Comma 2017-2018 Issue 2

8

The Comma

April 5, 2018 THE OBSERVER

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Being Patronized Doesn’t Make Me Like You (a haiku)

By OLIVIA LUCAS

Lavishly cruel, you slap down your credit card and pay for our dinner.

Fear(full) Life

By OLIVIA LUCAS

The Passionate Ocean to Her Love

By ERIN KIERNAN

Come live in me and be my love, And you will all the pleasures prove, Of sun-dyed coasts of strawberry And forty ships upon my sea.

And you will swim within my cove As I am sitting in your grove, And I will drink your cup of tea While you are floating warm and free.

As I scale up your highest peak, You’ll graze your hand across my cheek And vow to swim my cove no more And drag your body to my shore.

My feet will bring me to the top, And I will gaze and swear to stop And throw my body to your ground As our hearts fast together pound.

You’ll be empty, cold, and wet, And I’ll be faint but won’t forget The love I felt upon your crown, The pain I felt when crashing down.

I have a fear of shitting and public speaking and shitting in public places where others may hear me.

I have a fear of drowning (a very real fear) in a pool in my homework in other people.

I have a fear of success and failure of not knowing which is which of not being able to control either.

I have a fear of love and sex and sex that comes from love and sex that doesn’t sex that I want and don’t want and have always wanted.

I have a fear of insignificance which is why I moved to a city where I am so insignificant it forces me to try a little a lot never always.

So I will pluck fruit from your grove And take it to your peak with love As you dive deep inside of me And bask and bathe within my sea.

You’ll be in mar and I in shire, But melt we’ll both above our fire.

Since these delights my mind do move, I’ll live in you and be your love.

EMILY DAVANCENS/THE COMMA

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The Comma

JACQUILINE CHIN/THE COMMA

All Right 2005

By PHILLIP ROBBINS

So it’s been a few days. I don’t quite feel sick anymore. But I walk to my room and forget where I’m going half way there. Sometimes I throw up right after I eat.

The doctors all said it was something called a concussion. So now I have to sit on a bunch of other doctors’ couches and tell them how I feel or something. They all seem kind of nice

though. They just let me talk about what video games I play and ask how far I got in them.

They like it when I go into detail about the levels I beat, or when I tell them what happened on Monday Night Raw. Last week Jeff Hardy won the Intercontinental title. It was awesome.

One time one of the doctors told me that wrestlers get these head problems too from time to

time. I could only imagine what having more than one could do to someone.

You could kill your own family and not even know it.

But anyway, I think I’ll be able to go back to school in a few days.

Only problem, my math homework doesn’t seem so easy anymore.

Yes My Son Technically Was Expelled From School For Selling Drugs But That’s How I Know He’ll Make A Great Doctor

By SHANNON CONSTANTINE

What you heard at the bake sale is true; my sweet Thomas was expelled for selling prescription painkillers to classmates. And I wasn’t going to write this, except that my sister-in-law Julia said that she thought it was so admirable that I was “holding my head up high” after Thomas’ disciplinary experiences.

So I’d just like to clarify that I’m not special or brave for being unashamed that my son was caught selling powerful opioids at his school, because I see it as proof that he has a very promising medical career ahead of him.

My Tommy’s practice, before it was so wrongfully disrupted by the tyrannical hand of Pineview County School for the Arts (yes, he goes to an arts school, he’s just that well-rounded!), was located at the prime location of the broom closet by the Spanish classrooms. He worked tirelessly; he accommodated his hours to the needs of his patients, whether they be between 3rd and 4th periods,

between 5th and 6th periods, or the adderall rush hour just before after-school test makeups. And he wasn’t just a general practitioner, either. Thomas took the hippocratic oath quite seriously, too—he didn’t tell anybody what he was doing. But he served an essential purpose.

The students he served desperately need the kind of pharmaceutical goods that they could not find anywhere else, other than any other doctor’s office at any time whatsoever.

