Los Angeles Miscellany Volume 69, 2021

LOS

ANGELES

miscellany VOLUME 2021

69

Copyright © 2021 Loyola Marymount University.

EDITOR-IN- CHIEF

Charlie Martin EDITORS

Megan Loreto Kellie Toyama Sam Yaziji Angeline Kek Ellie Smillie Vero Urubio Andrew Garcia ADVISING

PROFESSOR

Chuck Rosenthal COVER

ART

Kellie Toyama DESIGN

&

TYPESET TING

Ash Goodwin PRINTER

DSJ Printing, Inc.

CONTENTS

writing SA LT R I V E R . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Lindsay McConnell, Class of 2021

12

LO L I TA RU N N I N G . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Remy Smith, Class of 2022

13

S L E E P OV E R I N G L E N DA L E.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Angeline Kek, Class of 2021 BERLIN POEMS...................................................................................................

Megan Loreto, Class of 2021 R A I N - D R I E D BOT T L E B RUS H.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Charlie Martin, Class of 2021

O U TC RY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Brendan Craig, Class of 2023

L A B R AT.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sienna Caputo, Class of 2023

“S L E E P, TA L K I N G ” .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Gabrielle Johnsen, Class of 2022

21

22 23

SMOKE............................................................................................................

Thatcher Gates, Class of 2024

S E L F- P O RT R A I T O N M Y A D O P T I O N PA P E RS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Christina Martinez, Class of 2021

14

20

L I M I N A L .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kellie Toyama, Class of 2022

T H E Y C A N ’ T B U R N US A L L . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Claire Shin, Class of 2023

11

27

28 29 30

SAT U R N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Haley Miller, Class of 2023

31

32

F LOW E R S T U DY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Christina Martinez, Class of 2021 T H I S TO D D L E R I K N OW .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Ellie Smillie, Class of 2021

39

S E A O F C LO U DS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Liam Chamberlin, Class of 2021 CO N F ESS I O N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Ella Kelleher, Class of 2021 TO B E F R E E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chloë Clark, Class of 2021 S E L F P O RT R A I T W I T H L I L I T H . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Charlie Martin, Class of 2021 O D E TO SA P P H I S M . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Haley Miller, Class of 2023 T H E A P PA R E N T WAS T E L A N D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Jake Nicastro, Class of 2022 E V E RY T H I N G YO U ’ V E SA I D . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kellie Toyama, Class of 2022 C- S E CT I O N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Robyn De Leon, Class of 2021 M OT H E R TO N G U E ( AS I A N S A R E N E X T I N L I N E TO B E W H I T E ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Angeline Kek, Class of 2021

45 55 57

58 60 67 68 69 73

I DA .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alexandra Paradzick, Class of 2022 L I F E G UA R D TOW E R 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Charlie Martin, Class of 2021

43

76

art O N M Y M I N D.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Maeve Sullivan, Class of 2022 CO B B L ES TO N E.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Megan Loreto, Class of 2021 D RY F E ET .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kellie Toyama, Class of 2022

9

19 25

B LU E B LU E B LU E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Vero Urubio, Class of 2022

26

LEON... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Ellie Smillie, Class of 2021 L A DY I N B LU E.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Maeve Sullivan, Class of 2022 A R I ES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Cat Pickett, Class of 2023 RIVER BEND.....................................................................................................

Charlie Martin, Class of 2021 FAC I N G F U T U R E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kaʻopua Daniel’s, Class of 2021

42 54

56 65 66

RUST I C M O U N TA I N S I D E .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Vero Urubio, Class of 2023 S P R I N G H AS S P I R A L E D .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Cat Pickett, Class of 2023

71

72

ON

MY

MIND

•

MAEVE

S U L L I VA N , C L A S S

OF

2022

S A LT R I V E R L I N D SAY

MCCONNELL, CLASS

I wake up with a song in my head.

It’s the whisper of pebbles, conversing about eternity.

Outside the world is as black as my gut.

Flies are quiet in the dark.

I drive through gravel, spines, and leftover hoofprints.

I reach the river, its exhale follows the sloping shoulders of the mountain—its mouth painted with brushstrokes.

Tall grass, untrimmed, hides the midnight glare of the water.

Its strands hold back the prayers of the surrounding dust.

The stars are grains of salt.

I look up to find them flaking.

I see a mountain of rocks in the shape of a cathedral.

Under the patience of the night sky, I stand at its edge.

Air wrinkles as the glow of the moon dives through it.

Pearls fall from my eyes.

Oasis in the desert, held by scarred mountains.

11

OF

2021

LO L I TA RU N N I N G REMY

SMITH, CLASS

OF

2022

“And the rest is rust and stardust.” ― —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

In these stillborn hours I watch you sleep and trace a line across your body, divide you into sections of angular flesh.

Looking at you my jaw starts to hurt, looking at you I know how much I hate you.

In summer we got caught in the throat of America, saw a plastic Paris on the Vegas strip where I shed my own skin and wrapped myself in someone else’s.

Slouching on a melting pavement, you said, God damn this heat I said, God damn you and He did.

We were always moving then, chasing something that was never there because it felt right to run, to pretend.

In California you put sand crabs in my hands and I crushed them with bleeding fingers, buried them in the ground.

No, I won’t forget (can’t forget) the night you bruised your knees walking drunk and I burned my neck on the curling iron waiting for you.

You took me for a ride and we breathed each other’s expired breath in your bruised Camry and I watched an anonymous city slide by out a smudged window.

There, I held your hand while you dug your nails into my palms and I cried but I did not let you see.

12

SLEEPOVER IN GLENDALE ANGELINE

KEK, CLASS

OF

2021

You said let’s make a blood pact and start a cult Make friends with a stranded pearl gourami

I’m friends with a stranded pearl gourami My soul is shedding (do you recognize me?)

My soul is shedding (will you recognize me?)

Gushing and spilling while you stand and watch

Gushing and spilling, please stay here and watch Bits of fractured sun filling in the cracks

Fractured sun overflowing all the cracks How would a chess piece try to stop the hand?

Why would a chess piece try to stop the hand?

You said come and take a nap with me You said come here, take a nap in me You said let’s make a blood pact and start a cult

13

BERLIN POEMS MEGAN

LORETO, CLASS

OF

2021

i.

Mother says the journey will not take a day.

We fly across a continent and then an ocean but with sleep it will not take a day.

And without sleep?

Several years at least. Drink some wine. Time will pass.

I was scared to think what the others might say and wore my new coat.

A smaller suitcase, mother said. And I nodded, unsure.

What of the time it takes?

The time what takes?

For your soul to catch up with your body?

She shrugged. Some say it never does.

And the rest?

They wait around.

I took a last look at the farm around the corner, a bike leaned up against the house.

I wondered who lived there now the farmer boy had gone away to school.

This was the last I would remember of California and the suffocating air of August’s fires.

It rained.

Was the weather for me?

I could not make out.

It was torrential.

I had slept, But still I felt the years that had passed.

It was the first plane ride of a long journey and it weighed in my shoulder blades as we dragged our suitcases across the ragged cobblestone.

14

I almost stepped into the church across the way, drenched and shivering.

I was so tired I might have knelt at the altar.

I saw a young man leaning against the doorway to our building, framed by streetlights and taking a drag, face tilted towards the rain.

He was a ghost.

I tugged my small suitcase up six flights of stairs, avoiding the lift, the size of confessional and covered with mirrors reflecting the dark crescents beneath my own eyes.

Snow fell outside of our window and into the alleyway stories below.

We leaned out into it, let the largest flakes melt atop the radiator and onto the softest parts of our hands. ii.

In the morning we walked to the river and stood on the bridge looking down.

All my money was in the pockets of my coat left in the wardrobe.

Someone offered me their gloves.

I wanted coffee.

There were bullet holes in the wall behind us.

American made, they said.

The bullets or the holes?

Both. I ran my hand over the spot.

They led us to a gallery.

I was overtaken by a suffocating cough at the coat check and slipped away.

Leaning over a faucet, tears streaming,

15

holding back bile, avoiding my eyes in the mirror, I was relieved no one would look for me.

Outside the frosted window trains passed on an overground track.

I counted them to measure the time.

My watch stopped counting during the fourth year of our flight across the Atlantic.

Six trains and no footsteps in the hall outside.

I thought of the flakes melting onto my skin.

Overnight the snow and any trace of our arrival had disappeared.

The boy with the cigarette was gone, and where the church had been, only a boarded window remained.

Was there a church?

I tried to ask, but no one heard.

I began to wonder if they would leave the place without me when my cough subsided.

I found a painting, Demeter, kneeling on the bank of the River Styx, I tilted my head, she was familiar— Where have you been?

They asked.

We’re going.

We walked to the S-Bahn, took the train heading east.

I watched the river through the sealed doors of the compartment.

Inside a tunnel I held my breath, let the cold creep into my bloodstream, looked up toward the fluorescent light, and asked to speak to God. But, when met with silence, I found I had nothing to say and could only wonder if our bus would be on time, and if there would be lunch,

16

and if it might not be better to put plaster over the holes in the wall, forget entirely, and go back to bed. iii.

But I couldn’t sleep.

I stared at the ceiling listening to the snores of the other girls.

I waited for it to stop, but when it didn’t I rose for breakfast, showered and traced the outline of my breath on the barren landscape of the quiet city out the fourth story window.

Two boys jostled over a pack of cigarettes outside but I didn’t recognize them.

Wandering into the market, where the glass door slid open and the cashier spoke to me in German, I bought some chocolate and asked for coffee.

They shook their heads.

I was on a train and the others were laughing.

I didn’t understand the joke, but the trees terrified me and I faced the window, scared to look away.

The girl with blonde hair leaned over to me and said the very words running through my head.

A train seems in poor taste.

Yes. For a camp like this.

I nodded. She leaned back in her seat.

Our bus had been cancelled; we would walk the rest of the way. iv.

Sachsenhausen. v.

When it was morning again, I found that another day had passed,

17

the space between us falling out of sync.

I called you on the telephone, asked you to tell me the truth, but the other end was quiet for a while.

I kept putting quarters into the payphone.

I can’t get you off my mind.

The time had expired.

Pacing along the bank of the river.

There was snow here once, but it had drained into the gutter, now water flowing beneath our feet before we woke up again.

I wouldn’t see a city with snow for another year, I couldn’t even picture it.

Walking alone to the bakery, I caught up with the memory of myself jogging to keep up and wondering what had prompted a sudden disgust I couldn’t explain to anyone.

When I reached for my camera the film had expired.

I can’t get you off my mind. vi.

Graveyard of metaphors for a horror that we will never understand.

It feels like a war, but what feels like war more than emptiness? vii.

My skin was dry and pale.

I don’t recognize myself in the mirror these days.

18

COBBLESTONE

•

MEGAN

LORETO, CLASS

OF

2021

RAIN-DRIED BOT TLEBRUSH CHARLIE

MARTIN, CLASS

OF

2021

I am driving to the desert as my last supper, and the cacti are shrinking into themselves. They are squeezing heroin out their needles, burning holes in white veils. I curl beside this, spit venom in snake mouths. Their scales flex like satin over bonfires, hardening into stained glass— fevered mosaic pieces drip to the sky, reflecting bruises of uncorked wine spilled in orange and raspberry juice.

A sunken eye socket in burnt sienna, the rings around the sun are bags, each heat wave a yawn. I make rings out of scorpion tails, etch our initials with coyote whiskers. If we are still, it is easy to see the earth spinning on record players, an ever-faint Johnny Cash ringing just under the crust. I let my finger-taps be hailstorms on your chest, wreck mahogany with acid and spite then kiss it all the same.

I can feel you clicking through my bones like termites, fluttering wings that keep blood pumping. I close hangnails and scars like garage doors. There are splotches on your skin, charcoal clouds splattered on night skies.

Ash fills my fingerprints from burning your hoaxes, trapping promises in the lines of my palms.

When I look over, you are gone: one bone short. We cannot lie anywhere without it being an unmarked grave.

