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Clerestory Journal of the Arts is a biannual literary and arts magazine that draws submissions from undergraduate students at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. By offering students an opportunity for publication, Clerestory hopes to inspire young artists to continue their creative pursuits, help maintain a high bar of quality for the arts at both campuses, stimulate conversation about student work throughout each school and beyond, and foster engagement between student artists and the wider community.
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Christopher Anderson • Managing Editor Kamille Johnson • Junior Managing Editor Jeffery Wu • Finance Carly West • Blog Editor Cathy Lee • Web Editor, RISD
Luke Dowling • Editor Cody Fitzgerald • Junior Editor Tristan Rodman • Junior Editor Bridget Ferrill Grant Meyer Houston Davidson Jeffery Wu Jordan Beard Mohamed Atia
design Pierie Korostoff • Editor Adriana Gallo Chelsea Wang Grace Sun Kathy Wu Luna Ikuta Marina Renton Hiro Nagaoka
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Kimberly Takahata • Editor Beatrix Chu Ben Ferleger Chris Anderson Ekaterina Kryuchkova Erin Schwartz Hannah Smith Jake Brodsky James Janison Kate MacMullin Pia Ceres Piper French Rebecca Steinberg Vhalla Otarod Will Serratelli Yogi Kim
Isabel Sicat • Editor Alex Sammon Allison Rubenstein Andy Li Beatrix Chu Cecile Hirschler Denise Van Der Goot Grace Sun Grant Meyer Jake Brodsky Kathy Ng Lucrezia Sanes Maya Sorabjee Ruby Stenhouse Sebastian Clark Sophia Schwartz
Vera Carothers • Editor Adrienne Ahn Caroline Kelly Crystal Kim Denise Yoon Gabrielle Hick Jeffrey Wu Kamille Johnson Lynette Lim Xueling Sarah Christensen Sarah Dillard Stacy Chiou Rachel Gutman William Fesperman The editorial boards select pieces to be published through a blind democratic process each semester
writing Erin Schwartz • accident Will Fesperman • “When you break a line nothing Becomes better.” - Jack Spicer Eliane Hsiang • Heirloom Leonardo Johansson-Lebron • Airplanes Lizzie Davis • Shifting Cultivation Sienna Zeilinger • Flight Patterns Gabrielle Hicks • Sea Shells Leonardo Johansson-Lebron • Above Your Eastern Cities William Lenard • Untitled and Untitled Lizzie Davis • Patrilineal Will Fesperman • A sniffle starts in a universe… Gabrielle Hicks • Fossil
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Chris Tran • Doll Andy Li • Coat & Bake Elise Mortensen • Untitled Karen Kuo • Knots Hiro Nagaoka • under the sink Sierra Barela • quiet looks James Chen • I, Disintegration Pt.III Jia Sung • Portrait in Red James Chen • Untitled Maria Antionetta Bugane • Erhebung
1. Michael Tamayo • Monument Blvd. 2. YourBoy • Like A Child 3. Bryn Bliska • Round Midnight 4. Sophie Ellen • My Friend 5. Ryan Christopher Gourley • 123 Phone
Visit clerestoryjournal.com to listen to and download music from our Fall 2013 playlist
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accident erin schwartz We’re standing at the site of a bad accident. Black power lines yanked down are broken and tangled on the sidewalk, and a path of burned rubber swerves across the sunbleached asphalt. The truck’s grille is crunched against a telephone pole and big wood splinters are strewn everywhere, two empty police cars angled up onto the curb. A firetruck screams a long way off. A man who needs an ambulance sits crumpled up in the truck’s cab with his head hanging down, breathing lightly and distantly,
and we’re stopped in our tracks on the other side of the street although we know it’s wrong to stare at people who are hurting. The sky is pale with heat and my sweaty skin feels sticky, because there aren’t many trees in this neighborhood and the sun is beating down hard on the brightness of the bone-yellow sidewalk and the glass shards in its cracks. My ice cream cone drips a white stain onto the toe of my sneaker. I take your hand and walk you away. I take you down to the basement of
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my parent’s house. Our eyes adjust to the dark. Low ceiling and cinderblock walls coated with a layer of earth grime, patchy cement floor, paint-stained, crooked wooden shelves make the place a labyrinth. We’ve never had the money to give it nice even floors and real lights and real walls, and I apologize for this to you without words. I take you to a space in the back corner I carved out with plywood and carpet scraps that I found myself like a scavenger-bird. I give you Wonderbread out of the bag and show
you how to play my guitar, and I like how you eat so much for a girl and how you are so bad at making sounds. I turn on the light. I sit you down on the couch, then I sit you down on the ground next to my bent knees. I show you the way I write, hoping you’ll find something that makes you want to stay here in the way I make my Ts crooked. I look at your impenetrable face and show you more, the way I hold my hold my hands loose like that with the scars on the knuckles, the way I say your name the way I say
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mine where I keep the things I’m hiding from my mother how my bones and muscles move when I lay down the tension in my hands when I hold your body the way my thumb and pointer finger can encircle your tiny bird wrist. I show you the grime under my fingernails and the good damp smell of the ground.
