Wink

LIBERTAS

V o l . 19 , n o. 1

the ;) issue

SATREBIL editorial EDITORS IN CHIEF Jordan Luebkemann | Will Reese POETRY Rachel Beeton & Jenn Chalifoux FICTION Tim Rauen & Meg Mendenhall NOT FICTION Ben Wiley FILM Edie Nicolaou-Griffin MUSIC Michael DeSimone TRANSLATION Katie Kalivoda & Graham Whittington ART Dani Steely

Contributors Jenn Chalifoux, Tom Champion, Jacob Cole, Drew Maurer, Chad Salter, Claire Samuels, Vera Schulman, Taylor Sorillo, Natalie Williford Libertas belongs to the students of Davidson College.

Contact the editors at libertas@davidson.edu

special thanks to. ..

Faculty Advisors: Paul Miller, Scott Denham (emeritus), Zoran Kuzmanovich (emeritus), Ann Fox (emeritus) Previous Editors: Emily Romeyn, Vincent Weir, Mike Scarbo, Vic Brand, Ann Culp, Erin Smith, Scott Geiger, James Everett, Catherine Walker, Elizabeth Burkhead, Chris Cantanese, Kate Wiseman, Lila Allen, Jessica Malordy, Nina Hawley, Kate Kelly, Zoe Balaconis, Rebecca Hawk, and Hannah Wright Founder: Zac Lacy visit us online: sites.davidson.edu/libertas

LIBERTAS W I N K

O c t o b er 1 0 , 2 0 1 3

Rachel Beeton

3

Ode to Online Dating

Tim Rauen

4

Out Of Phase

Meg Mendenhall

5

Snake Oil

Katie Kalivoda (trans.)

6

Borges and I

Nick Evans (trans.)

7

German Texts From Last Night

Madeline Parker

8

Lazy Hazy Tuesday

Megan Mavity (trans.)

9

A Wink, An Accomplice, A Desire

Ben Wiley Sarah Hamilton

10 ---

Why Can’t We Have Nice Things?

Thoughts From Abroad: Government Shutdown Edition

Edie Nicolaou-Griffin

11

Needs Work

Kelsey Wilson

12

You Can’t Make a Rainbow Out of Gay Cis Men

Michael DeSimone

13

Michael’s Relevant Music Picks

Anonymous Collaboration

14

Sexts

Timmy Basista

15

Last Word: Don’t Miss Sex

featured artist Kayli Rideout is a junior Studio Art major and Religion minor at Davidson College. She has a focus on portraiture and works mainly in the mediums of colored pencil and paint. She is currently in London, studying Renaissance art. Her interests include boybands and she’s thinking about getting bangs.

Ode to Online Dating Rachel Beeton

Dantheman54 likes me.

He says I seem cool and we should link up.

I don’t know what linking up is.

Is that something you do online, or in person?

I’ve answered a lot of questions in the “About Me” section.

I’ve said my name is Anne, which is a lie.

Against my better judgment, I’ve put up some pictures.

I just want to be loved.

I want to come home to a house where a boy’s heart flickers like a candle.

I want to feel the difference between cold and hot.

My mom says I’m a blonde bombshell, that I have a great figure.

She thinks every boy we meet likes me.

Dantheman54 lives fifty-four miles away from me.

He’s single; he’s 29.

My therapist says when we watch TV shows, the characters become our friends.

Maybe that’s what made Friends such a great show!

I mean, the producers literally called it friends as in, here are some friends for you to hang with on Friday night.

Rachel and Ross always did love each other.

Shakespeare says love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, but our professor says he’s talking about God’s love.

I want to be in love, so I can tell you about it.

But mostly, so that I can tell him, this person, this shape, that sometimes I’m not even sure I deserve to live, that today I watched this video about mistreated pigs in a slaughter house and I think I’m broken hearted. Understand, Understand, I think, I’m broken hearted. I’m broken hearted.

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LIBERTAS, Vol. 19, No. 1

Out of Phase

Where are we?

Sam recognized Dr. Masler’s voice, but it sounded distorted, a handful of lonely frequencies, thin as slivered glass. Beside him sat a simulacrum of his therapist, precise to the pore, but lifeless as a wax doll. Wind rippled the simulacrum’s loose black dress but never stirred her slightly parted lips. Her stillness strengthened the impression that the disembodied voice was speaking directly into Sam’s head, which in a sense was true.

“I’m in your office,” he said. “Right where I left you.”

Sam and the simulacrum sat in matching wicker chairs near the edge of a seaside cliff where wave after wave burst apart like muted fireworks. The sun hid behind a cumulus quilt, leaving a chilly haze that clung to the skin and smelled of salt water.

Again, Dr. Masler’s voice echoed between Sam’s ears: Conceding that point on the most literal level, the machine should have constructed a virtual environment by now. What I mean to ask is, where is your mind?

Sam inhaled deeply, savoring the sensation of cool, fresh air circulating in his sinuses. “Careful, Doc. Do you really want to know? I’m a sick bastard, remember? A criminal. My mind’s not someplace a sweet lady like you belongs.”

An eddy in the sea breeze blew a lock of blonde hair in front of the simulacrum’s face but she made no move to brush it back.

She never blinked, or turned away, much to Sam’s discomfort.

Oh, don’t be so dramatic. I know that whatever unscrupulous shadows may be lurking in your subconscious have yet to surface. The

machine is designed to start you off in a neutral location, somewhere you feel safe and calm.

Can you tell me where it’s taken you?

“To my happy place. Bright sun.

Beautiful birdsong. Unicorns and Korean prostitutes frolicking in the green… pasture? What’s the happiest word for clovers and lots of grass?”

A far away, half-metallic sigh rose out of the waves. Come on, Sam. You’re just wasting both of our time. Whether you believe it or not, you came to therapy to heal, and that can’t happen if we keep secrets from each other.

