Echoes Spring 2017

Literar y and V isual Arts Magazine Barnard College Spring 2017

VISUAL ARTS

Isabel Rivero....................................................................…..3, 8, 20 Emma Noelle.........................................................…..................…6 Mojdeh Kamaly.....................................................…............…6, 28 Omaymah Al-Harahsheh…..........................................................10 Dora Palmer….........................................................…..................12 Genevieve Nemeth........................................................................27 Caroline Wallis….........................................................….......30, 36 Eliza Siegel.........................................................…...................…32 Erin Reid….........................................................….....................33 Apolline Jonckheere.........................................................…....….35

Cover photo by Caroline Wallis Staff Page photo by Emily Kimura

WRITING

Untitled by Camille Allen…............................................................2 Blueness by Michelle Xu…..............................................................4 The Garden Shirt by Apolline Jonckheere….....................................5 We Sing Our National Anthem by Law by Radhika Shah….............7 Beautiful Envy by Olivia McCall….................................................9 “After Class Someone Asks You if You are Crazy” by Allison Yeh…....10 Happy Mess by Alex Parisi….........................................................12 Mirella’s Thumb by Joelle M. Milman….........................................13 Ankle Deep by Eliza Siegel….........................................................19 Elephants Can Laugh Like Us by Isabel Lasker…...........................21 Ode to the Midtown Pretzel by Caroline Strauss.........................…29 egg bread, twin braid by Joelle M. Milman…................................ 31 The Boars of Fukushima by Nika di Liberto Sabasteanski…...........33 Untitled by Camille Allen…..........................................................37

1

i’ve always measured my words in teaspoons, carefully. drop by drop i’ve watched each fall and wondered how they would taste on someone else’s tongue it never occurred to me that others do not live by recipes dump out cupfuls where they please care not for texture or presentation or cleanliness i wonder what it would be like to let all my words go (what could i create) CAMILLE ALLEN

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Isabel Rivero

3

Too often I’ve stood in line looking at chocolate bars and chapsticks (For Soft and Kissable Lips) and thought about the 7-11 at home with tea eggs and monolid remedies.

Who knew about White standards of beauty? I just wanted glittery blue stickers on my eyelids. Mom just wanted my eyes to be bigger.

Someone asked: do you even have eyelashes?

Overheard mom. She should have cut my eyelashes when I was younger and asleep.

Serena’s mom did – Rejoice! – and now she has thick and curly ones.

Is “New Honey Flavor” supposed to itch my lips?

Serena is wearing a yellow flannel that makes me think of cornflakes. She looks at me with her eyelashes and I feel like a droopy Eva Hesse sculpture, all my organs held up in nets, shaped like raindrops.

Staging what?

A ritual for the soft-hearted? A prairie of insecurities?

All the visitors are closing in like flies.

Forget it. Deny the clapping. Look outside to the moving blue car with palm trees curving past the windows to the taillight, then dropping off suddenly.

Triumph for the enemy.

MICHELLE XU 4

Blue and green Maman et papa Their favorite colors Side by side Stripes on a t-shirt whose fibers she vested armor for the misery-filled like chocolate for the self-indulging in her garden where she tilled her earth and told me she no longer lay parallel to green APOLLINE JONCKHEERE

5

Mojdeh Kamaly MOVERS

Emma Noelle NEYSA AT THE CHELSEA HOTEL

6

Brush off historical dust leave behind our brains at home to watch the latest Hinglish flick is not what we do.

Stand up, glare defiantly, gurgle gurgle croon Sing in Bengali what is subtitled in English thinking it is Hindi for those who sometimes speak none.

Not too well.

Stand up, glare at history say fuck you—in English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil and not Bhojpuri, never— to the indentations we left behind on our warmed over seats.

There is where we relegate hybridity when we cannot wink at ourselves in the mirror we really don’t look good.

We are native barbarians interrupted, forced to squat make our home in the butt-crack between the post and the colonial.

RADHIKA SHAH 7

8 Isabel Rivero

Since the third year of my existence, I found myself in a world divided into young girls that either “had it,� or not.

