ECHOES ECHOES ECHOES ECHOES ECHOES ECHOES ECHOES ECHOES ECHOES ECHOES ECHOES ECHOES
FALL 2019
ECHOES ECHOES ECHOES ECHOES
ECHOES
LITERARY AND ART MAGAZINE BARNARD COLLEGE FALL 2019
WRITING
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Mis-En-Scene by Aydan Shahd // 4 Is This a Real Memory? by Alabel Chapin // 7 La Bellissima by Isabella Sarnoff // 10 Velvet Goldmine by Aydan Shahd // 15 Spectacle by Anja Chivukula // 17 Lukewarm Summer by Olivia Treynor // 20 Graveyards by Isabelle Robinson // 31 For Girls Who Want to Eat the Sun by Catherine O’Brien // Gutterball by Anja Chivukula // 37 Walmart, November First by Willa Neubauer // 38 Maiden Grass by Lida Ehteshami // 42
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ARTWORK Untitled by Campbell Ives // Cover Untitled by Leah Collins // 5 Aviva & Memory of a Patio on St. Marks by Taylor Bluestine // Untitled (Slime) by Katrina Fuller // 8 Climate Greed by Kassia Karras // 9 de&rea st&ing by Maya Sibul // 10; 13 Untitled by Marg // 14 In love with her opthalmologist by Tuesday Smith // 16 Decay in Neon by Tess Majors // 18 Untitled by Marg // 19 Peacetime Strife by Leah Collins // 29 Light Sees by Chloe Zhang // 30 Untitled by Nia Holton-Raphael // 30 Untitled by Marg // 32 Light Sees by Chloe Zhang // 33 Why Rain Falls by Taylor Bogdan // 35 Untitled by Marg // 36 Shadow by Iris Jiachen Cai // 39 Intrusive by Tuesday Smith // 40 Snap crackle pop gets a BA by Tuesday Smith // 41 Untitled by Nia Holton-Raphael // 43 by Sophia Jao // 44-45
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AYDAN SHAHD
MIS-EN-SCENE 4
I want to rearrange the architecture like one might want to move furniture one inch to the left. I want to see what it would be like if the pillars yawned and stretched out from under the façade. I want to remove a brick and make the gap a little cave for a pet mouse or maybe a carrier pigeon, leave him toasted sunflower seeds and gold coins. I want to paint opaque over the stained glass window in just some places so the shadows make strange signs on the floor when the sun shines, like omens like twisted tongues. They will be deciphered to mean the very end or the coming salvation of the world, to mean that I wanted to paint the window. Is it enough to play god or to fall on your sword for the taste of lime juice and fresh snow, is it enough that I want you because I do is it enough that you have to trust the unerodable momentum of my blue bounding desire I bring you back a chip off the roof tiles because the way it caught the fog made me happy, I give it to you it means nothing it means I want to crouch with you in the chimneys covered in soot it means I’m not fucking around. Come to you with the stick in my mouth every day it’s a little more askew, soon you will have a yarn ball, soon you will have a kaleidoscope, soon a funhouse where you’re the man in every mirror and I love each one. Come with me to pick at the paint on all the walls claw through the plaster hit the thrumming electric thread. The exposed nerve in your gum Fallen scaffold Our itching skin
LEAH COLLINS UNTITLED
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TAYLOR BLUESTINE
MEMORY OF A PATIO ON ST. MARKS
AVIVA
IS THIS A REAL MEMORY? I think I can remember my father shaving his blue jaw in the mirror. I can hear the tap tap of the razor against the porcelain rim of the sink, and I am transfixed by the sharp cut of his face, the way it turns soft and melted in the glass like a sad stranger he and I get quiet, I let him look at himself I let myself look at him the way his chin dips around the stubble like a grey geode, an ancient twinkle this is how he makes himself ready for us, I think, how he seeks solitude this is an old, well-worn moment a sacred, secret majesty I am an onlooker now, just for a moment he has always done this, only I am new Is this a real memory? he told me I liked to sit in the sink and watch him they would bathe me in the sink once my whole body could fold into that little bowl the naked laughing bit of flesh they called by my same name now I can prop one foot on the lip to shave my legs I am waiting for the day when I won’t be this quiet watcher a fabricator of memory for when I will live into the remembering, be eternal ALABEL CHAPIN
