The Grinnell Review Spring 2018

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Copyright © 2018 by the Student Publications and Radio Committee (SPARC).

The Grinnell Review, Grinnell College’s semi-annual 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 reviewed 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. © 2018 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. typeface for the body text is Palatino and the typeface for the titles is Didot.

Cover art: Narrative |Sofia Mendez|digital photo collage Inner over art: Untitled|Victoria Park|digital photograph Inner title art: Untitled|Victoria Park|digital photograph All editorial and business correspondence should be addressed to: Grinnell College c/o Grinnell Review Grinnell, IA 50112 www.grinnellreview.com

LV | Spring 2018 ARTS SELECTION COMMITTEE Julia Shangguan Cecily Smith Paul Chan Htoo Sang

EDITORS Julia Shangguan Thanh Mai Emma Heikkinen Paul Chan Htoo Sang

WRITING SELECTION COMMITTEE Thanh Mai Emma Heikkinen Luke Jarzyna Mary Rose Bernal Allison Cottrell Mallory Bergthold Duy Duong

Contents W riting Andrea Baumgartel

Rain 18 Perpetullennial 39

Lily Seibert

SSRI

Mary Rose Bernal

Diagnostics 25

Allison Cottrell

A Tipping, Still Raining

Player 1

9 10

Steven Duong A Goldfish 8 Aquarist’s Sonnet 12 Hyunji Eom Yonsei (SKY) — and me Josie Sloyan

Object Lessons 4

44 32

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Miriam Tibbets

Life Bazaar 15 Bar Love 19 My Hat, My Heat, My Heart 22 Clara Trippe

Series of Circles, Concentric and Convex Inchydoney Fort Da Kill One Off, Bring In Another

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16 43 45

A rt Naomi Clayton

Dew Drop

Praire in Focus

Jump Creek Canyon

10 24 42

Lydia James

Sunset Over I-80 The Future is Handmade

Flight Patterns

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14 37

Hung Le

Rorschach

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Victoria Park Sorry

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Sofia Mendez

people walk next to people eat

with people look at people sit

with people Sam Nakahira

Stockholm’s Underground Subway Views from Hay House in Copenhagen Bergen Hills in Norway

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30 31

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Letter from the Editors Beloved reader: “We, the students of Grinnell College, formally request General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev to include Grinnell College (410 44’ 50” N latitude, 920 43’ 30” W longitude) as a primary target in the event of a nuclear exchange.” That’s a Grinnell student initiative from 1989? 1988? and we’re still waiting for that nuclear event. We’re feeling distinctly adrift, clutching at drops of memory. Clutching at Gorbachevs. Waiting for Godot.

With Bob’s remaining closed, Mac Field inaccessible, a new deep mysterious pit appearing outside ARH, a new admissions building rising up, and rumors of an imminent Burling destruction … all culminating in the eerie return of snow in April … where are we? Are we crashing into an existential dread? Who are we, as a campus, as a community, as a group of young adults living in the Iowan plains together ...

The Review is a brief reprise from such questions. Art can ground, can provide answers, can grant a glimpse into literary moments of clarity. As a whole, this edition of the Review reflects our collective campus life as of Spring 2018: seemingly preoccupied with the flowing of water. (There are at least three water-based poems in here.) Perhaps this strange sense of uncertainty is part of the natural wet flood of being collegiate.

As always, thank you to SPARC for their support and money, Jim Sigmon at ColorFX for everything, and Faulconer Gallery’s staff for the beautiful space. Thank you to contributing authors, poets, artists, writers, thinkers: without you, we’d all still be adrift.

- The Editors arts Julia Shangguan ‘18, Paul Chan Htoo Sang ‘21 writing Thanh Mai ‘18, Emma Heikkinen ‘21

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“A society should never become like a pond with stagnant water, without movement. That’s the most important thing.”

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, on the Arab Spring, 2011

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A Goldfish Steven Duong estranged from the

brackish Edens of its forebears

comports itself with some oddball

pomp, borrowed from the first emperors and scholars to make a science of contortion, to wrench scaled anatomy

into the grand shapes

of the day. Moonscapes

in tumid relief crown the skull in a fleshy pageantry, threatening to swallow eyelids telescoped into

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absurdity. The overall

effect: grotesquerie made rare,

gnarled aquaria.

A Tipping, Still Raining Allison Cottrell But anymore, I know that any more Would haul it back from mindless, sinking holes.

Ballasted brains praised for their weight adore [Abhor] that plunging feeling, lost control At discount prices, bright red signs above, Entire store on clearance. Moving out And running towards the End that’s gone and of The kind of character habit devout.

Contained within that race to free and gone, Forget almost the feeling, caught without Umbrellas in the rain. My socks I don And leisure walk to nowhere, joy and shout.

On balanced tiptoe so I stumble on,

Wishing for floods and sun to be and gone.

people walk next to people eat with people look at people sit with people | Sofia Mendez| photo collage

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Player 1: “Salutation!

Danger!”

Allison Cottrell “A warning, dear, the storms are coming in, Broken before but rising up anew,” A record player’s voice cuts through the din One morning where the windows dots with dew And tea so calms the lightning falls before The crash together meets uneasy air.

And evident the change, I know the lore, Built on that past experience with care, And malleable the brain enough to see That repetition built upon the back Does still weigh just enough in spare debris To linger and remind the cardiac.

A goal I see just in the dim light, there,

If you can reach, please pick it up with care.

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Dew Drop | Naomi Clayton| photograph

A Series of Circles, Concentric and Convex Clara Trippe It was the whole moon, visible, but only the crescent was lit and glowing.

All my concentration spent tracing circles around your shoulder blade.

One night, it was cold and she took me to the middle of the street and told me to look up at the stars.

“It’s a fishbowl,” she said.

“See how it curves.”

What if our ships sailed from the ocean floor to the very edges of our sky?

We would shake hands with spider crabs and shoot ahead of comets, all in the same day.

Some air breathing arachnids have lungs

named after literature. Book lungs, which contain blood-rich tissue, folded like the pages of a book.

So unlike our trees of bronchi.

Their pages require no movement, while ours grow and die 12 times per minute.

Messy humans.

Can we ever sit still?

Another day: she told me her mother bought her sheets, and this was the reason she couldn’t separate good from bad.

My father and I walked along the beach as the water cycled through colors of dying sky. In the last light, he turned to me and said “it’s like ink.”

Gallons and gallons of ink, the end curving away as if we were standing on the edge of a fishbowl.

