/BREE-oh/, noun
Vivacity, spirit, an individual energy.
The discipline of Comparative Literature is based on the assumption that the study of single texts and cultures is enriched by a knowledge of the texts and cultures surrounding them. It views literature from a broad and inclusive perspective in which philosophy, anthropology, history, language, and literary theory come together, and where the visual arts, theatre, and modern media suggest crucial comparisons. This journal aspires to embody those ideas.
Brio is a student-founded publication that combines literary criticism with fictive works and visual art. In an effort to represent the wide spectrum of discourses that serve as the foundation of comparative study, the journal accepts submissions from any source and in any language.
A Note from the Editors-in-Chief
phe·nom·e·na
/fəˈnämənə/
1. plural form of phenomenon.
phe·nom·e·non
/fəˈnäməˌnän,fəˈnäməˌnən/
noun
1. a fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen, especiallyonewhosecauseorexplanation isinquestion.
2. PHILOSOPHY: the object of a person's perception; what the senses or the mind notice.
You don’t need two journal editors – undergrads, no less to tell you we live in exceptional times – if you’re awake, you already know. The future threatens daily to foreclose our old systems of knowing, leaving us scrambling for new ways to make sense. Make, of course, in the sense of creation as well as clarification. When we were assembling this issue of Brio,weknewthat comparative literature’s interdisciplinary, intercultural, intertextual ethos might mean there’s no easy line to trace through this collection. Yet we observed that taken in aggregate, these works and their works and their writers – and perhaps all works and all writers – gesture toward a shared concern with phenomena. Some contain strange, exceptional, and unexplained events, or the consequences thereof. Others share a spirit with phenomenology, taking as their themes consciousness, observation, and the objects of direct experience. Together they show that even in the most disorienting times – to say nothing of the undergraduate experience – what we all have (sometimes all we have) – is our perception.
Phenomenafound its way to English in the late 16th century, a descendent via late Latin from the Greek phainomenon,or ‘thing appearing to view,’ in turn a daughter of phainein : to show. Briofound its way to you through careful consideration, and we hope that what we have to show for it will give you plenty to perceive in the days to come.
Angelina Fay and Halsey Hazzard Editors-in-Chief
S.L. Fritsch, AshestoFeathers……………………8
Amari Brown, TheFlowofHoney……...…..……9
Brittany Abou-Suleiman, Sweetland………...…..13
Rebecca Karpen, HighwayGodsandAliens…….19
l. wootton, dictatingpersonhood……..….………24
Anthony Scelza, Bruises…………………...….....26
Christina Manubag, Germ……………...……….31
Daughter…………………………………32
David A. Foley, GordianNot………………...….33
LotusEaters………………...……………35
C.R. Stern, ThisOldEarth………...……………36
Gabriela Velasco, SoifdeVivre……...…………..43
Angelina Fay, Takeit……………………………45
Jackie Yang, WithinReach………………...…….47
AEulogytoSensation……...………...….48
Tothedisheveledyoungmansittingnextto me…………………..…………………….49
Halsey Hazzard, All-One!....................................50
47th AnnualEdgertonTobaccoHeritage Days…………….………………………..51
Daniela Salazar, Mama,esquehasvistomucha muerte……………………………………………52
AMartianSendsaPostcardHome#2…..54
Natalie Behrends, WemgehörtdieWelt?............55
Whitt Van Tassell, Lapis…………………..…….57 Terminus…………………………………58
“BAYO,” SARiaH BUNKER
PHENOMENA
ASHES TO FEATHERS
S.L. FRITSCH
it was the winter when love was too heavy to carry, so you swallowed it, washed it down with the words you couldn’t figure out how to say. the winter when you learned a new form of forgetting yourself: cremation, you called it.
those were the months when you always ate alone and read books you didn’t like, when you lost the list of people to call and couldn’t remember your own name. you lived in photographs and wore socks sewn with sorrow and dreamt in hues of orange, slept in the kitchen and cried on christmas.
in the spring you learned the word resurrection when your feat sank into april’s soft earth. it felt nice to get un-stuck again with every step, to drift to a place that wasn’t heaven, just somewhere in between somewhere next to close to somewhere close to happy.
The Flow of Honey
Amari Brown
Sista always talked through clouds of smoke. Her Strawberry Mist filled the room; the haze and the heat weighed the morning air. She patted the couch and told me come sit for a spell. I asked her how long a spell was and she laughed once, a big round shape that disrupted the little row of circles marchin’ from her mouth in tightly formed rings. I climbed into her warmth where she held me close. Told me about the adventure of love and heartbreak. Doyougetwhat I’mgettin’at,honey.I told her yes. Of course, I knew nothing.
She said it starts with roses. No,sweetthing,notin yourhands,inyourheart.And in your belly. Betweenyour ribs,baby.And in your lungs. Promises,promises.So full of roses that everythin’ else just gets in the way. You start thinkin’ that you can take apart the world to make more space. But the only world you have is your own. Her voice was a rupture, the act of losin’ air. Took her breath away. Yeah darlin’,theyalwaysdo.
There were three of us, Sista, Mama and I. But when we were together, we were one beautiful body, twistin’ in pain. In pleasure. We were a firepit, one flame gesticulatin’ at the sky. One pile of wet soot when it ended. I danced and died with her and her. Their love was more real to me than
anything I had ever known. I thought I was ready for whatever came next.
Time skips on a record. When we emerged from spells and Cotton Candy smoke, dusk had broken and spilled powder ink over the hills and valleys. It settled slow. Sista nodded at the door. Timetogobreakhearts,love.I went to the bar alone. Well, not quite. The radio crooned, moaned, hissed. We spoke in a language only the two of us knew.
When I arrived, the lot was near empty. I clutched myself in the dark and cool and didn’t let go until I found my place between the curtains. For all the dirt the world has to thrown, here was the ache of anticipation, the fever, the sting of a clarified beauty. I bathed in it.
“Please welcome, Ms. Darla Summers.” Clap,clap. Still too early for a real audience, but the stage still welcomed me home. The sun was risin’ on my face, two steady white lights. From ‘fro to feet, I was all curve, my outline stretched across the cherry wood behind me in two dark slants. When I breathed in, I was full. My voice came roarin’ over the microphone, a torrential flood. It washed away every dark corner, carved out patterns in souls, erodin’. Knocked down glass and tabletops. Then
You came floatin’ in on the debris.
