Careless Magazine: Fall 2019 to Spring 2020

careless Careless

a Claremont Colleges literary magazine issue 3 • spring 2020

a Claremont Colleges literary magazine issue 3 • spring 2020

Issue 3 • Spring 2020

Letter from the Editor Words have a way of connecting people even without direct social interactions. I learned this six years ago, when the socially awkward me got inspired by a short story written by William Faulkner, sat down, and wrote, over the span of four days, six awkward pages of my first attempt at creative writing. What I did not realize at the time was how much of myself went into the story about a young girl burdened with familial responsibilities and the duty to take care of a younger brother with mental disabilities. I only knew that I wanted to make this story better. So, the awkward me from six years ago, who could barely hold proper conversations with people, took the six pages and left them on the desk of my high school English Literature teacher. A couple days later, she called me in. I still remember how embarrassed I was as she took me through her comments. I also remember how the six pages became the first cornerstones for a lasting friendship.

My engagement with literature was what inspired me to talk with others. Once I realized words had meaning – surprise! – and that it was possible to argue about their meanings, I could not stay curled up in my own bubble, enwrapped in only one type of interpretation.

Six years later, as I approach my senior year in college, my words and the connections they brought led me to devote my time to Careless Magazine, to advocate for a magazine that spans across the five colleges and attempts to connect the different voices.

Our third edition was delayed from the usual schedule of publication, and we apologize to all the authors who had to wait for our editorial decisions. We hope that Careless Magazine can continue to play a role in bridging gaps and spreading messages, and to serve as a forum for all student voices at the Claremont Colleges during these tumultuous times. I extend my deepest thanks to all the wonderful editors who devoted time and energy to this edition. Careless Magazine would not be possible without the enthusiastic work of all those behind the scenes.

Suh Won Chang, Claremont McKenna ’21 Editor-in-Chief

Agave

CHLOE WANASELJA

About Careless Magazine is a Claremont Colleges literary magazine. Our objective is to foster the development of writers and artists, to promote a wider appreciation of literature and art, and to create a literary forum written and managed by undergraduate students across the 5Cs. We accept poetry, prose, and visual art on a rolling basis and compile them into a print publication once every semester.

The submission deadline for our fourth print edition is October 26, 2020. Please direct submissions and inquiries to carelessmagazine@gmail.com, and visit www.carelessmagazine.com/submit to view our submission guidelines.

Staff

Editor-In-Chief Suh Won Chang, Claremont McKenna ’21 ​ Senior Managing Editor ​Cameron Tipton, Pomona ’20 Junior Managing Editor Becky Zhang, Pomona ’22 5C Wordsmiths Consultant Jia Rui, Scripps ’21 Interview Coordinators ​Aditya Gandhi, Pomona ’22 Becky Zhang, Pomona ’22 Web Designer Ethan Widlansky, Pomona ’22 Financial Officer Megan Marshall, Pomona ’20 Editors Aditya Gandhi, Pomona ’22 Ethan Widlansky, Pomona ’22 Hannah Downing, Scripps ’23 Katheryn Wang, Harvey Mudd ’23 Megan Marshall, Pomona ’20 Paz O’Farrell, Pitzer ’22 Simran Sachdeva, Scripps ’23 Sophia Augustine, Pomona ’23 Tyler Bunton, Pomona ’20

Contents panes

HAYLEY PIERPONT

Cover

Agave

CHLOE WANASELJA

3

MADISON YARDUMIAN

8

Growing Up

ELEANOR FURNESS

9

lineage

NATASHA VHUGEN

10

Anthropophagi

LUCAS CUNNINGHAM

11

At The End Of The Day

SCHUYLER MITCHELL

12

call me I was looking at a car on fire

SCHUYLER MITCHELL

13

panes

HAYLEY PIERPONT

14

view

NATASHA VHUGEN

15

King’s Speech

BRYNN PARKINSON

16

EMMA DUGGLEBY

17

SAM BOVARD

18

Notes on Hollywood

HARRISON PYROS

20

basement

HAYLEY PIERPONT

24

Grocery Store

ELEANOR FURNESS

25

Surf Scooter

TEODELINA MARTELLI

27

The Road to Cheyenne

LUCAS CUNNINGHAM

28

EMILY WILLIAMS

35

Broca’s area

LILLIAN AFF

36

Convergence

OLIVIA MEEHAN

37

Self Portrait

SOPHIE FRON

40

A Hymn

A Spell for the Living Body Poem

Proximity

Venn Diagram

MIRABELLA MILLER

41

MEGHAN ROSE

42

TESS GIBBS

43

LUCAS CUNNINGHAM

44

BRIAN BISHOP

45

JULIENNE HO

46

ELLA GARDNER

47

secret garden .

KAYLA LEE

49

Sunday Poem

TALIA IVRY

50

TIFFANY CHANG

50

In Memory of Paul Ehrenfest

J.J. SHANKAR

51

The Loch Ness Monster, and How We Breathe

KRYSTAL YANG

52

JAMARQUISE HUSTON

59

ADITYA GANDHI

60

alphabet soup

EMILY LU GAO

64

Allergy Season

SAM BOVARD

65

Poppies

KRISTINE CHO

66

LILY ROSS

67

UNTITLED Bodies Last Lament of a Soundcloud Artist fucca The Death of the Advil Morning Bike Ride

Ecosystem

Boggy Interview with Jia Tolentino

This is Poetry basement

HAYLEY PIERPONT

Back

A Hymn

MADISON YARDUMIAN

Fragrance drifts through the air like worship wrecked by the wind in my eye

Love will not look to me but for you I will ossify If beauty is desire press me against a window and call me stained glass If promise is vacancy grip the tender in my voice & seep into spokenness

Maybe love isn’t what we give but what refuses to fall apart

The cathedrals we build with the gleam in our eyes

8 • Spring 2020

Growing Up ELEANOR FURNESS

Family gatherings include

Swallowed comments like Baby shrimp which

Resemble mice fetuses and

Smell like cat breath and Feel like pig guts

Scraping the edges, corners, and walls of the room and I’m stuck. My fork collects the last traces of dried sauce on my

plate. I don’t eat it.

My cousin gets uncomfortable and decides it’s time to go

His parents and sister listen when he says so

After two decades they’re still careful with him

They support his arms while he walks and watch his expressions long before he makes them

They communicate in coffee-table-code and don’t usually talk about it once he’s left Whoever brought the shrimp placed them in a beautiful bowl I feel lucky to be there

Careless Magazine • 9

lineage

NATASHA VHUGEN

at the tip of the day, the moon was almost full, just a sliver shy. silver sliver. i picked blood from my ear. we could all hear the dryer running, and as my family sat reading five different books and not speaking to each other, my father ticked along with its sound. earlier: my grandfather hummed while he emptied the dishwasher, happy to be useful in the family scheme of doings and undoings. the way he hums is like the shell of a pistachio, the flimsy filmskin of a peeled navel orange, just the outer edges of the sound peeking through his teeth. more wind than anything else. my father hums the same way. i am trying to remember how best to love them. between: i watch the rainbow—make it a double—over the ocean. when the moon is as up as it will be, i look at it for too long, letting the light sear me viciously, beautifully. to be so cold someday. and my grandfather moves through the house, turning light switches on and off, all of them attached to bulbs he can’t see. and me, waiting for the thing which may not come.