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Aquarist’s Sonnet Steven Duong A thicket of reds and yellows flings itself across the glass in a choreographed volley. It shatters upon impact, a molotov cocktail in twisted bodies and snowglint eyes, dedicated to bigger things— mountains and Peruvian headwaters

churning like deities. These sliverbone souls hover in their communal, 30-gallon simulation of creekhood. Driftwood tenements conceal the twin slabs of bewhiskered grey keeping house, eldritch monks of some drowned temple. When I was small, I never wanted to be an astronaut—I gathered brackish worlds and watched them implode like suns.

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Sunset over I-80 | Lydia James | watercolor

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The Future is Handmade | Lydia James | embroidery 14

Life Bazaar Miriam Tibbetts Everything can be bought. I mean, look at it-this world, the ripeness of it. Smell the orange plumpness of it. It’s ready to be exchanged for coins and caresses, and at twenty cents a slice, it’s almost worth it, fat and ready for your greedy hands.

the color of a baby’s kiss. Remember to bring your reusable bags. Stop to try the sun, deep fried, or marvel at the darkly-woolen feel of a newly sleeping hand, how the tingles remind you of your college days when a tongue cost nothing, and a cheek cost a lovebite,

Taste the loneliness. That, too, can be bought, for a higher price. Watch its hazy redcurrant color as it fizzes from your mouth like a promise, like a broken bone. There are summer sherbet cups

when the cusp of a jaw meant everything. Remember how the marks that were left remained silent, and think of how the coffee you sipped the morning after was worth the smile you paid. Taste this world!

on sale, over there, and here in front of you is the health of your mother, and that can be bought, too, but only when you buy a cone of melty melancholy, and watch it drip down your hands. Just look at this world! How it sneaks in through the dust-

Lick at the noise that will spend your life slowly, the click of the seatbelt, the crack of the knuckle, the wobble of soup as it boils on the stove. See the buttery yellow joy of it all. Everything can be bought here, in the bazaar of your dreams. Give up your greasy coins, your greasy love. Take it in.

made shafts of light that will bake your kitchen floor into a fertile ground of lemonade and cherry pie.

Scoop it up by the jarful and hand your sixty cents over, and take it home to make a new pair of lungs, 15

Inchydoney Clara Trippe A body so strong it pulls the water up the shoreline, another without an end, or even direction, next thing you know its curved and becomes sky.

Its as if someone came and scooped their hand through a blue brick, then dropped us all inside.

I promise you, somewhere there is a love that doesn’t tell you to stay inside at night.

Someone watches the curl of your legs around themselves, snakes eating their own tails and toes that turn blue on the tiles.

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Far away, the sound of water, as endless as breath being pulled up against the rocks and pavement.

You wait for it on your door, clogging the entryway, pressing you up against the wallpaper.

Your toes disappear, then your legs, and chest, until it is just your mouth, wide and ceramic, gasping.

Sorry| Victoria Park| digital photograph 17

Rain

between footnotes the sedate gray sway of that view, that

Andrea Baumgartel

constant nearliness of blue determinism shifting lanes

Dirty with joy and sporadic with love, it wrings down flushed

(of unknown ultimate origin) into one, out of none.

and extracellular, rhapsudsying and rivulet and blipping sore.

If rain is universal then you must understand

Frolicked and double-crossed and uncorking its cords. It rains

why I might run out of this one, find another

so much we claim all rain looks basically the same but that’s

starscape where rain walks itself upwards and fistless and refusing

how evolution works, slyly, like step into step of deep time

its downfall, or descends anyways but with infinite modifications

lapse photography preserving the daily separation

and memories to toss back.

of a face into faces.

Darwin surely danced in the GalĂĄpagos rain, with no other reason than dance---noting 18

I love you too much to do that.

Of course.

There are animals made for lying in the rain.

This is not an explanation.

I know that you love to have things explained.

But this is nothing, and if anything, it is a way for me to confuse things, mistake your face reflected in the mirror behind the bar with someone else’s face, go home with him by mistake.

If anything.

So here we are, listening to swing music and wondering how we got here.

And so. And so, so-and-so, do you believe it now?

Meanwhile the snakes lie quiet in their dens of dusken waiting.

Meanwhile my mother wakes up again and again, bathing in cerulean migraines.

Meanwhile Duke Ellington’s Take the A Train is transposed by another young white man into a joke.

So here we are.

Bar Love Miriam Tibbets

The light is fading and the birds are going to sleep, where they can dream that they fly through a sky that is pink with promise.

Is that a song on the radio?

Or is it the beginning of Billie Holiday’s scream?

Here we are, listening to see if there’s been another murder.

Oh. Wait. She’s already dead.

Is that a song? Or is it me, desperate for a song to erase the hopeless chatter of the den of spirits, recreating my own cry over and over until it becomes an opera of passion?

So here we are.

Listening to see if you’ll murder me, maybe.

Meanwhile the man at the bar throws drinks at his patrons.

Have another. It’s on me.

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Have another. Meanwhile, I’ll fall asleep in your arms.

Here we are.

Watching the television and waiting for the zebra to get what we know is coming.

The music told us so. Heavy and frantic, he collapses underneath the lion.

Meanwhile, the motel lamp flickers on and off in time with our heavy breathing.

Us: wondering how we got here.

New skin for the old ceremony.

You don’t have to look at me.

Looking at me just isn’t the point anymore.

What I can’t understand is how you can recognize yourself with the change of every season.

As if it were easy to see your own soul in your eyes.

As if we loved ourselves.

As if we could use each other 20

like pomegranates, waking with each bite to a new world.

Oh. Wait. The quilt is already stained with my blood.

If I bleed every time, does this mean I am never changing?

Give me an explanation.

It’s not as though we haven’t been here before, though the room was different, and the beer cans weren’t smashed, and the geese had already flown south.

But here we are nonetheless, listening to nothing but our breath and wondering how we got here.

Dear Edith, sing to me of pink.

Tell me how we got here.

Meanwhile, I curl myself up and tuck my rattle against my belly and try very hard to recognize myself when summer succumbs to autumn’s kiss.

I wait without a sound.

Meanwhile the world goes dark with cancer.

Meanwhile my mother wakes again and again, thinking of her lost daughter.

Give me an explanation worth lying about.

Give me a drink.

Give me oblivion, or a glass coffin-give me something new to meet, someone worth my time.

Rorschach |Hung Le| digital painting on Autodesk Sketchbook 21

My Hat, My Heat, My Heart Miriam Tibbetts I didn’t see you because I wasn’t looking for you.

We go down to throw our hats first into the air and then the river.

We make our mouths taste of traffic jams and marigolds, a hollow palm calls to me from the other side of the city, a cat emerges from the fire and begins to lick itself clean of its grief.

