NO 9
2022
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY NEW YORK, NY
MASTHEAD
EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Simone Liu & Franzi Nace DESIGN EDITORS Serena Deng & Katherine Ju
MANAGING EDITOR Ellie Windsor
EVENTS & OUTREACH EDITOR Renny Gong READING EDITOR Owen Park
DIGITAL & SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR Ashley Cullina
STAFF EDITORS Anja Chivukula, Stephen Dames, Alejandra Díaz-Pizarro, Katie Kong, Skye Levine, Caroline Mao, & Grace Novarr
© 2022 4×4 Magazine All rights are reserved and revert to authors and artists one year after publication.
CONTENTS 4 WELCOME
7 AGAINST DIURNAL LIVING Yeukai Zimbwa
8 SELECTED EXCERPTS FROM MEMOIRS OF A PRESIDENT Franziska Lee
12 ELEKTRICHKA Sasha Starovoitov
16 EN PASSANT Gokul Venkatachalam
17 OCHRE, OCULAR Gokul Venkatachalam
18 A SASQUATCH THROWS A PROM FOR HERSELF DURING 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU Sam Losee
20 THE FLOORS ARE CLEAN ENOUGH Wick Hallos
22 CHILDISM Anonymous
28 SILVERADO Hanna Andrews
29 DOG PARK Agatha Wuh
30 STUDY IN SPRUNG SAPPHICS: MOSQUITO IN NOVEMBER Joan Tate
31 THE FIRST TIME I KNEW Joan Tate
33 MARLENE Morgan Levine
34 IN A MOMENT Chase Bush-McLaughlin
35 I REIMAGINE MYSELF AS STILL ALIVE, BUT A GHOST NOW
36 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS & CONTRIBUTORS
Camille Sensiba
DEAR READER WELCOME BACK. We are glad to be back as a physical book—something our readers can flip through at leisure, spend an afternoon with. This year has been characterized by a return to the physical. Most of our staff met in-person for the first time. We resumed our classic rituals and revels in the form of our open mics and lively discussions under yellowing Hamilton lights. We clapped ceremoniously at the close of each meeting, fifteen pairs of hands coming apart and back together again. At nine, 4×4 pushes double digits. We are a square number and a square issue, but we resist becoming old-fashioned, or dull. Our traditional events, from Kill Your Darlings to S&M, returned with a roar, but everything was not the same. We were also new, with fresh faces and pent-up energy. The magazine’s mission– or at least its Instagram bio– has always been to publish “the best undergraduate student writing at Columbia University,” but this “best” doesn’t prioritize conventionality or generic perfection. Instead, we traffic in delight and surprise, in risk and reward, in writing that leaves a mark. We are proud of this ninth volume because we think it does exactly that. Many pieces gnaw at the edges of their own form, eager to escape the limits they have themselves imposed. Camille Sensiba’s “I reimagine myself as still alive, but a ghost now” and Hanna Andrews’ “Silverado” float away from us, into fumes of either love or poison. The planes of bodies shift and rearrange in Yeukai Zimbwa’s “Against Diurnal Living” and Joan Tate’s “The First Time I Knew.” Everything familiar is strange: Chase Bush-McLaughlin’s “In
a Moment” and Mckenzie’s “Childism” lay bare the weirdness of being a college student, of meeting our corny and needy and unfinished selves, while Gokul Ventkatchalam slinks slyly along the sidewalk. Agatha Wuh’s “Dog Park” and Sam Losee’s “A Sasquatch Throws a Prom for Herself During 10 Things I Hate About You” probe the creature-human divide. As grateful as we are to exist physically, this year, with all of you, the aim of 4×4 has always been something less concrete. A feeling: the way it nestles itself like a stray kernel in your teeth, tangles itself in your hair, engulfs a room in rattly radiator-like glow. Whether you emerge from reading “glittered up” (Sam Losee) or “coralline” (Morgan Levine), we hope its charm won’t be confined only to this campus, or to this specific springtime. We hope it stays with you. We know it will stay with us.