20

LIMINAL KELLIE

T OYA M A , C L A S S

OF

2022

My body floats between contrary equilibriums1 now that I’ve come to know both ends of the sea.

With flecks of salt dried in my eyes I can see the thick blood inside me mixed with a drop of power and gallons of trauma, sealed in skin made brittle by the dissonance projected upon it.

I can’t tell if this liminal place I’m in is the result of gentle lulls to both shores, or shoves of rejection from each binary end.

The words of my oppressors flood my ears netted bindings force my bones to grow around lace.

But still, I have not yet been turned into a ghost and my limbs are fluid enough to swim, to dance.

Nature says I should not be able to stand atop this sliver of water—let alone make it my home.

But what choice do I have other than to exist peacefully on the contrary, to disprove archaic theory that has left those before me stranded.

1

From Frederico Lorca

21

OUTCRY BRENDAN

CRAIG, CLASS

OF

2023

If I walked with my hood up high, skittles clutched in hand, under the dark Florida sky, You would stalk to shoot me dead and leave me lying on a cold asphalt bed.

If I just stood selling cigarettes—outside a store—with no regrets, You would grab me, choke and hold, until I’m limp and at life’s threshold.

If I ran around a field—at twelve years old—toy gun to wield, You would fire before you thought—if I was worth your fatal shot.

If I slept inside my house, wrapped up in bed, by my protective spouse, You would storm it, filled with pride, firing bullets until I died.

If I played my violin, performing for some feline’s kin, You would flash those red-blue lights, pin me down, and seize the blood flow to my crown.

If I paid with a fake bill, and walked out the store under my own free will, You would crush your knee to my neck—a total of 8 minutes and 46 sec.

If I asked to not be killed, a dire plea left unfulfilled, You would look me in my eye, no remorse for my people’s outcry.

22

SMOKE T H ATC H E R

G AT ES, C LASS

OF

2024

Falling from the

bosom of death,

I drip white seeds of black crystalline sorrow,

I wave between the breath of life and despair,

I birth new fruit full of blood, full of sweetly rotten cores.

I birth my howls to God.

I birth my unfruitful harvest of an eternal despair.

I detest the skin in the white electronica screens,

I detest the words that mean nothing,

the vague sense of emptiness that rings from the I love you.

I fear she doesn’t.

I know that,

Maybe, perhaps, love was never born out of us.

Maybe, perhaps, her sorrow is her method of despising me.

Perhaps, I fall between the waves and dissipate into her crimson soul.

Perhaps the white salt boils from the geyser of our past,

Giving off the scent of what Was our love.

Where is our love save for the yesterday?

Where is our love save for the time and smoke of what was, and what is, long before?

I can no longer stomach my breath of life;

I can no longer stomach my breath of death.

I can no longer stomach who I am, who I was, and who I will be.

I feel no skin pressed against me.

I feel only the skin that crawls up out of me.

23

I wish to die. Yet a part, a disarmingly small part clings to this life.

I fear slipping away into the mist,

Yet the mist calls to me with her warm hands.

Warm white candle smoke sticks to my nose as I vomit the contents of my stomach, Warm white candle smoke lifts me to the air as I tremble in disquietude.

Warm white candle smoke drowns me in my humanity.

Warm white candle smoke makes, Warm white candle smoke me, Warm white candle smoke want, Warm white candle smoke to, Warm white candle smoke die.

24

DRY

FEET

•

KELLIE

T OYA M A , C L A S S

OF

2022

BLUE

BLUE

BLUE

•

VERO

URUBIO, CLASS

OF

2022

L A B R AT SIENNA

CAPUTO, CLASS

OF

2023

How many more sessions must I sit through, tiny blue pills must I swallow ’til I’m done tugging at the fat around my jaw. Burning holes in my reflection.

Choking on generalized anxiety and the shame of being a politically-debated object.

I’m always angry or guilty or bitter: exactly what they planned for us.

We can’t riot with our bodies as tools of self-destruction.

27

THEY CAN’T BURN US ALL CLAIRE

SHIN, CLASS

OF

2023

I don’t know if I want to talk about this.

Write about Asian lives on the frontline When our issues aren’t the only thing on America’s mind.

I’ve been told to do this all my life Keep your head low, leave the bad things alone.

Yeah it’s bad but do you wanna get killed?

Bat soup, bad food, go back soon This isn’t your home, you don’t look like us.

Model minority meeting microaggressions Turns to attacking our elders on the streets.

They say to me: You can’t be oppressed, When your people make more money than mine.

Ching chong, ling long—it’s dark humour Until someone’s uncle lies dead at your feet.

If we’re playing the Oppression Olympics I’m putting my bat down and my arms up.

I fight for you, you fight for me They can’t burn us all after all.

28

SELF-PORTRAIT ON M Y A D O P T I O N PA P E R S CHRISTINA

MARTINEZ, CLASS

A wall meanders on my body and into my throat, tangling wire and rust into my aimless entrails.

I eat my birth certificate to treat a fire on my tongue. I’m diagnosed with eternal papercuts, etching tattoos of snakes and stars behind my flesh.

You see privilege but I’m brown: a fox on the backdrop of a snowfall, shining as faded ginger moonrise, cradled in a powdered cloud. At night, I shine and gather feathers, building the wings to carry me to the end of my world.

I’ll drag my fingers on it, spicy-sweet, banda trickling down my thunder legs. Paradise is made of paper, creased into an open gate. Can I pass through with spangled skies and the veil of the Virgin of Guadalupe?

29

OF

2021

“ S L E E P, T A L K I N G ” GABRIELLE

JOHNSEN, CLASS

OF

2022

I know you thought we’d agreed, but, while we were speaking, I was asleep. Something about the future of archaeology, wondering how they’ll know when to stop, now that there is nothing left to excavate. Or you wanted to divorce me—either way, you’re free.

Friction and grease between your wine-swilled teeth, granite calves danced, dipped in nylon, baby pink. You must have been my dream. It’s gotten harder to tell, but I see what I see. Friendly old men shoot me in my feet when they catch me sneaking out down the street. Eyeless old ladies knit sweaters from trees. You switched your nose while we spoke, now it mirrors the sea.

I wish my ankles were bound to my wrists and you were roasting me over a spit. There’s no heat in either of these beings. There’s no drowning to keep me coming back for air. There’s a buzz—and you’ve heard it, when you’re staring at your bedroom door. It’s white, embroidered with roses, angry wallpaper. Each day, those hours faint in amber waste and radiate. If I ever felt awake, my mistake.

30

SAT U R N HALEY MILLER, CLASS OF 2023

You don’t know how you move me.

Make me feel small.

An insatiable urge to push my hand Down your throat.

Please please please.

The only peace I know is When you sit in my gullet.

Because for a second I am all there is.

But by the time you reach the bottom I hate myself again.

Raw.

There is a space inside my deepest crevice.

You have one, too.

A deep well, sunless and dripping.

Through the pulp and the phlegm.

Obliteration.

Come here, Witness the strength of prophecy.

Gaze upon a grotesque work of art painted with Blood and bile.

It’s an aesthetic you’d be ashamed to admit You’re attracted to.

Doesn’t might look grand up close?

You think I did this to myself?

You don’t know how it feels to be it all.

A Big God. It’s not a fall from grace, more like A deviation of purposeThat’s how it started.

But now I salivate at the sight of you alone.

Jaw slack when I look at youUnhinged when you inch closer.

Bare my teeth - you wish they were sharper But they look just like yours.

Dull, yellow, used.

Can you see the sweat wetting my upper lip?

The spit that’s pooling under my tensed tongue?

How will the salt, the metal, mix with the taste Of you?

Enter me.

Know me.

See me.

Feel me.

Understand the chasm I have becomeThe chasm I belong at the bottom of, Twisted, bulging, and bare.

I embrace you, finally And my mouth is a fountain from which The ichor flows.

Convulsions consume my being And this thick, familiar liquid washes over me Cleansing me of a terrifying future.

The only way I bleed Is when you come inside me with a blade.

It’s me it’s me it’s me.

The Capricorn, Darkness Visible.

Tell me I’m evil.

Tell me I’m not love Or happiness.

Denounce my power in front of me.

31

F L OW E R S T U DY CHRISTINA

MARTINEZ, CLASS

“I hate flowers.”

I told this to you on a warm evening in April on the top of a hill in the middle of Los Angeles. We went there to absorb the red, white, and orange lights of the skyline that vibrated with blinking and frenetic movement. My eyes were caught on the cars that streamed neon on the distant freeway, catching the rush of blurry afterimages made more potent by the hard cider you offered me after dinner.

At some point, you snapped me out of my urban trance, after your own eyes had fluttered to the distraction of a flickering streetlamp. The stuttering light shone upon a gathering of lavender, lonely but lavender, a faded and tired purple that was the most vibrant thing in the night.

I don’t particularly know what was so appealing about that lavender patch that compelled you to ask me the question, but it did.

“Would you like it if I ever got your flowers?”

You laughed at my answer, finding it revolutionary yet equally ridiculous. I told you that I hated flowers, my response blunt and confident, but mostly proud. Proud, as we locked eyes.

I had worn a pale blouse covered in peach rosettes that evening. Most of my nicest clothes are covered in floral patterns. You knew this and you still know. You know I am drawn to more than any old blouse with roses, but jumpsuits with apple blossoms, t-shirts with sunflowers, and lace imbued with tulip petals. I love that I was born a woman, and when I wear flower apparel,

OF

2021

I want to stand wherever I am and feel how the breeze makes me feel feminine. I want to spin like Julie Andrews in the title sequence of The Sound of Music, basking in the glory of the California sunshine as if I were on Viennese hills.

Sometimes, I do. In my backyard, when no one is home, I will spin and my sneakers will scrape on crumbling concrete instead of whispering against a field of technicolor grass.

You looked at me in the darkness when you stopped laughing and held my hand gently. Your eyes were dancing with some sort of idea—an emotion that I couldn’t read in that dim twinkle in what little starlight there was. There was a plan in motion, whether you knowingly had planned something or not.

“Don’t worry,” you had said. “As long as you’re with me, you won’t deal with a man who gives you flowers.”

Flowers don’t just pour petals and scatter pollen sands, but they spread a soft essence that tickles your nose and unlocks the things you once shoved to the back of your mind long ago. My mother finds this essence mostly therapeutic: sweet, and calming. She buries herself in it, using it as a pheromone for the soul. It’s a scent she longs for. She’s addicted to the scent of the nostalgia she gets when she thinks of the romance with my father that she can’t ever recapture, as she wrinkles and her brown hair succumbs to the loss of melanin once hers.

32

It’s a shame how I’ve developed an allergy to this essence. I’ve received too many flowers in my life and now my body rejects them. I break out at the smell as I am attacked by memories of performing ballet in different places: A high school, a Jewish community center, a hotel that I can’t even dream of affording one night in. These strange places were stages where I walked out in a tutu and tights, duck-footed, spindly.

In all of my dances, I am wobbling with blocks of satin-covered canvas chained to my feet, the weakest link in the corps de ballet. I was too tall, too lanky, too curved, straight but not straight enough to ever be considered good according to the impossible standards of classical ballet. Someone would always give me flowers after a performance, but only because others would receive flowers.

It wasn’t a victory: it was a consolation prize.

You may have laughed at my aversion to flowers, but I know you are thankful for it. It means that you’ll never have to deal with your real (and severe) allergy to them. I can’t ever forget how quickly your eyes yellowed and the skin around your eyelids flaked from your itchy tears after five minutes among lilies.

When you were asked to help carry lilies from a truck to the church for Easter Vigil, you accepted the request without hesitation. You thought that the clusters of pollen were stable enough and that they wouldn’t explode into yellow smoke onto your face. But they did, and shiny streaks smeared and shimmered on your nose and cheeks. The mucus poured out of the burning holes of your face, crusting in the dry afternoon. It was only a few moments, but it was enough to force you to wear ice cubes—like glasses that had lost their temples—and find someone to drive you home.

You needed medication and a good nap.