Float away, felt hat, old-skin-of-me, look for another kid to wear, find some other oyster shell to inhabit.

I tell you this: standing there, watching my brain swim away and snatching handfuls 22

of mist off of the water to eat was nothing like kissing your eyelids raw after dusk had fallen.

Neither, in fact, was the thrill of forgetting the landscape until it hit me again and again with its golden tendency towards gratitude, nor the feeling of the city’s pink candy perfume staccato-strumming the bellows of my hateful heart.

I hardly know who I am anymore or what I will become, and there are many things I will never understand, until I contract them like smoke or cataracts or children.

I didn’t see you standing beside me at the shore.

You watched my hat drift downstream and I think you knew that we were finished.

Each sunrise has its own passion.

Each jugular has its own drug.

There is no other knowledge of scarlet so sweet or so vulnerable, no passion of red so hot or so fragrant that each kiss becomes a lesson, that each hand plunging through candy-cane car fumes becomes an understanding, a flower petal dropped in parable left to watch the rings of its cause spread outwards to quench the sugarcane fire.

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Prairie in Focus| Naomi Clayton|photograph

she’d said it would be. It was a yellow pamphlet folded into thirds and printed in some kind of comic font, and a nurse looking not too unlike Ellen Daniels smiled from a graphic on the front cover. One glance inside told him that it had all the usual stuff. Kenny looked Mary Rose Bernal around his room instead and, seeing that it had walls instead of divider curtains around him, was glad that

“Mr. Voss?”

Kenny opened his eyes. It was a woman standing he wouldn’t be sharing his space with a stranger. to his left but leaning over so that her face was in front He did feel something in his chest but it was more of an annoyance that could be fixed with readjustment of his. She looked concerned. because his chin pressed uncomfortably into his

“Mr. Voss?”

He was in a hospital room. A teal blanket covered sternum. Other than that he wasn’t hurting. It took him his legs and the woman, who was a nurse, had a name awhile to even notice the cast that covered most of his tag that read Ellen Daniels. A mole stuck out on her chin right arm from view.

“Here you are, Mr. Voss,” the nurse said, that appeared as though she had tried to cover it up returning and placing the water bottle on the bed with makeup, but she had done so in a harsh orange beside his left arm. It was cold. “I’ve contacted the that didn’t go with her skin tone. doctor and she’ll be in to see you in a few minutes. Do

“How are you feeling, Mr. Voss?” you think you know what you want off of the menu?”

That was a good question. How did he feel?

“A turkey sandwich?” tried Kenny Voss.

Hints of lightheadedness, maybe dehydration. “Not

Ellen Daniels frowned and the mole moved too bad,” he decided.

“I’ll go and get the doctor then,” the nurse, Ellen down with it. “We don’t have turkey sandwiches here.

Daniels, said. “Is there anything you’d like me to bring We only have ham sandwiches. Would you like a ham sandwich?” you? It’s around noon, maybe lunch?”

“No, I don’t like ham,” Kenny replied. “How

Kenny nodded his head. “And a bottle of water about chicken noodle soup?” please?”

“I’m sorry Mr. Voss, we don’t serve chicken

“Will do. The menu’s under your left arm there, noodle soup either.” Ellen Daniels bit her lip and and you can just tell me what you want when I come Kenny regretted not reading the menu seeing as he back with the water.” was making it uncomfortable for the both of them. He

She left and Kenny found the menu right where

Diagnostics

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didn’t want to make a fool of himself again, and it no longer made a difference to him what he ate. “What do you recommend?”

“Well, the special today is chili with cornbread….”

It wasn’t a recommendation but that was alright.

Kenny ordered that with a carton of milk.

Ellen Daniels showed him where his remote was and how to use it, and while he waited for the doctor and lunch to come he flipped through the channels with his left hand. Not very many television shows were on in the middle of the day. It had been awhile since Kenny had watched T.V. His right arm hung limp on the bed as if it wasn’t his at all but someone else’s package left with him by mistake. He guessed that the reason he couldn’t feel it was on account of anesthetics.

For all he knew, his whole body could be drugged up with painkillers. That wouldn’t be so bad.

The grainy quality of the T.V. settled on a channel of ballet dancers, a male and a female dressed in white costumes on a dark stage, the male dipping the female so that her back arched nearly to touch the ground.

They were muted but Kenny didn’t bother to figure out how to turn the volume on. He liked it that way, silent.

It seemed to go well with the voices, carts wheeling around and clunky shoes passing by on the other side of his door. From where his chin was planted on the hospital gown, Kenny moved his eyes to follow the dancers’ twirls and leaps executed with the precision of machines.

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It was a full-length screening of a ballet, or so Kenny supposed, because it continued on for minutes without a sign of it ending. No one joined the man and woman on the screen and Kenny was amazed that they were able to keep going at the same rate and with what he imagined must be composed faces had the television had been clear enough to capture them.

He couldn’t fathom lives with that much discipline in them and what had to have been years of training to produce what he was seeing now.

A knock came at the door to his hospital room and Kenny let whoever it was in, bemusing the pointlessness of knocking and of admitting someone into a bedridden hospital room. It was both the doctor and his lunch arriving at the same time, the latter being carried on a tray by the nurse. The doctor was a heavyset woman with a haircut that curled in around her shoulders, and he had the faint recognition that he had seen her before.

She took a seat at the edge of his bed. He assumed that the folder she carried had his medical records in it though it couldn’t have contained more than a few papers.

“Hello, Mr. Voss,” she said. “Do you mind if we talk while you eat?” Klein, her name tag said. Dr. Klein.

He didn’t mind. Ellen Daniels set the tray on his lap and clicked the button on the side of the bed to make the mattress rise, whirring him up to a seated position and taking the hot feeling out of his chest.

The food came in a little black container that he

had to peel the plastic wrap off the top of just like a frozen meal from the grocery store, and condensation from the underside spilled down onto the tray when he did. Chili was in the larger compartment that took up three quarters of the box and a square of cornbread was in the smaller one. His utensils were in a plastic sleeve in front of the carton of milk.

“The surgery went well, Mr. Voss,” the doctor said as she opened his folder. “I’m happy to say there were no complications of any kind. Here’s a picture of your arm now.” She held it up for him because his one hand was in the middle of shoveling chili. “You can see that we inserted a plate and four screws into the radial head and along the radius. You should have a smooth recovery.”

She was smiling at him, and Kenny wondered what he was supposed to say. It was hard enough to focus on her instead of the noiseless dancing that floated just above her head. When he made eye contact he could still see it in his peripheral vision, the dancers like flower petals about to land in her hair.