10 • Spring 2020

Anthropophagi

LUCAS CUNNINGHAM

I felt my head - with wings of silk From off my shoulders fly It chirped - but once - before the Dusk Did fill the auburn sky I thought to think I could not think Forsaken was my Mind And in its place beneath my neck The Face it left behind Blind and bereft - all that was Left Once nightward thoughts had flown A gasping mouth - upon my Heart A face but left Alone I know not now where flew my Head Nor how it felt to Die But I know grief - the Hunger of The Anthropophagi

Careless Magazine • 11

At The End Of The Day SCHUYLER MITCHELL

She reaches into the weary sky Plucks clouds like figs And rolls them, supple, between her fingers I watch as they alight on her tongue Dissolving like fairy floss (Sticky and sweet and geranium-flavored) Horizon bends to welcome us Folding itself over our shoulders while She wears the distance like a shawl It catches the light when she sips nectar Stitched together between golden fibers, Points A and B collide in frenetic ecstasy Evening is bending into nightfall, Night falls into our back pockets I’m becoming acquainted with her loose change I’m relearning what it means to savor Feel sensation greet skin, slowly The taste of pennies blossoming as I bite my cheek As I inhale helium from silver balloons To mask each waver of my voice She dances atop the seismic shuffle And the puddles nestle in the concrete They catch our shapes and play them back to us: Our own silent moving picture

12 • Spring 2020

call me I was looking at a car on fire SCHUYLER MITCHELL

call it fiction then lean in and give me the sweetness of your breath, and I will unfold with the crimson that was once mine before, in the days when looking meant finding and everything fell at a dizzying pace, arraying, we are slower now, but a kaleidoscope nonetheless, like when I was in your car watching the honey sun dripping on the brittle hillside outside, just thinking about fire, and how I’ve caught it again, with you, so call me affective dismemberment, call me lily of the valley, uncanny, because I was focused on your hands all along, I was begging the priest in the cupboard for the looking glass, then planting butterflies at the base of your spine, the fizzle of a tablet dissolving into absinthe, absence, be careful, because I could see us billowing for miles, ripples on the scorched highway, each taillight a firefly, each headlight lightning on your tongue, as calloused palms sweep, fronds find me meandering, tracing each iridescent freckle in the evening hum, it was easy when the city still washed us in sound, easy when I didn’t know how to look in garbage cans, in gum stains, before my attention was captured by nickels flattened on the asphalt, birds outside the window, the seam of your red cardigan, yes, and you know when it is quiet I think one person might be enough, we’re dropping the match on the firewood this time, but hurry, I’m still waiting for the rain

Careless Magazine • 13

panes

HAYLEY PIERPONT

14 • Spring 2020

view

NATASHA VHUGEN

if you’re looking hard enough, you’ll see the yellow, the reckless sunshine of who you were. the view from the porch doesn’t end here. when i show her my house for the first time, i give her the tour: here is the living room, where winter curls around the flicked-switch fireplace; here is the kitchen, where this family’s women are buried; here are my blinds. i never close them. here: A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Girl, arms up, belly out. in every photo, she is looking for something. if you look down the road, you may still see me. i haven’t left just yet. please wave—i promise i’ll wave back.

Careless Magazine • 15

King’s Speech

BRYNN PARKINSON

How do I explain in the most playground fashion you were the one who I wanted to fill the swing set seat next to me heaven was splitting a cookie with you warmth was your king’s speech while I played the queen safety was you in the playhouse too

16 • Spring 2020

A Spell for the Living EMMA DUGGLEBY

Sip blood like honey from the wells of deer teeth, age stained into streaks of decay where birds fish for larvae between the rotting marrow.

Carve rings from ash branch, dying flesh on flesh where fire burns life into its own ribbed logs.

Bird feet sing of ember smoke.

Down leaves line hair like newborn owl beak reaching for a moth-swarmed moon, insect wings hooked on closed mouths.

Eat birdsong like pear flesh, juice stoking fire into feathered wing, blessings of life.

Careless Magazine • 17

Body Poem SAM BOVARD

1.

I peel my blackened toenail Back and It opens like an oyster; With a pop, and with wetness, red wine vinegar Squirting into my off-white bathtub.

But look! Underneath There is a pearl, A baby nail, sequestered Under the old rot.

In the way that beetles lay their eggs in old logs, The body needs decay to Grow 2.

My body is a pit I sink the rest of me, The things untouchable, Into.

I am only a vessel to be filled And emptied, to be hollowed out Like a drinking gourd, Like a dipper in the sky.

For any part of me to touch Your mouth, Even just my name, Is enough.

18 • Spring 2020

3.

Pain is the snake in my body I’ve named Intestines.

I dreamed it was pulled from me like taffy on a hook pink.

I’m curled around a porcelain prison until the constrictions finish tethered in two-week dosages for the rest of my life, until the medicine or my heart stops working.

Careless Magazine • 19

Notes on Hollywood HARRISON PYROS

I should never have gotten to know the person I’m sleeping with because now the sex is thrown off, but I think it’s only me. I was seeing this guy—or am seeing this guy—that lives above Sunset just a bit towards Silverlake and I know he’s a painter but like a “painter.”

You know, the kind that waits tables and the apartment he lives in is actually his aunt’s but for some reason she doesn’t use it, so he lives there rent-free? Anyway, I digress. I got to know him because my friend, who is also sleeping with him, told me he’s pretty interesting.

She said that he was an alright painter and that he was working on a portrait of her, but she hasn’t seen his progress because it’s a surprise, and I mainly assume she thinks he’s interesting because she likes being the subject of a painting.

Well, I’m looking at the portrait right now, standing in my underwear in his studio, and I can’t help but laugh. It’s all blacks and grays and comedic swirls, and he’s talking about how Rembrandt inspired him but I’m not sure he’s ever seen a Rembrandt. He keeps name-dropping all these artists and styles and technical themes— talking about Dutch lighting and French impressionism and John Singleton Copley for some reason—definitely trying to sound smart and professional in hopes that I don’t know what he means. And it’s all very condescending because I’m sure he has no idea that I read art history and take those classes since it’s my minor even though I’m an economics major, and that’s how I know all the stuff he’s saying is utter bullshit. But I just cross my arms, trying to look engaged, mumbling a, “Sure, sure,” whenever he stops his monologue to take a breath.

The painting is of a female figure and she’s either lounging or floating, I can’t tell just yet since it must only be half-finished. It looks like a sketch got blown up to the canvas because it’s streaky and the only colors are black, gray, and maybe a little blue too, but that might just be the lighting. There’s not a lot of detail, there’s absolutely no background—so kiss dimension goodbye—and it doesn’t look like my friend at all. Actually, it doesn’t look like anyone. I can only tell it’s a woman and that she’s either surprised or orgasming.

“So what’s the plan for the rest of it?” I ask.

“Well it’s basically done,” he says and that makes me want to jump out the window. “I’ll just add some eyebrows, maybe a smatter 20 • Spring 2020

to the background, and a bit of detail to the dress.”

This is the first time I realize the woman is wearing a dress.

“And you used Miranda as the subject, right?” I say, only slightly picking a fight.

“Yeah, but more of her energy, you know? I tried to mimic it onto the canvas,” he says.

“Oh that’s good because this looks nothing like her,” I sigh since it seems like we’re finally on the same page.

“Really?” he says cocking his head at the figure. “I think it looks a lot like her. Maybe it’s because you haven’t seen her naked.”

I have, in fact, seen Miranda naked, but I say, “Yeah, maybe.”

I’m already imagining the conversation I’m going to have with her, and just to stir the pot I ask, “What are you going to call it?”

He smirks and says, “I’m thinking A Dalliance with Zephyr.”

And if I haven’t already flat-lined, I sure do now. I’m internally screaming because that is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard this boy say, and that includes all the wild stuff we’ve said in the bedroom. I’m picturing him searching through an online thesaurus for this title, and I feel like he’s some B-rated YA author that thinks he’s good and really deep because he referenced Greek mythology, and I’m so overcome with my own reaction that I almost don’t hear him say,

“What do you think?”

“Well, it’s original,” I respond, which is also probably a lie.

“Are you gonna be in that art show on Vermont? Or near Vermont or something. I was talking to David about it.” We have both slept with David.

“No,” he shrugs. “I don’t like to put my stuff in art shows.”

Which means he’s never been invited to one.

“How do you sell your pieces then?”

“I don’t like to sell my pieces,” he says.

Which means he’s never sold one. Which means he’s never been commissioned, either.

“Okay,” I say, long and drawn-out, because I’m not sure how else to respond.

He’s walking to the kitchen and pulls his Brita from the fridge for some water. “I’m not about selling my artwork and making it a business,” he says while pouring. “It’s more than that—but you’re an economics guy so I don’t expect you to understand.”

At this point I seriously have to stop myself from looking for

Careless Magazine • 21

a TV crew to burst in to tell me I’ve been pranked or punk’d or whatever, because this is ridiculous. When no one shows I say, “But don’t you want to be a painter?”

He comes back to the studio and says, “I’m already a painter,” gesturing to the “portrait” of Miranda, and I’m about to call 911 because he’s killing me.

Now listen, I’m not super pretentious—or maybe I am and I’m lying to myself—but you have to understand this guy. He looks like an Instagram influencer that pays for things using the money he gets from sponsored content and almost sounds like the epitome of a surfer. He’s got a swimmer’s body and a tattoo on his ankle and ribs that I’ve seen on two different celebrities, and I know he lives and dies by Rainbow-brand flip-flops. And don’t get me wrong, he is incredibly hot, but I just wish I held onto my distanced illusion of him because every time he talks about how Van Gogh was so misunderstood and “ate yellow paint to put happy sunshine in him,” I want to blow my fucking brains out.

