DEAR READER,
Hello! Welcome to this 14th issue of Future Histories!
This magazine combines student art and writing in ways that activate both. Future Histories does not have a prescribed theme, but every semester, there seem to be pairs of visual and written pieces that go together almost uncannily well. My theory is that this magazine is a snapshot of the creative consciousness of Tufts students at this moment in time. What brings the magazine together are the underlying swells of emotion that we experience as a community. I think that is a pretty beautiful thing. I hope you find moments of solidarity as well as interesting surprises as you traverse the pages of our little archive.
Warmly,
Newt & Rachel & William
cover art | Aleta Larkin
Our Team
Our Team
CHAIR
HEAD EDITOR
HEAD OF DESIGN
NEWT GORDON-REIN
WILLIAM ZHUANG
RACHEL LIANG
EDITORS
JENNIFER GAO
MAITRI MISRA
MAYA CHANDRAKASAN
OLIVIA BYE
DESIGNERS
CHERRY CHEN
ALLAINE LARA
LEI YANG
AMELIA MILLER
WRITER LIASON
TREASURER
VALE TESCH
MAHRUKH KHIZAR
photo | Newt Gordon-Rein
Featured Artists
Sophia Chung
And a special thanks to all of our content reviewers!
Newt Gordon-Rein
Leila Toubia
Aleta Larkin
LiLi Miko
Arcadia Ohnemus
Mimi Zhang
Allison Kinzer
art | Ella Spirtas
Ella Spirtas
Amelia Hanson
by Finnegan Thompson
A barren landscape broken up By red brick.
Tree skeletons stand proud In clusters.
“When is the season of love?” He questioned.
When skeletons grow flesh Of lush green.
Forgetting that they will Shed their skin Again.
photo | Allison Kinzer
art | Sophia Chung
art
| Leila Toubia
Trains
by Lillian Marchbanks
As trains go they transition they pass and leave with your ambition
I am a shell of myself on a train You are on a set track to a series of set locations yet, the patrons are set at random As trains go no train is ever the same even the same train is different every time you get on
Trains, are constantly moving, constantly changing Their bodies are recognizable as a constant contingency unnerving it is
Trains shake your stability, with every rattling twist and turn I eye the passengers in passing how hilariously fast trust does burn I do not trust trains
Although, and hear me out perhaps it’s the people I doubt
So on my way to the last station, I realize my frankly jealous behavior it is trains that hold the people inside for trains, trust is implied
photo | Amelia Hanson
art | Mimi Zhang
I decide to not make any resolutions, gazing at my watch as the seconds tick down to midnight
You’re at the party Living
Splashing toasts to everyone you know Which is everyone
Periodically you look back and catch me looking at my blank bingo board
Borrowed by Evan Vezmar Time
Empty except for a neat row of “should have” and a diagonal of “will do”
Your dress is torn in the back and the hem doesn’t look so even anymore but you’ve patched it with a smile and you’ve embraced the disorder with a headfirst dive
Opportunity trips and spills her drink on your shoes
Adventure helps you wipe up and you laugh as she takes your hand and pulls you to the next room
The minute hand has kept on sliding past the twelve but the room decides to start shifting people out to the future
We, the disillusioned and afraid, remain inside at the bar
Racking up tabs consisting only of our yearly subscription bills and a Spotify Wrapped
Finally when the bartender says to fuck off I pack my inert heart back into my chest
You’ve left the party to go live I’m still here resolving to start.
art | Sophia Chung
Water Bottle
by Alex Lin
My little plastic water bottle Grew grime around her rim. I didn’t see it until I took a napkin to it, Chasing it into tight crevices, Soaking her in dish soap and warmth. (I had thought her water tasted funny.)
Three of her, the doctor said, is one liter— Three of her each day to keep my medicine working. Now she is the messenger between me and the fountain. She measures my health, metes it out kindly, Easy to hold, Fits snug in the right pocket of my backpack. Sorry, water bottle. I should have taken better care of you this whole time.
art | Mimi Zhang
After “Tampa Stomp”
by Mikey Sims
Maybe it’s true and there is a different weight in the air there, some miasma hanging in that stale room, the dying breaths of soldiers and Seminoles and brokers and suicides.
Maybe you breathed in those ghosts, and the heavy, chattering burden of them bore the holes into your brain.
And you turned to dust one day. And you were never buried. And there was no ceremony.