Your bad reaction startled the church director, who forced me and a team of volunteers to castrate every lily trumpet. We took our hands and

scooped pollen pods off the stamens, disrobing the stems that peeked out, like drawn action lines of a trumpet’s sound. We poured a mountain of gold into a small, but freshly prepared trash bin.

We kept pouring yellow until it was half-full and heavy. Our palms were coated in sulfur-bright dust that shimmered as your cheeks did.

The mess on my hands was frustrating. I was angered over how lily guts clung to me, rubbing mustard stains onto my favorite shirt—a white shirt with a red-and-black phoenix. They brushed all over me and I grumbled as more pinches of pollen fell. I was positioned in front of the altar, kneeling, and jerking my arm into the hollow of each lily in its centerpiece. As I grew more irritated, I used more force. The force was unnecessary, as I knew that a feather-like tug would detach the pods, but my festering anger bore harsh and stiff muscles.

I was mad at you. You said you would never buy me flowers yet I had to deal with them.

This was your fault!

A snap shocked me out of my mood, flinching as I grabbed a fistful of stamen and butterflywing petals. They popped and tore as I pulled my arm back, fragments flopping to the tile floor.

No one saw me kill the flower, but I feared the reprimand that was to come if my murder had been discovered. I picked away at the lily’s corpse, peeling off the remaining, innocent petals, like a banana. I took the shards and stuffed them into the back pocket of my jeans. The lilies were arranged in a display, so I shifted the pot in question to the back and rearranged the rest of the flowers in an attempt to hide my crime.

I was never convicted and no one ever questioned me. Someone eventually took a broom and swept away the pale puddles of pollen on the floor. I forgot about the lily bones and they shriveled away to rotten brown in my pocket. I would not discover them until I went to do laundry the Monday after Easter. They

33

disintegrated into the soft hum of a nearby fan as I fiddled with them in my fingertips. I let them go, and I was disappointed in myself.

For your birthday in September—we got drunk. With 4 shots of vodka between us, we became Plato and Socrates, and attempted a manuscript of a modern Symposium. It was clear we were not philosophers, so we only shared our trivia and niche knowledge on subjects we had irreversibly absorbed into our neurons. We spoke like we were running a two-man convivium, declaring our thoughts in the small apartment like we were in the hall of an aristocrat—our shouts echoing against the walls.

You were pro-capitalist, yet you spat Marxian economics like you believed in it. I abandoned the far-left intellectualism that I usually held high and found myself on the right. My topic for the evening was concerning the capitalist value of a flower.

I ranted: “Take a moment to consider diamonds. It’s likely our grandparents hadn’t considered them as the ultimate form of romantic commitment when they got engaged. A hundred years ago, diamonds were paperweights. Then a woman named Frances Gerety wrote ‘A Diamond is Forever’ and the paperweights were smashed into fragments that were worth more than gold.

The idolatry of a white stone with a buff job continued for decades. Why else did Marilyn Monroe sing ‘diamonds are a girl’s best friend?’

Why are they so emphasized in straight couple engagements all over the world? A couple of Americans dug up some rocks, decided to inflate their value, and glorify them until the rest of the world joined in, just like everything else in this damn country.

“The value of diamonds twins the value of flowers. Why would you pay eighty dollars for a couple of roses that die in a day? Rose bushes are available at Home Depot for thirty dollars.

Buy one of those. All it needs is some water and full sun, and if it has all that it can’t ever die.

Even if it looks like a skeleton or the thorns are brighter than the leaves, they will always resurrect themselves and bloom again if you want them to.

Most importantly, why would you pay for flowers if you can grow them yourself?”

I paced around the ring-spattered coffeetable stacked with shot glasses as I said this. Each of my feet took a dramatic swing and brush when I took a step, like I was a show horse in dressage.

When I finally finished, my eyes were fluttering from the daze of the gasoline-flavored drink, so I slipped into the nearby armchair with a stumble, dripping down like the gathered condensation on the glasses and table.

You grabbed the vodka and poured yourself two more shots. You vacuumed your drink into your mouth as your words, not slurred but like a song, alerted my fading body to a question. “So, I guess I get around the flower rule by buying you an actual plant?”

“Sure, whatever,” I said, too lost in stupor to comprehend.

A few days later, I heard a knock on the door and the faint clattering of running feet when I was studying for a statistics exam. I went to the door to find a succulent rose rising from dirt in a Solo cup. There was a note on it: Here’s a plant.

Have fun. Love yooooou. <3.

Admittedly, I laughed at this, even if the succulent’s fate was to be placed for adoption.

My roommate happily took the succulent in as her child and transferred it to a ceramic pot.

She left it on the top of her desk in the sun, where I could see it every time I went to sleep and woke up in the morning. After many months, it grew like the scales of a Stegosaurus, reflecting the afternoon sun that streamed through our window on those shards.

I awoke one morning to find that it had grown a stalk of heavy daffodil trumpets that

34

drooped over to reach the light.

Yellow like the sun.

Our song is “Sunflower.”

When you think of “Sunflower,” you think of us listening to the radio, driving down Sawtelle Boulevard after ballooning ourselves with ramen and milk tea. The endless stoplights glare through the misty windshield, flaring as your Mazda bounces up and down on the sudden grooves of the street. Your focus is deadly and your hands are welded to the steering wheel as you pierce your car through every open intersection and gap in the lanes, but, when you finally are signaled to stop, you bop your head to the beat and gently circle your body in your seat. You motion for my left hand, your heart pulsing with the blare of the bass, singing along like a frog. I smile and join in, too, looking into your eyes and following you, like I’m the cobra and you’re the charmer.

We stop when I see the red reflection in your eyes has snapped to a green one, and I panic to tell you to drive. We wash, rinse, and repeat.

You’re my sunflower...my flower-lover mother called me that first.

She embarrassed me when you came to visit my hometown the last week before the world shriveled up—when the already flaking pieces had canceled my original plans for a Mexican engagement. I decided it would be fun to play tourist at home, running through a menagerie of taco stands and ice cream shops. When we weren’t doing that, we would rush back home, sit on the couch, and laugh at old Vines together.

My mother whisked into the living room, her old-lady sneakers slapping onto the tile with every step. An ancient camcorder was wrapped around the back of her hand and a little cassette was pinched in the other, both trailing sprinkles of dust like twin comets as she approached the couch. I groaned when I realized what she was doing.

“Do you want to see videos from when she was a baby?”

I turned my face away as my mother nearly dove in between us, we parted the sea so she could land in the ravine between the cushions.

She shoved the cassette into the camcorder for playback. You were nudging me to look— excited to discover an untold side of me—but I continually refused a younger version of myself that was inferior to the version that now existed.

The whirring of the spinning tape and the sound waves dipped with static ordered me to bury my face into the side cushion as you and my mother chattered. I took a few glimpses at the square of light protruding from the machine, but I didn’t need them to remember the images that were rolling. I knew it was me—at age two—running around in a park on a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 2001. I had elephant trunk limbs that flailed to keep me afloat above an ocean of mulch. I had berry-kissed cheeks infused with laughing as I tottered along to climb on everything that crossed my path. My hair was curly—not wavy as it is now—like black velvet flower buds that tore through the wind. I was barefoot, having kicked off my tiny sandals at some point, but I wore a denim overall dress with a hat to match.

I was covered in sunflowers.

My mother had embroidered sunflowers as large as my baby palms in every place where there was room—each one placed evenly apart, each one nearly the same. It was simple work, but the bright yellow and coffee threads made the dress pop in the summer light. The yellow petals were chained from dark spiral centers, clustered with ermine and satin stitches, like my mother had taken the time to create new galaxies in each sunflower.

The hat was much worse. She had gathered a harvest of miniature artificial sunflowers, which she had arranged around the rim of the hat like

35

a wreath. She sewed each flower one at a time in the old-fashioned needle and thimble way, until it looked like I was wearing a bucket hat and a crown at the same time. The fluttery petal pieces of each flower panicked in the slightest breeze, making them look like saturated marigolds as they curled up and split from the stress of being tossed around. I was a mound of flowers, and I looked clownish, yet admittedly endearing for a child from the early 2000s.

“I’ve told her this before,” my mother said to you, as the video glitched to a blue warning at the end of the tape. “If I could give her any name I want, her name would be sunflower.”

I masked my annoyance by shooing her out of the room, like a puppy ready to snag my shirt and pull on it until it tore. She was chuckling low as she shut off the camcorder and vacated the room. You were laughing without restraint, and I imagined your stomach was an air pump in accordion-folds from the way you wheezed inbetween your streaming giggles. Your face was red like a ripening strawberry as you struggled to calm yourself.

You smiled.

You teased me.

“No wonder you like ‘Sunflower’ so much,” you said.

Then, you said something else.

“Maybe you actually like flowers?”

“No,” I said. “Then I’d be a fool.”

Little did I know that I was a fool.

We returned to my apartment in LA the next day on Friday the 13th. We should have expected that it was the perfect day for a modern plague to arrive. We were powerless to let it take hold no matter how much we did, and so the world was changed forever in an exchange of a couple of emails and phone calls. We became nocturnal because the six months we thought we had left to continually share was whittled to six hours.

We parted at dawn.

The gray light was inching into the entryway when I opened the door for you one last time, framing us in the whirls of an unpredictable future. I hadn’t cried yet, but you were beginning to. I watched glimmering crescent moons rise on the rims of your eyes. Your hand, shivering and scarred, held mine for what seemed like the entire length of our relationship. I didn’t want to let go because I knew the moment I closed the door, you would fly a thousand miles away from me. There were no longer any planes in existence that would fly me that distance.

I finally let go and closed the door. I didn’t peer at you through the window, but I listened to your footsteps fade away as you walked down the concourse. I sunk into a seat at my kitchen table and rubbed my hand that you held moments ago, trying to remember the sensation.

I haven’t touched another’s hand since. I want to hold yours again before I touch any other.

Since March, I’ve started to appreciate flowers.

In your absence, flowers have multiplied in my dreams and entangled my mind. It must be that I’m letting nature take over my garden’s body, because no one can tend to me or love me as you do. Every day without you grows into a spectral blossom on my skin: airless but heavy with my regret and loneliness. I keep telling myself that I am not the only one dealing with these feelings.

But when you are isolated like this, you cannot compare yourself with anyone else. There was no one else to compare myself with. The only world was my bedroom, and I was the last being alive.

I’m also Rapunzel. My room is my castle and I haven’t cut my hair since the day we parted. It tangles, frizzes, and explodes all over my face. I could pull it back, but it’s haybale-heavy. It’s a clump of a wolf’s tail fluffing behind me—wiry and scratchy to my touch. I don’t know what to do with it, and I won’t know until I can find the courage to slash it off.

36

There are some possibilities. I could braid it.

I could weave flowers into it. If I were daring, I could even dust my hair with seeds and let the sprouts siphon the oil from my scalp. My head is a meadow that could use some life in the coming, rolling winter. Another sign of how I satisfy my desire for life.

I touch the world through glass. The outside world is a portrait reflected through my bedroom window. The glass can be pulled away and replaced with mesh checkers, but the wind that rushes through the tight corners of my tiny box chills me. I shiver as I slide the glass back on.

What does your world look like now? What do you feel and see?

I always want to ask you about your window, but I can never find the words to say for such a weird request.

My view is an unmoving picture that never changes. The neighbors across the street have chosen to shut themselves away, and I haven’t seen a door open or a car drive away.

The man next door, a Mormon, has kept to himself since his mother passed away four years ago and the new world rewards his secrecy.

Not even the neighbors in the other direction, with a young boy and a new puppy, have made an appearance. I know they’re remodeling the house over the sound of the drill and the generation of sawdust. I can hear the young boy shouting as he pedals his scooter up and down the court. I hear the yipping of the growing puppy deepen into gruff barks. But all of this activity never comes into my vantage point.

There must be drastic changes, but I don’t see any of them.

When nothing seemed to change, I began to crave differences. When differences wouldn’t come, I began to seek them out. There was a set of things I could count on to always change—the flowers.

In these small changes, you were there.

The roses budded, bloomed, and withered.