SIMONE LIU & FRANZI NACE EDITORS-IN-CHIEF 2021-2022
YEUKAI ZIMBWA
AGAINST DIURNAL LIVING napping belly-down felt like fuck. spine: a portion of bungee chord SLUNK: suspent in the jell-o of whatever else keeps a back: blood muscle fat. i couldn’t remember where i seen all them candles through the white-sash windows or the women who huddled them, hooded as wart-speckled toads (and whispering what! smearing what red shapes onto the bent one’s back!): in the made-making light of full dark or through hooded eyes, before?.
FRANZISKA LEE
SELECTED EXCERPTS FROM MEMOIRS OF A PRESIDENT On her parents My mother was the last queen of England not Elizabeth but the Under-England the throbbing Thing mostly water now. She was a wolf & I ate cherry lollipops so my tongue Could be red as hers. The way some girls do Anything to be closer though I was suckled On saltwater. On weekends I went to my father A salesman travelled largely by balloon. Once he took me to the icecap where he kept beer. You could see the rod speared straight Through the earth. The great Kabob. Cold sticking Like skin to a grape. To Her Majesty he toasted. And I said why won’t it move? This white water It’s not moving. Like you wouldn’t believe. Because I grew up this way I was very rarely On solid ground. I got earthsick The first time before I noticed The way soil has wave/wind too, smally Pushed by Tube trains and worms.
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On her accomplishments I was the bee which told Beethoven to sing And often I did not appear at lunch Dates with war criminals and other Mythic figures. I liked to think of them Twirling a knife on the table, the waitresses Watching with pity from the wings. Disillusionment with monarchy My mother being a wolf had to wear Her crown around her throat. I thought often of forgiving her When I was president. I’d put her in the ground Like she was queen. Of Under-Under-England. On the location of the Republic Friends and enemies alike will ask me Where is it? To which I say: where Are you? On a map could you find it What the West calls Soul? Curled In your chest like a senator hiding In the hollow of some tree? Behind Your eyes, on your crimson tongue? Do you press it into paper when you sign Your name? Is it the meat of you? The mien?
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Personal life Like whipping cream I can’t treat A love affair lightly enough To discuss it. But my general who tasted The kumquats for poison, she I loved. As much as any politician can. Military coup and subsequent death All power corrupts In zig-zag formation. With my last clean corner I wiped My general’s tears. How sweet Her saber and my red Red mouth. So this was stillness. Oh, Emily, I wonder Will I go up to my father or down, Like my mother, the queen of UnderUnder-England?
SASHA STAROVOITOV
ELEKTRICHKA I’m on the train into the bad part of town, answering the call. I live with my brother and at night, I take the train into the bad part of town and come back in the morning. The bad part of town is not really that bad anymore. I started to take the train into the bad part of town because I was bored. But also because my brother started making a ruckus and I couldn’t sleep. My brother started making a ruckus because he was bored too. The train has a rhythm and it feels like I’m being rocked back and forth, like a baby, and that makes me so tired. That was nice when I first started taking the train, the chuka-chuka-chuka-chuka. But today I am wide awake so I leave my bag looped around my arm only once and don’t hide my change in my underwear.
My brother works at the university. He used to teach at the university, too. Except then he stopped teaching. And then he stopped working. So now he goes to his office and locks the door and works on projects. I’m not sure what he is working on at the moment, but I’m sure it is very important. When my brother comes home from the university he is always so hungry, so I think he must be working very hard and working up his appetite, really working it into such a frenzy that I sometimes think he has an animal inside of his stomach that’s just yowling out, like the stray cats underneath our window. There was a time one summer when one stray cat crawled into our foyer, where the neighbor’s door and our door meet and there’s a hall and you can hear everything anyone does in there if you’re in your apartment and she gave birth to three kittens in the foyer.