That predisposition, the ease With which their legs extended Effortlessly up to neighbor their ear Was the root of my envy.

The hours spent soaking aching muscles, Only to again sink into a Deplorable position, willing My body to just give in already.

Their beautiful bodies and languid muscles, I decided, could only stem from being left in a split in their infancy, or given a lucky gene that rendered them the ones that will be, and have always been, the champions of every breath of coveted attention.

OLIVIA MCCALL

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next page: Omaymah Al-Harahsheh, STAINED

Inspired by Lorrie Moore’s How to Become a Writer

A

ALLISON YEH

fter class someone asks you if you are crazy. Explain you ate a medley of Fruit Loops and Lucky Charms for breakfast and are fueling off of two hours of restless sleep. Explain you are an aspiring writer, and that late nights, early mornings, and crappy colorful cereals enhance your genius. Tell your ignorant classmate to go watch Discovery Channel’s Eaten Alive if she wants to see real crazy. Everyone glares at your backwards-inside out shirt, 10

convinced of your insanity. Shrug off their stares and strut out of the room, chest up, chin up. Your upcoming New York Times Bestseller novel Pride in Perjury — about a timid farm-girl who drastically leaps from a tractor, disappears, then steals Opera Winfrey’s identity — will show them.

Go home and start writing your novel. Reassure your mom of its potential. Leave out your teacher’s dissidence; lie and say he thought your plot was New York Times Bestseller worthy. Lie in the book. Make up words. Put down anything that comes to mind: sleep, sofa, cushion, food, Cheetos, sandwich. Take pity on your gurgling stomach. Get up and make a sandwich stuffed with Spicy Hot Cheetos. Assure your mom the red hot carbs fuel your creative brain. Ignore her nagging about your weight. Tell your mom to go watch Eaten Alive, and be grateful that you have not ended up consumed by a ten foot boa constrictor. Ignore your mom’s side comment, “Oh, like I have to worry, since no snake will be able to fit you in his mouth!” Lick your stained fingers with gusto.

Return to the safe haven known as your bedroom. Lock the door. Realize the isolated words abandoned on your Word Document are of no inspiration whatsoever. Rapidly tap backspace.

Decide to write about Eaten Alive instead. Change your title to Pythons in Perjury, or Pythons with Props. Or better yet, Pythons doing Pilates. Settle on: Pythons as Pirates: the Tale of Abnormally Large Snakes with No Money and No Mercy. Do a victory dance to All Star by Smash Mouth. All great writers deserve a victory dance.

Sing until your sister down the hall screams at you to “shut your pie-hole!” Shout back that you are an aspiring successful writer and therefore are exempt from any rash behavior since one day, in some distant future, your prospective New York Times Bestseller novel may, perhaps, potentially earn some form of income…unless you decide to go to law school after all.

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tell me, is it dizzying? to watch this bumbling debonair grope around with utmost grace for words nearly always half-misplaced?

ALEX PARISI

PROM Dora Palmer

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JOELLE M. MILMAN

M

irella walked down the street and thought about what it meant to have follow-through. Her shoes were white high-tops, dirty in all the right places, shoes she had rescued from a bin of old highschool stuff in her closet. She always went through old clothes, stuff of her drawers, whenever she went home. In the boxes in the closets she would find long forgotten collared shirts that smelled like the middle school cafeteria, or the sashayed scarf she would wear when playing a bellydancer in the school plays.

These Converse, in a white Thank you Mart bag, were lying at the top of the box when she unearthed and opened it. She looked at the laces for a second, dirty and frayed, woven strong. No one was home; 13

Mirella put them on and went for a walk, where she got to thinking about follow-through.

After college and she found herself back where she had started, the same streets in the same old shoes. It was fun for a while in college, there, where she planned parties and ran Instagram accounts and decided that work had meaning. And it did, for her, all the likes on the photos and the friends she made. But Mirella thought about the thesis she had wanted to write, the teachers she had wanted to meet, impress. None of the grand plans she wrote for herself had come through, and the toe of her high tops were scuffed.