The birds of paradise pecked the sky and furled their crowns. Hibiscus swirled, twisted, and trumpeted into red music. Specks of tea flowers twinkled and darkened. These flowers faded but remained ephemeral in my mind, and I collected them into a fountain of cut blooms that threatened to drown me.

I might as well let that happen.

And in dreams and daydreams, I swam through the flowers and imagined I could feel you there with me. I felt your fingertips polish my skin and the silk of your hair tickle the ravines behind my ears in the fluttering of petals.

The essence that I had detested for so long had transformed. No longer did I shudder at the remembrance of my adolescent pursuits, but I found myself trying to reimagine the contents of the cologne you wore for me on weekend nights.

I wanted to reciprocate your touch with mine. I wanted to run my fingers over your leafcelled skin and peel you open, and let the juicy contents flow out so I could swim in your currents forever. You were stuffed with flowers and it was all that you were trying to give me.

You can’t be with me. Only God knows the day you’ll return to me. But I turned my obsession with you into a garden. I tended it every day to bring that unknown day into tangibility. For now, I build you up like a scarecrow that would guard every flower that I see you in.

Every day is one day closer. I’ll sleep in these flower beds and let the essence lull me. Then, I’ll sleep in these memories until you come in your Mazda, sailing in on wind from the moon. I’ll hear your voice, deep and gentle like a song, coax me awake. I will gaze upon your face and the world will turn again.

Maybe, you’ll take some Claritin, and bring a bouquet with you?

37

I couldn’t handle it anymore.

I grabbed my purse, left my room, jumped into my car, and drove away. I didn’t try to drive to you, as much I wish I could. It’s too far and too dangerous. But as the days keep going by, there is hope instead of fear. I hold onto hope that the path to you will be stepping stones and not a trek to the moon.

I went five minutes down the hill to the supermarket to buy one thing.

I parked my car and approached the wide corridor, with caution and embarrassment. As I neared the sliding doors, I already knew what I wanted and I could grab it before going inside.

Before my eyes were faces of orchids of white, cream, and royal purple. They bent and crooked in the braces of bamboo, roaring like lions toward the noon sunlight that broke through the columns of the building. They sat in ceramic pots that sparkled with pink and green and blue and— lavender.

I took an orchid and stared at it for a long time before rushing inside to purchase it. Though I would add it to my collection, it would have no essence. An orchid is not a flower with an essence, after all. But it didn’t need an essence, as long as I could look at it. The only duty it would have would be to remind me of you.

The orchid plant I chose was a strong and sturdy cluster of white lion faces. On each flowerface, there was a bright yellow blush at the base of each petal as bright as the display of camcorder sunflower embroidery. From that blush, pure white wings extended from a gathering of a spine, like the color of the lilies that I had let rot in my pocket. They all gathered and coexisted in the embrace of a shimmering, lavender pot that sparkled the way your eyes did on that night you asked me: “Would you like it if I ever bought you flowers?” •

38

THIS TODDLER I KNOW ELLIE

SMILLIE, CLASS

OF

2021

This toddler I know cries like I do: endlessly and vague as fuck.

Thoughts spiral

from one worst nightmare to peacocky loneliness, lack of attention, pauses to mention

the next worst thing

that could possibly

happen.

I tell her to breathe, she yells at me until we bleed the same teeth sharp as knives, tart in bite

my sleeve ripped off

clean.

Pouty mouths

loud stomps out—a weak

attempt

at a door slammed shut.

She’s only three. What did you expect for me, I’m more mature than that.

39

Bruises on my legs

like paint

on finger painting day.

splatter

Bandaged boo boos

get a kiss,

mistakes are just the first time missed.

We try again, to wash

(out my mouth)

and wash her hands. Potty time is not playtime even though the toddler and I,

we pee the same.

Not the same as in: the toilet

(although that too).

Same as in we both send out a PSA from the loo

of arms and legs

that wave and wrangle around,

throwing our clothes off of our bodies,

onto the ground.

This toddler I know has become my new high school English class:

tracing my work,

replacing the classic

cliche

that somehow

some way

relates to me:

her snack tray & juice my charcuterie & vermouth.

40

Then down for a nap a tree raining sap no time for sad hats or feel better tiaras just one Llama Llama and I Wanna Iguana.

Stuck to you

like glue

just us two— sometimes Mary Jane joins me too except never with you.

Just me don’t you see that I’m older than you?

Old enough for this not too old for that.

Hypocritical contradicting anything and everything she sees fit, for she is the one who governs her mind

and I am just the flowers in the fields she grooms.

41

LEON

•

ELLIE

SMILLIE, CLASS

OF

2021

SEA OF CLOUDS LIAM

CHAMBERLIN, CLASS

When he was freezing he thought about his mother. She grew up in North Dakota, out on the prairie. Hours of her youth spent climbing in trees with her brothers. They churned butter. She got a job filing for a local farmers’ insurance firm.

They sent her to boarding school in New England. Her parents saved up for years so she could afford a degree in civil engineering.

When he was freezing he craved watermelon.

It’s amazing how thirsty someone can get. So thirsty that they dream about eating water.

Making it solid and sleeping in it. Melons have a texture like skin on the tundra. He couldn’t taste them exactly, but he could feel them in the meat of his forearm.

Drip...drip…...drip………drip…… his dreams thawed in a sliver of sunlight. They poured from his eyes, into his mouth, sweet as saline. The sunsliver startled into flight like a skittish bird. The dripping stopped and some rusty mechanism in the back of his head croaked, oh boy, it must be freezing again!

When he was freezing he agonized over the smug mug of the forest ranger, who recited a tired mantra to every poor soul passing through the mountains. “We weren’t built to live out here, but we sure built to live out here!” And the ranger slapped his hand fondly on the warm stone wall of the ranger station, as if the two of them had shared many inside jokes over the solitary years. Inside.. inside… inside…. he chanted. His insides twisted and yawned, bedding down for a long doze.

OF

2021

As dusk folded him into a numb blanket, he gazed down at a beautiful shadow. It fell over the valley below him, filling the trees with secrets.

It camouflaged a circumspect rabbit, who hid in a burrow from coyotes and hawks. The shadow belonged to a mountain. Some of the peaks in the distance had skiers, snowshoers, trails. This one did not.

When he was freezing he forgot about the cold and savored the smiles of all his friends. He couldn’t appreciate their warmth until he was smiling back through limestone lips. Where were they now? Were they thinking of him? They’d all gotten so busy with their families and their mortgaged futures. Nowadays, they only ever called about expiration dates or to wish him happy belated birthdays. Most of the time he let them leave a message on the cassette.

Before his fingers fell off he started to undress.

He pictured himself in a fancy hotel room, with a beautiful someone who paid for his wine and made him feel like a movie star. Soft skin against his cheek. Fingers running down his spine. His hair standing on end. Bells ringing. Snow falling.

Bedsheets billowing on the clothesline. How flat and lonely those plains were. How warm the arms of a stranger could be. So dark already… why was it so dark?

When he was freezing he dreamed of sleep.

Head full of helium, slipping into non-reality.

His eyes showed him a disturbed reflection, like a pond painted with a fresh flock of geese. Time

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was slowing down fast. Winter was dragging on forever. He wanted to get mud on his new white sneakers. He wanted to eat the last piece of cheesecake he’d been saving in the fridge. He wanted to kiss that girl from his astronomy class.

In his head, it was a sappy night under the stars.

He could see them both floating off in a balloon.

Out over an endless sea of clouds. Straight into the sun. His eyes couldn’t bear to look anymore.

He glanced away.

When he was freezing he was burning up hot. Steaming. His skin ached and peeled. The snow around him bubbled and boiled. He danced on his bare toes as if on a bed coals. It felt soooooo good to stretch the frost from his limbs after the eternity he’d spent curled in a ball. The stars shied away from his eyes, receding deeper into the night sky. The shadow of that balloon loomed above the summit, eager to swallow him up. He wasn’t

ready yet. Dancing was ecstasy. Remembering was sharp as a knife. He had to get to the top of the mountain. Somehow he still had to do it…

By the time he was frozen, his family had started to worry. They sent dogs and helicopters to sweep through the mountains. They wrote private messages to him in their journals that he would never read. His mom spent a week back home on the prairie, sitting at the loom where her mother had whiled away so many quiet years.

His parents found an affordable twobedroom in Florida, far away from their little Midwestern town, where it was all too easy to slip memories into the cracks of familiar sidewalks.

They lounged out their retirement on a beach. It didn’t ever get too cold, and at night you could squint out over the water and pretend you were flying above a sea of clouds. •

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CONFESSION ELLA

KELLEHER, CLASS

You will not read this—we have not spoken for years, so I would not know how to deliver this letter to you to begin with. The concept of ‘breaking up’ is strange. Humanity had been given this impressive brain and a complex palette of emotions to share with one another, and for what? For us to begin as two people who loved each other with the heat of a collapsing star and in the blink of an eye devolve into complete strangers—cold and frigid like lake water underneath a thick sheet of winter’s frost.

It took only two minutes searching online to find out that you still live in the same beige house built nearby the shallow lakes of western Virginia. The image of your home now sits in a wide abyss which rests at the pit of my mind, inside of a disturbingly dark place comprised of repressed memories that time has covered with a thin layer of ice. If I apply even the slightest amount of pressure, the darkness could swallow me whole. And yet I exercise my strange urge to play with fire. I imagine how you still walk restlessly at night throughout the long corridors of that house. Perhaps you even think of me in these moments.

—— Does Lilly still cuddle up to you on nights when she believes there are monsters beneath her bed? I’d tuck her in on especially cold nights and wrap my arms around her, and wait until

OF

2021

her breath slowly evens, a gentle indicator that she’d fallen asleep. In my mind, she is like a snapshot out of time, existing in some formless metaphysical realm where she eternally remains a capricious and sweet-natured nine-year-old girl.

It feels as though she has died—and in a way she has. By now, your younger sister must be fourteen years old. I occasionally think about how she probably doesn’t remember my name.

—— I’m writing this for myself, to bury for good a memory I have of your face which haunts me late at night when people tend to be their loneliest and guiltiest. I have been carrying a great shame all this time, it is something you had prophesied, something I denied being capable of. As I close my eyes now, minutes before midnight, a memory unfolds before me like a movie filmed in the first person.

One of my well-read friends recently explained that midnight is the symbolic break between night and day, it creates a sort of ethereal gateway, which is why it is often a time for the supernatural. That same friend of mine told me that if a person concentrates hard enough on a thought or a memory, they can re-experience it and uncover parts of it which their memory ushered into the subconscious (the dark place). Here I am at midnight (standing at the precipice), mentally flipping through the pages of our relationship (now is when I fall into the abyss).

45

—— It was dusk and we were walking down the busy streets of New York City holding hands, this was my first time visiting as your girlfriend. We entered the lobby of the Empire State Building together. I can remember it all vividly: your palms were sweaty, you were fanning our tickets against your chest, the colors were saturated like a strange fever dream, too many loud tourists surrounding us in line, several watchful eyes judging our bold affection. You see, my love was like a loud, contagious cough—something that cannot be hidden no matter how hard a person tries. Your love was slightly tamer, a gentle stroke of my fingers in the in-between moments, a warm kiss to the temple. A burly security guard obnoxiously eating a bagel led us inside a grand elevator with a group of ten other couples. When the elevator opened to the 102nd floor, we rushed to the ledge together, you held my waist and lifted me up high (despite the rules).

“Look! That’s our apartment,” you said. You pointed toward a sea of concrete.

In that brief moment, sticking my hands through the protective bars, thousands of feet up in the air, I felt weightless—I was untethered to the world and it was intoxicating. As I imagine myself there, on top of the world, I revel in the freedom from being stuck on the ground with you. My face, half-dipped in the stratosphere, was free from your scrutiny, from how you’d hang onto my words like a drunken sceptic, from your incessant accusations of adultery. When I climbed down from the ledge and faced you, you towered over me again and held my shoulders firmly, kissing my forehead with firm pressure as if to stay, “don’t get too used to freedom.”

