4×4 Magazine, Vol. 10

N O 10

2023

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY NEW YORK, NY

MASTHEAD

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Renny Gong & Skye Levine DESIGN EDITORS Serena Deng & Katherine Ju

MANAGING EDITOR Grace Novarr

EVENTS & OUTREACH EDITOR Nichi Pandey READING EDITOR Stephen Dames

DIGITAL EDITOR Serena Deng

STAFF EDITORS Bryan Ge, Franziska Lee, Alejandra Díaz-Pizarro, Sam Sadowski, Iris Yu, Naomi Zarin

© 2023 4×4 Magazine All rights are reserved and revert to authors and artists one year after publication.

CONTENTS 4 WELCOME

7 CURSE-HATCHING Gabriela Orozco

9 NORMAL FLORA Kiley Karlak Malloy

10 FOR GOOD MEASURE Gokul Venkatachalam

12 LEFTOVERS FOR EXTROPSECTION Gokul Venkatachalam

14 FRATERNITY Marino Bubba

17 BARTON POND REVEALS ITSELF TO ME Andie Tappenden

18 IT’S FOR THE BEST Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong

20 FOR THE DOG Beatrice Agbi

21 AND IF WE SEEK VENGEANCE, KNOW IT WILL BE LIKE THIS Renee Morales

23 STILL LIFE OF CHEESES, WINE, CASSANDRA, YEWA, YEWA, YEWA! Renee Morales

26 7031010445073 (BEEP BOOP SYMPHONY) Camille Sensiba

27 CAN’T HELP BUT LOOK Andrew Forrest Joseph Blake

32 FREE ONIONS ON THE DOWNTOWN BUS Ning Chang

34 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS & CONTRIBUTORS

DEAR READER HELLO THERE. Turning ten years old feels like a big deal. Double digits! But in some ways, we’ve refused to grow up. We’ve still got our small and scrappy spirit, perhaps this year even more than usual. For instance, we still haven’t learned to book a Hamilton classroom it seems, and just a few hours ago we were forced to relocate mid-meeting to make room for another more puttogether group. And some nights, we stayed up reading way past our bedtimes.

This juvenescence is reflected in our board as well—this year, we welcomed a record number of new members.

Like us, Volume X is teeming with life. It’s the bacteria gliding through the pages of Kiley Malloy’s “Normal Flora.” It’s the sparrow in Gokul Venkatachalam’s “leftovers for extrospection” just looking for a break. It’s Beatrice Agbi’s good, good dog.

In other ways, however, we own up to our maturity. We’re more sure of ourselves, and we know what we like—the delightful, the unexpected, the fresh, our buzzword. Camille Sensiba, for starters, returns from last year’s issue with her unmistakable vibrancy, shape, and voice, this time in the form of a robot full of yearning. Gokul Venkatachalam returns as well, bursting with the energetic sound we know and love.

The 4×4 ethos—the risk, the deviousness—manifests itself in “Can’t Help But Look” by Andrew Blake and the two poems by Renee Morales, pieces that break molds, that push beyond our expectations with regard to both form and content.

And in searching for the unexpected, we’ve surprised ourselves with our tastes, which are ever more tender and earnest. We miss who we miss, we’ve learned in reading Barton Pond by Andie Tappenden. It’s like Gabriela Orozco writes in Curse-hatching, “It’s useless, the current beckons.” And in “Free Onions on the Downtown Bus” by Ning Chang, we read tenderness in the thrill of movement and the joy of serendipity.

On the flip side, chaos and absurdity haunt the pages of “Fraternity” by Marino Bubba and “It’s For The Best” by Kaylee Jeong, as characters struggle with a confusing grief.

Now, with ten years under our belt, we’re eager to see our magazine continue to grow and change. Start puberty perhaps. We love every inch of this year’s slender beast and know that you will too—enjoy!

