Echoes Fall 2017

COVER HERE

Literar y and V isual Arts Magazine Barnard College Fall 2017

VISUAL ARTS

Maya Sibul ….................................................................................4 Yunxiao Cherrie Zheng…................................................................6 Maria Laura Jijon........................................................…..............10 Sophie Kovel.................................................................................17 Elle Wolfley................................................................….........20, 34 Kelcey Logan….............................................................................21 Antonia Holton-Raphael…...............................................21, 24, 31 Alix Ha….....................................................................................22 Lili Ladner…................................................................................24 Sadie Kramer.............................................................................…26 Lydia Nasser..................................................................................32 Elly Rodgers…............................................................................. 35 Natalie Tischler….........................................................................38

COVER ART

College by Sadie Kramer

WRITING

Rower/Poet by Virginia Gresham …...............................................2 Beehives by Willa Cuthrell-Tuttleman….........................................3 Nun downs tall boy by Virginia Ambeliotis…...................................5 Excerpt from “ Yellow Cigarette” by Olivia Nathan..........….............7 75 Random Things About Me Too by C.D. Gonzalez.......................11 Flint by Mya Alexice.............................................................…....18 Three Silly Poems about Mundane & Ordinary Things by Rinesty Rusli…..........................................................................................19 mannahatta, from midtown by Caroline Kelly…............................23 Sarah by Izzy Schettino…..............................................................25 Killing Jane by Jadie Stillwell….....................................................27 Malegueña by Caroline Kelly......................................................…33 90-10 by Veronica Suchodolski…................................................ 36 ma calls me about her cancerous throat 9 am tuesday before my coffee by Michelle Xu…..............................................................................37 Cooking Fish by Michelle Xu….....................................................39

1

Night like we were ships—our bodies crashing blind—on days more often eight and panting down the Cam, we rush toward fateful, blind approach—a coming-by surprise, we sudden flush, our half, then swallowed smiles. The thrushes, faint, echo to us fools—

how we groped for dying metaphors, and thought words could make real—how bodies creaked, and crashed themselves, on surfaces built by dreams. How splintered/cracked, we groaned—self-making/breaking the whole way—sighing, rhyming worship from our verses.

Oh, he said, and read some more, made voices splash like eyes—your eyes, and voice, the river tastes, leaving only empty lines.

Poems fade to chants—with every catch squeeze quick finish. Our silent, shameful stares—you’re coming—deeper in, & to, mine.

Coming, you’re becoming bigger than you seem. The waters seep, but cannot weep. With endless stroke stroke stroke, I’ll let you, pass through me. A rhythmic maybe—drifting past, toward verse, toward where we might speak, or see our thrushes crashing in/to

VIRGINIA GRESHAM 2

WILLA CUTHRELL-TUTTLEMAN

My mom took me here once, when I was very small.

That morning, she and I had eaten scrambled eggs and toast, and she’d taken me to The Marais. She bought me salmon-colored sandals because the ones I was wearing had given me blisters. We had grapefruit popsicles and she held my hand as we walked down the park path, down the gravelly and grey-tan sand littered with cigarette butts and twigs. It was humid August weather and gnats swirled around our ankles. Mom licked her thumb and rubbed off something on my cheek.

She’d taken me to see the insect house, and we sat at the cluster of chairs overlooking a large stretch of green. And then she showed me the apiary, where all the bees lived. Their houses looked like little shrines. We stood in front of the gate with chipped paint and watched them for about fifteen minutes. Their tiny gyrating bodies looked paler from far away. Up close, they’re darker. They bobbed in the air, moved in patterns, looped and danced like pinball machines. They seemed to be repeating the same movements, each bee confined to the shape it made in the air. I remember having tried to focus on one in particular and finding it impossible; they all melded together, gliding and bouncing in sideways figure eights.