—— I think it was winter when you made me cry for the first time. There was snow peppering

the grass outside the window of your home in Virginia. The cold air seeped in through the cracks of the front door and swept over me in a piercing embrace. I wrapped your blankets in thick layers all around myself, worrying that nothing could make me feel warm again. The first slap to my face doused me in a flame of feeling all at once: the fear of being alone, the awful tugging sensation in my chest—like my heart was being extracted, embalmed, and mummified. Hot tears began to flow a steady stream down both my cheeks. My mother didn’t notice the abuse until one evening sometime in autumn, when you had left a couple of finger-shaped bruises on my arms.

“Whore!” you yelled, then threw my cell phone roughly onto the countertop, shattering its surface completely.

I guess all girls who text a random boy for the notes from last week’s lecture is a whore then. (Soon you will discover that this random boy whose number you found in my phone one evening was not the boy you should have been threatened by. But of course, it wasn’t a man you were threatened by at all, you were scared of me.

You feared my power, my freedom, my destiny.

None of which contained any piece of you.)

My frantic words, the hurried attempt at making you see the illogical nature of the situation—it made no impact. This anger of yours was like a cobra’s venom, it burned and corroded everything around us, paralyzing the entire room in liquid flame. I see myself there now, standing half-naked in your bedroom, the victim of your temper. It felt like I was being baptized by the blaze of your hatred—born again from the ashes as a new fearless creature. The shaking in my wrists subsided. The crying has stopped.

I stood there thinking about the insanity of the elaborate story you had created in your mind which fastened me to the image of an evil seductress. I imagined this archetypally villainous woman as wearing a floor-length gown made of black silk that

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leaves a trail of smoke wherever she goes.

I began to laugh at the dramatic absurdity of it all. Is this what you wanted? For me to fulfill this role of the villain? The resonating vibrations of my uncontrollable laughter reacted to your anger the way a lite match does to gasoline. You struck me hard on the cheek, bursting a few capillaries in the process. An explosion of sensation, streaks of light, a summation of touch. For some reason, the stinging, the black dots that covered my vision, the carpet imprint on my shoulder as I fell onto the floor, the oddly timed numbness, it felt good.

“How dare you,” you said. Then you left the room, slamming the door shut. I was left behind to be consumed by the flames.

—— Later in the evening you crawled into bed with me, like a predatory serpent alerted to the scent of my vulnerability. You slithered your legs in between mine, pinning me against your mattress, and fucked me. It was rough and lasted longer than usual—sweat collected on your brow as you focused on performing your duty of masculinity—fucking harshly and without any feeling. Our overzealous movements, the pawing at each other, the pillow covering my face (so you could avoid looking me in the eyes)—I relished in it all. I enjoyed it, the raw animality of the moment, the weight of your hand on my throat, the strange sense of detachment. If somebody had overheard us, they would have thought we were fighting.

I reveled in this frenzied act, our warring bodies, as if the physical pain it caused me could drown out the emotional pain. I clawed at the skin of your shoulders; my nails dug so deep that they imbedded half-moon shaped wounds that leaked droplets of blood. I allowed myself to disconnect entirely from the reality of our twisted relationship. In my indifference, an alien pleasure began to dull my senses, my vision went

white and rapture spread through my mind and body alike in delicious nothingness.

—— I ran away that night, back to my childhood home. I arrived covered in bruises and my face was half swollen from sobbing. My mother was awake, clamoring with the dishes and finely chopping red bell peppers. She glanced once at me then focused on cooking. She was preparing a Chinese stir fry, a guarded family recipe. I’ve come to associate the aromatic scent of the various spices and the combating flavors of sweet and sour with pain and desire—two opposites better enjoyed together than on their own (oh the irony of it all!)

While delicately preparing the sauce, my mother grabbed a porcelain salt shaker in one hand and a crystal sugar container in the other. She poured the contents of both into the silver wok. I watched as the white powder melted like spring snow in the heat of the metal pan, amalgamating with the darker hues of miso and boiling broth, eventually dissolving away completely.

“Don’t confuse the two,” she said. She stirred the vegetables. “Pick the next man wisely.”

—— I left Virginia the following day. You and I embraced each other at the airport (a quiet declaration of a ceasefire) and I boarded the plane for Chicago. I dreaded class which was to begin in a few days. Upon arriving at the cracked sidewalks of my street, I noticed how the winter snow had already turned into a muddy slush as heavy rain poured all across the city in the beginning months of Spring. I made it to my morning lecture early that day, during a downpour, and entered the lecture building soaking from head to toe. I waited outside the classroom door, fussing with my wet hair, my natural curls already unfurling.

By this point in the semester, I knew every

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single student in each of my classes (at least to some degree), so I was quite surprised when a boy I could not immediately recognize arrived carrying a large backpack. He leaned on the white wall opposite to me, staring at me. I discreetly analyzed him as he set his things on the floor.

He was tall and broad shouldered, dark blonde hair, with striking eyes. I understood something.

I did know this boy, an aspiring writer named Daniel—quite easily the best in the class. I could not recognize him without the thickly framed glasses he usually wore. Inwardly, I rejoiced at the fact that he must have forgotten them at home.

My gaze was tethered to his. His eyes were vulnerable and blue in the way that the ocean is when ravaged by a storm, inflections of gray from the battling clouds above. There was something inside them that reminded me of flames in water— if you can imagine it—like fire trapped in ice.

(They were nothing like yours which are black and empty like the mouth of a cave). His were passion encased inside of a calm and guarded exterior.

Daniel was the type prone to social camouflage. Despite this, he had a deep and resonating voice that could catch even a passerby’s attention. I remember how difficult it was to avert my eyes from his. I chastised myself at this sudden attraction and focused on my fingernails.

The image of you surfaced in my mind—naked and on top of me, shaking with both anger and orgasm, possession swimming in your endless pupils. I wanted Daniel to say something to me, anything to distract me from you.

Our professor unlocked the door. It went on like this for a couple of weeks. I would sit one seat away from Daniel in class and catch him observing me during a long-winded lecture. Then his gaze would quickly concentrate intently on some point beyond the window. I would always return his stares and sometimes I would even smile at him.

——

This strange game of cat and mouse came to an abrupt end one evening when Daniel and I were the last two people to leave the classroom.

We quietly gathered our things and walked down the hall toward the elevator, which was built sometime during the prewar era. It still retained a uniquely antiquated style—little copper engravings and intricately carved designs lined the inner panels. It felt untouched by modernity, like a bubble locked outside of time and space.

Daniel pressed the button for the ground level and the entire contraption screeched with a shrill metallic urgency, then suddenly, the lift ground to a shuddering halt. He pressed the button several more times in earnest. I stayed silent, panic not quite setting in yet. The elevator was not equipped for emergencies, it belonged to the oldest building in the college and possessed no bright red press-for-help button. After five minutes of pacing around, we silently decided to sit down and wait—the guards were bound to find out that this ancient contraption was broken eventually. We accepted that it might take time considering the hour: ten minutes before nine.

Not a word was spoken for a short time, though it felt like ages in the absence of a clock, our only exchange was through curious eye contact.

Daniel removed his glasses and hung them from the collar of his white shirt.

“I guess we’ll be here awhile,” he said. His voice was like warm silk. I slid across the polished tile floor to sit beside him. There was something innately soothing about the way he spoke, it eased the tension in my shoulders, brought blushing heat to my cheeks and fingertips. I smiled in response.

I did not mind being locked inside with him, to me it did not feel like being trapped. Instead, it felt like a strange form of freedom—freedom in confinement.

Daniel pulled from the side sleeve of his backpack a discreet looking silver bottle. I had seen him drink from it several times in class that same night, and many nights before that. The

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corners of his mouth downturned as he swallowed the tan liquid. The slight pain in his features, the instinctual coughing after swallowing, made it quite clear that the bottle was not for tea. I wondered to myself, why did he drink alcohol in class? Who was this boy really? The chaotic juxtaposition of the hard-working midwestern boy with the heavily emotionally suppressed and mysterious alcoholic made me giddy with interest.

He offered the bottle to me, tempting me with a taste. I hesitated for a beat, then received it with a restrained smile. Without hesitation, I tilted the bottle to a nearly vertical angle and almost drained the liquor. It ran a burning trail that dripped fire down my tongue and around my heart and lungs. The volume of my persistent thoughts slowly decreased, my sharp sense of regret was dulled, and somehow my entire vision was blurred except for the detailed features of Daniel’s face. He took back the bottle and drank from it again in silence, breathing out subtly in relief. This boy puzzled me deeply. What he was thinking about? What was he feeling? What haunted him at night? We passed the bottle a few more times between us. I began to sloppily trace the outline of his nose, the plateau of his cheekbones, the soft padding of his lips…

I repeated in my mind two words in an almost tantric rhythm: desire, desire, caution, caution. In a substance-induced meditative trance, I saw that the plain of my human consciousness rested in a shallow depression of land between two illuminated peaks—each miles away from the other. One was desire: a natural human need, an urge condemned to sinfulness, an emotion as old as time itself. The other was caution: an aspect of evolution, a warning, a weapon in the arsenal of society. I shut my eyes for a moment, imagining the contrast of the two as if they were somehow inside the elevator with me. Both were joined together by a thin, porous membrane—I pricked a tiny hole in it with my nail and watched the dynamic of desire versus caution shift. Everything started to bleed.

(Could he see it too?) The red, thick substance, like a warm viscous goo of lust that grew fat and expanded relentlessly. It began to crawl up my arms and legs and consumed me entirely. I could hear you blaring judgement in my mind: whore, whore, whore! The sound of you became muffled by the rush of red that invaded my senses, your voice was reduced to a hum in the background— almost as though your mouth was covered by a thick pillow made of voluminous cotton. Then finally, I could hear you no longer. A pale, milky fog of caution had turned to a faint, blushing pink until it disappeared altogether, swallowed in one gulp by the rushing lava of desire.

I opened my eyes and watched the room faintly teeter from left to right. I closed them again to steady my senses only to be overwhelmed by a memory of you and I walking through a dark alleyway in New York City. It was the height of winter and the sun had already fallen back into the earth. Our emotions were still pure; I could not feel the fear which I later would become accustomed to. My hands were freezing. You opened your coat to invite me inside, I molded into your chest for warmth. A baker opened the back door of his shop to welcome a late-night shipment from a delivery truck. The driver slipped on a crack in the concrete and dropped a few sacks of powdered sugar which the wind propelled into the air. You rushed to help the man get his bearings. All around me were little imposter snowflakes, peppering the wind. You ran back to me and kissed me in the sweet fake snow, the taste of you reminded me of melted sugar.

“Sugar is dangerous,” my mother once said.

“Sure, it tastes wonderful, but it slowly rots everything inside of you.” Danger, I decided, is not ugly, nor is it foul or unsavory. Just like evil, it is made to entice you at your most vulnerable. I silently reminded myself that even the devil was a handsome man.

I wanted to kiss someone again. Someone who would not hurt me. I held out my fingers to Daniel’s lips, he didn’t flinch at my forwardness,

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only parted them in a wordless welcome. I dragged the tip of my finger down toward his chin and traced the outline of his jaw, like a drunken painter, exploring the features of my muse. The current of lust pulled me deeper and deeper until I could not resist. I rested my palm on his knee for support as I leaned in to press my lips against his. His taste was pleasant and earthy with a note of tang from the alcohol (a flavor nothing like yours), and I felt myself greedily indulging.

—— The elevator door popped open with the ease of a twist-off bottle cap. I imagine that the large-bodied security guard made laborious noises while trying to wrench the heavy brass doors open, though neither I nor Daniel paidany attention to it. I clung to his shoulders, somehow already seated across his legs, and held onto him like shelter. I had tasted freedom and the thought of bracing myself against the cold night air on the empty streets seemed like a death sentence.

We were led out to the exit. Daniel first, then me. The wind struck me with a force that washed sobriety through all of my senses. The last half an hour spent inside the elevator began to fade away, like waking up from a dream which becomes more intangible every second spent awake. He silently walked me to the light at the end of the block.

“Do you want to come to my place? It’s not far.” He reached for my right hand.