Soon, she was at the old coffee shop around the corner from the bridge. It was fall again, like it was, and the green leaves were turning dark red from within. The waitress was there taking care of the shop, the orders; Mirella saw that her favorite baked treats, the pumpkin cherry scones, were back in season again.

She ordered, sat down, examined the butter knife. She looked at her teeth in the silver of the knife and thought about, maybe, flossing.

The scene was the same as it always was, which made her more happy to be there. A crotchety old man in the corner complained about the news, and tap-tap-tapped the rubbered bottom of his wood cane against the iron bar that held the table up; he grumbled and a man with long hair sighed, at a table nearby, an intellectual with thin wire glasses and a deep book he was reading, deeply. The walls still were painted in red yellow purple pink spurts of acrylic, riled up and leveled, the thick acrylic that leaves a texture and takes a while to dry. Yes, it was the same, saw Mirella, when the server arrived precariously balancing a tray of scone and thick mug.

Warm, it would be, Mirella knew, warm to the touch but not too hot to scald you, full to the surface area rim of hot drip-pot coffee.

Mirella smiled at the waitress, who smiled with her lips right back; Mirella watched as the lady walked to her spot back behind the counter, as she tapped her smartphone watch to check the time, and also, Mirella noticed, the weather. Same but different, she thought, and grabbed a chunk of her scone and shoved it on her tongue. Tasted the same as she remembered but was crunchy. It was 14

later in the day, so maybe the scones had gone stale on the pastry shelf. Do all things go stale with waiting?

Mirella shoved her thumb through the hole in her red sweater, scratched the top of one foot through the canvas Converse with the rubber toe of the other sole. She poured in heaping teaspoons of sugar and the requisite one/eighth cup of milk, because Mirella believed that milk should always come with her coffee, a perfect base to the acid of the ground beans. She realized she didn’t have a spoon—“A spoon, please” she called out to the waitress, who looked up from her wrist watch, nodded, and headed over—and thought again about follow-through and why she didn’t have any of it; what could she do with her ideas; and also how come the essence of some beans or tea leaves added to some water can have such a strong effect on a person? Are we so susceptible to easy change?

The lady brought a spoon over and Mirella stuck it in to stir and—odd. There was an object at the bottom of the mug; it had sunk down, it clunked at the bottom. It was obscured by the milk of the coffee, invisible to Mirella’s eye, which was peeking desperately into the bottom of the coffee pool. One long strand of Mirella’s hair dipped a middle section into the coffee mug; Mirella pulled it away and sucked the strand dry, because what was in the bottom of that mug?

Mirella spooned the coffee again and felt the object move around, clunk around the sides of the cup, moving against the strength of the waves of the coffee. It was long, she thought, about the length of the coffee cup in diameter; it was wide like a coin, she realized, and spherical, a long straw. She thumbed it through the spoon a few times, felt it turn through the bottom of the cup, the coffee splashed over the side of the rim—

Suddenly suspicious: Mirella leaned her head over the cup until her chin was resting on the rim on the mug: her shoulders crouched up, her hands gripping the sides of that warm thick ceramic. A falcon in the sky somewhere over a national park soared with wide wings as it hunted its prey, and Mirella imagined the falcon and hunted her object, too, and in her mind she heard, from somewhere, a long and high m’caw.

She wished for a sip of coffee to clear her mind, give 15

insight, but to drink was to affect the environment of her secret, special, spherical object; to order a new one was to give the same away.

Mirella, crouched on the mug. No one gave her a second glance. Mirella, hyped on mystery, registered the outside light against the pastry bar mirror, the mother whose child was looking intently at the flyer for drum lessons on the floor. The flyer for drum lessons on the floor; hadn’t her brother taken those classes once?

No matter, no matter, mind over matter, Mirella thought: follow-through. What is on the bottom of the cup, she thought, what is this? She felt it again with her stirring spoon; round, spherical, the length of the cup in diameter, she reached her thumb up to her mouth to chew on the nail when

Gasp! Mirella knew what it was: it was a thumb at the bottom of her coffee cup.