I knew my Thomas was a special kid from the moment he was born. And as he grew, I, like any mom, imagined all the wonderful possible careers that he might have. With every cookie he stole from his kindergarten classmates, I heard the best business schools calling his name. When it was reported that he plagiarized the work of his female classmates in middle school, literal explosions went off in my head as I saw my Tommy show promise as a scientific researcher. But today

I know that my days of wondering what the future holds for him are over. Thomas will be an incredible doctor—and now he can deal me drugs to stop the literal explosions still going off in my head.

Of course, putting him through medical school will be difficult. I won’t expect every institution to understand the level of ingenuity that my Tommy shows. I’m sure that then, he’ll still have to face the same backwards reaction to his brilliance that his vice principal had today, with such ignorant comments as “He violated our drug-free zone policy!” and “No I don’t want to get in on the ground floor of his emerging local cartel!” My Tommy is a very special kid, and while it might seem like just an after-school activity now, he’ll need lots of support from influential adults if he wants to eventually prescribe dangerous levels of percocet to hard-working teens just like him.

9

10

The Comma

April 5, 2018 THE OBSERVER

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THE OBSERVER April 5, 2018

The Comma

11

Thomas and Francesca

By ERIN KIERNAN

Thomas and his wife sit on a large plot of parched land. In between mouthfuls of chicken he tickles her face with her braids. Thomas loves that his wife has that dark chocolate hair because if she were blonde she would blend right into the landscape. She is the only Italian he knows. His “Bella.” But her name is Francesca.

For two years, Thomas has been trying to learn “Carnival of Venice” on the guitar for his sweet Italian girl, but his fingers are stiff and caked from farming. Francesca reminds him that she has never even been to Italy, but he insists that hearing an Italian folk tune is good for the Italian soul. Thomas scrubs his farming hands nightly and moisturizes the tips of his fingers with sneak butter—the same way he quietly gratifies his sweet tooth with sneak sugar—so he can one day pump the melodies of Italy into his darling wife’s soul.

Thomas’s young eyes are starting to fail him, but if he thinks he sees a yellow dot across the field, he will run to it. Typically, it is a sunbeam, but sometimes, it is a small, yellow flower. If it is a small, yellow flower, he will pluck it. He will bite the stem and present it that way in his mouth to Francesca. It looks electric in her chocolate hair, but he mostly does it to hear her snort at his flowered grin.

Thomas and Francesca suck on their chicken-greased fingers and wipe them on their clothes. They dust off their bottoms and throw their bones away from their house.

Thomas tells Francesca that he has won the bone-throwing competition. As Thomas carries their whiskey back to the house, Francesca runs toward the bones.

“Tom! Lookit! My bone’s the furthest from the house.”

“Naw, ya think ya can beat me? How I know ya ain’t holding up my bone? Lemme have a look at the bone.”

Francesca strides towards Thomas and points her tongue at him. Tom is amused and watches his Bella fall and drive her chin into the ground. For no reason at all. Her tongue pops off and she lies motionless. Tom cannot quite see what is happening, for his eyes are starting to fail him, but he knows his Bella has fallen. He drops his whiskey and darts toward her. He calls out her name with each step and grows more frantic with every unanswered “Francesca.” Standing over her body, he calls out “Francesca” just as loudly as he did when he was a few feet from the house. He collapses and scoops up her little head in his massive hands. He peers in her bloody mouth and realizes her tongue is gone. He lowers her head and spreads his body on the ground, wildly throwing out his hands, kicking up a cloud of dust. He finds a tiny, dusty tongue tip. “I got it! Francesca! Francesca! Your tongue! My…” He swallows her lifeless body with his own and sobs.

