The Grinnell Review Fall 2014

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Copyright © 2014 by the Student Publications and Radio Committee (SPARC).

The Grinnell Review, Grinnell College’s biannual undergraduate arts and literary magazine, is a student-produced journal devoted to the publication of student writing and artwork. Creative work is solicited from the entire student body and review anonymously by the corresponding Writing and Arts Committees. Students are involved in all aspects of production, including selection of works, layout, publicity, and distribution. By providing a forum for the publication of creative work,The Grinnell Review aims to bolster and contribute to the art and creative writing community on campus.

Acknowledgments: The work and ideas published in The Grinnell Review belong to the individuals to whom such works and ideas are attributed to and do not necessarily represent or express the opinions of SPARC or any other individuals associated with the publication of this journal. © 2014 Poetry, prose, artwork and design rights return to the artists upon publication. No part of this publication may be duplicated without the permission of SPARC, individual artists or the editors.

The Grinnell Review is printed and bound by Pioneer Graphics in Waterloo, IA. It was designed using Adobe InDesign® CS5. The typeface for the body text is Perpetua and the typeface for the titles is Didot.

Cover art by Jack Dunnington Inner cover art: A Haze of Love and Ladybugs by Becky Garner Inner title art: Aint Nothin to Cluck With by Mary Zheng All editorial and business correspondence should be addressed to: Grinnell College c/o Grinnell Review Grinnell, IA 50112 www.grinnellreview.com Letters to the editor are also welcome. Please send them to the address above or to review@grinnell.edu

XLV | Fall 2014 ARTS SELECTION COMMITTEE Hannah Condon Cal Froiken Nathan Kim Sam Mcdonnell Masha Shevelkina

EDITORS Hannah Bernard Jack Dunnington Silvia Foster-Frau Geo Gomez

WRITING SELECTION COMMITTEE Sara Ashbaugh Fabiola Barral Nora Coghlan Thomas Foley Diane Lenertz Eva Lilienfeld Alejandra Rodriguez Wheelock Caleigh Ryan Eliana Schechter Josie Sloyan

Contents W riting Leo Abbe Man @ Café 21 We Just Called Him Admiral Nelson 54 Uncle Leo Sara Ashbaugh Sail Away 12 Vincent Benlloch Wrath Revisited 68 Jenkin Benson Functioning 44 Matthew Dole Lens

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Devin Doyle Dead 40

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Maya Elliot The Artistic Divide of [2018] 33 body love 56 Frankenstein’s Boy 81

Silvia Foster-Frau Hope 64 Caroline Froh Juno 45 Linnea Hurst This is How I Learned

Best Friend Dance

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Diane Lenertz Google Can’t Bring Back the Dead 40 Speed Dating 44 Jacob Miller Old Songs 10 Varun Nayar A Single, Lasting Image 36 Mouth/Angles 60 Josie Sloyan Girl with the Red Bicycle Idealized Portrait of a Young Woman

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A rt Hannah Bernard Skin Print 16 Skin Print - Head Detail 17 Kneel 38

Elle Azul Duncombe-Mills Untitled 50 Strays 57 Wave 69 Crossroads 73

Julia Broeker Bang Bang 58

Jack Dunnington 3 Kings 20

Hannah Condon Lateral Human Pelvis 15 Burial 25 Crocodile Hands 39 Porcupine Dog 55 Crow’s Feet 70

Xena Fitzgerald Dear Braque 29 Tribute to Grant Wood’s 72 Plaid Sweater Birth of Venus 78

Douglas Dale Yarn Series - Double Yarn Series - Cup

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Dani DeSantes A Boy and His Shadow

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Cal Froikin Untitled 41 Becky Garner Evolution of the Fire Worm 18 Lichen 79

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Nathan Kim Deposition 11 The Martyrdom of St Denis 30 Found Forgotten 32 Doyi Lee #sewol 42 Edith March Koi 37 Rosie O’Brien Study in Clothianidin: the Death of Bees

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Lauren Roush Red Rock 43 Masha Shevelkina Dune 31 Linnea Schurig Colorblind 51 Leina’ala Voss Enwrapped in Mist La Cocina de Mamá

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Madeline Warnick Burial 25 Mary Zheng Dad 49 Dinner (joking but this is China) 61

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Letter From the Editors Beloved Readers,

You’ve found the Golden Ticket! This is your invitation, you greedy children, you, into the frothy right hemisphere of the student body brain. In these pages, we find nostalgia and expectation, stories strung from the laffy-taffy textures of experience and imagination, we find the ineffable expressions of our lives. How exactly did this Willy Wonka Factory of a college manufacture such art pieces? Did our students detach themselves from current political and social context and fling themselves headfirst into the chocolate waters of their own idiosyncratic tastes? Or does The Review as a whole reflect a collective?—a galaxy of perspective shrunk into a bite sized, ready-to-eat worldview?

Ultimately, we forgo the explanations and opt instead for forthright enjoyment, for sheer delight! In doing so, we stress that these pieces be observed and absorbed, revisited and reflected on, savored like the Everlasting Gobstoppers they are. They’re meant to reflect experience as much as they are to be experienced. So hold this precious collection in your hands as you would a certificate of your birth, a manifesto of your life, a constitution of your rights, and as a eulogy of your death.

Readers, the 45th edition of The Grinnell Review was made by some of you and meant for all of you.

Thank you to SPARC for the dinero, to Diane Lenertz and Kayleigh Kresse for commandeering Bob’s for us, to Jim Miller from Pioneer Graphics, and to the perseverance and creativity of our Art and Writing Committees.

Delectably yours, The Editors of the Grinnell Review Geo Gomez, Silvia Foster-Frau, Jack Dunnington, and Hannah Bernard 8

“Bourgeois culture separates and isolates artists from other workers by according them a privileged status. Privilege encloses the artist in an invisible prison. We have decided to transform what we are in society.�

- Statement of purpose behind the Atelier Populaire during the

radical revolt of May 1968 that succeeded in temporarily shutting down the French government.

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Old Songs Jacob Miller The notes are too familiar to be of use; they flutter towards the lampshade, come back blue.

We have tried to turn them into strangers, but we have their skin under our nails, their tongues between our teeth.

With these words we sing memory, we wrap the summer air in sound and attempt crude transmutation, trying on old clothes to stand closer to the sublime light where that melody, more dream than song, first broke skin.

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Deposition| Nathan Kim| Black walnut dye photogram on twin XL bedsheet

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Sail Away Sara Ashbaugh

The painting hung on a wall in the entryway. It had been

there so long that if you were to remove it, you would find a perfect square of canary yellow wallpaper dotted with roses, each line sharp and distinct from its peeling, faded surroundings. The wallpaper—like the house—was so old, and its roses had faded so much, that there was only the vague sense of a pattern that had once existed.Yet, the painting remained as pristine as the moment of its final brush stroke. No grime was permitted there, no colors allowed to fade. The nooks and crannies of the frame were scrubbed daily for dust. It stood proudly in its purity, but instead of distinguishing the room, it only drew attention to the scraped baseboards and moldy ceiling. It was positioned in such a way, at such a height, and with the lighting just so that as the door swung open it was a guest’s first sight.

And what a sight it was. The painting was not remarkable in its subject matter; in fact, many of the guests noted (behind closed doors, of course, so as not to be rude) its stereotypicality.

However, all admitted that there was something compelling about the way the ship’s bow fearlessly cut through the rising waves, and how regal the billowing white sails seemed to be unfurling, and how the rich white foam being cast aside the stern had its own 12

sort of sparkle. The artist could not be criticized for mastery of the craft, they agreed, simply for a lack of original thought.

That didn’t seem to bother the owner, however. She hosted dinner parties frequently (as was expected) and she took every opportunity to point out to her guests (multiple times, more often than not) the exquisite use of color and space, and the flawless brushstrokes of the clouds and the sea. “You can just feel it!” she would sigh, often with an absentminded gentle touch on the frame. Her guests would eagerly agree (not wanting to be rude, of course). The painting was her most prized possession, and while dirt would gather in the corners of rooms and cracks in the ceiling would leak, nothing—nothing—was allowed to touch her painting. “Who painted it?” some would ask, but she would always respond with a tinkling laugh and a carefree wave of her hand, and the subject would be dismissed. Or, sometimes, someone would dare to inquire, “Why do you enjoy this particular painting so much?” and the same small laugh was this time paired with a condescending shake of the head, or a smirking glance to the other guests so they all could share a chuckle about the absurdity of the question. Her raised eyebrow seemed to say, “Why, silly! Who wouldn’t!” and that was the end of that.