“Actually, I came to therapy because the alternative was prison.”

Prison is still an option.

Sam hesitated. “You’re bluffing.”

Are you sure?

Sam looked down and picked at a strand of wicker for a few moments. He could feel the simulacrum’s manikin gaze as he considered his options. A gull cry pierced the ambient percussive flapping of a flag somewhere overhead. Underneath, the ancient ocean muttered to itself.

“We’re by the ocean,” he said. “Well, an ocean.”

More muttering.

And?

“And it’s peaceful, I guess. And grey.

The kind of grey that gets on your skin, you know? You can feel it. And there’s some ocean breeze. Typical. And… we’re sitting in chairs looking out over a cliff.”

He paused to gather his thoughts. “It all feels sort of distant, though… You know what it’s like? It’s like if Edward Hopper ever painted the ocean.” Another pause.

“You’ve been to the ocean, right? It’s a goddamn ocean.”

Tim Rauen

That’s the beauty of this machine. Most people don’t realize just how powerful their memories are, or how accurate.

Sam grunted noncommittally.

“Memory. In an icicle, a firefly chrysalis, autumn’s memory dreams in semaphore, waiting in its cold sarcophagus to melt in spring, wiser than before. That was weird.

Did I say that out loud? I’m not sure why I said that. That made no sense. It’s something Lucy said to me, and I know those are the words she used. Somehow. I didn’t remember those words until just now.”

The simulacrum, stirring for the first time, reached over and patted his hand.

Outbursts like that are normal at first. The machine allows your conscious and sub-conscious to overlap, and the results may surprise you. Who is Lucy, a friend of yours?

“Doesn’t matter. A ghost.” Sam pulled his hand away and slipped it into his pocket. “You know, it’s funny. You said this environment is constructed from my memory, but I don’t remember this place at all.”

Perhaps not consciously, but that might be for the best while you grow accustomed to the interface.

Sam’s armchair creaked as he shifted his weight to a more comfortable posture.

“I’m well past accustomed.”

Once again, this isn’t for your conscious mind. Your brain is adjusting to receiving sensory information from within, and it takes time.

Ideally, the process should occur in a low stimulus environment. Try to endure your boredom a little longer, and the machine will take you to another memory when you’re ready.

LIBERTAS, V o l . 1 9 , N o . 1

4

Snake Oil Meg Mendenhall The man approached in his tie, striding confidently, hands closed, shoe-taps shuddering out into the air, under the streetlights casting the hue of stars. This, at least, is how Roy imagined it later. He didn’t actually see the man’s approach, of course: he was in his study, thumbing absentmindedly through a stack of papers that he couldn’t remember if he wanted to keep or throw away or what. The thumbing wasn’t helping, as he hadn’t read a single neat black word that passed beneath his eyes. He was using the stack of jumbled papers as a handy implement of self-pity, a metaphor for the despairing disorder of his life.

He wondered where Wanda was. Probably in the kitchen, foraging for dessert, or taking off her jewelry in the elaborate master bathroom they supposedly shared—her eyes would be distant, cast aside. The flicker of a secret smile.

Maybe that was too much.

Anyway, there was Roy in his study (what if he went on a diet?), and Wanda doing whatever secret thing she was doing, and the child in bed, while the man strolled ever nearer the house, whistling all the while.

(The truth was that Roy had been gradually gaining weight his whole married life, a few pounds each year, maybe, and before he knew it his office was littered with copies of DietNOW, Men Slim, and even Women’s Health magazines—and he was nowhere near the man Wanda had wedded. He used to be quite good-looking. But Wanda, bless her domesticated heart, was such a cook, and the business dinners and all, and—could he really be blamed? Well, he had no doubt that something about this was his fault.

Of course Wanda was if anything thinner than before, despite her ever-developing sweet tooth. He was starting to think that she only ever ate when he was around to watch, to prove she was human, except of course the dessert he wasn’t supposed to see and the double-helping of red wine before bed. [“It’s good for my heart, honey bear.”] He had long since decided that weight control was one of those secret arts handed down the matriarchy. Out of his area.)

Sometimes with an odd pang it occurred to him that the feeling he felt in other parts of his house was something like fear. He stopped thumbing through the pages, not out of fear, but because of the doorbell, though the sound and the feeling were perhaps not mutually exclusive. He decided maybe Wanda would answer, but in a minute or so it rang 5

LIBERTAS, Vol. 19, No. 1

again, and so, not wanting to wake the child, Roy pushed himself out of his squishy spinning chair and forged a path through the hall, the living room, the foyer, and opened the door.

“Hi,” said the man who stood there, under the incandescent porch light, wearing his smile like his tie. He introduced himself and held out a straight hand.

“I’m Roy,” said Roy. “What can I do for you...?” he was going to finish the question with the man’s name, but he’d apparently already forgotten it, so he let the question trail off awkwardly.

“Well, sir,” said the man. “Your reputation in business precedes you. It has come to my attention through your activities in the great world of commerce that you are a man whose prestige is rivaled only by your beneficence, which in turn is rivaled only by your”—a wink here —“exacting demand for perfection.”

Roy, now in work-mode, an executive kept from his ritualistic midnight-oil burning, interrupted here: “Let’s cut to the chase, friend. Are you selling something?”

“Well, sir,” said the Man. “As a matter of fact, I am. You will, however, be interested—” “Thank you, but—” “—But you’ll be interested to know that my aim tonight is to extend that perfection outside of the business world, to areas in your life you might find lacking, or perhaps a little... overmuch.”

Roy, who was already closing the door, stopped suddenly.

“What type of perfection do you mean, exactly?”

“Well, sir,” said the man, hesitating for a moment. He straightened his tie. “In exact terms...I’m talking about weight loss.”