Thomas does not know how to cope with death because he has been alone for most of his life. But he decides it is best to deal with the decaying body before allowing himself an extended grieving period. He carries her

inside and drapes her over the bed. It is only three miles to town, so Thomas sets off to find the undertaker on foot. He walks, kicking up dust. A film, a soup made of dust and tears, covers his eyes, and he lets his knees buckle. He gingerly lays his body down and grits his teeth against the ground. He shrieks and shrieks. He finds the drama he has engineered comforting, so he continues to wail until he can no longer endure the pressure in his head.

Lying on the ground, he feels dust on his tongue. It makes him gag, and he thinks of his sweet girl’s body and how she will have to lie in the dirt forever. How she will have to taste dust forever. He thinks of the undertaker, a man he hardly even knows, and imagines him preserving her body, imagines him touching her body, imagines him fondling her body. He can’t allow it. He bites the ground and tears out as much as he can fit in his mouth. Earth falls from his mouth as he rises and shouts, “Satan! I know it was you! Always killin’ for no goddamn reason at all! Why ya wanna steal a little girl like that? Ya sick bastard! Come meet me! Satan, I’m here! Come on! Come on! Sick bastard!”

“ Satan! I know it was you! Always killin’ for no goddamn reason at all! Why ya wanna steal a little girl like that? ” Thomas darts through the landscape, looking for the devil. He resolves that he will fight the devil when he finds him and will demand the reanimation of Francesca if he wins. He knows the devil is powerful, however, so as a last resort, he will make a deal. Satan makes a lot of deals.

The sun sets without any sign of Satan.

Thomas sits beside a tree, periodically calling “Satan!”, biting his nails and tasting blood.

Bodies decay quickly. He can’t wait forever.

It might be as late as three in the morning, and Thomas tears apart his barn until he can feel the sturdy pointed tip of his shovel. He runs to what he determines to be the approximate spot Satan killed Francesca and starts to dig. With an almost supernatural energy, he digs a hole matching his own height by sunrise.

He doesn’t sleep. By noon, his black skin is white with dust, his eyes red with exhaustion and glazed over by film. His hands are cov-

ered with raging sores and blood drips down his shovel, hitting the water he has recently struck like ink drops. Digging through mud is much different than digging through silt, and his progress has been nonexistent for hours.

Still, he persists.

He will reach hell. He will find Satan.

Realizing he has not had a drink in a day’s time, he allows himself to bend over for a sip of the brown water. He collapses. With his face resting just above the water’s surface, his body forbids him to work.

He hears, “Thomas.” He opens his eyes but can’t see anything. At least eight precious hours, gone. He is failing Francesca. He starts to sob.

“Thomas!” repeats the voice.

“Who goes there?”

“It’s Satan.”

“Satan! I’ve been looking for ya for over a day!”

“Almost four days now. You’ve been asleep for over two.”

Thomas stands, tearing stiff muscles, and swings in the dark, enraged by pain and frustration. He darts around in the hole, tripping over the uneven floor, confusing water and blood and tears.

“Come on now. Get out of there.”

“I can’t! Ya bastard!”

“You can.”

Thomas feels himself land on dry earth.

He gets up and continues to punch and grab the air. His mind centers on Francesca once again, and he is disappointed in himself for letting anger cloud his focus. The sky possesses a slight glow now, and he detects the hazy outline of his house. He bounds toward it, not stopping when he hears his muscles pop.

Without bothering to use the handle, he rams through the door and fumbles toward the bed.

He reaches out and touches a body. It can’t be Francesca’s body.

He reaches for a candle and a match. Distressed, he can’t light either.

“Allow me,” says Satan, and he illuminates every candle in the room.

Thomas looks at Francesca’s corpse on the bed, bloated, foaming, green. That can’t be his Bella. That can’t be Francesca. That’s an act of the devil. That’s Satan’s doing.

He rips the body from the bed and slings it over his shoulder. He runs out of the house and tears through the field to the deep hole.

Without stopping, he throws the body inside.

He hears the splash and cracking of bones and fills the hole in with the shovel that Satan retrieved for him.