Fingers hung down from your cool, blue jeans. Teeth glowin’ white. Me, smoothin’ down my notes, tryna pretend
that I didn’t see. Sung to anyone else, but my words, unbidden, reached out to touch you.
When the last song ended, I shook you off like a dog. Theyalldogs.You tried to find me. I tried not to find you. I wasn’t playin’ games. Honest. But I still wanted to win.
I didn’t though. Did I? When the weeks rolled and I learned to look for you in the darkness? You were always in the crowd, waitin’ to catch my wanderin’ eye. Wasn’t as full as I thought. Not when there was still room for a flutter. Not when I started achin’ for
“Roses.” You smiled. Pressed them to my hands. “Just thought it would be a shame if no one else was givin’ you any,” you said. Lookin’ down and through your lashes. Swipin’ your thumb across your lip. Likeyouwouldfallthateasy.Humph.
When I went home, I hid the bouquet in the closet. Without the light, each flower wilted and withered. Didn’t matter. There were always more. “You know I got you.” Come on,Darla.I heard Sista’s voice. Protectin’ me. Wegottabe morecarefulthantheyis.Always.Tryna speak over the steady beat of
Lovelovelovelovelove
You talked smooth. Looked at me like you saw so much. Funny, since that was the first thing you took from me. My ability to see clear. I took what I needed, too. We were tradin’ parts like kids trade cards. Your arm for my leg. My secrets for your affection. For the first time, I noticed how the
sidewalks glittered in the day. At first, it was easy to ignore the cracks.
Thestorydoesn’tchange,kindness . I know what she wanted. “Who was she?” She wanted to dance with me. “I know what I saw. Quit tryna play me.” She wanted to die with me. “Leave. Why don’t you just go?” I was playin’ a game, alright. A dangerous one. “What you cryin for? Ain’t nobody tryna play you.” Squeezed my wrists too tight. “Come here.”
Kissed my forehead. Held me while I shook. Took my breath away.
No longer one body, three souls. I was two shadows. One of us loved. The other waited. For your eyes to descend from the heavens. Waited. For each rose to be plucked from my chest. Waited. For the sky to fall and the moon to crash land. All the while the other bathed in the dawn.
SWEETLAND
CLOSE TO HOME
Fat drops of moisture littered the highest point of her forehead, and Senna clumsily wiped them away as she peered upward. The tree was sick. Senna could tell because its trunk had matured into a sad, blistered grey and what was left of its corbeau leaves had begun to dry into crumbled foliage. The ones that remained hung like small bats.
With her finger suspended in the air she traced the bluish mold that infested its trunk. Hovering insects flooded her mother’s garden. A mosquito buzzed past her ear and she pulled her arms inside her sweater to shield herself. Her narrow eyes met the looming tree again then traveled to the yard across from hers, which was divided by a chain link fence. Coiled around the fence was a web of ivy, still green and lush. Past the fence was the home of one of her neighbors, an old man whose name she did not know. His windows, which almost never took light, rested directly across from hers. Weeds surmounted his yard but this was something that had never changed. She could remember when the brick was fresh in its greenish color, just barely discernible from his untended land, a cousin. Then as the hot summers did, they aged and dirtied its coat so that it no
longer blended with the foliage but stood obvious in its unsightliness, dirtier than the dirt surrounding it. If her mother were still alive she would say, “Senna, look at that poor home. Look how weary it is. Don’t you think we should tell him to let it go?” She would stare at it with those sad eyes, seeing life radiate in the most unlikely of things. So childlike and warmspirited in a way that even her own daughter could not understand.
Now, in the buzz of autumn, Senna sat observing the three windows that had always faced the home where she had grown up. On the second floor were two badly weathered shutters that hung from their nails, their brown paint peeled imperfectly. They grated softly against the grimy brick when the wind gusted. On the first landing was a single oval window fashioned horizontally which was divided into squares by small strips of wood, almost like the mouth of a scolding grandmother. The more Senna observed the home, the more its architecture formed sunken features of a grim face.
The old man who lived there had only appeared a handful of times before. A number, which aside from his thin white hair wasn’t enough to concoct a vision of his face. Senna thought of him to be a dull man, rising quietly from sleep in one of the worn shirts that hung from his clothesline in the fall. Most often she would wake to the soft ring of his pulley as he dragged his clothes into the darkness beyond his shutters, his shirts faded and worn. The sun played into the mystery, always
shining between them like a perfect arc, rendering it nearly impossible to peer inside. Thus she had to compensate: perhaps he would prepare eggs, unsalted with a slice of buttered toast for himself and his wife. Sipping his black coffee, he would shuffle over to paint the wooden moldings of his home, his sock occasionally snagging a nail in his floor. Most of this she had fictionalized something Senna liked to do for people, her own little gift. The woodwork was true; he had been painting nearly all of the times she could make him out on the second floor as she watered her mother’s flowers, high above her backyard. A few times she had noted the smooth back and forth rhythm of his arms, at least that is what she could make of his shadow. She wondered how she looked down there from his eyes, high above.
SHE ENTERS
Senna could not stop her mother’s hose from submerging her shoes in shallow, muddy water. Serdon had made a fruitless attempt of refurbishing it by attaching an old faucet as its head but it had recently begun drooling at its base each time she watered the buds that remained from her mother’s garden in the quickly cooling weather. Surrounding her ankles were a party of slugs dark and fat with mucus searching aimlessly for water. Senna didn’t know if slugs could
drown but she fastened her fingers like forceps and plucked one of the sticky creatures from a puddle of water and posted him softly on the rim of a flowerpot. Then something was tumbling out of the sky and it wasn’t apparent until it splashed into the ground with a faint plop and Senna pivoted in surprise. Like a perfect jellyfish, a nucleus of something lustrous, the center of the puddle gleamed silver. She bent down to the ground and slipped her fingers inside the puddle to discover a bracelet embellished with a small green stone, dripping in hose water. It twinkled in her hand and the strangest feeling of intimacy bubbled within her and by that time the most pitiful groan erupted from the soil and in seconds the thing was colossal. Senna whipped her head up as her beloved sycamore tree cracked and stretched farther over her garden like a possessed and bony body, clusters of leaves forming a stupendous shadow that enveloped sunlight entirely. Its branches flailed and threw soil that trickled with a dark red substance, uprooted vines heaving as they clung to its branches like threatened by a great fear of heights. It swelled and sprouted, relentlessly tearing its limbs from the dirt and unearthing fat centipedes and the blackest of worms and snapping insects that soared through the air and slapped the fence with such force that it compelled its wooden beams to their sides, the carcasses of beetles and spiders splayed like abstract. The bark of the plant peeled back in a sickly manner and high above and between the foliage exposed a pale, skin-
like membrane that throbbed within the trunk. It was a heaving creature, expanding outward until it stopped and the birds hummed and screeched as their nests flitted down towards the ungodly mess of dirt, and flowers and it was silent for a moment and the delicate bracelet lay cold in her hand.