RENNY GONG AND SKYE LEVINE EDITORS-IN-CHIEF 2022-2023

GABRIELA OROZCO

CURSE-HATCHING I’ve sent the children to look for buried dragon’s eggs, but they keep turning up bottle caps instead. Slipped through fingers of summer-drunk men for sweet eight year olds to uncover and declare treasure. Sand calls to beer like sirens to men. Or the ground calls to bottle caps like gravity does lovestruck girls high on hope. Easily tossed aside like the false copper green of Heineken. We’re not sirens how men say we are. Rather we’re Icarus, fragile and falling again and again.

Fuck physics and the crash of bodies on the cliffs, forget the existence of creatures you lack the capacity to imagine, your far away body and the hold you have on me. The spell I can’t shake. I’ll scrape together fairy huts out of sticks and lost sleep, pretend neither your silence and despondency’s itch exist.

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No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to stop thinking of you. I’ll carve out cave walls, walk the curve of an incantation bowl, like we did when we first wrote together. In the tongue of my ancestors, I count out seconds and predict when the dragons will wake. It’s a dull sort of ache. This heat and the water’s hellish temptation. Your words in my head. I try a new chant, scrap numbers for letters; alef, bet—try it backwards; taf, shin— It’s useless, the current beckons, even as the dragons shake open their wings. Your silken-scratchy voice sticks like cloth on sweaty skin. I can still hear you, crooning over your queer guitar as you pluck the strings.

OROZCO

KILEY KARLAK MALLOY

NORMAL FLORA Sometimes I swear I hear their hunger. Feel them gliding like ice dancers, carving paths across my intestines and collecting lactic acid on cilia blades too small for eyes. I can’t see them but I feed them, lovers that taste of strawberry banana and answer to Yogurt. I give them a body to hollow out and call human. When they die, they die in millions, so good thing they grow this way, too. For a short time, I know their names— Staphylococcus, Streptococcus and me. A symbiosis of self-interest.

So the stomach is a proof of concept: I can live with every small thing taking up space inside me. Can live with every thought except for lonely. Like a cicada chorus or the false flora blooming in my gut, my body hungers for something it can keep.

GOKUL VENKATACHALAM

FOR GOOD MEASURE you’ll be aw lrite as loooong as ya riiing n make it in before faiive uh klahck! puffpuff (pufforgoodmeasure) pass flashflash flash

4×4 POETRY AWARD WINNER SELECTED BY ARIANA REINES

GOKUL VENKATACHALAM

LEFTOVERS FOR EXTROSPECTION

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birds nibble on their bread fed up with rye it was rye last week and the week before where’s a sparrow to go to get some sourdough? spection the old professor croaked dabbled in acrylic painting oil takes too long to dry he said, allegedly trying to paint the moon but it passed over the clouds he surmised staring at the swirling sky

VENKATACHALAM

MARINO BUBBA

FRATERNITY HE WAS DEAD, MY BROTHER, and she was beautiful, his wife. There’s only one way that ends.

I smiled at the funeral because the priest was funny. He said that John spent too much time at Fenway Park and not enough at church. That’s why God took him so soon, he said through a thick Boston accent. The Big Man must be a Yankees fan. It was inappropriate and hilarious and I barked a laugh like a dog choking on chicken bones.

She looked over at me startled and smiled too, tears pooling inside her dimples.

I didn’t smile after that, guilt weighing heavy on the corners of my mouth, until the next time I saw her. It was sometime after the service, not nearly long enough to be okay but unbearably long to be alone.

A bell sang as she opened the door to the downtown cafe, her sunken eyes searching for me. I hid my grin in a glass of water, ice cubes crackling against my teeth, trying and failing to drown my giddiness.

It was morning and her boys were in school and I was mourning in black and she was too, except for her shocking yellow rain slicker and pink rubber boots. Drizzle stopped sliding down the windowpane after our second coffee and our vibrating fingers touched when we went for a third. I offered to walk her to the train. She offered to see me again in three days.

