4x4 Magazine, Vol. 7

NO 7

2020

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY NEW YORK, NY

MASTHEAD EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Gina Yatsenko & Jackson Watson DESIGN EDITORS Chelsy Jiayu Wu, Chloe Arnold & Caroline Mao

MANAGING EDITOR Isaac Schott-Rosenfield

EVENTS & OUTREACH EDITORS Franzi Nace & Phoebe Sanders READING EDITORS Anja Chivukula & William Lyman

SOCIAL MEDIA EDITORS Vivian Qiu & Simone Liu

STAFF EDITORS Angelo Hernandez-Sias, Lee Mary Beatrice Phillips, Alejandro José Pérez, Ocean Jensen

© 2020 4×4 Magazine All rights are reserved and revert to authors and artists one year after publication.

CONTENTS

4 WELCOME

7 ON VEHICLES Claire Adler

8 MISCARRIED Claire Adler

10 ODILE, MY EVERYTHING Henry Ellington Green

12 OPPOSABLE THUMBS Klara Pokrzywa

15 ADRIEN STARTS TO WEAVE Sam Losee

16 REVERSE ETYMOLOGY Mya Alexice

17 HARBOR Eliza Rudalevige

19 SUPPERTIME, MRS. ROCHESTER Perry O. Parsons

20 GOURD WATER Lorenzo Barajas

22 BOY HAD SOME LIL’ JAY 6S ON Mamadou Yattassaye

24 MAD COW Olivia Treynor

31 CHEEK Anita Dreenk

32 FOR THE NEW YEAR Amanda Liu

34 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

36 CONTRIBUTORS

DEAR READER IN OUR ATTEMPT TO WRITE THIS LETTER, we have come up against a somewhat annoying truth: introducing others’ work is hard. Still, something must be said. The two of us are in the same writing workshop, with the same professor, Heidi Julavits, so we asked for help. Her response to our query: “I feel about editorial letters the same way I feel about 800-word book reviews and marriage vows. They are a form invented to foil original thought.” With this optimistic valuation, her two suggestions were as follows: 1) We could try to make this letter as personal as possible, write it with a letter’s sense of particularity, openness, and insecurity or 2) We could really own the deep desire to share enthusiasms, communicate tastes, and create community.

“Things that are pretty doomed to failure. But still. Why not keep trying.”

So. We’ll try.

For us, enthusiasm is paired with risk. Or deviousness. Or surprise. There is a lot of pleasure in reading a piece that doesn’t quite meet us in our expectations of what it was supposed to be, as if it comes out of the corner to scold us, reprimanding us for our desire to fit it into a particular shape.

Lorenzo Barajas’s “Gourd Water,” for example, might feel to some readers like an immediate affront. Its spacing is difficult, even obstinate, defiant. But what peeks through when we do the work of stitching together the scattered letters? A proud snail. A psychic hotline. A speaker with a wizard name. Other poems take different risks. The voices of Perry O. Parsons’s “Suppertime, Mrs. Rochester” and Mya Alexice’s “reverse etymology” surprise us even as they speak more directly to us—sometimes in all caps. And each of these three poems, in form and content, play with fire; each reads with a different sort of invigorating energy. It is a pleasure to play along.

Other pieces ask for a different kind of work. Claire Adler’s “Miscarried” first situates us in Nevada, but it quickly slides through a twisted map of times and terrains. Things lose some of their solidity. Adler’s images emerge, stark, and the poem’s intense movements reward slow and careful navigation. Olivia Treynor’s “Mad Cow” begins with a teenaged boy looking out on the “suburb streets” of Indiana, and we stay, perhaps uncomfortably, in his limited perspective. The winner of this year’s 4x4 Award, Mamadou Yattassee’s “Boy had some lil’ jay 6’s,” begins at the intersection of 79th and Essex. But the poem’s voice moves us through other intersections—race and class, history and the present—until it returns us to the image of the boy. The poem is subtle, careful, and complex.

We will remember Yattassee’s poem, as well as Jhumpa’s kindness in agreeing to judge this year’s award.