You see, the first time I met this dude, we were doing cocaine at a friend-of-a-friend’s party somewhere on the west side, and the group was talking about mojitos, all sniffing and ecstatic and idiotic. And we spent maybe ten minutes looking for mint until this guy insists that basil leaves are just as good; well, the drinks were rancid but we were all too drunk to care, and that night I ended up hooking up with him in the bathroom for a quick second. At the party everyone drank too much and did too many drugs, so we all acted dumb, so I chalked our behavior up to inebriation. And I hadn’t really had a conversation with this guy outside of a party or club or while we were having sex, so now I realize maybe it wasn’t the liquor that made him ridiculous but that he’s really just like that. Long story short, it’s hard to take this guy seriously and I’m not sure what that says about me.

“Regardless,” I say, “you should come to the show on Saturday.

It should be fun.”

“I think I will,” he nods. “You guys doing anything after?”

“Maybe an afterparty at David’s,” I say. “Can usually count on that.”

“Is he seeing anyone?” he says about David.

“Not that I recall.”

“Huh,” he says and looks at the painting.

“Think you’ll have the painting done by then?” I ask.

“Yeah, maybe. But art takes time, ya know?” he laughs. Before 22 • Spring 2020

I can decide to light myself on fire, he says, “Want to shower? I’m a little cold,” since we’re both still half-naked.

So I say sure and we shower, and it only takes me about three minutes into the shower to decide that, yeah, I’ll have sex with him again. And we do—which confirms that I’m the only one who thinks the sex is thrown off, but I know I’ll keep sleeping with him because he’s still pretty good.

Afterwards, he’s refilling his Brita, talking about Saturday, talking about the painting, talking about how he does things because he’s a Libra. But I’m no longer listening. I’m still thinking about the sex. I’m thinking about how Van Gogh never ate yellow paint. I’m thinking about why I keep doing this and why I refuse to stop.

And I’m thinking about how this is just what Hollywood is.

Careless Magazine • 23

basement

HAYLEY PIERPONT

24 • Spring 2020

Grocery Store

ELEANOR FURNESS

I’m up next in line at the grocery store I start laying down my items on the small conveyor belt Completely absorbed by thoughts of what I’ll eat first When the hairs on the back of my neck decide to stand up And it feels as though the contents of my stomach liquidate and run down the front of my spine Something is off And I suddenly remember when I told my Dad at six That jump scares were nowhere near as scary as something feeling ever so slightly off The same reason I asked my mom to stop saying “That’s weird...”

When she misplaced something To stop the adrenaline from creeping up my back I reluctantly look up to immediately lock eyes with the man in the que across from me I can’t hear and All I see are His eyes That tell me

I own you.

Paralyzed I doubt myself first What if this man is only trying to be nice?

What could I be falsely reading into this situation?

Will anyone believe me if I tell them a look could carry sickness?

Refusing to turn his gaze, he tilts his head slightly down in an expression that wears like a Neolithic mask It is precisely the way his eyes alert me that I am looking at a mask By being the cracks in it That conjures this overwhelming feeling of “off” Upon realizing that this look carries weight My body becomes a ball of overstretched rubber bands and heat drops from my face I know he knows that my bands are snapping

Careless Magazine • 25

His look intended to ensnare And I suppose I’m safe in a crowded space with at least five feet separating us But fear can be independent of proximity So easily Everything you thought you knew can be unceremoniously uprooted He gets to look at you while you look at the floor You get to feel everything that has affected you in this way tugging at your sleeves like needy children Now I concentrate on exactly where he is without seeing On exactly what he says without hearing And exactly what he intends without speaking Once I leave the store carrying the groceries, each step towards the car feels like another limb untied and another second of breath regained I now understand that in that grocery store line As I was thinking about what I was going to consume first So was he.

I wonder if I will ever forget how a look could make someone deteriorate I think of how watermelons undergo a process called autolysis when they’ve over ripened It’s a process of self-digestion where the melon rots from the inside out And how aromas from one rotten fruit can trigger the process in other produce Telling them it’s time to begin.

26 • Spring 2020

Surf Scooter

TEODELINA MARTELLI

Careless Magazine • 27

The Road to Cheyenne LUCAS CUNNINGHAM

The road to Cheyenne was known for its inescapable loneliness. Hundreds of miles of weather-beaten trail in the shadow of the austere peaks of the western range. From the passes the wind blew hard down into the chaparral, laying siege to the shrub brush and sending travelers the way of the tumbleweeds.

There was only one road to Cheyenne. For a long time, trails cut across the West like so many cracks in the hard desert soil, but those days were gone now. What remained were the railroads and the graves of the buffalo. And twelve hundred miles of single solitary track, winding its way west along the Rio Grande, then north through the badlands and the shrublands and the high passes before breaking free from the mountains and descending along foothills and plains to its destination.

Sammy Wilson was tired. He’d been on the road for almost two months, and his weariness clung to him like a blanket. Since leaving Del Rio, he’d travelled almost a thousand miles. Now the worst was over. His face was weather-beaten and his back was taut from looking over his shoulder. The stress of the trail, the fear of being followed or set upon by bandits, had sapped his will. He spoke little when he came to towns, reserving his words for his horse and the cold silence of the desert night. His horse, too, had grown lean and strong over their months of travel. Descending into Pueblo, they could feel their excitement echoed in each other’s movements.

As the trail curved down toward the town, Sammy thought back on their journey. He’d left Del Rio in a hurry. One morning, awoken by the dry heat of the day and the noise of the saloon the flow below, he’d taken stock of his surroundings for the first time in years. Looking in the mirror at the gauntness of his face, he’d been overcome by the sudden awareness that if he didn’t leave Del Rio soon, he’d die there. He’d packed what little belongings he’d had left into two saddlebags and set out for the trail that same evening.

He found his horse on the same farm he’d sold him to, now ten years older and under the watch of the farmer’s nephew. He purchased him back with the last of his savings, taken the saddlebags, a bedroll, and his grandfather’s Winchester and set off into the desert dusk.

That first night on the trail, he’d been stung by a scorpion. Af28 • Spring 2020

ter several hours of riding, he’d sat down on a rock and as he’d bent to untie his boots, one of the small brown insects had crawled up his back and stung him right in the shoulder blade. That night, unable to sleep due to the pain, he resolved to return to town in the morning.

But seeing his horse’s eyes in the morning dewy in the desert air, he couldn’t bring himself to return the horse to the corral once again.

He deserved to run the trails of the West once more in his life, and to graze the green pastures of Cheyenne. Sammy could convince himself he was happy in Del Rio, but he couldn’t force others to make the same choice. So he’d ridden on.

Presently, a passing cart pulled him out of his reflection. A middle-aged man rode in front driving two able-bodied but defeated-looking horses. The man and the horses stared ahead, wearing the same blank expression. Beside him sat a large jar. As Sammy watched, the man took a swig. He grimaced for a moment, then his face fell back into a look of stark ambivalence. Sitting in the back were two children: a boy of about five, and a girl of thirteen. Across from them rode several more of the jars and a dark brown casket.

Sammy watched them go. He wasn’t sure if he hoped they’d make it to Del Rio or died before they got there. The road was just as lonely going south.

Sammy reached Pueblo without seeing any other travelers.

There was much less traffic on the road this far north. He hitched his horse and made his way into a small inn. He was alone in the dining room save for an old man wrapped in a blanket by the fire. As he entered, the man looked up with interest, took him in, the returned his gaze to the flames. He sat at a table near the back, facing the door, and reflected on the inn’s emptiness.

In the first weeks after leaving Del Rio, the road had been a torrent of travelers going back and forth, rushing frantically up and down the track like so many ants in an orchard. There was an energy in the air that Sammy couldn’t quite describe. It was like that feeling when you know you’re forgetting something but aren’t quite sure what. Or maybe the loneliness tinged with apprehension that comes with laying alone in the wilderness and watching the stars. So people kept moving, always with somewhere to be. They’d come from all around to the city, plagued by the specters of highwaymen and bandits who roamed the open roads and plains. They’d shelter in the inns and saloons for a day or two, planning to get underway again once they’d resupplied and regained their bearings. And some did,

Careless Magazine • 29

ill-at-ease with the squalor and the easy nature of Del Rio, they’d continue on to California or New Orleans or wherever they’d planned to go.

