4x4 Magazine, Vol. 8

NO 8

2021

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY NEW YORK, NY

MASTHEAD EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Anja Chivukula & Chloe Arnold DESIGN EDITOR Caroline Mao

MANAGING EDITORS Isaac Schott-Rosenfeld & Jackson Watson

EVENTS & OUTREACH EDITOR Simone Liu READING EDITOR Franzi Nace

SOCIAL MEDIA EDITORS Ellie Windsor & Simone Liu

STAFF EDITORS Emilie Biggs, Ashley Cullina, Renny Gong, Owen Park, Alejandro José Pérez, Lee Mary Beatrice Phillips, Vivian Qiu

© 2021 4×4 Magazine All rights are reserved and revert to authors and artists one year after publication.

CONTENTS 4 WELCOME

7 ARBOREAL TENDER Chase Bush-McLaughin

9 PORTRAIT OF RYAN SEACREST AS A CHILD Rayna Berggren

12 NOTES ON PASSING Claire Adler

14 PROJECTION Claire Adler

16 BEER DAIRY GROCERY FLOWERS Morgan Levine

17 BONAPARTE BEFORE THE SPHINX Joan Tate

18 MOON-FACE Sasha Starovoitov

26 CONVERTIBLE, EAST TO WEST Camille Sensiba

28 BREAD BOX Isabel Wong

30 MELON Elise Bader-Saye

31 SALMON Elise Bader-Saye

32 EL VIEJO Vero Montanez

34 RESPONDING TO YOUR VOICEMAIL Jackson Kienitz

36 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS & CONTRIBUTORS

DEAR READER It’s good to see you again. Or perhaps for the first time. We ourselves have been in your shoes reading these introductions for a nice, square 4 years, and are now in the new position of being on the other side of the page. Within that time, 4x4 has turned over a new leaf. When the two of us joined the editorial board as eager first-years, the magazine was on its fifth year, the first in which no founding members remained. Now, at the end of year 8 (or, perhaps, year 4+4), another such cycle is completed as 4x4 enters its third generation. We’re excited to show you how our magazine has grown, and we hope you stick around to see how it grows in the years to come.

And it is almost passé to mention by this point, but of course the plague times have been upon us throughout this year. There is an irony to thinking through the future of this creative endeavor at the end of a period of such great uncertainty over the future, a paradox which we see reflected in this year’s pieces. In Chase Bush-McLaughlin’s “Arboreal Tender”, that tension plays out organically, in the question of growth. During a time in which we live separated from one another and stranded in the tedium of waiting, Chase’s poem eases us from a recalcitrant, almost coded beginning into a meditation on the monotony of nature and the beauties that inhere in it.

Claire Adler’s “Projection”, in contrast, uses the wonder of encountering the forest to lay bare the impending calamity of climate change.

“Portrait of Ryan Seacrest as a Child”, by Rayna Berggren, directs our attention not forward but backward, towards a delightfully unsettling conjecture at the talk show host’s past. Other pieces also bring in celebrities in different ways. Claire Adler’s “Notes on Passing” evokes James Dean, Sherlock Holmes, and Owen Wilson in its expression of a palimpsestic

relation to manhood. “Bonaparte Before the Sphinx”, by Joan Tate, is narrated by a blend of the titular French conquerer and a woman navigating the modern realities of gender transition. This issue even features fan-favorite Yahweh in the awkward position of responding to one missed message with another (in a manner befitting divine dignity and grace) in Jackson Kienitz’s “Responding to Your Voicemail; Feb. 17th, 2021”.

An enumeration of the stars studding the cast of this volume would not be complete without talking about our 4x4 Awards. “Convertible, East to West”,

by Camille Sensiba, was selected to win our poetry competition by Claudia Rankine. In “Convertible”, we gain an elegant and deeply felt glimpse at what might have been for a car and its passengers. And Sasha Starovoitov’s short story, “Moon-face”, was chosen by Ottessa Moshfegh, who wrote that “it’s both funny and disturbing, and builds out a world that feels familiar in its provincial allegory and yet wholly strange”.

We could not be more thrilled to present all these pieces to you and more, and hope you enjoy them as much as we have.

Warmly,

ANJA CHIVUKULA & CHLOE ARNOLD EDITORS-IN-CHIEF 2020-2021

CHASE BUSH-MCLAUGHLIN

ARBOREAL TENDER Made up numbers, stolen punctuation; borrowing sea shells to glue them together, abstract into cerebellum, and beat your lease.