That night, I washed the smell of coffee grounds and grief out of my thinning hair.

For the first time in a long time, I counted passing days. When the third arrived, I brushed my teeth.

The bell announced her entrance again, midafternoon sunshine flaring behind her in a halo. I said hello with a smile and she did not smile back. She smelled hastily cleaned, minty and musty, as I must have.

Have you eaten?

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No. I haven’t much been able to.

Me neither, I lied. I was growing fat on edible arrangements and conciliatory chocolates.

Do you want to split something?

When we pulled apart the halves of our Caprese, melted mozzarella bound them together. Her finger cut the clinging cheese and she licked the remnants from its tip.

Juicy red dripped down her chin and, when I asked her how the kids were holding up, I reveled in the obscenity of basil on her tongue. Our eyes met as we wiped our mouths with paper napkins.

Meandering to the train, our shoulders bumped on the narrow sidewalk once, twice. When we embraced farewell, I must have held her too tight because she didn’t ask to see me again. I was too afraid to suggest it.

I trudged home through a sludge of impotence and fell asleep with my boots laced.

Forever passed. Two days, maybe, or five

years. I lost track of the spinning clock. I lost track of how long it had been since my loss. I lost my toothbrush.

Then one night, the doorbell rang. Bills, ads, sorry-he-died Hallmark cards had piled so high under the mail slot that I was forced to sweep them aside to open the door.

Fresh air punched me in the nose and my eyes teared up. Glimmering, I saw streetlights, stars, her cavernous cheeks caked in rouge. I was so startled, all I heard was babysitter.

Sure, I’ll watch the boys.

No, I got a babysitter. Come with me.

We left. I did not change. Evening air froze my sweat-soaked flannel to my chest.

We drank fire at an inky bar. We drank fire in a cramped booth. Our elbows beat each other purple. Red ran in rivers down her cheeks. Black bled from her eyes.

I did not see her cry.

FRATERNITY

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I swam to the bathroom and she followed me into the stall. I vomited. She watched.

She left. I followed her.

We drank fire on the sidewalk. We drank fire in the park.

slammed her head into my shoulder and rested.

I clung to her as a shipwrecked sailor clings to driftwood.

We drank fire. We drank.

Then we were at the bench in front of the creek in which John and I searched for stickball stones when we were boys. He was there, just as he was at twelve years old, staring. I picked up a rock, smooth and round, and threw it at his head. He disappeared with a laugh, splashing down the current.

She sat on the bench. I sat next to her.

We stared at the water, our necks stiff ahead, while my hand crept from my knee to hers.

Her hand was waiting for me. Our pinkies locked and I held her in a promise.

I clawed her toward me and felt the cool wedding band on her next finger. She BUBBA

ANDIE TAPPENDEN

BARTON POND REVEALS ITSELF TO ME On the subway a song about heat takes me to summer, two years ago driving in a car of moving air to coach on fake grass, when I get there half the girls are afraid of the hard-shelled cicadas and their endless trill, the other half scooping the bugs tenderly off their teammates’ backs like a melon-baller whispering against the rind. I am never sure of my instructions but that’s besides the point, the sport is surviving summer until I can meet Zoe at the river, which is called a pond and not on any digital maps and by this point I have deteriorated my arm muscles (which is, I guess, less a decision than the absence of one, which I have gotten very good at) but I dive in anyway, imperfectly, and when I’m tired of aiding my own float, craving the dry wood of the dock like a suture to a wound, I let Zoe grab my wrists and pull the river out of me.

While I am on the subway thinking about warmth that loosens limbs, Zoe is in another country planning her future and the blanket in my room is always cold no matter who gave it to me.

