APOCALYPSE
P E N D U L U M
Est. 1886
THE LITERARY ARTS JOURNAL OF PHILLIPS
EXETER ACADEMY
Winter 2025
M A S T H E A D
Editors-In-Chief
Elaine Qiao
Ethan Ding
Sophie Yu
Managing Editor
Pranavi Vedula
Writing Editors
Amy Lin
Anushka Noori
Faculty Advisor
Willie Perdomo
Cover Art
Elaine Qiao
I N T R O D U C T I O N
a note from the editors
All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.
- Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
The pace of Exeter life is paradoxically slow and fast. Grueling hours of homework feel like eternity, but weekends pass in a blink. Entire terms come and go, leaving behind only memories and impressions that become
hazy with time. We often trap ourselves in either the past or the future—recalling and planning for change, but losing out on those instances when they happen.
Consider the present moment. There is a world here, singularly special, unknown to history and perhaps never to reoccur in the future. We live through infinite worlds—their boundaries fused together, but each entirely different. Consider all there is right now, the noise, the anguish, the hope. We must act, organize, be.
Apocalypses are the ends of worlds. Conventionally, “Apocalypse” may bring to mind a nuclear wasteland or zombies, but it represents so much more. To appreciate Apocalypse is to embrace the significance of change in our lives. To find in ourselves the awe and fight the fatalism that accompanies community with which to share.
Our most heartfelt thank you to the Pendulum Board and Mr. Perdomo for your continued commitment, passion, guidance and support. And to the Exeter Art and English Departments, for giving us the words, brushstrokes, and lens shutters that allow us to articulate the world as we see it. Finally, our deepest thanks to you readers, for interacting with the fruit of our work and providing us the warmest community with which to share.
Each piece in our Winter 2025 issue offers an opportunity to experience Apocalypse, to interact with our artists’ worlds from their post-apocalyptic accounts. Inside you’ll find the apocalyptic significance in everything from delayed flights to alarm clocks. We hope you enjoy.
With endless love and an apocalyptic eye, Ethan Ding, Elaine Qiao, and Sophie Yu Editors-In-Chief 2024-2025
Thaw, Catherine Manley
“Candles”, William Inoue
Alarmed, Catherine Chen Lost, Eilena Ding A Portrait of Ji Qiuhuai, Angela He A Two-Person, Wooden Chairlift, Kate Gilchrist Scrim, Grace Yang
Whale Jaw
Lionel Hearon
Again the leviathan jumps from the murmuring sea, falling back through the air, slowly, like a toy guided by the hand of a young boy through pretend waves in his bedroom. Her beauty and scale make the hunters cry out like dogs as they claw their harpoons through her skin. She’s a marionette: as they pull, she dances, her thin blood draining, dyeing pink the black brine.
At home in Hals, the reek of rich rot hangs above these men as they flense into blankets of blubber all twenty meters of her length. On the long rock boatramp, waves brush her face as she waits to be broken up.
At Torvet now her jawbone reaches past the captain’s jerkinhead roof, a trophy of his greatest kill. She rises from packed dirt where children play and picture swimming in the ground beneath the beast who held the bone.
Behind the Face
Mari Chaparro
Self Portrait as Eve
Katherine Luo
The moment I was pulled from your rib me, the stubborn fat off your hips I was covered in the blood of you and I weeped for a body I don’t yet know is not mine to keep and so too you cry for the fate upon me as the same that befell you, the billionth Eve when the snake reared its sweet lemon venom and the white petals wilt into thorns so then comes first blood, and the past doesn’t seem so wrong anymore; Eve found it easy to forgive God so long as he owned her, bite scars like semicolons on her thighs have healed, from which was stolen
from her she promised herself would be returned when God forgives her too and her lesson learned suddenly, it will feel better when I’m older is a prayer not a promise, and young Eve holds her bare, cold shoulder, and feels shame for the first time yet you refuse to believe your rib, your womb begrimed and so Eve sits and she weeps for herself and for you, screaming into your deaf downturned ears, she learns to be silent as the ouroboros choking on its own tail, as glass is seen you watch me so hard you see through me and see yourself in my eyes the same color of mud
trampled in Eden and say Eve! I can save you! so you still think you have.
Objects of Security Are Really the Most Fabulous Things for Girls Who Think That God Has Abandoned Them (Not That I Would Know Anything About That)
Zoë Curtis
MY DAD says that everyone should learn to run at least two miles without stopping for water or breath in case of emergency. And that you should bring at least two layers of clothing and a can of Progresso and all of your hopes and dreams and wilderness skills with you anywhere you go. I don’t know what he thinks will happen to me where I will simultaneously need an avalanche beacon, proficiency in a-frame camping fires, and the knowledge of a university accounting course, but I listen anyway. What will happen if the day I need them comes and I’m
empty?
My dad says that the most important thing he can do for us as a father is be reliable–show up on time, support us in our dire financial straits, be the shepherd, etcetera, etcetera. Sometimes I think he worries so much about emergency that he must live his life in a sort of perpetual fear, but then I remember that he is nearly always doing insane things like buying tractors and backcountry skiing with a dog on the leash and putting lift kits on the Jeep, and that I really shouldn’t worry about him at all.
In Death Valley, he once told me that I’ll always
know whether or not we are in danger by how tight his shoelaces are. I spent the whole of that week with my eyes glued to the ground, trying to make out the tension of the laces on those black Solomons, wondering whether or not I’d ever learn to measure danger and tie my shoes accordingly for my children. I think my father has always wanted to be our object of security.