On Friday I made macaroni, letting you know, I’m on my way to the gym.

If parent is expert in origin, to mother is gynec, and poor terra for out-of-state contractors; Of itself, we are orphans and our fathers deep-pocketed.

To commodity, relation is foil, plate, and 4-5 minutes on high. So I will have my rigatoni tonight.

FOUR BY FOUR NO. 58- PAGE 8

I planted a tree so that there’d be a tree by the sea.

There was wind, still there’s wind, and the tree grew in low, and far in from the sea: left a cave in the loam, a long jug where the knots, in the evening, make sounds, like a harp, in the wind, and make cream of the frosts of the great tenor groundhog, a very soon, now. And of just the same wind.

RAYNA BERGGREN

PORTRAIT OF RYAN SEACREST AS A CHILD

FOUR BY FOUR NO. 8 - PAGE 10

Every year, the average person swallows four spiders in their sleep. Ryan swallows five. He has no way of proving this, but he knows it is true. It is also a secret. Ryan badly wants to confide in someone. He almost got it out at the pediatrician, but sitting on the crinkled hospital paper, his legs bare and knees all red from the AC — the moment wasn’t right.

In the meantime, Ryan self-medicates.

He makes laps around the Northern Georgia State Fair, stopping in front of bright neon lights twisted into cursive.

Skycoaster, he reads to himself, Dancing Elephants. He climbs onto a ride, stiffening his body while an older teenager straps him to the wall. The contraption begins to spin, picking up speed until the other riders flatten into smears of brown and gray. Buffeted by frenzied, metallic air, Ryan flips his palms up towards the sky as if receiving a spirit. His head is purged of all thoughts, filled instead with the screams of charged-up children.

The ride ends, and Ryan is spit out onto the concrete. Eyes wide against the urge to cry, he finds himself blissfully blurry, unable to walk without stumbling over his own feet, kicking up dust.

On weekends, Ryan lingers in Abercrombie stores, testing how each cologne sample reacts to a different part of his body: neck, armpit, ankle. He struts around the mall, trailing sensual musk notes. He surveys the food court, the pay-by-the-minute massage chairs, the strollered babies. Ryan likes an oppressive atmosphere. It helps him forget about the extra spider and his deep sense of loss for the life he could be living.

At school, Ryan lunges into danger.

Risk taking, for him, offers a sheen of self-care. Limply raising his hand, Ryan volunteers to read Anne Frank’s description of her changing body out-loud to the class. He is selected out of no other options and begins to read, thrust into the lawless spotlight of seventh grade English class. With 30 ears tuned to his singular, quavering voice, Ryan is startled out of his body and spooked into the present.

For a few glorious minutes, his problems are obscured by a world bigger and more serious than the one inside himself.

On the car ride home from school, Ryan opens and closes his mouth like a dying fish — the words won’t come out.

When he pictures the spiders tiptoeing

FOUR BY FOUR NO. 8 - PAGE 11

their dainty legs along the viscous walls of his stomach, the wrongness of it leaks down his throat and he feels like a mute.

The car stops abruptly at a yellow light and Ryan’s mother throws her arm uselessly into the back seat, failing to connect with any part of his body. Ryan stares at her floating hand mournfully until it retracts into the driver’s seat.

He tries to busy himself in the teen magazine she bought him at the grocery store, but he can’t focus. It is becoming more difficult to tell her about the extra spider than it was to ask if he could start shaving his face. Ryan knew she would say my baby boy and she did, as if blaming him for growing up. This time she could say something worse, like his name saturated in pity. Like are you sure? He had lost his sanity in addition to his innocence. Just say it, he thinks. He pinches his thigh flesh, trying to jolt the words out of his brain. 1, 2, 3, say it. His mouth fills with liquid. The air pressurizes, hot and thick. Say it. Say it.

His mother pulls into the driveway and the opportunity is gone. She yanks the parking brake and turns around to look at him. Ryan sees his failure reflected

in her ignorant eyes. He looks back at the magazine, pretending to be absorbed until she slams the door, miffed.

In the backseat, alone, the car engine sighing as it cools, Ryan watches the dust motes disturbed by his mother’s departure rise and fall like breath in the afternoon light. Everything feels late and almost over. He begins paging through the magazine, looking for articles about celebrities recovering from heroin addiction, which is the saddest thing he can think of. He finds a story about club drugs and homosexuality and starts reading, letting the rest of the world fade into a low-frequency hum of despair.