Maybe I never was your perfect copy, and the little girl that you became was the last we’d see of someone so selfishly loved.
And I hold my breath when I return there. And I am never buried. And there will be no ceremony.
art | Leila Toubia
by Finnegan Thompson by Finnegan Thompson
A cloak warm and fuzzy for trees.
A lookout weary-eyed for the sky.
An ending happily ever after for a road. Until a car’s headlights cut it open.
photo | Leila Toubia
Noblesse
Noblesse by olivia WaNg by olivia WaNg
We source our connective tissue from tidal waves, coral branches, altostratus, cirrus clouds. It’s a constant search, you know—for the lightning, one brush stroke of genius, one word to remake the world
in the form we’ve always known it to have, etc. Some diagnosis for social psychosis bronze platter on the gallery wall that proclaims in the jargon we drew up the emperor’s new clothes are cruelty-free and they’re ready to be picked up from the dry-cleaner’s at your earliest convenience.
Wasn’t I asking for the meaning of it all to be handed down to me in such terms as I’ve learned to parse, to interpret in these manifold manners?
Syllables made anew in the crucible smile brighter than you ever could and point you down the hall, it’s just to the left, ma’am—didn’t you see the map in the waiting room? the art or the commentary on modern life as we know it, the cure you were looking for a veil drawn over helplessness atrophy in terrifying degree.
Now we’re speaking in the common code with a wink and a smile, now we’re fluent, we don’t mean any harm but we can’t help but erode the ship that bore us, we don’t see the structure changing as it shudders and with all this familiarity I still can’t identify the stress that rendered your sentences abrasive, off-pitch to an untuned ear. How do I tell you what I can’t even utter?
We ask this of all our candidates.
How your eyes are full of kindness! And how your gaze burns, bright blue as the words that fall from your mouth lily-gilded, upturned lilting upon the carpet threads, this infinite kindness as a matter of course, we institute it as a policy here the view’s spectacular, windows outstretched over the whole sky— what a wealth of stories below—perfect metal frames to throw my malformed phrases from, impact crash on asphalt feather-light, crack and quiver of the eggshell the world fell from.
Blow me a kiss and bring me a flower before the landslide buries us or tell me something novel, a daisy on your tongue sit with me—maybe in the next room or the next town—as I pull at my scabs and watch the yellow pus to drain out, so much whimsy out of me into the sea (as it should be)
How I adore my artistic conventions to keep me in realm of my neighbors and friends and say, this is what I meant the first time, the last time that every so often when I play the black keys it’s the ringing of a hollow bell I hear.
I’ve seen the other shore in every movie and magazine that lines the lauded shelves We flung our bodies (flew!) ritually—remember that scene? your hands grasped too tightly and propelled me laid warm upon my back:
This is like home, and history, you said—
Maybe you always knew this, how the wave does not reach the strand.
art
| Sophia Chung
In the Face of Disasters
by William Zhuang
It’s been over ninety for the past week and July has barely commenced. My friend who calls himself a doomer is convinced even this won’t matter. Not when the nukes drop, he explains between bites of a chicken sandwich. Somewhere in cornfields, billionaires dig holes to install titanium mansions or spaceships to shoot themselves to Mars. I’m on the phone with you, watching you pet your cousin’s cat while she purrs. She rubs her head against your palm, no fear in her feline heart. Forever feels tricky right now, so I decide to love you, no timetable involved.
art | Leila Toubia
art|LeilaToubia
art|AletaLarkin
A.L.I.C.E. Protocol
by Newt Gordon-Rein
Content Warning: References gun violence
ALERT
they told us there was a man with a gun.
what do you do with a man? with a gun?
it is true that you can tell how I’m doing by the state of my bonsai
it is true that I wonder how to write something beautiful about darkness
LOCKDOWN they told us to build like beaver— did you know? that beaver teeth grow and grow?