“when you break a line nothing Becomes better.” - jack spicer will fesperman No Humvees No turbaned men no guns We stop in Oxford, MS A diner Sweet tea and countryFried steak My father the war Correspondent Has nothing to say --
I guess you’ve heard by now About this morning’s death Crocuses And what they stand for Yesterday’s Madness, a man walled in Among bones The newsmen sprang Their daily trap We were sucking On a thumb we found.
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heirloom eliane hsiang today’s him is a single polka dot rubbing vaseline all over his nipples. his morning tea has a double wave slip n' slide onto his stomach onto his belly button is an inflatable pool. i want to dive in. you need to change, he writes and there are horses outside my window. it must be thanksgiving. he writes again, dot dot dot and my thighs tingle so much they turn into chinchillas. not every woman will look amazing in the same animal print he has written so i should cut up my turkey legs for display. shouldn't i. the knife has the history of ten hummingbirds and a fly. i polka his button and rooibos fingers trace stretchy marks. he slips sorry in and out of me until i am a thanking machine and all the broken turkey legs i have hidden.
airplanes leonardo johansson-lebron My wife, Penelope made me pay for first class on our return trip from New York to Seattle. I’m pretty sure she’s been having an affair and I’m pretty sure she’s going to announce her secession from our holy matrimony once we land. I’d place my bets on somewhere around Baggage Claim C. The tension is certainly palpable I’d say. The air feels heavy and everything around me seems muffled as my lifeline, this 727, hurtles through cloud after cloud. A bead of water cuts a clear path
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through the condensation on Penelope’s cup but it’s soon wiped away halfway on its journey by my wife’s impatiently tapping finger. I need human interaction. Where’s the flight attendant? I order a bloody mary but I don’t want the flight attendant to leave. As she turns back toward the aisle I have a sudden urge to hug her leg and never let go. I imagine the air marshal leaping into action and beating me with the butt of his gun yelling, “ An airplane is no place to start a relationship!”