4×4 PROSE AWARD WINNER SELECTED BY YIYUN LI

KAYLEE YOUNG-EUN JEONG

IT’S FOR THE BEST

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WHEN I CALLED MY LIFE ON THE PHONE TO TELL IT I WANTED TO LIVE A DIFFERENT ONE it was so good to me I could hardly stand it: I understand, and if you ever want to try again I will be here, waiting. But I think I know what we have to do. So I’m going to hang up now, I’m going to hang up now—and when I looked up everything I wanted was sitting across from me in the diner booth, grinning, holding out its hand. Sorry I’m late but I’m ready to want you back now. I said nothing, got in my little car and drove away. Made eye contact with a man limping down the wrong side of the highway, thought about giving him a ride, kept driving. Saw the house I’d always dreamed of buying on fire, thought about walking through every burning room of my useless other life, kept driving. Passed my elementary school of so many years ago, remembered the time another kid silently beat me up on the playground, all that hot blood spilling from my little mouth. Kept driving. Felt my car lurch over something. I pulled over onto the shoulder, walked back, turned on my flashlight: a raw red glistening mess. I turned off my light. I sat down in the slaughter. I rolled around in it, smeared my hair with its rust, took fistfuls of it with both my hands, scraped the last bits off the road with my nails, licked my fingers clean. Ate and ate my roadkill heart.

JEONG

BEATRICE AGBI

FOR THE DOG The days were good because the days were long and idle spent sitting between the ottoman and the shutter windows rearranging guitar stands and plucking the same ABAB in the room. The days were good because they existed aloof, in the middle of a month of days. A year of days. The dog enters and exits. Black coat with spots of brown. The dog that died last year. The days she spent wagging her tail and panting while laying down on the porch in those scattered spots of sunlight— those days, her days, were good.

RENEE MORALES

AND IF WE SEEK VENGEANCE, KNOW IT WILL BE LIKE THIS oyá, mam, if on the way you see my father and feel yourself in wanting, give water give the child texture––garments that won’t fit. bless-girl, if the sun is shining give me boy parts: hairy nipples, nothing made to suckle make me big then fixate, wrestle like a camera’s shutter ache and on the first month of winter, pour wine to make me bleed. as if this skin’s a monastery, chewed tobacco ripe split between teeth here, a girl and there, her goat legs: sheepened fat except cut, here something on paper. oyá and her girlcrown. and if he’s wearing ironed linen oyá careful to make her bleed, as if

one could pinpoint where iya shed to mami, shell-nosed baby and the house: whispers all purple. oyá if he is sleeping don’t speak.

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as if i birth girls to donkey, like they don’t seek that love too, drum beat steady and soft breathing, sweet things resile on clipped knees, oyá mam please,

why won’t you make her bleed. as if she too were chicken––ire all in the way she says your name. like oil spun in red ribbon a reminder: how everything in the body eventually burns into lightning. when he imagines my lip curl oyá tell him it is whip, help envision shadow something directly in the vein for mami to cuff both ankles, but only

if the blade’s acute. you make her

bleed and i promise mam: that too is salvation. i wear this dripping shawl like a bird does evidence that it lived and it lives and i live like the time three girls pattycaked on a train home and bab had long been dead––how i love when they

commiserate and they were young like bees, set to sting so when

their tights began to ride up i watched how the thunder hid. the rivers

spurring in their bellies mam the currents in the tracks so hungry. and when his hand met at their shoulder underneath their breath oyá, gale. or, if they are still bleeding: a reckoning.

AND IF WE SEEK VENGEANCE

RENEE MORALES

STILL LIFE OF CHEESES, WINE, CASSANDRA, YEWA, YEWA, YEWA! in a THUN-THUN-THUN kinda manner If I were to ask her for moon and mouths, I’d get wet things––unfortunately how, when he drips down my back, the rest is all reprisal: a first day at work thighs both up in laces apron wound wet and the uproar thickening. Everything all Stravinsk-ied.

It means heavy-steps. How, when entering the bath he suddenly takes me. Holding, first an ear to glass then whisper-cling like quick breaths, lips maybe.

