COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK, NY
MASTHEAD
EDITORS-IN-CHIEF
Serena Deng & Grace Novarr
VISUALS EDITOR
Katherine Ju
EVENTS EDITORS
MANAGING EDITOR
Bryan Ge
Renny Gong & Stephanie Fuentes
READING EDITOR
Sam Sadowski
DIGITAL EDITOR
Iris Yu
STAFF EDITORS
Marino Bubba, David Chen, Stephen Dames, Alejandra Díaz-Pizarro, Ollie Ipkendanz. Franziska Lee, Skye Levine, Daniel Shannon, Lyla Wolf, Naomi Zarin
© 2024 4×4 Magazine
All rights are reserved and revert to authors and artists one year after publication.
DEAR READER
WELCOME. HERE WE ARE AGAIN. Eleven years old and entering our middle school days, we feel ourselves leaning into the thrill of change. Things are somehow even weirder and more whimsical than usual as we move classrooms, grow new inches, and discover unlikely friends. But underneath, there is also a tinge of sadness. An era of 4 × 4 is coming to a close—many of us are graduating, spreading our wings for the “not much anything” of the future, as Yeukai Zimbwa’s “sent” puts it.
The avian is a recurring theme in this year’s volume. In Andrew Forrest Joseph Blake’s “Dial Tone,” a “black bird / teems with the void of yesterday.” In Nickolas Vaccaro’s “How Put and Left,” a passing swan is marred with dirt. A flock of strange, meandering fowl emerges—these are birds that “[remember] morning,” as Charlie Coleman puts it, and hope to become “weightless as sky’s breath” in “sent.” In Remi Seamon’s “Imaginary Ancestors,” the birds escape our realm altogether, yielding to “the years.” Time slips by us so treacherously, leaving us at the end of a new, blank page. Yet there are new units of measurement with which we can mark our world: Nathan Cho instructs us that “1 shoe is 15 pigeon beaks.”
Elsewhere in the magazine, both mourning and newness abound. In “Frühlingsgefühl,” Giselle Silla exalts our reawakening in springtime, and in “Mochi,” Jiwoo Moon speaks of the bittersweetness of “lemon season without you.” At times we burst with glee, imagination, exploration: “I reinvent… my badness,” Renee Morales crows in “God Created Disco So I Could Be
Born.” In “Lace,” Isa Far locates the thrill of trying on new underwear. But always, there are heavier stories that we are reminded of, too: Armaan Bamzai’s “Mulaqaat” and Reese Alexander’s “On the Polanski Petition” grapple with violence and the process of living through it.
What a pleasure and a privilege it has been to meet weekly, under the auspicious lighting of Hamilton Hall’s Wednesday warmth, and discuss the work of our peers. We are forever mindful of the trust placed in us by those sending their work along, and forever grateful that we get to be the custodians of the delight embodied in this magazine—yes, the one that you now hold in your hands. As Volume XI graduates from a docketful of Submittable assignments to a body and spirit of its own, we thank you for taking part in this journey with us.