When there is no longer any hole, Thomas lies down in fatigue. His mind empties. After a few minutes of rest he walks inside the house. As he walks through the door, he calls out for Francesca. He stops when he sees a series of lit candles. His trance ends, and he remembers the events of the past four days.

He remembers his Bella’s mutilated body buried just yards away, no coffin, no headstone.

He should have employed the undertaker.

Satan laughs.

CASEY PUGLISI/THE COMMA

12

The Comma

April 5, 2018 THE OBSERVER

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JACQUILINE CHIN/THE COMMA

Spoons

By MADELYNE CASALE

Mama died on Thursday. She wasn’t related to me, but as far as I know, I’m not related to anyone. She liked it when we called her Mama.

Mom was too personal and Mother was too formal. We don’t know what happened, but I overheard whispers that she was found with her face down in a bowl of hot soup. It was a tumor, some said. Others said poison. I didn’t care much either way.

Sometimes I feel like I’m not alone, but then I’m reminded of my pitiful existence. I have to imagine my friends and family. It’s hard to do sometimes, because no one ever taught me how to read or write. None of the other children are educated, either, unless they are New Ones. But the majority of us have been here since we were infants. Mama always said, “Here at the Tenderheart Orphanage, we love and tend to each child like they’re our own.” So I thought that I was loved when Mama or Sister Mary Ann (who was not an actual nun, or even religious in any way) struck me in the face with the back of their hands if I didn’t stand up straight or my stomach betrayed me with the faintest growl to announce my constant gnawing hunger to the world.

It was a huge orphanage with a small staff; we were lucky if we saw the same nurse twice a month. We were expected to take care of ourselves and each other. But every time I got close to one of my fellow orphans, they disappeared.

When families and young, energetic newlyweds visited, they never looked at me, never saw me. I made a game out of it, my fondest childhood memory. For every time someone visited and didn’t look my way, I would sneak a spoon from the kitchen and put it in an old wooden drawer, the only furniture besides a small cot in my cell-like room. The spoons piled up over the years. The stolen objects were the only things that I ever called my own, the only things that never left me.

I had spoons of all sizes and colors. On one day, the big, stainless-steel soup spoon was a “Good Guy”, saving the small, plastic, purple spoon, the “Damsel in Distress.” On another, the prickly spoon made of old rotting wood was “Crotchety Elderly Man,” whose splinters had developed to

keep people away after a long, hard life.

I loved them all.

It took a while for the guilt to kick in. I gulped and pushed it back when I saw a stick-thin, blonde boy attempting to eat his ration of waterered-down Cheerios with his hands. But a week later at dinner, I sat by two little girls with plain, tattered dresses and matted hair attempting to eat their soup with knives.

“It’s impossible,” I said, looking near but not at them.

“All of the spoons are gone,” said one of the girls without looking up from her cracked, plastic bowl.

“You don’t know if it’s impossible until you try,” whispered the other girl meekly, as she

“ ‘All of the spoons are gone,’

said one of the girls without looking up from her cracked, plastic bowl. ”

caught my gaze and stared almost pleadingly into my eyes.

That was the first time I felt guilty about the spoons. I never thought that my actions would have affected anyone else. I wondered, Are the spoons really all gone? I slowly gazed around at the room full of hungry children and a few apathetic nurses. I furrowed my brow as I realized that I couldn’t see any kids using spoons. All because of me. The nurses couldn’t have cared less, but I knew that I had to do something.

I stood abruptly, knocking my chair back as

I ran from the table, up the worn and splintered wooden stairs, up to my room, only earning a few curious but blank-eyed glances along the way. My hands shook as I moved towards the drawer.

“Just like ripping off a Band-Aid,” I muttered to myself, trying to muster the strength to part ways with the spoons I grew to cherish and love. I took a deep, shaky breath before yanking the drawer open and grabbing all of the spoons.