The truth was she didn’t know who painted it and she couldn’t tell you why she liked it, except that something about the sea or the simplicity never failed to calm her. It floated in her mind’s eye as she went about the housework. She dutifully scrubbed the floors to shine and dusted atop the mantel, but as the days, weeks, and eventually years passed, more and more often she would find herself wandering to the entryway. Whenever the futility of her tasks overwhelmed her, she could be found standing

alone, staring at the painting, sometimes turning her head this way and that until she could almost see the toss of the waves and the swaying of the deck. That was where her husband would find her each day as he came home. The first thing he saw as he opened the door, his shoulders sagging, briefcase in hand, was the back of his wife’s bobbing head. Even as his hair thinned and he stopped asking her why she hadn’t cooked dinner or vacuumed the carpet or washed the dishes, he would still open the door to her head bobbing like a cork in the ocean.

So the dishes piled up and the carpet got filthier and her husband came home later and later in the evening, but she never tired of the painting. It was her companion in the lonely hours, always there to give her a sunny day on the rainy ones and an exciting day on the dull ones, in a way that no person ever had.

Certainly not her husband, who didn’t smile at her and so she didn’t smile back, and whose anger and expectations fell on deaf ears. And when they fought (which was often) she slinked silently to the entryway so that she could be with the painting. He usually followed, bringing his ringing accusations and constant refrain of “Why, why, why?”. He would give up after awhile, defeated shoulders slumped, leaving her and her painting standing proud and victorious. As he slouched off, he would sometimes raise his head and try to catch her gaze, his pathetic eyes pleading “How? How do I help you? How?” but she never answered, and her gaze never wavered, even when the door slammed shut behind him.

After a while they stopped fighting, and pretty soon after they stopped talking at all. She knew he thought she didn’t notice when he came home smelling like perfume that wasn’t hers or with a lipstick smudge on his neck in a shade she didn’t own, but

she noticed. She didn’t stop hosting dinner parties; if anything, she hosted more. All guests agreed she was just as charming as always, with the same charming smile and the same tinkling laugh. Sometimes they would ask about him, but she would laugh and shake her head and wave her hand and say something about business and the subject would be dismissed. She never stopped looking for opportunities to point out the exquisiteness of her painting.

Until one morning, which began as simply as all of her others. She woke long after he had left for work. Most days, if she was lucky, he came home after she’d gone to bed and left before she woke. She really wouldn’t know if he had been there at all, she considered, with a sideways glance to the neat left side of the bed.

She held a small smile as she drifted downstairs, until she reached the entryway. She stared, aghast, at the small yellow square dotted with blushing pink roses. Nothing had seemed so empty to her in her entire life.

By the time evening had come, she had torn apart the entire house. Contents of cupboards lay strewn across the kitchen floor, plates and glasses shattered, silverware thrown in all corners of the room. Furniture was overturned, dressers empty, clothes dangling from light fixtures and bedding ripped from mattresses.

No square inch was unexplored; even in her hysteria she was meticulous. If it had been in the house she would have found it.

She stood before the door, wringing her hands violently, brow lined with deep furrows, knots bunching in her shoulders and feet tapping incessantly, waiting for him to come home. Doing nothing but waiting and waiting and waiting. Many times over the course of the day had she picked up the phone only to realize she 13

didn’t know the phone number, or even the name for the office.

Again and again had she laid her hand on the doorknob only to be paralyzed, finding she had no choice but to return to tapping and wringing and waiting.

As soon as she heard the creak of the steps and saw the knob begin to turn she pounced, wrenching the door from his unsuspecting grasp, stumbling him forward into the doorframe.

“Where is it!” she shrieked. His back was still hunched and head still bowed, so only his wide eyes followed her movement as she seized him and attempted to shake it him out of him. He allowed her momentum to rock him back and forth as she shrieked, “Where! Where! Where!” He suddenly seemed to comprehend, jerking to his full height. As he did she caught a whiff of perfume.

“It’s safe,” he said, summoning all of the command he could muster.

“Where!”

He patted his briefcase reassuringly. “Safe.”

“How could you!” She stumbled away, her hand reaching up, involuntarily, to land a gentle touch where the frame used to rest. “How could you!”

Suddenly the all command was gone, and the confidence he had mustered whooshed out of his lungs. His shoulders slumped.

“Please, understand, something had to be done! I was trying to help you! You needed—something—please, understand!”

The silence weighed heavily, just as it had every night. It was a thick and suffocating silence. Her eyes were impenetrable as always, hollow, as if she didn’t see him and had never seen him, not really. He began to slouch away, tossing her one final, pathetic glance. That was when he saw it. He saw it dawning on 14

her face, the understanding he had been longing for all this time.

He watched, hardly daring to hope, as a sunny smile broke, and she banished the weight with a tinkling laugh. He laughed too; he couldn’t help himself, as she waved her hand as if to say, “No matter, it’s all right now.” Her smirking smile and raised eyebrow purred, “Silly! Of course I understand!”

That night he fell asleep more quickly and soundly than he had in a long time, his back straight and his brow unfurrowed, a small smile dancing on his lips.

She watched from the lawn. It was unbelievable, how quickly it had happened. The flames dashed from one room to the next, darting from piles of forlorn clothing to overturned furniture, following the predetermined serpentine paths laid by the gasoline. Racing up the stairs. The flames caught bits of peeling wallpaper. The heat scorched the patch of canary yellow, transforming it to bubbling brown, greedily consuming blushing pink roses. She watched as tongues of flame shot out of windows, reaching out toward her as if to grab her and shake her, asking “Why? Why? Why?” She turned away with a condescending shake of her head and a carefree wave of her hand, absentmindedly stroking the frame clutched tightly to her chest. As she walked away, over the roar of the flames could be heard a small, tinkling laugh.

Lateral Human Pelvis| Hannah Condon| Wood sculpture

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Skin Print | Hannah Bernard | Body, ink, paper

Skin Print - Head Detail

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Evolution of the Fireworm | Becky Garner|Digital gfp/chry fluoresence micrograph overlay

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3 Kings| Jack Dunnington | Watercolor on paper

Man @ Café Leo Abbe he’s so striped sweater kinda Russian— pouring eleven packs of splenda down the back of his neck; staring at the splenda, doing anything to get the itch unstuck from his ass; I think it’s weird, the way he drinks coffee at night and pabst for breakfast— yeah, I think it’s weird, the way he sticks his hand back there and watches me watch him.

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The Girl With the Red Bicycle Josie Sloyan

The gun was two and a half feet long and belonged to Uncle Roy who lived in Raleigh and didn’t even ask to say hi to us whenever he called. It was a rifle made out of brown wood with spots in it like it had just come from the tree. Mom didn’t like it, but Dad hung it from two hooks in the kitchen right above the white and black checked kettles on the shelf over the sink. Mom bought the kettles when we were in Carmel and they matched the white and black checked candle holders in the living room. Dad didn’t like those so much. He called it even.

“Roy’s got no use for it,” he said. He was sitting at the breakfast nook. He scratched Rufus’ head beneath the table and Rufus whined. With the other hand he was eating eggs scrambled with salsa and bacon.

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“I don’t imagine it has any use for him either,” Mom said.

She was washing dishes with her elbows moving very quick in circles, jab up in the air and down, jab up and down, up and down.

It looked like there was a tough spot on the pan. “It’s not gonna serve us any better than it did him. And think of Marty.”

“And Jordie,” I said. “And Rufus.”

“There’s a story in the paper about a young kid, about her age, who got ahold of her dad’s gun. Did you hear about that? Shot her father dead through the heart. All because the safety catch was off. I won’t have this in the house, I won’t have it. God knows we’ve got enough to worry about.”

“Listen,” Dad said. He was still eating. When Mom was upset she would stop doing whatever she was doing, or do it a lot harder. Dad did it too, only he liked to say he didn’t. He liked to get a lot of salsa on his egg when he put it together on his fork.

He liked to eat all the salsa and bacon and egg together. I liked to put it in different piles and eat it one by one: egg, salsa, bacon.

I saved the bacon for last. My favorite parts were the fatty parts that were crisp and had a brown layer over the clear-yellow grease inside. “This doesn’t have anything to do with Roy, alright? He just sent the thing as a nice little gift. Look, I can take Marty out back, teach her to shoot cans. Want to learn to shoot cans?”

“I guess,” I said. Mom’s back was still turned and she was still scrubbing the pan, over and over in a hard circle. “I don’t know.”

Jordie didn’t know what a gun was. That evening I tried to tell him how it worked but he didn’t want to listen, he kept putting his hands on Rufus’ tail. “Stop that,” I said. “He’s gonna bite

your hand off.”

Jordie didn’t listen to me. “Roof,” he said.

“Rufus,” I said. “The. Dog’s. Name. Is. Rufus.” I said it extra loud and slow so he would learn.

“Roof,” he said. He rolled onto his stomach. Mom was in her room reading a book about Ireland. It had a picture of a freckled girl on the cover in black and white. Dad was out. Usually he came back around dinnertime, but tonight he was late. Mom had started reading the Ireland book a few months ago but didn’t really read it, only talked about it a lot, until last month. “I just never have the time,” she had said. She wouldn’t say when she did have the time, only went up to her room in the evening and told me to watch Jordie. She started doing that around Halloween.

