A 9 out of 12.

In my mother’s mind it means her lucky number, four it means strength, it means changing.

A blank thing.

It is the shocking news her father played on the radio when he was not working, news like shouting.

It was her father’s name and now it’s hers.

He was a bird man too, born like her to fly far away one day.

But he never left, because, unlike my mother, he didn’t like it if he had to run.

For both, a Hobson’s choice:2 He tried molting away his feathers, his skin shedding away hard times like a Macaroni penguin, a flightless fowl with the largest crested plumes, weaker all the while.

She was a slender bird, an Arctic tern, a mighty flyer migrating away from Michigan from misfortune, but flight is a race she’ll never win.

You. I wish I met you before you took flight.

A lively fledging of a girl, so full of life you’d already done it all.

How quick

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you grew.

You flew away just like that, as if you were born ready to be a whirlwind.

Now, you are known to be a tough old bird.

Sometimes I wonder if you are ever scared Tossing, turning.

I wonder if you were ever scared of the world because it was too much at times.

Because you always had too little.

Because you were too impatient for the seasons to change because calm was too peaceful for the storm inside you.

Because your own forceful nature couldn’t match any natural force, not even the one you were named after.

You have become like your name, but you will not be caught up in the storm.

My mother used to hate her name its guttural sound, its spelling, its androgynous usage, which she was teased for at school.

My mother’s name is a wild tempest which blows fiercely knocking everything down, and so, she and her story are tempestuous.

If she was to change her name she would be blown away, she would become less powerful. not smaller.

Or weaker.

Perhaps she would be calmer, Maybe she’d learn how to adapt, accept how to let go, go with the flow She would like to sail into the wind.

But she is her own gale-force.

1 The Beaufort Scale is the scientific classification system for measuring wind.

2 A “Hobson’s Choice” is a decision in which there is no choice, or where both options are bad. It is named after the English liveryman Thomas Hobson

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Posto Santo Emilio N. Bankier, Pomona ‘27 Beyond the white caps of the northern mountains near the foothills where the cows and the brooks gargle and run down into the ricefields, the heat will hit you like a bull, trample over you and drag you to a place long forgotten and long rotten like the wrinkled, molding fruit in the tabletop bowl.

This place, a village they claim, a sanctuary to all which is crushing, place of deep and inevitable anguish which drives to exhaustion beyond the depths, beyond the depths.

Every house is an artifact unworthy of study, an old skull so dusty and cracked and chipped, untouched even by the wind which does not blow here for it was defeated by sickness and its weight.

And the heat which makes sweat and stick and itch and scratch and drowns the flies and kills the dogs with the bodies to be washed away by the rain that follows or crushed by the hail come thundering down from above onto carcass of body and carcass of houses with brittle shingles like stacked eggshells, with a died out color and long without a mother.

Is this the dream of Remus, and Abel, his brother?

Tell Cain that I’ve found his stick among the bones here of the Caesars and Alexander and mine and yours but not the bones of the dead for they are worthless, they do not put them here.

42

And a pale yellow flower whose name I do not know hangs from the the fingertips of a dried out woman, a mother, a grandmother maybe, but it doesn’t matter; she’s dead, she’s forgotten and her skinny body weighs like a rock at the bottom of our guts and the pale yellow flower eats at our skin like the heat, like the bugs, like death and mourning that dwells here, that swells here.

What love is there here in the burning and the road carving a path through the graveyard, where it’s not a place of touching; all that touches is the sickle and the skin and the needle of the mosquito piercing skin and racing death.

And there is no escape for there is no movement, you cannot move a muscle for the heat weighs on you, an anchor welded to every piece of skin, a cancer on each cell of the body.

Only the cats move, but I don’t think they’re real, they must be death for they ignore the heat, it’s like they don’t feel it; they glide through the streets and lay quietly with a well placed purr on the railings of teetering, cracked balconies, like overseers.

Like the demons of hell which this must be because hell cannot be any hotter but hell in hell there is howling, and all the cries of the murderers and the hypocrites fill in the space left empty by the flames.

43

Where the ghost of Dante, searching for his crown, crushes beneath his red soles the white eyes of Homer; crying out again and hearing nothing in response, he ventures out up the dusty road where the air is stale and hot and he is choked by his own sweat which runs instead of tears.

And heaven is nowhere to be seen except from the top of the villa of my ancestors where if you peek your head out the window, you can sometimes see heaven or Olympus, only you will also see the ground three stories beneath you, and you will wonder what it feels like for your skull to hit the pavement.

But church bells will call you away and you will gather with the other souls coming out from their shells to gather in this church of marble lies where in the center a cross glows, not because it is holy but because it is gold.

And outside again in the heat when all prayers have been said and songs badly sung, those beings with their skin hanging from their bones, like the weeds hang from the cracks between the red bricks of the church, murmur in an unknown tongue that only they understand and only they may speak.

This is their reward and it will die out too, and wander out into the ricefields, the only place that is sacred, and it is vast and swarming with mosquitoes and forgotten to all except God and me and you and the empty nights.

yosemite Nadia Hsu, Pomona ‘27

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milt fia meng, Scripps FA ‘23

I watch him do it: create a slit where there was none and reach in to scoop out yards of the stuff.