Caution blared in my mind with a resounding ferocity, in a hypnotic voice like that of a tarot card reader, it warned me to step away from Daniel, from his warmth, to walk back to the safety of my dorm, to the comfort of the soft amber lighting in my bathroom. It told me to take a long cold shower and wash the scent of this boy right off me.

I felt myself giving in, reducing in size, dissolving into nothingness. My voice was collapsing, I was being folded into the black abyss like an item of clothing neatly tucked away into

a forgotten shelf. I imagine now this is what you were doing to me. Me, your favorite garment, something for you to wear, to wear down, to tear and stretch at the seams. And when you decide that you are tired of me, you’ll strip yourself of me entirely, pulling me off your back with disinterest and finally you’ll stuff me somewhere where no one would ever find me again, or even recognize that I was once beautiful.

“Yes.” I let his fingers weave through mine, a gesture of possession, a sign that I want to be wanted—and it was clear in that moment that he wanted to want.

—— I left Chicago on a fine November evening.

The autumn snow had blanketed the tarmac and dusted the plane in a light powder upon take off.

I was bound for Virginia again, summoned by my mother and brother to arrive at your family estate early the following morning. The tickets, the preliminary phone call, the excitement, it all came suddenly the night before my departure.

My mother ringed me around midnight, with specific packing instructions.

“Bring a nice dress, something red,” my mother said. She sounded oddly distant and preoccupied. “It goes well with your smile.”

She especially stressed that last word. A strange giddiness wrapped itself around the way she spoke which made me feel instinctively uneasy. I can tell when my mother is hiding something, though I can never guess correctly what it is. While sitting hunched forward and restless in my seat, fumbling with stale complimentary pretzels and nervously picking at my nail beds, I wondered: why was my brother attending?

—— Every single Christmas and New Year’s Eve since I was ten years old was spent alone with my

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mother and her recipe book. Despite the sparse company, our table was always cluttered with an array of diverse dishes—each never matching the other. I remember that on one particular year, my mother brought home an assortment of miniature cakes from a Greek bakery which were positioned next to lo mien and shepherd’s pie.

When I complained about the eccentricity of our dinner table, my mother would say, “Let the others eat the same thing every year while we dine on the flavors of the world. Who cares if it’s just the two of us? We’re not actually alone.

Here, close your eyes, now imagine that you’re in Turkey,” and she’d plop a Turkish delight in my mouth. The sugar juxtaposed to the salty nuttiness, the pillowy texture of foreign dough, it felt like a bite sized piece of vacation—like the two of us were on an excursion in the Orient, sampling the exotic tastes of a bustling bazaar.

I took her advice and applied it to more than just being lonely on the holidays. When you first accused me of having sex with someone else and pushed me into your bedroom door, bruising the back of two of my ribs, I’d hear her voice echoing in my mind.

“Just close your eyes.” Her words would spread through my thoughts like a soothing balm.

“Now imagine that you are somewhere else.” I’d picture myself on the cold pebbly beaches of Lake Michigan, standing beside Daniel, skipping rocks across the silky surface of the water.

—— My brother always found some excuse to spend the holidays elsewhere, whether that be with a new girlfriend and her family, committing to a new job, or simply thinly veiled disinterest.

Even his “I love you” sounded forced to a degree. I decided a long time ago to accept that my brother will never actually love my mother and I the way that we require. To foolishly attach oneself to a person who cannot love properly is like tying

cinder blocks to your ankles and expecting to swim with ease. Even still, I managed to fall in love with you.

“Loving is a talent just like cooking,” my mother explained to me when I asked why my brother acted so distant during the holiday season. “Some people are born gifted and can create elaborate dishes without even looking at a recipe, and others set their kitchens on fire trying to make an omelet.”

I can understand why my brother would perhaps choose to spend the grand December festivities at your home, but for the life of me, I could not figure out why he chose to come on Thanksgiving. An American holiday dedicated to consuming the flesh of a large bird with bitter cherry and red wine reduction sauces.

We are not even Americans, I caught myself thinking, still frazzled in my barely reclining economy-class seat. We’re Kazakhs for God’s sake.

I kept wondering what it was that my mother was hiding so poorly.

—— I arrived as the sun began to rise and warm the skies to a radiant gold and the clouds began to bleed a gentle scarlet. I stood impatiently at the baggage claim terminal, watching a sea of swarming heads approach me. In the distance, I spotted your curly brown hair and thinly framed glasses. I wore a short blue dress with sheer tights underneath, hopeful for a kind compliment.

“You look nice,” you said as you ran a finger across my thigh, “too nice.” You ushered me to the backseat of your driver’s car. Exhausted from the last-minute packing and flight, I clung to your arm and let my eyelids drift shut during the thirty-minute drive. I hesitated before asking, “So why is my whole family coming? Some of your distant cousins too, right?” I looked up at you, my head laid down on your lap. You began to stroke the short tufts of my hair, petting me softly.

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“Well,” you said, and took a long drag from your e-cigarette, “you’ll see. It’s a surprise.” I tried to find a clue hidden in your black eyes, I tried swimming in their darkness for a few minutes while you were preoccupied watching the passing scenery. There was nothing in them, they were like burned ash, dead and empty.

—— I looked into the mirror with slight awe.

The floor-length wine-colored dress my mother suggested I bring had cinched perfectly around my waist and left a short train that looked like embers which followed me wherever I went. I heard vague chatter behind the bedroom door, there were already dozens of people packed in your living room. Frantically, I reached for a lighter from within one of the drawers. Not to smoke with or hurt myself with. The brightness of the flame simply comforted me in times of distress.

A loud knock came briefly, then there was a moment of quiet.

“Come out dear, the guests have arrived.”

My mother spoke excitedly into the small crack in-between the door and the wall. I tucked the lighter discreetly beneath the fabric belt of my dress and entered the living room.

Suddenly there were hundreds of eyes, all focused on me. I scanned their faces, each with wide smiles plastered across their cheeks. I felt my throat tighten, my hands growing frigid;, I had to consciously remind myself to breathe.

“The guest of honor!” your mother said. Her voice commanded the room. The crowd parted in the center to reveal a long table with several of your grandparents seated at it. I remember thinking: my brother, my mother, and your grandparents.

This is serious. In traditional Kazakh manner, I approached the seated elders slowly and bowed my head once before them.

“Not too deep, you must maintain your

nobility.” I remembered the lessons my mother would teach me when I was a little girl. While she would braid my hair she’d say, “A good Kazakh woman should never show her emotions clearly on the surface. Be like a river: graceful and calm, but with a currant of feeling that runs deep and strong far below where the eyes cannot reach.”

The table in front of me was cluttered to the brim with elaborate dishes, meat stews, rich pastas, and chilled bottles of champagne. Scattered on the edges of the table were also presents, all neatly wrapped in expensive fabrics. I looked at them in dazzled confusion, and thought, who were they for? I traced the intricate patterns of a lace ribbon which wrapped around a small box in front of me.

You angled your way out from within the crowd of spectators to stand behind me, reaching for my hand. Your fingers were cold like daggers of ice. I gave you an ingenuine soft smile, one that you had already become accustomed to.

“I think my son has something to ask you,” your mother said. She fidgeted with her full champagne glass. Her manner was as though she were speaking in the distance. There was something inherently lonely, something sad about the way she spoke. It reminded me of a withering flower. I thought for a moment about how she was trapped in a loveless marriage, bound to a possessive and angry man. I thought about how she was forced to raise a child birthed from a mistress and not her own body. She gazed at me through thick dark lashes, a murky look of hope.

“Aisha, will you marry me?” you asked. There was a surprising amount of luster in your voice, like the sheen of a precious gemstone waiting for someone to find it appealing enough to purchase.

You plucked the small lace box from the table and undid its ribbon. Inside were two sapphire earrings, blue like the meltwater of a glacier hidden deep within a barren tundra. I reached for them and held them in my palm. They looked up at me like a pair of wanton eyes—I saw in them the eyes of Daniel, the color of forget-me-nots.

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“Yes,” I said, my voice like the ringing of a half-empty glass. The crowd around us roared and clinked their thin flutes, toasting to our soonto-be marriage. In the wake of the cheer, the two of us stood motionless like pillars of white marble.

You reached for my shoulder, a touch of cold and wet stone, and pulled me into your chest.

“He loves you,” your mother said. Her voice sounded beautiful, but filled with brevity and evanescence, like the ripples of a pond. I looked deep into her eyes which are similar to yours, only with inflections of warm autumn amber.

Her mouth reminded me of a thread of leeches, all surrounded by pale skin like cold porcelain.

In that moment, she was a mirror. I could see my own face superimposed onto her features. In the frenzy of bright lights and loud drunken noises, I politely excused myself and left through the back door.

—— The earth lay white beneath the evening sky. I was being suffocated in that large room packed with strangers. Even my own mother did not seem like herself—all gleeful and hopelessly optimistic. I ran deep into the woods behind the house and found myself in the middle of an untouched clearing. All around me was a cushion of warm snow, soft and creamy like thick smoke. I withdrew my lighter from within the center layers of my dress and flickered the flame on and off.

I stood feeling strangely full of heat in the crisp fall breeze. I had never seen a night sky quite so busy. I blinked and the Milky Way came to fill my eyes, I tried hard and failed at keeping the

tears from spilling over. I began to walk forwards, toward the cedars at the end of the clearing. The branches, all under a thin coating of snow, rose starkly from the white ground and intertwined with each other in a twisted and sickly embrace with one another. They reminded me of you somehow—cruel and all encompassing. I frantically began scraping the snow off the branches one by one, violently brushing off the excess which left the dangling appendages bare and vulnerable.

I looked up and began to sift through the collection of white stars that embellished the vault of darkness. I breathed in the light of the star Vega before I held my lighter to the outstretched branch before me. It took only a short while for a flame to bloom. I threw dry pine needles and patches of dead leaves into the fire that kept growing.

I watched the embers explode and crack in a spectacular phantasm from a seemingly unreal world. The plume of smoke and angry flames engulfed the grove, each tree began to fall one by one in perfectly horizontal lines. The beauty of this massive dying made me feel finally at ease.

Faintly in the distance, I could hear you screaming my name. The sounds of firetrucks and screeching from a crowd of men with hoses rushed toward me like the crashing tide of the freezing ocean. I didn’t dare to look behind me.

In a mesmerized trance, I stretched my arms out wide with desperation, wanting to embrace the dancing flames. I ran toward the crashing bodies of trees and tripped on a small rock embedded deep in the snow. I fell back and as I caught my footing, the brilliant light from the flames flowed down inside me with a roar. •

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LA DY

IN

BLUE

•

MAEVE

S U L L I VA N , C L A S S

OF

2022

TO BE FREE CHLOË

CLARK, CLASS

OF

2021

“That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn’t matter, in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future.” ― ― —Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes

To be free Is to see when blind.

I lost sight Of my identity Stolen and wrapped in the same shackles, And whips That I wear on my back.

I can only hold tight to hope But fingers lose grip and the calluses That penetrate my skin, Never heal.

So the rawness comes to light.

A dim light.

A candle, whose thin fire fights Against the warm winds Until it is whipped into dark.

So deep a dark I cannot see my hue.

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All I see is his white eyes Painting pain in pure red, Like the soles of my feet, Which burn like the tears in my eyes That sit, but never fall as easily As the sweat on my body, Boiling in deep pores of fear.

And when fear sprints, Love does not blink, Does not walk, does not crawl.

My breath weighs down The string of a single balloon in the sky, Wavering in warm winds.

Until deflated, I am defeated.

Flat notes cry against the sharp That pierces the hope To be free...

ARIES

•

CAT

P I C K E T T, C L A S S

OF

2023

SELF PORTRAIT WITH LILITH CHARLIE

MARTIN, CLASS

OF

2021

Some days I am spoon-fed venom: lock-jawed and boiling, eyes melt into steel. It is rationed in each freckle, bites of tigers, scorpion lips. Humility crawls out my mouth like spiders.

My tongue has a taste for conceit.

I have sat in trees and whistled at wolves.