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Right now I am still passing through the good part of town. But soon, the good part will turn into the bad part that’s not so bad anymore and there will be more dust and I’ll have to close the window of the train. There’s another man sitting here, across from me, and he keeps coughing with his mouth wide open like a sewage pothole. I keep waiting for gunk to spill out of it. I really should close the window, because otherwise the dust will make his cough even worse and maybe his pipes will get clogged and there will be a man choking to death in my train compartment, which would get in the way of me going to answer the phone call I got tonight. When my brother first stopped working I made him dinner every night. When he was working, he would always go out for dinner with the other university men and women. They’d go as a group to the dining hall. He used to come home on Fridays with a few beers in
him and laugh so loudly and take my hands and swing me around saying, we’ve made so many discoveries today! Olga look, soon we’ll be the first, the first ones, we’ll know everything! And I’d laugh with him too because how silly it seemed-- knowing everything! He is my little brother, after all, so I can’t expect him to know how wrong he is about some things, but it was fun, still. When he stopped working, he started to come home hungry. His group stopped going to the dining hall. Instead, my brother now gets his beers at the corner market by the bus stop. He comes home later than when he was working. I used to prepare him a meal so that he could come home and it wouldn’t be any worse than when he was working. But he only poked at it and told me he wasn’t hungry, and then he would drink his beer and so I don’t make dinner for us anymore. Instead, I go on the train.
ELEKTRICHKA
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I take the third-to-last or second-to-last or last train most nights. I prefer the third-to-last, but sometimes I don’t get the phone call until much later, when it’s the second-to-last or even the last train’s time. There have been nights when I’ve gotten the call at the last minute and that’s when I really have to run. Many nights I’ll sit by the phone and wait for the call. I’ll put on my coat and my socks and my shoes and my underwear. I wonder sometimes if others notice that the underwear I am wearing doesn’t have that smell of being worn, and they know I’ve switched it out just for them. Tonight the call came quick, so I am on the second-to-last train, which is good because I’m not afraid I’ll fall asleep on the ride over there. There is only the man in the car and me, and I slither down my seat and peek at him only once between each stop. I count the seconds so I know it’s not too often.
The girls at work told me about the phone. There’s a number you can call and it takes you to a room, a room you don’t know yet, but it’s always in the bad part of town that’s not really that bad anymore. Then you hang up the phone and you wait for the call back, which doesn’t always come, of course. The first few times I called I never got a call back. The girls at work looked at me with sad eyes and said it’s okay, you will, we don’t always get calls back either, you know, not everybody has a fit that’s right for the night. Marina came over one night with a bottle of wine that her husband had made in the closet and we drank it all and sat next to the phones all night. The wine was sour and rank, maybe because it wasn’t ready yet because Marina had stolen it out of the bathtub, where her husband had piled all of the wine he made with grapes he picked out of the dumpsters behind the big Sunday market. I just want to
STAROVOITOV
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take a bath! She said and her lips were all purple like they were bruised. But he puts all the wine in the bottles and the jars, I have no jars for jam anymore, and her purple lips moved and I thought of her smiling and teeth being stained all purple-red and she said, the bathtub’s all full of these bottles and the wine’s not even any good! And we all laughed, and all of us were a little drunk on the not so good wine that Marina’s husband made in the bathtub. When I go on the train to the bad part of town, I sometimes imagine that I am going outside of the city. I close my eyes and the chuka-chuka-chuka-chuka becomes psh-psh-psh-psh, like waves or wind over the fields that I see if I squint hard enough, if the light’s still out on the rare nights I’ve taken the fourth-tolast train. The conductor is coming down the hallway now, I can hear the click of his hole
punch. I pull my ticket out of my sock, where I tuck it for safekeeping, and I hand it to him, his fingers fast and his eyes darting so quickly and I think, if he was a woman, he’d be good at the office with me and the girls. A voice announces that the next stop will be the second-to-last stop, which is my stop. I ready my things and I put on my scarf and my hat and my coat and I see that the man who was coughing has fallen asleep. I wonder if I should wake him. He will miss his stop otherwise, but I would not want to be touched by a stranger on the train, and I don’t want to touch a stranger on the train. Instead, I crumple a piece of newspaper that was in my bag and make a little paper-rock. The train begins to slow down and the doors open. As I step out, I throw the paper-rock at his head to wake him up. He yelps and curses and coughs all at once but I barely hear the end of it because I jump out and run.