I gathered up the bottom of my shirt to use as a makeshift sack, and after securing all of the spoons, I ran back down to the dining hall. I ran up to each child and carefully handed them a spoon.

“I know that John Spoon Sr. will find a good home with you.”

“Please take good care of Lisa Spoon.”

“I’m trusting you to love and cherish Sir Robert Spoon like I once did.”

It was hard at first, but the looks of complete confusion turning to true joy made everything worth the initial pain. These kids had never received a gift before. Christmases and birthdays were only myths and legends at Tenderheart.

For the first time, they knew how it felt to call something their own. For the first time in our lives, we all smiled.

After I gave a spoon to every child, and even the nurses (because everyone deserves something), I was left with one. I clutched it in my hand as I walked aimlessly through the old corridors, with floors sunken in from the decades of pressure from millions of tiny homeless feet.

I was lost in the pleasant imaginings of the new adventures my spoons would experience, with a wistful smile still lingering on my face.

“You have a beautiful smile, sweetie.”

I was snapped out of my daydreams to see a pretty lady with a young face and dark brown hair tied up neatly in a knot, with her equally young and bright-eyed husband trailing behind.

I looked up to see my own smiling face for the first time in the reflection of her kind, mossy green eyes. My body relaxed, and excitement buzzed so loudly in my ears that I barely noticed the last spoon clatter to the floor at my side.

Sonnet I

An Ode to Joe’s

Revolutions

By JEFFREY UMBRELL

By SAVANAH MANOS

By SAMI JUMPER

A moment in your eye: if that was all, a brief supposing of encounter, then that would be adequate. There is a small potential when I glance up, and again when my eye looks for yours across what seems to be an empty room. One looks around, and takes notice of efforts to redeem any doubts. Still, there is a lot of ground to make up. I’d prepared to avoid it, but not to revert all the way back to amassing thoughts, and often to commit is to realize before starting anew.

If looking past exclusively relied

on introspection, there’s no other side.

Whole Foods doth not compare To thy prices nor sustenance Nor doth others have such flair For thy selection is multitudinous.

Days of calm shopping art erstwhile And thine lines art winding But thy dost give me a smile So mine love need naught reminding.

I. withered vines slither over my psyche and

my flowered heart suffocates.

II.

ipomea alba only bloom under the moon. the beauty of starlight does not diminish the beauty of sunlight.

III.

tear out your roots of old, gnarled browns and grays. the earth needs vacancies to grow.

IV.

leave your fields fallow but only for a season. weeds steal empty space.

V.

remember this— do not give yourself to the night without promising to return with the dawn.

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THE OBSERVER April 5, 2018

The Comma

13

Hot Commodity

By JENNIE KIM

“hot commodity, filled with probiotics, great for your gut, fermented Korean food it’s spicy and sour all at once.” i’m ill-suited in the kitchen and i’m sure the kitchen hates me as much as i hate it, but there’s this weird attachment i have to kimchi. it’s the hometown kimchi. it’s the stories my mom told me about her childhood kimchi. it’s the i saw my mom work two jobs seven days a week for 7 years kimchi. it’s the, to this day, i watch and help my mom make her kimchi. it’s the neighborhood grandmothers who would spend days making a whole batch to last through the winter kimchi. it’s the going to get groceries and rushing home before the saltwater drains too much kimchi. it’s the acute awareness that i am the only bloodline my parents have in the united states kimchi. it’s the fact that my mom told me the same stories about her mother since i was 7 and i still pay attention kimchi. it’s the for the last thirty years my parents have lived vicariously through old photos and stories that happened months ago kimchi. it’s the i’m still telling myself that i’m okay with being 50% bilingual kimchi. it’s the i have larger than life goals and i dont know how to achieve them kimchi. it’s the my mom cries quietly in the dark kimchi. it’s the her father died and the only thing she can eat was kimchi. it’s the distant look, asking a higher being, how it became like this kimchi. it’s the don’t bow to me for new year’s because i can’t deal with it kimchi. it’s the i hope your grandfather is in nirvana kimchi. it’s the i worry about your grandmother kimchi. it’s the she couldn’t attend the funeral because all the flights were booked kimchi. actually, there were seats but eight grand, you’re kidding me, that’s really when i would be eating kimchi. it’s the she went to korea to help her mother grieve kimchi. but in reality, this might be the last time she might be able to see her face kimchi. it’s the preparation and the bright red containers to make the kimchi. it’s the oh shit we forgot something and now have to go back to the store kimchi. it’s the korea that i will never know kimchi. it’s the stagnation of my parent’s korea kimchi. it’s the collision of their values and ours kimchi. convenience for your dietary needs. i hope you realize that when you eat a piece you think of me.