And there are many other pieces we love and cherish. Pieces published, and pieces left unpublished. Thank you all for sharing your work with us, for requesting synopses of our discussions, and coming to our events. Simply put: it made us feel good. And, of course, among all this, a piece like “Cheek” will slip out and slap us in the face by not taking itself, or us, too seriously. So, to meet Anita Dreenk halfway, we raise a glass to Vol. 7 and all those who made it happen. Till next year. Enjoy!

GINA YATSENKO & JACKSON WATSON EDITORS-IN-CHIEF 2019-2020

CLAIRE ADLER

ON VEHICLES In Prospect Park, I find Death and How to Outlive It sodden on the dark ground. I record hastily that book jackets become flexible when left to soak, and that it can be hard to tell, from my back, how the rain is falling. Today, a lesbian with a round face reassured me that academia is a gay friendly field. Tonight, I will use the kitchen to make muffins, which I know from experience will be heavy and taste too much of lemon.

A misplaced Thursday retains its anecdotes. It’s like printmaking.

Each time, I think the ink will last for an additional and phantom transference.

I finished an absurdist Czech novel with a hexed narrator. Someone who owns a puddle-gray truck drives over the grass tipping. It is raining enough that there are no mosquitos out despite the tenderness in the scar over my right eye.

Things in the past do not appear further away— they smell stronger, and become less predictable.

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CLAIRE ADLER

MISCARRIED Petrified Nevada that malicious map piled heaps of stones barren brush over the dry ground.

A chest of drawers directed north, me and I at the gravel mouth and peering. He says it is beautiful all the way down, the meadow moving in the quick air, and wet cotton clouds at dawn.

A place enunciated along needles, charred soil, peeled back frilling like solid things.

Against this growth the geometric earth rising to schism, sore expansion, warm lake.

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And the grass, and the blue dust, and the bristlecones shivered, their polished flesh. Dry and smooth, dry running yellow smooth my hands like a child’s again, untouched on the gorged bar, the self-illustrated slow born sheath wrapping around the great entering the harbor and not breaking the water darting against itself polished unblinking tooth from under the earth. to stand beyond this

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HENRY ELLINGTON GREEN

ODILE, MY EVERYTHING my darling croc is a piggish croc always making bloody mess Odile, I call her, rosy scaly lassy, my everything, wears tastefully striped toe socks, respectfully, sometimes gets snappy and slitherwalks around the house, charmingly making it her bitch friends are few now once were in the millions... the few who accept seeing bloodjoy in my cheeks still ridicule my nomoreloneliness Wanda, addicted to pornography, calls my place a bog, I a frog who quit his job oh well, and Hiram, a gun nut, worries viciously for my seven daughters’ safety but they outweigh Odile altogether and are most of the time at elementary school so it’s fucking fine and Odile thinks I’m sweet, sleek, no freak except between the sheets, she ate my wife, she gets me, and we’re having a half croc child Kiril. Odile and Bret have fallen in love, forever, and are to be married with late Carys’ ruby ring.

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FOUR BY FOUR NO. 7 - PAGE 11

KLARA POKRZYWA

OPPOSABLE THUMBS In me (the worm) clearly Is not righteousness, but this-Persistence; —from Trilogy by H.D.

OPPOSABLE THUMBS

A WORM IS CURLED in the corner of my sunlit window. I’ve been sitting on my bed in silence with it for an hour.

“It’s really not what you think,” I say.

My hand is curled in my lap, bandaged fingers white and vulnerable. I am not looking at it. “Apparently it’s really not going to be that bad.”

The worm flexes a little against the glass. I can’t see its eyes but I imagine they are dark and beady like little droplets of tar.

“Losing a finger is not as bad as you think. Even if it’s the thumb. That’s what they’ve been saying.” I flatten the ache of my hand against my thigh. It does not hurt but it feels raw, like a cold wind is whistling against it. “Not as bad as all that. It’s not like it was my whole hand.”

The worm inches up the window. It’s pale and tiny, so maybe it’s an inchworm.

Or a maggot, or whatever. A little thing that consumes. I wonder if it would eat my thumb, if I went back to the hospital and dug it out of wherever doctors keep thumbs once they are detached from their original owners. I imagine having worms for thumbs, and shiver, unable to decode the thought as one of either horror or pleasure.