GRACE NOVARR & SERENA DENG EDITORS-IN-CHIEF 2023-2024
JIWOO MOON
MOCHI
Want to show you these plates abandoned by airlines. Used to take you like mochi mouthful. Coughed it up in class and left to fnd myself in lemon season without you. You, arms pocked with eczema. Like something burning on the stove, like paunch punching, like too much four on sticky things, like red bean sometimes, like jujube, like bunny-shaped cake molds, like that good, thin tail of fruit skin— you remind me of myself at sixteen. Sweet, like like
RENEE MORALES
GOD CREATED DISCO MUSIC SO I COULD BE BORN
When love comes knocking at my door I tell my baby it’s trouble you settle in the fnger. Nudging with the ball of my foot my big toe whispers “heed our glamour sudden glimmer’d like the shimmer of headlights is whipping tongues.” Or, hot the hard curve of my knees bent on the January sand I love you, and I love when you whisper “it” and mean truly fucking sticky. Back then when I said my rotten tooth gurgles like the Miami River I meant my body has the bad habit to linger. Like the forehead smack of dominoes I meant I often say WTF when I really mean “smother me,” a confession I bury under words like “irregardless” and “horizontal,” you won’t get it and I mean
FOUR BY FOUR
VOL. XI - PAGE 9
the same gap in my language. Against you I am a starlet buried alive by her own polished hand and I need something to kiss and confuse your slack lean with female impulse. Baby I’m scared and I like to be cruel. I arch my back in my girl-mirror saying yes and thank you and NO FUCKING WAY, asking for chapstick and batting my lashes, screaming “don’t stop” and I buy 5 books I need the rest of my life to fnish and I need the rest of my life so I groan and I kiss the postcards on my wall I’ve named after glaciers in a phone whose password I rub against my naked body I want to taste myself on someone’s tongue and I am not tongue-ing and when I don’t feel like it. PERIOD. May I crash into the metaphor mother Summer calls our common hero. Donna, baby, the drippy thing you named LOVE is oozing of my elbows enveloped in what my mom calls “bad Spanish” and I re-invent, for you, a means to revel in my badness: I am bad and I love my lips’ shapen improper’d “O” and the bed frame groaning when I take a bite of his thigh to give him closure. When you fnd me
I’ll be caressing my brown inner body with the soft part of my fake nail screaming my name next to Wall-E and the postage and the word “obtuse.”
I utter: come and see the rhyme’d glimmer personifed self-imposed in my mercy I want to be near myself so badly I hop on the M5 and curse and touch and make music––Donna, it’s here, I swim I female saunter I mean I female, I disco, I Summer-saunter and I mean it.
FOUR BY FOUR VOL. XI - PAGE 10 GOD CREATED DISCO
YEUKAI ZIMBWA
not much anything! still studying wind. undertaken the trackless trek’s long prep (at which wing-tilt will the blackhawk merge current––feeing the world nestward, in your direction
(how much riddling over elements til nice-kind-stranger frees me squarely in the jaw / with the brick spelled salvation (so skeletally concerned––such blood to it)?)?)
hope you’re eating good! hope to wax weightless as sky’s breath: digressive in edge-places
REESE ALEXANDER
FOR BUKOWSKI, FROM ONE OF THE WHORES
on nights i imagine myself losing my edge, i talk to charles bukowski.
bukowski, i cry into the bottom of a stale, con genital gee & t bukowski, i can’t write.
then don’t fucking write, charles shoots back, goes to steal my drink, misses, knocks it to the foor
like a pissed orange cat.
FOUR BY FOUR VOL. XI - PAGE 13
outside, the boys pin leaden shadows to rats’ tails. howl, breathe fre. knock loose my teeth.
up in alcoholic heaven, bukowski pours one out for me, another to his little daughter, then stops, ponders. licks it of that cloudy foor.
4×4 AWARD WINNER
SELECTED BY KAVEH AKBAR
REMI SEAMON
IMAGINARY ANCESTORS
FOUR BY FOUR VOL. XI - PAGE 16
Tey were very bored in the famine, in the rain, in the feld lying face-down like a painting. Tey were tired of being painted and not painted and crossed out. Tired of touching each other, of throwing stones, inventing mirrors, new ways of naming each other… they were tired of telling and being told the same stories which all said
I am your god, the one and only god you are so small I could step on you.
Tey were tired of being quoted in poems in languages other than their own, tired of walking
the long road away from the burning place
it wasn’t very new. If they told jokes, it’d go something like this:
Ancestor 1: …..?
Ancestor 2: …….!
Ancestor 1: !!!!!!!!!
Ancestor 2: !!!!!!!!
All Ancestors: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ten the birds would speak and they’d listen even though you don’t and I don’t and the years own all the birds.
CHARLIE COLEMAN
GREGORIAN CALENDAR
Rotting in the sunshine like a beast. Alright, so, a wash. Tere are fruits fowering elsewhere, tomorrow. Tomorrow you sit with the cave worms commiserating. Perfect crystalline structure of nothingness. A jolt, yes, from the right rotation or maybe a car crash. Tat could work. Or just shave of a month or two and change your name, new topography, old songs.