Roy eyed the man, then swung the door open. “Call me Roy, please,” he said.

“Of course, sir.”

The man picked up his bag—which, Roy noticed, was not a salesman’s briefcase or a politician’s rolling whathave-you, but something more like a carpet bag, like what a pre-war vagrant or a French gypsy would carry, but with handles—and followed Roy through the foyer, the living room, the hallway, and into the study. Small talk was made.

Roy apologized for the mess; the man complimented the house. Roy sat in his squishy spinning chair and gestured

one hand toward the sofa, indicating either “Do sit,” or “Please, spiel away.”

“That’s Archie?” said the man, nodding to a picture on Roy’s bookshelf.

“Yes,” said Roy, “he’s growing fast.” (Had he mentioned the boy’s name already? He didn’t remember. Probably.)

“Youth is precious,” said the man, before launching into his pitch.

The chemical details of the product, which comprised a large part of the spiel, Roy did not follow, but he enthusiastically reached for the “results pamphlet” that the man pulled out of his gypsy bag. Its glossy pages included numerous testimonials from the enthusiastically thin and several colorful charts that proved success beyond reasonable doubt. Roy, perhaps to prove that he was as exacting as the man had supposedly heard, raised skeptical eyes from the brochure and said, “I see commercials for this kind of thing on TV all the time. What makes this any different from all that stuff?”

“Well, you see, sir,” said the man, “most of what you’ve seen on television advertises mail-order diet plans, right? Or a pill you take at such-and-such time relative to a meal for so-and-so many weeks?”

Roy grunted affirmation.

“This here, you see, is neither plan nor pill.” (Unexpectedly, Roy was reminded of contraception.) “Rather, it’s a single solution, taken once in all of your long and happy life, that works gradually (but, of course, efficiently) over a number of days.”

Also unexpectedly, Roy chuckled. “Like a magic potion.”

“Exactly.”

Unable to help himself now, somehow irretrievably loosened by his own sudden laughter in the presence of so serious and contrived a man, Roy prattled, between more chuckles, “Imagine Wanda, can you? Suddenly impressed— heh heh—asking before bed one night, how did you do it?—ho ho ho—I can tell her it was magic...it was really magic...”

To be honest, Roy had no idea why he was laughing. He didn’t think the idea of a liquid medicine was in any way preposterous, not even one that could cause safe-and-consistent weight loss over a gradual-but-efficient number of days. He didn’t even feel particularly happy. Poor man, Roy

thought as he heaved for breath, probably thinks I’m laughing at him. Probably won’t sell me the damn thing now.

But the man only inclined his head back and eyed Roy over the bridge of his mathematically straight nose.

“Would you like to see it?”

“Of course,” breathed Roy, trying his best to match the man’s seriousness again. After a bit of digging around in the carpet bag, the man revealed a plastic vial of wine-colored liquid and passed it indulgently to his customer.

“And this will really do it, eh?” said Roy, shaking it lightly.

The man grinned as Roy unscrewed the white cap and sniffed the contents. “Smells like roses.”

For the first time, the man’s smile faltered (yet even this, somehow, seemed like a practiced gesture). “That’s my mistake. I seem to have handed over the wrong bottle.” He reached for it, yet some instinct—maybe the ambiguous feeling that he’d somehow gotten the man, beat him at his own game—prompted Roy to clutch the vial tighter, even hold it back slightly in a gesture reminiscent of keep-away.

“What’s this one do?”

And the man: “We in the business call that one the Love Potion.”

“So it’s what? Some sort of ED thing?”

“You could say it treats...emotional dysfunction. For when He’s way out of your league, or She doesn’t love you anymore.”

“It sounds like a real love potion.”

Roy regarded the Man for several long seconds. And, with another outburst of wheezy laughter: “How the hell do you sell this one?”

The man sighed. “We don’t, really. We have to bet it.”

“Bet it?”

“You get a free trial. If it doesn’t work, send it back, no problem, sorry for the inconvenience. If it works, then we bill you.”

Roy, distracted by the very idea of a love potion—much less the fact that here was a man who proposed that he, Roy, really held one in his hands—did not notice that such things usually worked the other way around. They were moneyback guarantees. Not honor-system billing methods. But Roy was thinking about love potions, about lovers, about the notes in Wanda’s jewelry box. With a tilted head, the man

watched him.

“How much do you charge for this?” Roy asked, taking another whiff of roses.

The man shrugged. “It depends on the case, what it was used for, how effective it is. I assure you it’s quite reasonable, especially for a man of your means.”

The other morning Roy had noticed that he was missing a pair of socks. All day at work he imagined Wanda snatching them out of a laundry basket, or even out of his dresser drawer, and tossing them to the bedsheet-tangled note-writer, ‘I’ll keep looking, but here, your feet at least may be the same size.’

He said to the man, or to the vial of wine-colored liquid, or to the socks clenched in Wanda’s fist, or to the shutting of the jewelry box, “Money’s no object, really.”

As the man strolled away from the house, Roy brought Wanda that night’s glass of wine, just a nice gesture, to show he notices these things. Later, in the dark room, he feels her hand slide over his belly, her leg, the man’s shoetaps shudder out under streetlights, and upstairs the child, for a little while longer, breathes quietly in his sleep.

Borges and I

By Jorge Luis Borges Translated by Katie Kalivoda The other, Borges, is whom things happen to. I walk around Buenos Aires and I dally, almost mechanically, so I can stare at the arch of the entryway and the patio door; I received news of Borges by mail and I see his name on the short list of three professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like the hourglasses, the maps, the typography of the eighteenth century, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; the other shares those preferences, but in a conceited way that turns them into an actor’s quirks. It would be an exaggeration to say that our relationship is hostile; I live, I let myself be, so that Borges can craft his literature and that literature substantiates me. It doesn’t take anything to confess that he’s reached certain valid pages, but those pages can’t sustain me, perhaps because the good already belongs to no one, not even the other, but to the language or the tradition.