Water: fig-eating, licking and tasting, it means no one and everything attracts detracts attacks me.

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It means, take me down deeper, dear take me down take me down take my body, somewhere.

Cavernous. How, when the flame licks a finger there’s no pause they call it tilting, partitions and the glass facing wet little mouths eating tongues saying: reneereneerenee, minemineminemine, open both eyes, saying look, it means: two lips going the distance.

It means here, when underneath dirty bedsheets back is bleeding, one of us whispers Chickpea, Sweetness, Red, like Forever Boy, come here why don’t you come see, quiet to feel your little death.

How, when I open the balcony to witness it’s all your Florida rampage,

MORALES

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air smelling ripe: Coffee, just like you used to just like you just you like you just like you used to how you used to smell used to just how you used to and, this time my mouth harder, deeper, [ Donna D./Billie/S-Summer/Summer ‘20 all up in our ear again. and A: would I have licked your sneakers clean peek smell soiled ribbons at the door that feeling of a shirt sweat drenched water water to feel it? Yes boy, Yes Yes Yes. but not lonely, no, hungry I am not eating, no biting, no I am licking all things shoes I am not forgetting I remember every thing like nails tearing skin, if that is your mouth at my neck dear know: I am not apologetic,,,,,

STILL LIFE

CAMILLE SENSIBA

7031010445073 (beep boop symphony) These days, the real _ modern poetry _ comes from the heart _ of robots like me _ and it is all translated _ from wingdings. _ But this is different _ because I get slang _ and I am all about _ feeling feelings _ especially blueness _ and surprise _ ! _ Here I argue _ for being more: _ I eat every day _ because I want to. _ Thursdays are more _ delicious than you realize. _ I am all over the place _ but very still _ because I choose _ to be breathless. _ All of this _ is literal _ but true. _ I am incomplete _ without desire: I do want _ to be something _ more personable _ ha ha. Imagine me _ my iron silhouette _ is lava lamp-insides _ turned on _ I curve like _ a sexy homunculus_ My whole build _ makes so much _ sense. I am tender _ and not in a sore way. _ I make love _ I make _ love _ I was made _ to be productive _ much like you _ and I do _ like you. _ In all my life _ my body is neither _ here nor there. _ Every science ends _ with falsehood and _ I am no I am _ soft and shocking _ ready to be _ really _ strangely.

ANDREW FORREST JOSEPH BLAKE

CAN’T HELP BUT LOOK Part I: All About Reincarnation Gas is filling the car. Full to the brim. Not an atom of room. A car idling in a closed garage, a kid left in the car on a hot summer day—the windows are up!

I’m choking on something. Something wants to get in or maybe get out, too full or too empty.

This doesn’t feel right. The car is filling up with gas. But I just keep gripping the edge of my shorts and keep looking out the window because my Mom is doing the same, just driving on.

I learned about reincarnation today in school. Death isn’t an end but a door. I’m maybe 8. What else could I be? Better maybe. Try to pull a thread and it knots. The car is so silent. I’ve always been bad at this sort of thing: speaking. The thread loops and knots up. Reincarnation. But the car is filling up with gas. Reincarnation: “Mom, do you ever think about dying and

being someone else?”

(Shitty explanation, I know! I’m 8, give me some grace.)

“Yes.” That’s the spark. Then, White. And the long tone on a landline when someone hangs up.

Something as simple as flicking a light switch or even the clink of a belt is all a gas leak needs.

We keep driving in silence like we didn’t just explode. Like we didn’t just level a whole intersection. If I look in the rear view mirror I can see a car on its side, and everything’s all up in flames. Glass that can never be unshattered. I’m blown to bits out on the street. I mean, it’s just excessive. Really gory. An arm flung all the way to the sidewalk, and who knew my legs could bend that way? My moms face is half gone, dragged along the cement. I’m all singed and charred, smoking up the air. Car accidents have that medieval sort of spectacle

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about them. You just can’t look away. There’s some observational satisfaction, disgust at the satisfaction, and then you keep driving because there’s other places to be, soldier!