“I am not so stupid as to be ungrateful,” I say. “I know what I’ve got: nine good fingers. One that got pulverized in a bicycle accident, but that wasn’t its fault. I imagine it would have liked to stay on a little longer. I certainly wasn’t ready to let it go.”

The worm’s imagined eyes glint, cold wet pebbles. Its gaze is sympathetic but not pitying, like a good friend’s. With its small and hungry mouth, it says something like, you will grow another thumb, as I have grown a new heart each time the last one was broken. Things grow back, even on large and bumbling things such as yourself.

“Thank you,” I say. “That means a lot, coming from you.”

The place where my thumb used to be feels like a patch of soil that has had something deep-rooted pulled out of it, churned-up wet soil from its underbelly cringing away from the light. Maybe the worm is right, and, if properly seeded, the soil will grow a new weed.

I have spent a lot of time looking for such seeds and sparks. The world contains plenty of hard kernels to cling or otherwise attach myself to, but none that have grown just right. Even before my

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POKRYZWA

thumb was neatly sliced off by surgeons who knew what they were doing, I was looking for something to own or belong to. Mostly everyone is looking for this, for some tiny thing like a stranger or a murder or a word.

“If you have any ideas about what to do,” I tell the worm. “I really have no choice but to listen. Psychically speaking—and what other way is there?—the whole thumb thing is actually making me pretty open to ideas right now.”

The worm, little seed sparking in the cold sunlight, doesn’t have anything to say. But it doesn’t move either.

I slowly stand. I’ve still got nine good fingers. Enough to catch a worm.

“Should I say something gauche?” I ask. “There’s got to be a line for this kind of thing.”

There isn’t. It’s a stupid thing to say.

The worm luxuriates in the sunlight.

It says, look at my carefree and fingerless life. I am your thumb reincarnated. I own my own soft white chrysalis, my squirm and writhe and wriggle. The energy my boundless body contains is enough to regenerate any grotesque digit you may or

may not have lost, that thumb which may or may not be rotting in a hospital waste basket even now. Split me open like an atom and see.

My crooked and bandaged pinky finger hovers over the worm. It is oblivious, or pretending to be. I feel as though I am about to commit a crime, but no one is telling me not to, not even the worm.

Even I, a large and bumbling thing, am capable of growth. I am like a starfish in the clever black eyes of the worm.

You’ll forgive this next part.

I scoop up the worm on the pad of my pinky and place it on my tongue. It thrashes momentarily and then goes still.

When I swallow, it sticks in the back of my throat, and I panic, coughing and swallowing and desperately trying to conjure up saliva to wash it down. There’s a blind, dry moment where the worm will not go down, and then it dislodges itself and slips into my stomach. Maybe it will not die at all. Maybe it will live in my body from now on, eating my food and my stomach lining and the soft inside of my veins.

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SAM LOSEE

ADRIEN STARTS TO WEAVE So thin you can stack them all like tissue paper, and run your wet fingers through them til they tear. The water bleeds the marker drawings of whales and lists of places you haven’t worn shoes to.

This time, you’ve slipped sudden as fawn into weft. He too busy being the loom to pass you more water, so dip your fingers in the lake, careful of the goose shit, and race your sister across the parking lot.

She waits on the other side, grinning in too many dimensions, so crawl into the taxi, blueish salty taste and all, and speed past every noun you’ve yet to know.

“I have all the limbs!” he yells and the twenty-four hour sparrows laugh at you for your elbows.

Scream, “you’ll never see what I can!” and follow your mother to the chicken coop.

Your monuments smudge syncopated, and the dead goldfish pile up somewhere out of sight.

It’s hard to say what’s wrong, so take the part you can’t explain and hold it like a hand.

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MYA ALEXICE

REVERSE ETYMOLOGY after Airea D. Matthews’ “etymology” as my mother did not have A BOY i was named [mya] and

rendered highly flammable. some million years ago it meant Beloved in Greek. but if I had been born A BOY

i would have been called M a t t e o, my mother lets me know.

rhymes with galileo,

sort of. this BOY would have been an explorer, or astronaut even, seeing the world from the inside of a fishbowl. he would never have been crazy or if he was, it would be the romantic kind.

the poetry kind. not a kerosene lamp with a fraying wick. matteo sounds like A BOY who never left the womb.

still perfect and in working condition. platonic masterpiece son. when my lips form your syllables, round the ending

o

like jubilation and JOY

i swallow my skin into yours using a cerebral tongue. you taste like silk reeled from synthetic worms. ours would make good names for twins.