Ryan looks up. The family cat meows from a small patch of pale yellow light.

He watches, sharply focusing his eyes, as she rests her chin on dainty paws. A chill of envy spreads over his heart.

CLAIRE ADLER

NOTES ON PASSING Choose between a hat that says gender and a hat that says masque.

Watch my dad on the floor like James Dean, model ship in his hands.

I’m an aspiring wife guy, a detective at 14. I know too much about illusion and Owen Wilson, his looks and the slap of his jeans. Read only women but speak from the chest like an impression, a connoisseur. I love my Sherlock young and strange, my dick limp as a fist. I stay cut and point to the bighorn moving natural against the cliff face like the tail of a kite. I draw a boy pointing He is enamored of everything I make him see.

CLAIRE ADLER

PROJECTION At the overlook wandering The wide gap, the forest So green that it was good In our sayings, overbearing Justification through life Alone in the clean sun I wanted every surface bare for it My loose arms swinging In the perfect sky barely Clocking our jeep’s graceful tug, In my white skirt mountain by mountain Persistent wind filling me up Water on his back, blue Tent on the blue lake When he left me To my skinny dipping story Nothing below the waist Open on all sides blue

FOUR BY FOUR NO. 8 - PAGE 15

The caddisflies blue the dead Peak I empty I a slipshod grin From the tree line From the dirt I gathered bacon Agates for the way Back when I woke On the fourth day yes I mistook it for a syllable A unit of meaning I could Exchange my bathroom girl Body who knew I would be back?

Where I’d been my forest was Burning like a projection A loose alien shape In the California smoke Asked will you see it but I Am a bad medieval All things at once to me seemed real.

MORGAN LEVINE

BEER GROCERY DAIRY FLOWERS In the afterlight of commerce I had my erotic moment Walking the arbitrary path The park & its animals Wetness on my face Feeling small & very loud like an old woman Keeping pace with my young friend’s long legs A white dog rose before us Mercy coming Uninvited as always

JOAN TATE

BONAPARTE BEFORE THE SPHINX After 5 months of Estrogen I made coffee for the first time at 9:18, only a little bloated, getting weary of boy things like periods which torque my non-uterus with wire. I thought I’d dodged all that.

It’s all very new to me: the War. But I’m adjusting.

The weather is holding steamy yet I can’t get a wink of sleep, the cliffside cackles when I cough, my men ask me for backrubs and vicodin, and this dry heat certainly doesn’t help my winks. I think it’s as though when I stir in the grains of my sugar the hills and valleys blink and yawn and ask “When do we get a cup?

Who put you in charge?” and we all laugh about it.

They don’t know I’m not the villain here.

I’m only following a thread passed down of girls making coffee and dragging their cocks in the sand

4×4 PROSE AWARD WINNER SELECTED BY OTTESSA MOSHFEGH

SASHA STAROVOITOV

MOON-FACE

FOUR BY FOUR NO. 8 - PAGE 19

IT WAS MOTHER WHO BROUGHT UP THE IDEA. The idea was for Moon-face to get married.

Why shouldn’t you find yourself a good husband, said mother, braiding Moonface’s hair and tying a rag behind her head.

Where are you going to go otherwise?

Moon-face had no nose, and so her mother gave her a rag to put over the flat space in the middle of her face where her nose should have been.

She knew she had nowhere to go, not with no nose, not when everyone looked at her funny and dismissed her when she tried to ask if she could get work. The women at the market shook their heads always when she went there to try and find a job, murmuring something under their breath about being busy and turning away to whisper to each other, as if they forgot that she had no nose, not no ears. What was a girl with no nose, where could she go, what could she do but sit inside while shielded by walls, more solid rags that could enclose her and keep her hidden away?

So Moon-face agreed with mother and they set about finding her a man.

Mother made sure it was done in order, all properly. If we don’t do it right, she told Moon-face, no one will take you. It’s al-

ready going to be hard, convincing anyone to take you how you are, but if we don’t show our best sides then there will be no chance, none at all.

Moon-face scrubbed her face and her hair and her skin until everything shone and rubbed oil across her knuckles so they looked soft and supple. She rouged her cheeks and trimmed her nails and mother waited in line for hours to get a starched frock that bunched up and pinched Moonface’s armpits into tight creases.