But many stayed, enticed by the city’s pulsating power and constant movement. The bars closed at four in the morning and opened again at six, people slept, ate, and kissed in the streets, and there was a certain tension in the air that enlivened the sense and brought feeling back to even the most languid of hearts. Life was easy in Del Rio, and that was dangerous. Easy has a dark side, and that was what finally made him leave. Rent was cheap and liquor cheaper because Del Rio had a unique form of government. A council governed the city and the surrounding area closely and with impunity – rendering Del Rio an almost sovereign state. The council was responsible for subsidizing almost everything in Del Rio – building tenement halls and great bunkhouses to accommodate the city’s ever-growing population, buying grain by the boatload and constructing great stills to liquify it, and improving the road leading into the city.

The council’s member’s lived in great ranches in the nearby foothills, and employed many smaller ranchers – like the one Sammy had sold his horse to – to work their lands. In doing so, they enriched themselves, and did well for the town. But their main source of wealth, and the reason for Del Rio’s expansion so rapidly, was far less reputable. Before its growth, Del Rio was a cutthroat frontier town on the verge of extinction. The land was as barren and hard as the people, and the undertaker came through town more often than the sheriff. Highwaymen plagued the many trails that cut the region, and the few remaining townsfolk lived in constant fear.

One day, the last of Del Rio’s residents got together and made one last effort to save their lives and their town. They met with the leader of the bandits and made a deal: the outlaws would be welcome in town and sheltered from the law, and in return all the townsfolk asked was their safety and that a portion of the gold the bandits took be given to the town. The bandits agreed, and those townsfolk organized themselves into a formal counsel. Almost immediately, Del Rio exploded in size and prosperity. The highwaymen roamed with abandon, enriching the town with their plundered wealth and forcing those they robbed into the city in search of safety and a fresh start. Over the years, Del Rio became known for its cheap living and thrilling atmosphere, and its outlaw origins faded to the background.

30 • Spring 2020

Many moved there, and many stayed even after they realized what lay behind the façade. Such was Del Rio when Sammy arrived, and so it was when he left.

Sammy finished his meal. He looked to the bar, hoping to even his spirits, but the bartender was gone. He was about to rise when the door opened and a man walked in. He was tall and old, but with the thick black hair and beard of a much younger man, finely combed and oiled back. He wore a suit of dark grey under a red riding duster.

Sammy watched him curiously for a moment. The man nodded to Sammy with a knowing smile, then turned to look at the fireplace.

Sammy followed his eyes, and where he looked he saw the old man by the fire staring intently at him. The old man spoke as if with great effort, his voice full of passion but tempered by age.

“Do not stop. Not ever”

“What?” He maintained eye contact, afraid to look away.

“You cannot stop. You must keep going.”

The old man rose from his chair. Sammy rose as well, fearful, and backed towards the door. The old man kept approaching. Finally breaking, Sammy turned and ran outside. He stood in the street, panicked, but the inn’s door remained shut. It was then he realized his path to the door had been unimpeded and looked around for the man in the dark suit. After a moment, he saw him, standing at the end of Pueblo’s single sandy street. Sammy couldn’t make out his expression, but the red tip of a lit cigar pulsed between his lips. Still gripped by the receding waves of adrenaline, Sammy untied and mounted his horse. When he turned the horse to ride from town, the man in the dark suit was gone.

It was several hours later when Sammy neared the top of the pass. He’d ridden hard for an hour or two until he was sure he’d put enough distance between himself and the old man’s cryptic threats.

He’d slowed his horse to a canter, and they’d passed several more hours in this way, winding slowly up through the foothills and into the first mountains of Sammy’s journey. Presently, they neared the top of the pass. Sammy was tired, hungry, and in foul spirits, having counted on a night’s sleep in the inn and unsettled by his encounter by the fire. The wind picked up as the crest approached, making him shiver. He looked longingly at the shelter of some nearby rocks, and, making up his mind that he was safe for the time being, he reigned in his horse. The animal whinnied his protest, eager to be down the

Careless Magazine • 31

other side of the pass and out of the wind.

“It’s alright. We’ll only stop for a few minutes.”

He dismounted and sheltered behind the outcropping. As he sat, he enjoyed the fact that there were no scorpions at this altitude.

In fact, he felt, for the first time on his journey, like he’d escaped the road – that he was no longer in transit, no longer fleeing Del Rio or riding for Cheyenne. He was nowhere, and that was strangely calming. He laid down on the rocks, glanced again at his horse, and closed his eyes.

When Sammy awoke, it was still dark. He went to rise and found with alarm his hands and feet were bound. Immobilized, he listened. First, the wind. It whistled mournfully. Then, a deep voice with an implacable drawl.

“You’re far from home.”

He was about to respond when another voice cut the darkness.

Slow and gravelly, like an old steam engine.

“These mountains are the boundary line. In case you’ve forgotten.”

“I ain’t forgotten, but I’m still surprised to see you this far south.”

“I’m here for the same reason you are.”

“And what’s that?”

A pause, then the gravelly voice spoke replied.

“I’m here for him.”

“Who?”

“Don’t play games with me.”

Sammy heard a rustling, then felt the distinct prickliness of being watched. He struggled against the ropes. The darkness began to resolve itself, but the voices’ owners remained out of view. He could see only a large dark lump near the trail. It seemed to be growing.

The drawl spoke again.

“A shame he stopped – and so close to making it over the pass, no less.”

“You had no right to interfere.”

“I wasn’t the first one. He encountered a friend of yours interested in hastening his journey.”

“Be that as it may, this seems excessive.”

Sammy suddenly realized with a shock the identity of the dark lump, and the growing pool surrounding it. The road is less 32 • Spring 2020

forgiving than the ranch. Still, he felt sad that he was now alone. He fought the urge to cry out, still struggling against his bonds.

“And to think I stumbled upon him quite by accident. I was just enjoying a change of scenery from the desert and those stuffy meeting-halls. How was it you happen to be here as well, just in time to interrupt my work?”

“I make a point to know who rides the road to Cheyenne. I’d have reckoned you’d have done the same.”

A pause.

“Seems I was mistaken.”

“Ah yes, always the sentinel. There was a time when I concerned myself with the comings and goings of the passes and the plains. A time I solicited the people travelling the roads.”

“By ‘solicit,’ you mean ‘rob blind’.”

“I assumed that was implied.”

“Penniless and destitute, you’d make them walk back to Del Rio and work for the very people who robbed them.”

“You twist my words. They were free to do as they wished – be it try again to cross the mountains, await help, or, yes, seek solace in Del Rio.”

“How generous of you.”

“It worked out for this one.”

Another pause.

“Well, almost.”

“That remains to be seen.”

“In any case, allow me to explain my reticence, lest you consider me reduced in some capacity.”

Sammy sensed the man with the gravelly voice had gestured his assent, for the other man continued.

“The road to Cheyenne is a lot less travelled than it once was.

The frontier’s closing fast, and the people are following.

“Now, that’s not to say Del Rio has fallen on hard times. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s become a rather nice place – gentrified, if you will. We’ve even got a few churches now.

“It’s just not worth the effort to be a highwayman these days.

I’d much rather build a new tavern every once in a while, sit back and watch the travelers come in.”

The other man finally spoke again.

“Well, that settles it. I’m taking him.”

“Now that’s hardly fair. Just because I spent my time better

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doesn’t mean I’m undeserving of those on the road.”

“He was headed for Cheyenne. That makes him my charge.”

“He was headed for the top of a mountain pass. That makes him cold, but nothing else.”

“So you’d rather just leave him here than that I take him.”

“All I’m saying is, Cheyenne’s not all it’s said to be, or all it once was.”

“Careful.”

“If he really wanted to get there, he wouldn’t have stopped. Or at least gotten a better horse. And if he wanted to stay in Del Rio, he wouldn’t have left at all.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“Some people’d rather live their lives on the range. Who are we to stop them? This world’s got plenty of empty rock for those who want it.”

Another pause. Then the gravelly voice spoke one last time.

“I reckon you’re right. Leaves more room for those who made the journey.”

“That’s that, then.”

The voices walked into view for the first time. It was too dark to make out anything more than shapes. One receded down the far side of the pass. The other paused. Suddenly, the swish-SNAP of a match being lit. A bright spot of light flickered in the wind and was raised to its target. As the watch was snuffed out by the wind, it was replaced by a dim glow. The red circle of a cigar bloomed pulsed in the night. The glow turned to face Sammy for a moment, then proceeded down the hill and out of view.

The darkness was complete again. Sammy shivered. The wind whistled.

The road to Cheyenne said nothing.