ELEKTRICHKA
GOKUL VENKATACHALAM
EN PASSANT sidewalk chess you forgot to RSVP (in lieu) to the rendezvous at 2 (in the afternoo) (a new milieu!) bait n switcheroos the ruse the rules
GOKUL VENKATACHALAM
OCHRE, OCULAR moon’s broken like a clock wrong twice a day white like a carton of milk $4 strange gaits strange shapes mouths awestruck, agape ochre, ocular different kinds of kindness warm crusty harrumphs guffaws, even goatlike bleats and pleats phantom rings
4×4 POETRY AWARD WINNER SELECTED BY CHEN CHEN
SAM LOSEE
A SASQUATCH THROWS A PROM FOR HERSELF DURING 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU after Chrissy Williams & Karen Russell
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the drive-in is almost closed for the night ! the glowing projector a sunken north star ! stark against the dark valley ! and on the hill above ! the wild joy ! of a smashing comet ! BOOM ! she’s a girl ! glittered up ! in a wind chime dress ! made of everything from the road ! broken beer bottles ! inside out chip bags ! pretty leaves ! a lost barrette ! she’s untouchable and noisy ! more lovable ! than the large hairy shadow ! of her photographs ! in the strawberry moonlight ! she’s especially irresistible ! blowing a kiss to newness ! glamour ! all other kinds of evil ! the childhood she survived ! all wet furred beast selves ! drowned in the lake ! by her beautiful big hands ! if a fire bit the woods she’d eat it ! in one gulp ! who cares about what she is ! she can sing to herself ! she can watch chick flicks from her own hilltop ! for free ! grumble all the words like a sleeping bear ! she could bully a heroine ! or steal her jewels ! and she will if given the chance ! she’s dancing by herself ! and she’s dizzy ! lurched by the romance ! between the world and her feet ! she makes the birds nervous ! she’s shiny with delight ! now the credits are rolling ! girlfriends zip up their pants ! fuck gratitude ! last night ! in her dream ! she made out with the moon ! tonight ! she wants a dream ! where every road sign ! every treetop ! every star ! is her face ! she wants you ! to see her ! from below !
LOSEE
WICK HALLOS
THE FLOORS ARE CLEAN ENOUGH As long as it receives some patient help, steady, returning, this apartment broom collects all the necessary satellites—dust, hair, dirt, paint, crumb— eventually. In the meantime, it still bows inwards and drops yellow, golden shoots.