I’d never known at that point in life what a bee sting felt like; there was no rush, no alarm at the sound or sight of one buzzing near my face or around my ears. I wondered their reasons for aimless flying – where were they trying to go, flying around in the same motions, going nowhere? Did they have reasons? What did they eat? Did they feel? Think? I didn’t ask any of these questions.

I stood with my hand securely in Mom’s grasp, just barely peeking 3

BODY PART 1 Maya Sibul

over the fence, wanting to know what one felt like in my palm, a tiny helicopter.

While we were looking at them she told me a story about when she was stung. She was a teenager, and she’d gone to a bike rental place in Massachusetts, where she’d grown up. The shop was small and local, with a garden next to it.

I asked her how much it hurt. She said she couldn’t quite remember, but told me that it was supposed to sting quite a lot.

She told me that they die after they sting, that they aren’t normally aggressive unless they’re wasps or yellow jackets. I didn’t know what a yellow jacket looked like. Bumblebees, she said, are generally harmless, unless you’re allergic.

We kept walking through the garden. Mom always had a problem with sun; she burned easily. We stuck to the shade, me in a white dress and those pink sandals and her with a straw hat and a shawl and a maxi skirt.

I wondered if bees die stuck in their honey, if they drown, unable to move, in something so sweet, something they made themselves.

4

I named my kindergarten papers Virginia A5 they didn’t get it

do u I hit the streets after rainstorms to dig for worms, dug Junie B Jones, got rashes, ate too many peanut butter cups, barfed a lot, kept a notebook in the sink cupboard, checked a box everyday

“today was: bad, good, OK” I drank red in church, they told me I had no original sin and I thought Jesus was Greek, I

loved communion, faked air-kisses for doughnuts, named my papers ad maiorem dei gloriam when they told me, hated my name, the syllables, wore spiteful jewelry. Then a teacher I loved told me

epistrophes didn’t have to be perfect; just repeat, I started to blur my third and fourth parts, worry only around other people, re-think about a girl, I de-wombed VIRGINIA AMBELIOTIS

5

SHOW OR HIDE

Yunxiao Cherrie Zheng

6

AN EXCERPT FROM:

OLIVIA NATHAN

This is the New York my mom misses. The one she saw

when I called her alone in my room freshman year.

The cabs were a different yellow.

Maybe I think of LA the way she thinks of New York.

Probably not. Mine is sunny, defective, driving through Griffith Park alone at night, Lana Del Rey, blue. Hers is green eyeshadow, Joni Mitchell, cocaine, the Diamond Twins (perpetually painting, perpetually depressed Carol and Cathy).

Before the bridge of her nose collapsed and Dad stopped writing.

Bruised women. Dark purple and an eye swimming in blood.

The last man she had sex with before my Dad lives here, I thought. She thinks she still lives here.

Malibu she liked though. Dark wood floors and the scent of yoga by the lap-pool. Mostly because she’s a wealthy woman who draws anxious 6” by 10” pieces in ink. I wonder if she missed paint when she was there.

She learned how to play the bongo. She called me when 7

she ordered it off Amazon. And then later that night, when she’d forgotten we’d already talked and spewed words at me, expecting responses. I told her I got Susan and Bill to watch Poldark.

I said, “That’s good.” “That’s so good, Ma.”

My heart slipping around inside me, trying not to cry on my aunt’s carpeted stairs outside the TV room.

I saw the bongo at Thanksgiving. Came up to the middle of my calf. Wrapped with a yellow, orange, and black pattern. Dad played it after we washed the dishes. He was really good, keeping up with a Bonobo track from “Black Sands.” I have yet to see her play it.

When I was fifteen she had a yellow craze. Tiny canvasses filled with blocks of thick, yellow paints. Carol said they looked like color studies. My mom did not appreciate this.

The paintings went on for a year and a half like that– cream yellow, lemon zest, egg, filigree gold. I realized: yellow is the saddest color.

––

No one’s on a phone. Which makes sense, but it means the idea of irl is not just an idea but a surreal imagining.

A photo of a woman in a tulle skirt, hitched up over thighs and slender fingers covering her vagina– hair on each side of her hand.