For the rest, I am destined to lose myself, definitely, and only one moment of me can survive in the other. Little by little I go on yielding everything to him, even though I acknowledge his perverse custom to distort and exaggerate. Spinoza understood that all things want to be preserved in their self; the stone wants to be a stone forever and the tiger a tiger. I have stayed in Borges, not in myself (if I even am someone), but I recognize less of myself in his books than in many others or in the grinding strum of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and I went from the mythologies of the slums to the games with time and with the infinite, but those games belong to Borges now and I will have to devise other things. My life is a escape this way and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or the other.

I don’t know which of the two writes this page.

LIBERTAS, V o l . 1 9 , N o . 1

6

23:15 Wir sollten einen Bierkuchen backen! :D 23:17 Inwiefern?

23:20 Mit Bier!! XD 23:23 Meinste, das schmeckt?

23:25 Oder wir lassen den kuchen weg und nehmen nur das bier. :D 11:15PM We should bake a Beercake! :D 11:17PM In what way?

11:20PM With beer!! XD 11:23 You think that would taste good?

11:25 Or we leave the cake out and just take the beer. :D

Texts from last night, in Berlin Translated from the original German by

Nick Evans

00:50 Wieso hast du aufgehört zu schreiben?:o 00:55 Weil ich nicht mehr betrunken bin *g* 00:57 OMG wie geimein!._.

01:00 Sorry, ich wusste nicht das ich lügen soll...

Mein Handy ist kaputt.

01:05 Kein Empfang...

01:07 Ich bin durchs hohe Gras gelaufen, und wurde von einem Pokemon attackiert.

12:50AM Why did you stop writing? :o 12:55AM Cause I’m not drunk anymore *g* 12:57AM OMG how mean! ._.

1:00AM Sorry I didn’t know I should lie...my phone is broken.

1:05AM No service...

1:07AM I was walking through tall grass and was attacked by a Pokemon.

04:45 Alter, lebst du noch?

05:16 Ghkbbgtukncgf 05:22 Okay das reicht mir als Antwort!

4:45AM Dude, you still alive?

5:16AM Ghkbbgtukncgf 5:22AM Okay that answer works for me!

22:10 ... so eine wie mich findest du NIE WIEDER! 00:11 Das ist der Plan 10:10PM ... you’ll never find somebody like me AGAIN!!!

12:11AM That’s the plan

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LIBERTAS, Vol. 19, No. 1

Lazy Hazy Tuesday The pot of boiling water hissed and steamed. Two cups of fine china sat next to the stove waiting to be filled. A third teacup was further off to the side, almost dangling from the edge of the counter: clean, untouched, but not to be used today. Catarina had taken the three cups out of the cupboard earlier in the afternoon, anticipating a second visitor, but now the one pair on the counter touched handles, the third cup at a distance. The hissing sound grew louder, angrier. They were in the bedroom--not a far distance, but desire had taken precedence over chamomile tea.

Shoes, her brown moccasins and his worn loafers, lay sprawled across the hardwood floor outside of the room. She had a no-shoes rule within five feet of any piece of furniture--bed, couch, armchair--that might be slept or fucked in. The dirt and stench of shoes was meant to be kept completely separate from the pleasantries of life, like sex and sleep. She was like that, methodical and sensible but also unpredictable and kind of crazy. That was part of her beauty, the contradictions she embodied.

“Mm, maybe we should go get that tea from the stove, huh?” The Man said to Catarina, her naked body curled up and facing him, eyelids drooping. “Should’ve put on a pot of coffee. You look so tired.”

Catarina raised herself from the bed, wrapping a patched quilt around her shoulders.

Her arms covered, nothing more, she moved from the bedroom to the kitchen. The Man followed. Turning the stove off and removing the pot, the hissing devolved into a small whimper, and she poured the water into the cups, side by side.

“You know where the sugar is,” she told him, eyes fixated on the water in the cup as it turned from clear to light yellow. Catarina liked her tea bag to sit in the cup for twice as long as the box suggested; that’s how her mom had made it years ago. Then she drank the tea fast, always without sugar or cream. Took away from the flavor, she said, but The Man never did change his habit of two spoonfuls of sugar, one creamer. These two were separate except when together, different in all regards but to be united in their tryst. Catarina had him over almost every Tuesday afternoon: his lunch break, her selfprescribed time away from the easel. Too much time in front of her artwork drove Catarina crazy; she treated art like she did her relationships, with lots of carefully mandated rules and distance: methodical. But then she was free to break those rules whenever she wanted to: unpredictable.

He stirred the cream and sugar with a wooden spoon because Catarina didn’t own any other type of silverware. The underlying metallic taste served as an “assault to her taste buds,” she’d explained to him once. Some of the wooden spoons and forks had been made in her workshop; she had bought the knives from a store, though, after giving up on her attempts to make the wooden “blade” sharp enough to actually cut through food. The Man seemed not to understand most of her eccentricities, but avoided questioning them.

Tea poured, Catarina slumped down onto the floor, back sliding against the smooth side of the counter. She noisily gulped the hot liquid like a feverish child tasting water for the first time in days. The Man probably wondered how she could do this without burning her pretty pink tongue as he blew on the rising steam of his beverage, hesitant to take a sip. Catarina set the cup down on the floor, and it wobbled a bit in a dreidel-like motion. Her movements were usually loud and exaggerated, either because she didn’t give a fuck or because she liked to draw attention to herself. Likely both, though Catarina’s dark curls, vibrant and wide green eyes, and tanned skin didn’t really let her fade into the background anyway. But it’s often those people who crave attention the most of all, maybe just to see how much of it they can get. The Man certainly did enjoy devoting his energy and undivided concentration towards Catarina on these lazy afternoons, once the tea was drunk and they rejoined their bodies in the bedroom.