Mother invited all the men from the building to have dinner, going around and knocking at each door and smiling when they opened it, saying please wouldn’t you like to come to ours for dinner tomorrow night? Moon-face came along behind her, holding a dish with pastries in it that she had spent all night kneading so that they would have something to leave behind with each woman that they disturbed.

You have to be careful with these things, said mother. And the other mothers, it was always the other mothers who opened the doors since their sons were at work, they all said yes of course and we’ll bring something by and when they came home mother had blisters along her feet from walking

FOUR BY FOUR NO. 8 - PAGE 20

up and down the stairs all day. Moon-face brought a tub of hot water with salts for mother to soak in and listened to mother recite all the dishes that they had to prepare, the cabbage that had to be stewed and steamed and the potatoes that would have to be peeled.

The time came and fists hammered away at the door, some stronger and some weaker. The mothers came with their sons and they all sat around the table to eat and talk, except it was mostly the mothers talking and putting their son’s name at the start of a sentence to make it seem like he wanted her to say it, like: my son has started working at the hospital, to which the son would grunt and ask mother to pass the stewed cabbage. They would chew with their mouths open and make noises that made Moon-face tighten her fists into balls underneath the table. She had to eat very neatly, lifting the rag with every bite and taking very small forkfuls to make sure that nothing dirtied it, and she chewed very carefully, so that nobody thought her improper. Some of the sons piled their plates so high that they spilled over onto the tablecloth and Moon-face always had to take it and scrub it clean after they left.

There were many dinners. So many that the tablecloth became too dirty, with oily stains that Moon-face couldn’t get out no matter how much bleach she burned her hands with and mother sent her to get a new one. Their cabinets were filled with potatoes and cabbage that Moon-face and mother would chop every week, standing at the kitchen counter as a pair and creating a sort of drum tune with the rhythms of their knives.

A stream of women dragging their sons like stubborn horses through their dining room. Moon-face spoke little, her tongue heavy, and the table was always filled with the sound of women’s screeching as drink poured in excess and they became more loose around the seams. Her own mother never drank, filling her cup and only pretending to take a sip every so often. This was because mother knew she had to be quick. She reminded Moon-face of a vulture, craning her neck over the tops of the trees and searching for a sinewed strip of carrion to swoop up and bring back to the nest for Moon-face to feast upon.

It was mother who saw him. Moon-face did not like the man that she was going to marry soon at first.

STAROVOITOV

FOUR BY FOUR NO. 8 - PAGE 21

He was silent, but his mother told everyone that he was a butcher, that he worked in the main market and carved away all day— a sculptor of sorts, she said. He ate fast, like a dog, and his neck was thick with veins and muscle that strained when he moved. He scared her, and she didn’t like the way that he looked her straight in the eyes, because most people would only look at her for a second before they noticed her rag and looked away, ashamed and unsure of whether it was appropriate to look at her any longer. As he ate, bits of cabbage flew into Moon-face’s eyes and made them water. Mother had made something special that evening, a block of ham. It was expensive and so they could only afford half and Moon-face though it looked a little silly, this pink butt in the center of the table staring at everyone as if it was begging to be eaten. The sons took fat slices and the mothers picked away at small strings of it.

In the middle of dinner, the man who would become her husband got up from the table and told everybody that he was going outside to smoke and would be back soon.

Mother reached under the table and squeezed Moon-face’s hand. The others

were speaking loudly and a haze of sound hung above the table and so when mother leaned over to whisper into Moon-face’s ear, nobody heard her. Go after him, she said, he’s the one. He looked at you with hunger.

So she went down the stairs and into the dark, where the man was standing and smoking a cigarette. His face was puffy and he had a stomach that hung over his waistband, paunched and stretching against the fabric of his shirt. He shifted his eyes over to her as she approached him.

Why do you wear that rag? he said, pointing his cigarette towards her face.

Her mother always told her to keep her no-nose a secret, that one day she would find a man who would pay a doctor to give her a new nose and then she wouldn’t have to wear the rag, so it wasn’t a secret as much as it was something that would soon pass. But now wasn’t the time for secret-keeping. If they were really meant to be, he would have to see her at some point, and so she decided to say those words that felt so wrong in her mouth out loud.

I was born without a nose, she said.

Can I see?

MOON-FACE

FOUR BY FOUR NO. 8 - PAGE 22

Moon-face took the rag off. Cold air bit the tender skin around where her nose should have been.