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ELIZA RUDALEVIGE

HARBOR Drenched in the sun-smoked lingering of day, like so many damp butterflies new from the cocoon, selfish in grasping the last bits of ochred light in the divots of our knees, under one tongue and swallow in the sky.

As she flies, shy oyster-glow of moon.

Our toes grip the wood like hope, yellow hope in a bath of salt, hope under kissing eaves of sail and rope, hope under the nimbus-clotted,

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sweating, gorgeous skies.

As she flies, shy oyster-glow of moon.

As she flies in the dusky trench of horizon, she is above the itching season.

Black flies eat the sweat of our thighs and armpits, tangle in our hair.

Black flies eat the juice of our eyes when we squint into the sun.

When dusk comes they are replaced by moths with broad backs like Tumbledown mountain Dancing in 3/4 time: sea, sail, sky. seasailsky, seasailsky.

The moon is a pearl.

The moon is an unfolding wing, furred at the edges with clouds.

Waltz.

We are young, damp fools.

Waltz, as moths do on the excesses of autumn.

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PERRY O. PARSONS

SUPPERTIME, MRS. ROCHESTER Keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times keep your nasty little hands and feet inside inside inside OH MISSUS ROCHESTER don’t you know not to bite the hand that feeds you? oh you weren’t hungry you say? well really that’s no attitude to take skinny little girls like you are made to be fed not to be hungry when nice mr. Rochester makes you dinner it’s supper supper supper time *scrape/spark* she burned the house down NO. 7 - PAGE 19

LORENZO BARAJAS

GOURD WATER a psyc hic hotlin e fr om a magazine t old me of very mun dane t hings that she had dreamt of that nigh t, s ym bols wh ich m eant t hat i would bec ome a tree. c ool wat er soa ki ng the insi de of a gou rd a pro ud snail sc aling an oak i mag es of bea utif ul th ings rot ting in s un. w asn’t s u re ho w she got my n um ber. i took a wa lk durin g whi ch i le aned i nto the cree k and it w his per ed back my name, my wiz ard name w hich i w as given when i dru g myself out of the sn ake tunnels, and henc eforth, was born. m y eyeli ds shut u pon rem e mber ing and i hear d so und s of weird music for a crys ta l glass. b efo re me i sa w all the colo rs yo u see w hen y ou clo se you r ey es . s low ly i bec a me c overed in hard bark, i kno ck ed on my self an d g ree ns p ushed th e ir wa y up fro m und er my sk in r oots, then, sho t down fr om my vei ns and liga me nts int o the so il ben eath m e.

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b riefly i tho ught, now this is one for the scrapbook. m y root s c urled ov er din osa ur bone s and o ld tele visio ns and ge n tly unear th ed them. t he p ast did n ot glis ten, but sat idl e in my dirt mau sole um c overed in th e mat te gl oss of nig ht dew. m y le aves tur ned infini tely wi thou t con cepti on of ti me. a nd in the sile nce i found, all kn owle dge. a fter al l soil on eart h and venus had been cyc led and all mon uments ruine d, t he grea t tr ee caug ht f lame and b urnt mag nifi centl y. o ut of the as hes, th e ances tral tree sp irit r eare d its u gly head and died an unr ema rkable de ath, t o signify the en d, the very last en d. i w as still collecting my ring s, t he f ilm w as still r o l ling

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4×4 AWARD WINNER SELECTED BY JHUMPA LAHIRI

MAMADOU YATTASSAYE

BOY HAD SOME LIL’ JAY 6S ON

Boy had some lil’ jay 6s on ‘round 79th n’ Essex.

Had to be like a 6.5 in women, a 5 in men.

And u could tell them jays was fake too; The way them laces barely lynched his shoes over the street lamppost.

--laces on jays range ‘round 54”-Plus, his blood tainted the b-ball off MJ’s palm; real jays damn near fluid resistant.