The weight of it in his hands, the way more keeps emerging. More, more, more.

Slabs pool heavy, a ribbon undulates for miles, crossing over itself again and again, coiling close. It makes my throat tight. It makes my teeth itch.

Tender trembling Soft slick Slick sheen It’s soft tofu for carnivores and rich cream for bad Buddhists and anyone else who feels desire.

Oyster for people who don’t want to chew.

He says it’s good gently fried and tempura battered or marinated in a kelp and sea salt broth or sitting in a little puddle of ponzu.

It’s all the same in the end.

It thick coats the tongue, seeps in deep, slips past and into the throat, diffusing into the acidity of the organ beyond.

Meat Head Jessica Yim, Scripps ‘25

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The Little Doe Krishna Rajesh, Harvey Mudd ‘24 Noctiluca phantasma. Common name Ghost Silk. It grows at the bottom of long-forgotten ponds, glowing an ethereal blue when the night arrives. Left alone, it does nothing but exist, fated to wither away as it needs far more nutrients than it can get. Alone, without a host, it cannot survive. But if given the chance to grow, the moss is more resilient than any other of its kind.

Odocoileus virginianus. Common name white-tailed deer. It roams thick-wooded forests, a gentle beast until they face the deepest of animal instincts: the drive to survive, thrive, and mate. Its food varies on the season, from fallen nuts to woody vegetation to berries to land and aquatic plants. It is shy and reclusive, avoiding contact with others whenever possible.

Parasite and prey. On their own, both destined to die, whether out of neglect or violence. But the two species are bound together in a blood pact that neither deer nor moss knows.

In a single moment, the pact will begin anew for a little doe exploring the forest on a breezy spring day. She exists in a transitional state between fawn and adult; old enough to have parted ways with her mother but young enough to miss her. She has reached maturity, but is not full grown. Not yet. She is still changing rapidly, coming closer to her final form with each breath.

This is the first Spring she has experienced. She was born in the sweltering heat of Summer and has only known the world to grow colder and harsher with time. But she has proven herself strong enough to survive Winter, and the gentle breeze now feels much like a sigh of relief from the forest.

The little doe is careful of the ground where she walks, avoiding brambles and twigs as best she can. (She learned of stealth in Autumn, when the sound of her hoofs on fallen leaves attracted a snarling fox, who she is lucky to have escaped.)

Her eyes scan the bushes and trees for food while her ears remain pricked for the sound of pawsteps. She learned of hunger, true hunger, in Winter and knows now to seek out food wherever possible.

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Twice she stops to quickly gulp down patches of forbs, galloping away at the slightest sound of danger. The little doe is not bold. She learned of caution in Summer, from her mother. A doe that was brave was a doe that would die.

She has yet to learn of anything in Spring. At peace, she enters a clearing in the forest surrounding a small pond. The setting sun’s rays glitter on the water’s clear surface, making a gold and orange wave. The light obscures the little doe’s vision, but she knows that there must be plants she can reach in this shallow pond.

She dips her muzzle into the warm water, taking a few grateful sips before finding a patch of moss to sate her hunger. She does not remember tasting this moss before. It feels like silk and tastes of contradiction, things the little doe could never put into words. It is achingly sweet and yet carries a metallic tang, the scent of predators and the fallen. The little doe hesitates at the taste, but it is clear after a moment that there are no predators here. She drinks and eats her fill.

Days pass, and the little doe feels safe in Spring. With this new food source, the shadow of hunger has lessened slightly. She returns once, then twice, and there is always enough moss to satisfy her hunger. And, as time after time no predators come near, she realises the pond is not a place of danger.

She regains the strength she lost in Winter, and with it roams further and further into the forest. With every rest, she is able to move farther than before. She encounters a fox one day and a coyote the next, but her legs are strong and swift as she flees.

But despite her new range, she returns to the pond often. The water is somehow far more satisfying for her thirst than the rains and puddles she used to frequent. It grows sweeter with each sip.

All is well, until the day the little doe arrives at the pond to see that another creature is already there, drinking from the pool. A buck, who looms large in comparison to her petite frame. It is the first time the little doe has seen another of her kind since Autumn. She hesitates—the buck smells strange. Even from this distance, the scent of violence and fallen prey fills her nostrils. But this predator-scent no longer alarms her. The

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scent is the same as the moss’s taste, and the moss is safe. The moss gives her strength. She approaches the pond.

Faster than she can blink, the buck spins around, and the little doe cannot understand what she is seeing. Rather than fur, bone covers the buck’s chest like the shell of a turtle. There is no time to think on it. The buck raises his antlers threateningly and snarls. (His teeth are very large and sharp, the little doe notices. Much larger than hers.) The little doe has made a mistake. In Winter, Autumn, or Summer, she would already have fled as fast as she could. But right now her hunger for the moss drowns out any fear she might have had. She stares the buck dead in the eyes and flattens her ears to her head aggressively. Slowly, cautiously, she steps closer to the pond to drink.