4×4 PROSE AWARD WINNER SELECTED BY ELIF BATUMAN
ANONYMOUS
CHILDISM
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We’re in our twenty-somethings-ish and we carry our anxiety around with us like the muji point three eight pen you haven’t come around to putting away after a two-hour slideshow where you sat, scribbling, in the very back of the dark Schermerhorn room. Against a wall. “Fl-l-ying, buhtt-ressses… Hhrrribbed fvaultings..”, the voice in your head intones, every five minutes. Your heartbeat threatens to accelerate. Your bladder is full. You should have peed before you came in. But you were “suhx mihnutes layte.” You hunch forward. Dig in your heels, brace yourself. “Happy Women’s Day!” the Professor had chimed when you arrived, smiled with her eyes and handed you two slap-size blue books. Must. Keep. Scribbling. You haven’t used a pen in so long. It feels so… mechanical. “On a more cheerful note, one idle hand is less daunting than a pair, the triforium is just a Bishop runway, nails– rrrr, hairrr, hipppsss-Study For Sihstine Ssshapel..” OH NO. “..Stained glass! Stained glass!” Oh nice, a new form of damage control and my oh my does it work. You look up and to the
side of the slideshow. The Professor is short and already swallowed by the giant CUIT cuboid at the front but her glasses hover atop. Must. Be Discreet. Oh, but COViD. So instead, you cup the stocky, green MEGA vape in your pocket, hard, imagining the smoke slowly wisping through your mask for a sweetly heinous moment, then you force yourself to think of something else. “Purrr bitch. Klarrrity, Clerrrestory.” Your eyes dart about the room as you caress your MEGA vape. Darkness, sfumato, blue books in the air, masked men turning pages, hurriedly scribbling. Oh my. That thing called Time is running out. Must. Hurry. Oooo, peee. Sweet bliss. “I have a sick student taking the test next week, please take your section one with them?” the Professor says after everyone has left and you’re mad that it’s not over. The midterm. “Hue-man-isssss-ihm,” the voice in your head has dropped to a low-relief sultry whisper. “The section you missed? I’m late for the airport.” Blink twice, the Professor has vanished. Poof! You trip over a chair and walk into a wall and push the pull door as you run
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down the stairs and out into the rain. It’s snowing but aren’t you just glad that that dumb picture-party in room 602 of the bizarre maze-ish building missing a 7th floor is over? “Must rub one out.” Then sleep out the Butler all-nighter, of course. “Butt-lurr, the Core Curriculum’s a CC slurrr. ArtHum? Yikes, more like must-cum… ah, shit.” Even you don’t think you’re funny anymore. Must be exhausted. “Blurgh.” Poof! You trip over a chair and walk into a wall and push the pull door as you run down the stairs and out into the rain. It’s snowing but aren’t you just glad that that dumb picture-party in room 602 of the bizarre maze-ish building missing a 7th floor is over? “Must rub one out.” Then sleep out the Butler all-nighter, of course. “Butt-lurr, the Core Curriculum’s a CC slurrr. ArtHum? Yikes, more like must-cum… ah, shit.” Even you don’t think you’re funny anymore. Must be exhausted. “Blurgh.” You text to raincheck the one-nightstand that seems to be advancing pure-
ly on Afrocentrism and vibes. He had suggested a movie and invited himself over to your place all in one breath, all on his own. “Arrr.” You smile. Doing the Lord’s work on campus can be so emotionally rewarding at times. The snow is windy. The cold whips you up one giant-hoodie-ballooning moment and you’re good for the night. Chilled to the bone, just as you like it. Keeps your baseline temperature below hot. When it’s chill out, you’re cool. Sometimes you tremble, but only when you forget to check the weather app and run through 27º-with-windchills into “Lehman li-bra-ry-ok this sucks. Like, like, like today morning… yo.” The voice in your head is starting to get agitated so you pat around for a lighter. A cigarette should do it. “Beam me up Scotty!” See, already chillaxing. You exhale into a blur. The glasses on your face are fogging up in the rain. “Fayaaa, wottarrrr, water, water, waterwaterwaterwaterershiiiittt…” Oh wow. This, this must be embarrassing. Holy shit. You forgot to pee. Yours is a worn out bladder and it’s quite surprising that it’s held out this
ANONYMOUS