Trim the fat for broth.
Used to be you hated how promptly the birds remembered morning. But now you miss the ticking.
ISA FAR LACE
With the surgical precision of a college boy fucking a girl he isn’t going to commit to, I pick out my next pair of underwear at Nordstrom. Kim Kardashian’s new underwear line does not have enough crotch room and Hanky Panky will fry in the dryer despite hugging my hips most fatteringly. But I’m not responsible enough to wash my underwear by hand. Tese are facts that tempt me to go for the dreaded Granny Panty. I think about Melba from Barnard Primary Health Services who told me to stop wearing thongs, demonstrating with many squats interrupted by allusions to her crotch that my thongs were the reason I got eight UTIs my sophomore year. Probably also the cause of a super-bacteria in my bladder. Suddenly full coverage seems reasonable. My sister used to sell underwear in this exact lingerie section, to rich ladies with rich husbands. Before that, she worked at Victoria’s Secret where she chased old men who’d made of with hundreds of dollars worth of crotchless thongs. White kids grew up listening to _________ and I grew up listening to my sister talk about how her coworkers snubbed her commission. We’d played hide and seek among this slutty lace when I came to visit her at work, the rich ladies on a death march for sexy underwear, and my sister hunting for a survivable commission, trying not to abandon me in garments I didn’t understand.
No sales ladies approach me and I wonder if that’s because I still look too young to be buying sexy underwear or maybe they just remember that I’m Jessi’s little sister. Tis break I’ve decided it’s time for “real underwear,” the stuf that costs over $30 a pair. Once my sister and I counted the underwear she had in her closet: 93 whole thongs.
Tat detachment and freedom that gave me those eight UTIs is gone. I think I miss these encounters sometimes, the lace hiding all that is ugly. Cheap, easily rippable validation. Now it’s all a mess. Melba says thongs are bad, so I trade out one thong just one for a full-coverage Natori pair. I pat myself on the back. FOUR BY FOUR
Who was all that for?
Certainly not her.
And who the hell are these underwear for?
Certainly not me.
“You always have such nice underwear,” said the guy clinically fucking me said to not give me the idea that he wanted to date me after giving me eight UTIs.
ANDREW FORREST JOSEPH BLAKE
DIAL TONE
after Anne-Marie Dillon’s “I am your controlling jock boyfriend with a car”
that black bird keens your femur right from its pop socket
you’re a boy down the street all danger
runny nose and snot rockets ranch straight from the carton quarters in a sock black eye pickpocket
drumming that chicken wing then lick your fngers clean your old man is always mad but never says why that’s why you’re gonna make it everyone else’s problem running in the dead of winter just for kicks chucking up your guts stolen nudie magz hard ons with your buddy and nun-chucks
pubes down the drain fexing in the mirror the sting of after shave
getting of and getting of scot-free hawk-a-loogie
dry humping with jeans mayo spread on white bread meat and cheese
american dream you’re nineteen and you were nineteen
all along that black bird teems with the void of yesterday and now you can’t forget it’s gonna go like this:
1. you’re gonna throw rocks at her window 2. she’s gonna look from above 3. searching for faces in the dark
think about her mom waiting street light halo above her head her nose is running red a warning to please get back before dark you’re not sure if she does sirens beneath the pillow beneath the bed you’d rather just watch plug your ears and say la la lalala
maybe it’s time to go home you’re numb at the airport looking for the police sketch of a prophet they disconnected all the payphones remember those quarters sitting heavy in your pocket that black bird preens its beak in your spleen that black bird careens black bird down the ravine coming home to roost cock (haha!) - a - doodle - doo
NATHAN CHO
YOUR THUMB IS ONE DEGREE FROM THE HORIZON
1 shoe is 15 pigeon beaks
1 deli cat tail is 1.3 new york city rats
1 shark’s tooth is .02 tuna 1 shark’s mouth is 6 So travel in packs of 7