Today she must not have wanted to return to the bedroom. He was still sipping at the tea, but she wasn’t in a patient mood. The Man allowed Catarina to force the cup out of his hand, fingers uncurling from the handle without protest. Instead of pulling herself up from the floor to imitate his position, Catarina tugged at his hand, round eyes asking him to fall down onto the wooden floor atop her reclining body. He conceded, already unclothed and his half-drunk cup of tea forgotten. Honey chamomile lips melted into one another, and Catarina’s blanket fell from her shoulders to give the lovers a thin padding between their bodies and the hard surface.

They usually liked to make a game of undressing each other, treating the progression of further nakedness as foreplay. A sleeve would drift down her arm (encouraged by his wandering hands), and he’d nibble at the freshly exposed skin. Belt removed, she would smack The Man’s butt, a look of mischief and lust imprinted upon her face. Catarina would

Madeline Parker maintain this expression through it all, as he made way southward with his tongue, stubble rubbing against her upper and then middle and then lower stomach. He looked into it, too; how could he not? But his face was less emotive, not that of an artist. Catarina probably considered their sex to be an inspiration to her paintings, his dick sneaking its way into the background of a stormy landscape or appearing on the edge of an old maid’s solemn face in a portrait. Some people say that the trick with any piece of artwork is to find the penis.

No matter what, it’s going to be there. One penis, if not more. The world seems to revolve around a phallic obsession--an obsession that came forth long before the Bible, only perpetuated more and more each century.

As they lay on the floor together, though, the undressing game had already been played out, leaving two unclothed bodies that begged for contact. She moaned, lips parted slightly, and wrapped both bent legs around his waist. The old apartment’s floorboards were prone to creaking and groaning when weight shifted onto certain spots; Catarina had chosen to lie back on a part of the hardwood floor that protested loudly under their movements. The Man didn’t fuck her with a particularly defined sense of rhythm, but the artist in Catarina enjoyed how he seemed to construct each motion by the second. His scattered mind and erratic movements clearly served as a source of intrigue, rather than annoyance for Catarina.

Another, ordinary woman might have judged the sex as incomplete, lackluster in its absence of tenderness. But she was no ordinary woman and had a way of finding the beauty in things that seemed to contain no beauty at all.

Often they switched positions and locations before finishing, but The Man and Catarina seemed to be fixed to the dark wooden floor, like a magnet underneath the floorboards was limiting the choreography of their sex. When she really got into it, she had this funny little leg twitch, a small but perceivable spasm that extended down to her foot. Right now, the twitch was causing her foot to hit up against a bookshelf. Neither of them noticed, even as her best painting--a portrait of a young woman with thick eyebrows, vibrant eyes, and a wistful look on her face--was shaking back and forth atop the shelf. As their pace quickened, moans rising from the bottom of the floor to fill the room up to the corners of the ceiling, the painting moved closer and closer to the edge.

But then he collapsed on top of Catarina, his lanky figure hiding her petite frame underneath, and it was over. The portrait still vibrated a bit on the shelf, regaining its balance as stillness took over the room. The Man rolled away from her sticky body, the skin resisting as he peeled himself off of her sweet sweatiness. Catarina did not defy his movements but stayed where she was, lying on her back with breasts, hip bones, rib cage exposed.

She looked especially beautiful like that, chest rising and falling with heavy breaths, hair messy and knotted from his hands grasping at loose strands. I liked her best in that natural state, I thought as I rose from the couch to get a glass of juice from the kitchen. Not that she dolled herself up much anyway, but now that red lipstick had been mostly smeared off from too many firm kisses, cheeks flushed not from blush but a post-sex glow. It was difficult to take my hard stare off of her, even as I moved away from the window and out of the room, angry and wishing that I had been the one to dishevel those chocolate brown curls and leave a vertical line of hickies down her stomach.

I gulped down my cold orange juice, the acidity hitting my throat harshly. The beverage was almost too chilled to drink, but the frosty feel of the glass cup felt nice against my clammy hands, so I just held it for a while, standing motionless in the calm of my silent kitchen. Forty-eight hours ago, I had been talking to her in the dim, shadowy light of her gallery down on 72nd Street. My teeth clenched; these two days had passed in slow motion.

She hadn’t noticed me for a while at the opening, as I’d positioned myself close to the wall, sipping at heavily steeped chamomile tea in a thermos. Catarina had flitted around the space of her gallery as she always did, the lightweight trail of her skirt moving behind her small frame. When I had finally made eye contact with her, Catarina’s face was softened, animated; her hands clutched at a cup of tea. “Oh, it’s good to see you here again,” she had said to me.

We talked, but she became distracted by a friend on the other side of the room, and so she left me and her mostly full cup of tea on the table next to me. I had poured the remains into my thermos once Catarina turned her back and walked away because I guessed she wouldn’t come back. She didn’t. Setting my own cup down now, I reached for the cordless phone and dialed those seven memorized digits.

“Hello?” She breathed into the phone, panting a bit, and I thought back to the nakedness, the intertwining of bodies, the arch of her back as she rose to meet The Man’s thrusts.

“It’s me again. I called yesterday about buying that painting of yours. And, well, I think I’ll take it.”

LIBERTAS, V o l . 1 9 , N o . 1 8

A Wink, An Accomplice, A Desire (II) Definitely it seems confirmed that this coming winter will be hard.