34 • Spring 2020

Proximity

EMILY WILLIAMS

Careless Magazine • 35

Broca’s area LILLIAN AFF

is, and, the, but stroke of bad luck drive

park

frontal cease start

stop

mom

36 • Spring 2020

pause

Convergence OLIVIA MEEHAN

She drives a little too fast over the torn up roads of Joshua Tree. Past metal fences and muted houses that hang low. The blur is cut with flashes of electric green: grass that gurgles sweet water, and laps up fertilizer like a drunk dog. A yard sale appears and Eliza pulls over. Two older ladies with bright eyes and baggy skin survey her as she joins the other customers, fingering racks of beaded blue and rusty red leather. Her hands fall upon golden locks and she pauses for a moment.

Back on the road the breeze blows a different way through her hair. She likes how the ringlets jump up and down as she throws the car over a speed bump. Pulling into the gas station, she leans on the hood of the car as the gasoline churns into the tank. She likes how the world is bare and flat and how the dust shifts along and how she feels like she is someone else. Because no one out here knows her. A deep warmth starts in her belly and expands to her chest. ***

Sitting alone in her room she bites her nails because she is thinking but her mind is blank. The walls are too thin and the noise itches her skin. She tucks a strip of straight sandy hair behind her ear, listening to the basketball hit the tarmac outside. Listening to the neighbor’s dog whose bark slices the sky, to Cyrus, the turtledove that sits on the power lines above her window and bobs his tail up and down, sometimes shitting, sometimes crooning, listening to the animated banter of her roommate, the entertainer, who hosts too many nights a week. She takes an edible so her mind can lay still and she opens the book for her English class whose cover is pleasing but whose sentences are too long, too full of too many words that don’t sink in right. ***

It’s dark and people are going places. She puts her white pants on. The white pants with a carpenter loop on the side. It’s so much simpler now that pants with a loop on the side are appealing. When you go into one of those thrift shops where music is crackling and the ads are clear and the fluorescent lighting is just low enough to

Careless Magazine • 37

make you believe you have been in there for twenty minutes when it has been an hour… Just run your eyes across the slabs of denim scanning only for a loop and you can save time looking. But why save time when you were trying to get away from it all in the first place...

She puts her top on, and then her socks. She does her makeup, and slides golden curls over sandy hair. “Too much?” she asks, turning to her roommate. “No, it’s fire” the entertainer responds. She still seeks confirmation from those whose sensibility she curiously admirers.

The entertainer almost always runs warm. Eliza looks in the mirror.

She looks hot. But this is bold. Bolder than usual. It’s off brand. But it feels good. And when she walks into the room where all the people ended up; all of them with their own preparations, their own way of making and remaking, she is someone else. ***

She likes to pretend. But she’s not really pretending, she is embodying; pushing out different sides of herself. It gets her high.

The way that you get high when you walk around the streets of a foreign country by yourself and you feel like you are a king and a peasant at the same time; you see it all and yet no one sees you. Sometimes, when she is alone, she puts her wig on and slides into that new pair of wooden heels she thrifted. She likes to vacuum the house like this, “Stand By Your Man” by Tammy Wynette playing in the background. And when the lighting is right and the sun hits the floral sofa and the California breeze blows the staleness of the air away… ***

Her grandma on her mom’s side was a stewardess. She was very beautiful. Eliza has a black and white photograph of her from when she was in her twenties taped above her bed. It has a thick mustache drawn onto it in ballpoint pen. Lines purposefully appointed by this beautiful woman whose hands shook, her mind clarified by too much cocaine. “Why did you have to ruin your face like that,” her husband had said as they reminisced over old photographs.

So now it sits above Eliza’s bed, carefully mounted by shiny gold tack pins. *** 38 • Spring 2020

Eliza likes the way her curls fall over her eyes when she bends down and dips up to the music. She likes the way they encourage her to look around a little less, smudging off certain sections of vision.

Or maybe because the hair looks right on her. It looks real. The statement becomes her whole body, filling her with a warm high, and suddenly nothing is over done. She can corrupt the whole room with her dancing; a feeling of intoxication that splashes the faces of the circle that is expanding around her. These curls blind people, making them look away, leaving a dark spot seared into their retina. Everything she wants to do is right. ***

Sitting on the swinging bench in the front of the house, she sucks a slice of Meyer lemon and lets the sting of citrus shrivel her cheeks into a kind of smile. As her wet brown hair drips water down her spine, she wonders when the large dead palm leaf will fall off the tree and if it will hit someone. She wonders if the little boy on the tricycle will ever make it over the speed bump. She wonders why there is a cane leaning against the side of the house and who needed to lean on it in order to walk. She picks it up and crumples her body onto it, pretending she has no strength. She hobbles down the road noticing how all the lawns in this suburban cul-de-sac are fluorescent green and how hers is a muted yellow. She thinks about the cost of water and the ugliness of gravel. She reaches the end of the culde-sac and turns around, leaving the cane on the side of the road.

Careless Magazine • 39

Self Portrait SOPHIE FRON

40 • Spring 2020

Venn Diagram

MIRABELLA MILLER

I habitually arrange my hoop earrings in a Venn diagram When I retire them to stillness on my nightstand The hoops I jump through for you can fill a thousand basketball courts, can stack to the skies and catch a rogue star for a long three.

I talk about you like I talk about the kids I babysit when their parents come home and ask if they’ve been good and they haven’t, but I say they were anyway to avoid interrogation.

You could live off the benefits of my doubts, welfare for the half-hearted.

I have become the Titan of your life, your Atlas Shouldering nine lives to your one, Two lives to your none.

It is hard for me to reside in this space we share Because I need to make it mine.

You wrench the judgment out of me, you make me make my presence felt.

It is hard for me to reside in this space we share Because I need to make you mine.

I can feel your annexation as I breathe guidance into your contracted-lung-consciousness that needs expansion and release.

It is hard for me to reside in this space we share Because I can hold my own here, and you can’t.

And doesn’t that bother you?

Your inadequacy?

I don’t know if you could tell, but it bothers me.

Careless Magazine • 41

UNTITLED

MEGHAN ROSE

42 • Spring 2020

Bodies

TESS GIBBS

Is this me, my body? Forreal, legit, deadass? How come I can’t recognize myself? Body: a self-contained, compact object surrounded by space or other bodies. How is it that something as infinite, godly, misunderstood, gaseous, irreplaceable as a soul can be locked inside a body? Where do I exist – electric brain, invisible ether trapped in a bottle, or the mind: possibly a fixture of them both. My mouth is open now (and my nose always is) – how come it doesn’t come pouring out onto the clean sheets encasing “me”? I wouldn’t complain about the cleanup. Sometimes I think I need a little less, anyway. Builds up and laws of physics require a release… of matter. But does it matter? Is it worth searching for if I will never pin it down like skin, bottle it like blood, hold it like intestines through my fingers, stack it like brittle bones? (This body feels too fragile. How can I rely on something with five bajillion mechanisms to support the soul-searcher’s purpose?) (Are they searching still, or found and are searching it? For what?) If located, where do I put it? Do other animals feel this way? Or do they already know that it lies in the hunt, in the taste of the day’s catch, in the downy touch of their babies? Back to basics, I see. I think that’s where. Report back with further findings at a later date.

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Last Lament of a Soundcloud Artist LUCAS CUNNINGHAM

Upon my waist a Gucci belt Upon my hips a Glock And likewise on my RAFs the girls Like loons in fall - do flock They know my bars - and so my name But do they know my soul?

The wisdom deep within the Clout Diamond Rollie out of coal I know I’ve fame beyond compare My domain reigns - Supreme Yet still the call beyond the willows Sips my soul like lean For what is life but that ‘fore Death And what is Death but naught For through my Ice the Reaper calls The cold Drip of a Red Dot

44 • Spring 2020

fucca

BRIAN BISHOP

Careless Magazine • 45

The Death of the Advil JULIENNE HO

That inhabitant of the medicine cabinet most frequently left on the counter is not properly to be called a bottle of aspirin, for his contents are brick-red and circular like trail-mix chocolates. Aspirin inspires the idea of a store-brand, generic drug: minimal white tablets with starchy binding agents that reminisce a bitter taste on the tongue, the unranked, uniformed footsoldier of the pain-relieving world. The mind calls upon the image of a minimal but bright affect of clear-cut words on the label of the cylindrical vessel. Nevertheless the present specimen, clad with his printed label faded from days in the sun atop its original store identification, sat with repurposed confidence atop the table. The day is strained, with pinched expressions scattered throughout the library accompanied by tense whispers wafting through couples on ruby-red cushions. The librarian perches on her toes, combing the landscape for aberrations in the monotonous buzz of stress, although I am unsure whether this is to find a conversation to join or just to reprimand noise.