When she was out I went into her room and checked the bookmark. The bookmark was a green cardboard snake. It ate a fatter slice of the book each day. “Me time,” she said. “I need some me time.”

“Guns are dangerous, Jordie,” I said. “I know a kid who shot his dad dead in the heart.” Jordie rolled over onto his back and grabbed his feet, and stared with his black eyes at the light on the ceiling.

When Dad came home Jordie had already been put to bed.

“You’re not asleep yet, huh?” he said when he saw me sitting in the living room. “It’s a little late for TV on a school night.”

“Mom said I could,” I said. That was kind of a lie. Mom had come downstairs and heated up leftovers, and then put Jordie to

bed. She came back down and turned on the TV and we sat there for a little while, she in the big chair and me on the floor with my head on her leg. We watched Hoarders and SayYes To The Dress. We watched Cake Boss. Usually she would let me sit in the big chair if I asked, but I didn’t ask. I sat on the floor with my legs tucked under me. I put my hand on the carpet and twisted the little fibers into knots. “I’m going to check on Jordie,” Mom said after a while, and pushed herself up from the chair. “You’ll be okay down here?”

I nodded yes. When she stepped around me I moved my hand to protect the field of knotted fibers I had made, like a little city.

“You’re up way past your bedtime, kid,” Dad said. He put his briefcase down and took his coat off. He brushed the damp off it and hung it up carefully. “You said Mom let you stay up late?”

“Well, not really,” I said. “Mom’s fine. I just stayed up late.”

“Is she upstairs?”

“Yeah, she’s watching Jordie,” I said. “She thinks maybe he’s a little sick so she’s been really busy watching him.” Jordie wasn’t sick, although he had been cranky and tired all day and made a fuss at dinner when Mom tried to get him to eat beets. She cut them up into little pieces so they leaked onto a plate and stained her hands with red-purple juice. Jordie wouldn’t eat them.

“Please, Jordie,” she said. “We don’t have any carrots.

I know you like carrots. Can you just eat these tonight?” He wouldn’t eat them. She picked the plate up and covered it in plastic wrap. “I’m worried about your brother getting enough nutrients. Marty, did you eat your beets?”

I didn’t like beets either. I had wrapped each slice in a napkin and fed it under the table to Rufus. He licked my hand 23

clean. Rufus loved beets. Nobody else did.

“I’ll go watch him,” Dad said. “Your mom can make sure you get into bed.”

He went upstairs slowly, like each foot weighed very much.

All Dads walk like that at night. I heard his footsteps creak all the way up the stairs. I turned off the TV fast, like it could burn me.

Mom and Dad were talking upstairs. I brushed my teeth in the downstairs bathroom.

Mom said she would come in and read a story to me, but I said I was fine. She came in anyway, yawning, looking at the thin silver watch on her wrist. The watch had links that stretched and caught the tiny hairs on her wrist. I tried it on once and slid it all the way up my arm like an Egyptian bracelet. It pinched my skin.

“Boy, it’s late for you,” she said. “You’re up way past bedtime, huh?”

“I’m not so tired,” I said.

She looked around my room, which was kind of messy.

“Feels like I’m watching Hoarders again.”

She laughed and I laughed and she sat down next to the bed, one knee down and one knee up, so her face was looking at mine. There were sags under her eyes and her face looked huge and full of tiny lines, like the moon.

“I don’t need a story tonight,” I said.

“Are you sure?” she said. “I’ve got a good one.”

“Only if you want to,” I said. “Otherwise it’s fine.”

“Of course I want to,” she said. “Don’t be silly.”

The story was about a girl who rode her bicycle 24

everywhere. The bicycle was the girl’s favorite thing on earth and every day she cleaned it with a rag so it shone. It was red, and when she rode through town people would say Hey There Goes The Girl With The Red Bicycle. She could stand up on the bicycle and stick her feet out. She could ride without putting her hands on the handlebars. What she liked best, though, was to just ride around through town and along the roads, and feel her feet on the pedals. But what she didn’t know was that there were kids in the town who were jealous of her and wished they could ride such a nice bicycle as well as she could. They decided to play a trick on her. Each night, while the girl slept, the kids would take a piece off of her beautiful red bike and replace it with a rusty old part from the dump. The girl didn’t understand what was happening.

Suddenly her wheels were creaky and old, and the seat was torn and spilling out yellow stuff, and the handlebars were all scratched and bent. She wondered if she had left it out in the rain. I must have neglected it somehow, she thought. So she spent extra time caring for her bike, polishing it for more and more hours throughout the day. Eventually she didn’t even try to ride it, she just woke up and set to work polishing the rusted brakes and the gears all clogged with black oil. The kids all had a good laugh, until they went home and tried to put the beautiful red pieces back into a bicycle. But they couldn’t figure out how to put it back together.

They were left with the pieces, and they didn’t know what to do.

And all the while the girl kept polishing her bike, waiting for the rust to give way to the old sparkling red paint.

“That’s sad,” I said. “Although it’s good that the mean kids didn’t get the bike either at least.”

“Hmm,” Mom said. “Do you think they got what they deserved?”

“I think so,” I said. “I don’t know. Will you turn the light off?”

“Sure,” she said. She pulled the blanket up around me, all the way to right under my chin. “Do you want me to tuck you all the way in?”

“Yeah,” I said. I lay there stiff as a board while she pushed the comforter in all around my body like a swaddle. It was the way I fell asleep quickest some nights, when I had trouble sleeping.

Mom turned off the light and I could see her face slivered with light in the doorway. “Goodnight,” she said. “Get some sleep.”

Over the next couple days the gun stayed right over the black and white checked kettles without anybody even talking about it, although Mom would look up at it suddenly every once in a while with a worried expression like it had just moved. Jordie was learning how to use the toilet and Dad was having to spend more time at work. He came home while I was lying in bed. My door was a crack open so the yellow light came though, and I could hear the downstairs front door crack open when he came in. Some nights Mom would wait downstairs in the kitchen for him. She would make coffee, and the smell would come up to my room. Sometimes she went to her room and kept the light on. Sometimes she would just go in and turn it off. On the nights Mom went upstairs Dad would go creaking into the kitchen and open the fridge with a cracking loud vibrating noise, and I would hear the clanking of plates and then quiet for a long time. By

Burial | Hannah Condon & Madeleine Warnick Bone, music box, snakeskin, and other mixed media

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the time he came upstairs the light in Mom and Dad’s room was usually off. Then the yellow hallway light was shut off and I was in complete blue dark and it was easier to fall asleep that way.

After dinner Mom and I took out construction paper and cut them into strips. “Don’t let Jordie get the scissors,” she said quietly. She fiddled with a red strip of paper and folded it into little zigzags like an accordion. It was seven-thirty. The clock was

It was getting closer to Thanksgiving and in school we were pretty loud when no one said anything. Jordie put a piece of paper making headbands with feathers on them for the Native Americans in his mouth and Mom took it out. She stuck a finger in his mouth and Pilgrim hats for the Pilgrims. We were learning a song about to make sure he hadn’t sucked off any pulp. “Your dad’s late. We succotash. Jordie had a Pilgrim costume from Halloween and I better start without him.” The sun was setting and the light was made him wear it one day when I got home from school. Mom low so everything cast shadows across the room. The gun over was in the living room and there was a bowl full of gourds on the the shelf sent a long thin darkness over the ceiling. When I looked coffee table in different colors: green, white, orange. I put my up I could see the outline of all of us, of Jordie and Mom’s and hand on one and it was cool and hollow. my head and the long black shadow of the rifle so long it almost

“I went to the farmers’ market up by Brighton today,” touched the other end of the ceiling. When I looked over Mom Mom said. She was opening the thin white veil curtains that was watching it too. Her eyes were very blank. In her hands she were underneath the real curtains on the windows so the pale kept folding and unfolding the piece of construction paper.

November light came through. “They had some great Thanksgiving Rufus was under the table with his eyes sleepy and black and Mom stuff. Did you say you needed a Native American costume?” reached out and scratched the top of his head. His tail thumped on

I wanted to be a Native American so I could wear the the floor. “Roof,” Jordie said. headband with the feathers in it, and so I didn’t have to wear

“Roo. Fuss,” I said. It was important for Jordie to learn new the Pilgrim costume with the buckles. The Pilgrim costume was words every day. I was helping him learn. “Jordie, say Roo Fuss.” stupid and Larry Greenman accidentally wore his Pilgrim hat all

“Roo Fuss,” Jordie said. “Roof fuss.” the way out to the playground and everyone laughed at him.

There was shuffling sounds outside and the door opened.