Jaime Gil de Biedma

By Javier Benítez Láinez Translated by Megan Mavity

(I) I don’t want to miss the dawn that wraps itself around your waist, melts against your silohuette, the delicate waves of your silhouette, a play of lights, shapes, curves, shapes, then once again you are paradise, the long absence interviewed once again like the exhausted pages of an almanac. ….and streets, streets, streets, an abundance of corners, abandoned lonely corner, Desire’s hidden corner, the corner of Gran Vía, Arteaga street, the corner where the rain soaked me, the corner by a shoe store, the corner of a few huge grocery stores, infinite corners of this city that does not give us a place to love each other freely.

;) 9

LIBERTAS, Vol. 19, No. 1

Maybe the only thing in our way is that we are a little too young.

Luis García Montrero I have saved that first image of you, the smile, the nervousness, and a boring French class.

It was, after all, the first days of fall, the halls in which we wandered were smoky and kept us from hurrying to see each other.

Then the date arrived, the first.

And the first time I missed you, and the first drops of spilled coffee on emotion’s common grave.

Then Granada seemed to have a certain smug complicity, an arrogant way of looking at me, as I stood at the foot of the Alhambra, Walkway of Sorrow, as I wrapped my coat around your shoulders.

Just like after the first kiss there lingered in our mouths a certain strange taste of unreality, and you wet your lips on my cup, casually, generously.

Retracing the streets exhausted from the years we made our own pact with history, facing the trip with suitcases from a shipwreck, empty, waiting to slowly fill them with the life that escapes without doubt from my verses.

I suppose that after a few years when we are not a little too young and the winter that comes will be hard, we could follow, together, the footprints of those days counted from our first moment, the hangover of afternoons of indigo lust, once we have approved the ultimate analysis of these pages written with capital letters in a Gothic font and still unfinished….

(III) This city of intermittent strikes, its avenues long like whips, and plazas that recall long-ago dates and names that time has erased.

This city with infinite works of art, with forests of cement murals, with virgins, demijohns and blessed water, and the dead who rest alone.

This city that knows of nostalgia, of shifting powers, of past wars, of cups, of bohemia, of nightfall, of music and poets.

This city that dances with your body to the rhythm of boleros or tangos, that dreams of your lips, gets drunk and then cries when you have left.

This city without a doubt is not our own or maybe it is too much our own.

;(

Rejected Perspectives PAGE 11

SITES.DAVIDSON.EDU/LIBERTAS

Why can’t we have nice things?

Ben Wiley

So what?” And I get it. We have other problems to deal with, like poverty, and homelessness, and war You might have heard that expression, the one with Syria ... and the fact we’re all going to starve that goes “this is why we can’t have nice things.” to death when global warming breaks the world’s It’s usually said after someone makes some enor- agricultural systems, but we’ll most likely be dead mous fuck-up that means everyone else is going to anyway by then, so who cares, right? be punished accordingly, because our society likes giving a large, annoying sentence to lots of people “Before, I could take a nice if at first we can’t succeed at giving a specific perwooden walkway to get groceries if son the death penalty.

I wasn’t in the mood for getting exI don’t really hear anyone saying that at Davidpensive, healthy organic things from son, though. For some inexplicable reason, we get that place that smells like decaying to have nice shit, and no one ever takes it away. meat.”

We get the honor code. We get Commons. We even get weird statues with holes in them that somehow But I just want to go back to the boardwalk siturepresent diversity. So you were probably as surprised as I was when you realized we no longer had ation, and say that this is a human tragedy. Before, I could take a nice wooden walkway to get grocera boardwalk between here and Harris Teeter.

I know, you might be thinking, “no boardwalk? ies if I wasn’t in the mood for getting expensive, _______________________________________________________________________________

healthy organic things from that place that smells like decaying meat. Now I have to risk being run over by cars ... or worse, walk through a park.

Who can I blame here? I’m being told “the EPA.” So what, we need a permit to put up a walkway on wetlands? Who are we? I thought our town’s median family income was $100K a year. As senior environmental studies major Grace Dover put it, “it surprises me to see this kind of bureaucratic mixup in a town like Davidson ... it’s very common to see these kinds of eyesores in third-world countries, especially in Latin America.” But not here, in Davidson fucking North Carolina. Don’t we have money to pay off a public official or something?

I’m not even joking.

Get it together, Davidson.

Ben Wiley ‘15 is a “Sociology major” from Louisville, KY.

THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD: THE GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN EDITION S PECIAL G UEST R EPORTING

BY

S ARAH H AMILTON

____________________________________________________________________

Being abroad is hard you guys, especially when there is a government shutdown happening.

Abroad student’s thoughts and opinions on the government shutdown: “WHAT SHUTDOWN?” “I only get BBC on my TV so…”

“Oh, really? Wait, it’s October 1st? So much time has passed!”

“I tried to explain the government shutdown to my host mom, and she literally didn’t believe me. She thought I was lying.”

“How do you say ‘healthcare’ in Spanish?”

“I just found out my host family has Republican tendencies.”

“Is it still happening?”

“What club do you want to go to this weekend?”

“Yo, have you seen this chicken parm recipe on Pinterest?”

Needs Work

By Edie Nicolaou-Griffin Edits by Ben Wiley

I decided not to compile a long list of pretentious movies for you guys not to have time to watch. I pay 7.99 dollars for Netflix every month just to feel that if I had time to go through shows like OITNB while wearing my pajamas and eating microwaved ramen alone in my room, I would.

But why vicariously experience love and pain and time-travel and near-death and triumph of the human spirit when you could be experiencing all that in real time on Patterson Court? Why watch a movie when you could be getting really, really drunk? (“I don’t get why this text has been struck out.)

I’m not trying to judge anyone’s life choices here. I would, however, like to publicly judge myself for being a junior and never having visited the permanent collection of the Van Every/Smith Galleries, i.e. the VAC (any student can schedule an appointment for a free tour). I just found out we have pieces by Picasso, Matisse and Goya that are hanging at this very moment on the walls of the VAC’s basement, less than a mile away from the Armfield apartments – home of the native North American performance art that is beer pong.