“Do you have any questions, Mr. Voss?”

“No,” he said as a reflex. He re-evaluated. “Well, just one. What now?”

“Now,” Dr. Klein responded, “you’re nearly ready for discharge. I’ll just write up a prescription for painkillers because you’re going to feel a swelling and soreness when the anesthetics wear off and then we’ll get the paperwork in here for you. How does that sound?”

She said it like it was supposed to be congratulatory, but Kenny found himself disheartened at the idea of leaving so soon. It seemed as though he had just gotten there. He said it sounded good though, and the doctor left to get the prescription filled out.

“I’ll get the discharge papers ready,” Ellen Daniels said, getting up from where she had been sitting and walking around the room like all of a sudden things were happening. “You should expect to be discharged in about an hour, so if you have someone to come and pick you up, you should call them now.

Or if your phone’s not on you at the moment, we’d be happy to call for you.”

She hesitated with her hand on the door handle, apparently waiting for Kenny to tell her one way or another. He sat with the tray of food half-eaten still on his lap and looked back at her. He had no one to call.

Jean was in New York.

“I can’t drive myself home?” he asked.

She removed her hand from the door and used it to rearrange her scrubs. She patted at her hair and she patted at her mole. “Mr. Voss,” she said. “Your arm is in a cast.”

Kenny had forgotten.

“You don’t mean to say that you drove here on your own with a broken elbow, did you?”

He had. It had been tricky and the whole way over he’d considered turning around.

“That’s alright,” he told her. “I’ll call someone.”

She nodded and left him alone in the room. On

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the television, the male dancer had left and it was only the female now, darting her toes backwards with the top half of her draped over. She was performing a solo act, controlling the emotion of the stage by the way that she drew its boundaries with her body.

It was beautiful. Kenny didn’t know why he had never learned how to dance. Jean had wanted them to take lessons once, hadn’t she? It had been on some flyer that she’d stuck to the refrigerator and she had brought it up along with whatever else she’d deemed important news to share that day, bills or some company picnic or whatever it happened to be, but Kenny had put it out of his mind by the time that the brisket was on the table.

He had never seen the appeal in dancing and now he didn’t know why that was. Maybe it had to do with the fact that faced with the appeal of soggy food on the one hand and a leaden cast on the other, he had no choice but to watch it when he had gone so much of his life ignoring it up until this point. He thought that even the sound would take something away from it, something he couldn’t place but that drew him to it with an insatiable gaze.

He was alone for now but he wouldn’t be for much longer. The nurse would return with the papers and the prescription and he would have to leave but he didn’t have anyone to call. Jean was in New York again and out of the question; he didn’t know when she’d be back. She hadn’t told him. As far as other options went, his mind was blank. He didn’t know the phone 28

numbers of any of his coworkers and he wasn’t sure that he would get their names right even if he did. He hadn’t been around his parents since he and Jean had moved out here.

Kenny moved his tray off to the side and rummaged single-handedly around the bedsheets for his phone, finally finding it by his knee. He called up a cab company and watched the screen as he listened to the dial tone. He didn’t have the address of the hospital on hand but he found its name printed on the lunch menu and told the cab driver to be there in an hour, figuring he could wait in the lobby until the car showed up.

That was all he had to do before the nurse returned and even that had seemed an exhausting task. He was too lazy to even remove the phone from his ear to end the call and instead stayed on the line after his counterpart had left to hear the drone play.

On the television, the whole cast of ballet dancers was crowding the stage, beginning what appeared to be the dramatic movements of the finale. They obscured the male and the female from view, but Kenny knew that they were still there behind the rest of the cast preparing to burst forth into the center. That was always how these ended, with the star roles taking the applause that would be there for them though Kenny couldn’t hear it, and everyone else bringing up the line that would be thanked for supporting.

And it happened just how he thought it would, the two of them bowing and then everybody bowing

and then the bows directed to the stagehands behind and the orchestra beneath, who got recognized though no one ever saw them. Without the sound of applause for context, it looked rather comical. But still Kenny watched in hopes that another ballet would start next.

He never got to know. Ellen Daniels the nurse was back then and asking for his signature on various highlighted parts of papers, which proved to be a very awkward experience because Kenny could only scrawl in capital letters.

Then she removed the tray from the bed, helped him to stand up, and asked him where all of his things were and if he would want help getting them together. His clothes were piled on a chair along with his wallet and keys. She handed them to him and then opened the bathroom door and told him that she would wait outside. After he had dropped the pile of clothes on the floor and was struggling with untying the hospital gown, he noticed that she hadn’t asked if anyone was coming for him and figured that she already knew the answer. He wondered how many other patients she had to do that for.

Ellen Daniels was still waiting there when he emerged after twelve minutes. She was sitting down with her hands in her lap and seemed to have been

doing nothing during that time. When he did emerge, she merely stood up and handed him a plastic grocery bag with his wallet, keys and phone inside of it so that he could slip the handles around his left wrist.

“And that’s that,” she said. The orange-tinted makeup had smeared away the part of her face that it had intended to cover so that the mole stood out, brown and marked even more by the orange right beside it. “You’re free to go.”

He almost told her then as she was about to open the door.

She seemed like the kind type based upon what she had done for him, bringing him lunch and his belongings and all that even though it was part of her job. She stood expectantly and with confusion because his mouth was open, and his mouth was open because he was about to say it, about how he had really broken his elbow. But he had a feeling that if he began to tell her, he would have to tell her all of his secrets: about the dizzying and drug-like effect of touching nothing but the balcony under his shoes and what it was like to lose all connection to the meager scrap of identity a person had left. How could he tell her how it had happened? How could he describe the paralysis of that moment and the cowardice that finally compelled his arm not forward but backward instead, flung in a

“‘You don’t mean to say that you drove here on your own with a broken elbow, did you?’ He had.”

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pathetic act of violence against his apartment window?

Jean was right; he was weak, too weak even to end his own life. But that wasn’t an appropriate thing to say to another human being. He could never tell anybody and so he would have to clean the shards of glass from their carpet using only his left arm, and he would have to do it soon because it was beginning to get cold out.

But he didn’t want to think about the window and he wasn’t in the mood for talking, so Kenny Voss held up his left hand to shake the nurse’s. Ellen Daniels’s hand was thin and soft and reminded him of a falling petal. “Thank you,” he said before heading out into the hall.