And with this pronouncement, Mirella claimed herself Queen of Sheba. And she would take the thumb out for all to see.

And the store would give her free coffee for all time in commemoration of the found thumb. And she would create an art piece of it and it would gain critical acclaim immediately, and that famous art critic from The New Yorker would post sardonically about it on his Instagram, and he would ask her questions like How ever did you know it was a thumb in your coffee and she would smile coyly and say Well, I have always been possessed with the most very natural of detective skills, but it was really the influence of my mother that inspired me to find and create this thumb today.

No one in the coffee shop gave her a glance, but Mirella was Queen and she knew it, that was that. She noticed the knot on one of her Converse shoes has slipped to the side a little, so she adjusted the tongue of the shoe with her fingers.

Now, she would extract the thumb:

A thumb was about to emerge from her coffee cup!! Where was the evening news!!

It took three acts of balancing the thumb upon the spoon when, as the waitress from behind the counter went to take an order and happened to walk by the very table where Mirella sat, 16

finally Mirella pulled out, from the depths of her deepest coffee cup, mug of caffeine, and promises of follow-through towards the art career she had promised herself she would make after college, grandly—a carrot.

“Oh god, a carrot?!” The waitress, who saw the orange cylinder come out of the milky coffee depths, said. “My my. I guess the ingredients to our carrot cake got loose again,” she said, with somewhat uncharacteristic ease. “Here—let me take that from you. I’ll get you a new one.” And she took the mug out of Mirella’s curled thumb and headed back into the kitchen.

Mirella was still crouched. She put the soggy piece of hair from before back in her mouth. (Is this what the thumb had tasted like?) Was it a thumb or a carrot in her coffee?

A Thumb it was, it was, she decided decisively; it was a thumb and the waitress had taken it away. Mirella noticed a shoe had come untied, so she hoisted one knee up, rested the other shoe on a chair to tie the tie that would hold the shoes together.

“Oh—miss, please don’t put your shoes on the chairs,” the waitress said as she came back with Mirella’s new coffee.

The Converse slipped back onto the floor, and Mirella’s head probably nodded blindly. Mirella chewed another chunk of her thumbnail and stirred the coffee—no thumbs in there, this time. She drank the coffee exceedingly fast and felt the caffeine take hostage of her head, her skull suddenly behind bars. Her thumbnail came up to her teeth and she began to bite, bite, bite.

She finished the scone and bit her nail until the white ridge was gone and the little nail filigrees were littered on the floor. She bit the side of her cuticle until it bled; she tried to write in her notebook, but nothing came. She bit her nail more and smeared some blood on the notebook pages. The old man kept tap-taptapping his cane against the iron side of his opinions on the news until Mirella lost it, bit down hard enough on the side of her nail to swallow a chunk of skin, lost it and left a 10$ bill on the table and stalked straight out of her home-town coffee store.

On the way home, Mirella bit her pinky nail and thought about follow-through. She could still make thumb art and be famous, she reasoned, if only the story won’t be as good. Mirella 17

always had other nails to bite. She bit them on her walk home, on her walk home in her Converse.

Two houses away from home and a rock got caught in the rubber bottom of the shoe. Mirella sat down criss cross applesauce and took the shoe right off; shook it in the air to free the pebble.

The pebble was freed. Her socks were white, up to her ankle, cleaner than the Converse that would never go in the wash.

Her thumb was bleeding again; she staunched it on the sock, then on the flap of the tongue of the Converse she had taken off.

You know what? She took off the other one, too. She took it off and walked home in her socks and dumped the shoes in the trashcan that stood waiting for the trucks to come pick it up, take the trash out of the house. There was no reason to resurrect those from the high school box, anyway. And she should’ve just drunk the thumb in the coffee, too. Her cat was waiting for her behind the curtained window to her house; it waited in the window’s sun.

Mirella took her key out and wondered if there was an answer to follow-though. She made a move to turn the key in the lock and missed; tried again, and made it.