Just look at how the ballpoint’s ink bled the words if u not from here, don’t come here on those trashy gum bubble soles; the lamppost not ‘pose to illuminate scribble lines off them shoes Who the hell got peach colored Jordan 6s anyway?

Oh, Boy had some lil’ jay 6s on.

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OLIVIA TREYNOR

MAD COW

MAD COW

THERE IS A MAN WITH MAD COW DISEASE walking through the suburb streets tonight. He looks like he is seven feet tall and made of worms, but that just might be the way the light is hitting him and the fact that it is dark out and everything gets grainy and buzzing when it’s dark. He’s walking like he’s cowering from something, maybe the anger of the fluorescent lights or the sound of his own whistling voice meeting his eardrum. The sky is all flat and vacant and nothing.

Things are colliding all the time.

Right now, what’s colliding is the man’s feet and the pavement, his dog’s dumb slack jaw and all the tepid Indiana air seeping into his dog-throat, but tomorrow it will be something else.

I close my blinds. I hope he trips and the dog eats his body like you read about sometimes on the news.

INDIANA IS NO JOKE. Winter is cold and keeps you frozen solid, and summer thaws you all the way out to the point that you’re wet with humidity the second you step out of the door. My dad lives in

Phoenix and I like it there. It doesn’t get too cold in Phoenix. When I visit, his wife makes me tortilla soup and it’s always too salty. I stare at her a lot, and there’s not sex in my eyes when I do, I swear, but it’s funny to have someone suddenly tell you to treat a woman like she’s your mother when she’s not, she’s just some thirty-fiveyear-old scraped out of the Arizona sand, she could be anyone, how could she be my mom. She has an overbite and a pair of adult braces on her teeth to undo it and a name that sounds like keys clanging against each other.

My dad asked her to smile with her mouth shut when we took our Christmas card photo, and all I could think of was, why am I taking a Christmas card photo now, it’s March. My dad reminded me it was probably the only time I could visit that year and then asked me to stop breathing so loud. The shutter fired and his hand fell from my shoulder.

My dad is bald. I don’t see him much.

He’s on the news sometimes, reporting on wildfires, and he sends me photos of his face on the TV screen printed on his

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TREYNOR

home printer, the images coming out all fuzzy and with those weird green lines you get when you print things at home in color. And he signs the printer paper photos. I used to tape the pictures up on my bedroom wall, but now I just throw them out. What am I supposed to do with printer paper photos of my dad’s bald head.

I DIDN’T ALWAYS LIVE IN INDIANA. We used to all live in Wisconsin, my mom and dad and I, when I was a baby and I couldn’t speak or form memories or think and I just kind of laid there. Some kids with divorced parents talk about how they remember the yelling and the fighting and things, but I don’t remember anything like that. I was in diapers when we went to Indiana without my dad.

When I asked my mom why they had divorced, she said she’d tell me when I turned eighteen, but I didn’t want to wait two years so I just went and asked my dad when I visited him in March and he told me it was because mom thought that he was a loser. When mom picked me up

from the airport in Chicago, I told her what my dad had said, and then I told her I thought she was a bitch for leaving him like that.

She looked like she might hit me for a second, but then she just got quiet and made her voice gravely like she was pulling back the leash on her throat and said that my father didn’t make many friends in Madison and only got drunker between their being married and my being born, and by the time I was two, she had decided she was sick of living in a house that no one visited and she wanted to go see things.

The leaves were getting heavy and green outside. I could hear the sound of the wind through the closed windows, it shrieking strange and ugly.

So why the fuck did you move to Indiana if you wanted to see things, I asked, my words not really being a question. She went quiet after I said that, and we drove the rest of the way home in silence.

MAYA IS SMALL ENOUGH that I can hold

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MAD COW

her wrist between my thumb and pinky.

She has a face like a small bird might if a small bird could taste sweet and artificial like strawberry candy. She blinks so forcefully sometimes that I think she’s going to start crying, and sometimes she does cry, and when she does I sit next to her and put my hand on her back and try to remember if my computer is charging or not and I study the scar that eclipses her forearm, and she is so silent and sad and patient with her sadness and I am just sitting there with my hand on her and time is inching forward.

I started dating Maya sophomore year.