This same energy lives in the bottle: the basal urge to abandon the moment of difficulty in favor of ease became increasingly appealing to those who feel that the buzz in their heads begins to overwhelm. One could not help but glance at him.

This is a pastiche of a work by Virginia Woolf.

46 • Spring 2020

Morning Bike Ride ELLA GARDNER

So, I’ll try to keep this short, because maybe you’ve already heard parts of this from your mom and Nana, but you’ve probably only heard the parts where they swoop in to play the hero, and obviously there’s more to the story than that. It was the morning after our St. Patrick’s Day party and they weren’t doing so hot themselves, sleeping off some wicked hangovers upstairs. The house on Wavecrest was a disaster zone, naturally. There were still at least four or five of Nana’s friends conked out and snoring on the living room floor when I came down. Mo McGee was wearing Paul Sibley’s tie around her forehead like a bandana, and his shirt was all rumpled and unbuttoned down the front, which was pretty goofy because he’d been my high school principal just two years before. I was always getting sent to his office for the shenanigans me and my boys would pull, but he knew I was basically acing all my classes except math, and he thought I was funny so I got Snickers bars instead of punishments. Pretty radical, I know. He even made me and my bro Patrick “prefects,” which didn’t mean jack shit but made your mom jealous because she was accustomed to being the golden child. Anyway, I stepped over Paul and went out to the porch, where Lucian was munching on this gnargly-lookin’ piece of toast, all burnt up and black. I used to call him “Lotion” because he had such a smooth way of talking, and when he was stoned, I called him “Lotion-in-slowmotion.” Lotion-in-slow-motion didn’t even look at me as I hustled past. He was busy brushing crumbs out of his hippie beard and staring up at a dirty piece of fabric wrapped around a high branch on the maple out front. (You probably don’t know this, but Nana took some allergy meds in the ‘70s that made her psychotic, and she spent a whole afternoon cutting her bathrobe into thin strips and flying them from that tree, like blue cotton streamers. That was a few years before she married Lucian, so he couldn’t have known the full story unless the neighbors ratted, but there he was, contemplating the leftover evidence with bloodshot eyes. Hah.) Anyway, I went around to the garage, grabbed my bike, and split. It was a wet morning, which I did not appreciate, because I had a long ride ahead of me.

Now strap in, because this is the part of the story where I lose people: I knew something horrendous was going to happen if I didn’t stop it.

I won’t tell you how I knew, because you wouldn’t get it, but that fact

Careless Magazine • 47

was as real to me as you are, sitting in front of me now. In my opinion, psychic intuitions are not so different from psychotic breaks, but you don’t see palm-readers getting rounded up and pumped full of lithium. Hah. Anyway, I would have made a clean break of it if I hadn’t stopped by Patrick’s house to nab the rain jacket I’d lent him.

Braw was in to all kinds of psychedelics, and on top of that he called himself a poet (and you know a lot of poets are just con-artists with egos), so he essentially had no right to judge me for anything, but he asked, and I gave him the skinny; I was biking to Santa Barbara to stop an earthquake from killing Nana and Heather. If I didn’t go immediately, Quackenbush the plague doctor would remove his mask and split the earth in a catastrophic Quacken-quake, and creepy crawlers from below would wiggle out of the seams and drag my family down to the underworld. So yeah, I needed my raincoat lickety-split. I didn’t get the feeling he really gave a shit when I told him, but I guess he must of because basically an hour later, Lotion’s car pulled up in front of me and Nana tackled me straight to the ground.

I’d already shralped about thirty miles up the PCH, which might surprise you because I’m so skinny now, but remember back then I was practically a professional skater, getting featured in Thrasher and all that. Even so, Nana walloped me right off the bike and dragged me in to the backseat, and then they stuck me in the hospital while Quackenbush squatted at the bus stop out front and cackled through his beak. It was pretty preposterous. Long story short, they got their diagnosis. I got a prescription and a parade of rinky-dink shrinks.

And now everybody gets to continue drinking and smoking and tearing apart their bathrobes and marriages and none of that matters because apparently, I out-did them all. Hah. So, what’s your mom’s version of that story?

48 • Spring 2020

secret garden.

KAYLA LEE

in our Secret Garden, you picked the tips of the wheat stalks, crumbling the grains into my hands, and flowers grew from the scars of my body, covering me in beauty that you strongly believed in; don’t worry about the clouds, hayeon, you whispered, pointing to the white-naped crane, it is god’s backdrop for all living things; the green moss would serve as our bed, as you explained your deep knowledge of the world, the stars and my future that seemingly aligned for you that i struggled to find meaning in; soup is the core of your body, hayeon, it is what warms your soul and makes you move, have some more, you poured your life into my body; your breath served as the eternal, spring winds that touched the corners of our space, as deer strolled across the patterns of your zen garden, but when your mind slowly slipped from my hands, i wasn’t sure what to do. The gates closed to our secret garden.

I couldn’t feel your presence, and I could no longer hear the swishing of the wheat stalks. Four years ago, your mind was gone, it had disappeared, you did not remember our secret garden, you did not remember me, when you held my hands silently, surrounded by wires, cords, and a metal jungle, you asked me who I was, and I could only reply with, I am an extension of you, lost in the maze of your mind, our secret garden it is only now that I am able to map the location, drawing the outline to our end of the world. the smell of soup, the sound of cicadas, the beating of the bird’s wings, they all call to me, and as i step back onto our cobblestone path, surrounded by the wild, pastel blue hydrangeas, i wonder if the thorns that poke into my feet and the rain that surrounds my body are your memories, and if this is the path that leads me to our Secret Garden, even if i get cold and tired, will you wait for me?

Careless Magazine • 49

Sunday Poem TALIA IVRY

Some Sundays slog by alongside the road, clogged up with dread.

So dreadfully commonplace, that they leave the same bitter ache in your teeth, in your jaw as grinds your car to a halt, stop among the sitting people, not touching, waiting for Monday.

Ecosystem

TIFFANY CHANG

50 • Spring 2020

In Memory of Paul Ehrenfest J.J. SHANKAR

Time is a blanket dragged through grass smeared with ever-longer streaks that speak to the futility of the past.

I stared at your photo for a while — those festive eyes above tightened lips that smiled the sick man’s smile.

Careless Magazine • 51

The Loch Ness Monster, and How We Breathe KRYSTAL YANG

I know one truth. That is, I believe one thing: my father left us the day I was born. My mother told me that she was forced to drive herself to the hospital, because he had folded his face between her legs and refused to come out, stuck in some wild, hormonal hibernation until the doctors anaesthetized him along with my mother. And when she opened her eyes after the C-section, he was gone.

My mother refused to tell me why he left. The answer must have been like a family heirloom, a piece of buried treasure bulging from her heart like the cancer that metastasized in her chest when she turned sixty. Good fortune, she liked to tell me, didn’t run in our blood. (I do not think I believe her.)

In my dreams, he was always searching for her. He was a shadow stooped low over the horizon, as real as a plastic submarine, and she was the ghost of a conch shell, echoing from the ambient noise when you cocked your ear against her stomach. My father and I, we would close our eyes and hold our breaths, and listen to how her insides resonated at a slower and deeper frequency, like the groaning of her voice when she hummed along to the car radio. We would wrap ourselves around her waist, letting the vibrations push through us, and I would wake up with a raging fever and my eyes burning from sleep. ***

My mother and I visited him every summer at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. The one with the big spinning mushroom ride and the colorful arcade with pink jawbreakers and expired glow-inthe-dark bubblegum hanging like plastic corpses from the entrance.

We would blow ten dollars on the dumb claw machine games before making our way down to the pier. I would try to walk across the sand in a straight line, leaving a trail of grimy footprints as bait to be devoured by the water or the fish or whatever things lived underwater. I liked to waddle in after my mother, my hands balled into empty fists and tucked into the crevices on either side of my nose to form a pair of fleshy binoculars. We would trudge deeper and deeper until the back and forth of the tide made us dizzy, but we were desperate and the ocean was always opaque with nothing.

52 • Spring 2020

For my parents’ ten-year anniversary, my mother mailed old wedding photos to our friends. I remember staring at the man in the pictures, at his gently-sloping nose and freckles and opposable thumbs. I imagined him swallowing me whole. I imagined myself burning with shame, searing a hole through his belly and tumbling feet-first into the icy Pacific. Sometimes I dreamt of drying up the entire ocean with my body.