I make a big deal about the “object of security” thing because it is sort of a running joke in my family as to how much of a “prepper” my father is: always buying soup cans, always being cautious, being an almost religious disciple of the nebulous concept he calls “calculated risk”, buying a backup generator, and a fire blanket, and extra bags of rice and emergency milk to use for when the world shuts down, like he says, or on a random Thursday when he cannot be bothered to drive through our 3-mile cow fields to go to the grocery store. My father is obsessed with objects of security. I’ve recently been piecing together moments from my childhood where his obsession with preparation and imminent danger and powdered milk has saved me: the time on a cornice where the wind was too strong at the summit
and I couldn’t get over the roll and he picked me up and carried me just to the bottom of the knoll until I could ski again. The time we were on Scotty’s and I slid sixty feet between his knees and my boot and ski went flying down the hill (to this day, it remains 100% his fault that this even happened). Being stranded at the bus stop or feeling liminal in Tokyo and wanting to leave or having a disciplinary case and reaping the consequences of my own actions. Maybe I should’ve never started that bit about him being a prepper, because it’s the reason I’ve never had to be, because he is always prepping for emergency (even through generators and non-perishables and loving items that give us security).
This summer I popped the tire on my very old (2004) Chevrolet on the highway coming back from the gym. It was hot and August and I thought I was going to die and get hit by a semi that would pulverize me into dust. I pulled into the fire lane and called my dad and nothing happened except for I learned to change a tire myself and work the jack and become a badass woman by the grace of God and my father’s refusal to let me sit and watch.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the inevitability of bad things happening. The messaging is everywhere really: eventually the Sun will run out of hydrogen and begin to die, natural disasters will happen, fires will start during brush season and there will be no more apples or winters or remaining Beatles. Bad things seem to always be happening to good people, and for a while during my depressive episodes (the ones where I’d knit maniacally and eat some chocolate and laugh at terribly violent Sexton poems) I believed that was because God had abandoned them. Sometimes, I’d think, unlikeably, that God had abandoned me in a suffering so mortifying that there was no physical evidence of it– no real strife or adversity, just a 14 year-old-girl with a hand-held CD player and a love for Jim Morrison and prisons of her own devise. Obviously I’m past that now (no longer a bratty romantic nihilist) but sometimes–like when I pop my back-left tire on the freeway or crash in the backcountry with cold fingers– I think that same, probably self-aggrandizing thought: dear God, why me, why do bad things happen to good people, what did I do to deserve this, etc. The hot tears stream down
my body on the corner of the driveway on Highway 89 where the beer distributor is and I think insufferable thoughts under the Budweiser sign about how the world is ending and what would Joan Didion do and would James Baldwin or Cornel West think that any of my terrible behavior and theology is justified. Then, like a Gabriel, my father comes in and is my object of security and I look down to see how tight his shoelaces are and realize he is wearing Adidas slides and there is no way we could be close to Armageddon if that was his choice of footwear.
I’ve been on a religious kick since last September. I bought this dainty, sort of Byzantine cross necklace (I don’t have a picture for you but it looks like a really lovely plus sign with a garnet in the middle) on Depop with my own money and both of my parents and my sister made fun of me for being a Jewish girl with Christian paraphernalia. A friend of mine who is Christian told me that it might be blasphemy. A wonderfully inquisitive teacher asked me about my religious history as it pertained to my seemingly complex jewelry habits (Magen David one day, Byzantine cross the next).
I told him it was because I love Byzantine art, which is factual, but not the integrative truth I think he was looking for. What’s true is that wearing crosses felt pretty good and not at all blasphemous, because I figured if my heart wasn’t really in it and I was not thinking about the book of Revelations or Jesus as king, if the only thing in my mind was the tesserae at Ravenna and the Byzantine mosaic I like, and a vision of the boy that sat next to me in sophomore year art-history, it isn’t really blasphemy at all, not to me anyways. I’m always very embarrassed about wearing this necklace, but then I think religious symbolism is one of the best things for girls who lie under the Budweiser sign on a furniture dolly believing rather falsely that God has abandoned them and the world is crashing down. Then, all you can really ask for is a nice cross necklace and a couple more objects of security.
My very weird and ever-developing taste for spirituality has me loving all of the terribly small phenomena that make my life special. In simple, maybe loaded, terms, I’m seeing God everywhere:
• My dreams
• Scheduling every minute of my day and going to sleep at 10:30
• A good earl grey
• Don’t Call Me Home (memoir of the daughter of a totally manic Warhol girl)
• The river when you do Tashlich in it
• Leeks and shallots
• Really sweet inconceivably beautiful Norwegian women
• My jealousy of them
• My grandmother, who seems holier and holier every time I see her
• Simon & Garfunkel, Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, James Taylor songs
• Joan Didion (like always)
I watched this fabulous thriller “The Reflecting Skin” and a favorite artist of mine dropped an EP with some disgustingly good drone music last week, and I started listening to Christian hymns that I really find quite
beautiful in continuation of this five-month religious gig. My favorite so far is “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” because the messaging is honestly quite universal if you consider yourself a spiritual person at all, but you must only listen to the Perry Como version and nothing else, because all of the instrumentals don’t feel weighty enough and Perry Como also sang “Papa Loves Mambo,” so you can shuffle his discography and listen to those songs one after the other, which is one of the funniest things Apple Music has to offer you nowadays.