After I talk to my mom on the phone I masturbate or jog.

On season one of The Affair, an old lady in a shop answers Noah Solloway’s inquiry about a yoga class by saying everyone doing yoga or wanting to do yoga should just do what they actually want– sex. I think about that a lot.

I close my eyes and touch myself with my thong still on and I’m a different person in an unrecognizable, usually carpeted, landscape.

My mom called and told me about her therapy session that Monday. How she discussed the first time her dad saw her work and wasn’t impressed or didn’t compliment it and she felt like she fell right through the wood floor. This was at least thirty years ago.

How she can let the past stay there– the present is something new but Janet really understood her today because her Dad didn’t like 8

her paintings when he saw them. A Czechoslovakian immigrant who never finished high-school, owned a hardware store, and married a busty, blue-eyed, black-haired Dolores. He didn’t show support.

It becomes twenty-five minutes in 1985. Like Nan Goldin’s but with oil.

Then she finally asks me a question. How is he? How’s the relationship?

She says the same thing before goodbye every time– even when she’s stoned. She misses me, wishes I was there, thinks of me. I repeat it back, wanting to say more– to say I don’t know what New York is but I know what LA means. I don’t think about Zach now. I draw naked women a lot. But she’s put her cigarette out on the front patio and has opened the French doors and says, “Bye bye.”

9

REACH Maria Laura Jijon

10

C.D. GONZALEZ

I

1. Someone once told me that I was like syrup.

2. I never thought of myself as sickeningly sweet and sticky. I can attest that I have never given anyone a cavity, rotted a mind until it needed a filling.

3. I do have a sweet tooth.

4. But they could have meant to compare me to a gooey and processed concoction. You know, maybe they were saying that I subsisted as a fake, a copy, a substitute no one really liked adding to their coffee.

5. My abuela had to drink Sunny-D, the fake orange juice, because of her illness. Her body unable to break down real sugar. She could not enjoy the luxury of a café con leche with a spoon azucar anymore.

6. She was a beauty pageant queen in Cuba, the land of never-ending sugar cane fields. She won the title “The most beautiful woman in Cuba” at the age of 22. Abuela Dalia was queen of everything 11

pure and organic.

7. What will I have achieved when I’m 22?

8. My mom never bought Sunny-D again after my abuela passed.

My mom also tells me I am the spitting image of her.

9. I don’t think so.

10. In Miami, everyone was a carbon copy. We all had the same familial narrative. We could all recount our abuelos’ tales of leaving their tierra and coming to a foreign land not knowing a lick of the native language; their story etched in the palms of our family history. We were all the product of an exiled community.

11. Identity is a complicated topic for me.

12. I started speaking Spanish a lot more recently. It’s a new appreciation that my parents are astonished by.

13. At least ten girls at my high school had the name Carolina Gonzalez. At least thirty girls had the first name Carolina.

14. I think that’s why I like using my middle name. Dalia. My abuela’s name.

15. I remember the first time I walked into the paint-chipped Freedom Tower. An eerie silence draped over me as I trudged along the refurbished museum. As I took each step I wondered if my abuela had stepped in that same spot too. I could feel the stale pain seep through the walls and slowly wrap itself around my ankles.

16. There’s only one girl at my college who has my same name.

Sometimes our packages get mixed in the mailing room. I’m used to it already.

17. We took the same class one semester. I had to scribble my ID number on all my papers, just like I did in high school, so the professor would know which Carolina.

18. I always introduce myself with the Spanish pronunciation of my name. People then tell me they can’t roll the “r” and I sigh in response.

19. Yeah, I know it’s extra.

20. My abuela became a seamstress when she came to the United States. She would design dresses for a small boutique in Palm Beach while my abuelo worked the sugar cane fields during the day.

Jackie Kennedy bought some of her dresses from the little store and wore them in the White House. That’s a legacy.