The buck lunges, crashing into the little doe with enough force to knock her off her hooves. Primal fear takes over and she is aware of nothing but her heartbeat in her ears. She scrambles, trying to stand and run before she is gored through by the buck’s antlers.

But he doesn’t charge. His lunge was that of a fox, not a deer, and he now leans in and bites savagely into the little doe’s front leg.

It feels as though a fire had been lit under her skin, burrowing deep into her bones. The sunset red of her blood spatters the buck’s exposed bone, and more drips from his muzzle. The buck pauses, tongue flicking out. Lapping up the blood—a chance to escape.

The little doe kicks wildly out and finds to her shock that her strikes carry far more weight than expected. The buck staggers back and she runs, ignoring the pulsing fire that attacks her leg whenever she puts weight on it.

She does not know how long her world is just blood, and fear, and the pounding of her heart. She runs and runs, trying to outrun the predator-scent, the scent of blood. But it does not fade; of course it does not, the scent is coming from her.

Deep in the trees, the little doe comes to a halt, trembling legs barely able to hold her weight. Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong. But her heart slows down faster than she thinks it will. Slowly, a hazy calm wafts over her. The buck is gone. She is safe, and she notices with this realisation that her leg no longer hurts.

She glances down. There is no blood. The wound is gone, but in its place the little doe sees bone, not skin. Perhaps her fear should continue at the sight, but instead it brings her calm. No sharp teeth will find pur-

chase on her leg again. She is secure, safe from further pain. The bone shell does not worry her so much as the fact that so much of her remains unshielded.

The adrenaline fades. Deep exhaustion and hunger set into the little doe’s body. She has never felt so tired. This was beyond the energy needed to flee the terrifying buck, this felt as if part of her had been used up, and now she is a little emptier.

The little doe leans against a tree, though her ears remain ever-pricked for danger. She is so tired. It would be so easy to just lie down and let the hunger take her away.

As her eyes close, her nostrils twitch. The smell of her own blood is all around her. It is very dangerous; the scent will bring yet more predators. But the scent does not spark the little doe’s fear. Instead it sets her hunger aflame. In a daze, her tongue flicks out and licks a little patch of her blood that has seeped onto the tree.

Her eyes snap open. The taste seems to wipe her exhaustion away, letting her focus on her surroundings. She sniffs the air more carefully.

There is her blood, yes, but there is another blood scent. Squirrel.

Her legs move of their own accord, carrying her to the source of the scent. There, at the base of an oak tree, is a plump squirrel with matted grey fur, turned rust-coloured from a bite wound. It breathes heavily, more blood spurting from its side every time it does.

The little doe doesn’t think. She shoves her head down and greedily laps up the pool of blood. Each lick sends sparks of joy and energy through her body. Her vision goes hazy with ecstasy, until the blood is all gone. She blinks. The squirrel is dead now, with a second bite mark on its throat.

The squirrel does not sate the little doe’s hunger for long. The next day she is wandering the forest again, looking for the dead and the dying, chasing off predators after they have brought the prey down for her.

She gets a finch this way. A crow. A mouse. Not enough, not enough.

Though each satisfies her for a time, her hunger always returns deeper than ever before.

The little doe walks the forest with confidence, now. Her chest, legs,

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and back are now all safely encased in bone armour. The thought of a bear scares her far less than the thought of being unable to get the sustenance she needs. She returns to the pond every day, but the moss now seems to only whet her appetite.

The moon grows large, then shrinks again until it is only a cat’s claw in the sky. The little doe has run out of patience. She has been so hungry for so long that this time, when she sees a fox stalking a mouse, she does not settle for the mouse. She creeps up from behind and waits for her moment. There. The fox wiggles its haunches, ready to pounce on its prey. In one bound, the little doe leaps and bites down, her teeth crunching on the fox’s neck bone.

The mice dashes into a bush in terror. The little doe lets it go. Mice are too small to satisfy her. She drags the fox’s body, still in her mouth, back to her wonderful pond. She has not seen the buck again, to her disappointment. She itches to defend her territory. The little doe drops the fox at the bank of the pond and has the most satisfying meal of her life.

She does not waste this time. All that is left when she is done are bones, sucked clean of marrow.

She lets out a little huff of contentment, licking blood from her muzzle. Full for now. This was what she had needed all along. Predator-scent no longer means danger. No, this is prey-scent, the scent of the injured and weak whose ghosts predators carry on their fur. All creatures who cross her path are meals in the making, each more invigorating than the last.

The little doe dips her muzzle into the pond to drink. Reflected in the pond, a mask of bone gazes back at her.

heatwave

Sophia Merchant, Pomona ‘26

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Chronicles of Transspace Fleet #128 Nikki Smith, Scripps ‘25 I. “Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with me.”

- Leslie Feinberg So finally they eradicated nature, too.

IV. we never needed something

between every star

II. The night before we leave Earth, I crunch out onto my porch

as binary as

gravity

out here we are

the space each molecule a point

of infinite possibility-–imagine

in snow boots and pajama pants for one last joint to fill up my lungs with smoke—a cancerous keepsake to remember Earth by.