We have to keep moving, soldier!

Do you hear me? Sir yes sir!

We keep driving in silence. The closest we’ve come to understanding one another and it vanishes in the rear view mirror. The dead me is taken to a coroner, Dr. Death.

He’s all business, the office clown, and he snaps on his gloves, declares: “Cause of death: having a mother! Would not wanna be this kid!” He wipes at his brow, as if there’s sweat. He’s an easy charmer, all suave. “This is gonna be sooo much paperwork.”

He’s riding high when he ‘Honey-I’mhome’s later that night. A kiss on the cheek for his beautiful wife: Yearning The MidWife. “Mmm, how’s work?” And he’s all obtuse and funny “Oh don’t get me started!

They’re working me to death!” Hang up the coat, take off the shoes. What’s for dinner?

Yearning The MidWife had quite the day, she’s dead on her feet. So many deliveries today! Yearning holds them, cradles the heads of new life as they come into the world. New life always comes wailing, that

same old ancient voice of sorrow. Wailing like they know what’s to come. Wailing like they’ve already experienced life. Yearning touches their heart, the gentlest imprint creating an eternal fossil. And new life keeps wailing until it seems life is just wailing, trying to make sense of an incomprehensible longing. There is nothing to understand! This is an old Truth: Yearning.

Dr. Death and Yearning The MidWife share a dinner, candles and table cloth, the whole shebang. Share the cooking, share the cleaning. They’re very modern about it.

Modern love keeps the world spinning!

EPILOGUE: “Honey did you turn off the stove?” Dr. Death goes to get up and check.

Places his silverware down on his plate: they share the gentlest touch. The smallest little clatter. Metal against metal. “Oh sh-“ And then: White. And the long tone on a landline when someone hangs up.

Part II: Exotic Male Dancers Think of Jesus, but castrated. Is that Sacrilegious?

Being a man only makes sense when you don’t think about being one. Maybe when you don’t have to think about being one.

BLAKE

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But isn’t everyone thinking about being one?

So me, I’m juggling on a stage. Everyone’s laughing. There’s some polite snaps, some condescending nods of affirmation: “man, you are a man”. There’s some jeers too (a lot), letting me know I’m not welcome in the audience anymore: “nothing” at the same time as “freak”. What is this? Some cheesy 80s movie? Jeez. So isn’t everyone thinking about it constantly?

I have stage fright so I imagine everyone in the audience naked. Well crap, because they’ve already been picturing me naked this entire time! I can’t overcome that ratio of gazes.

I can’t be the only one thinking about being a man. Sure I’m on stage flapping about, but the audience is obsessed with it! Sometimes its like I can’t even leave. They need me so they have somewhere to fix their attention. Because if the lights go out in the theater and there’s no one to thrust on stage, the gaze turns back to the self.. Now they’re sitting in a dark room, still thinking about being a man. Whether they were looking before in admiration (envy) or in a seduced aversion (like a car crash) hardly matters now; Now they’re thinking about

being a man—about themselves being a man! And now it doesn’t make any sense!

Not if you think about it.

“Actually its not complicated, just look in your pants!” Oh okay, so do you feel like a man? I’m gonna look you dead in the eyes and ask if you feel like a man? Does your dad think you’re a man? If you want I can pretend your voice didn’t crack on the Yes. Who are you trying to convince with that answer? Come on, jump into this uncertainty with me!

Is this scary? Oh, boo hoo! Imagine how I feel juggling on stage, gazes tearing me apart!

“I’m a man” is a really weak sentence. It’s a mantra. Desperate to be something.

Scrambling itself into a self awareness that contradicts its own existence. Being a man only makes sense until you start thinking about being a man.

Ugh. You libsharts ruin everything.