A great whistle shattered the air as the thing shot its roots down like limbs of some overgrown vermin, as if to snatch the young girl’s body and shoot her off far into the sky. Instead the fat veins plowed into the very garden before her, groaning and churning under the soil until it had conceived a gargantuan curvature of entwined roots fit for some extraneous being living or dead to pass through. There stood before her a brooding entryway, for which between muddy walls laid a bizarre road. Far beyond the dark, a neon sign twinkled:
SWEETLAND
Senna’s cigarette sizzled upon landing on the ground of the garden. In the now darkness, smoke plumed from its lit end and curled around her ankles like a small snake prompting her to enter and she shifted slightly in her shoes. She strained her neck trying to grasp the unimaginable magnitude of the plant, her heel crunching against the dead leaves that were now entirely missized against the enormous foliage that dangled high above her body. It was nearly black and beckoning, birds swirling around its crown from down here the size of gnats. She stood up, a child ahead of the mouth of a beast, plagued by some blood-warming sensation that conspired her entrance. Senna
closed the clasp of the bracelet around her wrist and stepped through the doorway.
She traced her hand along the dirt walls of the underpass, mud mashing under her shoes. The cracked sign now swung softly above her head and at the end of the filthy system of roots and webs was a rotted wooden door that stood waiting for her hand. She gripped its rusted handle and could see the bracelet glowing crimson under the luminous beacon of some other universe absolutely. She turned back with a sudden sense of dread and it was as if the tree could sense it because it was closing in on itself, roots reaching for each other across the narrow tunnel, a lattice that blocked all ways but onward. Go on, the bracelet breathed, and Senna pushed the door open.
Highway gods and aliens
Rebecca karpen
I've been waiting for a while Since I ran off from the aisle. That collared dress Was cutting me Off.
I've been sitting in Seattle, Well, Ain't that half the battle, Knowing yourself Well enough To be leaving When the lights've grown too Hot?
My toenails are broken, My shirt's ripped right open, I've been chewing off The sides of my Lip.
Heard the beasts in the alley Call themselves “Bonnie” and “Sally,” And offering to take Me
On a trip. "Ooh, well me? I'll go AnyWhere!" I Quipped.
listenhere
Bonnie used to be a sculptor 'Fore she learned to please a man,
But should've Known that that was coming, Was always so good with her hands. He broke into her kitchen, threw her art out on the floor. Left her cash As she was Running out the door. Now she's been Hiding from That bristled buck And working as A Whore.
Sally's not much of a talker, She's been knitting Bon a scarf To cover up the scar On her lip So men can't see it In the dark. She smiled at a novelist Then he left her In the snow.
Now she's got two scarves Drawn up on her wrists, Calls 'em
“Marlon” And I think “Brando”.
We drove off to Michigan Not knowing Where to run.
I've been thinking for a while Of my father And his gun. Firing it
At the folks Who he said had been disturbed, Clawing At the buildings And mangling Their words.
When I was down in Michigan, Said they could leave me here. Went into a dusked motel, Showed them my bra For a beer. The owner, Well he's a narcissist And likes kicking at the rocks, When he's not sitting At the poolside And admiring His socks.
I walked from there To Illinois, Where I grew up In the fall, But got paralyzed And incontinent When I saw the shadows On the wall. I slept down In a field that night, Not knowing where to hide. Is he still running off To get me?
I will not Become his bride.
I guess someone must have
Told the man, I was resting in the corn, Woke up To a stark black colony Standing on my hair, Badge And hat Adorned. They brought me in To see the worst as all my faith was shorn, Tendered into Some kind of smock, Delivered to The devil's First son born. His teeth were crooked And out of sync, He laughed As if to clear the air. But it only caused me to cough And hardened Up The atmosphere. He chuckled as I was sputtering, "Why, you look worse for wear, Didn't know you Still liked To run. Now come on Back my dear, You've been burnt up By the sun".
I turned to barrel Out the door But their forearms All were cocked.
He said "oh c'mon here darlin' See I'd only like to talk. You've got blood on your wedding gown, You thought You had knocked Me off?
Honey child, Your mind is a barricade, From things you can't Abscond".
There are highway gods And aliens, I've been praying to them Since they shut me up In the clink. Don't know if I believe in 'em Anymore. In truth, I've gained more From the kitchen sink. I hear them sometimes, Wandering, Catch the curtness in their words Bout two girls who died out west And a balding motel manager, All strangled By Some sort Of bridal Dress.
DICTATING PERSONHOOD
l.wootton
I don’t remember my dreams, his face staring at me from the darkness, tiny rabbit I think I’m ok with being just meh. I don’t speak Italian, but this is a chain restaurant.
Friday
My friend Ayaka touched me, in class, embodying her monologue before me
...I bleed into what will come after me.” world where time and space are defined never empty, incoherent, and forgetful…” the pain of losing you.
You: The single human being… that you are ”
Words ,
we use noises and movement and words , to communicate, I want to hold her close and I find it hard to explain I wonder if you feel it, but I remember his cold fingers inside me and dull pain, my body shivered ( those…. In nature these days it is cold too, I have to face the wind tunnels. I miss the warmth of spring. I miss it all . no coat and must bundle up, layers of sweaters, those…. were not orgasms, the AC was on too high.) and there is no pleasure only shock,
the same. Physical ecstasy, I tried to feel... never let her go,,,, I love you in a way.
[ ] come to new understandings of what it means that you are.” Ayaka and I talk without , “No I couldn’t, if ever I tried, quantify you before you or I arrived -- it is uneven, time... “Quantifying death does not quantify pain“ Friday “I am a vessel of what came before me and I bleed into what will come after me.”
Shrimp scampi with spinach last night, I, being stalked by an invisible panther; the only dreams I remember are the nightmares, address the underlying depression I have lived with crushing bleakness my therapist says it’s late to all my scheduled activities, as per usual. I wore the same clothes for two days, and ,
BRUISES
ANTHONY SCELZA
When I wake up in the morning it's two in the afternoon. My apartment is always empty, free of food, and furniture, and roommates. I live at the bottom of a crumbling old building in the Bronx and my window faces the street. At night, the tree-lined block is quiet, and a man without a home sleeps on the steps inside of the building because the door doesn't lock. I look at him and feel warm inside.