In any case, sample-sizing religion is making life deliciously complex– I’ve gotten really into the gym lately and sometimes when I am on the Stairmaster I pretend I’m Jacob on the ladder climbing to heaven and that if I stop I won’t reach salvation and it helps me keep going even when the sweat drips in my eyes and I can’t see anything. (I’m not a Christian and so I don’t believe in the salvation thing, but pretending has been great for my cardiovascular fitness, even if it’s biblically inaccurate). I don’t know what it is I’m training for really, only that I need to keep going, need to keep climbing. I’d probably spend ten hours in the gym if I weren’t limited
by time and sleep and work. We don’t have a stairmaster here but I put the treadmill on a 14% incline and it does the same thing for me spiritually. Sometimes, I like to remember that I should honor my father, and I run two miles with the hymns blasting through my headphones.
I’m not a great runner, but I do the best I can. I keep going. Something is always better than nothing.
I found out also that “Nearer, My God, to Thee” was reportedly the last song played by the Titanic’s string quartet as the ship was sinking. Of course, that made me start thinking about the end of the world again, and the feeling that bad things always happen to good people. But this time around, I’m thinking that maybe God has not abandoned them. I’m thinking instead that at the points when you are the most spiritually raw and bloody, you are closer to God than you’ve ever been before; when you are on the precipice of personal apocalypse, you are only separated from what God really is by a thin veil– you could look through it and see him behind the mesh, but you probably keep your back turned (like those reports that the last song played was “Autumn”) because you believe there is nothing
behind you. The truth, at least as my pocket theologians (James Dean, James Baldwin, James Taylor) have taught me, is that when you think you couldn’t be farther from holiness, you are nearly there and all you should do is look over your shoulder and see God smiling at you- then maybe, you’d be in on the cosmic joke. Maybe then, you’d be listening to Perry Como and loving the little things and feeling the weight of apocalypse lift off of your shoulders like a heavy velvet smoking jacket. The messaging of inevitably bad things happening is everywhere really: I’ve been looking at these pictures of obscure, too-wise signs in small–town Appalachia and thinking big thoughts about what they mean:
I think they have something to do with the universality of love and suffering, cataclysmic fate and doomsday- we are under a God (or we are not) and we are wrestling with angels and maybe we will have something to show for it at the end of the day (like our ability to run 2 miles and pump the jack and lower the spare and file tax returns) but maybe not. And does it matter anyway if you are prepared for doomsday when it comes? Will you hold on tightly to your objects of security and pray to live even when there’ll be nothing left? It’s a very Sisyphean question and I don’t expect any of us to answer, especially because I hate philosophical rhetoricals. I also find it utterly pretentious to talk about because there is no point ruminating on mortality when death, and to a point, apocalypse, is inevitable. Better to ruminate on what I am going to do with my finite and still blessed time: sit in the passenger seat with half a cookie and heckle the driver, run into a field, stare at my father’s shoelaces (he is my best friend), be a good Jewish girl with a cross necklace, and train for the apocalypse by running 2 miles under the watchful eye of Perry Como and Dolphin Blue from “The Reflecting Skin” or whatever will give me a sense of security.
All I had, I gave.
Anything as universal as death must be a blessing. Are you going to cowboy up or just lay there and bleed? We came from dirt, We have to swallow it.
This is Just the Beginning
Allison Kelly
Blossoms Still Cling
La’i O’Shea
THICK AND sweet strawberry juice spreads through my mouth, setting my tongue tingling, staining my lips a crimson red. The light shimmers off of your face in lines of gold, dancing through the thick air towards your eyes, reaching into the depths of your irises. Irises leap through the air on a hot breeze, the same one that rustles through your hair, bringing that thick, sweet smell of strawberries, mixed with the drying straw spread out behind us. The sun sets in the corner of one eye, the smoke from steam rollers drifts in the other, and your face, as you watch the fish fly above the waves, your face is the center of this view, the soft lines by your eyes, the sprinkle of freckles across your nose. Your hat rests on your neck, face tilted slightly to the fading light, drinking in the last bit of sun before the set. All of it lies in front,
lakes and mountains on the horizon, fields of straw and orchards at my back. All of it rests, sinking towards the ground, the mountains yawning and turning in for bed, orchards bending their limbs as if to bid you adieu, strawberries falling off of the stems into our hands, staining our fingers, staining our mouths. Clouds burst up above, raining down a hail I’ve never known, an ash out of this world, out of nature. A million tomorrows spread out in my lap, a million yesterdays forgotten at my feet. All of my mistakes and your accomplishments, all of the laughs I’ve cried and the sighs I’ve sobbed. All drifting away on the hot breeze as the lake churns like your eyes. All snatched from my fingers, all lost. The fields and hay, and buildings, and trains, and houses and schools and cars, planes, ships, solutions, all burn behind me because I didn’t believe. The fire sears my back, and your braids catch on fire. The lake steals my breath and soaks your dress. I drown, staring at you as you stare to
the world, longing to move, to reach a finger out to save it, scared that I won’t help. And I, who scoffed at the problems, sneered at the solutions burning behind you, I wish you’d been braver. But tomorrow is our last Today, and you are my last goodbye.
Darkness is Deafening
Catherine Chen
December
27th
Ava Truong
I DO not see him at first.