12

21. What would I be?

22. I started taking ballet classes this semester. I want to be more elegant and eloquent. Like a beauty pageant queen.

23. I know what I don’t want to be.

24. My abuela always moved with grace and precision. She also loved ballerinas. Her favorite artist was Degas. Sometimes, when my schedule allows it, I’ll go to the Met and sit in the Degas gallery and stare at the paintings. I feel something, hereditary nostalgia, while gazing at the delicate posture of the dancers.

25. I don’t want to be syrup.

II

1. Our first date included a visit to the Whitney Museum down in the Meatpacking District.

2. I don’t know. I find it ironic that one of the most hip and “fresh” areas in New York City was once packed with foul slaughterhouses and bloodstains on tile.

3. That was our only date.

4. My mom and dad just wanted me to meet a nice Cuban boy, preferably from Miami. They wanted to keep on the tradition of “pure-breed” generations. They thought everyone else would cause trouble for me, anyways.

5. He was a constellation. My friends laughed at me when I compared him to glittering stars in the sky. It was a cliché, but it didn’t take away from its validity.

6. I know, I’m a spoonful of dramatic, a cup of naïve, and ten gallons of idealistic.

7. My parents knew that if I left to New York, they wouldn’t get what they wanted.

8. They wholeheartedly believed a suitable Cuban boy would do the trick and bring me back home for possibly forever. That’s why my dad decided to come back to Miami, for my Miami Beach mom. Now my turn loomed overhead.

9. He was Jewish and raised in the city.

10. Their greatest fear? The inevitable fate that I would become an exile of the house on 1521 Alegriano Avenue.

13

11. I had to leave. The conservative Hispanic bubble would wrap itself around my neck and tighten with every passing day. I wiggled out, but its grasp left thick, noticeable blemishes that never really faded away.

12. I didn’t feel numb when I was with him. Blood rushed from my head to my fingertips. Heat pulsated out of my lips. I was warm again, glowing. It was an entirely new experience and I slurped every second of it.

13. I made him a physical CD mixtape for Christmas. It was decorated with my awful calligraphy and different stamps exclaiming “Party!” and “Fun!” I included Devendra Banhart’s song Santa Maria De Feira on the playlist.

14. I went so far as to tell my mom about him. I was bubbling over with hope and the untainted notion that something good could happen.

15. The morning after the date, we played his mix tape while lying in bed and finishing off a bottle of cheap pink wine. Santa Maria came on. He didn’t know a lick of Spanish, but I still wanted him to hear the song.

16. My mom nervously laughed, “Be careful.”

17. Te digo todo aquí va bien.

18. It was my first heartbreak. My first real heartbreak. The kind of heartbreak where you feel as if a bird has pecked your heart apart and what is left is the discolored, rotting muscle baking in the sun. It left a stench of hopelessness and pessimism on my clothes.

19. I didn’t tell my mom that.

20. Yeah, it was the mature thing to do. To break it off before it ever had the chance to crackle, pop, and fizz. “It’s not you, it’s just not the right time,” he whispered. Fuck the conception of “the right time.”

21. We sat in Riverside Park, watching our boots sink deeper and deeper into the snow below us. The numbness slithered back into the soles of my heels and made its way up my spine.

22. I cried in front of him. I heaved and gasped for air, drowning in heavy emotions. My lungs started filling with tar. He watched.

23. I think feelings are stupid now. Just as stupid as country music and the idea that people are innately good.

14

24. I wanted to go back home, back to the house on 1521 Alegriano Avenue.

25. I didn’t tell my mom that either.

III

1. The best advice I have ever been given came from the graffiti artist Stephen Powers.

2. It was a soaked Thursday night in Brooklyn.

3. My friends and I took secret swigs from a lukewarm bottle of Coke and rum while our giggles bounced off the walls of the Museum.

4. Every moment felt sound tracked to that Lorde song “White Teeth Teens” and directed by Caryn Waechter.

5. My mom tracks me. That’s the deal we made when I left home.

I had to tell her where I was going and who I was with and send her their phone numbers. If I didn’t answer in .00002 seconds I would already have ten missed calls and 15 spam texts.