It's Monday and I remember that this week will be like the others. I'll work a minimum wage job for thirty, or sometimes, forty hours. And then I'll sit in class for another eighteen. I'll read books too quickly and sprint through the places where things don't make sense. I'll rise before the sun and drift back into sleep on the 4 train, spread across a seat, or leaning, not really standing, against a cold metal pole. I'll wake up again, on a park bench, or to the sound of a blaring horn and car tires screeching to a halt. I'll pass beautiful women on the street and imagine what it might be like to share a bed, and then I'll call my girlfriend and tell her that I love her. I'll struggle to pay my bills on time. Maybe, I'll decide against quitting my job. I'll think about taking out a loan. I'll think about increasing my hours at work, and then I'll think about something else.
When I was five, I asked my mother where my father was. She told me they hadn't gotten married, and that he lived
far away in South America. A year later came my first memory of him. The company my mother had been working for underwent a restructuring, and she'd lost her job. My father lived with us for a month, maybe more, maybe a little less. I don't recall. Two years later, we visited him where he lived and worked as a waiter, on a cruise ship in southern Florida. We went to Disney World, and one day decided to eat breakfast as a family. I must've said or done something wrong, because my father's entire demeanor changed, and it frightened me. He said some things and stormed out and I haven't seen him since. My mother asked a cleaning woman if we'd be able to retrieve the items we'd left in his hotel room before we returned to our own. She told us we could not. I don't know what he did with the stuffed animal I'd received from my godmother when I was baptized. She was a little white bear, and her name was Lovey, and I'd chewed her nose off when I was a toddler.
I'd spend several years struggling to find out what it was I wanted to do. There were so many things I could do, the grown-ups told me. My mother enrolled me in Big Brothers Big Sisters in an attempt to fill the role my father didn't want. I met a man named Chris, and we ate pizza and played backgammon every week until I moved away.
I'd gotten into serious trouble from a young age. I spent my fourteenth birthday inside of a detention center, waiting for my day in court, charged with terroristic threats for
telling a friend in confidence that I wanted to kill our assistant principal. I'd been in a fight and disagreed with the way he handled the situation. In the detention center, I was on suicide watch and slept on a mattress without sheets or a pillow. After three months I had my day, and the judge seemed confused. She sentenced me to a year of probation and told me she never wanted to see me in her courtroom again. And I never went back. *
On Tuesday I woke to a pounding on the door. I looked over at the alarm clock on my side table and realized I'd missed the only class I was registered for on Tuesdays. But, I could still be on time for work, if I wanted. I didn't know if that was what I wanted. I had a few hours. I had some time to think. Lately I'd been sleeping in, more and more frequently, with surprising ease. It felt difficult yet natural, like letting the clock run out on the remainder of my life. But the pounding, yeah, I ignored it. I hoped if I ignored it for long enough it would go away, like most things, and like most things, it did. When I unpeeled myself from my sheets hours later I held a dirty shirt to my face and deemed it wearable. I stomped a cockroach and flushed it down the toilet. I left the house, locked my door, and saw a notice attached to it. Something about an exterminator having stopped by, and this being the third month in a row I'd missed the appointment. I folded the notice and threw it in one of the trashcans lined up against the
side of the building, retying my shoe before I continued on my way. Where I was going, I wasn't sure.
Did I fail to tell you everything in my life is for sale? I left books, essays and fiction, from all of the major suicidal 20th century writers, at a store on Flushing Avenue, receiving a fraction of what I'd paid. My furniture left me through internet listings, or by trucks that picked up the pieces from the sidewalk most mornings. I sold clothes through an app on my phone. Sometimes, I'd steal new clothes, from high-end boutiques, and then I'd sell those too. I never hit the same store twice.
I decided against work. I called out. I rolled five or six cigarettes, the tobacco bought with what money I'd made the previous week from the clothes. An older woman passed me by and saw them in my hand and asked for one, so I gave her three. I noticed some outgoing calls to an unsaved number that I didn't remember making, so I walked to the Harlem River and threw my phone at the water, and I was starting to feel a little better. I laid on a rock, spread myself out, like a starfish, staring directly into the glow of the sun. More than once I'd convinced myself that I'd died and was now living in some form of purgatory, a place where nothing gets better but doesn't really get worse, either. Things happened, and I would deal with them, and I wouldn't do a whole lot else.
I remembered looking at the Manhattan Bridge. And I remembered taking Amy's picture in Washington Square
Park, when she was visiting, after it had snowed a foot. And then I was in Brooklyn, in a bodega where a man named Sammy taught me phrases in Arabic and let me pay for all of my egg and cheeses at the end of the month.
After a few hours of this I got up and walked towards Grand Concourse, knowing that my home was only a few blocks further. I thought that if I walked into traffic the cars would move through me. I walked into traffic and cars stopped moving. I ate handfuls of almonds for dinner that night, and the next several nights. I put my tongue to the electrical socket in the bathroom and rode the trains from end to end. So much felt seductive.
When I sold the few remaining things in my apartment I could call my own, I took a car to Philadelphia and gave the driver the address of the house I'd grown up in. By the end of the ride I'd lost weight and hoped I'd never find it again. I knocked on the beige door, greeted by a man I didn't recognize. Yet the house looked the same, unrenovated, at least on the outside.
Come in, I've been waiting for you most of your life, it's been so long, he said.
Against my better judgement I followed him into the smoky house. I felt disoriented and I looked around, eyeballs shaking, staring at the ground.
GERM
CHRISTINA MANUBAG
First you saw them on her skin
A two-week-old with tubes jammed into veins of thumb-sized hands and feet, eight months and twenty pounds on your thighs, oozing out of still blind eye sockets,
The little green maggots clung to her hot cheeks and wrinkled fists, locked onto the respirator, to her lungs, but even young she knew to cling to permanence.
After that, you ordered your first dishwasher, antibacterial soap and disposable towels. At church, you gave peace and Purelled your hands while the maggots bit into the baby carriage by the pew.
Seven years later they had laid claim to all of it: her hair, your wedding dress, the master bedroom Gnawing at the walls you could not defend yourself, so you packed your sterile suitcase and fled.
Every time you returned, they became a bit more bearable though by now they encased her body like a moss shroud, her voice coming through faint and muffled and foreign.