Do you think I’m beautiful? she asked him.

No, he said, I think you’re hideous.

Mother thinks you look at me with hunger, she said. Do you want to eat me?

The man blew smoke in her face before dropping his cigarette on the ground and grinding it into the pavement with his heel. He growled, collecting phlegm in his throat, and spit out a glob of black and green at her feet.

I like looking at you, he said. You’re one of the ugliest girls I’ve ever seen. But I have a big appetite.

Then he turned and went back into the building. Moon-face followed him and when they returned to the warmth of the table, where all the mother’s cheeks were flushed and forks were still clattering on dishes, the man pulled his chair over to Moon-face and sat next to her.

When all the sons and mothers had left and Moon-face stood at the sink, running hot water and pouring soap over all the leftover plates, mother came up to her and stroked the top of her head.

I think we’ve found him. Her chest swelled up with pride. Moon-face’s hands were burning underneath the water. The way he looked at you, it was just so special.

As if you were a real girl!

Mother told Moon-face to prepare a cake and take it up to the man. It was a big cake, so heavy that it made her arms hurt as she climbed up the steps to the seventh floor where he lived. His mother opened the door and smiled at her. She called for her son. He emerged from the dark hallway, taking heavy steps that made Moonface wince.

We’d like you to come around sometime this week, she told the man, looking down at the floor.

He took the cake out of her hands and ripped the towel off of the top, bringing it to his face to smell it before taking his hand digging it into the side. He ripped a chunk out and shoved it into his mouth.

Crumbs fell to the ground.

He came by for many nights after that.

There was always a feast on the table. Her mother had started begging during the day to make sure there was enough money to go to the market and buy the best ingredients, telling Moon-face that it was just

STAROVOITOV

FOUR BY FOUR NO. 8 - PAGE 23

for the time being, that there had to be good food for the man. He’s so big, she said, and he works so hard, he deserves to eat under this roof. So Moon-face got up early in the morning and put pots on the stove and scorched her face with steam and there was always fresh bread and liver and plates of freshly sliced cucumbers set out for him when he came by in his stained butcher’s clothes. And every night after dinner, when they went outside so that he could smoke his cigarettes, he asked Moon-face to take her rag off and he would stare at her, sometimes touching her face and brushing his thumb over the empty no-nose space. They never kissed.

She was glad, because she was afraid that if they did, he would bite her lip and chew it off.

He asked her mother if he could marry Moon-face. Her mother cried and covered him in tears.

I never thought that someone would find my darling worthy! And she threw herself into the man’s arms, patting his head and weeping into his shoulder. She says yes, said her mother.

On the night that they were married, mother invited all the sons and mothers

to a chapel on the corner and Moon-face wore two veils, one over her head and one with lace over her flat space. Mother had spent the whole morning preening her.

Her eyebrows were plucked at with sharp tweezers, her lashes slicked with black mascara and lined with pencil, her ears weighed down with garish plastic jewel— they look real, said mother, no one will notice— that stretched out her lobes. The man had brushed his hair back with something wet that never dried. Afterwards, the crowd piled back into their apartment, just like in the old days, and there was a party, loud and raucous and the man sat with Moon-face the whole night with his arm around her, gripping her tightly and pressing his fingers into her.

When everyone left, the man went out.

He did not tell Moon-face where he was going.

He brought home a greasy parcel wrapped in brown parchment.

For you, he told Moon-face, and thrust it into her hands.

Moon-face took the parcel and unwrapped it.

Do you know what it’s for? he asked, smiling.

MOON-FACE

FOUR BY FOUR NO. 8 - PAGE 24

No, she said, her stomach churning with disgust.

It’s a nose, he said, pointing to the severed pig’s snout in her lap. It was crusted over and leaking onto the paper. I’m going to sew it onto your face and you’ll never have to wear a rag. We can walk down the street and you can smell the apple blossoms blooming, and you can cook dinner without burning the ham like you do every time because you’ll smell it when it’s done.

And after it was done, the man climbed into bed with Moon-face and she could not sleep because all she could smell was the blood on his fingers and the ripe sweat under his arms and the tar on his breath and the rot in the folds of his skin.