I’ve never been comfortable with the fact that light goes in gets trapped that pupils are absences. the darkness of eyes echoing the darkness of mouths
INFORM they told us to be messenger.
what are you in for? who has your number between their teeth? don’t you know without you they would grow it is true you can tell how I’m doing by the state of my bonsai
& auto-lock on my phone means I was watching something late in bed
I’m telling you: a professor told me to watch what I eat. I’m telling you: the beauty whispers darkness
COUNTER
they told us to throw chairs and yell at the man with a gun. a professor told me to watch what I eat. I spit the darkness out at her. a professor tells the class to mind what enters their eyes and brains and mouths
after all she says we are what we eat.
trimming the bonsai is a splinter bending until it agrees twisting is trade: tree pain for my balance
EVACUATE
they told us to go to church, but they forgot to say which one. you are what you eat then why do I inject these little darknesses into my little darknesses haunted rectangle screening my vision inject gore death repetition and the doors are beaver-falling and the teeth are metal gnawing until they break and the dirt is dry and the eyes are never shut enough and what if moving is leaving and I with only my body in the way, I wishing I could whisper the darkness beautiful
art | LiLi Miko art
Cottonwood, cottonwood, let down petals of snow in spring, behold my mauled thumb, minced chives, the brumal choir claims
“She can’t see two feet ahead.”
My eyes decay
“Who’s that?
Who’s there?” they query
It’s a messenger, sending intro / ductions
There is nothing without intro / ductions
“Oh look!” in unison
Extend a hand, start again
There are no beginnings under eiderdown
No beginnings from empty beds
Only Sundays slept away
Cottonwood, cottonwood, “Can she see?” liltingly sung
No, but I can hear: astigmatic branches whistle irregular curves, crescent moons leave creases on hollow cheeks, sleep hails the unhurried, folding into crumpled brows
Such is the way of those dark months
Hark!
Do you hear the brittle skin?
Can you taste the cold dawn?”
Sunken eyes bely murky dreams, the kettle’s shriek shatters the stupor
“Where is there?” they whine
If by there, you mean a proud tin soldier, cloaked in Marx’s overcoat, sold and bought once again
Then yes, I’ve been reading childhood books and skipping meals
I’m been here and there —
“She lies,” they demand
I continue,
There is sinking through blurred sheets to a time when we rise before the sun, a future when the cut on my thumb has healed and I can wake up with clear eyes, to see crystalline faces no need to grasp blindly for words when we don’t say hello, for hellos are worthless don’t shake rough hands but instead take to running when cutting onions won’t make you cry but the sound of blood-stained herbs and milky petals is liable to join in chorus, singing:
Cottonwood, cottonwood, Let down your hair
Take a dip in the well
Feel the stones beneath the arch of your feet
For what a divine bend
Nothing can be wrong in a world where I can fill the space between my heel and the ball of my foot
With all the beginnings I can’t imagine From Sundays slept away
TheCottonwood’s
Mirage
by Celia Duhan
art | Arcadia Ohnemus
Make
by Amelia Hanson
a bed
lay looking at the countless creases my used-to-be-clean comforter the cracks between my bed never thought you’d leave me unmadeupatall after all that year, I made us up myself a cup of tea was honey-dripped melting warm and disappearing wet I thickened you up, and you thinned me out I left sticky, and you never cared to lick things up you never even liked tea just had a runny nose I’m never what you need purely something to make your bitters sweet
a call left a voicemail there so you would call back I was just something you could keep always waiting after all of the ugly tones a decision left till ten after then you would check in talking soft ticked we talked still just a decision you never made I could make an anything but still, you never make a move make a mess make up make friends we’ve made a mistake
art | Leila Toubia
Find my voice
by Evan Vezmar
Take my tongue, cut it out and s t r e t c h it until words tumble forth.
All the little ideas, The self i own, stolen in pieces from people i loved,
We are looking for a place to land
And yet the sounds don’t seem to make any sense
Or the phrases are just too cliché and i stop meaning myself and start meaning the image i give the world
My throat throws thought out but no one’s there to tend to it
Who locked my voice in a fear cage blocked by straight-brushed soldiers and the tears trying to rise up?
An anecdote shrinks into a solitary note
Unsaid words sharp as swords cut truth into manageable, expecting, digested lies.
art | Amelia Hanson
sky blue
my iPhone says I have 5,068 pictures of the sky.
this is not true; there is a picture of an Outlook calendar Photos has highlighted the “Sky” in the Skype desktop icon behind some appointment for April 24th, 2020 (I didn’t realize, of course, where I would be)
but, there would be the sky, certainly there is evidence of this:
April 28th it was blue. so blue the tree under it looks blue too
there are others where the sun is in the right place the subject lit, the blue confined to the background
apparently, every day the sky looked the same sky-colored, with clouds (sometimes no clouds)
so many, like I needed to remind myself the sky is always sky-colored
last week: I screenshotted a building on Google Maps, this girl’s apartment above it: sky blue
yesterday: I sent my friend a picture of her school’s bus my iPhone noticed the blue negative space behind the building outlines the letters
today: the sky is gray my iPhone says my photo out the window is not sky.
by Clara Davis
art |
Sophia Chung
I am an awful sleeper.
by SarahRochdi l
by Sara Rochdi art | LiLi Miko
I wiggle my toes so I remember I’m alive, My rusty joints need to be cracked. I say that I feel like an old lady–I can’t open my legs without waking up with cramps, And I know that’s not sexy to hear, But I need to crack my bones: Head, neck, arms, legs, Snapping my body back together.