My extended hand is not a snack I just want to see how many fngers is your tooth How many fngers I need for escape
RENEE MORALES
PLEASE TELL MAMI
i will get home tonight and when i do i will tell all my friends she has yet to pick out a nickname on my behalf like 21 years of imagining mouthfuls and the only two syllables urging strangers to say it backwards like a cheap way of suggesting you don’t love me
enough to at least try and be creative it’s fne please tell mami i will get home /
tonight i am sitting shirtless back sticking to the dinner chair with peeling leather from foot sitting as mami uses kitchen scissors to fx a haircut Leydi gave me that summer the sun asphyxiated when i pulled strand from root to strand my 13-year-old scalp kissed by the creases in her fnger look
i am not saying names in completion like Leydi though Leydi gave me a haircut that stuck out so awkwardly that summer mami fxed it without apology i cry tonight i will ; get home for winter with a delicate reminder of a half-truth: the highway needs the bottom of its body to remember and they’ve been fxing the Palmetto my entire life and my entire life i’ve dedicated to revisions to admitting you can’t ever really say my name because by nature it’s always been incomplete and i wonder what bus mami take to school like “does-she-lace-her-sneakers-do-they-velcro-wasthe-aglet-unrolling-didthey-have-aglets-at-all” her motonetas gathered tight in the breadth of my name like mami how do i translate “aglet” my fst the way they pull your eyebrows back: the gait the underbelly of a vowel i cry i will
get home, eat all the olives, learn
to say “socks” correctly in Spanish i will call you somewhere in Libya the hard bristle of the detention brush a step in my method to beat sugar the way mierda unfolds on the tongue or like 2000, like Mexico and Venezuela and ink cartridges pens fruit rice and rice and discover my name is far too tender to resist the callus the weight of the ground sinking into itself with a whisper Diana’s dull spoon-clink espuma leaking sweeter where the lip cracks clean i am right here and the drywall is still in my hair i know i melted the last plastic knife trying to sear your face onto my wrist mami but i am still right here tonight i will fnally get home i : will acknowledge all the ways i address you incorrectly: i confess i am your feet smelling like artichoke i used to fush down goya beans hover over your body while you slept like that nightmare i used to have FOUR BY FOUR
PLEASE TELL MAMI
when we lived on 49th and i remember Katrina well forgive me i fnally believe i was born into lightning crossing my knees and wasting sorries tonight i drench my sheets in violetas and mistake it for cow’s milk speak to my ide as if it were the soft stretch of your arm in a dream i smell your perfume and burn eggshells asking you to come to me i say “dame” wrong and “do not hate me if i cannot get home tonight” i will not decorate the christmas tree i will ]
not admit it is me it is me it is me trying to get to another part of the same stretch of grass i will fnd faces of men i can never know i am staring at a photo of you at a birthday party in 1976 when Mima’s house bowed a smile in the direction of your pufed sleeve i will get home and my body will be a marsh so soft you will step into see my hair has fnally grown believe i really am FOUR BY FOUR
a mosquito that it is november and your 8th birthday so
… please do not mistake felicidades for the wet squish of your school shoes for your name called out at a playground i said i will get home tonight so quit asking “René ?” no mami it is me and i am telling you i will not go back i am right here now please turn around.
PLEASE TELL MAMI
NICKOLAS VACCARO
HOW PUT AND LEFT
We undo and I say we undo and still turn of away and forth, turn you away as turned to the last-land and waters from it, waters their swelling forth in steed-ways, turn you toward them whom you name and named and their cold feet rent, and the dirt, the dirt sing lo sing to which they weep, still search you, lo they have left and come past for so you say and I recite, the glass and on their backs low arcs and burdens which you give, you give and look for something there between necessities, here for a white swan fies from dirt, with talons from the dirt, and looking look you mar these all, mar, you mar.