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Stockholm’s Underground Subway Art | Sam Nakahira| ink

Views from Hay House in Copenhagen | Sam Nakahira| ink

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Object Lessons Josie Sloyan

She’d only smoked pot once in high school and been put right off it and for years after had defined herself as aggressively antidrug, remembering that awful embarrassing first time. For a little while, between the charged white space between school and employment, she’d even volunteered at the local faction of Concerned Midwesterners Battling Substance Dependency. All day she’d stand out in front of the Hy-Vee and mechanically smile, hand outstretched with clasped pastel flyer, her face starting to ache around noon, her outstretched hand feeling more and more like a plea. During these challenging hours she’d go back to the individual memories folded into the one horrible memory of the night she’d smoked pot, unfolding and smoothing each plane of the story’s story to better appreciate where and what she was right then, at the Hy-Vee. The problem with Hy-Vee was that the building’s roof’s overhang was preternaturally short, giving the building’s façade a naked and unfinished look, like a botched haircut.

There was no way to stand in the overhang’s maybe half-inch of shade except towards the later evening, when the building’s shadow cast her way and gave her

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skin relief.

Before that summer, the year she’d graduated, she’d worked the desk at her aunt’s beauty salon, which was a cushy job but she had to use fancy words like gratuity and beverage. Sometimes the ladies would remember her name and ask how she was liking school and she’d say just fine. The only people she’d ever seen with blue hair were either her age or over sixty and cane-saddled. Another drawback was that she had to have on a full face of makeup at all times, even if she was on her break and just trying to eat her tuna sandwich or whatever. If she forgot, her manager would be bearing down on her in seconds, going “Fullface!”, the manager’s own face terrifying, over-rouged and scabby with foundation. Her aunt kept a bowl of old-school hard candies on the desk, butterscotch candies in yellow clear saran with the wrapper’s ends quaintly twisted, and red oblong candies in wrappers designed to make each individual candy look like little red pineapples, which the candies were hollow and full of syrup that sometimes oozed when you bit them and sometimes just gummed your teeth right up. Also mints that crumbled on your tongue. Her aunt kept the desk’s lower-right-hand drawer full of superior brand-name candy that she didn’t think anybody else knew about, though the trash can beneath the desk was always full of their fun-sized wrappers. Some of the other girls raided the supposedly secret drawer on a regular basis.

Each shift she herself would take two or three

superior brand-name candies and put them in a gallon plastic Ziploc she kept in her backpack. When the Ziploc was full she’d take it to the red-eyed kids who hung out behind the baseball field during class and played Hacky Sack and she’d sell the bag at a significant markup.

Maybe halfway through this final school year the rumor started going around that Ellie Watts was selling Ziploc’d candy at a marked-down rate to one particular group of kids. Her newfound benevolence could be traced back to a month earlier, trudging through the baseball field after business as usual with backpack luffing emptily around her shoulders while she mentally re-calculated how much she could make if she started charging per piece instead of selling in bulk, when she saw the most incredible-looking boy: his face the face of teen-angst movie heartbreak, cigarette hanging off it, his slouch not so much a slouch as some kind of muddled anti-authority statement, this boy the kind of bad-boy Object of Her Affection she’d been waiting in her heart of hearts for as long as she’d known people could be objects. The Object saw her standing there, with what look on her face she didn’t even know, and waved. He was just far away enough that if she were to say something (an insane thought) she’d have to raise her voice. If she were to walk toward him (equally insane) she’d have to turn fully around, foolishly, like she’d changed courses just to engage in one particular conversation with somebody she didn’t even know.

Then the Object was saying something, his voice a little raised, not foolishly at all, and she saw then how simple he made it seem, how simple it was, to walk across the weedy grass and say he thought he knew her, wasn’t she the girl that was like selling candy to his friends? and how easy it was to say yes that was her and actually her name was Ellie and if he ever wanted candy or anything (although at this her sweat glands sprung open spontaneously so sweat began to roll in lazy full drops down her sides) just ask her and no it was fine it could be free even because they were cool and it was no big deal at all, it was nothing, it was entirely insignificant.

Desire activated her. Before the day was out she had approached Bernice Wayne, the way tall girl who sat in the back of Homeroom with her eyes faintly crossed and jumped every time the teacher went BerNEECE is there somebody in there today? and gnawed her braids when called on for an answer she never had.

Ellie said she sat just one row up from Bernice and how come they didn’t know each other anyway? Bernice looked at her with incomprehension. Her shirt was spotted from her braids’ soaked ends.

What?

Well high school was short and you had to get to know who you went to school with, didn’t you? I mean these were like the best years of our lives or whatever and it’d be a shame to have spent them without knowing what your peers—uh, what other people or whatever were like, don’t you think? Or whatever?

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Or whatever, Bernice agreed.

Right. So I’m saying let’s all hang out or something this weekend. Bring all your friends, I know them a little bit, they’re the ones behind the baseball field all the time, right? There’s that girl Cate and that Jackson and some tall guy, the one with the cigarettes?

Oh, I know you. You’re that girl giving us that free candy.

She didn’t even flinch. I’ll see you this weekend, she said.

and retract into herself, finding in herself vast swathes of her own untouched skin, a body in her mind that seemed more real than the one whose hands were at five and seven on her laptop’s keyboard. The Object came towards her. He came so close her mind’s lips were hot with his breath. He smelled like nothing. His voice sounded like her own voice, which in her head was genderless and omnipotent, reading the world back to her. Touch me, he said in her own God’s voice.

His face was the same face she’d seen behind the baseball field in flawless 1080p. The word swoon sounds like somebody falling, but the actual interior feeling is of something lifting up through you, carrying you up so your knees buckle, the stuff that makes you you rushing upwards on a draft of pleasure. Since she was like thirteen she’d been masturbating mechanically, the way you’d change a car’s oil, maintenance through mindless routine. Not like this. She tried to write in her diary and realized there weren’t words. Stared dumbly at blank paper. The only vocabulary she had was a boy’s vocabulary. Cunt, dick, pussy: boy-words. She didn’t like the way it made her feel to use the word cunt re: herself; scary, out-of-control, whorish. Anything she thought made her think of that word whore which to

“... she was seventeen and

All through that warm dusty week she came to understand every hour was how desire was exacerbated by time. Later she would learn that heavy with lust, the equation was more complex, that desire + time was in fact a bell days swollen curve whose curve was further agitated when you threw distance nearly to the into the mix, but at that time she was seventeen and every hour was heavy with lust, days swollen point of pain.” nearly to the point of pain. She had never dated, never kissed anybody, never given sex a passing thought, and as if in retaliation, desire was steamrolling her flat. She would never again in her life have fantasies so rich and all-consuming, untainted by experience and the inevitable mediocrity of real-world intimacy. During class she would pull back from her face’s smiling mask

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her was synonymous with slavery. She didn’t know how to make sense of anything. Ellie, said Ms. Nugent, are you with us today? She nodded dumbly. Could you come up to the board? She imagined standing to show her skirt soaked through.

Bernice Wayne came up to her at lunch and said there was going to be some little thing at Ken Yardley’s house on Saturday ‘cause his parents were going out of town to renew their vows or some garbage. On that day her hair was pulled into painful-looking cornrows, her head segmented newly into dozens of tiny perfect squares. Just show up whenever, she said. I don’t know.

Should I bring something?

Bernice squinted. What?

She’d never done this before. Never mind.

Through contemplation of the Object’s face she felt she was coming to a better understanding of her own. She had gotten her period when she was twelve same as anybody but mentally, puberty-wise, she was what her mom called a late bloomer. She stood in her bathroom’s buzzing white light and turned her head right and left. She looked over every square inch of her face very carefully, not moving that one space at all as her eyes passed over it, the same way, much later, that she’d stiffen when somebody’s hand touched the same part of her body, not moving that part of her at all as if she was best when utterly still. Her cheekbones were not exactly symmetrical but if she clenched her

teeth shadows appeared beneath them. She practiced in the mirror for nearly an hour, fascinated by the face emerging from her child’s face, a face that was like punctuation at the end of a long and mystifying sentence. She stared into the very centers of her eyes and looked for what she thought she’d find there.

That night she was scheduled to smoke marijuana for the first time she packed a small lightweight bag with Visine, breath mints, a change of jacket in case the smell hung around, and a tuna sandwich in case she got hungry the way the kids behind the baseball field did. Bernice opened the door and gazed out fuzzily. Oh, she said. OK, yeah, come in.

Somebody shouted who was it and someone else asked if it was cops.

It’s just that girl, Bernice shouted back.

Ken Yardley lived on Oakley and Fourth, where the houses were one-story and flags jutted from where they’d been staked beside front doors and hollow wind ornaments spun softly on their plastic hooks, openmouthed carp and angels in white dresses, and the wooden porch steps were soft and gave under Ellie’s feet. Ken Yardley’s house did not have any evidence of a hired cleaner’s touch or of a particularly analretentive parental presence. The ceiling was baroque with mildew in various stages of life, which made everything look shadowed and spangly. Below, kids she dimly recognized were looking at her as she stood in the living room’s doorway with either irony or

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apathy. In nightmares from that night on and through her adult life she’d dream this sequence, or one very like it: entering a room, she’d stop as soft thumbs of faces turned towards her, expectant for something she didn’t know how to deliver, feeling like nothing so much as one protruding self facing down an opinionless, vague-minded collective. Ok so come in if you’re gonna come in, said this Ken Yardley with the bleached tips and stolen leather jacket (the anti-theft tag had been badly bent and wangled, and she could make out the faintest indents of someone’s teeth driven into the plastic), and she took a hesitant step into the room, which was muggy and dark and smelled about how she’d expected it to.

There was the Object. The Object was holding out to her what she immediately thought of as a nontraditional wind instrument and she tried to sharpen her jawline like she’d practiced in the mirror by clenching her teeth and hardening her mouth so hollows appeared below her cheekbones and lifted her face into a tighter version of itself. He was asking if she wanted this or what. The Object looked handsomely disheveled but his breath was a whole other kettle of fish.

Sobriety only seems like clarity when you’re not sober. A lifetime of sobriety is, too, its own shape of not-knowing, just like any other way you’d experience the world. That’s what she kept telling herself as she bravely swallowed mouthful after mouthful of fuggy smoke, convinced she wasn’t doing it right, mortally

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afraid she’d turn out to be one of those cases that just Didn’t Get High, which she wasn’t even sure existed but if it did she’d be one no doubt. The nontraditional wind instrument’s mouthpiece was iridescent with sweat and pubescent skin’s oil. Someone across the circle remarked that the first time always hurts and two other people told him to shut up in overlapping near-unison. Bernice Wayne asked in sympathetic undertone if she was OK. Her stomach was so full she didn’t think she was capable of speech. Vomiting went from a horrific abstraction to a matter-of-fact potential scenario. The Object was looking at her with an expression she didn’t even know what. Someone else told her to inhale and hold it in and not just blow it out right away, and she burned with injustice and humiliation. What a complex knowledge they all seemed to have of the anatomy of breathing, like a conference of saxophonists. She would probably pick almost any kind of physical pain over nausea. Nausea felt like the body’s self-betrayal. The more she thought the word the more it sounded like the name of a Greek goddess or some exotic country’s princess. She felt a burp rising in her throat and was grateful for the relief but then saw the Object still watching and brutally suppressed it. She was a delinquent and a traitor to her own body. She had never wanted so bad to forget she had a body. She was swelling and buckling like a tarp she’d seen the student government trying to hoist up over the half-painted gazebo this past Parent Weekend, a great wily silver thing that snapped and boiled with

Flight Patterns| Lydia James| sewn frabic collage

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wind as students ran around it, shouting, gathering armfuls of the stuff that blew away from them and then back in their faces, the tarp made violent by the wind that buoyed it, so they’d had to get hooks and hammers and stakes from Custodial and stake each corner until it was tight to the ground and the wind couldn’t get in and its surface was smooth and without life again. She remembered that day was gray and without sun. The wind had come up out of nowhere, as will happen in Iowa, and had not let up as the sun set. The shape of the half-finished gazebo under the tarp had looked like something was growing out of the very grass itself. Some students had seen the wind and brought out a lopsided art-class box kite and were setting it up on the quad, one student holding the box and the other running backwards, letting the string run out between his fingers, and then he’d yelled to the other student who’d flung the kite into the air so the air caught and dragged it upwind where it bucked crazily against the updraft and she’d stopped to watch, her and a few others, watching the brown bulky thing twist and shiver midair like its own species of improbable bird, the nylon string a shadow’s shadow against clouds lit arrestingly with storm’s blue light, noticeable if you knew where to look, impossible to see it was hard as metal, its own entity, this liminal string that brought the hand up towards the kite as much as it kept the kite anchored to earth, the distance between point 1 and point 2 its own world expanding between finite things.

Perpetullennial Andrea Baumgartel

Let’s see Seattle!

Popping bottlecap Seattle— No bother don’t bother the Cranes horsy in their sky-cradles, otters Paddling skedaddle in Seattle.

Check out the people in Seattle!

I wanna be a person in Seattle.

Grow falafel. End up tech.

Hash tag noregrets when I forget My friends and forget Nothing more Than lapping up Seattle.

Running over in Seattle. My elbows Buried in— Ah, quintessentialattle.

Ladle me spaceneedles of Seattle.

Handle its candles (ínfuséd) so they freeze Their light on rainstick streets While the buses trapeze around the locals Of slinky time and ribbonjuice wine And cheese—

While I stand here in Seattle I’ve lost my mind, Seattle.

This evening school of thought Is fun to dabble in as well But my friends are getting jobs And my enemies are probably also getting jobs Not that I have any enemies But in theory I could Go off and be A firework But that is much too razzle dazzle And they got rid of all the plastic baggage In Seattle

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SSRI Lily Seibert

My mind convinces me that jets scraping sky are enemy forces coming to destroy the planet and that flesh-eating bacteria burrow their way into my intestines causing my body to combust from the inside out so the doctor gives me a pea-sized capsule that will allegedly unwind the tangled nests in my brain.

Ingesting you is a prayer that dies silently on my tongue like the bitter aftertaste that lingers on my tastebuds.

I can’t put my trust in anything, much less a pill that burns like acid.

You are the constant rattle in my purse, singing out promises of no more cold sweats in summer, no more 40

mind-numbing, soul-shattering feeling of dread approaching from all sides, no more calls piling up from friends I won’t see because somehow only my four poster bed gives me an illusion of safety, promises of serotonin and dopamine saturating my brain with pleasure, creating more effective synapses, inhibiting the reuptake of neurotransmitters that allow me to feel human touch again.

At your command I feel the slow unwinding of sinew and bone, muscles unfurling after years of dormancy, army forces withdrawing, my consciousness finding a place to land.

Raising you to my lips becomes a victory lap, a celebration of the chemical reactions that allow me to simply be.

I scoff at my former self, who imagined strangers scaling her 11 story building, coming to get her

in the night.

Stale breath escapes from my lungs, a sigh.

Only the feeling that comes from the absence of pain.

How could anyone say this is wrong?

My life becomes a before and after, like fault lines from an earthquake, and I’m months removed from the rugged ground on the other side of the rupture.

For you I traded the summit of a mountain at the northern tip of Morocco, waves and sand crashing together, making skin feel electric, The excitement of something intangible, beyond my reach, all for calm.

Heart pounding and sweaty palms in exchange for stillness.

You turned the brightness down, on everything, but I’ll take it if it means no longer

feeling blinded.

I tell the doctor I’m better but I feel like I don’t deserve it because the only thing making any difference is you, a foreign agent sent to douse a fire that accompanied me long before the thoughts had concrete ideas around which to wrap themselves, that defines me as much as my will to love strongly and passionately take the world in my grasp.

This calm is a daydream that departed along with training wheels and blanket forts at bedtime.

And I can’t help but wonder, as my brain rewires itself and neural connections disassociate in order to steady my breath whether I’m still me when I’m with you.

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Jump Creek Canyon |Naomi Clayton| photograph 42

Fort Da Clara Trippe

On a Thursday night, I woke to see your skin bubbling.

It slid down your bones like sleds down a hill in winter.

I could not look away. It was like all things beautiful and gruesome.

When we lay next to one another, I can feel the mattress breaking down around our sleeping figures, becoming worn in all the wrong places. My spine will grow crooked once you are gone, trying to fill space meant for two bodies. In the morning, the only sound I can register is eggs spiting on the stove, they slide from liquid to solid, lines of lace where they touched the pan for too long.

I don’t love you, I think. Not in how I have been taught: devotion as lungs caving in along a wooden cross.

I have yet to need anyone like I need blue sky in December. All else is second to this, my burning blue.

I had burned bones to bury. They are cumbersome, but I took them to the end of a dock and slid them far out across the ice, so that when the thaw came, what was left of you could watch the world become liquid and loud and ever moving. You could sink to the bottom, or you could find an out letting stream and flow past the city limits.

Either way, you’d be far away, in such a place I wouldn’t see the evidence of you leaving.

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Yonsei (SKY)— and me

Hyunji Eom

when i think of yonsei i think of yeon weak, yeonhada, to be weak—diluted. in korea, they say even rivers and mountains change in ten years i couldn’t come back for seventeen. when i think of yonsei i think of sei sae, like bird, like generation—altered, new. in class, we read of an exiled poet that renders those he considers lovely unto each star: memory; loneliness; mother. a girl tattoos it into her flesh.

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think, can we ever return to that mountain rising in the distance, top lower than the mist, the stars dimmed from the lamplights? i still smell the scent of tangerines, pulpy warmth off the heat of skin rising from eu— lalia fronds brushing our hands, swaying in the breeze. they are replaced within months. the darkening horizon remains blind against the glare of this city. watch, because the sky we see is shorter than the ocean that countless have dreamed across. here, i learn 가되, verb tense, conditional, you can leave, you can take—in exchange you come back, you return. we chant, breaths paused— we wait.

Kill One Off, Bring In Another Clara Trippe

Ever since Jenna moved to the city, her favorite part about getting drunk was walking home alone, when booze made her feet move faster and the lights all around her seemed to drip quickly with honey. It was the one time where she felt her loneliness and liked it; this emotion that was less of an emotion and more of a co-habitant, like she had moved into her body and loneliness was already established there, roaches underneath the sink.

When she broke up with her first and only boyfriend, that was what she told him, that she had an infestation of loneliness underneath her sink, and he wasn’t adequately trained to exterminate it. He told her the sex wasn’t good enough for this bullshit.

She considered the breakup mutual.

Now she was alone again, in a new city, and all around her loneliness was magnified across the concrete. She could feel it sliding across the telephone wires, and broadcasted on her neighbors’ TV’s in blue tinged light. She didn’t know any of her neighbors, but sometimes she would see them in the

hallway and their unfamiliar eyes made her miss her college, that was filled only with people she knew occupying various green space. When there was grass, some of the lonely sank into the ground, similar to the way sound is dampened by thick walls of insulation.

After her long walks home drunk, Jenna would stumble into her home and collapse on the couch, pulling her laptop closer to her with detective shows already queued up, the kinds with chalk boards and overcast skies. And also: always a corpse, a woman with eyes round and cold like a fish. The women looked the same in those worlds, dead or alive. In the grimy lighting off long alley walls, one show would have a blonde detective with an angular face, staring down at the body of another blonde with an angular face, like she was seeing her reflection battered beneath her. Across every episode, she watched the women look at each other without recognition, no moment where the blonde detective found a bathroom and locked the door so she could 45

“... always a corpse, a woman with eyes round and cold like a fish.”

stare into a mirror and remember what her face looked like without a halo of blood. Afterwards, against the dull ache of her fading drunk, Jenna would go to bed after and close her eyes, imagining an extra scene with the detective in her home, where she cried for the deaths of all the blonde women, her hands slowly tracing her ball joints, her orifices, trying to banish the memory of her reflected body littered with exit wounds. She was whole and unhurt but Jenna imagined underneath her grey detective clothes, maybe under her skin there were parts of her writhing in pain after watching her look-alikes being murdered again and again every episode.

Jenna’s dreams were always strange after this, though not in any overtly violent way. It would just be her and a sea of indistinguishable women, pushing forward like salmon up a river, knowing there was something behind them coming, but never seeing it for certain. It might as well be violent because the eyes of the women were wide with identical terror. When she woke, it took her a few minutes to remember that there was no threat now, nothing to make her heart beat quick.

But this night Jenna didn’t slide onto her couch with cop shows. She dropped her keys inside her doorway and decided to pick them up in the morning.

She had been doing that lately, miscalculating the grasp of her hands, or careening into doors as she turned corners. It was nice to be drunk and blame that, but it had been happening constantly and somewhere deep

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in her brain she was sure there was something wrong.

She thought of that old question, if a tree falls in a forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound? If no one is there to see her, is she walking in a straight line?

If no one witnesses her losing her mind, is she really going crazy?

Jenna pulls out her laptop and a piece of paper she had folded in her pocket, stained a bit on one side by beer. A man at the bar had told her she looked like a porn star he liked, something about how the way her mouth looked around her beer bottle. He had jotted her name down and YOUNG GIRL SUCKS AND FUCKS HER STEP BROTHER AT CHRISTMAS DINNER, saying it was his favorite. He had suggested she look it up, very simply like it was book she should check out of the library.

She pulled up a porn site, and was greeted with images of bodies overturned, closed eyes and mouths open in a way that could either be pleasure or agony.

Jenna never really understood porn. They all seemed the same. A male torso pumping tirelessly. A woman opened for all to see. Fingers and spit and the woman’s ass unnaturally round and shiny. She never watched a video all the way through; she had no interest in watching a disembodied penis ejaculate onto those shiny women.

When Jenna pulled up the porn star, she was disappointed to see that the woman in question did not really look like her. The porn star looked too young to be fucking on camera, with a star on her shoulder and

Bergen Hills in Norway | Sam Nakahira| ink 47

tiny hips, very far from Jenna’s figure, that got wide at the shoulders and hips. She knew she shouldn’t have been that surprised by this, that it was naive to think the man was telling her an interesting coincidence, instead of attempting a crude come-on, but still she felt her loneliness well up as the video played. The porn star was sucking on a dick furiously, like she was purposely trying to block her windpipe and choke to death.

Jenna held her breath as the porn star gagged, panted, and then went back in for more. She breathed a sigh of relief when the woman was flipped over, her mouth given a break.

It wasn’t arousal, but Jenna could feel her stomach stir in response to the shape of the two bodies against each other, grainy low angles of a thing placed in another thing again and again. The name of the porn star written down and crumpled in her pocket did nothing to identify this woman, who was just legs and a stomach and mostly a body with orifices to be filled.

A mouth permanently in a circle. Jenna wondered if learning how to be a porn star meant learning how to shape your body to fill a frame, or if it just took an extremely high pain tolerance. She was now watching the woman be bent into some sort of square. The

woman’s face was shiny like the skimmed surface of a lake.

She shut her laptop. It was too much, her mind imagining the woman after, her shiny body in front of a mirror, without grey clothes but still with invisible wounds, revealing all the ways she had been touched like blood along her thin, childlike frame. Jenna did not want her to be a person at all.

She wanted her to be shapes, a space to be filled while it itself was filling a different space through the camera. For this porn star to be a woman meant that Jenna was of the same breed, another body to be filled and watched and stylized with whatever oils they kept off set. The man at the bar had made her one, she was sure, in his own head. He had imagined her in shapes, on her knees or gagging. Her mouth around the bottle.

Jenna closed her eyes, watching the blue glow fade from even afterimages. She didn’t want to be one of these women that looked the same. She didn’t want to see her look a likes plastered on billboards or laying inert on television screens. Jenna stood and walked to her bathroom. She closed the door and locked it behind her, and took a few seconds in the dark before she flipped on the light. She considered herself in

“YOUNG GIRL SUCKS AND FUCKS HER STEP BROTHER AT CHRISTMAS DINNER”

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the mirror, and imagined her with a halo of blood.

Imagined it filling the frame. Imagined it breaking out of the rectangle and dripping into the sink. She was unsure where her body ended and the body of this porn star began, or the bodies of the blonde corpses, the blonde detective. In the end, it didn’t really matter if they looked the same. On the screen, they were made interchangeable. Kill one off, bring in another. There were plenty of bodies, all heading upstream, already in terror, already so aware that they were alone, even in their crowds. Jenna rested her forehead against the mirror, touching the forehead of her reflection, as if it was her daughter she was trying to comfort. She whispered to it,

“We are both here. We are in this together. We got this.�

Jenna turned off the bathroom lights. She laid in her bed, and closed her eyes, and when she opened them again she was once again in a crowd of women, but this time they all had her face. And this time, they did not look afraid.

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Contributors Andrea Baumgartel ‘19 prefers soggy cereal that has preferably been left sogging in the fridge overnight.

Sorry.

Mary Rose Bernal ‘19 Naomi Clayton ‘21 Allison Cottrell ‘21 enjoys a good carrot.

Steven Duong ‘19 is a fish from the family Cichlidae in the order Perciformes. He is a member of a suborder known as Labroidei, along with the wrasses (Labridae), damselfishes (Pomacentridae), and surfperches (Embiotocidae). This family is both large and diverse.

Hyunji Eom ‘19 I am a third-year English major pursuing medical studies. I hope I can continue to write lots more in the future.

Lydia James ‘19 Hung Le ‘19 I spend most of my free time reading punchy comics and trying to draw them.

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Sofia Mendez ‘19 is a third year from Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Sam Nakahira ‘19 I’m a third year History major with an American Studies concentration. In my free time, I like to make ink drawings. I get my artistic inspirations from manga, graphic novels, and internet procrastination.

Victoria Park ‘21 Victoria Park LLC.®™ is branded.

Lily Seibert ‘19 is a third year English major from New York City. In addition to writing for the S&B, she is also a member of the varsity softball team here at Grinnell.

Josie Sloyan ‘18 Miriam Tibbets ‘20 enjoys the scent of lemon soap and the voice of Peter Gabriel. Catch her in the grill, watching for a simple twist of fate.

Clara Trippe ‘18 believes Miss Vanjie was robbed on season 10 of Drag Race.

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