6. I call it “Hispanic Mom Syndrome.”

7. Freedom was fleeting for me, or at least I thought it was. I was always watching and being watched. A caged bird that could not sing.

8. That night I felt free.

9. I didn’t tell my mom where I went and that I was drunk on rum and the idea that moments like these were worth the risk. This went against our agreement.

10. I bought a lovebird when I was 15 and named it Mango. My mom gave Mango away without telling me.

11. I think that explains our relationship best.

12. Stephen Powers sat in one of the galleries, concentrating on the strokes he was painting on the canvas. It was a thick black line that would later became the letter in the phrase “Bide your time, Can’t buy your time.”

13. I always wanted to paint. I never had the talent.

14. He struck up a conversation with us. We talked about New York and living in the city.

15. One of my friends told him we were students at Columbia 15

and his eyebrows shot up.

16. “Don’t drop out of school. Don’t be like me and drop out of school. School teaches you to do the mundane things and finish them. Once you finish the boring stuff you can excel in the stuff you love doing. You’re at a great place right now.”

17. My parents were coming up on Tuesday to discuss the topic of me withdrawing for the semester.

18. I’ve had too many moments where my stomach knots and my nails sink into my palm. The reason behind the reaction never changes.

19. Stephen smiled at us once more and went back to his meticulous task.

20. Inútil.

21. I eventually told my mom I had left the borough of Manhattan.

22. She got pissed, as expected.

23. Freedom takes the form of a double-edged sword. It was something that has shaped the life of my family; it gave them opportunities that have tied me into the shoes I walk in today.

24. Freedom for a nineteen year old is dangerous.

25. But I think it’s necessary.

16

Sophie Kovel

17

flint. curved at the edge like where the water meets sand. uneven, unbothered, unperfect. flint, michigan. here the first daughter of earth is tainted brown like brown skin. a third world country in our own (gated, patrolled, neighborhood watched) backyards. suburbia killed flint, michigan. private homes, private schools, private bigotry played out in public, us vs. them, I guess. it’s us vs. them. the body vs. the tumor. have you ever had a doctor feel the breast of your country? give you the bad news? thanks for the pink ribbons.

I’d rather have the chemo. take it out, no matter what. kill me in the process. kill me if you have to. flint. flint like start a fire like burn it down like scorched earth policy like witch hunt with pitchforks like heat in my bones like ancestors curled around a fire like maybe we were all human, once.

MYA ALEXICE

18

1. Frozen Bread We keep our Bread in the freezer, you see.

Because we want it to last.

A safe, mold-free ice box in this parasitic world.

Just be we age and we have to deal with heartbreak, rejection, disappointment, arthritis, FOMO, and menopause Doesn’t mean our Bread has to.

All we want for her Is a warm, cozy toaster a quick dollop of chunky peanut butter and some sweet, smooth, raw unfiltered honey.

19

2. Open Pores

Open pores are like Open books.

Filled with juicy secrets and some gunk you don’t understand.

They reveal where people are at Mentally, Environmentally -hormonallyBut unlike a book, You can’t just READ your pores.

You have to exfoliate And tone And moisturize And do it all Consistently.

RED Elle Wolfley

3. Dried-up Pen You have served me well.

You have become one of my closest friends.

You know my homework assignments, You’ve read the letters I’ve written to Alex Martin, You know what I need from Trader Joe’s, And my story ideas for my radio show.

But now, your well is dry.

Your barrel is empty.

You are a clear, inkless tube.

I can’t use you anymore, dear friend.

It’s time to crack open a new one, And start again with an identical Jelly-roller- ball-point ink pen.

RINESTY RUSLI

20

Selection from series “ORIGINS” Kelcey Logan Antonia Holton-Raphael

21

Alix Ha

22

there was once marsh here, trees too.