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KATRINA FULLER
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UNTITLED (SLIME)
KASSIA KARRAS CLIMATE GREED
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MAYA SIBUL
DE&REA ST&ING
ISABELLA SARNOFF
LA BELLISSIMA
“YOU SHOULDN’T love things that don’t love you back,” I say as I stare at the back of my naked hand. Earlier, my gold ring slipped to the bottom of the pool and I muse over it all afternoon. I splash in a mosaic pool surrounded by the four tangerine stucco walls of La Posada Doña Lala, a hotel whose name sounds like lyrics. It reminds me of my great aunt, La Bellissima Anna Moffo, an American coloratura soprano, though I never met her. Sometimes, I rummage online for archival footage of her opera performances, because my father’s memories are slim bones to pick, and she truly was magnificent. He once told me that she left 10
for Mexico City on his eighth birthday. “You should have listened to the way everyone sang for me that night,” my father says. “Nobody wanted me to notice she was missing. But boy, could I tell by the chorus.” On the Christmas before that, La Bellissima descended her fanned staircase in an emerald gown so slowly that my father fainted in anticipation. I imagine her undulating upwards after each step down like a duck bobbing in a lake. At night I dream that I, myself, collapse waiting for La Bellissima, that she kneels to hoist me onto my small feet, that I grasp the base of her chin with four fingers, and with my thumbs I knead her lips into her mouth like sweet dough, upholstering her teeth while she sings from Madama Butterfly. In another, she asks me who I am. “Do you see it,” I ask, “the ring.” He laughs. “I’m sorry. I know,” I say. “I just – help,” my voice squeaks, and then we laugh together. I swim breast stroke towards the shallow end of the pool, holding a sparkling Corona above the water and I look at him for a response. Normally, fruity cocktails or lemonades or teas interest me more, but these felt like laborious favors to ask the kind hotel staff on a viciously hot day. So, I continue to have beers. Anna Moffo, I think to myself, wouldn’t particularly like beer, but then again, what do I know? He stands on the concrete perimeter, in remnant water splashed up from a little girl who swam before us, peering in for my missing ring. Last night, stumbling back from our dinner in the summer heat, we resuscitated the dinner conversation up the stairs to our room. From the balcony, I saw the girl’s baby doll abandoned in the water. I twisted my long hair off my neck as I stopped to watch its pale plastic limbs float, its green skirt writhing in the water, happily forgotten. 11
“I’ll keep looking,” he says. “But I don’t see it.” Only a sliver of the pool still has sunlight left, and I calculate how long we must have spent inside it. “It’s over by you, I think. Or it’s gone. It’s okay,” I say. You shouldn’t love things that don’t love you back. I gathered these words, also lyrical to me, from my mother who lives in a big house on a canyon that sets ablaze nearly each summer. I think about how my mother loves music, too. And gifts like rings from sweet boys. And humid evenings. “I would offer to get you a new one, but you’re telling me you won’t love it, and that you didn’t love this one, so,” he says. I laugh. “I shouldn’t love it,” I say. “But I do, I love this one, I think. Or I wouldn’t have to keep telling myself not to love it, right?” He walks over to our belongings hung neatly over a lounge chair and returns to the pool edge with an outstretched towel for me. “Let’s go,” he says. “The sun is setting, you’re a little drunk, and I’m losing you emotionally to a ring.” Months later, in New York City, a black bird sits on a telephone pole in front of a bus. Out from its beak, a green beetle falls onto the windshield. I laugh as the bird flies on because, for a brief moment, I want to pin down its wings like a butterfly.