A gruff nod to the countable glinting stars, the same ones that Matthew Shepard saw when he looked up from a fence not fifty miles from here.

If we can still see dead stars, maybe they look down and see Matthew on the porch with me, snowflakes clinging to his eyelashes, shivering and blowing smoke out into the gummy dark.

III. As it turns out, it’s not too difficult for a bunch of queers to commandeer a billionaire’s rocketship, as long as you bring enough bricks.

As we lift off, the boosters roar, the scream of a raw and practiced throat.

Sweaty squeezing hands and red flashing lights and the pressure thundering in our ears and higher and higher and nothing but flimsy groaning metal between us and the hostile atmosphere and hot, hotter and then we are weightless

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building a body atom by creation

Adam

back knowing

then leaning

seizing the reins of

the void

will catch him V. We name new constellations for Marsha Joan Leslie Lou And when nature as we know it is out of sight beyond dark endless horizon, we hold each other and remember in another’s mouth the taste of peaches, the breath of fresh mountain air.

Try not to long for Earth—instead watch your trans sisters, their faces bathed in the dawn of a newborn star and know nobody will ever hurt them again.

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The Spring Flood Jakob Priestly, Claremont McKenna ‘26

“Where the rivers meet.” Her voice had warmed my bones, the sweet scent of flowers that followed wherever she went overwhelmed my senses. Every boy in Grenthyl, and even a few girls, had tried to court her. I hadn’t dwelled on it for long, thinking myself lucky to even have a chance to meet Lilythicket- yes, the Lilythicket.

However, as I rowed back from the Geren’s old tavern last night, it occurred to me that I didn’t know which rivers she was talking about.

With the Spring flood purifying the land beneath our stilted homes, there wasn’t much of a separation to begin with.

I groaned and leaned back. What if I’d misheard her? She was like Summer wildflowers, blossoming in vibrant proclamations of love before slipping away to the memory of last season. She was too good for Grenthyl. Everyone knew it, but we all selfishly wanted her to stay.

Her paintings sit trapped on our walls instead of blessing the homes of wealthy patrons or for public observation. The dark waters hungrily clawed at my small vessel, almost black except for the light reflected from the grinning moon.

The monotonous waiting for the floods, then waiting for the ground to become visible, was made bearable only by her humor and wit and light. But she was too good. Her dreams weren’t in some floating village one big surge from being swept away but in some epicenter of art and purpose and culture.

I sighed. The Lilythicket. She’d chosen me! The bottom of my little boat was more plugged-hole than wood, but I felt like I was in one of Forn’s stories, rowing to rescue my princess. Doubt was blooming in my chest, however. I swallowed that down and focused on my fanciful imaginings.

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Pulling the oars in, I found my makeshift anchor— nothing more than a rope winding around a large stone- and threw it into the crystal waters. If the rivers were lower, this was about where they’d join hands.

My little lantern seemed pathetic next to the silent strength beneath me. If it weren’t for the distant lights of other watertowns in the distance, it would be easy to imagine I was all alone. I watched them for a while as my doubt grew. Surely I had misheard. It wasn’t where the Infren and Helvin rivers met, but where the Helvin and Gyur met.

Or maybe I had mistaken the meeting time for tonight when it was truly tomorrow. Doubt is a dangerous monster, it gnaws on you from the inside out.

I got so nervous that I had begun to pull in my anchor when I saw another boat approaching from the river. The rope slipped back through my fingertips and I waved, then I felt like an idiot because obviously, it was me. Who else would row out here in the middle of the night?

As Lilythicket approached, the silhouette of her curly dark hair became visible. She giggled and waved back. I quickly stopped and cursed my stupidity.

She tossed me a rope, and we pulled our boats together. Lilythicket held one end, and I the other. It was like holding hands, I thought to myself. The water didn’t seem hungry to me anymore, but like a gentle beast rubbing against its master’s feet.

“Do you love me?” Lilythicket asked, looking at me with eyes like the fresh-turned soil.

I couldn’t stop the heat from blossoming in my cheeks or the startled look on my face.

She laughed again, and it seemed like the sun had risen early. “That might be a little strong. Do you like me?”

I cleared my throat, but it still came out higher than I would have liked. “I like you very much.”

“Would you follow me to the end of the river?”

“Of course, and further than that!” I wasn’t quite sure where this was going, but it seemed like what the hero would have said in one of Forn’s

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stories.

“To the end of the world?”

“This world and the next!”

“To a land that doesn’t flood every spring?”

It was my turn to laugh, “No such land exists!”

“But if it did?” She asked earnestly. I somehow felt ashamed, like I’d made a mistake.

“I’d follow you there as well.”

“It exists, you know. I heard about it from some spice traders when I was younger. We can go, tonight, together. If you hop into my boat, we can take turns rowing. Grenthyl will be far behind us in the morning.”

Lilythicket gently pulled the rope toward her, and let one of her strong hands rest on mine.

I gently pulled my hand away and looked toward one of the distant villages, ashamed. I would do anything, but not that. She needed to stay here.