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Instead I take a sip of my drink. Mary is a sweet name, but also homely enough to describe a woman who would surely make a good wife. It’s a name with no bite… which is nice. This is absurd. I notice my hands are shaking slightly. I wish I could be more self-aware. The pilot’s southern drawl creeps through the loudspeaker, “We’re gonna hit a rough patch of turbulence in a moment guys so just sit tight.” I brace. The plane starts to jolt in staccato beats. I imagine we are actually in a toy airplane clutched by a giant hand,
completely at its mercy. Penelope leans away from me towards the Turkish businessman seated at the window. Soon I feel engulfed by a gargantuan lurch somewhere deep in my belly and in some part of the plane as well. We’re plummeting now, down, down, down. The speed of our descent makes us all weightless in this tube until everything’s a mess of swirling hair, spinning luggage, and spilled drinks. My wife, (oh Penelope!) promptly disappears into the assured embrace of the Turkish businessman. They begin to passionately kiss in these last moments
preceding death. I dejectedly begin to embrace the back of the chair in front of me and soon enough I’m passionately kissing it as well when the plane rips apart. Oblivion is much stranger and more beautiful than I had thought. I almost drop my bloody mary. Daydreaming again. I’ve been doing that a lot lately. Concrete thoughts seem to have no substance anymore. They just slip through the cracks in my mind like water through the grates of a street drain. I constantly feel weightless as well as if somewhere down the road my center of gravity was simply
snuffed out like a candle. Ugh stop it. I get up to go to the bathroom and my wife continues leafing through her Home Goods magazine without pause. I try to give the Turkish businessman the stink-eye before I leave but he’s far too absorbed by the gaudy screen of his laptop to notice. Am I intimidating? Right before entering the bathroom I’m tempted to peek through the curtains and check out the coach section but I don’t. Once inside I don’t know what to do but I appreciate the relative quiet save the soft whir of the plane engine below me.
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I have nothing to do but stare into the bathroom’s narrow mirror. The first time I saw Penelope was in a mirror. I wish I could preserve her reflection in that moment, my own prehistoric bug trapped in amber, and simply live with that for the rest of my life. When we started dating she told she was in love with someone else but that for the time being she would keep seeing me. I remember responding by nodding my head and mumbling something about being true to yourself. I met the primary and possibly only recipient of her love a month later. They
had dated but this man no longer wished to be in a relationship. He was effortlessly assured of himself, of his presence on this earth, and of his effect on others. He seemed possessed of an unwavering, airy confidence sharpened by quick wit and patient aggression. I felt desperately at a loss around him and would later find myself, subconsciously or not, adopting his posture or even facial expressions. I saw him walking around nonchalantly eating a peach once and I did the same. I tried to mimic the narrowing of his eyes before he took a bite or how he lingered for a moment before pulling away with
a mouthful. He was listening to the Smiths one afternoon so I bought The Queen is Dead and played it in the car while Penelope and I were driving. I kept stealing furtive glances at her to judge her reaction but it was a rainy day and it was dark in the car so I guess I couldn’t really see her face. To this day I’ve lost track of which aspects of my personality are mine or were once actually his; the spoils of my past emotional vampirism. The first time we made love was the night that man had left Seattle to live in Paris, never to return. After I came I noticed Penelope’s eyes seemed
a little clouded, impenetrable, and I felt infinitely sad. It was as if I had been shouting to her, my cries amplified by passion and longing only to fall upon deaf ears on some cold, distant shore. I lay in bed that night counting the little rays of moonlight on the ceiling formed by the shade over and over again. This became a habit from then on including on our wedding night. I would sometimes stand on the balcony too if I was feeling particularly restless and watch the tiny airplanes passing overhead to their vague destinations, wondering if the ones headed
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toward Seattle carried a particular passenger on his way from Paris. I continued scanning the skies over the years, a lone sentry, but it was often not preceded by sex now. Penelope had become increasingly distant. While staying in New York she no longer ate with me and that was worse than losing the sex. Oh God, I feel weightless again but I realize the plane is on its final descent towards Seattle. My hands start to shake and soon my legs. With every hundred feet closer to earth the shaking increases in intensity until it’s uncontrollable.
When the plane hits the runway I sit on the floor and lean against the toilet clutching both of my ankles. I will not leave this little bathroom. No way José. The door is knocked on by a set of hands about twenty minutes after the plane has reached the gate. “Sir are you alright?” I think it’s my flight attendant who has spoken but I don’t answer. Pregnant pause: “Sir if you don’t answer us within the minute we will have to break down this door.” Was that the pilot? I can hear the voice of my wife. She
sounds exasperated. What seems to be a throng of flight attendants continues banging on the door. I can picture the air marshal muttering to the others, “ How does he expect to get a new girlfriend doing this?” Penelope and the others all nod in agreement. I’m not coming out. Airplanes are so much pressure.