After his daily Mountain Dew, my manager has the habit of flicking beads of caffeine-infused spittle onto anyone in his vicinity. My good knit sweater was an unlucky target this morning, and I am taking the fifteen minutes the commute back to my two-room apartment allots me to attend to the damage.
I also have a lot of dark hair that cuts my periphery in half, so it is a wonder that I see him at all. But it suits the universe that a white-hot train whistle interrupts my administrations to my poor sweater. Because of this, because I took the late shift this night, because I crossed to the opposite side of the tracks where there is no puddle to soak my thinly-soled shoes, and because I have a weakness for relics of my past, I look up from the
rusted subway tiles and across the tracks.
He has grown out of childhood. There is nothing in his profile that suggests the boy who once filled his pockets with hard caramels because he knew they would make my lips stretch into a full wide grin. Stripped of baby fat, his cheekbones rise straight and tall, with all the gentleness and none of the uncertainty that a long-gone gangling boy once had. Watching him there in his American-made coat, unburdened by the awkward costume of our youth, I feel the weight of the Minimart vest folded in my back pocket more acutely.
Before I can decide if I want him to notice me, at the head of a train, the same whistle that made his presence known to me comes barreling down the tracks to hide him away. I inhale, feel the sharp air bounce against the taut line of my throat, and open my lips around a faint Hello just as the train snuffs out the silver
crown of lamplight on his temple.
The train brings a stale breeze that lifts a lock of hair from my shoulder and just as easily lays it back down around my neck. A woman with salt and pepper hair and lines carved into her cheeks brushes past me and into the waiting train car. She glances back at me casually, grocery bag dangling from one gloved hand, and I want to take her hand in mine and walk through those familiar doors and watch him recede into the distance until he is nothing more than a pinprick of light between my thumb and forefinger. I want to elbow my front door open while peeling my right boot off with another. I want to eat hot porridge in front of the late night show and doze off until the alarm for my next shift rang.
But I don’t really.
The train car doors close between me and the woman. That is forty-seven minutes more until I can tear my bra off. This particular one digs into the soft part underneath my shoulder and sometimes draws blood, but I forget all that the moment the train leaves and leaves him there in its wake. I exhale. I had half-be-
lieved that the subway car would steal him away and leave a beggar with a clinking can of coins in his place.
But there he is in all his foreign glory, and this time he looks up as if drawn by some invisible string and turns his steady gaze on me. He raises his hand in greeting. If I was the sort of person who was led by such compulsions, I would have cried. As that is not the case, I stand there with a warmth spreading in my chest as if an egg yolk has broken in me. And then he crosses the tracks and is standing beside me, and the clean scent of him is hitting me all at once.
“Rosa.”
“Hey.”
He pauses. I see the tedious formalities waiting behind his small polite smile and can’t bear the thought that the golden echo of our childhood has been pared down to an insipid How do you do? on the A-line.
I intervene. “You cut your hair.”
“It’s been years. Did you want me to grow a mullet?”
“No. It looks nice.”
“Your face is still the same. Let me find a photo.” To prove his point, he draws his phone from his pocket, and the seconds of silence he steals to find the titular photo stab into me. I distract myself by trying to read the tag sticking out of his collar. It is a good tag. Velvety and thick. I wonder what thread count it is. Triumphantly, he holds his phone up in the yellow subway light. The picture is blurry, but there he is with that gossamer smile my mind wanders to so frequently when the minimart line grows long. And right beside him, my reflection wraps her arms around his slender ones. It is hard to believe that my chin once fit right there at the base of his shoulder. I feel as if I have woken from a dream and realized the best part of it stands before me.
“When did you get back from university?”
“I’m not at school right now. I’m apprenticing in Kyoto for the winter.”
His hand rises—I want so badly to know if time has weathered the calluses he earned from those long days on the lake—and easily thumbs the stain on my
sweater, as if he could magic it away. “Your mother must be so happy you’re back. She gives all her potato salads to me because you’re not here to destroy them anymore.”
“You’re making me hungry.”
The next train slides to a stop behind him, and he steps backwards into the subway car without taking his eyes off me.
“It’s just like you planned. You left this nowhere town. You’re living in Japan.”
He laughs, and I desperately want him to do so again. He asks, “Do you want to leave?”
“There’s nowhere else for me to go.”
He looks away. “You would like it in Kyoto. We would go to the sea.”
There is too much to say, so I say nothing.
The whistle shrieks behind him as he looks at me with so much gravity in his wide open eyes. “In ten minutes, the train can take us to my mother’s house. You can be back in your bed in an hour.” And in a few more hours he will be on an airplane and then in a new country with people who are just as bright and quick
and clean as him and I will be but a blip in the whirling cacophony of his life. Perhaps we would write letters. The problem with that is that I cannot bear it, me being here and him being there, the messy imperfection of loving and being loved, the fouling of my sweet crystalline memory. My silence writes a line between his brows, and I have the sudden urge to smooth it out with my forefinger.
“Rosa?”
“I’m-”
The train shifts beneath our feet. He hooks his hand around my elbow, poised to pull me to his side, but my foot pitches back involuntarily. He loses his grip on my arm as the doors slam shut.
“Rosa?”
And then his face is just a pale oval rushing past me into the dark.
I exhale as salty tears pool beneath my chin. The wetness bleeds onto my poor sweater. I am faced with the sudden certainty that if he had called my name again I would have answered
yes.