With sad eyes, Lilythicket gave me her best smile. “I understand,” she said, but I felt like she didn’t truly.

Without another word, she pushed off from my boat, and began to row back to the village, leaving me anchored alone again.

A land that doesn’t flood? I suddenly couldn’t control the fit of laughter that burst out of me, joining with the whispers of the unforgiving water like a minstrel troupe out of tune.

That doesn’t exist.

Impossible.

窈窕淑女 Christy Li, Pitzer ‘24

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killers dream of love, my father dreamed of guns Gideon Ellant Reiter, Pitzer ‘26

delilah, on a brown couch in the evening Aanji Sin, Scripps ‘24

when the killer comes crying toxic cinnabar staining knuckles turned white from cleaving to the hilt of the knife not in malice but in shock in fear i bring his face like a kaleidoscope flashing with conquest and bloodguilt to my thighs and tell him sing me a song beat your chest my father dreamed of empty golden hills vascularized with valleys overflowing with milk and honey pumping life into verdant olive trees fruiting and sustaining the people who loved the land with their rifles my father dreamed of new ways to love the land new guns to embrace it he filled up notebooks with crude sketches of affection he scribed dissertations of his devotion a love to defend him from solitude the dreams of a killer are haunted not by the souls of their victims but by wretched gods who forgive by acquitting judges pardoning presidents vile lovers who look the maimer in the eye and whisper i know you are in pain

I only think about you now in the shower, on mornings when I didn’t sleep well but I’ll pay you back for that time in quarters, like we used to, when I would eye the fishbone curve of your hip and the hair in your bathroom sink.

The room is melting off of its concrete frame. I ask if you remember whose fault the fire was, and your response is in the shuddering white blaze behind the curtains of my eyelids.

The sun for a shadow. The morning I woke up and stopped recognizing you. Your body, an imploding star. I used to watch your body like I was transcribing it for a penny, every showing, every adaptation, you on that stage, my heels dug into arid soil.

Remember: the sun off of its axis, the ocean a far-down thing. We used to feed our quarters to slot machines and watch the lights go.

Play that part back, I wasn’t finished watching.

You are watching the lights, and I am watching you.

Nowadays, the sky moves slow. I pay for my things in dimes and pick bones out of my teeth and separate the salt from the sea and things will oxidize, eventually, if it all stops spinning.

I feed a slot machine for the first time since November and think of you. I fuck him and think of you. I am always thinking of you.

and fathers dream of love of babies and guns

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Waiting Hannah Wand, Scripps ‘27 My 16-year-old thighs stuck to the blue vinyl airport seat. Sweat dripped into the hollows behind my knees. I should have been doing the chemistry homework that sits in my backpack, or at least reading a book, but I couldn’t force my mind to focus. Too many PA announcements and crying babies. Instead, I swiped animated fruit into lines of three, watching them disappear, new fruit falling to fill its place. An animated gardener jumped for joy on the sidelines. Fantastic job!

The average person spends a total of five years waiting. We wait for buses and planes. We wait for water to boil and lights to turn green and spouses to return home. We wait for life to start or end. All those pauses add up. Five years. 1825 days. 43,800 hours. 157,680,000 ticks of a grandfather clock. Seven percent of a lifetime spent in limbo.

I thought about the bag that sat at my mom’s feet. Its contents. What it looked like passing through the security scanners. How likely it was to spill. We were flying from San Francisco to Nebraska to bury my grandmother’s ashes in the family plot. Her headstone had marked an empty grave for five years while we waited for the right time to travel, then for a pandemic to pass. Even in death, my grandmother couldn’t escape this fate of waiting.

212 planes take off every minute worldwide. So, while the electronic board in front of me displayed [SFO-OMA: delayed], a million people surged through boarding tunnels and buckled themselves in. A million people ignored a safety video or sipped coffee from a cardboard cup.

They traveled for work, family, vacation, pilgrimage, school, exploration, service, fun. I wondered how many sat, suspended in the air, on their way to bury their grandmother too.

Passing By

Christy Li, Pitzer ‘24

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I waited for the plane to arrive. I waited to board. I waited to take off. I waited to land. I waited to collect our bags. I waited for the rental car. I waited to arrive at the cemetery. I waited to let out my tears until I was alone in the bathroom of our dark hotel room.

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The Vampire Baby Eliza Powers, Scripps ‘25 Vampire babies weren’t supposed to be born with cleft lips. Or cleft palates.

I was looking at my baby sister, Eloise. Her eyes were big and her tongue hung out of her face lazily. From her mouth to nose, which hadn’t fused together in the womb, was a gaping hole, pink and gummy. Her surgery was the next week, after Mardi Gras, when they’d stitch it all shut, a blackened strip of blood and stitches down her face.

It was the Mardi Gras before Katrina. We lived on First Street in the Garden District, neighbors to Anne Rice’s old house. My mother was in the kitchen, preparing a famous batch of blood rum punch. She was wearing a four foot tall Victorian wig. And go-go boots. And fake eyelashes, which I thought looked like spiders.