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long. Since Lehman. Over four hours ago. “That’sactuallyimpressive…” but still. Must. Resume. Kegels, but for now, must run. There can be no going back. You are past the Scherma-point of no return. The scenic route would be even less crowded in the sleet but this is an emergency. You fly across the chapel, past a stylized marble ambulatory; the curious bench by Low Library’s Stylobate. Well, close. Behind it lies a thicket then a patch of grass which you and your friends have dubbed The Spot Where Education Slaps. “Lowe.” Should have added: In The Summer. “Lowe library.” The snow falls harder, liquid. A clamminess clamps up your thighs as they hurtle past each other, faster. Thank God for giant hoodies. “More like adderall bodies and black pants.” Okay. Everyone is rushing somewhere, no one’s gonna see. The cigarette is pixelating against the wind on one hand. “Everyone’s is a leisurely pace relative to this speed though…” the voice in your head starts to reason out and you promptly extinguish the cigarette into a clench. So much is happening but you hear it. Per-
haps you recall. The sound of water and fire, smooching up against your palm. Your hands are moist. “Moist hehe– ah fuck!” It’s a sweet burn but a slow burn and you know for sure that it’s not going to leave a scar. “Are you sure? Are you sure?” You toss it and step on it. The landscape has ceased to flee. You’re panting like an old dog. You’re wet, getting wetter, warmer. “Speed it up freakshow. We’re about ten seconds from gargoyling it out on Lowe Steps.” The voice in your head has arrived at your daily introspections. Your muscles are spasming, clenching, unclenching and you feel so tired. Why do you feel so tired? “It’s getting dark, that’s why.” Oh yeah, almost forgot. The Adderall witching hours are upon you. “This is do or die, don’t embarrass us, please.” It is close to sobbing now, the voice in your head. You reach for yourself, pull your act together. You don’t live that far now, surely, you must have one last run in you. How else are you alive? You inhale as deeply as you possibly can and take them two at a time, these Lowe
CHILDISM
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Steps. “Skipping do-o-wn Lowe Steps, skipping do-o-wn Lowe Steps…” The voice in your head is getting sleepy and that absolutely, cannot, must not happen. Your heart races. It’s dangerous to be alone in the silence, the dark silence, you know. Your face is dripping. You clench your poor bladder and skip harder. Your mouth is open, the droplets are salty. Maybe you’re sweating but you could be weeping, no one’s none the wiser. Certainly not the flimsy footfalls you are leaping past. Oh, I’m so tired, ma’. “Where did my childhood go? I feel like I grew up too fast, like. Girl, I miss those days, you know?” She has a voice that flits about on hummingbird wings, a voice from behind you, dipping and ebbing with the wind. You could listen to her all day. She sighs and you begin to unravel. It’s a deep sigh that sends a shiver down your spine, like the cloying inhales and exhales down your neck in the trapping embrace of an eager tinder-date, panting, about to waste your fucking time. They give you goose-
bumps and you must like it, for it has long ceased to be a game but you keep swiping. Left, right, right, left. “Those days I’d skip in the rain, not a care in the world, knowing a warm bath, a mug of hot chocolate with marshmallows and snuggles by the fireplace would beckon me inside when the dance-skipping wore me out. It never did. “ She sighs again and you have slowed down completely, almost. “I would skip around our front lawn until one by one, the lights dimmed out in the house across the street. First the kitchen, then the living room, fourteen skips then the bedroom lights. I’d try to skip to twenty but my mother always apparated at seventeen, a chancla in hand and a stern face and the rain would just… stop.” The snow has melted into your eyes and now the regurgitation begins. You are a set of skips afar but her sing-song is carrying or it may be that you know the words by heart. A single double-take is all you can savor before leaping into a giant skip. She is part of a delicate book-umbrella pair tiny-stepping it down Lowe Steps, behind you, approaching. Normally,
ANONYMOUS
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you’d deem it absurd and attempt in good faith to suppress it -that irrational feeling like you’re being pursued- but this is an emergency and you need all the help you can get. All of the dams are fucking breaking. “Childism,” her friend muses, and promptly laughs it off. It is hollow and it bounds across the dark, lonely expanse that is Lowe Steps at twilight, barely flickering. You have long turned a corner but still you feel their gazes, trained with intense longing on your back, watching you skip, pushing you forward. You’re in the home run. The pen’s sharp end is now fully buried into the flimsy patch of skin at the base of your arteries but it will be a while before you feel it.