Now fourteen years after that, you return to the hospital. Her arms wrapped, tan but cold, all the green hacked off with a thumb-sized razor;
rejecting permanence, sick and small with a face like yours.
christina Manubag
You thought she could solidify you. A two-week-old with tubes jammed into veins of thumb-sized hands and feet, a waste of eight months and twenty pounds on your thighs.
Influenza seeping out of her still blind eye sockets, she was wrinkled, fat, ugly, soft gunky lungs locked onto the respirator, she learned young to cling to permanence.
In her fantasy, she calls you and says, “I’m doing bad again.” You hug her from across the wire. “I’ll take care of it,” and you do.
You bring her more sweatshirts when you see the apple juice stains, oiled hair slick and white specks. “Love you,” as you leave and a pat on the back. A nurse locks the door behind you and her face changes.
She learned young to crave masochistic love, convincing herself that transcription creates permanence. Masturbatory words like grinding cavities, Tears damp on her shriveled skin, squeezing zits –permanence.
GORDIAN
NOT
DAVID a. FOLEY
Bob Grove once cut his Thanksgiving turkey with a chainsaw and called the Butterball hotline to ask the operator if she knew whether the oils from the chain would adversely affect the meat. She asked him why he had cut his Thanksgiving turkey in half with a chainsaw and he replied in the most level of voices and with all due respect that his brother-in-law had asked him if there was “some most efficient” way to both carve the meat and crack the wishbone, so he marched the whole family out on the front lawn and tried to split the thing down the middle, though despite his best efforts, it had come out such that the bird’s left breast was a solid 250-300 grams heavier than the right. She asked why the brother-in-law had wanted to know something like that, so Bob put his hand over the receiver and when he returned he said the whole point of Thanksgiving was to eat and spend time with family and precious time on “this weirdly ritualistic fowl preparation” seemed trivial and in fact detrimental, subtracting from the cook's time doing the really important stuff, so if they were all really as dedicated to the thing as they claimed to be why settle for less than optimal?
The operator glanced at the Butterball Hotline customer service guidelines scotch-taped to her cubicle wall and, remembering her $14.79/hour pay and the Thanksgiving dinner her children were preparing for when she got home from work, she loosened the white-knuckle grip on her landline and conceded that these were fair points, but turkeys are a porous thing, and chain grease was probably seeping into the flesh even as they spoke and anyway what the hell was the point of splitting a wishbone with a chainsaw? Bob told her that splitting the wishbone was non-negotiable I mean they all had wishes, the brother just must’ve figured there was a faster, more intuitive way to go about it, I mean who the hell cracks any other bone with their bare hands?
LOTUS EATERS
DAVID a. FOLEY
Having tumbled through the morning and tumbled as they do back down the many concrete husks of the post offices and the libraries and the grocers and the banks and the various offices with various conference rooms in which various Jeffs had tried to sell them on the merits of “Big Data,” they are flushed into a current of others which propels them toward the park where they can collect themselves in the pocketful of grace of lunchtime
whereupon looking up they find occupying $12,249.44 worth of land a pinkflowering cherry tree which Deborah from the Parks Department had placed there to bring tidings of Spring, whose blossoms drift into their soups and salads to become a languid floating flower “What a strange thing!”
THIS OLD EARTH
c.h. stern
I.
You tiptoe down to my room, past Momma’s and Jim’s, past baby Cara’s, and past Grandma June’s. Whenever you have a nightmare you end up in my twin bed with pink butterfly sheets from that catalogue with the pictures you stare at for hours. Ever since you, the baby, and Jim moved in two months ago the leak in the roof is worse and I hear the drippin’ from my bed. I miss the peace and quiet.
In the summer the air is so heavy that we keep the windows closed. But when you sneak in I pretend I’m asleep until you slide them open. I act like you woke me up and mumble “shut it,” but I know how much you love the sounds of the cicadas hidin’ right beneath the peeled-paint sill.
It hasn’t rained in a while but clouds had covered the corn fields all day. Jim said if we didn’t get rain soon, he would make us go out there with pails of water.
You climb into my bed. Liftin’ the sheet carefully you sit and slip both your feet in, then slowly lower your small torso, rolling your spine back until your head reaches the pillow––Miss Nancy just taught us all about different parts of the body. You’re so close I can feel your paper thin nightgown scratching my legs, but it’s okay ‘cause I know how scared you get.
All of a sudden I hear a noise and I think someone else woke up, but the pangs come too fast to be feet. A crack of thunder tears open the sky and a bolt of lightnin’ flashes so bright I can see the Saint Matthew cross on the other side of town in the black charred night.
You grab my arm tight and I start cooin’ “it’s okay,” I nestle your head into the crack of my arm as I turn on my back to see the window. The rain hits the sill like bullets hittin’ a metal bucket and the wired screen looks like a warped rainbow goin’ on for miles.
I hear your breath get heavy and feel your chest rise into my ribs. I start to nod off when the rain doesn’t sound like rain no more, but instead wails like a sick child.
You wake me in the early dawn and I feel your nails diggin’ into my shoulder. You’re on top of me and your forehead is already startin’ to sweat. Your face is speckled with shadows of lightnin’ bugs that had searched for shelter from the storm.
“Tatz, Tatz, did you hear the screaming last night?” I don’t know why you started callin’ me Tatz instead of Teresa, no one else calls me that.
“No one was screamin’ Janey. A bad storm spooked ya,” but I’m not too sure ‘bout that either.
II.
I hear a noise, some creaks comin’ from your floorboards. Yours sound different than the rest of the house because they’re the new oak instead of pine. Your door is open an inch and I see your body swayin’ back and forth as your head bobs up and down. There are lightnin’ bugs coverin’ the ceilin’ and flashin’ all over the place like fireworks at the county fair. They swarm into a bright moon and lift you off the ground, cradlin’ and twirlin’ you.
After a minute, they gently lay you down and your knees fall to the daisy rug. My blue eyes are starin’ wide and I realize Grandma June’s harp tunes are shakin’ the pipes. The bugs hover above you, silent and dark.
You’re only wearin’ undies and I see your smooth, curved spine with your chin tucked into your thin neck. I try to stay hidden in the shadow of the door, but I feel somethin’ in my bones, and I got chicken skin ‘cross the back of my neck and arms.
I burst in and the bugs fly through the open window.
“What in G-ds good graces are ya doin’,” you lift your head and Grandma’s music stop at the same time. I hear baby Cara start wailin’. The pipes always freeze when she cries, like she takes up all the water in the house.
You turn to face me and a smile creeps ‘cross your face.