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shifting cultivation lizzie davis how can I help it if this is the place where we left in checkered shirts the stump of the tree joyful then at the thought of entrusting it to the earth an ancient crown
we imagined it would drip narcissus in crystals a whole colony of blossoms splashed against its foot a pelt of moss that exhaled bell-shaped violets they’d turn their heads in perennial welcome
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it is not forest anymore but field stalks lean together pressing forwards an almost-ripe army but still we cocoon the stump with our bodies fingers curled like talons in the dirt mid-august heat lolls on skin summoning blisters but still
there should be reaping and sowing the see-saw cadence of machinery there is only thirst and rustle of movement in grass the shadow of the hour shortening across chapped lips
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flight patterns sienna zellinger One night I find myself playing chess with a boy I’ve just met. His father—my boss—makes polenta in the next room. The boy arranges my pieces into a defensive position; he is teaching me strategy. A knight is both a man and his horse. “You can’t be afraid to retreat,” he says.
Since I left this time around, I’ve stopped calling it home and for the most part just stopped calling. I am here because I’ve been feeling unmoored recently, because I’ve been offered dinner, and because I want to be able to beat my dad at chess. I ask the boy how he knows what to do next.
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I am a morning person, which hampers my social life with everyone except the birds. At sunrise, ducks paddle playfully on the water; above us, gulls form a skein and never look down. Most birds know how to build a nest instinctually by the time they leave. Some come back each year until they figure it out. And then there are seven genera that don’t make nests at all, but find them: the cuckoos leave their eggs with the warblers, and the paths their fledglings fly are just as true.
I pick up a pawn, then reconsider. Sacred as the honor that seems to be carved into the knights’ very eyes is the gentle weight of a father’s hand on his son’s back.
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sea shells gabrielle hicks you and i race stray dogs over broken bridges we howl together
----your echoes ricochet inside my ribcage leave me a crooked spine -----
----a box of matches grows old in the rushes
i forget your shoulderblades are made of bone
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and i imagine telling you truths without fear
something very fragile in me fissures when i am starving
of lying down into belongings we never asked for
----your hands can bruise
----your faithlessness keeps me hungry
i connect them into constellations and name them after elements
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-----
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my fingernails fell off in a process of reverse efflorescence
some parts of us loved.
the callouses grew over too quickly to be love
i walked into a spider’s web and cleaved it imperfectly
--------when do i draw the jawline? when do boundaries begin again
above your eastern cities leonardo johansson-lebron I was all the eastern cities once, one by one. Travelling for days beneath a fat zero. Days of heaven. Borne by empty hours with empty language. Past sacred groves and gardens hungry for rain. Past mystic warehouses crowded with sleeping dolls of men, pills floating like cereal in their stomachs.
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In Montreal she spoke to me on a street corner as infant leaves of autumn rattled close. She told me, “This city is spent.” That I should kneel to the stale ground and kiss her feet. But I didn’t. How could I? as she loomed like a silkworm drunk on camphor, spinning fresh doom, her words aspic lines piercing plundered hemispheres. Sometimes though, even now, I dream of her cruel lips As she bites into a fig on a cold beach where dawn’s pale rays bloom like a dying flower or already dead.
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I wake up thinking what I should have told her: There could be joy in these streets. Nights humid with passion and dancing under vapor from sodium bulbs. Bulbs above all your eastern cities. And all the computers of the world humming in their electric cradles will be heard until drowned out by a last, desperate aria. Under the streetlights they’ll sing, “Isn’t this what you wanted? Isn’t this what you hoped for?” “No.”