“We’re making our own costumes, but the teacher picks All of us looked over. Rufus stood up with his tail wagging who gets to be who,” I explained. “She hasn’t picked what the frantically and whined. Dad stomped the frost off his shoes and put third-graders are going to be yet.” his briefcase down.

“Okay, well, let me know,” Mom said. “Hey, I got some

“Sorry all,” he said. “I didn’t know you’d be waiting up for construction paper in Brighton too. Do you want to make some me. Isn’t it Jordie’s bedtime soon?” he asked Mom. paper chains after dinner? Your father said he would be home too.”

“We thought you’d want to make paper chains with us,”

“Yeah,” I said. “That sounds really fun.”

Mom said. In her hands she flattened out the accordion and 26

squished it together again. The creases were getting white and worn. “I didn’t know you’d be late tonight.”

“Let’s get Jordie to bed,” he said. “And Marty, how about you go brush your teeth?”

I had planned on making a lot of paper chains. Enough to cover the ceiling. I wanted to make them and to have Mom make them and to have Dad hang them in colored swags all over the house. Even to show Jordie how to make them although he couldn’t use the toilet yet. “Can’t you even make some?” I asked.

“I’d love to, but I’m drowning in work, kid,” he said. “How about tomorrow?”

Tomorrow was ages away and I didn’t even believe him. I stood up and put the strips into two piles. Green in one and red in the other. “I can do them myself,” I said.

I brushed my teeth and changed into pajamas and went downstairs to get a glass of water. Mom and Dad were in the kitchen talking very quietly. I sat down on the stairs and put my hands around the railing like they were prison bars so I could stick my face through. The railing bars were made out of a yellowish wood. They had grooves in them which were good for sliding, although the staircase was too steep to be much fun.

“And I don’t want to hear it anymore, Eli,” Mom was saying. “I won’t have it.”

“Listen, I’m sorry about this,” he said. It’s a bad situation.

I’ve got a lot to lose here.You understand, don’t you?”

“I’m starting to think I don’t understand anything about what’s going on.”

“You’re being ridiculous.”

There was the sound of moving around, footsteps from one

side of the room to the other. I stood up slowly in case they were going to come out of the kitchen. I would say I was coming down to get a glass of water. I would act very groggy and sleepy. Now I had a terrible secret. I felt very sober and adult with the vague knowledge of unhappiness.

“Get the gun out of the house, Eli,” Mom said. “It’s giving me the creeps.”

There was a long heavy sigh, and then I saw Mom’s head in the doorway. I ran softly all the way upstairs and lay in bed, drawing the covers up around me so I couldn’t move my arms or legs.

The next morning, the sun was shining green through the curtains in the kitchen and Mom was frying eggs and I asked for mine sunny side up because I liked to eat the white part all around and save the yellow part last and then crack it wobbling open so the yellower guts came out all over the plate. Dad was eating his egg scrambled on toast. He had the rifle in his lap. I looked up and the hooks were empty. A towel hung on one of them, draping down over one of the kettles. “Hurry up and get dressed, kiddo,” he said. “Day’s a’ wastin’.” He was very cheerful and took big crunching bites out of the toast. Black dust drifted down onto the plate. Dad liked his toast very burnt, with a lot of butter soaked all through so it was soggy on the top and hard on the bottom.

“Decided it was time to get rid of this thing,” he said, indicating the rifle. “It’s been spooking your mom’s nerves. Mine too. It’s just not a safe thing to have around a kid.”

“Two kids,” I said.

“Exactly. Two kids. I think I’ll ask around at work to see 27

if anyone’s interested, and if not, I’ll take it to the pawn shop tonight. Come back and we can finally make some paper chains, how does that sound?”

“Good,” I said shortly. I was waiting for my egg. Mom’s back in the morning light looked strong and hard. Her shoulders were straight and true. She cracked an egg into the pan with a deft quick movement. “You can go on and change,” she said, turning, seeing me. Her face was very light and pleasant, like she was just enjoying herself cracking eggs and making them and smelling the sizzling butter smell and hearing the pops and cracks. “Okay,” I said. “Be back in a minute.”

The eggs were good, and buttery and salty, which is how I like eggs. The yellow ran all over the plate just like I liked it. Dad left the rifle by the door in the umbrella stand and Mom drove me to school and Jordie babbled away to himself strapped in the backseat about dogs and the sun and the sky.

That night we waited again but Dad didn’t come home.

Mom had a curious resigned look on her face and before it was even seven-thirty she said she had better start getting Jordie ready for bed. “You too,” she said. “After you’re ready for bed maybe we can make some chains by ourselves.” I didn’t want to make chains anymore. “I’m just going to go to bed,” I said. “I have a lot of homework for the Thanksgiving play.” I was a Native American and I got to wear a headband with feathers. Jeannie who was my best friend was a Native American too and we got to say lines to each other in the play. I had brought my headband home and I was going to show it to Mom but I decided to just leave it in my bag.

Mom went upstairs with Jordie to give him a bath and I brushed 28

my teeth and changed into pajamas and read my lines. My lines were about the Thanksgiving feast. I said, “We will have succotash, a traditional Native American dish.” I said, “Succotash is made from ground corn.” I said these lines in the mirror while I was wearing my headband with the construction-paper feathers. It was getting late and Jordie was asleep and I had turned my light off so Mom would think I was asleep and I was reciting my lines in the mirror with my window open so I could see in the moonlight. I could see my face and the paper very clearly but everything else was blue and shapeless. Downstairs the door cracked open and Dad’s footsteps creaked through. I heard voices first low and then getting louder. I heard Mom’s voice raised and then shouting in a hissing way. I heard Dad saying something, and then saying it louder, and then Rufus was barking and there was a great clamor that kept hushing every minute and turning into furious hissing whispers and then getting loud and all the while Rufus barking and whining and barking. There was a clattering sound and then a brief silence except for the barking and whimpering and then there was shouting and then a tremendous noise like a punch through the air and a high-pitched whining that didn’t end and then it ended and there was silence, absolute.

It was an accident that later when Uncle Roy visited he said happened because he had forgotten to unload the gun after he was hunting deer up in Black Rock Mountain. This was after Dad moved into the apartment across town and took his briefcase and suitcases and the tablecloth from Aunt Edgith and set up a guest bedroom where me and Jordie could stay sometimes on the weekends. I saw more of Uncle Roy then because he would

come down and stay with Dad every other month for a few days, eating beef jerky from the stick and hawking tobacco spit into the gravelly dirt out back, where there was kind of a backyard and a barbecue pit for grilling. We buried Rufus back at our house, under the honeysuckle bush behind the back porch. Mom didn’t say much. I performed in the Thanksgiving play and remembered all my lines and went to middle school and high school and college, and when I got my first job I rode a bicycle to work and gripped the handlebars so tight my knuckles turned white and I nearly started to cry.

Dear Braque | Xena Fitzgerald | Gouache

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The Martyrdom of St Denis| Nathan Kim | Oil paint, stencil, & acrylic

Dune | Masha Shevelkina| Oil on canvas

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Found Forgotten| Nathan Kim | Print

The Artistic Divide of [2018] Maya Elliot come unto me, you white washed walls, and i will paint for you a room. we are uninterested in your poets, your faulkners and hemingways. jealous as godlings we take no interest in greatness that comes not from within: no interest in inspiration not found in our own poetic skin. listen: the radio tells us we’re gods. the television tells us we’re titans. meccas of beauty, of vice and virtue and the mystic in-between – and we believe it baby, we really do. we sweat ichor on the dance floor and speak in tongues: fireballing and hawkeyed and rum-mouthed we breathe shambly wisdom; bare-footed we blaze the haze halls of cleve pit and call ourselves shamans. listen: you don’t have to love us. in fact, don’t. we love ourselves enough for our egos to go spinning on, immortal, without you and yours.

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Lens (I

nspired by Greg Smith’s “Quality Uncertainty: The Market for

Lemons”) Matthew Dole Camera one:YOUTH swimming in the street, red-and-white Volcom swim trunks billowing around his legs, blond hair darkened and plastered to his head. The water is up to the windows of the Honda minivan parked outside 1525.

Camera two:YOUTH is accompanied by FRIEND, and they are picking their way through the ooze next to the impromptu river, slogging to the bloated lake. Grins are fixed on their faces. The footsteps of giants ring loud in their ears.

Camera three: Headlights of slow-passing cars reflect gold and yellow on the surface of the park-lake. Every ripple left by a latefalling raindrop glows in the beams. The jungle gym is a rainforest.

elsewhere, but never here. There are never tornados here. How could there be tornados here?

Camera one:YOUTH dips his head underwater, baptizes himself in rainwater and surfaces with leaves in his hair.

Camera five: Outside the house. FAMILY watches clouds overhead. They are green and boiling, riddled with lightning.

Spirals in the sky cause YOUTH to be frightened, but PARENTS maintain that there will be no tornadoes here.