“I’m just preparing,” and before I can ask you what you’re preparin’ for, Momma calls us for lunch. You skip right past me and I follow you to the kitchen.
At lunch I tell Momma ‘bout what I saw and she says, “mind your own business Teresa, ain’t nobody botherin’ ya. Everyone has their own way of doin’ things.” I know that’s the end of that ‘cause her eyes are amber right now. Momma’s eyes change colors when she’s sad or mad, she says she got it from her Daddy that’s why I don’t got it. If my Daddy were alive I’d have asked him why he don’t got it.
III.
You make me so mad when I catch you tryin’ on my dresses from the catalogue. Take the ones Momma sews me, but not my specialdresses.
I chase you from my room all the way out to the back fields.
“Ya know Momma, Grandma June, and me were doin’ just fine before ya’ll showed up! Now the house is cramped, the roof’s leakin’ more, and I’m sick and tired of you always bein’ in my business. Your stupid baby sister cries more and more each day, I can hardly hear my dang thoughts. No one invited you here so why don’t ya just leave?”
“Momma invited us here,” you answer. You’re so still when you speak, it boils my blood.
“Don’t you dare call her Momma! She is not your Momma! Your Momma is gone or dead.”
“Maybe, maybe she ain’t even my real Momma.” You draw lines in the dirt with your bare foot.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“How do you know who your Momma is? I look more like Grandma June than you, maybe you're the one whose Momma’s dead.” Your forest green eyes don’t leave my round face.
“What in G-ds green earth are you talkin’ about?” My voice starts to shake. “Shut your hole right now! You are not one of us. You showed up outta nowhere, not knowin’ a thing ‘bout farmin’, thinkin’ we’ll just take care of ya’ll for free. Well ya can’t just take over the whole house. I won’t let it happen, I won’t!” As I yell, the paint melts off the house and shingles start to fall.
“Who said I don’t know anything about farming? I know this here earth. This soil is my home.”
“I’m tellin’ Momma you’re crazy. Ya’ll need to get out of this house before I make ya.” I push you down into the dirt and run inside.
IV.
After three days locked in my room, I finally calm down. Momma’s rhubarb pie calms folks down in one bite, but sometimes if you’re real mad, it takes longer. She bakes for the whole town when there is a drought or when a Pastor gets locked up for stealin’ money from the church. It last ‘bout two weeks before you need some more.
I’m peelin’ potatoes when I hear a low rumble comin’ from outside. It’s about to rain and I gotta bring the wheelbarrow in before it gets all soggy again. I leave the back screened-in porch to find you in the middle of the newly planted carrots.
“Get out of there! Ya gonna mess up all of Momma’s hard work,” I yell, but you don’t hear me.
The field feels like sponges beneath my feet. You move around the rows like the wind twists branches. I can’t help but stare at your swift feet. I’ve seen on the television where they do funny lookin’ dances in these big gyms. You’re more graceful than they are.
Your feet are sinkin’ into the ground inch by inch while your arms are above your head. Your hips sway and your hands twist ‘round each other. It’s the same dance I saw you practicin’ three weeks ago. The wind picks up and catches pollen from the flowers surroundin’ the house. Together they
revolve around you while pickin’ up dust and droppin’ pebbles to the ground.
“Janey! Janey!” I yell, but the wind is too loud. I think you’re gonna be sucked into the sky when the fertile soil starts eatin’ your feet. I can’t move my own like there are weights or somethin’ holdin’ me back. The earth grabs and claws at you, like it’s starvin’. It’s movin’ so quickly, it’s already up to your neck.
There’s that creepin’ smile again.
Your deep green eyes stare at me with the calmness of a sleepy faun at dusk.
“Everyone has their own way,” is all I can mutter before your fingertips disappear beneath the earth.
Soif de vivre
Gabriela velasco
Why do people only lust in the dark?
It seems sad that kisses against a wall
Solely stir with wings fueled by alcohol,
And the sting of other coping mechanisms.
It seems tragic
That honesty is dripping in taboo
And you still don't want me
But I do, I do, I do
Want to taste things for what they are.
But to not be left scarred
For wanting to cut the wait time.
For wishing for a shrine
That has all the answers,
Of how one becomes water
Because I am no longer satisfied with the dirt.
Begging to be reborn as a child of the moon
So spooning won’t be left to my imagination.
To move with another in syncope
Drunk on music and pleasantries
So lightning might strike once more.
He was so eager when he couldn't see me Perhaps it's what keeps me from leaving
As another collectable For someone's mental shelf.
Surely there's a way I can feel worth more than that?
A passing smile
A complete denial for herof the cigarette, you lit. But now I have an ashtray full of if only’s And voices sighing, Forget it- you'll always be lonely.
Nothing comes from nothing, So desire must exist in the raw daylight. Yet my life is governed by a law Of only appealing foggy minds With empty words and hands.
Maybe I should just join the machine line And give up altogether.
Because there is no soundtrack Or Iloveyoutilltheends .
Take it
Angelina fay
It’s not the colors of the leaves, but the smell, that takes my breath away.
In these ruins of summer, watching things rot, I feel close enough to touch myself. The plaintive silence in me is a hollow one, ticking in me like heels on marble, like a bomb.
They ask me again and again. I tell them I never want to work in a gray building, no matter how many windows it has, no matter the view. I want to be somewhere green, the pen marks in my poetry books lining and lining to the point of ripping through. With my writing, flesh in the hand of flesh, reminding me that there are other humans, that I need not carry this weight –That this life is only an interlude.
And when, like a pulsating heart, this truth came to me, trespassing in the forbidden garden, it settled like a dust storm.
The history in which I was not myself is long, but smooth, now rounded like a rubbing stone, buried underneath the leaves that are still green.
During the summer solstice, I moved slow as a train on the rails. June heaved and hid. If life is finding a way of telling your story, I’m still walking like something newly born.
And maybe this was never what I was meant to be. The longing in my heart keeps me like a secret, holding me in eddies, in rivers, in oceans, in bodies. I can tiptoe around the pond in the moonlight without diving for the sword, saying to myself, I understand, I understand.
When the truth came like a string of green lights down the boulevard, I found myself wishing to be grass. Or maybe sand on a beach, the skin of oceans, soft and cold in the hour of the star. Or the flower lawns under children, the first of the season, full of April water. Those would be better forms for me, sighing in seasons than creaking in bones, putting seeds like molars in the deep of my dirt mouth.