She stared at me in class often and I knew she would blush and say yes if I asked her to a school dance, which I was right about. She squeaked when I did ask and nodded a little too strongly and I pressed my lips together so I didn’t smile at her too-opaque enthusiasm.

I called Maya the night of winter formal and told her that I hadn’t gotten a tuxedo or anything and that school dances actually weren’t really my thing, but said that if she wanted to come watch

a movie I’d let her. I remember Maya’s mom dropping her off and her walking to the door looking almost wounded with her dress on that was sequined and too big around her chest and the obviousness of her eyes having been freshly wiped, with some black halo of something remaining on her lids, and how she put on my sweatshirts and pants when I told her she’d be more comfortable. I laughed at the way the hollow shell of her awful dress looked hulled onto my floor.

LOVING MAYA IS LIKE INVENTING HER. I don’t know if I mean it when I say that I love her, but I can feel myself writing and rewriting her, knowing that if I say I think her skirt is too long she’ll roll the top of the seam up, that if I laugh at her knee socks she’ll cut them short. I think I could hold Maya’s entire body between my thumb and pinky, could wrap my fingers around her so easily she might dissolve into some barely lucid image, knowing she is less of a girl than she is an obedient apparition. Sometimes when we’re kissing I hover my hand over her

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TREYNOR

stomach and I can hear her whispering ​ please​and then I pull my face back until we are just two noses apart and I tell her that I’m bored.

MY MOM TELLS ME Maya is a nice girl, and I know she says that because Maya always overdresses when she’s invited for dinner and she doesn’t know how to eat spaghetti without splashing red onto herself and she writes thank you notes after she comes over. She really is beautiful, but she’s pretty because she asks you if she’s beautiful, because she tugs at her clothing and she almost wants permission to breathe. She is so stained with wanting it makes me wince sometimes. I can feel her asking. She asks when she pulls her shirt low and she asks her she does her makeup in my bathroom with the door closed and she asks when she really asks, when she puts her lips together and pushes out the words d ​o you really like me a​ nd I tell her not to be dumb, and she protests that that’s not an answer, and then I kiss her, and she usually stops asking. Of course my mom would like Maya. My mom’s boyfriend is

cheating on her, I know it and she does, too, and the fact of it is so dense in the air of our house it makes it hard to swallow your spit. None of us say anything about it. My mom posted a filtered inspirational quote on Facebook about ​ wanting to scream but​​only being ​​ able to whisper “I’m fine” a​ nd that was the most articulated the affair has ever been.

Once I said the woman’s name. I don’t know why, not completely. I think I was hungry to have words put to the thing I felt was so heavy in its unspokenness.

I said the name at the dinner table while my mom was drinking water and she dropped some on her lap and her boyfriend dropped a fist onto the table like it was an answer. I felt pity for her then, looking at her red face and eyes staring down at her plate, peas buoyant in the spilled water. She was on a diet that week and was eating only vegetables at the dinner table and looked fatigued from the regimen, though I knew she was hoarding chocolate covered almonds in her room.

Her skin had deep creases like a crumpled linen, and softer lines too, like shallow half moons around her closed mouth.

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MAD COW

I excused myself from the table without asking and sat in front of my mirror for a long time and wondered what part of me that word had emerged from, if the syllables had escaped, stowaways on my exhalation, or if I had meant to say it. Had I meant to say it. I wondered if it even mattered if something was premeditated or not. Who am I to be in charge of my mother’s feelings. She’s a woman. I hear her and her boyfriend having sex at night, not that night but others. If that sound can carry through the walls that vaguely separates my life from hers, then I can speak a name and she can hear it. I slept fine after I realized that.

I TURN FROM MY WINDOW and Maya is sitting on my bed with the streetlight strobing onto her body in stripes, legs crossed and eyes watching me. Maya met me on my back porch tonight with the sound of my mom’s car leaving the garage still humming in the air around us. She was picking at a split end when I slid the back door open. I could tell she was uncomfortable that I had seen her

in a moment of crude imperfection, and I let my mouth draw itself open into a wide, lazy grin. She squeaked out a h ​ i​and dropped the frayed strand between her fingertips. Her nose was pink from the cold outside. I thought of not opening the screen door and just watching her from behind the porous mesh, like she was in a cage or a fishbowl.