Camera three: A telephone pole has snapped. The top half remains suspended from four thick black wires, perfectly straight and symmetrical. FATHER tries to take a picture, but it doesn’t turn out. The Lord dislikes paparazzi.

Camera six: The mumbling of sump-pumps is backed by humming generators, and hammers ring on rooftops as holes become bandaids become houses. Chainsaws tear into trees, leaving limbs scattered on unconcerned asphalt.

Camera seven: FAMILY huddles around the television in the basement. The power fails, and with a quiet zoop, the television Camera two: The mud does not suck at their shoes. It bites and gnaws and tears at them, sinks its teeth into the edges and holds on goes dark along with the rest of the world.YOUTH lights a candle and peers out the tiny rectangular window near the ceiling, tight. They make their way back up the river. watches the clouds come to earth.

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Camera four:YOUTH’s nose is pressed against cold living-room window. Hail makes snare drums out of rooftops, washboards out of cars, kick drums out of garbage cans. There are tornados

Camera three: A car goes by, lightning flashes, the cross is illuminated. Heavens save us all.

This is How I Learned Linnea Hurst ‘15 This is how I learned. We were standing on the subway platform. My mother carried a shopping bag full of mangoes. My sister wiped the sweat from her face. There were candy wrappers on the ground, and a man with no legs playing guitar. Many other people stood with us, waiting. When the train approached it made so much wind that the candy wrappers lifted into the air. So did my mother’s skirt.

The man playing guitar laughed with the breaks of the train. When we entered our car, there were only men. Men that wore dirty jeans, men that wore suits, old men with hats sinking low over their brows. Their eyes scaled our legs to cup our chests. My mother filleted a mango she had taken from her bag with a pocketknife. She passed us slices of fruit and asked if we wanted water. The train made its first stop, and another herd crawled in. There was an announcement in Spanish over the audio system. The train started up again and my mother tucked the half eaten mango away into her bag. I looked at the men, one by one. None looked back. A man with a small mirror in his hand stood next to my mother. He pointed the mirror up her skirt. He tilted his head, and then the mirror, back and forth. Then, he smiled. My mother still held the pocketknife. Very quietly and very quickly, she trimmed the man’s fingers from his hand. They fell from his hand like beads of sweat. The mirror fell from his hand also, and broke into many small pieces. The pieces lay suspended in a red pool of flesh that shook to the rhythm of the train. The whole affair reminded me of Jello. That night, the fingers were swept away.

The pieces of glass remained on the train, piercing the rubber soles of men to come.

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A Single, Lasting Image Varun Nayar Once again in Warsaw, your teeth were ivory, gripping stone citadels.

It was night time, and of course, because it was night time, you were drunk (singing too), with white organza licking your cheek; with your hot ankles pressed up against my chest; a Jose Cuervo (diluted in Sprite) pooling the cup of your mouth.

Those leaves you saw against the wind resembled birds. And when they fluttered into life, you grasped your throat, as if by some cheap magic, they too had all swarmed into you.

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Koi | Edith March| Oil on canvas

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Kneel| Hannah Bernard| Body, ink, paper

Crocodile Hands| Hannah Condon| Linocut print

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Google Can’t Bring Back the Dead Diane Lenertz Last week I searched your name.

The usual things came up: obituary, previous addresses.

Even a picture of me (a girl I can’t remember).

Google archived the Ham Radio Message Board that you posted on in the 90s.

Early internet action. Interesting.

A man named Michael Gray was looking for you in 1996.

I guess I am looking for you now.

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Untitled | Cal Froikin| Pen, marker, photoshop

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#sewol| Doyi Lee| Digital collage using photoshop

Red Rock | Lauren Roush| Laminated plywood, paste wax, graphite, glass decanter

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Speed Dating Diane Lenertz

I lost my speech with my mind.

Oh sure, I talk.

But— Well, they say when people hit their heads too hard, lose their grasp on interaction, they can’t talk but they can still swear.

They test it by plunging paraplegics’ hands into ice buckets— all in the name of science, of course.

So, I still talk.

But it’s like that—more compulsion than conversation. I’ll be the first to admit it.

In the interest of full disclosure, my arms aren’t screwed on right enough anymore, either.

Terrible accident at the factory.

I could show you how they pop out—maybe later, you’re still a stranger, after all.

Enough about me, what do you do to stay alive?

Functioning Jenkin Benson Love like a shirt worn for five days straight.

This bold bruh brewski has got me smelling like a wet dog and acting like any broken home.

If god won’t help me, I’ll start eating these aluminum cans until I’m so heavy not even gravity can give up on me.

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Juno

(translated from Opium für Ovid Yoko Tawada) Caroline Froh

Juno’s five-year-old daughter asks how a woman on a toilet seat can be certain that what’s coming out of her body is not a baby. She’s worried about the baby falling into sewage water.

increasingly critical of her mother and took care to use the word “openness” as much as possible. Now that she’s become a mother herself, she finds that she would much rather engage her daughter in debates about contraception and National Socialism, but who

“Talk about something else.” knows if she’ll even be interested in that. The only thing clear right Juno’s trying to teach her daughter that some things aren’t suitable now is her daughter’s fascination with human excrement. for conversation.

“Why?” she asks. Juno doesn’t answer and turns her back to her

Still steaming, smeared with blood, amorphous and daughter instead. wrinkled, screaming after it’s birth from the abdomen, defecation.

Ripened in the time between sleep and the final parting,

Juno remembers clearly the feeling when her own mother fermenting stench, deep exhale and a plugged nose, until the would abruptly change the topic instead of answering one of her release from the body’s opening triggers short-lived excitement. questions. Questions that had to do with her uncle, for example, who died in Poland during the war, or the technicalities of sexual

Juno’s first child was an accident. She was twenty, an intercourse. But she didn’t remember bowel movements being art history student who spent summers in Greece and Italy taboo then, which simply meant that Juno never brought them and earned her daily bread as a museum attendant. She fell in up. As Juno progressed further in her education, she became love often at the beach, and took pleasure in creating fictional 45

backgrounds for herself. In Greece, she referred to herself as

Excretion as a happy birth. A pleasurable abandonment “Hera”. Juno became pregnant in that humid, salty sea wind, of a product of one’s lukewarm inner life, with or without pain, unprepared for a child or any sort of domestic lifestyle even announced by a flush. It doesn’t take long for the joy to pass, but though she didn’t quite want to let the father go free. And so she it will be experienced again tomorrow, as it is once a day, between gave birth to a little girl who looked nothing like the babies from sunrise and the beginning of the workday. the Renaissance paintings she was used to, reminding her instead of a latex bag that sucked from the top and spat from the bottom.

When the first daughter was still small, the family lived Juno spent her entire days keeping the screeching little body close to the city park. Juno would bring her daughter to play clean and fed. She had never considered herself maternal, and on warm afternoons, sending her off by herself into the mock so it surprised her when she began to jungle and then settling down to read her notice little changes in herself: she felt newspapers with the names of women for till steaming transfixed by the children she passed on smeared with blood titles. When her daughter had to use the the street, sensing a glow in their face amorphous and bathroom, the two would go hand in hand she’d never been able to see before. It to the little wood house beside the gnarled wrinkled screaming didn’t even matter how unkempt or oak tree. The daughter loved hearing her after it s birth dirty the child was. mother’s voice cross the dividing wall, and from the abdomen she pretended that they were in different

Juno should bear children, countries and talking on the telephone. defecation that is her role. Coronis decides that “Mama, can you hear me?” she should be a character in her next book. The head of the “Yes.” arts center, who Coronis pities because of her childlessness, “Mama?” noted thoughtfully one day that she doesn’t need any children “Yes.” because books are her children. What an insult to children, to

“What’s an austerity package?” be compared to books! Children weren’t put on this earth to be

“Where did you hear about that?” metaphors! What an insult to books, to be compared to children!

“I saw it on the TV. What’s inside an austerity package?”

A life without children is an indulgence for Coronis, but a life

When the daughter was thirteen, she would insult her without books is unfathomable. mother when she was upset with words that had to do with bowel movements. Maybe she was experiencing nostalgia for the time when they had attended to nature’s call together.

“S

,

’

,

.”

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,

,

When she turned sixteen, she developed an interest for ancient history. She stopped fighting with her mother, but still preferred to stay in her room blasting music and examining the photographs inside her book of ancient Greek art. On her seventeenth birthday the two went to an exhibit featuring an ancient Greek goblet. It was early afternoon, and the women wandered leisurely together through the empty display rooms.

Bodies were traced on the goblet, white on black, that strained in their bending forms, strained against the horse drawing their wagon, straining muscles of their thighs, an uncovered erection, soft folds in the fabric of their clothing, but none in their faces.

Juno and her daughter drank sparkling wine in the museum café, and then went to the lavatory, sitting side by side once more.

“Mom?” “Yes?”

“What does it mean if an apartment is inviolable?”