But if I’m honest, I’ve known it all along –during the summer’s longest day, I still only wanted to be where the roses were, keeping every one of my promiseswild as the hair of graves, free as the dead in the sea.
Within reach Jackie yang
Their fragile, four-legged ship brought to rest on a level, rock-strewn plain near the southwestern shore of the arid sea. The sun settled low over the eastern horizon behind them, the chill of long lunar nights still clinging to the surface.
To reach the moon so sharp and clear as to seem unreal, its floor littered with boulders, myriad craters rushed below, was the first realization of centuries of dreams. Houston,TranquilityBase,here.TheEaglehaslanded.
Tentative steps test soil like powdered charcoal: the first human footprint on the lunar crust.
*All words taken from the NewYorkTimesarticle, “Men Walk on Moon.”
A EULOGY TO SENSATION
JACKIE YANG
The midnight dumpster behind a 7-Eleven, where we watch the moon lean into a neon pool of paper cups and melting slushies.
That jar of plastic paperclips hugging the corner of your desk. A murmuring maraca, a colorful cacophony, when shaken just right.
The tang of ice on tongue and teeth in a melody of mangoes, in a whispering of peaches, and the lingering suspicion of mint.
The instant a dragonfly takes off, when its long, lacquered body beats against the back of your hand for just a moment, before darting away on the lakeside breeze.
And smoke, in a silent graveyard. Slightly bitter, slightly hard. Left when candle’s dusk draws closed. But still it carries the memory of a sweet heat, a release, and clings to clothes and skin the way your blood did to air, the way your muscle did to bone.
TO THE DISHEVELED YOUNG MAN
SITTING NEXT TO ME
JACKIE YANG
tell me of your findings, your learnings, your hours spent pondering the depravity of soul. fill me with your smugness, your gleeful spite, your delighted moans at the chewing of a heart. sing me the sick pleasure of little boys pulling at flies’ wings and spiders’ legs, of your old fathers who built cities on the curved, bleeding backs of sorrow, and I will tell you this: yesterday, my little sister pulled a potato beetle out of our birdbath. cradled it with a fallen leaf, set it down in the quiet grass.
All-one!
Halsey hazzard
We’re on her roof in Bushwick (the requisite set dressing) hiding from her Buddhist roommate, hypocrite, heroin-chic, keeping close watch. We’ll go in when we’re cold. We hope we don’t. No drugs in the house, he said, but this is medicine, religion. Get enlightened quick or die trying. Flying by, the trains.
Next time I’m alone in Manhattan, on my roof and on my back beneath a bruised and branded sky. The friendly trees bend their boughs up to me from the street. Come buzz with us, they hum. We love! I bow to them, to life.
We slink across the midnight street to where there’s always someone sleeping. (hare krishna, hare krishna, krishna krishna, hare hare) We weep for dreams and death and dog parks, everyone who ever whispered, temperance and revolution, farmer’s markets and lost wallets.
There's music in the garden next door. The great sung throb of being tugs the breath from my chest. I think of Dr. Bronner and his bottles. I think I'm smiling.
47th Annual Edgerton Tobacco
Heritage Days
HALSEY HAZZARD
summer’s ebbing away. the trees keep their leaves like secrets. i just talked to my mom for the first time since june. she told me to stop blaming the world for my problems. i told her i wasn’t “just you” – and hung up.
i’m halfway through my second pack of cigarettes ever. dad named me for a man who said “hit hard, hit fast, hit often” and cried when he found my american spirits. “i’m taking after you, you know. be proud.”
mom has been calling all day. i’ve been pretending i’m busy. i convince myself she wants to apologize for last night. her mother died of lung cancer. i take another drag. a text: “pick up the phone. your uncle died.”
we were never really close, any of us, i guess. which is somehow worse when someone dies and you’re too late to make up for lost time. my roommate, now outside: “are you okay?”
her friend downstairs is playing lorde too loud. i have to sit down or I’ll trip down the steps. not the way cigarettes usually kill, but i’ll take it. warning: “beware of cancer, stairs, your mother.”
Mama, es que has visto mucha muerte
Daniela Salazar
You don’t mention him much, Your brother: The Runner. Who raced in competitions, raced in life, raced away from his wife and child and sister, and into an oncoming train. The conductor said he was so fast he couldn’t believe it.
(I always imagined a lime green meadow, but this is Cali, Colombia in the early 80s; any green here is hammered through with cement and gray and telephone lines.)
This is the story you’re most quiet about.
You mention Jonathan more, your other brother’s child. Chocolate crescent eyes, a belly wide smile that curled up like a tickle in your ribs.
(In my head he’s still eight years old, the age he was when I met him. I wonder, is that how you remember him?)
We heard later that the taxi driver stopped the car and left just seconds before it happened paid off, of course. This one tore through you like metal tears skin. But when you speak of him, it’s like your words bend down to hold him, like you could carry him back in your arms.
Your mother’s death lasted six years.
(And even I can’t imagine how that was for you.)
I remember seeing the synapses of her mind spring loose, one-by-one. Like coils in a breaking machine.
One. Hija,arewe?Two. Whereismyson?Three. Letmego, Idon’twanttobehere.
Less and less lay in her head, and what remained was hanging. Quiet in her chair, until you rained down on the home, calling out to nurses, joking with the other elderly, and finally kneeling in front of your mother’s legs, head tilted back and laughing when she asked who you were.
A martian sends a postcard
home #2
JACKIE YANG
They miss their orbiting star so much they build miniatures to keep with them, for when the sky becomes black with its absence. They fashion small hats to keep them protected. Some stand politely upright on metal spines, others curl downwards like the old, weak with their duty.
Their sustenance needs to be tortured before they are capable of digesting it. They mutilate it with knives, licking the blood-juices, boil it alive, or lock it inside a radiation box until its insides are steaming.
Could it be that they are so cruel to one because they’re so close to it, and worship the other because it’s so far away? (On the things that keep them alive and what they do to them.)
Wem gehört die Welt?
NATALIE BEHRENDS
15.5.18
Flughafen Schönefeld
And what did I think of Berlin?
I’m in a purple-pink plane speeding (too slow for my connection, maybe) towards a rock in the north Atlantic, and then to my home swamp. These Icelandic Viking stewardesses stride up and down the aisle trying to sell us Pringles and I try my damnedest to be introspective about a few months in this Central European marsh village that had history happen to it repeatedly until the grim little craftsmen’s huts by the river mushroomed into grim little apartment blocs and the burgomaster moved from lodge to town-house.