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DE&REA ST&ING MAYA SIBUL
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UNTITLED MARG
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VELVET GOLDMINE A pocket mirror becomes an emerald brooch, the homoerotics of Narcissus, the comfort of a belonging smuggled down generations: age 12, the nod from the Grown-Up dyke across the coffee shop, 20, the beautiful man in the park who holds your gaze and grins at your longing like he can hold it in his mouth, like he knows it. We hand these things on like jewels palm to glittering lovers’ palm. To know the sound of the things you want before you know the words, a tug every time you walk by a staircase in a doorway, the muffled cry of your name before it is your name from the rooftops. All there is to curl around is him forcing open your mouth, is him too loud in your head to resist opening. The most beautiful thing we could hope to be is a glittering refraction of this love! The plastic gold stuck to the hair on his belly. A clamor of stillness under the roar of our deaths and slick limp throat shrillness, a failure of voice when he’s close. It gives to laughter, he says I know it’s silly but I feel part of a history of something. On my hand across his wet thigh, the ring he gave me winks in the dark, the green agate gleams. AYDAN SHAHD
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TUESDAY SMITH
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IN LOVE WITH HER OPTHALMOLOGIST
ANJA CHIVUKULA
SPECTACLE
Between the body count, the clouds unfurl, menthol tropical, aerosol mystique, nothing to see by but the pulse and throb, rhythmic crushing in of limbships-hands, we know each other only by our body heat, jumbled close enough for claustrophobia. A floor up, breezes breathe through open doorways, cooling gasps of personal space, the flickering owf ceiling lights, but I don’t want it, no listless couches small-talk-full, no keening of the sterilewhite, don’t drag me back to him, wheezing with the bi-pap, push-pull, compressed air and consciousness not quite fitting in the same tired body, he feels like there’s a fog in his throat, my mother said, he feels like he can’t breathe, and then he didn’t. I wipe an arm across my face, slick with someone else’s sweat, salt-burn familiar as the gulps of humid air, stale, jostled by the basement crowd. We came to find our midnight sun, all motion pulled to glinting streaks, a speaker full of garish noise, the panting and the bodies.
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DECAY IN NEON TESS MAJORS
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UNTITLED MARG
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LUKEWARM SUMMER
OLIVIA TREYNOR
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YOU GOT COLD in the water. It was a lukewarm summer, with the humidity cranked down low and the sweet laugh of Idaho cicadas humming through the air. We were seventeen and felt about that age, everything feeling in between. We stood in the water, pushing oxygen in and out of our bodies and waiting for the sun to set on top of us. The sky was simmering with something. All that deep blue and warm pink. We had been dating for eight months, though it was hard to tell because we never really counted. I thought it’d be nice if I took you to my family lake house before I left for school. You agreed that it sounded like a good idea, and, to our surprise, our parents did, too. So we drove up to the panhandle of Idaho and on the way our car got totaled and my grandparents had to pick us up and when we got to our room there was a dead rat in the bed so we slept outside in sleeping bags and woke up the next day at noon and decided to go swimming. That was just the way things went. Idaho is always the same in late August: it is hot during dinner and thunder rain lightning when you’re ready for dessert. We were waiting for something to happen in that lake, noticing how it shifted, the water holding some distinctly pacificnorthwestern volatility. The thermometer on our dock measured only three inches under the surface and tricked us into thinking the water was warm. It was a heirloom and borderline-obsolete device, only accounting for the layer that is sunbaked and forgetting about all that seaweed and cold beneath the surface. The strata of temperature underneath us. I liked the hot air on my skin and the cool lapping all that warmth off, the both sensations at once. It reminded me of something, like the gnawing stomach sinking I get even when I’m crying out of joy. Hot, cold, hot, cold. I didn’t know why you were shivering. I kept asking you to dip your head under the water. You’ll get warmer once you do, I told you. I must have promised that a thousand times. You didn’t listen. Instead you stood there, arms embracing your body, goosebumps prickling when you brushed up against me. 21
Bats strung through the air like anachronisms, the threat of October held in their haunted silhouettes. Their clicks made me think of a sound I had memorized from a childhood home I used to live in, a noise I always thought sounded somewhere between a wind chime and a whistle. That house was tucked in between long, blonde hills. Deer often stood in the backyard and ate my step-mom’s prized thumb-sized tomatoes. My dad would run outside and yell when he saw a coyote passing through. I was terrified of the dark and slept with the covers pulled way high above my head. And then there was that noise, occasional but consistent, always definite. It was an owl’s hoot, I learned later, through a flat explanation from someone who did not find it endearing that I had never connected the onomatopoeia to the real deal. I almost liked the mystery of not knowing an owl’s hoot was an owl’s hoot, that it held something different because I so isolated the sound from its origin. When something is lonely and unnamed like that, when it is anonymous and so tied to something else, you let it become that other thing. A Russian doll emptied of her twins and made into a cocoon. A calling card, a signal, a secret I shared as the sole witness. Something greater than an owl’s hoot. Something too big to name entirely.