This is an actual thought I had the other day: “Maybe I could spend a little less time on facebook and instead visit the VAC.” But why walk all the way across campus to look at pictures in the VAC when I have Instagram in my pocket?

God bless the Internet.

Turns out you can browse all of the permanent gallery pieces online, on the VAC’s website, so for God’s sake don’t worry about walking your ass to the VAC. About a week ago I was binging on Facebook (I assume you meant to write “bingeing” but Facebook does have a partnership with Bing so I don’t know) and came across a “mildly NSFW” video titled Noah. The whole film was only 17 minutes long. Naturally, I was expecting to watch no more than 30 seconds until I could shift my attention to another article about Miley Cyrus’s debauchery. But I didn’t. And I non-ironically love Miley Cyrus (some of the time), so I hope that says enough about how much I liked Noah. It might be the best movie I’ve seen in months.

We’ve seen so much of our lives played out in movies. We know what it looks like to meet a love interest, to flirt, to break up, to take revenge. We know because we’ve seen how other people do it. But there are other things in life that for one reason or another we haven’t seen on screen yet. (what are you talking about) This is the reason why the Davidson-produced Youtube documentary “A Night at F” has less than 50 views. (this reference is so random… and I’m not sure it’s clear/funny enough to be included as is. Does it have something to do with Paris Hilton’s porno, “A night in Paris?”)

Rarely do movies about digital culture actually get digital culture. #TheSocialNetworkSaidALotAboutMarkZuckerberg’sComingOfAgeAndNothingAboutWhatFacebookIsOrHowWeUseIt. (Unless you’re going to elaborate about this point or about The Social Network, you might want to leave this out. I might go with elaborating, but right now this doesn’t feel like a fully developed thought.)

Noah brilliantly and heartwarmingly depicts those alone-but-not-lonely moments, when you find yourself sitting in front of a screen typing and deleting and typing and deleting again until you finally decide to send nothing but a fucking “;p” (;p didn’t deserve the word fucking, maybe because there’s no discernable, hard-consonant way to pronounce the emoticon.) After “A Night at F,” this might be the most relatable movie you will ever see about what it means to use social media, and to have a digital “self.” To be or not to be a facebook profile?

p.s. Go see Don Jon, written, directed and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (did you know that one time Joseph Gordon-Levitt replied to one of my youtube comments?)

11

LIBERTAS, Vol. 19, No. 1

You Can’t Make a Rainbow Out of Gay Cis Men J

ust a few months ago I was drinking hazelnut coffee in the Union, early enough that the settled all-nighter quiet hadn’t quite lifted, reading an opinion piece in the Davidsonian between work and my feminist theory class. The op-ed criticized a recent “Ask-A-Gay” panel that could have been managed more sensitively, and I nodded along with the thread of argument until the very last word – a plea for wider openness about homosexuality.

My visceral reaction to this word was rather like miscalculating the last step in a darkened staircase. I set the paper on the table and my eyes fell on an advertisement from the Gay-Straight Alliance for their biggest annual festival: GAYPRIL! I didn’t make it to feminist theory. Four years of inarticulate frustration with how queerness is framed in Davidson student discourse concentrated into one momentary data set, and I was too angered by a long chain of micro-erasures to do much more than cry for the rest of the morning.

An inclusive GLBTQQIA community is necessary for my well-being, I’ve come to realize through years of loneliness and confusion. I did find one at Davidson: very slowly, one coming-out at a time, through a network of social connections. Out of our informal queer community, just one or two of us were homosexual.

I set that word in italicized distaste because it leaves a taste in my mouth of 1950’s-style pathologization and abusive conversion ‘therapy.’ You can say

gay. You can say queer! It’s not a bad word In fact, please do say queer; SHOUT QUEERNESS FROM ROOFTOPS AFTER QUIET HOURS. I never attended a meeting of the Gay-Straight Alliance. None of my queer and trans* friends did.

Perhaps I was wrong, but I doubted that an organization with that name would be a safe space for a genderfreak like me. I’m not gay or straight. I’m not cis, either. That alliance passes me by without so much as a friendly wave.

There is one queer student organization where I felt safe, but it is strictly confidential – it keeps no membership list, it hosts no public events.

There is need for that, without a doubt, but there is also need for representation and voice. The informal, person-by-person queer and trans* networks at Davidson are close and supportive. They’re also slow and invisible.

One cultural shift that must be practiced is the public recognition that queer does not reduce to gay.

There are bi Davidson students. There are pan students, and ace students, and poly students. There are intersex students, transmasculine and transfeminine students, genderqueer students, nonbinary students,

agender students. There are students who are queer and trans* in ways we haven’t figured out how to articulate yet.

You eat lunch with them and complain to them about your workload. They are not acknowledged to exist in a discourse that only sees gay issues.

It’s a lonely and confusing life outside of the alliance.

After graduation I moved to Seattle. In the last two months I have more than tripled my transgender network. New acquaintances ask me which pronouns I prefer. Nonbinary genders abound. There’s a weekly trans* support group in my area. I run the queer interest network for service corps volunteers in the Seattle-Tacoma area. Coming out seems like a bizarre narrative – the danger, the fear, the shock is gone. “You’re queer? Cool, me too. You should join our book club.” I’m integrated into a visible, substantial community here.

Two months.

I know Davidson can be that secure for everyone in the rest of this ever-expanding acronym of ours.

It can nurture queer and trans* voices, help us find each other. There’s already an alliance in place – it’s just a matter of making it polychromatic.

For today, though, if you’re lonely or confused or in need of community: kleighwilson13@gmail.com 704-450-0151 Your voice matters, and I want to hear it.