I look at the one that got away, And all of them got away. All the way up that hill, And I am bad at climbing, I only know how to slide.
Mother always said to stay grounded–“There is nothing to look at up there.”
But I see you in all the stars shining around, With a polluted air that my smoky breath made even worse. I have been rolling down and it goes: Head, neck, butt, legs.
My insides are pressing and shredding, My stomach pain never left me, I’m not thinking about anything, But I’m thinking about how you’re gonna suck on my nipples, Get them all hard, and leave me wondering if it was the cold Or my sexy ghost.
I am all I have left behind, And you avoid my eyes now.
I remember glancing at you from your coffee shop’s stained glass, And you used to look back and smile. Now you see through it and through me.
I only see you when the sun goes down The house is not black, it’s grey and it’s blue even, The smoke coming from my insides swallowed Away all the colors.
I am breathing through every cell, I am finding ways to clear up my mind, Weighed down, I press on the wet soil Falling over me.
And it goes: Head, heart, arms, legs, Husked down and buried away.
art | Leila Toubia
Could Picasso Do This?
BY Olivia Wang
art | Ella Spirtas
I see and hear on a surface level—the echoes and eddies of others, and forget that seeing and hearing normally have other meanings: these meanings are a paved path, bilateral. I speak whatever comes out and don’t explain. I lose cause and effect.
Abstraction: when things are stripped away, all the definitions, the rigid interlocking structural webs that provide clarity. We end up with data points—the abstractions are the guesswork, your line of best fit approximating burnt bridges, your imaginative extension into ancient ruins. When words slide in a gradient, in small, similar steps, in unit cubes, is that clarity? What words are structural, and what like the substance of air?
Words can’t be cubes. Words can’t be 3D printed into a lattice of bowtie-shaped voids, a twisted jungle of teeth, of bone tissue. I am walking because I am walking. I walk out of the light onto the train platform, through the crowd of people; it is my only, greatest mission, my body oriented to traverse the landscape of other moving bodies. I have achieved a small perfection of walking— I forget why. As I talk with you, I am imagining another conversation with you, a sketch of a sketch.
Artistic license allows me to change the record, to alter; now in staccato-beat, under a roaring, rush of wings, wind blast in the concrete tunnel, my words are not precise to reality, they are precise to the page. I lose the feeling of strong feelings, I lose care for consequence: each action is an event which occurs for mysterious reasons, certainly not of my judgment. Effect never arrives in my mind, never left the station, left waving furiously, fruitlessly at the departing train. I sat in a black mirror while sound funneled through me. What do you want to know?
Each thing, now, is a faint smile or a muddied yellow. It’s why I look into your face and see the underpainting—shifting lines, angles, yellow, brown, green, green.
Types of Normal
by: Arcadia Ohnemus
There’s the stranger type of normal
There’s the recognizing type of normal
And the say hi in the hall type of normal
There’s How are you? - the short answer And How are you? - the long answer
There’s happy to see them type of normal
There’s sad to leave them type of normal
There’s got caught up talking longer than you planned to type of normal
There’s making plans normal
There’s texting every day type of normal and
There’s calling every night type of normal
Then there’s I can’t believe I can’t call you anymore type of normal too.
There’s silence. That can feel normalIt’s different from stranger normal.
Everything feels quieter now.
There’s we don’t see each other type of normal
There’s I have no idea how you are normal
And then there’s we used to be strangers and then friends to more until we were that not-stranger-nothing learning to exist in the same space again type of normal.
I write my poem; you write your crossword. Our pointy pencils press on paper. “Howdy”
Of course that’s the answer to line 5 Across: Cowboy’s Greeting
Just the wrong way to start a conversation. Sometimes I wish I were a cowboy. They don’t have much need for paper. They are masters of dialogue and 37 Down: Lights Camera ______ They command the audience’s attention; Stupefied.