CHILDISM
HANNA ANDREWS
SILVERADO Coming through canyon shortcut. The biker bar and it’s cutting cars. The bar lot a dust ditch with bikes lining ridge and wooden vendor carts selling silver rings. Today no bikes no lanes no lines no trade. We rolled the windows up but the chaulk itch is already throat stuck. We are almost to the freeway. Overhead, a plane teeters top heavy, sprays red mist. A drop of blood in a water glass. Dia-mono-ammonium-poly-sul-phosphate. A bucket of Manic Panic’s Wildfire in a water glass. Coastal desert curse. Cursed cutting through. I hold my breath like we are going under a bridge long and concrete full of fumes familiar from sleep the outside just outside the outside a clearing an end the end expanding the end only oxygen.
AGATHA WUH
DOG PARK I stopped in front of a parked car to fix my blond wig. It was a long way to the dog park so I carried Tekno in my pink tote bag, which matched my two-piece pink suit from Value World, a steal. At the entrance, I let it out and switched on the power button located on the underbelly. Its eyes lit up and it wagged its tail. It seemed excited to see the other dogs. It wobbled towards a cape-wearing Pomeranian sniffing at a tired Labrador. Their owners (presumably), a witch and a dinosaur, were flirting nearby. I trotted after Tekno, but it was hard to walk on mulch wearing stilettos, each step like sinking in miniature quicksand. When the witch saw Tekno and me fast approaching, she hissed and threw a ball into the distance. The Pomeranian shot across the field; the couple followed. I stood there, dumb, like the scene where Elle shows up to the party wearing a sexy bunny costume. Tekno kept bumping into the Labrador, which hadn’t budged the whole time. “C’mon buddy,” the dinosaur finally beckoned from afar. The Labrador lifted his heavy rump off the ground only to stop again and squat into an all too familiar position. He blinked his glassy eyes at me, turd in mid-flight. It seemed to hang from the * for an eternity, refusing to make a safe landing. He continued to blink at me, slowly, and I couldn’t help but to look away first.
JOAN TATE
STUDY IN SPRUNG SAPPHICS: MOSQUITO IN NOVEMBER .Hate on the slap-struck thing! The wall set to buzzing, feels the sticky blood of a beast who bit, now a pearled blot of red, crushed by your serious palm and drywall. Hate how the rugged, drag it all smeared downwall all, red, broke like ember, heaved it up, its health, and small proboscis, with wings and thready legs, ball up beyond petite. Wag your eyes from overhead, hands in the hair or wall, sighing or reflecting on mottled verbs of attrition, turning back to me, never to notice the bumps that are blooming out of your shy neck.
JOAN TATE
THE FIRST TIME I KNEW Scene: Enter child, yoked to the bodypurse My face squints, it’s all it can do while pressed against the light coming in this honeycomb cage, furling out in sunpeals: warm petals profligating like beams. In boredom I’d counted those thousand screws again, all uniform, all jagged, rumbling and fraught except for those few I’d found who were queerly tilting out and up the schoolbus-back, buzzing under my bulkframe to steel against a tight stinging of the sinister toe, with a sharp pick of white in my right wrist from some bruised thumb gripping my Hunchback of Notre Dame. A poke to my slumpshoulder and I meet my seatmate with blood sluicing from her face in runnels to the gummy floor, no explanation, just someone calling out in my imagined havoc murder. I see my house, jump off this frantic hive and quake
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clean through the shower curtain, a spit of aquamarine green light, chuffing from my face to fill the sepia cauldron of the mirror with sudden static lookingdown terror. I remember I palmed my tough skin dry beneath His gilded portrait for years, I palmed and knew til it was those real blue days of New York Spring bleeding on the M4, hearing my old prayers come right out His mouth the meek will still inherit the Earth, my banks will flood like an open wound, heaven must’ve been so full of boys like me
MORGAN LEVINE
MARLENE after Max Ernst
on a clear day the sea rises and turns I see you Marlene with your red feet twin reefs coralline you straddle me I look up your salt skin a blue sound a halo I could not hold anything to you not a U-boat torpedo tube not even my own bioluminescence in the dark you bloom I love when you use the sun to pick your teeth relic of sea vertebrae halfcold shield of desire partial to the enemy you only take my want when I take it away from God are you a genius? if so I do like you very much so very much my Marlene I want to be your bird your steadysweet marble myna veining my way through the land I wait for you my raptor captor I wait for your red boot your clean shins my girl my girl decalcomania of my world