“Where does it say that?”

“We read the German Constitution yesterday in school. It was in there.”

Two half-naked women sat next to each other, separated only by a thin dividing wall, and interpreted puzzling concepts. It was as if time had reversed. Juno could still taste sentimentality on her tongue the following day.

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Enwrapped in Mist | Leina’ala Voss | Digital photograph

Dad | Mary Zheng | Digital photograph

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Untitled | Elle Azul Duncombe-Mills | Paper sculpture

Colorblind | Linnea Schurig | Graphite pencil

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Study in Clothianidin: the Death of Bees | Rosie O’Brien | Natural honeycomb, raw & processed beeswax, black & red pigment

A Boy and His Shadow| Dani DeSantes| Digital painting

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We Just Called Him Admiral Nelson Leo Abbe I heard he smokes cigarettes just so he can find opportune moments to talk to the girls who smoke cigarettes. yeah, but I never talked to him. no, I never talked to him, because there’s something sinister about the pistols and soliloquies and dirty ideas tucked behind his couple of eyeballs. yeah, he’s not always drunk but he’s always drinking strutting about like a cock trying to get people to call him captain morgan;

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charging up to dark hair and thickness, clearly overserved, starting to lecture about the lack of a killer rager scene and seeing if they wanna find a nice place to get feeling pretty rubbery after the party.

Porcupine Dog | Hannah Condon| Digital

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Body Love Maya Elliot

Joy comes in sallow light, lemon tinted and tart on the tongue. The air is hot on my damp skin; I rise from the waves, slow and sleepy as Atlas beneath the weight of the world. Heavy. Bogged down in the material. Black on white. My skin is an arrowhead against powder fresh sheets.

Base and unfiltered in lemonade light, sweet in the silence dried against khemetian flesh, nudity is a rarity in this graveyard home, but this does not make it any less precious.

A shift: my chest swells with the blinking pump of my million-eyed blood. Stuccoed eyes are drawn to my round belly, the pert dark nipples, the dark curve of limb and thigh and sex.

This body, vehicle of grief beneath my everyman’s clothing, becomes statuesque in the space between reality and musty sheets.

Homely – a flesh and blood recreation of the sculptures done of the first women, glorifying wide hips and heavy breasts and open, attentive mouths. This is the body gifted to me in God’s inattentive creative sweep, and though I can never love it, in the bastard child of dawn and day, I struggle to understand it.

Those arms, whose are they? Mine. They are mine.

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Those legs, so thick and sturdy! Are they Oak’s? No, no.

Still they are mine, gnarled as they are.

That face! Round and squashed, surely it is the forgotten creation of a cruel pot maker? Maybe so, but it’s mine.

Appling cheeks and lips the color of rosedusk, skin hard and brown – born from coal, ground into being deep beneath the red earth of a motherland remembered only in my bubbling blood.

All these are mine and only mine and forever mine and always mine.

A vessel. A bottomless vase meant for the filling up of that airy lifeblood called memory. In deprecatory acknowledgment I find ownership and possession. This body is me. It will never be anyone else’s. These fingers that curve and stroke; these, too, obey only two letters.

In the morning tartness I am a cat lapping cream. I am an arrowhead of pleasure arching across rumpled sheets, black and bittersweet, at the delicate ministrations of mind’s eye. I am misting between earth and shore.

I am a revelation the angels would have gnashed their teeth to have trumpeted before The Lord.

Strays | Elle Azul Duncombe-Mills| Digital photograph

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Bang Bang | Julia Broeker | Pen

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Mouth/Angles Varun Nayar

Bombay is burning its children down, this time with language.

How then can your softened ‘r’s not be an illness, but rather, a stain that comes from having a home to only remember.

I sat with a mouth gaping at the sun, swallowed the flooding for years.

But a knife, or tongue, can unbecome with such torrential rain. What then happens when a jaw unlocks, loosens like a flower, or fist, leaking molten honey.

Your motherspeak has edges, you see. It burns and cracks, licking the angles as it goes. Where then does this new language reside? The one that folds so easy, like silk collapsing on concrete – a fluidness against a hardness.

I’ve lost the words for how my mother's voice hangs, like limp teeth, against the grain of the receiver; its mechanical hiss. 'Why do you say take care like that?' she asks, 'you sound so afraid.'

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Dinner (joking, but this is China) | Mary Zheng | Digital photograph

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Yarn Series - Double | Douglas Dale| Synthetic yarn over rubber

Yarn Series - Cup| Douglas Dale| Synthetic yarn over ceramic

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egg. They say a bird acts like its dying two times in its life. Once when it is actually dying, but once before that, when it lays an egg.

Ima chirped.

I know, Janice said, sighing.

Staring at the little white egg, Janice was reminded of her high school art teacher, Mr. Lavaña.

Silvia Foster-Frau

He may have started more sentences than he finished and gestured more than he talked, but he was the reason she became

Deep red from the teabag stained the inside of her mug. an art teacher. She remembered the day of school that Mr. Lavaña One full week after the egg had materialized in the corner of the had rummaged around his suitcase, telling the students he had a birdcage, Janice sat on the couch in the TV room, thinking about surprise for them. The students held their breath and then let out a it. A round lump settled in the back of her throat and she found collective sigh of disappointment: a chicken egg? He set the chicken herself choking slightly, her eyes watering. Her husband, Alan, egg on the display stand in the middle of the room. Draw it, he was sitting on the reclining chair to her left, his feet propped up said simply, passing out powdery, colorful chalk and black sheets of on the coffee table. His eyes were half closed and she could see the flickering TV reflected in his glasses. She hunched over herself paper. “Excuse me, Mr. Lasagna,” said one kid. “I didn’t get a white and reached out, checking his mug to find it empty, too. His weak chalk.” Mr. Lavaña smiled. “Excuse me, Mr. Lasagna,” Janice had said, “I didn’t get one either.” Mr. Lavaña told the class he didn’t Lipton left no mark inside. see any white and perhaps they weren’t looking close enough at

I’ll go refill these, she said.

To get up from the couch she had to grip her hands on the the egg. Janice leaned in closer but didn’t see anything. He told the students to draw the egg not by what they thought it looked cushions and strain her calves. She didn’t stand up, she heaved, hauling the weight of another life that curled in the round curve of like, but by what it actually looked like. Mr. Lavaña explained that her stomach. In the kitchen, Janice refilled the kettle, set the water white is actually not one color but many, swirling colors. “Don’t to boil, and then leaned on the counter, staring at the birdcage on draw what you know,” he’d said, “draw what you see, what you feel.” Janice tried tilting her head and squinting at the chicken egg, the windowsill. Ima was a parakeet with dark red, light blue, and bright yellow feathers. The colors didn’t blend; they were startling. but she didn’t see the swirling colors he’d described. She’d sort of wondered if Mr. Lavaña hadn’t just been describing what she Ima was beautiful, but she seemed to think her egg was more beautiful. Parakeets usually lay up to 4 eggs at a time, but Ima had imagined his artists’ mind to be full of: deep, swirling, colorful ideas. just laid one pure white egg, which she took painstaking care of.

Janice squinted at Ima’s round little egg, but it stayed pure Sometimes Ima didn’t eat or sleep just so she could be with her

Hope

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white.

Janice must have been there for a while because Alan came in and found her leaning against the countertop watching the bird. The afternoon sun was beaming yellow into Janice’s hair and reflecting a rainbow off the little egg. It’s kind of beautiful, thought her husband. Ima meanwhile was gathering shredded bedding into a large pile nearby.

“Looks like she’s making a little bird den for the burden,” Alan joked, snorting a little at his own pun. “We’ve got to get rid of that thing.”

Janice’s knuckles turned white and her eyes, which were already moist, dropped ovals of reflective salt-water onto her face. Suddenly the teakettle began to pipe harshly and Ima, agitated, returned to the egg and restlessly sought to position herself over it, to protect it. Janice turned away from the bird and stared beady-eyed at Alan. He hadn’t seen her eyes look at him so intensely in a long time. Janice’s rage gushed out, spitting.

Was building that unfinished cradle a burden to you? She yelled above the kettle. Her belly used to be beautiful and sacred. Alan used to poke her abdomen just to watch the white depression slowly fade. Her clenched knuckles released and her hands banged on top of the counter, causing Ima to take flight in her cage and spin around in circles, squawking.

Was it all a waste of your energy? Is it all a waste of Ima’s?

SOMETIMES THINGS GO TOWASTE, ALAN. AND THERE’S NO FUCKING THING I CAN DO ABOUT IT! Janice hiccupped, shaking.

She couldn’t see anything anymore, only colorful circles in her mind’s eye, like traces of the frantic bird’s flight path. The noise

from the kettle was searing.

Was squeezing my hand in the ambulance and crying into my sunken stomach telling me you loved me a burden for you? Sobbed Janice.