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patrilineal lizzie davis The morning of his arrival I watch him make a peanut butter sandwich. He tears into the kitchen, flannel robe pockets stuffed with balled up receipts and colored paper. He moves like a hive of bees, pours coffee, drinks it noisily, slams two pieces of bread into the toaster. He is humming, deep-throated, red-faced. Dialing the knobs on the microwave oven with quick precision he begins to lay the contents of his pockets out across the floor. The maple slats are systematically tiled over with blue and white notecards,
curling lined paper, pages torn from telephone books. Standing to slip out, I recognize the lanky penmanship, syllables that dissolve into an unintelligible cuneiform. There is a writing system sprawled from wall to wall, an entire lexicon of his own design. “Where are you going?” He asks. “Just upstairs,” I say, and our sameshaped eyes meet. He says nothing. In my room, I think of how he used to call often. Sometimes I’d sit in the hallway,
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listening to the muffled half-conversation behind Dad’s bedroom door, the familiar swells of cajolery and pacification. We’d get letters once or twice a month, words scrambling across backs of envelopes, business plans dashed off on the covers of catalogues. Occasionally the sentences would buckle. There was that time when I answered the phone. No one was home and I was curious. In a voice more grounded than I’d imagined, he talked a little about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, how he’d
been drinking more water, found a place to stay. “It’s slow going, one day at a time, but it’s a start.” I had expected his speech to unravel and fray but it went on in a very straight line. When I come back downstairs, Dad has a beat-up photo album on the counter and the papers are off the floor, in a heap next to the coffee machine. The two of them are unfurled like symmetrical wings, broad faces capping their frames, square jaws moving in tandem as they talk. “This is Mark and me,” Dad says,
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holding out a glossy black-and-white. “He’s maybe three, I’m five.” They’re caught mid-laughter, breath flowering as vapor in the January air. Lowslung sunlight powders the snow. There are other faces, other siblings I have never met, will never meet. “It’s pretty,” I say. Mark smiles. I haven’t seen him do this before, and it’s nice. I notice the pamphlets from the hospital are still spread out on the counter, all sansserif typeface and welcoming dimples. I wonder if it makes him uncomfortable. •••
Two months, and I don’t tiptoe anymore. He’s stopped carrying the papers around. Sometimes I call him Uncle. Mom has been placing the pills strategically, the way she used to with my vitamins, then the Effexor, then the Anafranil. She puts them next to a cup of water, no ice, on a clean white napkin. She says nothing out loud, cracking eggs into a ceramic bowl, whistling. He takes them, though. I watch it happen every morning. “You ever hear the one about your dad and me and the capes?” It is Sunday and dusk, the sky smoky and pink. I’m sitting a few yards from him, our feet in the lukewarm sunshine pooled
on the grass. “No. Tell me.” I haven’t heard many stories. I don’t know if the ones he tells are true, but I take what I can get. “Well, we had these capes. Superman was real big around that time. We had these real red Superman capes and we would wear them every day. One afternoon we thought we might as well put them to use, so we tied them on and climbed right up onto the roof, and then we just, we jumped off.” “Really?” “Really. There we were on the grass, sorry bags of broken bones, and your granddad comes out, he pitches a fit. We
were both crying—five and seven I think —and ended up with a couple of fractures each, at least. Stopped watching Superman for awhile after that.” He’s smiling, so I smile too, but really I’m wondering why I’ve never heard that one before. I’ve been keeping track of the stories. I jot them down as soon as I can after he tells them – there’s nothing else to go off of. So far I have that they grew up on 34th Street, that my grandfather loved building birdhouses, that there were orchids and a porch. That there are four of the eight remaining. And that fair skin and mental illness are what yoke us together.
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••• The weekly pillbox has been untouched for days. We talk about this over dinner, while he watches T.V. in the next room. My mother in her black cashmere is crying a little. I want to tell her to give it a rest, but I’m only supposed to listen. “Well, you certainly can’t be alone with him anymore.” Dad says, practically mouthing the words. “I don’t think you need to worry about me. I mean, he’s the one you should be worried about. Right?” “That’s exactly the kind of attitude
that will get you into trouble. He’s gotten, you know, violent before. That’s why they locked him up.” This she whispers. “I know, Mom.” The three of us glance into the living room, where he sits and wilts, watching some John Candy movie. The stack of paper is in front of him again, twice its original size Mom shakes her head. “We have got to get you to take those meds,” she whispers to him, knowing he can’t hear her. Her face is warped, desperate and pitying. I’ve heard those words from her before.