“So there we are, standstill traffic on The Causeway,” my mother said. Madame Dupont and Madame Lefort stood next to her, helping arrange petit-fours and finger sandwiches on a tray.

“Ooh, is this Leroy’s First Bite?” asked Madame Jacquard, joining the circle with a little plastic plate of stuffed bat bites and boudin balls.

My mom continued.

“So finally I give in and roll down the windows, and bam! A pigeon flies into the car. And before I have time to react, he’s grabbed it by the neck and is sinking his teeth in,” she said.

“Drained the whole thing in two gulps!”

The women turned around to look at me. Our kitchen was Victorian, old New Orleans: worn-in hardwood floors, a wooden cupboard filled sparse with boxes of Spanish rice and packets of Gumbo seasoning for guests (we ate out a lot), peanut butter, cereal in tupperware (since my mother opened a box of Cheerios and a cockroach flew out), an unopened bottle of Tabasco.

“You’re getting so big!” Madame Dupont said. “Notre petit prince!”

“Go show us your first tooth,” my mom said.

“I can’t find it,” I said.

She smiled. “Go look downstairs.” The women clucked at me.

Madame Dupont patted my head.

I turned to look at my sister. Eloise stuck her tongue out at me, and it slid right out of her face, touching her nose. Like she was taunting me.

Everyone was all excited for the new baby.

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“Just in time for Mardi Gras,” Madame Lefort had said.

To prepare me for big brotherhood, my mother’s friends from college had gotten me a doll with curly blonde hair and sharp teeth. But when she was born, Eloise was bald. And she’d never grow sharp teeth.

“Her teeth won’t grow in right,” my mother said.

“How will she bite if she can’t take a bottle?” my father asked.

“How will she feel when all of the other little girls drain their first bat?”

She would never have binkies to give up to the baby alligators on Avery Island. She couldn’t take a bottle. She choked in her sleep sometimes. I wouldn’t ever admit it, but she looked alien to me, almost scary.

I was hungry. I was also missing my tooth. By the time I made it down to the basement, it was the Mardi Gras after Katrina.

The basement was flooded. Against the wall: a car seat from my father’s Toyota Sequoia, a plastic tricycle missing a wheel, half a dozen cans of paint from the kitchen renovation in 2002, a few pieces of splintered plywood. My mother’s Muses shoes, collected over several decades, had been destroyed, along with boxes of Christmas decorations and my old Easter and Fourth of July smocks. At the bottom of the landing, a dead cockroach, face up.

This basement was quieter than all the Mardi Gras before.

No more trays of jello shots, “photo booth pictures” with boas on my father’s Blackberry camera: full of pictures ranging from nuclear families dressed like “The Incredibles” to Madame Levain’s breasts.

Upstairs: shrieks and cheers. It was lunchtime, sandwiched between the Rex and Zulu parades, so the grown-ups weren’t fully wasted yet.

“Half-drunk,” my father called it. But the kids were fully on a sugar high, shrieking Bloody Mary on the second floor.

“They’re going to blow out our electricity,” yelled my mother from the kitchen.

Eloise was a year old, and had just started walking.

The first surgery was a week after she was born, to sew her face back together. I had watched her in the tent at the hospital, little mittens on her hands, knocked out from anesthesia. Her skin was yellow, mouth crusted with dried blackened blood and stitches. My mother bought me a zebra at the hospital gift shop. She slept in a pull-out chair. At one point Eloise got a fever and they pumped pink liquid into her through an IV. My aunt came in from Alabama and did a 1,000 piece puzzle in the hospital waiting room with me. The adults talked in hushed voices. I wondered if my sister was dying.

I walked upstairs, back into the kitchen. It was midafternoon, 2010.

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Jessica Yim, Scripps ‘25

Cheese, Jam, and Cigarettes

“Leroy!” shouted Madame Geraldine.

The ladies were in the kitchen, dressed in wigs, holding cups. They were decked out in black and gold, fleur-de-lis. The Saints had won the SuperBowl last February. The women were doting on my sister. Her third surgery had molded a nostril from the gummy flesh that was her nose.

She got home the next day. Our house was filled with flowers. (“Look at all these flowers,” my father had said, Eloise on his hip. Her eyes were wide. “Look at how many people are thinking of you.”)

“Isn’t she just beautiful?” said Madame Dupont. They were watching Eloise. She was five years old, and stupid. I think I hated her.

“And so smart too! I bet you’re going to be a professor, like your daddy,” said Madame Lefort.

“Leroy!“ Called my mother. “Do your George Bush impression.“ To the other women: “It’s hilarious.”

“You’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie!” I said. They exploded in laughter.

And then there was Eloise the rat, toddling towards us with a stuffed goldfish.

“Bownie! Bownie!“ she called, and the women laughed harder.

“Here you go, petit,“ said Madame Geraldine, offering her a scorpion lollipop.

I glared at her. I was ten, and wanted to be a marine biologist.