She looks so waxy in the moonlight I find myself thinking she could be translucent. I imagine myself pushing my hand through her. Right now, I want to trace my fingertips on thesoft, gummy part of her arm below her elbow, and so I do. I sit next to her and force my skull into her neck until she drops her phone.

What, she asks, and I don’t respond.

Instead, I hold my fingers above her skin just so, and she gets goosebumps under the whisper of my thumbprint. Her eyes focus on me and I pretend not to notice.

She’s breathing so shallowly that I can hear the air churning in the room. The dull forcefulness of the AC machine whirring.

I have the urge suddenly to pinch her skin and so I do, taking an inch of

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TREYNOR

flesh between my fingers and squeezing.

She stares at me and I wonder what she is going to say but she stays silent, lips parted in the center like there is a word tucked between her teeth she is trying to hold onto. And I want her to ask me to stop, or to say something, and I want to know that it’s my choice what I do, but Maya says nothing and the room we’re in feels wider than it did a moment before.

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ANITA DREENK

CHEEK You ever do this? Walk into a public bathroom and find the stalls all occupied. Wait around, maybe look down at your phone or something. Try not to stare through the slits in the stalls. Hear someone start pulling from the roll, wipe back and forth. Flush the toilet. They walk out and you size them up. Try your hardest to make eye contact with them. To get them to make eye contact with you. Squeeze your face all tight so their afterimage stays with you as you walk into the stall they just vacated. Check out the toilet seat they just rose from. Maybe there are little flecks of pee or maybe just some water from the flush if you’re lucky. Sit down on the toilet seat and feel that person’s warmth. The warmth and their impression is always better if they are very large or big-bottomed or took an especially long time on the toilet. The warmth may be the best part and the way it makes you feel like you know the other person. Like they have invited you into themselves or given a little of themselves to you. Think real hard about what they look like and take pleasure in the fact that your bare asscheeks are essentially touching their bare asscheeks. If you’re quick and if they take their time washing their hands they might still be in the bathroom with you, like five feet away from you, and through the slit in the stall door, you can see a thin strip of them, and get this spine rattling pleasure out of touching them like that, all bare and ass-to-ass like that, feeling their warmth and feeling how little they are aware of you touching them like that. There’s nothing better.

Right?

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AMANDA LIU

FOR THE NEW YEAR WE BOIL SWEET RICE BALLS AND LET THEM RISE THREE TIMES BEFORE EATING

My mother taught me that the moon is soft and filled with crushed seeds and sugar. She set it on the mantle because it belonged to her father, but she leaves it on the mantle because second-hand objects carry the last owner’s misfortune. This, I believe, is what they mean by love. Tonight, she slices persimmons for us at the dining table and eats the skin directly off the knife. We breathe empty steam and the sweetpaste of sesame. My brother shatters the porcelain soup spoons.

We quiver with laughter at the ensuing shards—some of which still carry fragments of watercolor pearflowers—for shattered glass is said to bring peace after the New Year, and we do not sweep since that is said to sweep away good fortune. Last year a cardinal flew into the kitchen and smashed the window—its red breast glass-shredded even redder. It shrieked for ten days and ten nights. I ran barefoot over the bleeding kaleidoscope tile to see its dime-sized heart, but my father wouldn’t let me. He continues to tell me that this has nothing to do with the sky. Tonight, we cup our spoonhands to plunge into the water, as if seizing a fish, to recapture the moon. All eight of them. Grotto Heaven, sweet earthly paradise. Those who sit tangy and fragrant in rice wine.

I muffle the mouth of the kettle with my bare palm because I was taught that ghosts tend to follow the sound of night-whistling. We celebrate with firecrackers that laugh and shout in the dark around our feet and emit not a spark of light.

NO. 7 - PAGE 33

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WELCOME TO THE BACK MATTER. The poems and prose are behind you. We hope you have read them, and read them vigorously, and now (perhaps out of a sense of duty, or inertia) you continue reading, and so it is the time to thank you. Thank you for submitting, for coming to our events, for eating our snacks, for your time and energy and appreciation—for all of it, we thank you.