CHASE BUSH-MCLAUGHLIN
IN A MOMENT WE HAVE THIN, WINDSWEPT HAIR in this transhistorical moment. Going for pho in this transhistorical moment, I am shocked when, below the table, a friend hands me her shoes... Later in the night, but still in this same moment, the table receives a free round of light beers, and each of us a rich taro soup which reminds my friend, shoeless, of her mother. I do not know where to fix my eyes, uneasy now in this continuing transhistorical moment. The next morning, this moment still has not passed. Hair gathers in my eyes, but fails to cover my scalp. Simone has little to say about my—now troubling—transhistorical moment. She is caught up, rather, in a suprahistorical non-moment, brought on by a case of whooping cough, and has lost her voice. Adam offers me his cigarette in this deeply troubling and drawn-out transhistorical moment. I am reminded of the cigarette
I noticed wedged between two thick, white-marble slabs in the columbarium of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, whose ash seasoned a bouquet of roses set out, by another visitor, for the name below. I am now extremely disturbed by this transhistorical moment. In a fit of rage, I smoke the cigarette quickly, and my hair regains its thickness. Simone calls to say she again lives subhistorically, and has returned to her work in the Rare Manuscripts Library of Yale University, after a non-momentary leave of absence. There is no epilogue to my still-continuing transhistorical moment, which is in itself a suffocating peridrama, horrific in scope and yet dull, unpublishable. Simone no longer answers the phone, and Adam is rarely home. Queasy, sweating, and anonymous, I have taken up smoking. Yet even this I do extratemporally: miserable, frowning, wretched.
CAMILLE SENSIBA
I REIMAGINE MYSELF AS STILL ALIVE, BUT A GHOST NOW and when I make my debut I will smell like mist and I will fill the ballroom and live in their ears & noses & they will all say wow she is barely there! like nighttime weather! or the touch of a fifth limb, except I will not be seethrough because I will be colorful instead, and I might confuse you but you just have to sit with me. But I will not be quiet and my vocabulary is far more sophisticated than boo, hear me and my ageless wind, my phantom manifesto! I will teach myself how to have ghost babies, and they will look different, unlike me, but by then we will have forgotten biology, and life will be entirely figurative. At the end of time, when I am on my ghost death bed, reach for me, & find that I am still already holding you.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
OUR GRATITUDE TO ALL WHO HAVE MADE THIS MAGAZINE POSSIBLE IS UNBOUNDED, but we will attempt to distill some of that thanks here. To the Activities Board at Columbia and the Columbia Arts Initiative: thank you for your generosity and giving us the opportunity to print the many copies of our magazine we feel it deserves. To all those who submitted—we received more work than ever before and were delighted, touched, and struck anew by the talent on this campus every week. We easily might have compiled two issues with the amount of well-written work we received. To Elif Batuman and Chen Chen for judging our prose and poetry awards with such attentiveness and enthusiasm. We were honored by your willingness to participate in our project, and a little bit starstruck. As much as we are thrilled to hold this book in our hands, 4×4 is more about community than it is a physical magazine. We want to thank everyone who attended our events this year, who read and laughed and brought their friends. Our readers, for their generosity, and for making it all the way to the back matter. Of course, thank you to the board—our nearest and dearest friends. To our new members, for slipping so smoothly into our way-of-doing while bringing much-needed fresh perspective. To our seniors—Ashley, Anja, Ellie, Franzi, Owen, and Simone—for their wise insight and shared, enduring love for the magazine. What we have here is an excellent magazine, but also a reminder of collective effort and care. When you set the book down in a dusty corner of your room, for it to slide into a crack and re-emerge at a later, unexpected moment, you might find that, like Camille Sensiba’s ghost, we are “still / already / holding you.”
Sponsored in part by the ARTS INITIATIVE at COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
NO 9 2022