I pivot on my heel, and the sharp click of my boot sole against the subway tile echoes wearily. It will be a forty-seven minute walk home.
Foe from Below
Catherine Chen
Thaw
Catherine Manley
To do anything at all, is to listen & we run through the twilight, forever turning into now as the ghosts of autumn foliage chase our warm bodies with the deafening winter gales. It is such an early hour and yet, this is it.
Time’s soft hands wring Earth through her hourglass, its metallic, shimmering chime constricting the days with some invisible count until the rigid corset of the seasons lets go and allows us to breathe
into the gentle song of the morning, the slow, almost-stopping raucous breaking of the day as your mind wakes alongside it, the soft patter of warm rain as it is overcome by the thunderous drumming of plasmic explosions.
But for now, I hear the stilling of the night, the sharp exhales as we step out unto the ice & I told him that to always be now is to be forever, yet I burn my hands beneath a sink of epochs. The droplets ring and ring, but it is only to silence at the chisel of frost. For to melt and to meld are only a
letter apart, and each dawn I rebuild my ice castle so winter will envy me when I face its doors.
Listen to me, you may have your forever: hear the birds as you stare out at pillows of snow; sing the winter carols as your back crumples beneath the wheels of late summer heat.
But time will continue to freeze and thaw the groaning machinery of this place, the roaring catacombs that must be remembered because they are a miles-long pattern.
You must feel at home in this place. So we are not freezing. We are not freezing.
“Candles”
William Inoue
8 candles on my slice of cake, tiny sparks against the bruised ache. Their flames frail, brittle, thin, a dead dream ensnared deep within.
The frosting grins, the faces don’t, don’t, don’t.
Empty chairs where love croons alone.
Walls painted in muted hue and cry, the cracks a reminder of the times I’d ask why. Each shout, a tremor shaking the sky, words like storms that make angels wry.
The floorboards creak with ghouls of care,
a house of whimpers, drunk air.
Hands that should cradle, instead they break, break, break.
Echoes of kindness, a carnage snake.
A delicate heart now alone stands fumbling with a lighter in unsure hands.
The lamps outside flicker with disgust, mocking the tears that cover me encrust.
A shooting star implodes behind withering eyes, hope eclipsed in a world of lies.
I chase the light, but shadows
grow, grow, grow.
Dancing on walls I no longer know.
Dreams escape like smoke to the air, leaving me breathless, a feeble flare.
And when no one sees the boy alone, alone, alone.
Lost in a place he cannot own, the candles snuff, the dream departs embers cooling in fragile hearts.
When nowhere feels like home, Where do you go?
Alarmed
Catherine Chen
Lost
Eilena Ding
I SINK into the cool metal chair at my airport gate, finally free from the chaos of my first Hell Week. I dream of swaddling myself with that plush-felt airplane blanket and falling asleep to Crazy Rich Asians as I stare at numerous parked planes thickly blanketed in snow out the vast window before me. My phone buzzes in my pocket and various pinged tones around me happen simultaneously. The chatter around me abruptly dies away as everyone glances down to look at their phones. Our flight is delayed by two hours due to severe weather.
Telling myself that two hours isn’t so bad, I joyfully swing my feet, brushing them against the speckled tile as I plan reunions with friends and devise the lengthy list of movies I’m about to binge-watch on the plane. Gazing at the clearing storm, hope and excitement for
the comfortable ride home engulfs me.
The grizzled man sitting beside me takes a deep breath and hesitantly glances at the TV screen displaying flight statuses. My eyes follow and my stomach drops—a long red cross cuts through the delayed departure time, a new time in ten hours taunting me on the screen and stabbing my dreams. All of my previous enthusiasm disappears and I am filled with nothing but complete and utter defeat. I desperately scour the terminal for a service worker who can save me.
“I’m sorry,” the woman behind the counter said flatly.
“But where am I supposed to go?”
“I don’t know, honey. You’re still a minor, so hotels won’t let you check in.”
I approach every airport worker I can see, but their responses are all the same. No one can help me.
Realizing I’m officially stuck in this prison, their snarky,
unapologetic sorries echo in my head.
An announcement blares from the speakers above me, instructing everyone on my flight to pick up their bags from baggage claim because we’ll be switching planes. I resentfully listen, making my way through the cold airport, surrounded by pools of exasperated people.
I try to return to the terminal to find a place to sleep, but barricades block the entry and force me to stay in baggage claim. I collapse in a heap of unclaimed baggage, fluorescent lights pounding down on me, nowhere to go and utterly lost for the next ten hours.
A Portrait of Ji Qiuhuai
Angela He
1. HE LAY THERE
Small against the broad silk of the casket, his weight barely creased the white sheets edged with chrysanthemums. His suit, deep brown linen, blended into the tones of his skin—ashen, muted. The flesh by his mouth seemed to sink inward. And his eyes, unopened, revealed how unaware he was of this room, or indeed his loved ones closed in around him.
She aimed the lens at the ground, focusing in on something near her feet.