*
As a child, my step-mother would always buy me the same hand sanitizer, a plastic spray bottle with the label torn off. She would take my small and unworn palms, spritz spritz and then work the strange liquid into my skin until it disappeared. I would smell my hands afterwards, fascinated by its mysterious scent, sometimes even spraying it into the air like perfume to anoint my childhood bedroom. It had some kind of smell like a back porch, like sitting in the dirt under a farmer’s market, like pushing through wet warm moss into clear air. The smell was thyme, a discovery I made in the vegetable section of a grocery store. The sterile obviousness of the herb made my stomach feel sour, stupid for finding out such a persuasive, nostalgic experience could be bottled in a syllable. 22
The recycled Safeway air, the coldness of the vegetable section and the loudness of those supermarket fluorescents. And then the source of all that mystery and comfort tucked in with every other anonymous plant that is thin and green. I liked it better when it was something else. At thirteen I enlisted a friend to tattoo a sprig of thyme on my left rib cage, our crude tattoo gun of needle and Indian ink practiced first on orange rinds and second on my skin. It was summer and she was my best friend, and so it felt intuitive that then was the exact moment something should be scarred into my skin forever. I chose thyme because it reminded me of being small and having my hand held, of that scent I could never remember the source of. Halfway through the permanent experiment I texted my parents to ask if it was okay. I was the type of child who asked questions like, Am I allowed to break the rules?, probably out of the stubborn inheritance children of divorce receive, which is the nagging sensation of being bad. When they said it was not okay, I immediately halted the low-fi procedure. To this day I bear a line with one round appendage under my left breast. It is a sprig of thyme, I explain to people I show. Or it was supposed to be. It happened a long time ago. I only show it as a novelty, a party trick, an icebreaker. The intimacy of its location makes it private enough that I have to make a joke to qualify showing it. As an apology for the crudeness of it, the humiliation of forgetting a smell enough to put it next to my heart. Eighth grade makes you sentimental like that. Now the sprig of thyme is something else, no longer an earnest homage to a childhood mystery but an awkward testimonial to a period of time when I wanted badly to put my childhood in the past tense. My grandfather has always had an affinity for stars. He is a doctor first, a cardiologist if you’re asking, but he is also a photographer and a philanthropist and other things too that I 23
would recount with child-like pride if only I could remember them. He has a belly the way most men do and wears funny ties and often forgets to check his insulin after eating three bowls of ice cream for the fun of scaring my grandmother. He is a lot of things. But I think of his star-gazing tendencies first. There is something special about when you are little and a grown-up is looking towards the sky. The perspective of being small and then seeing everyone taller than you feel small, too. I went to Catholic school for a long time and now I think of everything in theological terms, making my staunchly atheist grandfather into a Moses or a David, looking up to be a medium for some kind of greater message being transmuted. Decoding stars like they are binary, zeros and ones blinking in the sky at him. I wasn’t sure what things he was unlocking when he woke up at three in the morning to watch meteorite showers, or to point out Jupiter, shiny and stable, in between all that blackness. But I always asked to sit on his shoulders. So I could be close, too. I wanted to look up. I wanted to see that certain mysterious something high above. * My grandmother is an artist and the gatekeeper for the cabin. She’s been coming here since she was a girl, faithfully returning every summer to paint the lake in watercolors. She was six feet tall when she was young but has shrunk considerably since. Now her spine snakes down her back in an ‘s’ curve which makes it hard to walk or stand for long. She tells me that an artist’s work in never done, and that is why she must come back so much, repaint the same scene over and over. My dad says my grandmother has too many things and is painfully unorganized. Not a hoarder, but hoarder-adjacent. He bought her and my grandfather a big house in Massachusetts so, he hoped, the moving process might make her organize everything. But instead she filled up the new basement with paintings, and objects she might want to paint, and objects that inspire her to paint. 24