An issue of 4x4 is the product of a lot of labor and care on the part of our editorial staff, and we would be nowhere without a group of students who come every week ready to make a case for the pieces they’re passionate about. But this year, we want to thank our editors for not slowing down after vacating campus—even as the readings got more strenuous and the weeks more tiring, you were present, attentive, and invested. To Chloe, thank you for the question of the week. To our graduating seniors, we want to say thank you and give each a little air-kiss. Angelo, Chelsy, and Gina—whether you are new to the board or ending your fourth year, your presence, voice, and work are what have made this issue—and 4x4’s continuation—possible.

The Columbia Arts Initiative, too, provides invaluable support. Their funding allows us to continue printing physical copies, and no matter how far away each editor, author, or reader of 4x4 is at the moment you’re reading this, we are overjoyed to be able to preserve our material issue. Additionally, we would like to thank Jeffery James Keyes, Claire Valdez, Potluck House, Writers House, Eric Wohlstadter, De’Shawn Winslow, and Shyanne Figueroa Bennet for helping this year’s events come to fruition.

We also want to thank Jhumpa Lahiri for judging this year’s 4x4 award. We feel immense gratitude for your selflessness and care, and we remain a little bit giddy that you were willing to contribute to our project.

CONTRIBUTORS CLAIRE ADLER is an aspiring lesbian campground host and occasional poet.

These days, you’re most likely to find her baking bread, crocheting small animals, complaining about her home state of Utah, singing the praises of her home state of Utah, or ruining conversations by bringing up climate change. Her work has previously appeared in Tabula Rasa, 4x4, and Phases, and was awarded first place by Cambridge poet-in-residence Bhanu Kapil in the 2020 Pembroke Street Creative Writing Competition.

MYA ALEXICE’s favorite documentary is Space Jam. They live with their kitten named Ramen. They write poetry, among other things.

LORENZO BARAJAS once had a dream that he needed glasses. They gave him super miniscule, tiny glasses with tortoiseshell, star-shaped frames. Each frame was about the size of a pea. It was magnificent.

The cult of the starving artist has no pulse! Bow down to world’s first dehydrated writer, ANITA DREENK. Be careful not to cut yourself on her chapped lips.

HENRY ELLINGTON GREEN is a senior on lockdown in Irvington, NY. He studies Creative Writing and English and loves his little pooch Willoughby. He is EnglishAmerican. His name is not doublebarreled. In pre-Corona times he played in a band called “underperformers.” Did Henry write his own bio? Maybe.

PERRY O. PARSONS (They/Them/Theirs) is a rising senior at Barnard College, where they study theatre with a concentration in directing. They are ecstatic to be published in volume 7 of 4x4 and would like to dedicate their poem, Suppertime, Mrs. Rochester, to all of the delightful old men who have ever called them such names as AMANDA LIU is a senior in SEAS studying “sweetheart” “little lady” and “missy”.

Computer Science and Math. She enjoys Cheers and wash your hands, everyone! breakfast foods and pretty theorems and Email: Pop2102@barnard.edu their proofs.

Like Avril Lavigne, KLARA POKRZYWA SAM LOSEE is a poet and flower farmer died and was at some point replaced by from the Hudson Valley in NY. Currently, a clone. She enjoys jokes, japes, goofs, she is a sophomore at Columbia College antics, and general buffoonery. studying Poetry and English, at least until they add an Arts & Crafts major.

She loves fairytales, befriending the local fauna, and swinging her heart out in Riverside Park.

ELIZA RUDALEVIGE is a first-year in Columbia College planning to major in English and concentrate in Gender Studies. She is originally from Brunswick, Maine, but would like you to know that she has never met a moose.

MAMADOU YATTASSAYE is a 20 year old writer, poet, and musician from Harlem, New York. His creative journey originally began in the 7th grade after being introduced to creative writing in English class. That love for writing eventually evolved into a love of written OLIVIA TREYNOR is a first-year at Barnard poetry, spoken word, Hip Hop and College from California. She loves lakes R&B music, forms of art Mamadou but is scared of the ocean. continues to cultivate. Currently, Mamadou is a third year at Columbia University, studying Creative Writing and Education Studies. Stay connected with Mamadou on Instagram @mamadouofficiall and on Twitter @mamadouofficia1.

Sponsored in part by the ARTS INITIATIVE at COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.

NO 7 2020