I drifted off for a while just now, woke up once twice three times in strange panics. First I thought I was on the Landwehrkanal with a beer in hand, passing it to somebody. Woke up, realized I wouldn’t ever do that again, had a strange stomach-dropping moment of fear. The second time I could feel myself lying in that wide, perpetually twilight bed in my room on Markgrafenstraße. The third time, I was breaking a chocolate bar.
What am I leaving? Very little, I still think, despite my dreams. Berlin for me will always feel shadowed by just about anything a city could be shadowed by. Its residents are renters from ghosts, carving out their existence around days of remembrance. Slowly they forget the past that is woven around them and look forward, to this tech-y rich-and-sexy Berliner face, but the fabric stays. I think this is why to me some parts of it seem so hollow. How long do you have to walk through a park before you forget all the bodies buried underneath its moss and flagstones? According to Berlin, about twenty years.
As always it is the immigrants who make the city livable, plastering the black-and-white Izmir clock-tower and Umm Kulthum over bullet-riddled concrete, selling döner and bahn mis instead of the sauerkraut they fed my grandfather when he was a press-ganged ship’s boy in the Wehrmacht. They rescue Berlin from a life in blinders. Germany must change at least a little, must bend and allow in those strangers. They will save Germany from pale stagnation and get for it cold thanks and burning homes.
The best Berliners, like the best Americans, are the ones who start each day a little horrified. There must be urgency in your blood and melancholy in your head to look at your life and see the price others paid for everything you have, and to look for a way to repay. In other words, I think you have to feel a little bad all the time to actually do any good.
I travelled to Vienna to see my first real works of German art, a set of beautifully grotesque medieval altarpieces. I remember the wounds on St. Sebastian and St. Roche, and I remember their eyes. The Germans sent their saints to Austria; I think if they hadn’t, if they’d had the leperous face of the beggar St. Lazarus staring at them balefully from walls and windows seven days a week, they might not have learned to muffle the past in the way that they do. What price for a guiltless night’s sleep?
There’s no way to solve everything and reach a totally blameless existence. But a good life, the best a life can be, is a life that when balanced up in St. Peter’s great account-book all the honest good comes out to slightly more than all the unmuffled guilt. We live such intertwined lives that a tug on one of the thousand of strings running through my life has a chance of tightening someone else’s noose. But if I tread carefully, following each thread as far as It will go, I may also loosen the ties around someone else’s wrists.
I do not want to spend my life strangling people out of ignorance.
LAPIS
WHITT VAN TASSELL
See the power, see the towers rise over the ships.
Let me Look upon you. Let us see and be seen.
In Ur they built a ziggurat.
Follow the line of the sun, glinting (burning) off Freedom Tower.
Yell from the Chrysler, “I Miss Babel!” Let it rise again.
Watch me watch you. Watch me, God. Listen,
I can speak no longer. Look! 40 Wall Trinity Church.
Notice me or notice the Metropolitan and her collections To You.
Under the Hudson, over the East, in steel and dreams soar out the Brooklyn, the Manhattan, the Holland, and the Lincoln.
Under the Hudson, over the East, in steel and dreams we pour our supplication into you.
O, Manhattan! O, Monument! O, City!
TERMINUS
WHITT VAN TASSELL
Did you see the railroad go in yesterday? They nailed it down with memories we try to ignore And baked us a luncheon of grits and peach pie When that engine comes in they promise A shipment of satin summers like they used to be
Remember how azalea honey dripped sunbeams Under that stand of pines just past the dock
Your grandfather climbed up into the night sky
To bring down a mason jar of moonlight
We laughed and cried tossing cane rods at the brim
As he told us how the stars were just molten lighting bugs just past our nets and how one day the railroad would crash through it would be on a day like today when the engine came in rosebud lips wet with sweet tea sitting around on lawn chairs
on a day like today we’d float along the coal smoke breathing deep billboard promises eyes licking up and onwards up and up the ether-dark searching for new stars in the strip-mined sky
THE BRIO EDITORS ARE INCREDIBLY GRATEFUL FOR THE many people who made this journal possible. THANK YOU TO ALYSON WILD AND THE ENTIRE NEW YORK UNIVERSITY COMPARATIVE LITERATURE DEPARTMENT. SPECIAL THANKS TO FORMER EDITOR-INCHIEF LIBBY TORRES FOR HER PATIENT GUIDANCE. THANK YOU TO ALL OF OUR TALENTED WRITERS FOR SHARING THEIR GIFTS WITH US especially to our cover design, a work of Sariah bunker’s entitled “first vision.” WE DO NOT TAKE YOUR ART LIGHTLY. AND IN THE SPIRIT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND OUR DUTIES AS ARTISTS, WE ENCOURAGE YOU TO CRITICIZE, ANALYZE, AND CHANNEL THE WORLD AROUND YOU. ABOVE ALL, WE HOPE THAT by SHARING THE WORK OF OUR PEERS AND THEIR MULTIFACETED PERSPECTIVES ON THE WORLD, WE CAN MORE EFFECTIVELY AND MORE HARMONIOUSLY INHABIT THIS PLANET, OPENING DIALOGUES WHEREVER WE GO AND ALWAYS LOOKING FOR ANSWERS.
THE FALL 2018 ISSUE OF THE BRIO LITERARY JOURNAL IS EDITED BY:
ANGELINA FAY. Angelina is a senior majoring in journalism and English. She will likely engage in conspiracy theory conversations when she’s not mobile ordering from Starbucks. She thanks her father for passing onto her the love of writing, and her family for their cheerleading and love.
HALSEY HAZZARD. Halsey is bringing her studies in comparative literature and Media, Culture and Communications to a close come spring. Following that, she’s dead-set on diving headfirst into a long and illustrious career taking down capitalism, provided it doesn’t get her – or the earth first.
BRITTANY ABOU-SULEIMAN. Brittany is a senior majoring in comparative literature and creative writing. While she is a writer of fiction and poetry, she is beginning to realize that she’s much smoother on paper than in person.
SARIAH BUNKER. Sariah is a senior majoring in Global Liberal Studies and sociology. They enjoy yelling at catcalling strangers, dancing on their roof, and generally raging against the man-chine all day and night.
GABRIELA VELASCO. Gabriela is a senior in CAS majoring in sociology and minoring in psychology. She is particularly interested in both creative and academic interpretations and investigations on modern love.
NATALIE BEHRENDS. Natalie is a senior history major who enjoys translating turn-of-the-century chewing gum ads from Yiddish for political reasons. After graduation, she intends to live somehow.
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