I used to dream about them, hulking titans twisting up into the rain-dark sky. here were reeds and peat and paws which thundered over bones, savage scripture that stormed out from the pages of pop-up books and tore the world into curved lines and puzzle pieces. there are trees here now, but they are different: kept creatures, collared greens.

CAROLINE KELLY 23

MUTUALISTIC SOCIETY Lili Ladner

Antonia Holton-Raphael

24 40

She sings gospel in the kitchen with a voice like silver floating through the apartment competing with the washing machine groaning and swishing away dragging her feet in worn out flip flops five days a week they slish and smack across the floor arthritis don’t stop her from chugging through the house like a steam engine on her legs that she plants in the ground like trees but when she sits, she collapses every muscle and bone creaks until she becomes the chair with her hair looking like the night sky from the white hairs mixing in with the black ones and she coaxes vegetables into your tummy with stories of talking bunnies and you don’t have the words to say that without her you’d be a spec of dust and float away into space without ever learning what love was and you take in her face with its soft edges and you could wrap your arms around her cheeks and store your whole world in them. at night she sends you off with a kiss to your room the common woman is as common as the moon.

IZZY SCHETTINO 25

FLOWER GIRL Sadie Kramer

26 48

JADIE STILLWELL

The man with the skull outside of his body is riding a

ten-speed. She catches the barest silver glint of him first, prepared to see him in pieces. Eyes, nose, mouth. Instead: the full-face coverage of a custom motorcycle helmet pulled low over his features.

He’s left with questionably human grin of lipless metal teeth.

Hey, she thinks about asking. You want to help me bury this body?

In the basket of her bike, a half-eaten bagel and a Barbie.

She avoids looking down. She can’t see his nose anyways, can’t get a feel of him. Hawk, she guesses of the shape without really knowing what design that conjures. Hawk sounded like a verb and a noun all sheared to a point.

She thinks the skull-faced man might appreciate defying the limits of grammar, blurring the line between description and being. Thinks this because of another question she has for him: sir, do you know you’re on a bicycle and not a Harley?

But she knows that answer. He knows. She admires his capacity for smooth transition, for the inability to tell the difference between translations of speed.

Want to help me bury this body?

Her wrist twinges as she steadies her bike in his wake. She thinks: this is how I’ve decided to play things. Let it drift out. This is the summer she’d promised to kill June.

27

At a picnic table around the bend, someone has spread out a woven blanket like a dinner preparation and left it there. She knows it would smell muggy from rain if she came close enough.

The quiet politeness of it keeps her at a distance, as though she has not been invited to this particular party.

Two tables down, a man and woman face each other. She wonders if they feel the same, if they know something she doesn’t.

The woman has a wide face like an open gate. Her teeth are yellow from tobacco but quick to smile.

“I am trying,” the man is saying. “I am trying to keep calm about this, but really it’s so difficult with the war going on. With everything that is ending.”

She feels as though she has intruded, stepped into the uninvited place anyways because its boundaries weren’t where she’d initially thought. Her chest fills with alien delight at having a moment in her possession that does not belong to her. Someone else’s memory of the end of the world.

“Stop,” the woman says. “You need to start over.”

The man nods. He is older than his table-mate, hunched.

He has farmer’s knuckles curled around printer paper. He squints at it like trying to sight-read braille.

“It’s good, but I want to be moved. It’s not moving me, yet.

The play is about loss and growth, Robert. Make me feel it.”

The bike tilts where she’s stopped near a water fountain. It presses her shorts into an angry rim on her thigh. Early yesterday morning, she’d stripped off her bikini and felt the lack of grace in the way her body refused to yield. The stutters as she jerked the halter down over her hips and let it hang there a moment, resisting further motion, thinking that if she couldn’t move herself, how could she possibly be moved by anyone else?

The man nods again, jerkily. Frustrated. The way his hands tighten on the page. It’s clear he hasn’t made it to the end of the monologue yet. Clear that the last lines are where he feels he’s truly going to capture the pulse of things if she’ll let him get there.