I told my mother this once, when I was fourteen and we were spending Christmas at the Boardwalk, our toes wrinkling from the cold, damp sand as other families waddled around us in thick winter coats. She started crying, and I felt so awkward standing there that I cried too. We cried and cried until our eyes hurt and the water streaking down our face left white grime on our cheeks. And when we couldn’t cry anymore, my mother rolled up her pants and soaked her toes in shipwrecked seaweed along the shore, wove her fingers around her waist and filled the chilling air with her stories—punctuated by soft hiccups and whimpers—about the wedding, or how my father was now the length of the highway outside our house, or how she missed having wild, passionate sex with him in the upstairs bathtub filled with Epsom salt. Our Boardwalk rituals: an almost-truth.

We also collected scraps around the house and lugged them to the beach. My mother liked to throw things into the water for him— aspirin tablets, condoms, bridal magazines stuffed into wine bottles.

I liked helping her. It was an alien catharsis, copying the stroke of my mother’s right arm, launching books and flowers into the swell of the tide, not quite sure where or what or who I was aiming at.

Once we drew pictures in school for Father’s Day and I got put in detention for telling the teacher that I was going to throw my artwork into the ocean. When my mother got the call, she threatened to sue the principal and signed me up for swimming lessons the next day.

I got in trouble at school a lot. There was also this instance in third grade, when we had to fill out worksheets about ourselves.

Draw a picture of your family, describe what you wanted to be when you grew up. I told the teacher “I don’t know” and she said “try your best” so I ripped the paper into thirds and balled them up in my hands. I pretend to throw them, like I was on the beach, like my dad was going to stay underwater forever and I was going to make my mother laugh and catalyze a reaction that formed those wrinkles Careless Magazine • 53

around her eyes. ***

When I wasn’t thinking about the beach, I was thinking about the day he left, about the way my mother might have pushed her skirt up around her stomach and stared at the tops of his lashes from the space between her knees while their cold sweat pooled together in a salty, sour soup. ***

I usually came home to find my mother pacing around the house, walking towards her bedroom before turning around and running to the front door, then shuffling back to the bedroom, back and forth like a wave that couldn’t decide how to break against the rocks.

When I was in high school, I wanted to work at the local aquarium. The lady in charge made me fill out information about my parents. I told her that I couldn’t write down the name of my father. She glared at me. I remember there was a wart on her nose.

It drooped so low that it practically touched her upper lip. She asked me if I never learned how to write, but I had to explain to her that yes, I could write, yes, I could also read, no, I didn’t think the name people called my father was actually his name. ***

On my twenty-first birthday, I asked my mother for two things. That is, I asked my mother for two more truths. His name, his eye color. I was tired of the questions and the tabloids and the gossiping girls in school.

My mother reached across the kitchen table. Touched my cheek. Her hand was cold. She blinked, and it was as if she was looking past me, across the interstate highway, towards the nothingness of the ocean. He must have been watching us. Another almost-truth, I think, but I do not know. ***

Apparently, on the day of my college graduation, my mother had spotted his blurry picture in the newspaper, he had blue eyes— 54 • Spring 2020

cobalt, like mine. So I spent most of my adulthood standing in the dim light of my apartment, inspecting that space between my temples in the mirror and watching my pupils expand and contract in my fogging reflection. They were breathing, maybe.

I met my future wife at the optometrist. She bought me glasses as a birthday gift because she thought I was nearsighted. They made everything look shiny and blurry and the wire frames scraped the backs of my ears when I wore them, but I put them on when she let me sleep with her for the first time because even though they kept coming loose and sliding down my nosebridge I thought that this might have been the sort of thing my father loved to do for my mother too.

I went back to Santa Cruz to propose to my then-fiancé. We ate at a nearby Italian place and trotted across the sand at sunset, our sandals in our hands and our eyes trained on the sand, the tiny kernels rolling out and around our feet. When the sky reddened with dust, I got down on one knee and looked into my wife’s eyes, those beautiful breathing things. I opened my mouth to speak, and at that exact moment, I could feel my wife’s name sink below the depths of my consciousness, like something was dragging it away from my body. I wonder if the same thing happened to my father. I imagine this is how our family forgets our truths.

On the night of our wedding, my once-future-now-now wife peeled herself open for me. I felt everything become a soft, wet darkness. My eyelids swelled over my eyes as I pressed my forehead against her chest, her steaming lungs, her heat. My wife stroked my hair and I wondered if she could feel how I pulsed around her, how I started melting against the smooth incline of her torso. My glasses were starting to fog, and for a brief moment, I wondered if this was the last time I’d see her, with her legs wrapped around my neck and her manicured fingers massaging the base of my skull. I felt the thin band of color around my pupils pull taut, and the motion hurt, actually hurt, like my optic nerve was being twisted and yanked through my skull.

Perhaps this is what happened to my father on the day he left, when he slotted himself into the driver’s seat and knelt down in front of my mother like he was requesting union, this time offering his body instead of a ring.

The next day, I watched my wife urinate in the toilet. I caught a few glances of myself in the mirror. My eyes were twitching. I wasn’t Careless Magazine • 55

wearing my glasses. My wife and I, we kissed in the shower with the plastic pregnancy tester trapped between our thighs. I drank in the heat from the spray and my wife stroked my wet eyelashes and asked me what we should name the kid. We can give him as many names as we want to, I told her. When we stepped out of the shower, our skin glistening pink under the morning light, I bumped into the counter and watched my glasses twirl in the air before shattering on the ground. ***

My mother passed away six months later. The doctors said it was cancer. But looking at the veins assembled across her whitening face, I imagined the weight of my father’s identity cremating her insides, her immune system kicking into overdrive, her cells multiplying in a desperate attempt to protect our family.

I remember standing by her hospital bed the night before her heart died. She reached out for me, her hands covered in tubes and needles. I asked her, one last time, about my father. Why he left us.

Why I had his eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have known.”

By then, the truths had started coming to me. Day by day, my wife’s stomach ballooned into a bubble of hot flesh, and drinking her unbearable heat at night, I was also realizing. I knew I would change, I knew my father had changed, I knew that the stories about my father, the ones swimming inside my mother, were changing at that very moment.

I do not believe that my mother is a liar. ***

When my mother died, he was spotted again in the Caspian Sea. The message was relayed by three fishermen who lived in Turkmenistan. My wife played me the news broadcast on her phone, balancing it on her swollen belly, and I chuckled at the fishermen’s eyebrows, thick and untamed in a way that made the whites around their eyes spill out from their sockets. I wanted to hold my mother’s funeral on the Boardwalk, but the police got involved and said it was a bad omen for tourism if a woman’s ashes were dumped into the sea. My wife and I had no choice but to dig out our old sand toys and bury her remains in our backyard. I stayed up for three nights after that, reading the articles about my father—mockumentaries featur56 • Spring 2020

ing hundreds of ghostly faces basked in blue light, printing photos and pinning them to cork boards with red yarn and dollar-store thumbtacks. One day, I will learn all the truths. But for now, they trickle in slowly, starting from my eyes and draining down into the base of my spine. ***

During one of our visits to the Boardwalk, my mother pulled me into a cheap souvenir shop. She pointed to one of those fortune telling machines, the ones that would spit out a yellow ticket with lucky lotto numbers on it. This one was brand-new, the gold paint perfectly untouched. The animatronic inside—the torso of a gypsy wearing a turban—stared over my head, and I remember turning around, staring out at the beach to figure out what he was gawking at, or searching for. I asked her what she was going to do.

“Your father and I, we never knew what the future would be like,” she replied, digging out a crumbled dollar bill from her shorts.

She slid it in. The two of us took a step back, watching the man inside the machine come to life. His eyes glowed red and the speaker below him croaked “I can see your fortune—come see it too, no?”

She kept the yellow slip with her until the day she died. I know, because when my wife and I visited her during the holidays, we would find her curled up in front of the fireplace, worrying the paper between her teeth. Before the cremation, the doctors handed me the slip, which was so worn and wrinkled that when I turned it over to read the writing, the ink was completely rubbed off. I think the fortune said something about apologies, or a happy reunion with a loved one, or how to discover your own truth, because why else would my mother treasure it like her own son—with all the love in the world, knowing it would eventually transform into a stranger before her very eyes? ***

A few weeks before my wife’s due date, I stopped sleeping.