Kelsey Wilson (‘13) LIBERTAS, V o l . 1 9 , N o . 1

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picks

music

michael’s

#relevant Michae l De S im o n e

A

Furthest Thing

fter the major label debut that proves the hype wasn’t a fluke and the sophomore album that comes to terms with fame and fortune, what becomes the mainstream rapper’s focus on his/her third release? For Drake, Nothing Was the Same revisits his past with new eyes, literally rewriting his youth with quintessential come-up track “Started From the Bottom” and speaking of relationships long gone in the solemn and frail “From Time.” On “Furthest Thing,” Drake reinterprets his past not through lyricism, but through a pair of vignettes that play like lost tracks from Thank Me Later and Take Care. The track opens with a Jon Hopkins-does-rap-esque beat and Drake sing/ rapping “Karaoke”-style about one of his infinite encounters with a lost love. After the musically dense (and highly rewarding) “Tuscan Leather,” “Furthest Thing” feels perfectly familiar but new, a Drake song fans are never tired of hearing. Before three minutes are up, a piano quietly makes an appearance and the entire track flips. Drake starts celebrating himself over a champaign colored and laden Just Blaze style beat. This outro is only a minute and a half and yet it reinstates Take Care so well. Only two songs into Nothing Was the Same, Drake has shown deep musical prowess and given us the background on his past albums. I guess it time to hear what new Drake is all about. Que “Started From the Bottom.”

Drake

J.A.W.S. Luxury

You may also enjoy: Immunity by Jon Hopkins, Camp Registration feat. Step Brothers, Action Bronson, Blu, & Domo Genesis by Alchemist, Keys 2 the City by Nipsey Hussle

S

o let’s get past the semantics and call this what it is, a Disclosure tune. The two brothers making up the UK’s superstar house duo teamed up with dance-nobody Luxury (as of my writing Luxury has 315 twitter followers) to create this supernova of a track. Rife with neon synth bursts and female coos/grunts, J.A.W.S. goes toe for toe with Disclosure’s most euphoric tracks. The tune removes any of the irony or self-loathing a happy dance track happens to inherit during such a cynical time for pop music and instead demands joy in the most obnoxious way.

You may also enjoy: Last Chance by Behling, Latch feat. Sam Smith by Disclosure, Skyballer by Lemonade

Sweat (Prod. by Brenmar) Ian Isiah

I

magine a world where Jeremih released Late Nights With Jeremih and then continued his winning streak. Then imagine that he wanted to get his piece of the twerk pie so he ended up keeping his smooth, wet, and sex style, but placed his vocals over huge, yet complex production. Now, let’s move Jeremih out of the equation and throw Ian Ishiah into the mix (whose only qualm I have with him is that he is featured on Azealia Banks album, being released in 20never). What we have is a low key artist who just released a banger that parallels in explosive power to Bauuer and Just Blaze’s “Higher.” While Davidson may be content playing the biggest hits from South Korea, if you want to start a real party, songs like this actually exist.

You may also enjoy: Girl Go Wild by Jeremih, Bait by DJ Brenmar & DJ Sliink, Burn Rubber feat. Joe Moses & YG by DJ Mustard 

Be I Do (Jameszoo Remix) Nightmares on Wax

T

ake one part corrupted Nintendogs file, add electronic based sounds, and throw a Game Boy Horror into a mixing bowl. Bake until this double entendre makes sense. And you’re done!

You will also enjoy: Synthavision by Computer Graphics, The Streets of Rage- Streets of Rage OST, Tilt Shift by Mosca

Other Relevant Tunes: Collard Greens feat. Kendrick Lamar by Schoolboy Q, Ultraviolet by FKA twigs, Heathrow (Children of the Night) by World’s Fair, Explode by TGT, Southside Deep by Trippy Turtle, High Road by Cults, Against a Wall feat. Lofty 305 by Ryan Hemsworth, Bando by Migos, Dedicated feat. Asaad by GrandeMarshall, All You’re Waiting For feat. Nancy Whang by Classixx 13

LIBERTAS, Vol. 19, No. 1

I’m going to buy a riding crop.

A slender, black, simple one with a handle on one end and a smooth, round metal bit on the other. Before buying it, I will snap it against my thigh so that I know it feels exactly how I want it to feel.

I’ll tell you what I’ve bought, but and I will wrap it around your wrists and attach them to the posts of a wide bed so that you have to hold them up to avoid the pain of the cord cutting into your wrists. I will blindfold you and take out the switch. I will hold the tip in ice until it’s cold, and I will begin to run it over your chest, softly. So softly you can barely feel it, but hard enough that you flinch in anticipation of something harder. I will circle your nipples and run down the front of you, push the tip into your stomach, prod you and feel you with it.

I will pull it up and use it as it is meant to be used, working up from your calves to your inner thighs, dangerously close to your dick, snapping it against your skin.

I will trace over the red lines with my fingers and my tongue, move up your body with my hands and wrap them around your arms. I will pin your arms back and pull them down, tightening the restraints, and I will hover over you, allowing your cock to feel how wet I am but not letting it in until you beg.

Once I’m ready, I’ll slide you in, your skin against mine, so you can feel how warm I am, feel me clinch around you. I will work you up and then take myself away before you can finish, repeat the whole thing over again until you’re right on the brink and then remove myself. I want you

SEXTS

I won’t allow you to see it. I will buy a coarse plastic cord,

to cum all over yourself, when you can’t hold it in anymore.

And I want to leave you like that while I masturbate in front of you, still blindfolded, so you can hear it but can’t see anything.

I want to make you hear me come and know you had nothing to do with it.

I want to be so deep inside you you can feel me in your throat.

LIBERTAS, V o l . 1 9 , N o . 1

14

LIBERTAS last word