Standing on the edge of the path, she feels a too-close empathy to the right of her breastbone. The same want for an end.

She’s been biking for far longer than she needs to. June is twenty 28

years old. She could have thrown the trash bag out, earlier. Really, her mother had said, you’re being awfully dramatic.

The woman stops her cast-mate again, throwing up a rough palm. Doesn’t let him finish. She feels the scrape of the motion against her own sternum and is aware of her own fingers toying with the collar of her t-shirt, of her own stillness.

On the bike path, she pushes down on the pedal to feel a surge of motion. She is haltingly aware of playing both parts in this play.

––

The path curves around a playground, turning back on itself in an uneasy circle. There is a troupe of light haired little boys digging in the sandbox with absolute focus, blue-eyed intensity. With a sureness all mothers would call lack of experience, she thinks there’s a myth to children’s gentleness, to their heady distraction.

The tallest boy looks across at his brother and says, “dig deeper,” and she does not wonder at the distinction of their particular goal.

The middle boy has a scrape all down his shin, but his eyes are shining. Resilient, malleable things. Breaking themselves to grow.

She stabs the kickstand into the ground so her bike leans stiffly against a tree, crouches at the sandbox.

“Hey.” Voice lowered to a stage whisper. “What are you up to?”

She throws a grin she’d taught herself in the sixth-grade to the boys’ mother, standing with raised eyebrows in the distance.

“We’re burying things,” the oldest says, worrying an uncertain smile between his teeth. “You’re too old.”

She’s scraping up sand with her nails, finding the sweet, cool layer with the pads of her fingers. She could do it right here, leave June. They might think it was cool.

“To bury things?” she asks throwing the pebble into the indent she’s made. Too public, she decides. Not pretty enough. The older boys nod.

“Nah,” she says. “You don’t ever outgrow that.” And pats the sand flat with her palm.

––

She’s afraid of what’s going on here. Keeps flinching and 29

re-imagining sounds. It wasn’t like she’d truly killed anyone or like she was going to.

She crushes a daisy with the fat front wheel of the bike and swears. Okay, it was a little like she’d killed someone. She grinds her teeth together over the fact that she hasn’t, hoping the chalk taste will make it feel heavy and real in her mouth.

Get rid of her, her mother had said. The limbs all akimbo in the white trash bag, a sculpted heel pushing against the plastic. Get rid of that thing. You’re too old. Don’t call her a thing, mom. But she was getting rid of her. There’d been stiff blonde hairs caught on a discarded lollipop when she’d yanked June from the bag.

To her right, a stream crinkles like tissue paper, leaving the barest echoes of sound. A little girl shouts and it makes her jump.

Jesus.

She decides to be mildly amused by herself instead of frightened. This is all new. She’s never been very good at changing her own mind or delineating the exact spot where real and make-believe rubbed each other raw and went separate ways. In the second grade she’d knocked out Brad Keller’s two front teeth over Santa Claus and still gotten presents for Christmas.

Amused, not frightened. She’s lecturing inward from her left temple, where Intro Psych classes had deemed the logic lives.

You’re twenty and once left change on your niece’s pillow. Tip-toed out with the white of her baby tooth tucked into your palm. You can get rid of your old Barbie doll. It doesn’t matter if she has a name and you called her by it. She is not a live thing. If you think hard, she has always been dead.

The purposeful change in emotion feels like pulling teeth, or leaning hard into the turn of a fairground teacup, hands going muddy with the smell of iron until the movement is yanking and specific. Leaves her with gaping space where stillness used to be as everything goes soft and insubstantial at the edges. She smiles, content with having made the world that way herself.

In her palm, her niece’s tooth had felt warm, like a sunsoaked pebble or a living thing. She’d held it in cupped hands before flushing it down the toilet and thought: this is bone. This is of her body. This is the collateral damage of growing.

30

Antonia Holton-Raphael

31

Lydia Nasser

32

It was a guitar and it was kindling.