Being a man makes sense when you aren’t thinking about being one. It makes sense that it doesn’t make sense that acknowledging you have to think about being a man is what allows you to not think about it. Does that make sense? Being a man only exists when its absent from our

CAN’T HELP BUT LOOK

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presence. As soon as we give it words it all falls apart.

Well, I’m beer-ing and grilling like a real man. I take after my dad: hunting and grilling. He’s a good man, the best I know. Or maybe he’s just the best I know, and I say “good man” because what other way would I say it? He tells me “you’re sensitive, son,” with great pride and a sentimental sheen in his eyes. “You’re getting strong” and he pokes at my arms. We cut wood together to make a fire. He tells me “you’re growing into a man” and bumps his shoulder into mine. Yes, I do want to be a part of this club. A part of something. Something tender in me reaches out, “Dad, when do you become a man and know it?”

“For me.... Being a father, yeah, that was probably it for me. When my name became Dad more than my own.” Which doesn’t make much sense, it doesn’t really answer my question. This comforts me more than anything. We might even understand each other. Being a man only makes sense when you don’t think about it.

I chop wood and the cold makes it worse and also better. I’m sweaty and thrashing around.

There’s a Hello Kitty shrine in my room,

and another one for Jesus too. I’m all about a good American Bald Eagle, about laughing loud with an open heart. No care in the world, I stutter when I try to read my poetry to people. Throw back some shots to make it easier. My gut is impulsive and compulsive. I have to translate myself or my gut will run me into the ground. It makes for a sillily painful life. I’m getting the conviction to say what I mean. I lift something moderately heavy and show off the guns; the chivalry is really just a goofy pretense for me and the chivalry-ee to fill out a role.

Like mismatching socks. We are in a contract: in not acknowledging the roles we acknowledge them. Flip it on its head. I run around and learn the art of falling. It’d be good to stoically live in a cabin, gaze lovingly at the sunrise. I could stroll with my hands behind my back, leaning over flowers, holding a newspaper with extended arms because I’m using my readers.

And go on stage and make a fool of myself.

Or sit there, stare back, wait for their boredom to become agitated. Then yell a “fuck you” at them. Face a mirror at them. Or sit in the audience and cheer when everyone jeers or jeer when everyone cheers. Set off a bomb of confetti.

BLAKE

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“Now for the final performance, the extravaganza of this millennia: Messiah is finally here!” Rip off my clothes. The audience gasps. They faint from shock—oh my how their eyes have been corrupted!... You load of hypocrites! Hypocrites who have been undressing me with your eyes this entire time! You’re obsessed with it! ... Why do you hate the same performance you once loved, once I do it willingly?

CAN’T HELP BUT LOOK

NING CHANG

FREE ONIONS ON THE DOWNTOWN BUS They sweat in my bag as we roll off the M1 and through the lower east side bars and we nearly we nearly tap dance out into the scummy chill and neon air Still crowing about our unexpected harvest from some blue soul who left them for us And because I’m hanging out with Peter, we talk— He thinks that divinity is phony.

He has Galileo’s telescope tattooed on his left arm It charts its course like a hanging sign pointing his his way Blinking in inky pinpricks like God isn’t real but the planets are! and yet in the slow lulls of our conversation, he muses What if I’m wrong in the end?

And yet you say you don’t believe in ghosts! I say Hand to god, I don’t he laughs I have Five sweet onions in my bag And we head off slanted westward

to watch a midnight movie.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE COLLECTIVE EFFORT THAT WENT INTO MAKING THIS MAGAZINE deserves more ‘thank you’s’ than we can fit on a page but, here, at the end of the issue, we’re going to try.

First, we’d like to thank our staff. The year it took to put the magazine together was full of meetings that ran late, running around campus flyering, and reading each and every one of our 140 submissions with care and intention. As a young board, we figured it out as we went along. We’re immensely proud of our final product and the 13 editors who stitched it together, piece by piece.