There was a leak in the basement and it flooded while we were at the lake. I swam outside while my grandmother, with faulty rural-Idaho cell reception, talked over the phone to the plumber in Boston about what to do with all that water contaminating all those objects. * I know it is mythologically American of my family to live in one place and have a summer home somewhere else, somewhere we would never really want to live. A place like Coolin, Idaho. The cabin was built in the 1930s by my great-great grandfather, when there were no roads and he had to take a boat or a seaplane to get there. Every summer my family would trek to the lake, flying into Spokane from Pasadena or Boston, depending on the generation, and take a rental car out the twoand-a-half hours until the paved road turned into gravel (that’s when they knew they were close) and then they would drive a little bit longer and take a hairpin turn across a road that is mostly for logging trucks and they would tuck the rental car into the bosom of the shoreline and drive just a little longer and a little slower as the road disintegrated into raw dirt and then they would park and wheelbarrow their belongings in for the summer, and pull back the curtains to let in some light. Do you hear the mythology unspooling? Are you reading this in my grandmother’s voice, papery and high, recounting the famed paternal figure but without all those ‘greats’ attached? That cabin has been a family heirloom for as many generations as my hand has fingers. It feels a little like that: like bones, like flesh, too. * I was raised there the way that children are raised mostly in the summer. July is the year breaking open, cracking in half like a great pomegranate to dirty my knees and tie knots in the hair I refused to brush. I’ve always thought of childhood as the three-hour stretch in between school and dinner time, that growing-up occurs when there are no adults around to remind you what happens when you do get older. I was a loud kid, not 25
quite bratty but adjacent to it, the kind of kid that wears teachers into the ground. I tried lots of hobbies like dancing and singing and guitar playing and pottery but nothing really stuck. I had a terrible momentum that made it hard for me to pause. My refuge, what feels like my only, was swimming. I spent lots of time in water. I used to take long baths every night my parents would let me and I would ask my mom or step-mom to wash my hair for me so I could close my eyes and feel baptized. Water has always had this quality for me. I think it was something about turning off, about gravity getting quieter and the feeling of my body escaping out from under me. It was peaceful, not saying anything, though I didn’t quite think of it like that. I’d spent a lot of my adolescence thinking that silence was the same noise as failure. Maybe swimming was practice for me, my own kind of growing up. As children, a favorite activity for me and my brother was wading into a river two cabins down from ours to see how long we could stand the cold. The river was named Hunt Creek, a zigzagged thin line on a map, a squiggle that looks more like a vein than any sort of body of water. Hunt Creek drains down from a nearby mountain, made up of snow runoff and other freezing things. It had a strangely steep incline: the bank was all big rocks and soft sand under, nothing really to grip onto or let you only walk in halfway. Just cold water flooding in from something high above, water so cold it makes it hard to breathe. We made it a game to see who could last in the impossible cold. We’d force cousins or visiting friends to play with us, finding it thrilling to subject ourselves and everyone around us to play our waiting game. There was something about the terrible tolerance that made it intriguing us, asking our bodies to wait and wait and wait, because patience was always a punchline to us and never a virtue. The trick, my brother and I decided, was just to jump into the water. No testing to feel the temperature. Just to dip our whole bodies into its freezing cold and then run away towards the lukewarm water of the lake, deceiving our skin into thinking the rest of the lake was hot. Stunning our nerves into a 26
frenzied dance of hot, cold, hot, cold. It was a game we taught ourselves, a game every child somehow independently teaches themselves, because everything about childhood rhymes, doesn’t it? Everything I thought I was alone in was really just an inevitable rite of passage. * At night we would retreat back into the cabin. My grandfather would be on his computer, loudly recounting his favorite lines from the Shouts & Murmurs section of the New Yorker to no one; my grandmother sitting in the kitchen and telling my father stories he had heard a thousand times. How in the afternoon she and her sister would be sent to the kid’s cabin, an old houseboat that was rolled onto land in the forties, and the two of them were always given a single Hershey’s chocolate bar to share. Their game was to try to go the longest time possible in between every bite, to draw the sweetness out for as much time as they could stand. My brother and I would seat