Coffee dribbles down my face, And I quickly wipe it up with a paper napkin. 20 Across: Rorschach Test
Word Choice by Sam Cranston
Maybe therapy could bring us closer, But we are not symmetrical. Maybe you could get lost in me too, But despite the point of my pencil, I’ve run out of words.
photo | Amelia Hanson
| Arcadia Ohnemus
art
The Moon is a Friend or Me
I’m always excited to see him
He’s often around, but I mainly only catch him at night
He watches people
He’s not much of a talker
Maybe he’s brooding
I wonder what he’s thinking about
And if he can hear my thoughts
I am surprised when he’s full
Usually he’s hungry
He’s smiling
I know he’ll keep any secret
I know he’ll listen
I know everyone sees him and no one sees him
Just like me
photo | Newt Gordon-Rein
Maybe I am the moon
I am listening
I am hungry
I am smiling
I am not someone you’d want to have a conversation with I’m far away
I’m in the dark
I’m the second
I’m surrounded by different things
I’m surrounded by stars
But even though we both live in the sky, I am not a star
And the stars know that too I am the moon.
by LiLi Miko
art | Aleta Larkin
Opposite Day
by Sam Cranston
There was a man who lived opposite the cemetery, But he was never morbid, For he lived opposite to it. He did the opposite of what those at the cemetery did. He never laid down, or touched soil, But he still had turmoil.
Those at the cemetery, felt nothing at all. He felt everything.
Those at the cemetery, didn’t fear his house, Like he feared theirs
He needn’t be so opposite, The cemetery will never house him. A cemetery accepts all emotions, He proudly rejects them. He chose to live opposite of the cemetery, Because he likes the view.
The cemetery chose to be here, Because it couldn’t choose.
art | Leila Toubia
A winter walk together, I saw shooting stars with you and I wish I could give you my halfway-opened, Sparkle-lost, hazy eyes to see Crystals in the sky. I have sniffed you like a dog for three weeks, And I am a bad breed, Your scent leaves my flaring nostrils and Everytime
I need to remeet you, Rebreathe you, retouch you, Catch up to your new bits, And by the time I do, I am already on the next bus back.
My arm won’t know how to wrap around you, My body won’t know how to hold you Fetal positioned.
With a mouth pressing on my sore cracked nipple. My lips won’t know how to press yours, I will lose memory of every curve in your body, And every mole I traced in the dark, With the tip of my sticky fingers.
A winter walk alone, You danced in the shadows, And I wish I were the grass you were stepping on. The tightness in my chest will never leave, The last piece of my heart screams to be crushed, And your feet are tiptoeing between the already Dead leaves.
A winter walk alone, I say your name a hundred times, I sit curled up on the marble floor, The freezing wind smacked my shaved head, And I’m colder than how I was before.
“What was your name again?”
A Winter Walk
by Sara Rochdi
Snakeskin ( The Kleptotherm)
by Isabella Gorman
You placed it in the museum in a display case on a lit pedestal.
The expulsed version of me all dried up, stale.
To the museum, you come with peers from your vanity cabinet
To shoulder the burden of your empty grief. They gawk.
Fascinated with the stolen edition, a dehydrated relic a husk.
You pick it up and show it off; lathering on your pride wishing to conjure or condition some sort of divine regression.
You come over to me now and your hands slightly linger on my face and your touch absorbs my heat.
A silent plea to resuscitate the living.
Why do you love, to tell me you loved a paraded phantom instead of the warm body that embraces you?
For Hope
by Vale Tesch
July it gets hot, so hot your hope starts to muddle. Hope carried in the wind doesn’t feel like enough, July days, those gentle breezes barely enough for your body’s sweat, and even hurricane gusts become good only to remind you what fear does and doesn’t feel like. July comes and where before you could walk outside and breathe in for hope, now there’s humidity that sits in you, on your skin, fills your eyes. Those days you see the heat, waving, waves beating on, slowly eroding; a thick slice of curved glass to catch the world through.
July, comes and I swear I can’t think anymore. Why think when there are wildflowers along the side of every road, when marigolds can bloom with darkened reds & golden yellows sharing a petal? Why hope for you any longer, when the first night up North, away from that Southern heat & humidity, I walk out back, just before the corn field starts, and see the white yucca blossoms reaching up to trees, to the moon? When the moon herself, curved and dangling, sure, not waiting, tells me, here is what it is to be known when lost.
photo | Leila Toubia
art | Sophia Chung