The cat never came out from the other side of the curtain; Mirella went to her room. Maybe some things are better remembered obscured.

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we shed our clothes down to our underthings, poked toes and then limbs into the murky summer stream and fished for tadpoles with pale fingers, bent by water they slipped through the spaces where webs used to be, wriggling away with writhing tails back into the clouds of sand they came from and we were left, ankle-deep in mud, with more freckles (but fewer frogs) than before.

ELIZA SIEGEL

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Isabel Rivero

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ISABEL LASKER

O

n a Wednesday in May my father calls from California to tell me that he’s dying.

He’s a man of science, my father, an atheist in every sense of the word. It’s not that he doesn’t see the value in religion it’s just that he finds it all generally ridiculous. He was the only parent in my middle school class to skip every Bar Mitzvah ceremony but always attend the party, laughing to himself alone at the fondue bar. *

A few months after that phone call in May I go into his bedroom. My mother is looking around the room for a place to put the two-foot orchid Debbie has brought over. Debbie is our rich friend whose husband owns a Toyota dealership and encourages her to spend their money like charity, so she does. (Over the course of the next year Debbie will bring: a combined total of twenty five pounds of See’s candies, a dozen full course meals, a masseuse, and a new large orchid at the start of each month. She will also give us box tickets to the Rose Bowl that we won’t use.)

He is lying down on the bed with his eyes shut but I know he isn’t sleeping because you can’t sleep on poison (this is what we call chemotherapy). His skin has yellowed and his lips have lost their color. His eyelids are purple and his hands have those dark red splotches on them from all his dead blood cells, the splotches only very old people get, the ones already on their way out. In a few weeks he’ll go in for a procedure with a one in three survival rate.

Dad, I say, shaking him lightly. I have really good news. His 21

eyes are still closed but he raises his eyebrows. About your transplant. The odds are a lot better than we thought. I’m beaming, as if he can see my face through his closed eyes.

My mother looks over at me. He’s out of it, sweetie. Let him rest.

I think of my next words slowly. I look at the man who doesn’t believe in God or religion or coincidence or magic. I look at the man I don’t recognize anymore. And then I tell him that in our rashness we switched the survival rate for the mortality rate. I tell him that instead, odds are two in three he’ll live through the procedure rather than die.

Really, I say. You have to believe me.

That evening my mother and I shuck corn in the kitchen to Rumours. We sway our hips and she sings Stevie’s high notes.

Sometimes it feels strange to be happy, if only for a few minutes.

My father walks into the kitchen, out of bed for the first time all day. He is different, at least there is an air of difference about him.

The light in his eyes against the sickness in his face is remarkable.

He walks up to my mother and kisses her on the forehead.

*

My father’s given name is Albert but he changed it legally when he was eighteen to Alex. I don’t think he changed it because it sounds better, though it does, but because of the feelings associated with the time in his life that he was Albert.

His father was devoid of any compassion; any emotion really, just anger. He drank like a German and took mistresses out of boredom. He had a son with his secretary who my father only found about a few years ago. He raced thoroughbred horses and had friends in the mafia. He didn’t see his children except when, each evening, he would make them draw his bath, sitting in the other room with a glass of scotch watching the little boys correct the water temperature.

My father’s mother was an actress. Her real name was Betty but the studios changed it to Jane to make her a more marketable commodity. She was glamorous, swallowed up by fur coats and bright lights and red lipstick. Sometimes she even wore a prosthetic calf to make her legs more shapely. She was a baby 22

herself when she started having babies, twenty and hiding her stomach on the set of her first noir. My father never saw her really, only to say goodnight in the evenings before bed. His most vivid memory of her is her perfume, a musky talcum sort of smell.

He lived with his younger brothers and a governess in the nursery; they were only allowed to play in the main house when called to by their father. There were a few governesses over the years but most notable was a woman named Edna Brown. Edna Brown was short and stalky like a little Hungarian man, pockmarked from her face to her toes and hefty in the arms and thighs. She would smoke two to three packs of cigarettes a day and sometimes she’d cough up blood. Edna Brown would get drunk and angry and take to beating the shit out of him because he was the oldest so he could take it. Once Edna Brown held him up by his collar against a brick wall and kneed him in the groin repeatedly until he’d cry.