REESE ALEXANDER
ON THE POLANSKI PETITION
reached concerning their 2009 signatures, the following artists declined to comment:
I AM KEPT UP AT NIGHT
by the sound of sharp pens scratching against virgin paper. It rings out constantly. Others seem not to notice this sound. I wish I could say they are lying. Or that they are choosing not to hear the sound quite purposefully. Tis is not true. I know the truth. Tey do not hear the sound because they do not have the tools. Tey do not know what a pen is. Tey have never seen paper. To ask them to identify the music made by the interception of the two would be madness. My peers practice this art of deafness each day as the world forms around me for the very frst time, as God scratches Genesis onto the black board of that lecture hall in that necrogenic university. Yes, look around you now, that one—that same one. You know where you are. Tat necrogenic university where I scrounged
for scraps, where I sold my body to the Title IX Ofce each day, where I cut my hair in the inbox of the college president. But do not feel sorry for me. Tere is no need. I am blessed. I was blessed with the gift of sight. Two glass eyes were handed to me in a manilla envelope by a trauma ad-vo-ca-te, along with a sentencing paper I paid no attention to. And these magical eyes lifted Shelley’s veil, so emerged our creophagous world. And the carrion was so beautiful that day—the same day he pointed at me from across the shuttered classroom, boxed in by silly makeshift witness stand, kind and unkind idiots telling me to repeat my words, choose my words carefully, remember the words he said, remember the words he did not say, remember the words he rolled into thin strips of paper to smoke once then put
out against the skin of my screaming shoulder. And all the while the carrion’s color sang in their faces: ruby, amaranthine, burnt sienna, fecks of amber gold mixed onto shit-stained sheets. HA, but it doesn’t make me angry anymore, not really. When the necrogenic university hangs messages of support, or photographs of tired women who smile in college merchandise, blue lions looking up from their chests hungry, waiting, I look at these things with my nice new eyes, and I feel the same as I would looking at a slug slowly crossing a pathway in an overgrown forest. It is there. How am I supposed to know whether or not it should be there, if it is natural or invasive? All I know is that I see it. Tat is most days. But sometimes there will be another day, a new one. Tese are my favorites. My mind will be sitting by an October ocean in San Sebastián, picking chopped fruit out of the remnants of a watery glass of sangria, searching for a pecifc flm by Pedro Almodóvar. Yes, the one where the woman is beaten beyond recognition. Where the
man picks her up and slams her across the room. Where she is disfgured by scalpel blades and toothy kisses. Where she is made anew. Is there no greater love than a man reaching deep inside you and taking every ounce of your own self out, the university-appointed therapist asked me once, pursing her lips like a frightened clam. No, I answered. But there is no greater earnestness, I have decided, than his handcufng you to a sweltering radiator and throwing the small key, wet with your own saliva, down the subway grate. Burn there, he says. And, reaching out for one such unknowable, ungraspable flm, I instead close my wine-stained fngers around Pedro’s signature. It sits surrounded by friends in warmth and light, not staining, but invigorating the parchment paper on which it acts as testament. Te signatures of one thousand close friends, lovers. Teir letters intertwined, praying together on bruised knees in an origami steeple for the safe return of their lost Messiah. Wow, what a love. What a love I will never know again. ALEXANDER
GISELLE SILLA
FRÜHLINGSGEFÜHL
Te crabapple bleeds into the margins of my window, moving in real time like a stormfront across land. I go away for the weekend, and Monday morning the beech tree has sprouted a scrufy new crown of short baby leaves,
nascent, shy, unfolding like hands from the fssures of its wintered arms. My mushrooms sizzle in their pan, the radiator works overtime under the immodest, open window, and I know
I will be writing the springtime for as long as I am around to live it.
I will stand tulips in milk jars and feel the wind whip my ankles and praise this palette of sun that breathes a pulse of green life through the trees once again,
(once again)
(once again)
(once again).
4×4 AWARD WINNER SELECTED BY EVIE SHOCKLEY
ARMAAN BAMZAI
MULAQAAT
FOUR BY FOUR
VOL. XI - PAGE 40
At dinner, we tell the one about leaving the Valley. A girl palming coins for the night bus, her teeth fat on her tongue.
In this one, the temple buried a mosque buried another. Te dark happened at once, and inside it, children sprinted towards its borders. Te one about the woman who, reaching south, encountered her own body asleep in the rubble.
Before becoming fowers, my uncle said the wrong prayer and laid his head in the wrong direction. My mother dropped her face in her hands like a bride, as her father’s home was eaten by the heavy evening.