STAROVOITOV

4×4 POETRY AWARD WINNER SELECTED BY CLAUDIA RANKINE

CAMILLE SENSIBA

CONVERTIBLE, EAST TO WEST

FOUR BY FOUR NO. 8 - PAGE 27

In the driver’s seat, a man reaches over without looking and presses his calloused thumb into her chin. Like clay, it stays that way. She wears a sunhat in a sedan. Too many, one by one. A man chases one line everywhere. The woman eats everything he leaves behind. The backseat is full of rain; everyone gave them rain with no receipt. They have so much that they choke, that they cannot look at their life and say there it is. At a shotgun wedding, the bride doesn’t have to worry about bleeding on her white dress. From the driver’s seat, the woman is seen with her hands grabbing at the trees as they pass by, and a man must think, with those hands, she is so opposable. She is always her. I would like to forget the way the car turns and turns, but there it was, the paint so red and hardly chipped, I didn’t know how to say it.

ISABEL WONG

BREAD BOX A bear stumbles from earth’s cheek, humbled by what haunches between its jaws, its bluish stutter, its lumpen cry, its cub, blind as a ventricle sloshing warm with milk, a bread red fawn stumbles, blinks, looks up and knows this is the face that put everything in its place.

The weight of trees, the swallow of wind, the palm of honey at the door each night whether it’s twelve or two or ten tucking our burrowing one to bed, scattering nightmares from hair so soft and sticky it smells faintly of wet cake, of walking too fast, of dawn on a humid train breaking fast over a hand full of radiant red fish, headless sugar banjos that fork our eyes and produce laughing

FOUR BY FOUR NO. 5 - PAGE 29

lips out of lines of sucker sour cherries at the edge of a silent forest lion bright with rain. Peeling out of the foretold car, we run to the patter of sleep, the shuffle of our bird coming to bed rumpled and roughed up and wishing for the comfort of fruit in jam, of peanut spread, anything jarred and treacly, anything preserved is waterlogged everything preserved waterlogs her: our everything, our tired oyster eyes, our darling boxing fox bludgeoning into us humming for a sandwich of bodies where she is the butter, thick and snapping and smoky warm.

ELISE BADER-SAYE

MELON

And i know a new perfection when i see him again. How i adore him—mornings climbing the fence of the melon patch to wipe the dew off their outsides with the hem of his too-big shirt. I hope you can see him, can see your own sweet love. See, the seasons pass like this. Winter by habit strips the pith with her teeth. Spring talks quick around pale mouthfuls. Summer bites through rind, pith and seeds indiscriminately. Autumn borrows a knife from his sister only to carve a human form, unclothed, perhaps in agate, melon left gathering sunlight.

ELISE BADER-SAYE

SALMON

And it’s alright. How i wish i could wrap my arms around you lick the seed out of your eye or the small hairs like finest bones across your skin. In high summer it’s cold in the river. See the salmon along the water like women in the subway cars! wriggle always forward, something above, beneath, inside. It’d not be subjective if i called it majestic, scales flashing like a thing out of breath. In the photo you can’t quite see, but i was there. Flashing, back and forth, like a baby’s breaths or something so small.

VERO MONTANEZ

EL VIEJO

Everyone on the block called him “El Viejo.” Even the kids would skip over the formal “señor” when their parents weren’t around. Every day, the neighbors sat on their stoops and porches, watching him carry loaves upon loaves of bread home from the grocery store. Everyone made stories up about the Viejo. “Maybe he’s a French toast fanatic.” “I heard he stuffs them into his sweater for warmth.”

“Joselito told me El Viejo is too cheap to properly replace his chair cushions.”

There was a day where, instead of coming back with bread, he carried dozens of cabbages. This sudden change angered his neighbors. Cabbages were not as fun to gossip about as bread was. They formed a mob and stormed over to the Viejo’s house. When he came out onto the porch, one of the men from two houses down said, “Oye, Viejo, why the cabbages all of a sudden?” The Viejo said nothing, simply leading them through his tiny house to the backyard. They found about twenty tortoises, all huddling around different piles of cabbage.

The Viejo turned to his neighbors, explaining, “I went to the doctor. We’re a gluten-free house now.”

JACKSON KIENITZ

RESPONDING TO YOUR VOICEMAIL; FEB. 17, 2021.

What we, and we here being Yahweh, don’t like Is the question.

And I am really conscious of everything I say.

Just a quick quick caveat about what I’m able to do: Big scale sort of nature.

The um big uh sublime nature.

Instead of being like you know, Let me think of a good example.

Like you know instead of Instead of having a setting of A giant mountain like in the background, I can make a grassy plateau.