For his sixth birthday he received a bicycle, which he’d ride to an alcove of trees behind a parking lot designated for the butlers.

He pretended he was driving his car home from work. There, in a little hutch beneath the trees, he had created an imaginary family, a wife and two children. They ate dinners together and read books aloud and talked about school. He kissed them and hugged them and then he would tuck them into bed and love them the way he thought a father should. He’d wait until they fell asleep before returning on his bicycle to the isolated corner he occupied in the nursery.

My mother says it’s a miracle he even got married and had kids at all, which might not be an overstatement. You’d understand why this was if you knew his brothers. One of them, Larry, has had five DUIs and will never get behind the wheel of a car again. My parents tell me that Larry hasn’t had sex in twenty years because he’s damaged. Larry smokes cigarillos and used to produce movies but he screamed on too many sets so that didn’t work out very well for him. We don’t see him anymore because he and my father can’t be in the same room but he calls me on my birthday sometimes.

The other of my father’s brothers drinks a lot less but is in fact a much sadder character, probably the saddest character in my life. Steven lives alone in a red house three blocks from the beach 23

but he hasn’t been to the beach in a decade. He smokes pot from the moment he wakes up in the morning until the moment he goes to sleep and in between then he sits alone in his living room staring at the seven-foot stereo he has spent his lifetime doctoring, listening to the only music he has ever loved and will ever love, which is jazz. He has no family except us and he hasn’t ever had a job so I don’t really know who he sees during his days. My father says probably no one. Steven thinks the government is after him so he doesn’t have a telephone but I hear he might be getting an email soon.

Another fact about my father: he swims in the ocean every day between the months March and October, sometimes even into November, stopping only when it’s absolutely unbearable. After he swims in the ocean he comes home and makes himself a margarita, usually exactly at six in the evening. These margaritas are as constant to me as daylight. His are the real ones, with real Triple Sec and real Rose’s lime juice, none of that knockoff margarita mix.

He makes them on the rocks and salts the rim of his glass, and he only uses one type of glass—not the type Mexican restaurants use with the big open rim but a lowball, the classy type you’d put whisky in.

Sometimes as a kid I would go with him to the beach after school and we’d swim all the way out passed where the waves broke, before I was scared. I’d hold my breath and dive down to grab a handful of sand as proof that I’d made it and my ears would pop on the way back up. We’d float on our backs and hope to see dolphins but usually we never would.

One day I became scared of how deep the ocean was, what could have been down there. For years I stopped going with him at all. *

Its April, a month before he will call me and tell me that he’s dying. He’s visiting me at school; staying with his Republican golf friend in an apartment with too much pastel. We go to the Natural History Museum because he doesn’t know much of Manhattan but he does know that.

We walk around the African Mammals wing slowly like 24

we’re seeing it for the first time. He takes a photo of me in front of the elephants. Elephants can laugh like us, he tells me.

We decide to move to the second floor for the Asian Mammals. We walk up the stairs and I start to tell him a story about my roommate’s boyfriend who sleeps naked and makes his own Kombucha. He doesn’t respond so I turn around and find him kneeling at the base of the stairs, grabbing the railing as if about to faint. His face is sweaty and white and there’s a sort of primal look in his eye, like an animal aware its being stalked.

*

A few weeks after that phone call in May we drive, the family, to the cancer doctor, a man called Doctor Piro. Doctor Piro is the best cancer doctor in all of West L.A., the cancer doctor, even, for the stars. I search which celebrities he’s treated on the car ride over but apparently Google doesn’t give you that information.

The waiting room is underwhelming, nothing like the movies. In the movies everyone is asleep or crying or staring blankly at the wall; the camera pans to the slow ominous drip of something that resembles rodent blood more than actual chemo.