This year, we have only one senior—Nichi Pandey—on board. Despite only joining this year, Nichi stepped up to become our events editor and was instrumental in planning events. We wish him best of luck as he graduates and with all that is to come.

Thank you to Ariana Reines and YiYun Li for agreeing to judge our magazine. We are grateful, and beyond honored, for your time and support. We’d also like to thank the Columbia Arts Initiative and Activities Board at Columbia for their generosity, which allowed us to print a record number of magazines this year.

To our contributors, thank you for choosing 4×4. There are many magazines who would be lucky to print your work and we’re honored to be the ones to share it.

It has been a joy to gather weekly and read your submissions so, to everyone who submitted, we are grateful for your consideration.

Finally, we’d like to thank you, reader. We hope you enjoyed Volume X and are giddy at the thought of you rifling through our pages or reading it all the way through, whether it ends up tucked away in a closet or lingering in the back of your minds.

Without your continued support, 4×4 wouldn’t exist. Our magazine is small, but meaty. We hope it sticks with you; we know it will stick with us.

CONTRIBUTORS BEATRICE AGBI is a current sophomore in Columbia College who is majoring in English and taking suggestions for what to concentrate in. She has mixed feelings about being from New York City, and (despite the poem) has no dog. In fact, in recent months she’s considered getting a cat more than a dog. She sometimes goes by Bea, in part because it’s an appropriate nickname, and also because she can communicate with bees.

MARINO BUBBA is a junior studying political theory and creative writing at Columbia College. His fiction has been published in Surgam (Piss), Skink Beat Review (The Letter), and Empyrean Literary Magazine (The Moon Shines On), and he was a semi-finalist in Sunspot Lit’s Geminga microfiction prize (Smoking Buddies). Half of those pieces were rejected from 4×4. The others were never considered.

ANDREW FORREST JOSEPH BLAKE is a reformed history major studying creative writing at Columbia University—please don’t ask him a causative question about history because he will go silent and then start vomiting! Born and raised in Arizona, he’s a lover of slapstick style Looney-Tunes comedy. He’s infamous for his jerking abilities (the dance, you freaks!). To the reader, he sends his greatest love and gratitude.

NING CHANG is from New York City and a junior at the School of General Studies.

KAYLEE YOUNG-EUN JEONG is from Oregon. You can read more of her work in diode, Maudlin House, and Frontier Poetry, among others.

KILEY KARLAK MALLOY is a poet and essayist from Farmland, Pennsylvania. She likes dark chocolate and rain.

RENEE MORALES is a sophomore studying English Literature and Creative Writing. She is a Cuban-American poet from South Florida interested in experimenting with the strange, the spiritual, and the sublime. When she’s not writing, she’s plotting the takeover of her Corgi farm, where she works as the dutiful servant to thousands of lovely Corgis. Her poetry Instagram is @r.moralespoetry.

GABRIELA OROZCO is a former DC Youth Poet Laureate whose work has appeared in The Washington City Paper and B’chol Lashon. She studies Comparative Literature.

CAMILLE SENSIBA is a senior in Columbia College majoring in Comparative Literature & Society and Creative Writing. Her three favorite things: rain boots, little orange newts, and Hoolihan Brook, sometimes all together. She sees a nice warm cookie in her future, at last.

ANDIE TAPPENDEN is a poet from Michigan about to graduate from Barnard College. She is perpetually in search of freshwater to dip her feet in or people in New York who know how to play euchre. So far she has been unsuccessful with the latter. If you have any leads please reach out.

GOKUL VENKATACHALAM is a visual artist from St. Louis, Missouri. Their approach to poetry focuses on the conjunction of rhyme and image, trying to capture vocal timbres and the particularities of speech. Follow them on Instagram @surfaces.depths

Sponsored in part by the ARTS INITIATIVE at COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.

N O 10 2023