ourselves at the table and ignore all the noise around us and ask will dinner be ready soon and can we please eat outside? And the food would always take longer than we expected because the stove is as old as the house and old things always take longer, it felt like, and so we’d prop our legs up on the table and count our mosquito bites and scabs until one of the adults floating around the cabin noticed our grossness and asked if we could please not do that the dinner table. And then we would sit and try not to squirm too much and wait. When we stood in the lake long enough, your teeth began to chatter and I asked if you wanted to get out. You said no but wouldn’t tell me why, and I watched you swear you were fine while your skin crawled up and your jaw stuttered against itself. We stood in the water a little bit longer, the bats dipping and bending through the thin air and your teeth crack crack crack like a heartbeat flutter. 27
It was sad, though we didn’t know it quite yet. I was leaving for college the next week and there was something melancholy mixed in with all the beauty, something about the sky canted, something about the moment too cold for you. I had to be the one to suggest we get out. I didn’t want to, at least, I didn’t really. I wanted to stay a long time. I wanted to drink in the stillness of mountain water and the swiftness of those chirping bats and the way your jaw betrayed your insisting that you were fine and listen, listen for the sound of an owl cutting through the air and wait and wait and wait until it all came back to me, the cast of my childhood, my grandfather staring upwards and the hot, cold tricking my small body. Instead we got up and dried off and you promised maybe later, when it was warmer, we could go swimming again. But it had already been cannibalized by the sourness of it all, the sweetness of its savory. The way a moment always ends too soon. The way that thyme doesn’t smell like much but will drive you crazy when you forget its name.
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PEACETIME STRIFE LEAH COLLINS
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LIGHT SEES
UNTITLED
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CHLOE ZHANG
NIA HOLTON-RAPHAEL
GRAVEYARDS I hold my breath when I pass graveyards, because even though I don’t believe in ghosts, I do believe in tradition. They are awfully similar things: never quite as you remembered and always out of reach. ISABELLE ROBINSON
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LIGHT SEES CHLOE ZHANG
UNTITLED MARG
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FOR GIRLS WHO WANT TO EAT you are sixteen, swallow the solar system. THE when call it hot or wet or violent or some other word the real poets love. in the place between your SUN ribs, hope that you are god, and remember that
god doesn’t rewrite her stories. say what you feel when it’s still raw and bleeding and untouchable. don’t let anybody read it. remember that you were born at the bottom of a swimming pool where no one could touch you and that you ate the sun as a teenage girl. relish in it. you are everything. a year later, sit on the fire escape and paint the sky vermillion and chartreuse and other pretentious shades of red. flip pedestrians the bird. you know everything. wonder if you would die if you turned a triple flip and hit the concrete. resolve that you would, but only if your head hit first. everybody always talks about what splattered brain would look like, but not the sound of it. from the fire escape, see the alley and an oily puddle from behind where the car is parked, but know that nuclear waste can’t touch you. remember you were born at the bottom of a swimming pool. close your eyes, and you are still there. say you won’t ever be small like that again. you won’t. CATHERINE O’BRIEN
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WHY RAIN FALLS TAYLOR BOGDAN
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36
UNTITLED MARG
GUTTERBALL
just dribbling, that’s all the rain there is. none left to sputter past the lip of it and simper down the street. no myriads, y’know? no branching straits in parallels braiding slicks across asphalt. just dribbling, just the pittance the gray coughed up, spats of gloss strewn here and there. just joyless puddles the city will take weeks to shed
ANJA CHIVUKULA