What I can’t do is I can’t hear everyone at once.

Why is the finger sized for fitting in the nostril? An example of the question.

All it is is you decree that that that was going to happen was going to happen.

What constitutes work time what constitutes leisure time? That’s the other question.

Canine melodramas.

Equestrian melodramas.

Nautical melodramas.

All leisure time.

Don’t know about you folks but I don’t remember floating in the ether and choosing to inhabit this enigmatic bodily form.

I hear that often.

And I think the thing is it gets a little sometimes fuzzy for people but that’s okay.

You have people who are good you have people who are bad.

You have conflict based in really broad strokes.

I encourage everyone to take what one might call a gestalt shift.

Undertake that gestalt shift and try to uh inhabit your own world.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Hey, you made it! This is the back matter, where we express gratitude and other platitudes. Putting together the magazine before you took months of diligent work and creativity, and we want to show our deep appreciation for everyone who made that possible. First and foremost: thank you for reading our magazine! Thank you for supporting our magazine, submitting your writing, and coming to our events—virtual and otherwise. We are so very lucky to be part of the incredible Columbia literary community.

Our 4x4 community also includes the friends and former editors and contributors who made our second annual MFA panel possible. Thank you to Angelo HernandezSias, Aurora Masum-Javed, De’Shawn Charles Winslow, Eric Wohlstadter, and Perry Levitch for your time and insights.

Thank you to the new members of our editorial board for taking a chance on us. We appreciate you putting yourselves out there amidst this fall’s uncertainty, and we are so glad to have you with us. And to our graduating seniors—Chloe, Emilie, Isaac, Jackson, Lee, and Vivian—we will miss you deeply, and we are so excited to see everything you go on to do.

And a huge thank you to Claudia Rankine and Ottessa Moshfegh for judging this year’s 4x4 Awards. It was an honor to work with such accomplished artists, and the editorial board will remember your kindness and contributions for years to come.

CONTRIBUTORS CLAIRE ADLER is a Barnard senior majoring in English. She grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, a strange place which continues to vex and inspire her. In her free time, she enjoys crafting, hiking, and fantasizing about tenure-track employment.

ELISE BADER-SAYE is a junior in Columbia College studying Spanish and everything else. She has such a short attention span that it’s a miracle these poems are here for you to read. She encourages naming things that quicken the heart and being visceral with your friends around town.

RAYNA BERGGREN is a senior at Columbia College studying Creative Writing and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She loves Wikipedia and midcentury furniture.

After a hazy yet fab stint in the tasseography game, CHASE BUSH-MCLAUGHLIN hopes to settle down as a krautrock scholar. He is from San Francisco to a sometimes exasperating extent, and currently studies philosophy.

JACKSON KIENITZ is kind of semi-forgettable in a strange way, but he is a tremendous bicyclist.

MORGAN LEVINE is a multimedia poet from Houston, Texas, studying English and Creative Writing at Columbia University. Their work has been featured in Quarto, The Blue & White, Gigantic Sequins and elsewhere. Morgan currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of The Columbia Review.

VERO MONTANEZ is a junior majoring in Creative Writing and concentrating in Ethnicity and Race Studies. They were born and raised in Paterson, NJ. When they are not listening to Colombian vallenato music, they can be found reading, writing, or on their way to the nearest Wendy’s.

CAMILLE SENSIBA is a sophomore studying Creative Writing and Comparative Literature & Society. A lover of freshwater, big weather, and run-on sentences, she would do almost anything for a nice warm cookie— she is always hungry.

SASHA STAROVOITOV is a sophomore at Columbia College studying English.

JOAN TATE is a trans poet studying Creative Writing Poetry and Classical Latin at Columbia University. After growing up moving around Virginia as a 5th generation pastor’s kid and finding her roots in Appalachia, Joan has since become enamored with the living and transient quality of the New York school poets and tries to merge these influences with her spiritual presence, southern background and gender that has long been obscured. She’s a copy-editor for Ratrock, and when she’s not writing about her admiration for Riverside Park or questions for ghosts, she often finds herself reviewing the swings of New York and programming Experimental Music shows for WKCR-FM. Perennially cold, Isabel Wong hails from Hawai‘i where she can be found thinking, making, or eating food. If she’s put her cutlery down, it’s probably to pick up a YA novel.

Sponsored in part by the ARTS INITIATIVE at COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.

NO 8 2021