2. HIS GRANDPA SAID HE WAS TOO SKINNY
so he was occasionally allowed to drink sheep milk. The warm tang of its taste was a rare indulgence from the small herd his family kept. Most of the milk was sold off,
They were everywhere, pressing in with cries that cut the air, long wails that broke into gasps. One of the funeral directors murmured something to the mans daughter. She looked at him for a long time, and then nodded, her face taut, lips pulled inward. There was a series of clicks below the crescendo of crying—like a pulse, from the casket easing forward. The crowd pressed closer, a wave pulling him forward. In the corner stood his 11-year-old granddaughter, clutching his old camera. She lifted it, settled it back across her collarbone, and adjusted the weight in her hands, feeling the rounded shape of it against her palm. With a small step back from the crowd, she raised the camera, resting her left hand on the lens, just like he had shown her.
exchanged for cheaper staples to keep everyone fed. As the eldest of eight, born in a northeastern Chinese village in 1949, he learned early that food was a question, not a certainty. Hunger had a way of making itself known in every gaunt face at the dinner table, every shallow bowl of porridge stretched to feed just one more mouth. Childhood was really an exercise in survival. With his mother bedridden, it fell to his grandfather to raise him as best he could. His grandpa, even by his own admission, wasn’t really much good at it.
The boy often ran wild through the village, his bare feet kicking up clouds of dust, snot trailing down his nose, and dirt smeared on his cheeks as if he’d wrestled the earth and lost. His shirt hung loosely from his shoulders, while his pants clung stubbornly to his skinny frame, patched so many times they barely resembled fabric anymore. Shoes? If he had them, they were worn so thin the soles might as well have been paper. The cold wind bit at his exposed skin, but no one stopped to pull him indoors.
At home, his mother lay on a wooden bed, her
face pale and drawn. She spent more time sleeping than speaking, leaving his care to the grandfather, who barely kept up with his own needs. You’ll manage, he’d grunt when the boy asked for help mending his torn pants or complained about the blistering wind. The boy quickly learned not to expect much—not hot meals, not patched clothes, not comfort. Sometimes there was breakfast, sometimes there wasn’t. On the mornings when the pots were empty, the boy grabbed a handful of cracked soybeans from the storage jar and chewed them dry as he walked to school.
By the late 1950s, the country was unrecognizable. The sheep had long vanished, confiscated along with the land as the state “cut the tails of capitalism.”
His father’s steady job at a state-owned soybean mill was a rare stroke of luck. The oily soybean meal he occasionally brought home was a lifeline for their family of eight. His siblings fought over who would get the largest helping as they stood in line, bowls held out like offerings. The ‘three years of great famine’ taught him the countless ways to make something out of the oily paste.
While his grandfather sighed and muttered about the government, the boy gathered scraps of firewood, boiled water over a small flame, and coaxed those few soybeans into a watery broth. “You could smell it ten meters outside the house,” he’d marvel at the retelling of it all.
3. 臭老九 Stinking old ninths were what they called intellectuals in 1966 China.
Before then, he was the best student at school, as well as the most popular. You’d often spot him with a trail of children running after him as he bounded through the school grounds. He said it was something about being the eldest at home.
Even in the midst of scarcity, the boy clung to his hunger for learning. His grandfather rarely noticed when he slipped away to eavesdrop on adult conversations or crouched by the village school’s window, straining to hear the teacher’s lessons. Once, he
climbed up onto a roof beam to sneak into a class, and the teacher—upon finally spotting him— burst into laughter and invited him inside.
But all of that changed when the Cultural Revolution swept through China. Schools were shut down and people were demeaned for “knowing too much.” Teachers and scientists, people he admired, were dragged through the streets, humiliated, and locked away in decrepit barns they called “cowsheds.”
Learning was dangerous now, and knowledge had become a crime.
To him, utterly stupid.
One evening, before the bonfires of books were set ablaze, he crept into the school library. Inside, the air was thick with the scent of old paper and dust, a kind of graveyard for the words he loved. He worked quickly, pulling books from the shelves—classics, science texts, novels—anything he could carry.
He stuffed them into a rough canvas bag, the spines digging into his side as he hefted it onto his back. The groaning wood beneath his feet seemed louder than it
should have been.
When he got home, he hid the books beneath his bed, the bag stuffed so full it barely fit. He would wait until the house was asleep before pulling one out and reading by the faint glow of a kerosene lamp. His hands trembled as he turned the pages, both from the cold and the thrill of rebellion.
In middle school, I was on track to attend the best university in China, he would say with gleaming eyes.
When the school doors shut for good, he was allocated a job at a bus company, first as an apprentice, then as a driver. His daily reports were nothing more than notes on bus repairs and routes, yet each line carried an eye for the small details others overlooked. His talent was first noticed by the bus company where he was reassigned to a company reporter liaison. He was eventually recruited by the local newspaper as a reporter, and by age 28, he had transitioned from fixing buses to writing stories, his name appearing in print on the pages of a prominent paper. He found his passion as a journalist. When floods struck the town, he was there—ankle-deep
in water, dodging debris to capture the faces of the men straining against the currents. By nightfall, he was back at the office, writing, and editing until dawn, the clack of the printing machines echoing. His articles would go on to win multiple awards, earning the attention of the Chinese Xinhua news agency, which eventually summoned him to join the writing teams for multiple important national-level reports. But his sharp, critical articles made him enemies. One evening, after submitting a piece exposing corruption in local factories, he was called into his editor’s office.
“This one won’t run,” the editor said flatly, sliding the draft back across the desk.
He demanded to know why. “It’s the truth.”
“Some truths are too dangerous.”
Weeks later, he found a letter waiting for him at his desk: forced retirement, effective immediately. They couldn’t silence his principles, but they silenced his platform. It left him forever wondering: what really mattered in a world that preferred silence over a man who refused to soften the facts?
4. HIS DAUGHTER TOLD HIM PLANE RIDES ARE ALWAYS COLD
In the summer of 2001, he flew to America to visit his daughter in graduate school.
Over his shirt, he wore an army green jacket and a scarf he’d had since his first job. He cradled his CanonEOS1; it had been a precious gift from his daughter on his birthday.
The white man in front of him wore shorts that revealed pale, lightly freckled calves, and a faded T-shirt that might once have been bright. A strangely-shaped pillow—C-like in form—curved around his neck. The man turned back to look at him. Nihao. The man chuckled. Qiuhuai grinned at him.
When the plane landed smoothly at Newark airport, he took the cap off his camera and placed the lens about two centimeters from the window.
“My first photo of America,” he murmured to himself. He pressed down on the shutter, but his flash was on: an accident. Everything within a five-inch radius
of his camera turned into white light momentarily. He turned his head around to find other passengers glancing at him- including the white man in shorts.
Qiuhuai smiled at the man. Nihao, he said. The man let out a little laugh and turned back around.
5. AMERICA IN THE EYES OF A CHINESE JOURNALIST
His first stop was Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - a heavy industrial city reminiscent of where he grew up. In fact, Qiqihar used to pride itself on having the largest hydraulic press machine in China. After the tide shifted, the hydraulic press factory closed in the 1990s leaving thousands of workers unemployed. He wrote several pieces about it, weeping at the stories of loss and grief relayed to him by the workers and their families. He wondered how Pittsburgh had transformed into the beautiful city that lay before him.
Standing before a towering cathedral stained with black coal dust, he traced the soot with his fin-
gertips. It was like a reminder of the city’s industrial past—a past that, unlike Qiqihar’s, had somehow given way to renewal. Pittsburgh had transformed into a city of glass and greenery, and he couldn’t help but wonder how. That’s when the idea came to him: he would write a book about America through the eyes of a Chinese journalist.
Later, he moved to New York City. Every morning, he’d find himself a spot in Columbia University’s East Asian Library. He’d slip into a chair tucked between towering shelves of books with thick spines and faded titles. He liked the smell of old paper, the hints of dust, and a faint whiff of leather. He’d settle in, crack open his notebook, and write with his head bent low, his pen moving like he was afraid of disturbing the quiet.
During those seven months in New York, he’d return there, daily. Sometimes he’d lose track of time, lifting his head only when the evening light slanted in through the windows, turning the rows of books into shadows, his notes spilling off the page in tired scrawls.
He’d written by hand in Chinese a book about America, an experimental text that did not read like other books you’d find on the subject. His was a patchwork—part essay, part photography, part story—all woven together in a way that defied easy categorization. He wrote about the way America moved and breathed– its culture, its education, its history, all those big, sprawling ideas—but then he took you closer, down to street level where people lived. He took you beyond grand narratives of politics or commerce and slipped you into half-lit corridors and stoops crumbling at the edges. He wrote about the way an old woman on a corner in Chinatown rearranged plums in a crate, how a bus driver in Queens greeted every passenger with a nod and a joke, how two kids in a Bronx playground showed off their chalked hopscotch lines as if unveiling hidden treasure. He wrote of a Polish tailor hunched in a tiny shop, stitching for hours by the glow of a single bulb, and of the Puerto Rican couple next door who argued softly over what to cook for dinner. He noticed the weight of grocery bags cutting into knuckles, the way sweat gath-
ered at shirt collars in rush-hour subways, the lingering scent of cinnamon from the bakery run by an Armenian family who still remembered the old recipes by heart.
In his pages, you didn’t just find out that immigrants existed; you met them face to face. You tasted the salt of their work. He wrote not just to report, but to search for something—what he called a “shared understanding.” He wanted readers to feel the hum of humanity on every page, to see that even in a place as vast and unfamiliar as America, there was something universal, something we’d all recognize.
The book was published in China in 2005. On its front cover was printed a little poem he also penned: I reached my hands to touch the fragrance of Lady Liberty, Her dark hair flowing through the evening breeze.
The Hudson River golden in the sunset Quietly holds its own heaven on earth.
6. WHERE THOSE LINES CROSS
He was the type to stop five times on the same path to pull out his camera and take another photo. He often looked at things that others might find, at first, to be quite insignificant. Like a puddle on the road, or a white moth. One day, he aimed his lens at one particular moth. It wasn’t one with long wings that stretched out like they were meant for something grander. The kind you’d only notice if you were already looking for something else.
“You see? The dark bark makes the fuzz on its wings stand out,” he said to his granddaughter, who was simply staring at what she thought was another insect. With a practiced flick of his hands, he slipped the camera strap from his neck and handed it over to the young girl. As her eyes met the viewfinder, the world shrank. The rough texture of the bark seemed deeper, each groove sharper in shadow. Against that darkness, the moth’s pale wings appeared ghostly, edges catching the light just so, a soft halo tracing its form.
“See the grids?” he asked. She adjusted the framing slightly.
“Always put the things you want people to notice right where those lines cross.”
And she did. Four years later at his funeral, she situated a wilted chrysanthemum petal on the intersection of grids somewhere near her feet. Up close it was pale yellow, with faint ridges running through its surface. Without the rest of its bloom, she could see its edges were slightly frayed, curling inward as if wilting. She adjusted the focus and noticed how the petal’s texture shifted—soft, almost velvety where it caught the light, but dry near the edges. Now, she could see it too, as if she had his eyes.