Tis one we omit: the engineer’s wife, expectant as the moon, who stayed behind in pride. Her drum of rice soaked slowly with familiar blood.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WE ARE FIRST AND FOREMOST GRATEFUL FOR YOU, OUR DEAR READER, for turning the pages of this issue and engaging with us all the way to the back matter. Tank you to the Activities Board at Columbia and the Columbia Arts Initiative, for your generosity and for allowing us to print more copies of our magazine than ever before. Tank you to our contributors—without you we could not exist as we are. We hope that this issue has felt like coming home to roost.
To all our submitters, thank you for your trust, care, and bravery. Each year, we feel so lucky to receive such an outpour of student writing. You delighted us so many times over. We’re grateful for such a bright 4×4 community—thank you to all our eventsgoers and newsletter-receivers, to all who were intrigued by our posters or stopped to chat with us at the club fair.
To Kaveh Akbar and Evie Shockley, our sincerest gratitude for judging our contest. We were honored by and full of admiration towards the care and energy you put into reading these pieces.
Finally, endless thank yous to our wonderful staf: for a year’s worth of vigor and verve, for patience at late-night meetings, for 4×4 walks, 4×4 karaoke, and 4×4 egg-andspoon race. To our seniors, Grace, Skye, Renny, Katherine, Sam, Franziska, and Marino. Tank you for your dedication to this magazine until the very end.
CONTRIBUTORS
REESE ALEXANDER is a junior studying English and creative writing at Barnard. Her work has been published previously in Quarto, Echoes, Flash Fiction Magazine, Five on the Fifth, Literally Stories, and Trinity College Dublin’s Te Attic. She is originally from Birmingham, Alabama.
ARMAAN BAMZAI is a junior at Columbia College, studying English and Public Health. He’s fve minutes early to everything and wants mustard with that. He speaks Kashmiri, Hindi, English, and Loudly.
ANDREW FORREST JOSEPH BLAKE is super chill. If he could, he’d tell you to read Tell Me How Long Te Train’s Been Gone by James Baldwin. Born and raised in Arizona, he dreams of erring endlessly in a desert, searching for elsewhere. He’s perplexed by the non-taxable event of
tithing with cryptocurrency, but that’s for another time. Rejoice! Check out some of his previous work in 4×4’s last volume, and SLOTMACHINES4DUMMIES in Te Columbia Review.
NATHAN CHO is a freshman hoping to study creative writing, a fact he avoids sharing to escape the expectations it creates. Hailing from Delaware, he’s a lot of people’s frst. Tings on his mind include ginkgo trees, the price of HMart snacks, and how he should really fold his laundry.
CHARLIE COLEMAN is a junior (BC ‘25) studying English and philosophy. His work is featured or forthcoming in Quarto Magazine, ZENIADA, Jet Fuel Review and Sandy River Review. He is a passionate people-watcher.
ISA FAR wishes she majored in English, but couldn’t stomach it. You can fnd her serving your cofee at Hungarian, or else working on her creative writing there on her days of.
JIWOO MOON is mostly from Maryland. Right now she likes knitting hats with ear faps. She wants to write about love—in a serious way.
RENEE MORALES (she/ella) is a Cuban poet from Miami, Florida who is as deeply fascinated by Welsh Corgis as she is the erotic. You can fnd more of her writing at @r.moralespoetry.
REMI SEAMON is a sophomore at Columbia College studying Comparative Literature. Her work has appeared in various journals, including underblong, Hotel Amerika, Glint Literary Journal and Unlost.
GISELLE SILLA hails from Washington
D.C. She is a senior at Barnard College, where she majors in Urban Studies and minors in German.
NICKOLAS VACCARO is a frst-year at Columbia College and intends to major in comparative literature. Poetry, for him, is perhaps the truest, at once most individual and universal, expression of the good and of the tragedy of the human. He has found that poetry fulflls the human need for myth, for symbolism and for meaning and becomes the domain where both poet and audience realize the great magnitude of their humanity.
YEUKAI ZIMBWA writes.
Sponsored in part by the ARTS INITIATIVE at COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY .