Sincerely,
Sincerely,
DearHoot,
It took me 22 years of life, 3 of which spent editing for this magazine, to bleed truth for the first time, in an email written on airplane mode. Do you know this feeling? Staring at a blank page/screen/United Eocnomy tray table thinking everything everywhere all at once until suddenly you have wrote it all without looking, in one breath, one hour, one flow of digital ink, one spell of honesty, and signed it, nameless, “Sincerely”.
Honest, vulnerable, unpolished and uncut work – humanity in letter form – is at both a premium and a loss. And so Sincerely begins with Body Signatures, with Em Chmiel returning us to basic expression, to the messages contained and framed in our faces, skin, hands. This is an issue of dreams, finished and unfinished, sweetened nightmares and tongue cut fantasies. Places and memories and bodies that exist caught between our imaginations and our pasts – fictions of sincerity (see Vera-cidic. These pages describe the beginnings of endless letters and best wishes unfulfilled – stories, regards, apologies undone and undressed.
Lyla Wolf opens a Love Song for Clarice Lispector; Kendall Bartell breathes a new vision into flight. Isabelle Shi knits poems whispering, screaming, and connecting desire as we spiral through these pages. In “Can’t We Go Back” and “Holey”, we are reminded of the great personal literatures of love and loss and beautiful endings that live only in our inboxes, in our skin, restless dreams, our desk drawers and bedsheets and the tender rips, tears, and holes in our clothes, forming their own holy gaze.
I hope you take this issue in all its unfinished and overthought sincerity – sincerely late, sincerely flawed, grateful and heartbroken and exhausted of our best wishes, regards, respect – sincerely yours and not yours. A love letter of our hearts, pressed into yours.
Sincerely,
Cate Mok Editor-in-Chief ‘24-25
BodySignatures
CREATIVE DIRECTOR Em Chmiel
PHOTOGRAPHERS Em Chmiel, Frankie Stolcke
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Will Park
MAKEUP ARTIST Mason Harper
PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS Chloe Alto, Grace Zhang, Sofia Trujillo, Anand Chitnis, Madelyn Elizonado, Dina Cazun
MODELS Faye Fariz, Anjali Rao, Anja Vasa, Eve Girzadas, Chimene Keys, Daisy Freidman
Sincerely, a valediction often used to sign off messages of importance, bears the connotation of genuine, heartfelt affection. Things said or done sincerely are authentic, unguarded, and vulnerable. To move through the world sincerely is to embrace its indelible touch, allowing ourselves to be sculpted by every encounter, every moment. When considering how sincerity manifests in everyday life, we were drawn to the body as a focal point for life’s “sculpting.” What are the physical manifestations of living a sincere life? What does a sincere body look like?
Desire all the things I think about to circumvent my thoughts of you
1. her eyes skim my headscard down to 妈妈’s flats so of course I tried to do a twirl for her in this skirt too biiiiigbigbig for me that’s the worth of it, it’s not nibt to hold. i hold up a finger for her to wait because Waiti have more — i lift up all that which is all too big for me to show all my little secrets. she laughts, i laugh because of her laugh.
2. the things (two things: the white top you’ve seen me in, and our skin in a bag) we lost to the pacific ocean. because i heard those who die not on earth will in the sea and i was so pleased to hear this i may just start letting currents wash over everything i hold
3. 爸爸 tells them i’m turning a big round humber and i wanted to laugh and cry because he’s right and wrong and to him, this not-so-big0round-number is me. Me his biggest pride, while my biggest pride is how long i can grow out my fourth nail. no, see? my biggest pride is you too. you who slipped into the water, too, for a split secondjust so you could get that photo of me standing in forty-degree-midnight, smiling with my most nig round number teeth and lips and cheeks that’s it, that’s it that’s it that’s it that’s it that’s it
Lyla Wolf
LOVE SONG FOR CLARICE
LISPECTOR
(and I know what I want now). I have found it. I have found an immeasurable love, a knowledge of what I desire, a compulsion to kiss an artwork and leave my lipstick to stain, a comfort similar to that of being held. I have found it in the writing of Clarice Lispector, writing that may be as close to life as anything is without being life itself. The intimacies in each story—the faint blood stains on cotton underwear, the horrible feeling of asking “who am I?”, the learning to experience pleasure—these are parts of myself which I haven’t yet put into words, and I am at once relieved and angry that Lispector has done it so perfectly (I fear that I have been infected with jealousy). But the next best thing to writing it (or perhaps equally as good, or maybe even better) is reading it. Despite my possible obsession and definite love for Lispector’s work, often when I read it I do not quite know what I am reading. We quote Aristotle who speaks of our human desire to know, but do I want to know? I think more than that, I want to feel. In The Hour of the Star I become Macabéa who wants nothing more than to be like Marilyn Monroe; in An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures I become Lóri slowly finding love, although I must differentiate between the commonly described feeling of
“escape” one gets from engaging with a work of art, and this feeling here: ________. Reading her I feel less like anything I know how to tell you and more like >(!)( , do you understand?
It is glory. Lovely. Melting.
Cool. Discovery. Selfhood.
Something that feels at once very personal and very universal.
When I read Lispector there are always moments in which a shout, a yes, an ohhowIloveyou, a THIS rises in my throat, a longing to let her know that I know and that she knows and thank you. “Don’t forget that for now it’s strawberry season. Yes,” and I know what you mean even in December. YES I want to shout (ideally from a rooftop) yesyesyes! Reading her on the train downtown I must control myself so that I don’t let out this exclamation and startle someone sitting nearby. Lispector’s writing is the kind which I must consume all at once, and when I have a paper to write and so on I say to myself just one more page because I never want it to end, and doesn’t life sometimes feel so full of waiting for endings? The sweetness of a plum. Picture this: a thirst that comes after forgetting to drink water that day, that hot and dry day in June, and then drinking it glass after glass or even straight from the faucet. This feeling of quenching thirst is similar
to that of reading Lispector. And the jessamine!!! Before I picked up Àgua Viva for the first time, I had never read someone who adores flowers the way I do (at the Whitney I stood in front of O’Keeffe for at least an hour) (I would exclaim on spring walks with my sister a desire to eat the lilac) (often I would eat the lilac) (a wanting to somehow tape a gardenia above my lips so that I could smell it constantly) (becoming someone else entirely each spring and summer—a little girl again).
When Lispector writes of flowers I am taken back to the extravagant wall of jasmine I once stood under in Rome, momentarily unable to move; transfixed and in awe. Her words become the perfume. Her style too. The softness of white florals, the tenderness of unfurling leaves, the sharpness of peppercorn. There is no doubt that she understands an em dash, a comma, an ellipsis… that’s the thing about her writing, you can look at each individual piece—be it grammar, punctuation, plot, or dialogue—and each one is artful. Now picture all of it together! And there are lines that can be enjoyed on their own:
“What a thin slice of watermelon”
she writes, a line that I repeat to myself when I miss the bus or when I look down at my thighs loathingly or when I get blood
on my beloved cotton underwear or when I get a B on my French exam or all the other times… What a thin slice of watermelon! Lines like this, which color her stories perfectly, create a work that feels rather like a film. Her writing is saturated with real, awesome (I remember being eleven years old and learning the real meaning of this word, not just the overused connotation but the awe, and that is what I mean when I use it) sensuality. My mother, my sister, and I used to watch Kurosawa’s Dreams, a film whose glowing stories I adore, and I feel that same adoration and vibrancy when reading Lispector’s words. Intensely beautiful. Reading about Macabéa, who wants to be a movie star, I feel much better and not so crazy wanting to be someone I know I cannot be. She embodies a desire for identity and love and I suppose this is what it is to be of this age and to be alive but doesn’t it feel so intimate and delicate and consuming? For Lispector to capture this in eighty pages is an accomplishment in itself. She must have understood what it means to be alive. The style of her prose and punctuation seems to say, “I’m alive and I know I am,” it seems to reach out its arms and offer an embrace, a kiss on the forehead. Her prose feels alive on the page and somehow that transfers to the reader: a widening of the eyes, a filling of the lungs with air, a heart beating a little faster, a sudden en-
Lyla Wolf
-ergy to jump up and do the dishes or call someone. When I’m reading her I no longer need Zoloft or a new dress or anything of the sorts, in fact I’m not sure I need anything at all. Is this love? I think to myself, it must be. Reading, I fall in absolute love, falling, falling… and it is not the ground I eventually land on; instead it is a bed in a small room in Rio, or alone in the early morning sea—the very green Mediterranean. To understand you must understand this: if I remember one thing from Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire it will surely be the readiness to live life as described through color, just as when I think of my favorite film, Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Betty Blue, I can immediately hear the rich sound of the piano, see the pink paint, the green popsicle. I am a sensual woman—sharp air, thin sun, fragrant dusk, nectarine pulp: these things control me—so I am instantly drawn to Lispector’s work not only for its stories and characters, but for its engagement with the senses. I cannot forget the hotdogs or the most perfect description of Coca-Cola or the dying rose continuously replaced with a new one. If—on a particular day, reading a book of hers—I am too full of anything that fills a person (the various anxieties and obsessions) to really understand her story, there seemsto always be a perfume to smell, a fruit to eat, a jasmine vine so alive it may very well make me weep.
MODELS Emily Heimer, Natasha Last- Bernal, Oluchi Nancy Onyimah, Mira Boyer
CREATIVE DIRECTOR Vaidehi Shrestha
PHOTOGRAPHER Harper Rosenberg
PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS Hailey Khetan, Arisha Lari
From the Moon, I Call | Isabelle Shi
Sejin? She hears
In between my gasps
Slow down, she asks me
To slowdownmylove, but I’m only Human, my lungs
Aren’t suited
To breathe up
Here, it’s beautiful
I see things
Burn, I Miss you I bend
Back, and I’m burning I say I’mburningI’mburning too
To her it’s no concern
Look, she says
Do you hear
It pulsing, the music I push
Down my lungs
And laugh, I hear it I hear it
Fit
Into the spaces in my backbone, and For a place with no gravitational pull I still am Attracted
To winter & after I weep the wet Slips
Away. I slow & my lungs rise. & rumble
They flit away
This is the Moon, after all—
Title | Isabelle Shi
I wake up with my tongue cut bad from a dream but I rarely get nightmares, and Nat doesn’t dream. I think about the morning my eyelids opened to a surge of saltwater and that shit had stung, spilling into all the crevices of my skin and still it did not wash away all the moles that weren’t mine. This time, I turn from the wall to Nat’s stricken face: me too, me too I also had a dream where girls got murdered and before you could say pair of mantis knives or $2.99 bundle of leaves or any other perfectly ordinary detail from our perfectly freakish dreams–—
the water rushes back———but unlike its first deluge last winter—this one’s a rumbling low beneath the skin——can you hear its hummmmmmmmm…it goes like yes yes yes yes it just goes it goes just like the currents I no longer fear
Birds of Paradise
Creative Director & Photographer
Kendall Bartell
Stylist
Sam Rosen
Models
Mason Holliday
Anja Vasa
Elisa Vasquez
Fabiola Villatoro
Anusha Wangnoo
Production Assistants
Video Makeup Artists Casting
Sage Rahim
Anjali Rao Vasa
Harper Rosenberg
Arden Pochna
Isis Washington
Cayla Lamar
e r a c i-dic
PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS
Cas Sommer, Isabella Rasch, Isabelle Shi, Isis Washington, Paula Duarte
CONTRIBUTING DESIGNER Eleanor Trask
SPECIAL THANKS Barnard Theatre Department
Paula Duarte, Isabelle Shi
Romi Marckx STYLIST ASSISTANTS
STYLIST
MAKE UP ARTIST Mason Harper MAKE UP ASSISTANT Isis Washington
Romi Marckx
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
PHOTOGRAPHER Norman Godinez
MODELS Dani Rivera-Agudeloi, Leah Gonzalez-Diaz, Maya Shkolnik, Mira Boyer
EXECUTIVE BOARD
Editor-in-Chief – Cate Mok
Digital EIC – Lyla Wolf
Layout Director – Emily Heimer
Editor at Large – Maya Shkolnik
Socials Director – Romi Marckx
Events Director – Qulani Mohammed
Treasurer – Julia Neely
EDITORIAL STAFF
Layout
Ava Beredo
Sonia Kim
Fernanda Andrade
Sophie Cheng
Anna Song
Arisha Lari
Writing
Jayna Rohslau
Sophie Johnson
Natasha Last-Bernal
Althea Downing-Sherer
Sebastiana Hobey
Eleanor Gonzales
Isabelle Shi
Malvika Reddy
Arden Sklar
Keren Kubersky
Leah Gonzalez-Diaz
Anjali Rao
Yawen Yuan
Alexandra Churchland
Socials
Ava Beredo
Mira Boyer
Nick Machayi
Evie Komninakas
Andee Lee
Anjali Rao
Chancey Stefanos
Natasha Last-Bernal
Events
Anjali Rao
Nick Machayi
Digital
Ezinne Okonkwo
Cianna Boayue
Zoe Pyne
Masthead
BODY SIGNATURES
CD: Em Chmiel
Frankie Stolcke
Will Park
Mason Harper
Chloe Alto
Grace Zhang
Sofia Trujillo
Anand Chitnis
Madelyn Elizonado
Dina Cazun
Faye Fariz
Anjali Rao
Anja Vasa
Eve Girzadas
Chimene Keys
Daisy Freidman
CAN’T WE GO BACK
CD: Ezinne Okonkwo
Chancey Stefanos
Ollie Mitchell
Tonycia Coe
Nick Machayi
Kathy Cao
Qulani Mohammed
Angelina Jia
Leah Gonzalez-Diaz
Elisa Vasquez
Isabelle Shi
Alexandra Churchland
HOLEY
CD: Vaidehi Shrestha
Emily Heimer
Natasha Last- Bernal
Oluchi Nancy Onyimah
Mira Boyer
Vaidehi Shrestha
Harper Rosenberg
Hailey Khetan
Arisha Lari
BIRDS OF PARADISE
CD: Kendall Bartel
Anjali Rao Vasa
Harper Rosenberg
Arden Pochna
Isis Washington
Cayla Lamar
Anusha Wanganoo
Mason Holliday
Anja Vasa
Elisa Vasquez
Sam Rosen
Fabiola Villatoro
Sage Rahim
VERACI-DIC
CD: Romi Marckx
Cas Sommer
Isabella Rasch
Isabelle Shi
Isis Washington
Paula Duarte
Mason Harper
Norman Godinez
Dani Rivera-Agudeloi
Leah Gonzalez-Diaz
Maya Shkolnik
Mira Boyer
Eleanor Trask
Contributors
honestly, wholeheartedly,ingenuouslyingoodfaith, in earnest, resolutely, fervently, truly,
faith, in earnest, resolutely,
truly,earnestly, genuinely, simply,naively, naturally, evercordially, so sweetly, seriously, truthfully,