••• I’ve been given strict instructions to stay late at school. There are signs of relapse. He hasn’t slept, he’s stopped making peanut butter sandwiches. Yesterday after dinner he told me he’s a millionaire, that he and Warren Buffet met for lunch at M’s downtown. He said they ate cucumber salad and discussed their net worth. I didn’t tell anyone. They don’t want me home while they’re at work so I go to the volleyball game. I watch half the first match, but the gym smells like dampness and lip gloss; the girls are cheering relentlessly. I can’t
stop thinking about the year before, when I started stashing pills in my the bellies of my worn Birkenstocks, in my jacket pockets, in the porcelain music box next to my bed. Halfway home, I’m walking faster. It’s warm for September and the air is damp. The house is visible, the windows dark except for Mark’s. “Hello?” I shift my backpack to one shoulder and take the steps two at a time. His door is open a crack and I knock. “Hello?” Mark leaps out of the closet, slamming the door behind him. His t-shirt is sweat-
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soaked and he’s wrapped the top of his head in aluminum foil. He folds his arms across his chest, says nothing. “What are you doing?” I manage. I haven’t felt uneasy in his presence like this for months. “I’m just protecting myself. We have to protect ourselves.” “Are you alright? Can I get you some water?” “I’m fine, Amanda.” “Listen,” a step forwards, a sigh, “I don’t know exactly what it’s like, but I really think you should take these.” I hold out the plastic box, point to the large blue lettering. “It’s F today, and you haven’t
taken one since M.” It happens quickly. He looks terrified, bats the box out of my hands. There are words, they’re bundled-up, restrained by his grimace, something about poison, conspiracy. His breath is hot whiskey smoke on my face, he kicks the T.V., the screen gives way, there are hands are on my shoulders. He calls me Nancy, shakes me, releases me, collapses. After that it’s only a matter of time until my parents arrive and take him away.
a sniffle starts in a universe… will fesperman A sniffle starts in a universe, ours, and ends in a quiet room. The room is mine. The sniffle was in the room to begin with. The room may or may not start and/or end in our universe. The room is not a universe. The room is not a poem, though a poem and the room may or may not start and/or end. I love you. The room is a room and it is at the same time not a room. There are at least two rooms. Please don’t try to understand. The sniffle belongs to no one, and their mothers, and someone I haven’t met walking streets I won’t walk on.
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untitled william lenard Drowning at dawn I watch for seagulls Pretending I have companions
untitled william lenard Southwest point at blank beach Rode a horse in made-up mind Instead, drove car to unrealized future
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fossil  gabrielle hicks I. the house is a hollow kind of quiet. what passes for God loiters in the shadows under the eaves. the bedroom reeks of fossilization.
II. when he comes back he finds a mouse’s body, curled tight like an ammonite, under the ottoman in the living room. her body left rivulets on the mattress. he counts the contours to see if he was happy.
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he recalls: their pillows were covered in purple lilacs and when her hair fanned out like a blackbird taking flight (which he never before associated with leaving) all he could smell was summer. III. does the winter matter if he had his aestivation?
when they sigh and tell him they are sorry he wants to roll their apologies into a sphere and crush it with a fist and imprint the heartlines on his hand into the pity. IV. palindromes ricochet through the dust in the pantry. Lepers repel because they know how to leave things behind.
doll chris tran Digital photography 2013
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coat & bake andy li 35mm film 2013
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untitled elise mortensen Water based silkscreen 2013
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knots karen kuo Found materials 2013
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under the sink hiro nagaoka Medium format silver gelatin print 2012
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quiet looks Sierra Barela Oil on Printed Paper 2013
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i, disintegration pt.iii James Chen Charcoal and oil on canvas 2012
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portrait in red jia sung Oil on canvas 2013
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untitled james chen Charcoal and acrylic on canvas 2012
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erhebung maria antionetta bugane Photoshop & photography collage 2013
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