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WALMART, NOVEMBER FIRST I wish, on days like these, that I could go to Walmart. There’s a sanctuary of sounds and lights within the plastered brick building. Chemicals and lacy undergarments, men’s XL t-shirts hanging from high-up shelves. Long coils of garden hose, pitchforks with purple handles. The aisles are dirty from workmen boots, the footsteps of mother’s towing screaming blonde babies by their skinny wrists down plastic aisles. On the loudspeaker, someone calls Alec towards reception. There’s a horrible peace about it. The machine-made objects, the commercial alignment of products and the way it is one store yet the whole of America, too. Somewhere, where I am not, a father lifts his child into the plastic seat of a grocery cart, and that child asks for candy. A woman looks for earrings beside her aged mother, who grasps for her hand, unaware of who stands beside her. Towards reception, a large, tattooed man carries bananas in a plastic bag towards the checkout line, stopping to flip through magazines, noticing Meghan Markle’s new haircut. He spots the father whose child now screams, reddened, and the woman’s mother who wanders towards the electrical strips in aisle eight, unaware of her daughter’s frantic calls from two aisles down. The man puts his rain jacket on, noticing through the automatic glass doors that the parking lot is damp. He hopes the roads towards home don’t freeze. I wish, on days like these, November firsts, that I could go to Walmart to leave Walmart again. I like the hit of cold, the sound of cars and single mothers pulling crying babies from the flannel-lined car-seats. I like the movement of air blowing plastic against the sides of buildings. I like the smell of the wind, gasping at the edges of my bag full of coat-hangers. The cold air outside reminds me what oxygen, moisture, plants are like. There is an airiness, breathlessness, a freedom between my own car and the 38
automatic doors which lead to the fluorescent innards of the plaster building. In the parking lot, littered with cigarette butts and discarded receipts, damp and pressed against pavement, I feel myself walking and it is as if I move, both from and towards, the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. The in and out, those lights lit angrily against the darkening rain. The woman beside me leans against the shopping carts, pulling from her damp cigarette, watching the parking lot turn from grey to black. Her sides are thick with fat, but her fingers are steady against the stream of smoke which blows towards route seven. I am aware of the smell of her, and the dryness of her mouth, the sallow patches between her eyes and on the skin under her neck. I am aware of the tattoo on her wrist which reads, “SERENITY” in large, purple, cursive letters, curving slightly up her forearm where the tail of the ‘Y’ bends downward. I wonder which serenity is hers, where she finds it, if it is here, beside me, as I look for my car? Or was it found only with a boyfriend long gone, or a mother long gone, or the remembrance of a childhood, long gone, a large, cursive reminder of loss. WILLA NEUBAUER
SHADOW IRIS JIACHEN CAI
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INTRUSIVE
40
TUESDAY SMITH
SNAP CRACKLE POP GETS A BA
TUESDAY SMITH
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MAIDEN GRASS
look mother. I have your hands the thin ridge of toes Tehran at the east heel the mole of Fars beneath the hangnail. Even the barley of your laugh grows along this throat. But you say something in my field cannot that I have lost the taste for your god your gardens your gracious arsenal of acquiescence. You accuse like a brick whose powers are to bash and be broken that I am a woman of the west bridge the brown bells of my body clang at a different hour that I find lust is a fist not knees of lilies that I need and you knead. but it is not the same that my shame will last for generations all because she ate the edge of things and I only the centers. She cuts like a metal salad, still good for you even as it rips at the belly I am too tender unable to carry such sacred bitter water this daughter will leave the table cold it will empty chairs rattle rugs and fail to catch those Christ nails that somehow show how strong she is even while lying down.
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It is too late to apologize though the words would swell against her hills and dale. But I will not for I know sorry is just a word. Yet, she will forgive me when I return push past paladin plains ghost over geometric gates my feet damp across maiden grass and the short stride to her door. It will open. Her face will startle like a flock of birds doused in sunlight before wheeling back to the nest. LIDA EHTESHAMI
UNTITLED NIA HOLTON-RAPHAEL
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EDITORIAL BOARD
CLAIRE ADLER EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
ALIYAH SIMON-FELIX EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
RUCHI SHAH TREASURER
MATHILDE NIELSEN
SUBMISSIONS DIRECTOR 44
SOPHIA JAO WEBMASTER
ARIANNA SHOOSHANI LAYOUT DIRECTOR
MARY BEST
LAYOUT ASSISTANT
EDEN ROSENBLOOM
SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATOR
AMY ZHANG
EVENTS COORDINATOR
READING PANEL MARIE PAPAZIAN ANA COMAS-SHORT LUCY NARVA HANNA DOBROSZYCKI 45
SUPPORTED IN PART BY THE ARTS INITIATIVE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
47
ECHOES
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FALL 2019
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