A Two-Person, Wooden Chair-Lift
Kate Gilchrist
IN REMOTE Northern Michigan, a two-person, wooden chairlift darted up the side of a mountain, surrounded by trees heavy with ice and thick flakes of snow swirling gently around them. Every weekend after a faded yellow school bus screeched to a stop outside of my house and dumped me out into brown slush, my dad drove me up to that mountain.
It would always snow on the way up. The good kind of snow, the kind when the world’s quiet and gray as fat flakes sift down from the wool-spun clouds and land with barely audible puffs. I’d look at the slowly-piling drifts through the windshield as my dad drove just above the black ice that blended into the cracked asphalt on countless deserted two-lane highways.
There was usually music in the background, too; any and everything my dad liked. Classic rock from the 80s, new singers he’d discovered (he’d started listening to Billie Eilish in 2018 and was very proud of himself), or Taylor Swift, for the culture. Sometimes, I’d ask a question about the song, and his eyes would light up behind the wire frames of his glasses.
Our rides were always like that: a warm car, playing good music, in the middle of a snowstorm. We’d get there just as the night turned velvet, when the soft haze of the sunset lingered just enough on the horizon to keep the dark at bay. And it was cold, but that didn’t seem to matter once you moved fast enough, my dad reminded me. And so off we went, onto that wooden lift.
On the ride up, we’d sometimes talk about philosophy, or Lucinda Williams, or anything that wasn’t
tied back to our lives on the ground, and we’d sometimes not talk at all and sit in the warmth of comfortable silence. Sometimes he’d quietly remark or, knowing him, wax poetic, about how pretty it was outside. And it always took him saying that for me to notice how the mountain glittered silver in the lights from the lift, and the birches and evergreens on the side were lightly dusted with the fresh snow, and occasionally I’d hear the whoosh of someone speeding by, all while our lift moved on.
I don’t remember the skiing so much as I do that moment, of slipping through a crack in my world into one where everything was beautiful, and poetic, and subtly shimmering in amber lights.
And when that moment broke, we’d land with a soft thump in the snowdrift at the top of the mountain and I’d take in a deep breath of the metallic air, the type where the chill burns your nose and mouth. I’d try and shake out my ice-crusted hair. I’d remember that my hands were cold and chapped. And then I’d rather be in my room, curled up in bed, face illuminated by a blue light shining out of the covers. I didn’t want to adventure anymore.
But I’d go down the mountain anyway, losing sight of my dad and everything else in the haze of kickedup snow and my breath frosting in front of my face. And then I’d be at the bottom of the mountain, where the snow had seen so many people, it’d turned to brown slush. Where the lift line now numbered almost fifty impatient skiers, and you couldn’t even see the amber lights or familiar wooden chairs anymore. And then we’d always leave.
After I left home, my dad and I didn’t go skiing anymore. And anyway, the mountain was undergoing renovations. They were taking out that wooden chairlift, my dad said. What a shame, my dad said.
Scrim
Grace Yang
Morning of nov. 6
Jillian Cheng
when my eyes finally opened, i bolted so awake that my neurons hadn’t yet pulled their triggers and i forgot that doomsday had already arrived. early mornings in new england are cold enough to choke out even the strongest of starlings.
my window was open and i only heard the whistle of wind, the tapping of pipes against the wall. i rolled over and held my lamp steady in my gaze, let it unfocus, let it split in 2, 3 more seconds before click they fired, click, ripped through the chambers of breathing promises mounted in the folds of my brain, click, everything will be okay, we had whispered in unison, a promise or
question (everything will be okay? everything will be okay?), when our eyes were glued to blue bruises and red pools on the television screen, and you kissed my knuckles, and i wondered when fate would strike and the credits would roll.
i untangled myself from my sheets. i stood by the window and watched the wind rattle the oak trees.
we will never go back, the wind howled. the wind was like a colorless waterfall. the wind pounded through the trees. we will never go back.
i asked it,
how long until we will listen to ourselves? how long until i belong to myself? how long until the liver-spotted businessmen are tied to hospital beds and their problems be come ours? how long?
we don’t know, the wind said. it calmed, cooled to a solemn breeze. we don’t know.
Blue Hour
Grace Yang
Ode to a post-apocalyptic second hometown
Olivia Pierre
I think I’ll go back to New Hampshire, where shadow envelops like a shroud and sadness makes sense once more. I have read your poems about sun and light and sunlight and decided that I will stay in the dark and damp, awake and unafraid.
Have you ever been truly in the dark, New York? Have you experienced the unforgiving black sky, eager to swallow you whole as the cold nips at your fingers, begging to drag you down into icy sleep? The squares of light through your windows tell me no, you have never lain out on the fields, face flushed, to stare at the stars like you so ever desire.
At least I know I can die in the dark and in peace.
When ghosts swirl around in this land of fiery red leaves and pine, I know that I can shriek until my throat burns hot and wet and raw. Like an animal, I’ll claw at sinew and tendon until nobody will be able to tell the difference between my screams and their wails of bitter cold, their death and my almost-life. If they could hear me, the frostbite would be creeping up their fingers now anyways, freeze-dried rot on skin a black sun on the horizon of an eclipse.