And don’t touch me! She snapped as Alan stepped toward her, his arms outstretched.

Alan didn’t know what else to do, so he removed the kettle from the heat. The high-pitched shrill ended so the bird landed back on the ground. The refrigerator hummed, the bird rustled her feathers, and Janice breathed irregularly. Alan remembered that Janice had been cleaning Ima’s cage when she had first felt a pang in her sides. She had been at the mall buying little toys when she’d felt another cramping, back-hunching pain. She’d been hanging up a pastel blue and yellow curtain when they had first fallen: two red drops dripped dimples onto their new carpet.

Alan grabbed the kettle and poured the steaming water into their mugs, making Janice’s tea bag bloat and the red stain disperse. Alan knew that the parakeet, for lack of a mate, had laid an unfertilized egg that would very soon begin to rot. He knew the egg needed to be thrown away.

“Honey, you’re right. Some eggs go to waste. It is the nature of things. But Ima needs some relief. We have to take the egg away”, he said delicately. “We have to do this, for Ima.” For Ima. Janice did not meet Alan’s gaze, but opened the cage and swiftly, quietly, took the egg and put it in her pocket. Ima squawked frantically but she did not bite her.

I’m sorry, Janice whispered.

The next day, Alan walked through the kitchen and let out a deep sigh of relief when he saw the eggless cage. Ima was back to normal, playing on her swing and eating healthily. He walked 65

into the TV room to find Janice balancing on a stool against the wall.

She was haphazardly fastening a new canvas, her swollen belly brushing against the wall. His mind flashed to the image of Janice with her swollen belly fastening pastel curtains almost a year ago, but he quickly shook it out of his head. Alan lent his arm to Janice as she stepped down from the stool. Looking at the black canvas up close, he saw only an overwhelming swirl of vibrant reds, light cream blues, and golden yellows. You have to step back, Janice told him. She went to the side of the room.

He passed by his reclining chair and stood next to Janice to look at her painting. Then Alan reached over to hug her, her large, round belly warm and soft between them. He felt little movements between their embrace, and he knew that this time, he would get to finish the cradle.

What do you think?

“It’s beautiful,” Alan whispered, “you’re beautiful.”

Ima’s chirps from the kitchen echoed through the rooms.

Alan held Janice’s hand and they both stared at her painting of a deep, swirling, colorful egg; round as hope.

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Best Friend Dance Linnea Hurst We hummed through grade school classrooms, tilted our heads until our hair formed a single burnt yellow shield.

We careened past soccer coaches that called one the other’s name—we just laughed, dressed alike, confused them all.

We knew our rhythm, and like a porch swing in the easy heat of August we swung to it, cracking eggs on the black asphalt, throwing our bodies off diving boards, hauling blankets and pillows outdoors to build forts that shaded us as we drank cream soda.

One day I opened your refrigerator to notice that it was wider and brighter than my own—so I tried to forget my spaces instead fitting to the curve of your banister, to the slanting words of your Polish nanny.

I even made my hands like your hands, as they sopped up oil and vinegar with crusts of bread.

And for six years you studied my spaces too, fit into them well enough, or at least said you did, until you began to hide your hands ate new food I didn’t know about.

I was sure it was a mistake, later sure I had lost a limb and for five indulgent months I grieved those spaces I thought were mine— until I met another girl, studied her smell and the voice of her mother, stayed up all night atop her bed, (too old for forts) to talk about the friends we had lost.

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Wrath Revisited Vincent Benlloch

It’s nice to speak again.

The Last Time, or a Last Time, we broke emptied bottles and screamed into night.

I wrapped my car around a Sunset Drive marquee, but couldn’t find you amongst the metal in the morning.

I shouldn’t have been as happy as I was to kill off an old friend.

I don’t know why you keep coming back.

Buried you in a snow-blind of alcohol and pot haze.

Bled you and quartered you over long nights of botched neurosurgery.

But there’s still acid in my blood.

And there’s still bile in my stomach.

And there’s still rage pulsing in my blindness.

And you will sit with me.

In the white walls, 68

You hang, and in the shallow dark, you will let slip just enough to drag my over-killed bones, and my empty heart, out of bed.

Fine.

Let’s have another then.

Another punch-drunk roundabout, ancient brothers with old aims, with new weaponry.

We’ll dance the dance so familiar.

Sinew from shattered sinew and vein from drained vein, two brain-dead dogs gutting each other with toothless maws spilling impotent sparks over alley-spoils long rotten by the concluding bows.

We share a face, might as well share a grave.

Wave | Elle Azul Duncombe-Mills | Plywood sculpture

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Crow’s Feet | Hannah Condon|Trace monotype

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Tribute to GrantWood’s Plaid Sweater | Xena Fitzgerald | Watercolor & mixed media

Crossroads | Elle Azul Duncombe-Mills| Digital photograph

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Idealized Portrait of a Young Woman Josie Sloyan “It’s not exactly so simple as being able to describe her in your average cliché terms of beauty, or even of quirky offbeat ‘original’ beauty as you might think I’d go on to describe, i.e., socks baggy around her ankles, thin-wristed, a mouth that moves in a certain way when she’s thinking, or a certain manner she has of taking off her glasses and turning them around and around by one stem between her fingers, et cetera. Those things are very, I guess visceral, and that’s not exactly real.”

Q. “Well, yeah, I mean—I mean I guess they are real, which makes them—invalid.”

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Q. “Think of it this way. We are all defined, to other people, in a very solipsistic, artificial way. How do you define me? Immediately by what I am wearing and by what I look like. And thus by whatever your opinion of those things are. If I was wearing say a leather jacket, and you were vegan or against animal cruelty, your automatic impression of me would be one of mild distaste maybe or condescension. Even if it was unconscious or unstated. Not that there’s anything wrong with that of course but it’s invalid. I am not necessarily what I look like, or how I dress.”

Q. “I guess I define self as…as something inside. Don’t roll your eyes. It really is. It’s something other. Look, I can choose to go out and start wearing leather jackets. That doesn’t make me a biker or someone who chews tobacco or shoots animals. Okay I guess you could say it’s an indication of my ignorance of or at least indifference to the animal industry, but that doesn’t mean anything either, since it’s possible I was not well-educated about that topic, or grew up in a home indifferent to animal suffering, and am just not well-informed on issues like animal cruelty. Or maybe it’s a jacket I got from my father, who died last fall and always wore it, and maybe he was a bit of an asshole and liked hunting, and I never really liked him although I always felt uneasily that I should, and even went on hunting trips with him which left me feeling dissatisfied and ultimately disillusioned with this idea of a ‘father figure’ who was supposed to enlighten me about

the world of masculinity, hold a door open for me into a shining world of mahogany and bear skins and all that crap, but then he died, burst an artery and fell right over down dead with a vein blue and crawling in his right eye. Not even a romantic way to go but there you have it and then it was me and my mother with her eyes the same color as the spilled water on the kitchen tiles, faraway and very remote, and her outstretched hand with its patterns of shifting capillaries like an underwater city holding out the familiar black leather. Which smelt of whiskey. And maybe I’d wear it with that same sense of unease and disillusionment with which I’d gone hunting, and the expression on my face that you took to mean brutishness, or the simple unhappiness of a bigot, was really a deeper level of self-conscious understanding and maybe wistfulness for a concept of masculinity that never came to be. See? Clothes never mean anything you think they mean, and therefore they never can mean anything. It’s a paradox that leads nowhere.”

Q. “No. Not even one of those fake-leather ones. Irritates the hell out of my skin.”

Q. “I guess it’s lucky too that, in my case, she really does fit all those lovely Petrarchan ideals. Lucky in the sense that it is easy for other people to see, upon seeing her, why I am the way I am about her, even though of course they’re completely wrong. It has

nothing to do with any of that. But physically I would say she is kind of a muse. To me. Because she so easily fits into clichés. For example she has a perfectly oval, Madonna-esque face that is like a Botticellian dream. And when she is thinking to herself, or looking off into the distance, she assumes this air of perfect, untouchable peace that is at once ennobling and holy. When I see her—I stand up straighter. I want to match that holiness.”

Q. “Yes, as I was saying, it’s not about what she looks like, honestly.

Here’s what it is, to the best that I can untangle it in my head: there is something in her spirit which resounds with me, quietly but truly, in a very electric and profound way. It is almost too hard to describe, except that I can compare it to a religious experience in that it is so emotionally poignant and powerful on a deep, spiritual level that at times I am almost moved to tears. Sometimes it occurs when I’m in her presence, if I’m standing say at one end of the room and she is standing at the other, not even necessarily aware of my presence, just standing with one hand idly rotating a hair-tie around her wrist, her mouth forming a question about the reliability of a certain mobile phone provider, or about the quality of coffee in the store that just opened up down the street from her apartment, as I stand at the room’s end with my hand suddenly clenched on the doorknob as though it is conducive to the particular energy that is all running together in my heart and throat and eyes. This happens I would say at least once a week, but that’s just an estimate.