EMILY DAVANCENS/THE COMMA

The Tooth Fairy

By RYAN KELLY

In the first year that I knew my boyfriend, I pulled out all of his teeth one by one by one as he slept. I kept a pair of pliers under my pillow, rich with the scent of his blood. He was a heavy sleeper. His house had burned down around him as a child. A firefighter carried the sleeping boy out, limp and sweaty like raw meat from the butcher’s block.

The first tooth I took was his top left incisor, which gleamed meanly each night when moonlight slid into the room. It glowed so bright I couldn’t sleep. I became an insomniac, and every night, it seemed that the tooth shone brighter, piercing first through my closed eyelids and then through the pillows I stacked over my face. It started to seem that perhaps the light was not being reflected from the moon, but rather was emanating from the tooth itself, generating more power nightly.

The tooth had to go. I bought the pliers at the Home Depot and watched oral surgery videos on YouTube until he came home from work and I made dinner. We had sex and he went to bed at his normal hour and I straddled my

boyfriend on the bed and pinched the offending tooth between the metal claws of the pliers. His breath was sweet and soft like a baby’s. He never snored. There was a lot of blood and I had to turn him on his side so he wouldn’t choke, like you do with a person having a seizure. The blood was darker than I remembered blood to be, and when it dried on my fingers it was sticky and tasted like sweet red wine. There was a snapping sound and the tooth slid neatly out, looking more like a claw than what I imagined teeth to look like. The ones smiling on the posters at the dentist’s office always have two legs. I later discovered that only the molars are bipedals. Canines and incisors are more like mermaids with long, curved tails.

Like elephant tusks.

I put the tooth in my mouth to clean it. It felt smooth like a pebble, like I had found it nestled among many others in a shallow creek. In my hand it glinted one last time, winking at me, assuring me it would keep our secret.

I buried the tooth in a patch of damp, soft soil in my backyard. When I was young, my mother had told me that

this is what the Tooth Fairy did. The tooth did not grow into a tooth tree, but rather into a baby, which the stork plucked from the supple ground like a root vegetable and dropped on a stoop before going on his smoke break. My mother delivered babies at the hospital, wearing plastic gloves to pull pink wriggling jellybeans from the wombs of strangers. She was the first face many babies looked upon. If people were like ducks, each squalling baby she delivered would have imprinted on my mother and I would have many siblings rather than none at all.

My mother delivered me by herself with no help from anyone, my father working a late shift at the hospital. She died from blood loss but was reincarnated as my nextdoor neighbor’s English bulldog, Sally.

Each following night I extracted another tooth from my sleeping boyfriend, the wine of his blood running through my fingers, the sickly sweet smell of developing cavities. I planted three neat rows of teeth and grew a thick garden of oleander. Sally ate two of the gaudy white flowers and died face-up, looking at the sun.

COMMA

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF erika ortiz / EXECUTIVE EDITOR elodie huston / FACULTY ADVISOR elizabeth stone // EDITORS megan crane / tatiana gallardo / alex merritt / cat reynolds / bessie rubinstein// MEMBERS mary alter / lucia bailey / kiley campbell / sophie guimares / alexandra richardson / ashley rivera / abby wheat