Up there, everything looks disfigured, broken pinkies hook under jawbones, sharp tugs at jugulars, lips to pressure points.

I am salt thrown over careless shoulders, pine needle daggers and hornets’ nests.

I have made my own Eden inside my ribs, tore bone from flesh, gnawed on sins.

I am the pause between striking a match and the flame. On the seventh day, I crawled out, found hand holds in each crack, fell in palms I no longer control. I am cold showers, damp feathers.

I write grocery lists on paper skin, tables of glass bones. I leave my chest cracked open, severed wings, vultures make crowns out of ribs. I hug fingernails, breathe to keep them warm.

(I am warm.)

The greatest thing you could do is tell me you love me without expecting to hear it back.

57

O D E TO SA P P H I S M HALEY

MILLER, CLASS

OF

2023

In my mind, You are many things.

A blade of grass In the field in which I stand.

Where my eyes meet the horizon And the clouds stretch above.

The pain it causes some, It also causes me.

Draped on the throne, Adorned with jewels, I want to dance with you in the ballroom.

But like the excess of luxury, This is sin.

If this is the serpent, And you are the apple, Then I am Eve. And in that I find power.

A great rebellion fueled only by love.

Who could’ve imagined that?

I want Sundays.

Afternoons, mornings, sunsets.

Midnight fights, crying, yearning.

I want everything I’m supposed to want.

Give yourself to me as I will to you: Fully, with hesitation but without remorse.

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Tell me what you think about me.

Promise you’ll be honest.

Lying on the shower floor I answer, I was thinking about you.

Twilight painted under my eyes.

I see you on a cliff, The skyline of my stars behind you And you are all there is.

And I am frozen in place, In total and absolute awe.

How can something so familiar Render me so helpless?

Caught in my throat.

A weight on my chest.

Crocus flowers, dill weed, rosebuds.

Seafoam, waves, clamshells.

It is shameful, it is beautiful, it is pure and it is animal.

It is warm, it is lonely, it is ginormous and it is rare.

My words feel big Though without meaning.

But against all odds I will always find myself here.

In this field, In this ballroom, On this cliff.

You are my reflection, And I’m forced to give myself the same grace That I am certain you deserve.

59

T H E A P PA R E N T WA S T E L A N D JAKE

Our

NICASTRO, CLASS

father gazed solemnly over an apparent wasteland—he watched my brother tend to our crops, stark and stagnant, and I to our flock, restless and hungry. I moved a herd of dirty sheep to the gate, careful not to lead them over patches of thorn or thistles. And so our days went—my brother and I, working side by side, day by day for hours, he to the soil and I to the herd. With our father’s giving eyes among us. We worked each day to please him, and he decided if our work was fruitful. And inside was our mother. Our beautiful, free-spirited, delighting, intelligent mother!

She spent her days inside, attempting to warm the hearth and keep us humbly fed. Our father was a faithful man, and he challenged us to see God in everything that we did. He was serious about our work, and didn’t indulge in the pleasantries of laughter or dance like our mother would do.

In fact, he punished such behavior! So, alone, our mother danced inside. I am much more like our mother in this way, and my brother our father.

Our mother’s attitude was almost beyond belief, and she was secretly the one I had looked up to. She was loose and relaxed. Her voice was soft and sweet, and could always calm me down. As we grew up, I would often object to the opinions of my father and brother. I would holler and stomp and spin around in frustration! And they seemed almost scared of me. So would come reprimand!

And dutiful penance. But our mother, there was nothing that she seemed afraid of. Privately, she would bring me aside and show me a picture that

OF

2022

she had drawn, or sing me a song that she had learned, and it would bring me peace. As I got older, to avoid such predicaments with our father and my brother, I would take the herd for miles and miles about our flat, dusty, apparent wasteland. I’d walk far and far out until I would see the blazing sun saunter down in the west, and then I would walk towards our home, where hot food would be ready to eat. Our father would ask us about our work and pray, with our mother offering a helpful wink to me when no one noticed. She helped me feel less alone among the four of us, out here in this deserted apparent wasteland.

—— We lived in a small, green, wooden house with two floors—our father, our mother, and my brother’s rooms being on the first floor, and I by myself on the top floor. Our father had to provide our house with an add-on after my birth. Until then, though, I had learned from our father that any attempt to build the house any higher than it was was swiftly destroyed by a sudden gust or storm. And so, my room, too, was tiny and plain, and only what it seemed I needed; but, like much else in our world, lacking the true excitement or creativity that I had longed for. Except for what was out my window! My quaint little window, positioned westward looking out towards the sky. At night, I hardly ever slept, instead opting to stick my upper body to the wind and look up

60

at the bright and glorious stars. One thing about this wasteland was that the sky was always clear.

Galaxies and stars and moving objects raced and swirled above me. I would look at and name each and every shape or glow that I could see in the nighttime sky, saving them only for myself. But the most spectacular part about my window was the noises from The Out There! My mother had told me secret stories growing up of The Out There—a place green and wide, full of animals and fruits I could only imagine, where the beasts roamed freely and the bushes overgrown. There were things called waterfalls and rivers and lakes so vast that I could not even imagine them. And, on some nights, hanging out of the window, I could hear all of its beasts, laughing and dancing and cursing and singing in the ways that I had always wanted to. The Out There was too far away to be seen, but kept me up with its noises.

I was warned to never bring up the place to our father, and spoke of it sparingly with our mother.

Some nights, though, I would look outside and see her head, hanging out of her window too.

Basking in all the noise.

On that day, I had taken out the animals per usual. The sun was high and hot, beating down on my neck. Sweat was dripping down my body.

And the noises from The Out There were much louder than usual. So I took the herd to follow it. Further and further west I went. The noises kept getting louder, but the horizon continued to be flat and blank, heat waves shimmering in the air. The flock could sense something too, and I realized that they could hear the noise. So we all ran towards it, frolicking together under the giant yellow sun. They bleated and shouted their animalistic noises, and I joined in with them.

We didn’t get any closer to The Out There, but boy did we laugh! In the apparent wasteland, we really loved it. But, being lost in this purity, I had not noticed that a small group of the sheep

had run away from the herd. Ten to twenty of them, perhaps, had continued sprinting west and towards the noises and the sun. By the time I had noticed, it was out of my control—I could either have searched for the ten missing, but that meant maybe losing the rest.

I thought about what our father would say, and the disappointment he would feel. I thought about the punishment I would face and I thought about my brother, laughing in secret at my failures. And I thought about our mother. And I knew that she would understand! She was who I needed to get to first. She would understand! If I could get to her, then maybe I could be saved. So back to her we went. I shepherded the remainder of the sheep into the gate and ducked inside before our father could count them. Mother was sitting by the fire, roasting our food, sipping her wine.

“Mother?” I approached.

“My youngest child! Dearest babe. How are you?”

“Good, Mother, and grateful as always. But today, out in the field, I had run into quite the situation,” I said, head hung in shame to the floor.

“A situation?” She said, turning towards me.

“What is the problem?”

“Well...” I began, “as I was taking out the herd... Well, you see, it was really hot outside,” I trailed off.

“And?” she wondered.

“And, well... you know the noises.”

She looked at me blankly then nodded.

“The noises... Out There. Well, today, they were terribly loud, and it seemed that the sheep had heard them too. And so we —” “And so you ran.” She said with a smile. I offered a no-tooth one back, eyes still aimed at the floor.

“Yes. I mean, we all did! Really. And some had just gotten away.”

She laughed. Father called me in from outside.

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——

He stood above me, snarling. “I think I can count forty-four sheep out here. No, my son?”

I looked past him and pretended to count.

“Forty-four?” my mother pitched in from behind me. “And what’s the matter with fortyfour?”

“Well, my love. We had fifty-eight yesterday.”

She looked at him and laughed.

“Oh husband! Your memory really must be becoming an enemy.”

“An enemy? What do you mean? What do you call an enemy?”

“There was fifty-eight last week. A handful made it out then, when a vengeful wind forced open the gate. It must have been some kind of retaliation. I wrote it down in our records. I can show them to you, if you want. You old man.”

He looked at her, stroking his chin and unsure to believe. I stood in front of her, eyes to the ground once again. And then we heard a scream.

“Help me! Help me with it now!” said the voice of my brother, upwards to the heavens.

Father ran around to him, and my mother gave me her wink.

—— That night, we all sat around the table per usual, heads bowed down in prayer. Our father held the brothers’ hands, and our mother sat at the other end of the table. “Oh Lord, while our plates tonight may be empty, and the crops ruined a fair share, we still wish to thank you for providing us with the love and fulfillment of a family.” My brother squeezed my hand harder. “And thank you for our youngest son, for taking such good care of our animals.” You see, what had happened was, while my mother was covering for me, a large crop of my brother’s plants had unexpectedly died while his back was turned—seemingly without explanation. It had left us without vegetables for the night; my brother offered to slaughter a sheep

for him, but our father had decided that going without food would be the proper punishment for my brother’s “crimes.” I didn’t agree with his methods, but I wasn’t going to say anything, for fear of my own mistake getting brought to the light. And so, the rest of that night was spent in prayer, my brother’s jealous hand squeezing mine harder and harder throughout the night. I had no choice but to stay silent as he squeezed my fingers purple and numb until the ceremony was over, hours later. We crossed ourselves and each went silently back to our rooms, my brother’s eyes never leaving mine until I walked upstairs, and out of his sight. I heard a door slam below me.

That night, in my room, the noises were so loud that I couldn’t even hear our mother’s soft footsteps coming up to my door. And then, I couldn’t even hear her knocking! So she turned the handle slowly and walked right in, my body hanging halfway out of the window and smiling, trying to forget the tensions from before. I felt quite guilty for my brother’s failures, despite knowing I did nothing to cause them. I felt a hand touch my shoulder and turned around to see her smiling face, starlight reflecting from her eyes. I opened my mouth to speak, but she put a finger to her lips.

She took my hand and led me out of the room, and quietly down the stairs. I looked at the closed doors left behind me, and we walked out into the celestial midnight of an apparent wasteland.

Not saying a word, we walked westward together towards the noises, which were even louder than they were before. As we got closer to them, our pace picked up. And we began sprinting like the animals before us, racing towards a place we could not see. Then suddenly, she stopped. She turned to me and she smiled. “Right here. Right here is good.” She lied down, right there, on the dirty and dusty ground. She patted the soil next to her, and I went there too. We both gazed up at the sky—entire universes laid out literally in front of us, swirling and dancing in different milky colors.

62

Millions of stars shone brightly overhead, present from many years ago.

“You always asked me about it,” she stared ahead, talking to the sky.

“The Out There. Those noises. Those fantastical, imaginative noises! And now I will tell you. What seems like centuries ago, beauty seemed to be all that there was. It was just your father and I… and we actually lived way Out There!”

I turned to her, mouth agape. But she continued staring at the spectacle above. “New animals would appear everyday, your father and I tasked to name and take care for them all. It was naked and it was good, for a while... But you, my son, you are like me. I always knew you would understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Right in the middle of such a miraculous place stood a tree, taller than any in the garden but with branches just low enough for us to pick the fruit from. And the fruit, round, bright, ripe, and red always. ‘What should we call these?’ I would ask your father. After some thought—‘those...those look like apples!’ And so it went. As simple as that.

Everything in the garden was ours, named after whatever fantastical gibberish we could come up with. Your father was so creative!” She sighed. “But we were warned greatly about the fruit...but, my son, it was ours. It was all ours! We had named it, had we not? Just as we had named you and your brother?

And cared for them? And it all looked so good...”

She trailed off.

“A serpent, whom we also named, had told us that if we ate the fruit, we could be like God. We would be like God, and truly know good and evil...” she laughed.

“Good and evil?” I asked.

She stared ahead.

“And you know what?” She turned her head and smiled at me. There she was—the most

beautiful woman on Earth.

“You know what I learned?”

“What, Mom?” She raised her hand above. “Look around.

There is peace all around you.”

I stared at her, hanging on her every word.

This is what had been inside of her, behind her smiles, behind her songs and dance and art and her love and care for me.

“I ate the apple... and learned nothing. I learned that there was nothing.”