My dad used to take me to the Audubon Aquarium, buy me a $12 cold cheese sandwich at the cafeteria, and watch as my breath fogged up the glass. When no one was looking, we’d fish stingrays from the interactive play tank and drain them in one gulp. He never bought me a stuffed seal or whale, even though I begged.

“Only books,” he said, so I got an Encyclopedia.

Then my mother bought Eloise a fish mobile in her crib: a dolphin, a whale, an unspecified orange fish. They spun in a circle to the chime, and fake water and glitter bubbled up against the plastic. One day, he came home with a stuffed whale for Eloise. That was the first betrayal of my short life.

I decided to look in the parlor. It was 2015. Mid-afternoon sun filtered in through the curtains. There was Eloise, sitting by the dessert table, picking pieces of a large piece of king cake with her fingers. She still couldn’t chew well from the jaw surgery: first it was tomato soup, clear broth, then smoothies, then mashed potatoes, and now she could manage solid foods, but soft only.

“Hey,” I said. “Have you seen my tooth?”

She looked at me. Her under eyes were still yellow. They had moved her jaw forward three centimeters, twelve screws in her face, rubber

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bands congealed with blood and smoothies.

Eloise shrugged.

“Have you seen Monsieur Toussand?” she asked, except her voice was garbled from the braces, and it came out like “Monshur Chussand”. For weeks we built a pillow fort her to sleep with her head raised, so she didn’t choke. She drank opioids liquified into cherry medicine.

I shook my head.

“He was peeing in the yard.”

“Oh boy.”

“I can’t find my tooth anywhere,” I said, grabbing a piece of her destroyed king cake. She only ate the purple pieces.

“Watch out for Monsieur Toussand. He offered to take me hunting at his house in Pass Christian and said he’d give me his guns.”

“That’s when you know it’s bad,” I said, and went outside. On the porch, Monsieur Jacquard offered me a beer.

“You want one?” asked Monsieur Jacquard “How old are you now, Leroy? 15? That’s old enough.”

He handed me one, a Bud Light. I cracked it open and started to chug as beer dipped down my chin. We both watched as Monsieur Toussand unzipped his pants to pee on our Magnolia tree.

Someone screamed from inside the house.

“Jesus Christ, Eloise!” It was my father. “Jesus Christ!”

Monsieur Jacquard and I turned to watch through the kitchen window. There was a flurry of movement; Madame Lefort’s red boa slapped against the window, a few feathers came loose. I walked towards the window: slurry, syrupy. I was getting drunk. My sister had collapsed on the kitchen floor. Wearing a long sleeve white shirt, a Drew Brees jersey. Her skin was yellow; her cheeks were bright red.

She was in pigtails, and on oxycodone.

“You shouldn’t have put so many blankets on her,” my dad said.

My mother was dialing 911.

“It’s my daughter,” she said into the receiver. “It’s my daughter.”

Then, Monsieur Lefort, holding a live crawfish in one hand: “She’s awake.”

I ran into the kitchen, but everyone was gone.

It was dark out. The “official” Open House was over. The food was picked clean, the plastic cups all used up. The adults had resorted to the fancy china wine glasses.

“Leroy!” Madame Dupont said. She was wearing a red boa and a cheap black wig: a bob, with bangs.

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“Come have some spinach artichoke dip!” She offered me a cracker, which I rejected, and a bourbon, which I drank.

The kitchen was cleaner than it had been during the day: two rinsedout bowls in the sink. There was leftover spaghetti, half a wedge of brie, rosemary marcona almonds in a little dish, and the frozen meatballs my mother kept in the freezer. The adults were holding red goblets. I could tell this was an impromptu after-party: my mom would call “I’m putting on my pajamas!” every fifteen minutes, but she didn’t actually want anyone to leave.

And in the study, my father was smoking a cigar.

“Can I try some?” I asked. My father smoked a cigar every Mardi Gras. He was tenured at Tulane last spring.

“Is she going to be okay?“ I asked.

On his desk: my Bowdoin application, my essay on The Catcher in the Rye, edited with red pen, Eloise’s medication chart: eight medications labeled with AMs and PMs, scratched through, stars denoting if she threw them up. Oxycodone, Tylenol PM, Amoxicillin, topical ointment.

Further down: he tracked her liquid intake: Coke, Water, Milkshake, Smoothie.

“She had a Coke with dinner,” he said. “I sat with her until she finished it.”

“But she threw it up,” I said. “Remember? With the Amoxicillin.”

My father looked at me straight into my eyes. He laughed.

I left him in the study, and went into the bar. There was Eloise, pouring Sprite into a cup. My sister smiled at me. She had a slight underbite; her top and bottom teeth didn’t match up. Her mouth pulled up slightly in the middle. But her face was full and round and her cheeks were rosy. (They had implanted two resin fangs into her jaw; “A rare success,” her surgeon had said. “Most are rejected or rot into the bone.”)

“Here, have a drink,” Eloise said, and handed me a rum and coke.

Amelia LeBougeouis and I started going out. But even after she started climbing through my window at night, I made her leave before midnight. I kept waiting for Eloise to appear over my bed like when she was little, in an American Doll nightgown, pale in the moonlight, asking, “Can I sleep with you?”