Really it’s a lot less dramatic. Most patients have headphones in and some of them even bob their heads to the music like normal humans. They drink slushies from 7/11 and sometimes the women paint their fingernails. In fact, I think it would be offensive to cry in this waiting room.

The most plasticized man in all of Santa Monica glides into the room to greet us. He wears tight leather pants and black leather loafers with a gold G on the toes and he doesn’t wear a doctor’s coat. His hair is like hot wheat, a sort of singed blonde mop swooped into a little nest on the side of his head.

I’m Doctor Piro, he says, reaching to shake our hands. Just call me Piro. He smiles with what little muscles still function in his jaw.

I watch Piro’s face contract and expand as he explains to us in dummie terms that if my father wants to live more than six months he needs a bone marrow transplant. He spits facts at us in a solemn tone but it’s hard to concentrate when there’s so much to look at.

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That evening my father comes down to the kitchen and makes his margarita. I tell him to make enough for me and we sit with our drinks in a long silence. He looks at nothing for a while until finally he clears his throat. He’s been reading online about transplants, he tells me. Odds are one in three he’ll live, he tells me.

At dinner that night over a meal none of us touches he puts his head in his hands and he cries. I don’t remember the last time he’s cried. *

One week before the transplant I go with him to the beach every afternoon the way we used to. I tell him I’m not scared of the deep anymore, even though I don’t mean it. We swim all the way out past where the waves break and float on our backs while we wait for dolphins. And for a minute I really don’t feel scared at all.

*

A year from that night in the kitchen shucking corn, after the poison and the transplant and the months of blue limbo, I will drive him back to the plastic doctor. He’ll sit on a sterile yellow chair as an overly talkative nurse tells him that he’s a miracle. You really beat the odds. I mean, jeez, these things are so scary. But you did it! Lucky one in three. Someone up there’s lookin out for ya.

He looks over at me from the chair. There’s a look in his eyes I don’t recognize. I think for a moment that maybe it’s wonder.

She’ll stick some needles in his arm and give him a series of vaccinations. These are his baby shots, she says; welcome to the world, baby Alex.

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13

Genevieve Nemeth

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BABY’S BREATH

Mojdeh Kamaly

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29 CAROLINE STRAUSS

If I am struck down crossing Broadway I would not be remiss For there is no such finer fate Than your sweetly salted kiss.

30 Caroline Wallis

To braid a bread begin by moving upwards, melting lines of yeasted dough of meticulous blending by moving upwards berating the shape of dough of meticulous blending which rises in leavened breaths creating the shape by the way this works according to form which rises in layered breaths at first, and the way this works according to form is the second becomes the first, and third becomes the last the second becomes braided, tug of the yeast at the third becomes the last while moving upward, braided, each tug of the yeast finishes the line while moving upward; to braid a bread, begin.

JOELLE M. MILMAN 31

Eliza Siegel

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I read in the Times that the boars of Fukushima have returned to the city limits and they are radioactive.

They showed pictures of them standing boldly at gas stations and in the empty, love-less bedrooms with glass-less windows, curtains splayed open toward the radioactive breakers and the radioactive sun, care-less like they hold no memory of the glass they used to cover or the man who slept in the bedroom without the boars of Fukushima angling for burnt rice or a mildewed cushion.

Art

wo

rk by E

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And evidently, the former, surviving residents of Fukushima have asked the government of Japan to give the town to the wild, radioactive boars.

Their ghosted streets and banks, the coastline and its boulders.

They only wish they could take their ancestors with them, but the boars of Fukushima will guard the ancestors, as a condition of their residency, their squat, radioactive bodies patrolling the radioactive dust of the elders while the lampposts sputter out and the glowing, icy Pacific tides lap the tired sand without memory it would seem of what they’ve done.

NIKA DI LIBERTO SABASTEANSKI

GIRL ON SWING Apolline Jonckheere

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Caroline Wallis

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little one why do the words on the scare you, when before they offered shelter

page

this is where we were born this is where we will die take refuge.

CAMILLE ALLEN

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Aurian Carter Layout and Design Director

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