Her eyes stayed locked into mine. “There is no way to know what is out there. Who we are with.

Why this wasteland is here. And for that, that gave me comfort. That there is nothing! Nothing but peace all around us. To me, at least, that is peace.

Your father...” she said. “Your father could not find the same solace that I could in that unknown—in, what I had called it, that humanity. And so still he prays. And forces its meaning.”

“Nothing?” I asked above.

She laughed. “My son, we don’t know a Goddamn thing. But look! Look at that. Look at that star, directly above you.”

She was right—right above my forehead, lightyears away, rested a star that seemed brighter than any other in the nighttime sky.

“If you can just look at that... that’s all the proof we need to exist. Feel it above you. Now look to your left—and there is peace. Now look to your right—and there is peace. We don’t need to do a thing but recognize and love and live in the peace constantly surrounding you. Because once you realize what I did, that is all that there is.”

I stared at the star ahead and thought about what she was saying. And it seemed as if a greatly weighted coat of armor had been lifted off of me. Three bells rang in the distance, and we continued to lie.

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——

The next day, while I was about to move the herd out into the wasteland, I heard a call from my brother. “Brother!” he shouted, running up to me, scythe in hand from shearing the grains. “Let me walk with you.” I found his request strange, but I welcomed his company.

“What is with the change of heart and occupation?” I asked him, smiling.

“I just wanted to ask you a few things,” he told me.

“Okay. Like what?”

We continued to walk further from the house.

“What were you and our mother doing last night?”

I stopped and looked upwards.

“Nothing.” I said with a wink. He stood, staring at me puzzled, and we continued to walk.

“Father told me that he had heard you two leaving the house late last night. And thought he had heard your voices from far away.”

“Is that so? What did he hear?”

“He wasn’t quite sure. So he sent me to ask you.”

“Brother. It was really nothing.” I couldn’t help but smile.

“Nothing?” He asked.

“Nothing.”

We continued on. He asked me again. “Surely our father didn’t make up these voices himself.

What could it be you are so secretive about? Could

it have something to do with the death of my crops yesterday?” He said, his voice lowering with anger.

“Your crops, brother?” I said with a laugh.

“Those are nothing too.” I sauntered ahead, before turning around to face him. “ Would you like to dance?” I asked, hand outstretched to his.

He said nothing, but stared into my eyes before spitting on the crackled ground below me.

I laughed again. “Oh dear brother. Come now.

Your sacrifices—no matter how bountiful—really mean nothing anyways. But dancing with me, now that means something.”

I continued forward, sure he had had enough to stop his follow. From a distance, I could hear that the noises had started up again.

“Shh... listen brother,” I turned towards him—his scythe was raised high up into the air.

The sun beat down on his face, sweat racing down towards his toes. His teeth were tight and gnarled, like a starving animal. And it was just us, alone with our flock, in the middle of this apparent, lonely wasteland. The blade came down towards my neck, and still I felt that peace — My limp shadow had dropped to the ground, and back towards it I went.

64

Right back to nothing. •

RIVER

BEND

•

CHARLIE

MARTIN, CLASS

OF

2021

FA C I N G

FUTURE

•

KA ʻ O P UA

D A N I E L’ S , C L A S S

OF

2021

E V E RY T H I N G YO U ’ V E SA I D KELLIE

T OYA M A , C L A S S

OF

2022

after Nicanor Parra

Now that I’ve grown Let me be honest: Dear family at the risk of sounding cruel I wish I could forget what you said.

Selfishly, I don’t want to know your ghosts And I wish I could forget what you said.

The stories from your childhood on the Haunted Island, I know they were meant to help me love my youth Or perhaps, allowed you release in retelling.

But couldn’t you spare your child’s ears From the hymns you heard only amidst death, And leave her with more than forced pride That hides pity when she looks to her past?

I know it’s not all that you are And I’ll keep listening to your nightmares, But I won’t tell my children everything you’ve said.

With the greatest bitterness in the world I can’t tell my children everything you’ve said.

67

C-SECTION ROBYN

DE

LEON, CLASS

OF

2021

One finger tip after another.

Suspended, a puppet playing make believe with love as the hand that touches me, but there is too much wind in between. feathers fluttering and tornados rise out of the tension in the air before it snaps like a rubber band against my cheek, red splotches traveling to my chest, making me hyperventilate when nails barely scrape the hairs expanding, Up and up

and up slowly creeping, burning calves to hike in the mounds of flesh and knotted springs of coarseness.

We drifted away the moment the light touched our belly buttons, the impact branded me, like an uppercase C in ‘Certain’ where you certainly had me and continued to tickle my mind with flashes of passive memories.

Once I let you go, all of the past will seem to dissipate before me; you, the singular anchor to 22 years of my own history. Threads that suspend me, with an uppercase C for when it is time to cut you out of me.

68

MOTHER TONGUE (ASIANS ARE NEXT IN LINE TO BE WHITE) ANGELINE

KEK, CLASS

OF

2021

every time a white person compliments my english what the fuck am I supposed to say? they want me to play recordings of conversations with my dad glued together by english sentences and not my accented mother tongue how i have lived in the blue polos of private schools swam in a e i o u as i slipped and slid out of the womb their itch to know scratched only by thoughts of “so that’s why she sounds like one of us” if i was born in parker, pennsylvania (population 840) i would still be another quiet asian girl to those who truly belong in the land of the free who want a justification for my coherence who see me as a pleasant exception who want me to beam proudly like they’ve just complimented the rose and jade of my knitted sweater trading niceties in a gentrified thrift store indebted smile and a squeaky thank you as if they’ve done me a life-giving favour each time my tongue—a fish writhing in hot oil refusing to greet death sour solidified under a stiff smile to not birth thick stinging silences to protect white feelings

69

tell me—when the hell have white people ever swallowed their tongue to protect asian feelings? not in 1882 nor 1942 and sure as hell not in 2021 everything belongs to only white faces people who look like me are merely borrowing words why are you so surprised that l’s roll off my lips like rolls of silk? working hard and laying low to prove that we too deserve to belong i should reply “wow! your english is also very good!” drained from being polite to people who thinks “third-world country” equates to an inherent lack don’t even get me started on the bullshit that is “third world country” when those syllables were only carved by orange-stained napalms you smeared on our lush sun-beaten soil on our bony burned kids running naked from gunpoints while you flew home on helicopters to fatten the pockets of old white men you can hide behind thoughts of good intention but spare me your good intention every time a white person deems my people not white enough to belong.

Inspired by Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong

70

RUSTIC

M O U N TA I N S I D E

•

VERO

URUBIO, CLASS

OF

2022

SPRING

HAS

SPIRALED

•

CAT

P I C K E T T, C L A S S

OF

2023

IDA ALEXANDRA

PA R A D Z I C K , C L A S S

OF

2022

This is how it ends.

There is a road, surrounded by woods and snow, where the pavement glitters like cheap jewelry.

It’s raining, because it always rains in Appleton, especially on nights like these. She would never be sure how cold it was, in the ice and slush, because she is sure of one thing and one thing only.

There is a car, the front crinkled like an accordion, the doors thrown open like spread arms, rear lights flashing red. They cast the white and black in crimson, they paint the world with blood, and she knows she should walk away. She thinks that blood cannot be as red as rear lights. What is on her hands is much darker.

This is how it ends.

She walks into the woods, and does not look back. * She has always asked questions no one wanted to answer. How difficult it must have been, for her mother and father, to constantly have her on their heels. She could be as dressed as fancy as they wanted her to be, and her voice would still be grating to their ears.

“Why is the sky blue?” she asks her mother as she clips on diamond earrings.

“How do animals know what foods to eat?” she asks her father while he drops ice into a tumbler.

“Do you think we’ll evolve to be the size of giants?” she asks her mother while the cook serves them dinner.

“What’s in the basement?” she asks her father, and gets hit for her trouble.

She stops asking them questions after that. * “Mara?” she asks the cook, “What’s in the basement?” The cook is old, has been with the family since she was a baby, and knows all her favorite foods. Mara has killed rats with her bare hands, threatened to skin a delivery boy if he didn’t stop looking at her chest. Nothing can scare Mara, she thinks. Mara would never be afraid of anything as silly as a locked door.

Instead, Mara pales, then tries to give her a cookie like she’s seven and easily distracted again.

“Don’t you worry about the basement, Ida. There’s nothing to worry about.”

She takes the cookies, leaves the kitchen, and tries to ignore that Mara is lying. *

73

“Why don’t we go in the basement?” It’s a stupid question from a stupid boy, but she likes him.

She likes the feel of his hands on her waist, of his mouth on hers. He is not a boy that her parents would like, but then again, that is why she likes him. “Come on, Ida. It’s more private.” She likes the way his voice sounds low and rough.

She likes what he’s implying.

The key to the door has always hung beside it on a hook, large and ornate, iron and copper. She unlocks it as fast as any door; it is the darkness that descends down that makes her hesitate, the air that feels too moist, the sense that some things can never be unlearned. “We shouldn’t go in,” she whispers. He laughs. Cocky and brave and trying to prove his courage to a pretty girl, he says he’ll hit the light switch when he gets to the bottom.

He walks down the steps. He does not come back up.

She drops the key and runs. * People whisper when they see her now. Her name becomes synonymous with witch. Wicked Ida, the story goes, that lured that poor boy to her house and slit his throat under the light of the moon.

Never mind the fact that they have not found a body.

The police do not even interview her. Mara doesn’t talk to her. Her parents only look at her out of the corner of their eyes; she avoids the hallway that leads down to that basement door. It takes a few months, but they leave on a business trip. She is alone.

She walks down the hall, and picks the key off the hook. * The car keys are so much lighter than the one of iron and copper. The driveway is covered in slush that soaks into her socks, and rain that makes her hair stick to her forehead. She can barely feel the cold above the throbbing in her head, her fingers are numb and covered in tacky blood. The engine purrs like a cat, the wheel squeals like a pig.

She’s only a mile out of town before the throbbing turns into a banging behind her eyes. It makes crimson drip from her nose. She groans, her vision triples.

There is something in the road with too many eyes.

She swerves. * This is how it starts.

There is a door, and there is a set of stairs descending. There is a girl with fear in heart and mind, with legs so wobbly that she can barely make it all the way down. It is cold, but it is always cold in Appleton.

74

There is something breathing in the basement of her house, something that moves like water.

Something that slinks and glares from shadows. Something with too many eyes to count, limbs that writhe like it is in pain, and a smile with only sharp teeth. She thinks it will bleed red. She is wrong.

This is how it starts.

She kills, and feels no remorse.

75

L I F E G UA R D TOW E R 4 CHARLIE

MARTIN, CLASS

OF

2021

I. Dante’s Inferno is written in stars that have died long ago.

You wipe sand off my leg, tell me the ocean collects uncertain souls, that we all return to our roots in some way.

Your voice is small, a flash of teeth against storm clouds.

I hold my breath, wait three fourfive seconds to hear how far it strikes; your syllables are drowned by shallow foam, sucked in my lungs and held in my throat as I continue to count.

You prod my bones, press your hand against my chest to feel your words crunch like seaweed and gravel on a worn-out road.

The sudden rise and fall of my chest feels like pointing at waves from the passenger seat.

It is almost like we are stealing this moment, balancing on glass and no parking signs as we become our own lighthouse with a burnt out bulb. II. You are the color of a turbulent sea under asteroid glows, your eyes volcanic rock and a little bit of rust.

They tell me they will love me far more than your body will ever allow.

I feel riptides under my fingertips.

I am swirling currents on your skin your cheek.

We find ourselves as grains of sand, falling off limbs of galaxies.

You reach out your palm of clay.

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III. Different suns juggle our existence like Time or God while we sit on the trunk of my car.

It is here I tell you there is no truth only pieces of cloth memories stitched together by a lost traveler’s compass needle.

You weave your presence through my fingers, wonder if it is cold enough to snow inside black holes— what would it be like to be sucked into one, or to have a mother who treated you with care?

My hand fits perfectly around your thumb. I wonder how we grew up in anything less.

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