Four beers later, and I stumbled upstairs.

“Leroy?” Eloise called from my parents room. She had been sleeping there since her last surgery. Five nose surgeries in a row, all failures.

Hypertrophic scarring, collapsed nostrils.

Eloise was fifteen, and our house was empty. She was under the

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electric blanket.

“Come lay with me.”

Her breathing was shallow, her hair was greasy, matted.

I was drunk: my head was spinning, my mouth was dry.

“My tooth?” I asked, but she didn’t answer. The room started to lurch.

I walk to the bedside, past the opioids and apple sauce containers lovingly sprinkled with cinnamon from my mother, past the bandages and vaseline and antiseptic ointment and q-tips and packing.

“My throat,” she whispered. They shoved a three inch tube all the way down to her stomach to breathe for her. Eloise swallowed. There on her neck: my tooth, encased in sealant, on a choker necklace with a pearl and a little fleur-de-lis charm. Of course.

I collapsed under the covers, next to my sister’s shallow breathing, and fell asleep instantly. She put her cold wrist against my arm.

I had a dream that I hadn’t had since I was little. Both my legs were mangled in a car crash on Tchoupitoulas. I was run over by a streetcar.

At the hospital, I ate shaved ice, and got a giant teddy bear, a $200 Lego set, and a card signed by everyone at Trinity. This dream used to make me feel guilty; I never told my mother about it.

I woke up again in the night. My head was pounding; the bed was empty. My mouth tasted sour. I stumbled downstairs. It was my senior year at Bowdoin. Eloise had another jaw surgery; the first one was regressing. No one wanted to talk about it.

When I made it downstairs, the living room was swallowed in darkness.

An American Werewolf in London was playing. There, on the couch, my sister, drugged and yellowed and sleeping, her head on my mother’s shoulder. My mother was also asleep.

“Come here,” my dad said, who was in his boxers and black T-shirt, hair slicked wet from one of the showers he took in the middle of the night. He was eating a bagel. The glow of the television lights hit his face; he had cream cheese in his beard.

“Come sit with us”.

He didn’t explain why they were all down here without me at four in the morning; he didn’t have to. He looked at me from the glow of the television lights. I walked to sit in the armchair, which was my spot, and we watched the movie until the pale sun started seeping through the windows, through all the credits, as my mother and sister slept, and we were all together.

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You Always Have Candy in Your Pocket Saru Potturi, Pomona ‘24

because you’re an older brother, you tell me, you’ve been one since you were three; you know what cheers a ten-year-old up and you know you’ve got to distribute them equally your left pocket always bulges, the right one you leave free for me to tuck my hand into on december days with the sleet on the streets, every inch of road covered in melting snow and your nose red from the cold, just the tip, and you don’t like coffee but you put some on anyway. the kettle screams. the kettle screams; the marshmallow bobs. and i think about buoyancy and how it’s a living thing, i think about the face you make when you drink, wrinkling your pink nose in jest i think about the cadences in your voice, the dips and crests they settle softly in my chest, the warmth and bitterness.

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Last words of a mycologist

Whom It May Concern:

sunburn—

ripped

from here,

blades

face.

gust,

Katie Wang, Pitzer ‘24

hollowed, by this hideous I was torn earth.

today, parchment

the distinguished death that I deserve— and dare I say —worse than

stripped and and hearth, in hand, damp

I lay, as I write to you pockmarked of my ghastly

outline

been home clutched

To

dear beige,

a gentle place.

gills, to no avail

page!

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I am dying, and it is not it is painful, it is shameful,

I have from thing, from my

So now

chalky

fair

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waxen, a

A

brown odor, Goodbye

pinch of water down my shoulder and I breathe a misty breath, dispersed into murky green on this barren resting

Goodbye

with crooked my own

and cry:

Maybe they were witches for it, but I knew better than to intervene. They simply knew, better than any of us, what to do with their demons. They knew to burn and burn and burn until the air was rid of everything but laundry and young limes.

Goodbye fair world.

Once, on a Sunday just past sunset, a spear of green smoke pierced the sky above the school. We called it a scarecrow at first, a goddess’ cruel attempt at decoration, but we laughed nervously when we recognized the sweater, still stained with fresh cologne. It was silent except for the embers crackling in approval, except for the colors that seeped from the body, screaming. The whole school closed their eyes and mourned for a moment, then continued to pull their clean clothes off of twine.

my words dust

On Sundays just past sunset, the girls’ school down the road smells of laundry and young limes. Rage lurks in the shadows of ivy, in dark knots of hair down their drains. It’s a quiet thing.

The young women seem to wring it out of their bodies at the start of each week, spray the unconvincing mask of citrus over any lingering odor. I envy them for their mastery of this art– how they pull clean linen out of rubble, wash their hands in lavender-scented gasoline. I too want to powder my cheeks with ash and call it fairy dust.

My underbelly ribbed

the air rife with I croak fair brethren!

Audrey Gruian, Harvey Mudd ‘26

Sunday Best

Ad Infinitum

Jessica Yim, Scripps ‘25

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