It spilled sweet, earthy notes into the August air, humming under the weight of his hands, his fingers sticky with summer popsicle as they strummed on worn-out copper wires. It filled the silence of the space she’d created, his songs growing longer with the shortening days and her shortening fuse, his crumpled-up patience.

It sheltered, soothed, sang to him and punched windows through the walls of claustrophobic gray rooms, those rooms that he’d never liked but whose ceilings he could draw from memory, the rocket science art of ninety degree angles and flat white nothingness.

Its wood warped under the weight of her words, while he wore those same old jeans, he hadn’t changed out of those jeans in weeks and they were starting to turn gray. It pitched through her eardrums and bled into her brain; she couldn’t focus anymore and he wouldn’t focus anymore, someone had to focus on the roof over their heads but how could she bear to breathe when her brain was bleeding, it would not stop weeping, louder than her, always louder and building to a terrible crescendo, his fingers bruising themselves as they plucked harder and harder, shattering the quiet violence of the night with a strangled cry.

It wailed as she yanked it out to the yard.

It smirked as she struck the match.

It lit up brighter than every star in the goddamned sky, and all the night-birds and salamanders shrunk away from the taste of smoke at the backs of their throats.

CAROLINE KELLY

49 33

Elle Wolfley

34

I LOVE IT HERE SINCE I’VE STOPPED NEEDING YOU

Elly Rodgers

35

It was summer and there was unrest, paint peeling off the old farmhouses, humidity so thick that mosquitoes bred in midair like sin. We met between the lettering and the watercolors, the liminal space between language and expression. Since coming home things have felt uncertain, like the subway right before it rounds a bend, like the faded patch of dark between two streetlights, an urban kind of anxiety where I’m waiting for someone to push me down from behind. I wish I knew a way to understand things the way they’re meant to be understood out here, by way of dirt between your fingers and fireflies down by the dark river. There’s a melancholy that feeds on our insistence that we should learn from the past, growing gluttonous and fat on the way we sing along to love songs together without meeting each other’s eyes, fearing the known-unknown, what has hurt and therefore we assume will hurt. Your sleeping face is purple and blue in the midsummer twilight and I feel like I already miss you. Fireworks rumble in the background like the plea of a carnival beast cowering between the whip and the ring. I’m trying to figure out what I mean to you, like am I the vowel sounds or the streaks of orange and yellow on the canvas, am I the words or the feeling, and what would I have to be to shift the scales. 8020. 70-30. The words never seem to make a difference but I’m not sure what else to do.

VERONICA SUCHODOLSKI 36

adamant throb-thump after her first swim, not a fish bone hooked tight or a bad cold, throat a pocket of firecrackers red in the new year. ma is aggressive in her calm. even when the pepperpod knobs doubled, she visited spain to see dalí. adamant life pulse on pulse no flicker of worry in her voice only talk of buying picture flames for dalí posters, wall décor, and teasing: for a powderedmilk kid i’m pretty good. no flicker of worry in her voice only a nugget cough-throb big enough to lurk.

MICHELLE XU

37

Natalie Tischler

52 38

of this kitchen counter remember the wet fish stretched tight in saran wrap like a jack-in-the-box not yet sprung. tops of blue september trees wagged in the window as the dogged light knifed through the animal— its scales like onion skin, a fancy coat more for show than protection. tonight, it is laminated with scallions, ginger, soy sauce: antibiotics for homesickness. and for a moment, history steamed into the room as I sat, a fish bone in my teeth, vegetating in its primacy.

MICHELLE XU

39

fall 2017

AURIAN CARTER

Layout and Design Director

ALINA SIDDIQUI Editor-in-Chief

SIMMONE SHAH

Layout and Design Assistant

NORA FOUTTY Editor-in-Chief

SARAH PATAFIO Events Director

ALEXANDRA LONGO Literary Director

CLAIRE ADLER

Arts and Media Assistant

Sponsored in part by the Arts Initiative at Columbia University