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More often it happens when I’m alone at home. I know, it sounds strange. But that’s the way love is, in my case anyway. The last time it happened was just this morning. I’d woken up early in a lazy, dreamy kind of mood—I’ve been in that mood pretty constantly, which should come as no surprise—and went to make coffee. The sun was just cracking over the horizon like an egg.You should have seen it—do you like sunrises?”

Q. “Well, I guess I think about them more often than the average person. There’s something very new and clean, and by extension cleansing, about sunrises that I really relate to. So I was standing at my kitchen table, looking out at the sunrise, the way the new torn-cotton scraps of cloud were becoming defined, gaining shadow and weight, and the way the breeze would send shivers through the masses and masses of trees below. It was a pretty beautiful morning. I had just bought new coffee filters and I was still holding one, for no reason, since I had already put one into the coffeemaker and at this moment there were the crooning liquid sounds of brewing coffee and the smell was warm. I was holding one of the coffee filters by its crenulated edge, absentmindedly moving my fingers so I felt the lightness of the paper, the machine-stamped creases, and watching the sun crack all over the sky, and all of a sudden I was about to cry. I felt like God making the world. Have you ever felt anything so beautiful as owning something that owns you? That is what it was. But for her.

And here is why: because I knew that if she were there with me, at that precise moment, she would have felt it too.

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So I guess that is how I define self. Although she has one persona which may be defined by, okay, the people she associates with, the way she dresses, and the activities she engages in, there is something—I am convinced there is something—that runs deeper, along the walls of what I would say is the rawest marrow of her thoughts and ideas, that is the way she perceives the world. And it is with this that I identify and am so in love with, beyond all capacity for love, beyond everything, even myself.”

Q. “Talked to her? Well, no. That would defeat the whole purpose.

Haven’t you been listening to me? What’s so beautiful about her is that I don’t know her. Haven’t said a single word. And so she can be this indefinable thing. She is a vessel into which I put myself.”

Q. “What do you mean?”

Q. “Well of course it’s all in my head. ‘Not real,’ if you want to put it that way. If you think it’s necessary to live in such visceral terms.

Of course I don’t operate on that level. I guess I like to think of myself, however condescendingly, as having transcended that level. My love exists on a higher plane. Therefore, it’s untouched.

Normal love—or I guess what you call love, anyway—lives and dies in a breath.You have this idea of someone and it grows and

becomes full and ripe and is gone in the next moment, in the very second between their looking past you to looking at you.

You know what I’m talking about. Isn’t there something pure in the anticipation of their character that wholly belongs to you?

You choose to destroy that thing for the chance at a ‘real’ kind of love that is tainted and unromantic and grayish and slack from overuse.Yeah, I can see what you’re thinking. ‘You poor asshole.’

Can’t you see I’m thinking the exact same thing about you? What it comes down to is that I choose unreality. As soon as I saw her I knew. It was that instantaneous—I guess you could call it “love at first sight,” a cliché that will never happen to you, that only I can experience because I have chosen to live with ‘first sight’and nothing else. Can I even describe what it was like to see her for the first time? Are you going to roll your eyes like that if I say it in clichés? It wasn’t until later that my friend told me she knew her from work and started inviting her to get-togethers just to see the look on my face. It was one of those colder fall mornings and the air had a bite in it, and the sky was gray and low as though it were the same stuff as the ground. I went into this coffee shop with my scarf pulled around my face, breathing steam, and sat near the window so I could watch the remaining leaves on the trees shake and rattle, all the people walking by with their tweed and gloves and hands wrapped around to-go cups and eyes blank with thoughts and cold and walking fast with their heads down.

She was sitting three seats away, also looking out the window in a faraway absentminded kind of way. And yes she was wearing an oversized suit-coat Annie Hall-type jacket, and gloves that looked like patent leather with two small black decorative buttons on the right side of each wrist, which I could see when she adjusted her

sleeve to check her large and almost mannish watch. She looked like she smelled like linens and laundry detergent. She looked like someone to whom I could confess my sins. She was wearing a pair of jeans that looked fitted but well-worn as though they had been washed many times. I could picture her, standing in some sunlit living room, taking them from a pile of clean clothes and putting her face to them to smell the clean good smell. Her eyes were calm and the same color as the sky and like the sky they went on forever. It felt like I was standing at the foot of a mountain and hearing the sound of a great river underneath. She was looking outside at the wind and trees. And that was enough. And I was happy. That’s—” Q. “Yeah. That’s the point.”

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Birth of Venus | Xena Fitzgerald|Watercolor & mixed media

Lichen | Becky Garner| Digital design based on micrograph

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La Cocina de Mamå | Leina’ala Voss| Digital photograph

Frankenstein’s Boy Maya Elliot you came to me loudly bits of paper wet against the fraying glue of your editor’s mouth. swallowed too many words down the wrong pipe, you had; cut the pieces of your gullet and mashed them back together until the edges fit. you said save me and i said what the hell, i’ve nothing left anymore.

and the promise of transformation. i said put gregor sansa to shame, won’t you? the man smiled a secret smile. all bone. and at the scientist’s ball you were the prettiest monster of all. he made you perfectly: princess diana’s smile. prince william’s nipples. king kong’s cock. you were the the ugliest beauty i ever did see. you were a hideous lover, made all for me.

i sold you to the man beneath the staircase with the snaggle-toothed scar and the mermaid smile for fifteen pieces of silver — i’ve always been a garage sale judas —

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Contributors Leo Abbe ‘16 is a third year at Grinnell College.

Sara Ashbaugh ‘18 is a first year.

Matt Dole ‘16 is a third-year English major from the fertile land of Golden Valley, MN. He writes poetry, non-fiction, and whatever else pops into his head.

Devin Doyle ‘15 is a child of a man who can barely fit into his shoes. But that’s because they’re size 14s! Also he is SUPER down with everything. Hit him up for whatever! Maybe.

Vincent M. Benlloch ‘18 is a manic, hummingbird-hearted narcissist from Los Angeles. Partially house-trained. Tortured in Elle Azul Duncombe-Mills ‘16 is a devoted chocolate the most pretentious and self-indulgent way possible. lover. She also obsessively takes photographs of trash and decaying things.

Jenkin benson ‘17 is an ex-scene kid that now likes to write poetry. Also, he owns multiple crewneck sweatshirts.

Jack Dunnington ‘16 Oldest and Fatherless.

Hannah Bernard ‘15 found her hammer and is going to smash the patriarchy.

Maya Elliott ‘18 is a dingus of galactic proportions and should be avoided at all costs.

Julia Broeker ‘17 will not survive the winter.

Xena Fitzgerald ‘17 wishes she was a witch.

Hannah Condon ‘16 is disturbed by the fearless Grinnellian squirrels because they are so unlike the skittish mountain squirrels of Colorado, her home state.

Silvia Foster-Frau ‘15 has fourth year status but a first year heart.

Douglas Dale ‘15 is sorry for shouting so loudly. He just got excited.

Dani DeSantes ‘15 is a Studio Art major, hailing from Madison, Wisconsin, and sadly lacking in full sleeve tattoos.

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Caroline Froh ‘18 is feeling nostalgic.

Cal Froikin ‘16 has big aspirations, stay tuned. Get at me while my work is still affordable.

Becky Garner ‘15 is (apparently) really obsessed with Linnea Schurig ‘17 “My life is pieces of paper that I’ll get microscopes. She also believes that the world is full of potential art back to later. I’ll write you a story, how I ended up here. supplies, not to be resisted!

Masha Shevelkina ‘15 really enjoys sending laser beams Geo Gomez ‘15 got the club goin’ up on a Tuesday. into your soul from table-top heights. Run. Linnea Hurst ‘15 is a 4th year.

Diane Lenertz ‘15 is on a long walk.

Josie Sloyan ‘18 is a first year student, potentially majoring in English and concentrating in Art History. This is the first time her work has appeared in the Review.

Nathan Kim ‘16 really shouldn’t write anything this late at night. So there. Also takes commissions.

Leina’ala Voss ‘18 Age: 20/ Sex: Female/ Relationship Status: available.

Doyi Lee ‘16 doesn’t need a bio.

Madeline Warnick ‘16 loves dark rainy days and wonders why she ever left the utopia of the Pacific Northwest.

Edith March ‘15 has nothing to say.

Jacob Miller ‘17 is an earth tone.

Mary Zheng ‘15 twist / exist.

Varun Nayar ‘15 is somewhere in Prague, where he is learning that the moon does not have to be full for us to love it.

Rosie O’Brien ‘16 is an American Midwest Native. Her approach to life is like the prairie: diverse, colorful, changes with the seasons, and needs frequent watering. May occasionally contain bison.

Lauren Roush ‘17 enjoys spending time with her cat, Luci Fur.

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