I spent my nights with my calves tangled around my wife’s knees, stroking her throat as she snored. I would bring her pulse close to mine, close my eyes and think about the future. The exact moment when fatherhood would drag me under, and I would take my first breath, my first real one.

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***

In kindergarten, we read Where the Wild Things Are. I imagined my father like one of the horned creatures in the book. I imagined that my mother tamed my father like Max did, by sailing across the ocean and staring into his eyes without blinking. I imagined that my father was the wildest thing of all. ***

One day my wife will give birth, and then I will realize it was never my father’s decision to leave. Decisions are a privilege and a lie. I guess I will spend my nights following him instead of my mother, wondering when my own child will learn about the things that breathe underneath the water. I will wish I knew what it was like to hold that infantile thing in my arms, to peel back his eyelids with a thumb and forefinger and watch his irises swim away from the white light glaring down at them from the ceiling of the operating room.

Perhaps the flesh will have my eyes too.

One day I will do exactly as I’m told: nestle between my wife’s legs, press my ear against her stomach, and listen to the humming, drumming echo of the creature awakening inside her—my child, and me.

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Boggy

JAMARQUISE HUSTON

Look, o’er the fog, Salvation is a slog, Soft, we shall, we will...

Scratch and claw With ironclad will, Till sill’s slag sings Its Siren Song.

Friendship.

Look, o’er the fog, Forgiveness is a slog, Soft, we shall, we will...

Scratch and claw With ironclad will, Till sill’s slag sings Its Siren Song.

Family.

Look, o’er the fog, Forever is a slog, Soft, we shall, we will...

Scratch and claw With ironclad will, Till sill’s slag sings Its Siren Song.

Romance.

The marsh rings With extreme Pangs of pain As it sings A wail that Rhymes. Yet hope springs Eternal.

We will be fine, We will be fine.

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Interview with Jia Tolentino ADITYA GANDHI

Image from Texas Monthly.

A staff writer for The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino is among the most prominent essayists of today. Her work casts a critical eye on popular culture—from TikTok to incels—in addition to art, politics, and her personal experiences. She published her first book, Trick Mirror, in August 2019.

Careless Magazine conducted this interview alongside The Scripps College Journal. ‘SCJ’ denotes questions asked by them.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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SCJ: In your new book you talk about how you have to be a narcissist to be a writer. Do you need self-delusion to do anything that matters?

I don’t exactly think that’s true. I definitely don’t think you have to be a narcissist to be a person, or to do anything that matters. I mean, I actually think that being a narcissist is at odds with doing a lot of things that really matter. But I do think that self-delusion is, to some degree, natural and helpful. Even just to operate in the world right now without thinking about climate change every second of the day, a bit of a delusion but it’s necessary.

You write about such a wide range of topics, like reporting on the Weinstein trial but also talking about Cats and how it fits into our current cultural moment. Do you feel there’s some sort of common thread in what catches your eye?

Anything that provokes a really strong reaction. To me, if I would make my friend talk to me about it at dinner, then it’s worth writing about. It’s pretty simple, you know. And I feel lucky to be able to write about such different things. If I’m thinking about it in my off time, if I’m thinking about it after hours, then why not, right? And if it’s something like Weinstein, something like Cats, you know. I’ve had plenty a conversation about it in real life and that to me is the only marker.

Do you feel like you’ve had to work to get to a point in your career where you have that level of freedom?

I mean, I wrote for free for forever, I wrote for almost free for forever—but then when you’re writing for free on your own blog you can write about whatever you want. So in a way it took a long time for me to get paid to do it. The kind of great thing about the Internet is anyone can write about whatever they want. But it doesn’t mean that anyone’s gonna read it, so over time I just figured out how to do it in a way that felt kind of clear enough that it was worth talking about.

I still kind of feel like I’m blogging. I still like the title “blogger,” you know? Bloggers get a bad rap, but blogging’s really fun. ​SCJ: Is there anything trending right now that’s on your mind?

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Oh my God, of course. Honestly, all I can think about right now is the primary, you know, I mean I think it’s like that for a lot of us. There are always lots of things on my mind, but I rarely—I don’t have opinions on a lot of things. It’s like the things I do have strong opinions on, I always write about them, and otherwise...

If your job requires you to come to some form of articulation about things, I’m really wary of getting sort of pundit-disease and forming conclusions on lots of shit when in reality my opinion doesn’t matter at all. And so I try to let my brain kind of float. I try not to think too quickly, because I think that is a pitfall of being a writer on the Internet, is that you can sort of be like “what’s my take?” And I think often it is better to have none. So I try to guard against that aspect of my job.

SCJ: You’re an essayist and a reporter, which seem like two things that you maybe have to reconcile somehow.

I actually think that essay-writing tends to—I mean traditionally people think of that as the more opinionated form, I think. In reporting traditionally, you’re not supposed to show you have an opinion, but at The New Yorker it’s different because it’s not a newspaper. The things that I report there, I can show that I have an opinion, which I’m very grateful for because I’m not the kind of writer that couldn’t. I don’t have the skill to conceal my point of view and I actually find it kind of dishonest when people pretend to have total objectivity, because it’s not real.

Speaking of opinion, there was a New York Times review that talked about your ambivalence being characteristic of millennial life-writing. Do you think ambivalence is a product of our time and that’s why it plays a role in your writing?

I don’t know. I feel like it’s pretty audacious to say that this era invented ambivalence, but I do think that the one thing I end up writing about over and over is voluntary participation in destructive systems. Which again is not particular to our time, I’m sure all throughout at the very least the twentieth century people have been saying that, but I do think there’s a certain way in which that’s become a dominant chord of this era. Nothing’s ever new, it’s just

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always exaggerated in certain ways, you know?

As individuals, it’s hard to disentangle from certain thought processes, whether or not we recognize that such choices make us complicit in an unjust system. So how do we reconcile those individual choices with the good of the greater collective?

I mean, everyone’s answer is different, right? This is a question I got asked a lot, it’s like, what are we supposed to do when self-improvement is contained within capitalist patriarchal ideology, and yet self-improvement is undeniably attractive. Taking care of yourself is genuinely attractive for some really legitimate reasons. And the answer is, I mean, the mistake would be to spend all day thinking about it. I think one of the reasons I wrote that article and other things I’ve written on the subject, it’s just like untangling the situation so that I don’t get lost in thought it it anymore and can turn my attention elsewhere. I’d rather just be very clear about the incentives that are at work on me so that maybe I can act a little bit more freely and more clearly. Whatever I choose to do vis-a-vis my own makeup doesn’t fucking matter, you know what I mean? Like I think what’s more interesting is understanding the systems that are at work.

SCJ: On that question, you’ve spoken about feminism before as sort of an individualist distortion nowadays of what you think should be more about studying systems of power and so on. What can you say to women here about feminism and the framework of solidarity we should have as an alternative to the GirlBoss myth?

I probably wouldn’t be saying anything that people don’t already know here. I mean, feminism is about collective good and not individual success. And I think most people know that, and I think that the GirlBoss wave has crested, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that that is empty. I think that with everything you see happening politically right now, you can just see people getting sick of that marketing language—it’s been going on for a long time, you know, since Dove Real Beauty it’s been the dominant paradigm of this quasi-feminist advertising. The alternatives are clear, and they’re clearly better.

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alphabet soup EMILY LU GAO

today my mama called me her zìdiǎn and it made me realize how words have always bloomed from me orchards of poems run through me, stories wrap their vines around my bones, and songs perch on my tongue waiting for another sunrise to serenade

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Allergy Season SAM BOVARD

ions of emotion posit themselves in my body clogging my sinuses creeping down my throat i start coughing them up violent hackings of spit and spite phlegm and jealousy sadness lingering in the redness of my eyes

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Poppies

KRISTINE CHO

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This is Poetry LILY ROSS

This Is Poetry.

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Contributors Aditya Gandhi Brian Bishop Brynn Parkinson Chloe Wanaselja Eleanor Furness Ella Gardner Emily Lu Gao Emily Williams Emma Duggleby Harrison Pyros Hayley Pierpont Jamarquise Huston J.J. Shankar Julienne Ho Kayla Lee Kristine Cho Krystal Yang Lillian Aff Lily Ross Lucas Cunningham Madison Yardumian Meghan Rose Mirabella Miller Natasha Vhugen Olivia Meehan Sam Bovard Schuyler Mitchell Sophie Fron Talia Ivry Teodelina Martelli Tess Gibbs Tiffany Chang

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